Advert - Philco Radio (1936)

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1936 advert for a Philco type 444 'The People's Set' bakelite wireless. The auction house Bonhams sold one in 2009 for £144 although another website suggests a going price of £495.

Advert - Postal Bargains (1936)

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Christmas postal bargains from 1936. A sugar dispenser for Auntie Flo? The Pip cigarette puter-outer for Uncle Silas? And, of course, the Ni**er Money Box for your favourite nephew? I wonder what the Dragons would make of the Spork?

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 - Vidor Portable radio (1950's)

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The Lady Margaret portable radio manufactured by Vidor Ltd of Erith, Kent circa 1953/4. I hope that she won't be driving while it is playing on her knee. They also produced Lady Anne and Lady Elizabeth models - some sort of specifically targeted marketing strategy?

Random Ad - CB Radio Rig (1982)

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Originating in the USA Citizen band Radio was popularised in the UK by films like 'Convoy' and 'Smokey and the Bandit'. "What's your handle, good Buddy? I'm knocking on your back door and I've got the pedal to the metal. Ten Four."

Random Cutting - Death of Tommy Handley (1949)

10th January 1949

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January 1949

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Tommy Handley was a star of radio from a time before TV when that meant he was heard in just about every home in the land. His comedy show 'It's That Man Again' affectionately known as ITMA was so popular during World War II it spawned a film version.He died quite unexpectedly at 56 years old on the 9th January 1949.  

Random Cutting - War Declared in Chamberlain's Speech (1939)

4th September 1939

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This is the full text of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's speech broadcast by the BBC on Sunday the 3rd September 1939 announcing the start of World War II as published in the Manchester Guardian the following day.

Random Cutting - Roy Plomley obituary (1985)

30th May 1985

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Apart from 'Desert Island Discs', which he devised in 1941 and presented until his death, Roy Plomley (pronounced Plumley) wrote 16 stage plays, a novel and scripted 2 films.

Random Cutting - Listening to a Wireless on a Train (1923)

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This early attempt at the iPod certainly had it's drawbacks. 

Our King is Dead - George V

Daily Sketch dated Tuesday January 21^st 1936

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George V came to the throne on the death of his father Edward VII in May 1910. He was a popular King with simple pastimes such as murdering wildlife and stamp collecting. After World War I his health deteriorated, mainly due to his heavy smoking habit, and he suffered from pulmonary disease and pleurisy. He died at 11:55pm on May 20^th some say with the help of his physician. I couldn't possibly comment.

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The new King was George V eldest son who reluctantly took on the role of Edward VIII. Of course he was never crowned because he abdicated before his coronation to marry Wallis Simpson (who was not Marge, Patty and Selma’s secret 4^th sibling).

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Lord Hewart served as the Lord Chief Justice from 1922 until 1940. He popularised the aphorism "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done."

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Bertrand Russell is now best remembered (if at all) as an anti-war campaigner and pro-nuclear disarmament demonstrator, but he much more – a mathematician, philosopher, historian, teacher, TV celebrity (when that meant something), author and plane-crash survivor. He died in 1970 at the age of 97.

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From December 1934 until July 1935 Florence Blenkiron and her friend Teresa Wallack travelled from London to Cape Town on a motorcycle and sidecar combination with no support team, satnav and, for a lot of the time, no roads. When they reached South Africa they quarrelled and Florence made the return journey alone.

If you look this up online you will find Teresa taking all the glory mainly due to her still in print book of the journey ‘The Rugged Road’. I can’t find anything about Florence’s return trip, not even if she made it home safely.

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This Winchester By-Pass was the first all dual-carriageway by-pass in England and opened in 1940. Since the late 1960’s and before the co,pletion  of the M3 I used the By-Pass many many times on journeys between London and Dorset and ‘fondly’ remember the hours spent queuing for the lights at the junction with the A333 (now B3335).

