Advert - Aspro featuring Dickie Valentine (1950's)

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Dickie Valentine had 14 Top 30 hits between 1954 and 1959 and was killed in a car crash in 1971. Aspro (Aspirin) may not harm the heart but if you are brave enough check the side effects online.

Advert - The Colony Restaurant (1950's)

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Felix King had a residency at the Colony Restaurant from 1950 until 1959. As far as I can tell the restaurant was part of the Colony Club where ageing film star George Raft acted as host for several months in 1966 before being deported as an 'undesirable alien'.

Wally Griffin was an American comedian possibly worth staying awake until midnight to see.

Advert - Rex Coronation Souvenir records (1937)

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On 12th May 1937 the Coronation of King George VI was held at Westminster Abbey. This advert was published on 13th may 1937.

Note that the records came with a full-colour picture label e.g.

Cutting - Jack Hylton Dies (1965)

29th January 1965

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Jack Hylton was a very popular band leader in England and on the Continent (even playing for Herman Goering in Berlin) throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s. In 1936 he took America by storm and toured Canada. He also dabbled in entrepreneurship, having brought Duke Ellington over the Britain for the first time in 1933. In 1940 he stopped performing and concentrated on theatrical and TV production, having London West End hits with shows like ‘Kiss Me Kate’, ‘Kismet’ and ‘Salad Days’. At the age of 70 in 1963 he married 29 year-old Beverley Prowse and, as detailed above, died in 1965.

Advert - Ferguson Radiogram (1940's)

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For those that are too young to know, a radiogram is a radio receiver and record player in one cabinet. If you don't know what a radio or a record is then Google it. This advert is from the late 1940's. 47gns? Approx £1585 allowing for inflation.

Advert - 'The Golden Disc' film (1958)

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'The Golden Disc' was known in the USA as 'The Inbetween Age' and starred Terry Dene who had a trio of hit records before being conscripted into the Army in 1958. He was discharged after only a couple of months due to ill-health. He left rock-n-roll behind to become an evangelist and I saw him at a local hall in Dagenham in the early 60's.

Advert - Music Club (1981)

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The Audio Club of Britain offering vinyl long players or cassettes for only £1.29. Who would you go for - Mantovani or Judas Priest, Rod Stewart or Ted Nugent, David Bowie or Blue Oyster Cult?

Random Cutting - Soho Midnight (1958)

June 22nd 1958

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Rock'n'Roll has become associated with Teddy Boys but the characters in these pictures are, to use the word coined only a couple of months earlier, beatniks, who tended to go in for cool jazz and reading Kerouac.

Random Cutting - Mick Jagger (1979)

4th May 1979

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The Rolling Stones' singer, Mick Jagger had married Nicaraguan born Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias in 1971, but she filed for divorce in 1978 when she accused him of adultery with model Jerry Hall whom he married in 1990. The $1 million settlement was peanuts compared to the one when he split from Jerry Hall in 1999. 

Live Aid (1985)

The Mirror dated Monday July 15th 1985

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Live Aid was a pair of pop music concerts held on July 13th 1985, one at Wembley in London and the other at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, organised by musicians Bob Geldoff and Midge Ure to raise money for the famine in Ethiopia that had been going on since 1983 and took 400,000 lives.

The concerts featured the likes of Status Quo, The Style Council, The Boomtown Rats, Adam Ant, Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, Elvis Costello, Nik Kershaw, Sade, Sting, Phil Collins, Howard Jones, Bryan Ferry, Paul Young, U2, Dire Straits, Queen, David Bowie, The Who, Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Paul McCartney, Four Tops, Billy Ocean, Black Sabbath, Run–D.M.C, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Bryan Adams, The Beach Boys, George Thorogood and the Destroyers, Santana, Madonna, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood. I watched it on and off all day and of course recorded some of it on VHS video.

Random Cutting - Death of Verdi (1901)

2nd February 1901

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Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was born in 1813 and between 1839 and 1893 produced 30 operas including 'Rigoletto', 'La Traviata' and 'Aida'. He died on the 27th January 1901, a week after suffering a stroke.

