IRA try to assassinate Margaret Thatcher

Daily Mirror dated Saturday October 13th 1984

Click to Enlarge

An unusual wrap-around front/back cover in portrait orientation for this 1984 edition of the Daily Mirror.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet were staying at the Grand Hotel in Brighton for the 1984 Conservative Party conference when a bomb, planted by IRA member Patrick Magee, exploded.  It killed 5 people including Anthony Berry M P and badly damaged the front of the hotel.

Patrick Magee was found guilty on eight counts including the five murders and was sentenced to a minimum of 35 years in prison. Controversially he was released in 1999 as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

There is little or no other ‘hard’ news, except for sport, in this edition.

Click to Enlarge

‘Good Morning Britain’ was presented by Anne, Nick Owen and puppet Roland Rat. Far more interesting is that I too had a kidney stone removed in Bournemouth Hospital.

Click to Enlarge

Home computers really came to the notice of the general public in the UK in 1981 with the release of the Sinclair ZX81 and the BBC Micro, so this advert is from the early days.  And what days – software input from cassette tape, 32 x 1024 bytes of memory and 80-column text-only visual display output. And no internet.  It’s a wonder the things caught on at all.

Click to Enlarge

Saturday night TV and, with the exception of the contestants on 3-2-1, not a single member of the public being humiliated, fed false promises of stardom or being used to make money from phone-in voting.  Just plenty of professionals - comedians, presenters, actors and Noel Edmonds - doing their jobs.

One of the oddest headlines I have encountered and not a pun in sight.  What I can't believe is that he 'booted her into the air'.

Probably invented in the early 1970’s in Japan, karaoke didn’t become popular in the West until the 1990’s. 

Click to Enlarge

So this is where the makers of the recent ‘innovation’ slankets got their inspiration.

Knowing nothing about football I thought Gary Lineker was just that jug-eared clown who advertised crisps, but it seems he played for England 80 times scoring 48 goals in the process, as well as scoring 281 goals in other matches for various clubs and all without once being shown a yellow or red card.  You live and learn - and at my age, forget.


A Merry Christmas to one and all.

Mussolini 5th Assassination Attempt

Daily Mirror dated Monday November 1st 1926

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Benito Mussolini was the leader of the Italian National Fascist Party and became Italy’s Prime Minister in 1922.  His administration started out as a right-wing coalition but by the beginning of 1926 had become a dictatorship with him as supreme commander or Il Duce.

In this, the 5^th attempted assassination, 15 year old Anteo Zamboni tried to shoot Mussolini but paid for it with his own life when he was lynched.  (Trivia note – the man who identified Zamboni as the culprit was the father of film director Pier Paolo Pasolini.)

Despite his prediction (mentioned in the article) that he would not die a violent death, Mussolini was himself lynched and hung from a street lamp in April 1945. 

Click to Enlarge

Note also the picture of Houdini on the front page. Harry Houdini was born in Hungary as Erik Weisz in 1874, moving to America with his family at the age of 4.  He started in show business as a slight-of-hand magician but then concentrated on escapology. His act became World famous and he toured America and Europe. From 1918 to 1923 he had a second career as a film star. In the 1920s he used his experience in performing magic to expose as fraudsters psychics and mediums. I guess that the lack of space devoted to his death was due to the news coming in late the previous evening, and that more appeared in the next day's issue.

Click to Enlarge

Of all the people in all the bars in all the World to try to con why pick on the ex-welterweight champion of France and Europe; middleweight, light-heavyweight and heavyweight champion of Europe; not to mention "White Heavyweight Champion of the World"?

Click to Enlarge

Cheaper petrol - there's a novelty.  1s and 6d a gallon (7.5p) is the equivalent of 4d a litre – that’s less than 2p a litre!  Using the National Archive currency converter 4d in 1926 is roughly the equivalent of 50p now, so, taking into account wages, RPI and the colour of magic, petrol has gone up by about 270%.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

The F8 camera first entered service in 1919 and was later adopted as the standard RAF camera.  At first the camera was driven by a propeller connected to a flexible drive system, later this was replaced by an electric motor. Designed to use 9" wide film but to have a 7" X 7" image format, this allowed for instrument recording to be exposed along the side of the film.  The 100 exposures were on a 65-foot long roll of celluloid film.

Click to Enlarge

I thought this was just an odd name for ‘sleeping sickness’ but according to Wikipedia -

Encephalitis lethargica or von Economo disease is an atypical form of encephalitis. Also known as "sleepy sickness" (different from the sleeping sickness transmitted by the tsetse fly), it was first described by the neurologist Constantin von Economo in 1917. The disease attacks the brain, leaving some victims in a statue-like condition, speechless and motionless. Between 1915 and 1926 an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica spread around the world; no recurrence of the epidemic has since been reported, though isolated cases continue to occur.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

I wonder what Medicus would make of McDonalds?