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I didn’t realise that the old ‘canned’ laughter debate was this old. I’ve been in the audience for several TV recordings recently; and radio audiences back in the 1960’s, and it’s true that being there does make even the feeblest jokes funnier. Modern TV audiences are encouraged to laugh out loud at ‘something you would merely smile at when watching at home’.

De Gaulle Drama

Evening Standard dated Tuesday May 27^th 1958

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Algeria in North Africa had been a French Colony since the mid 19^th century and a war for independence had been going on since 1954. In May 1958 the French military in Algeria were so fed up with Pierre Pflimlin and President Rene Coty’s French Government not fully committing to crushing the Algerian rebels that they staged a coup d'état. The military supported the return to political power of war hero Charles De Gaulle who they thought would reject any idea of French withdrawal and Algerian independence. De Gaulle was willing and able to end his 10 year political absence and on May 29^th he took over the Presidency from Coty. Unfortunately for the right wing military leaders he could see that hanging on to Algeria would be a disaster and the country gained it’s freedom in 1962.

See this post which is a cutting about Jerry Lee Lewis and his troubles from the following day.

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3 million cigarettes worth £35,000 – that’s about 1.2 new pence each. With cigarettes now retailing on average at 35p each, the haul would be worth about £1,050,000 these days, assuming you could find enough people who still smoke to buy them.

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Peter Manuel was born in the USA of Scottish parents and moved to Scotland when he was 5. He was arrested in January 1958 and confessed to killing 18 people, but he was only tried on 8 counts of murder. One of the charges was dropped due to lack of evidence but, despite conducting his own defence and almost convincing the jury of his insanity, he was found guilty of the other 7. He was hanged on July 11^th 1958.

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Looks like Maggie Woolnough is using the same bike she had in 1893 when she started.

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This when you really did have to pull round a dial and wait for it to wind back for each number, so 13 would take a fair old while compared to today's push buttons.

Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) or Direct Distance Dialling dates back to 1951 in the USA and became available within the UK from December 1958.

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Mr James Studd is a man after my own heart – “I will go 10 miles out of my way rather than join a traffic jam.”  Prior to December 1958 when the UK’s first Motorway was opened there was less chance of getting trapped in a traffic jam with no way out.

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One look at the Home and Light radio programmes and you can see why Radio Luxembourg on 208m was so popular with the youngsters of the time.

Far too much cricket on TV for my liking – both channels all afternoon! 

I wonder what happened to Roger Moore who starred in ‘Ivanhoe’? Recently I watched a couple of episodes of ‘Mark Saber’ (ITA 6:10) starring South African born one-armed Donald Gray as a detective – it hasn’t really stood the test of time unlike ‘Dial 999’ for instance.

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Herbert Lom co-starred with Sylvia Syms in ‘No Trees in the Street’. The cast also included 17 year-old David Hemmings of ‘Blow-up’ fame. Miss Syms was recently seen in ‘Eastenders’ as Olive Woodhouse.

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Part of a 3 page spread of book reviews and adverts that promoted Foyle’s Bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road rather more than is seemly. Christina Foyle was the daughter of the bookshop’s founder William Foyle.

Unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Goering, John Haigh only murdered 9 people so his literary pretensions are acceptable.

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I include this bit about Jack Dempsey because it mentions his New York restaurant where in 1973 I had the best steak I have ever had in my life.

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A strange and very dated look at the goings on at the Goodwood Motor Racing meeting. Hardly a mention of the cars, with name-dropping of Dukes and Debs taking priority. 

Valentino admirer's suicide

Evening Standard dated Thursday August 26^th 1926

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Rudolph Valentino had died the previous Monday. See this post. Peggy Scott was variously described as an actress, dancer and scriptwriter but I can’t find anything online about her career. She had claimed to know Valentino but a representative of the late star attended Scott’s inquest and denied any connection between the two.

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After the General Strike of May 1926 the coalminers were no better off than before and continued their strike. By November it had fizzled out as workers at mine after mine were forced back to work as their Unions ran out of money. The tone of this article, especially the last ‘Down the Pit’ section is decidedly anti-miners and this may well reflect the opinion of the paper’s owner Lord Beaverbrook.