Random Cuttings - Teenagers, Rock'n'Roll and Violence (1956/1958)

13th Spetember 1958

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September 1956

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18th September 1956

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27th May 1958

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The song 'Rock Around the Clock' by Bill Haley and the Comets was featured in the 1955 film 'The Blackboard Jungle' and was the trigger for some incidents of teenage violence in cinemas, so when the success of the song spawned a whole film, local councils, which had the right to ban film showing, got their collective knickers in a twist. Two years later 1958 teenage violence and lack of morals had become tabloid bread and butter. 

See this post for more on the Jerry Lee Lewis scandal.

Random Cutting - Pop 30 (1983)

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The Top 30 Singles chart for 26th October 1983. Despite the prediction Duran Duran's 'Union of the Snake' peaked at number 3 in the UK. 'Uptown Girl' did make the top spot. 'Puss in Boots' to number 5 and Men Without Hats' 'Safety Dance' got to number 6. 

Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

The Mirror dated Wednesday January 29^th 1986

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The front and back covers of this edition of The Mirror (as the Daily Mirror called itself for a while) were unusual in that they were printed sideways.

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This was the 25 launch of the Space Shuttle since the first orbital flight in 1981 and the 10^th using Challenger. The special commission appointed Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident found that NASA management were to blame for not heeding scientists’ warnings that the component that failed would be at risk if the launch was made in the weather conditions that prevailed on January 28^th and that they had known of a potential fault with the component since 1977. A U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology investigation came to the same conclusions.

The Shuttle program was halted until September 1988 when the program was resumed. All went well until January 2003 when Columbia broke up on re-entry. The Space Shuttle program finally came to an end in July 2011.

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L Ron Hubbard died on January 24^th 1986 following a stroke. He had made a living as an author of pulp fiction in the 1930’s and 40’s but then developed Dianetics - a way of improving an individual’s physical and mental health. Later he went on to expand these ideas into Scientology. He has been called both a messiah and a pathological liar, but what can’t be denied is that he led a fascinating life and is well worth Google’ing.

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I like the comment ‘if he hadn’t been there he wouldn’t have got hurt’. I am surprised though that he got away with keeping an axe under his bed for just such an event.

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Anne Robinson (yes, the Weakest Link Anne Robinson) waxing lyrical about Prince Charles.

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I could imagine this happening in the 1950’s but in 1986 it’s unbelievable. Could there be more to the story than is printed here, or was the Landlord really that out of touch with the world of the 1980’s? 

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Paul McCartney, Roger Daltrey, Bob Geldof and some other bloke. It says four stars but I say three stars and Phil Collins. 

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The Top 40 in all its variety. Number 3 should be ‘Walk of Life’. Number 39 is a version of one of my all time favourite Animals tracks ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ by a group even Google hasn’t heard of - Coltello Show Confederates.

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Palace intrigue just like in the olden days. Did Princess Anne really call Princess Dianna ‘the Dope’, or not? We commoners will never know. Or care.

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The usual pre-World Cup optimism. In fact England were pushed out of the Mexico World Cup in the quarter-finals by Argentina and more specifically by Diego Maradona and his ‘Hand of God’ goal. Argentina went on to win the tournament. Gary Lineker won the Golden Boot as the leading scorer.   

The Crowning of George VI

Daily Mirror dated Thursday May 13^th 1937

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The King who shouldn’t have been. May 12^th 1937 was to have been the Coronation of Edward VIII but when George V eldest son chose marriage, to the divorcee Wallis Simpson, over the Crown, the succession passed to the second son - Albert, Duke of York. He became a surprisingly successful and popular King but ill health cut his reign short in 1952. 

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A possible question for ‘QI’ – how many Queen Elizabeth’s have we had? Allen Davis senses a trap and refuses to answer.

First time contestant Ami Childs buzzes in, “There was, like, Queen Elizabeth but that was, like, ages ago, you know, like Shakespeare and all that.”

Ross Noble bites the bullet. “Two”

Klaxon sounds.

Stephen Fry looks smug. “No. At least 3 and by some accounts 5. Queen Elizabeth 1 and 2 and GeorgeVI’s wife Elizabeth. Edward VI and Henry VII were also married to Elizabeths.”  

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Being of the peerage doesn’t make you immune to life’s troubles. Gustavus’ wife Joan died the following year and he was killed in action in France in 1940. The surviving son Gustavus Michael became the 10^th Viscount Boyne.

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£4000 is the equivalent of about £150,000 now. I thought the ‘take no responsibility for your actions and sue’ culture was something new.