A lot of interesting advice here but what pops out at me is the mention of ‘canary pudding’.  Surely not.  They wouldn’t would they?

Click to Enlarge

“By gad, Sir, never did me any harm being beaten at school.  In fact quite enjoyed it, doncha know. Still go to a young lady round the back of Charring Cross Road… well.. hurrumph… that’s enough of that.  More brandy, Jeeves.”

Grace Kelly Weds

Daily Mirror dated Friday April 20th 1956

The elegant and beautiful actress Grace Kelly had a short but memorable film career from 1951 to 1956 that included such classics as High Noon, Dial M For Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and High Society. In her penultimate film The Swan she played a Princess and in 1956 she became a real one when she married Prince Rainier of Monaco.  They were married for 26 years until 1982 when she died in a car crash.

Nikolai Bulganin, the Premier of the USSR, and Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, visited England for 10 days in April 1956 , spending most of their time in London meeting with Prime Minister Anthony Eden and Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskill.  They had just completed triumphant tours of India and Burma, but they didn’t get the same enthusiastic welcome from the British public.

They had arrived by Soviet warships and it was revealed later that  

the CIA, MI6 and the Naval Intelligence were all involved in a mission to send divers under the warships at Portsmouth. One of the frogmen, Commander Crabb, vanished during the operation on the 19th April , forcing the British authorities to cobble together a hasty cover story. 

Exempting old age pensioners from the duty increase – could this be a plot to kill off the old folk and save on pensions?

The body of Ms Helen O'Reilly was found by a milkman at 6 a.m. on April 18th, 1956. She was lying outside number 15 Hume Street, Dublin, a silk stocking tied loosely around her neck. She was five months pregnant.

The woman the reporter spoke to turned out to be Mary Anne (Mamie) Cadden, a nurse who provided back-street abortion services. She had already served 5 years for a previous offence.  This time she was found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang, but this was commuted to life imprisonment. Shortly after she was declared insane and died in custody in 1959.

Driving with your left arm around your floozy is all well and good, but how are you going to text your wife to tell her you’ll be late home?

Press speculation in the run-up to the Cup Final between Manchester City and Birmingham City discussed which of Don Revie and Bobby Johnstone would be selected.  In the end both of them played. The match is remembered (by those interested in such things) as the one in which goal-keeper Bert Trautmann played the last 17 minutes with a broken bone in his neck.

Revie went on to manage Leeds and England.

If only I knew what a ‘liquid pencil’ was I’d be a rich man – or in prison.

A Week in April 1919

The Daily Mirror Overseas Weekly Edition

dated Thursday April 24th 1919

Click to Enlarge

An epic post featuring The Daily Mirror Overseas Weekly Edition from a week in Spring 1919 – nearly 6 months after the cease fire of the Great War the final Peace settlement is still being thrashed out in France, there is trouble in India, Egypt and Turkey, intrepid aviators are trying to cross the Atlantic or being killed in almost daily plane crashes, while the public is being urged to take joy-flights and serial killer Landru is on trial in Paris.  This edition is basically 5 Daily Mirrors stapled together with a wrap-around cover (now detached) and deals with the news for the 17^th to 23^rd April.

Click to Enlarge

The first carefree Spring holiday since 1914 is here. Carefree apart from those things mentioned above – and a rabies scare.

Click to Enlarge

And if you are in Hastings there is always the latest in beach attractions - a washed ashore German U-boat.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Henri Désiré Landru (1869 – 1922) was a French serial killer (charged with 11 murders) and real-life "Bluebeard".

Landru lured victims by putting advertisements in the lonely hearts sections in Paris newspapers, then he would seduce the women who came to his Parisian home and, after he was given access to their assets, would kill them and burn their bodies in his heating furnace. Between 1914 and 1918, Landru claimed 11 victims: 10 women plus the teenaged son of one of his victims.

In 1919, the sister of one victim tried to track down her missing sibling. She eventually persuaded the police to arrest Landru. After a lengthy and highly publicised trial he was found guilty and guillotined.

Click to Enlarge

How can one not trust a dentist that not only knows where the lady’s teeth are but isn’t afraid to point them out with arrows?

Click to Enlarge

Note the name Shinwell among those jailed - Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell went on to become a Labour MP, chairperson of the Labour Party, Minister of Fuel and Power in the post-war Labour government, Secretary of State for War, Minister of Defence, Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and Baron Shinwell of Easington.

1919 saw a wave of race riots in Glasgow, South Shields, Salford, Hull, London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Newport and Barry directed primarily at black sailors.  On January 23^rd fighting broke out on the Glasgow docks between black and white sailors waiting to sign on to a ship. The black sailors, over 30 of them, fled pursued by a much larger crowd of white sailors, who, using guns, knives, sticks, batons, bricks and other makeshift weapons, attacked the nearby sailors' home in which the black sailors had taken refuge.