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Valentino’s body was laid out for public viewing in the Gold Room of Frank E Campbell’s Funeral Church in Manhattan, where others including Oscar Hammerstein and Enrico Caruso had also been displayed. The circus atmosphere that surrounded the lying-in-state, encouraged by the media presence, offended George Ullman and he stopped it after only 2 days. It turned out that the Fascist guards mentioned in the article were in fact a publicity stunt concocted by the Funeral Home’s management and that the wreath from Mussolini was bought in the Home’s own florists.

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Edward Creed had been the manager of a cheese shop and on the night of July 28^th his assistant left him to put the day’s taking in the safe and to lock up the shop. Several hours later the next-door neighbour thought he could smell gas coming from the shop and he called the police. They found Mr Creed dead and the gas jets on but unlit. The safe had been cleared of money. Witnesses placed 2 men loitering near the shop on the day of the murder and the police published descriptions but no one was found. The two women mentioned in the article were never traced and a verdict of ‘murder by person or persons unknown’ was returned at the inquest. The case remains unsolved.

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Krishna Murti (or Jiddu Krishnamurti) was born in 1895 in India and at the age of 14 was taken under the wing of Charles Webster Leadbeater and Theosophical Society who groomed him to be the new World Teacher. After training and a European education he travelled the World lecturing on esotericism, or hidden knowledge or wisdom that offers the individual enlightenment and salvation. In 1929 he split from the Theosophical Society, but continued teaching until his death in 1986.

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Presumably Sarah Carlisle was under 21, because I believe that Thomas H Grater was 24, having been born, according to the FreeBMD website, in 1902, and if they had both been over 21 they wouldn’t have needed any parent’s permission. A further search at FreeBMD shows Thomas marrying in 1930 to a lady by the name of Broughton. Sarah Carlisle is too common a name to pin her down.

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I remember hearing these SOS messages at the end of news broadcasts and usually of the form ‘would so-and-so believed to be on holiday in the Lake District please contact their mother who is seriously ill’. They became redundant with the spread of mobile phones in 1990’s. 

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Yes you guessed it – it’s the drawing that made me post this, although a cold Barclay’s Lager would go down a treat today. It was brewed by Barclay Perkins of Southwark, not by a bunch of merchant bankers.

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The term ‘bandit’ seems to refer specifically to motorised smash and grab raiders. According to Robert Murphy’s very good book ‘Smash and Grab – Gangsters in the London Underworld’ the most famous girl bandit was Lilian Goldstein who drove for Ruby Sparks while they carried out numerous raids between 1922 and 1927.

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Quite what this fashionable young lady is doing with a coal-scuttle on her head is anyone’s guess, but then I know nothing about haute couture.

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Tunnels Bathing Beach was, and still is, a feature of Ilfracombe, North Devon. No helicopter rescues in those days. 

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I remember that when I was a kid it was common knowledge that stevedores at the London Docks, while unloading bananas from ships, were forever being attacked by tarantulas. There again it was common knowledge that if you trod on the cracks in the pavement the boogieman would get you.

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The famous songwriter Irving Berlin was a Russian-Jewish immigrant and Ellin Mackay was a Catholic heiress and daughter of the head of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company. Despite Mr Mackay’s objections, the couple were married at the New York City Hall on January 4^th 1926 and he subsequently wrote her out of his will. It took another 5 years for father and daughter to be reconciled.

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Nicholas Zographos was one fifth of the infamous ‘Greek Syndicate’ of gamblers who were a fixture of the great European casinos of the inter-War period. A detailed article on the Syndicate can be found here. Zographos died in 1953.

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An example of the art being created for the London Underground in the 1920’s. Charles Paine, whose name adorns this advert, produced posters and advertising artwork for the LU from 1920 until 1929. He was born in 1895 and died in 1967.

Wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester

Daily Mirror dated Thursday November 7^th 1935

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Prince Henry William Frederick Albert, the Duke of Gloucester was the 4^th child of George V. His wife was Lady Alice Christabel Montagu Douglas Scott. Doncha just love those multiple names? Lady Alice’s first cousin, Marian Louisa Montagu Douglas Scott, was the grandmother of Sarah, Duchess of York (Fergie) who married Prince Andrew, Alice’s Great-nephew.

Prince Henry was a career soldier having joined the Army in 1919 and rose to Field Marshal by 1955 and a Marshal of the Royal Air Force by 1958. He died in 1974. Alice died in her sleep in 2004 at the age of 102.

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Tension between Italy and the northwest African country of Abyssinia had been increasing since December 1934 until early October 1935 when Italian troops invaded. As both countries were members of the League of Nations and the League declared that Italy was the aggressor and had, therefore, contravened Article 10, economic sanctions were brought against Mussolini’s government. Controversially the British and French governments did not press for more severe action against Italy for fear of driving Mussolini into a pact with Hitler’s Germany.

The war was very unevenly balanced, with Italy and all its modern weaponry against the poorly equipped and untrained Abyssinians, so by May 1936 Italian forces had overrun the country and captured the capital, Addis Ababa. The Abyssinians surrendered and the country became Italian West Africa until it was ‘liberated’ by Allied forces in 1941.

After the war, in 1937, Italy left the League and in May 1939 signed the Pact of Steel with Germany.

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A subsequent inquest into the death of the Reverend Johnson was told that he had suffered with bouts of depression and severe back pain for many years and brought in a verdict of ‘suicide during temporary insanity’.

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The American film company Warner Brothers started making films at the Teddington Studios in 1931 and carried on for the next 20 years despite a large part of the site being destroyed by a V1 bomb in 1944.

In 1935 about 45 films were made at the Studio including the Hitchcock classic ‘The 39 Steps’. 

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In my cynical old age I can’t help thinking that these days most passers-by would be filming the fire on their i-phones instead of shining up the nearest chimneystack.

It is odd to note the lack of disapproval of the mother going shopping and leaving a 5 year-old in charge of a 3 year-old.

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The National Film Investigation was a one-off questionnaire created by London Film Productions to find out what and whom the British film-going public liked or disliked. Over 10,000 people took part.

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German U-boat U20 sank RMS Lusitania on May 7th 1915 with the loss of 1198 lives.

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Katherine Hepburn had won a Best Actress award in 1934 for ‘Morning Glory’, her third film, and was nominated again for ‘Alice Adams’ but lost out to Bette Davis. She went on to win 3 more Best Actress statuettes.

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Guiseppe Sasia was beheaded by executioner Anatole Deibler on February 17^th 1936. Deibler publicly executed 395 men between 1885 and 1939.

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When Lord Reith set up the BBC he defined its purpose in three words: educate, inform, entertain. Looking at the run down of this 1935 Thursday night’s programmes I would have to add ‘bore the pants off’. It was probably heavenly listening if you liked orchestral music and the odd East Anglian Herring Fishing Bulletin.

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“By Gad, Sir! The filly probably wrote this letter in the nude! I always make the memsahib wear galoshes when she’s in the scriptorium. Pass the ink!”

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Serge Alexandre Stavisky was an Ukranian born large-scale swindler who, when faced with exposure and arrest, fled but was found by the police having apparently committed suicide. After his death the scandal broke and many high-powered businessmen and politicians were implicated triggering a crisis that led to riots on the streets of Paris.

The trial reported here was of 20 associates of Stavisky all of whom were eventually acquitted.

Pierre Laval was the Prime Minister of France at the time of the trial, his second of 4 periods in office. During World War II he was head of the Nazi puppet Vichy Regime for 2 periods. 

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And you thought that the World-Cup-result-predicting octopus was something new!

As for Mr Longsight’s predictions, after much painstaking research I can now reveal that the 8 Home wins were all correct; of the 4 Away wins 3 were right (Lincoln drew with Hartlepool) and of the 3 draws only 1 was correct (St Johnstone and Aberdeen drew 0-0). I bet you will sleep easy tonight – I know I will.