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This 4 week long strike was protesting about conditions of work for London bus drivers and conductors, notably hours of work, rates of pay and a proposed speed-up of London buses. Failure to involve the Underground and Tram workers was blamed for the failure of the strike.

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Maureen O’Sullivan shot to fame as a very scantily clad Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan in ‘Tarzan the Ape Man’ in 1932. She went on to appear in another 50 or more films and to do a lot of TV work over the next 62 years. She died in 1998. 

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King Alfonso XIII left Spain in 1931 after the country had been proclaimed a Republic and his eldest son, also Alfonso, took the title Count of Covadonga.

In May 1937 the ex-King Alfonso severed relations with the Count, blaming him for making public assertions that he still considered himself legitimate heir to the Spanish Crown.

He married Marta Rocafort-Altuzarra in July 1937 but they were divorced in January 1938.

In September 1938 the Count was being driven home from a party in Miami when the car crashed. He died six hours later.

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Popeye had first appeared as a character in the American syndicated newspaper strip ‘Thimble Theatre’ in 1929 and this is his introduction to the UK newspaper print, although he had been seen over here in cartoon films.

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They certainly took their comic strips seriously in the 1930’s, and with the quality of ‘Jane’, ‘The Ruggles’, ‘Belinda Blue Eyes’, ‘Buck Ryan’ and ‘Gordon Fyfe’ I’m not surprised.

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For ‘candid camera pests' read ‘paparazzi’. New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia was re-elected and in fact held that office from 1934 until December 1945. William Griffin was all for keeping the US out of World War II and narrowly missed being put on trial for subversion in 1942.

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One definition of ‘to croon’ is ‘to sing popular songs in a soft, sentimental manner’. So a crooner is someone, usually a man, who croons. With the advent of the microphone it was no longer necessary from a singer to sing loudly or project his voice to be heard at the back of a theatre, so a quieter more intimate style of popular singing developed as epitomised by Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallie and Frank Sinatra.

Old Bailey and Whitehall IRA bombings

Daily Mirror dated Friday March 9^th 1973

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In the first IRA mainland bombings since 1940, four car bombs were planted in London on March 8th. Two were defused, one in a car outside a Post Office in Broadway and the other outside the BBC's armed forces radio studio in Dean Stanley Street. However, the other two exploded, one near the Old Bailey and the other at the Ministry of Agriculture off Whitehall. As a result of the explosions one person was killed and almost 200 people were injured.

At the time I worked near the Old Bailey at the top of Ludgate Hill, directly opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. I had a habit of popping out mid-afternoon to buy a Mars bar and was crossing the old Paternoster piazza when there was a very loud boom that I felt as much as heard. As the crow flies I was only about 300m from the blast. Luckily there were a lot of buildings in the way.

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The people arrested at Heathrow included Marian and Dolours Price, Gerry Kelly, Hugh Feeney and Roisin McNearney. In November 1973 all except McNearney, who had turned Queen’s evidence, were convicted of the Old Bailey and Whitehall bombings. 

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Rail chaos, miners' strikes, dock strikes, go-slows, walk outs - this was the hay-day of the militant unions, but they had no way of knowing that Margaret Thatcher’s reign was only 6 years away (give or take 4 or 5 days).

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The London School of Economics had been a hot-bed of student unrest since 1966 and this was yet another in a series of protests. 

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On March 5^th sixty-eight people had been killed when a Douglas DC-9, flying from Palma to London, collided in midair with a Convair 990 Coronado aircraft over Nantes in western France. The accident occurred during a French air traffic controller’s strike and stand-in military controllers were being used.

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The problem is whether to watch ‘The Virginian’ and then ‘Morcambe and Wise’ or ‘Hawaii Five-O’ and ‘On the Buses’? There’d be no hesitation in watching one of my favourite films though – Jean Luc Goddard’s ‘Alphaville’.

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Straight forward story – fan sends Paul McCartney seeds, he plants them, they come up as cannabis, police see them, he appears in court and is fined. I think there is a printing error though. McCartney is quoted as saying ‘there should be legislation on the use of cannabis’. Surely there was or he wouldn’t be in court.

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Fans got more than they bargained for when, in 2002, the iconic Wembley Stadium was demolished and a new stadium built on the site.