The Glasgow branch of the main seafarers union, the National Sailors and Firemen’s Union (NSFU), succeeded in having a ban imposed on the employment of black sailors in the port. British Seafarers’ Union (BSU), a small and more militant breakaway from the NSFU, refused to accept black sailors as members. Shinwell was a leader of the BSU.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

By 1919 many educated nationals in India were far from satisfied with the reforms introduced by the ruling British since the formation of the Indian National Council in 1885.  White Englishmen still dominated India and there had been no real decrease in their power or increase in national power.

Even thought Gandhi had already embraced the idea of Satyagraha or non-violent action, there were many deaths on both sides before Indian independence finally came in 1947.

Click to Enlarge

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was followed by a period of Civil War with the communist Red Army fighting off the White Army, which had been formed by ex-Tsarist men like General Denikin.  British Prime Minister David Llloyd-George covertly supported the Whites because he feared the spread of communism to the rest of Europe and particularly Germany. The Treaty of Versailles was being hammered out at the time and Lloyd-George was worried that the end result would weaken Germany to such a degree that a Communist Revolution would follow there.

Click to Enlarge

I always thought that the old so-much-down-and-so-much-a-week, aka the never-never or hire purchase, was an invention of the 1950’s.  Apparently not. By the time you add 2/- for the luminous dial and a further 2/6 for p&p you’d be paying 19/6 for a 14/- watch, and I wouldn’t dare phoning the customer help-desk – note the phrase ‘no unpleasant inquiries’. There is an unspoken ‘or else’ there.

Click to Enlarge

An odd juxtaposition – a page full of pictures showing the delights of flying (newly re-introduced to the public after the restrictions of the War) and a portrait of a very experienced pilot who was killed the previous day.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Public pleasure flights were very popular between the Wars.  Sir Alan Cobham toured all over Britain looking for suitable sites for Aerodromes and used pleasure flights to win the support of the locals in each place.  The one thing missing from these 2 articles that I would see as essential is a good working parachute.

Click to Enlarge

Hopefully they weren’t testing these anywhere near the pleasure flights.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

In a bid to cross the Atlantic and win a £10,000 prize put up by the Daily Mail, a Short Shamrock piloted by Major Wood and Captain Wylie took off on April 19, 1919. 

Click to Enlarge

Unfortunately the engine faltered, and the aircraft was ditched off the coast of Wales, smashing on the beach at Holyhead.

Click to Enlarge

Jules Charles Toussaint Védrines had been flying since 1910

In 1912 he broke the air speed record reaching a speed of 145.161 km / h. Also in 1912 he was seriously injured during an attempt to fly to Madrid. In 1913 he flew from France to Egypt (with stops) in his Bleriot monoplane. He served in the French air force in the First World War, specializing in difficult missions dropping French spies behind German lines and later picking them up.

On January 19, 1919, he landed an aircraft on the roof of the Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann, despite a ban by the prefecture of Paris. He won the price of 25,000 francs offered for this feat, but became the first air-born offender in aviation history. He died on April 21, 1919, flying from Paris to Rome

Click to Enlarge

And if that wasn’t enough to put you off pleasure flights then this tragic accident should have.

Click to Enlarge

“By gad, Sir, if that filly wasn’t wearing a three quarter-length coat over a jockey’s coat not to mention a barrel and a telescope, I’d get a look at her knees!  More brandy, Jeeves!”

Click to Enlarge

 Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Then as now, the tabloid press, of which The Daily Mirror was a pioneer, loved a good panic.  To be fair this was a serious outbreak, which led to an order that all dogs in London and the Home Counties must at all times be muzzled.  All that is except fox hunting hounds. Can’t have the safety of the public interfering with ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable’, as Oscar Wilde would have it.

Click to Enlarge

“How terribly modern –you’ll be getting the little tyke an iPod next.”

Click to Enlarge

Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst was a British political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement, which helped women win the right to vote.  She founded the Women's Social and Political Union.  Her 3 daughters – Christabel, Adela and Sylvia, joined her but in 1913 there was a rift and Sylvia and Adela left the WSPU.  During the First World War Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel supported the Government while Sylvia and Adela became Pacifists.

Click to Enlarge

‘… the comfort of a pair of carpet slippers, a warm fender, hot shaving water in the morning and the rest of the luxuries…. Cannot be obtained without the aid of the woman…’  and this was written by a woman!  Sylvia Pankhurst probably coughed and spluttered her burn porridge all over her breakfast table that morning.

Click to Enlarge

A topical item hot on the heels of last Wednesday’s Public Sector Workers Strike.  Personally I wouldn’t face a class of 30 kids of any age for all the tea in China let alone ‘a pension of a guinea a week’. (a guinea was  £1.05p). According to the National Archive’s currency converter this was the equivalent of £22.27p in 2005.

Click to Enlarge

“By gad, Sir, knees!  Brandy!”