Apollo13

The Evening Standard dated Tuesday April 14th 1970

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Apollo 13 was launched on April 11^th 1970 with Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise aboard, and was intended to be the 3^rd manned moon landing.  About 200,000 miles from the Earth (the Moon is on average 238857 miles from the Earth) an oxygen tank exploded due to a short-circuit in the wiring.  This happened at about 3am GMT on April 14^th. *** Spoiler Alert ***  After enough drama to fill a feature film the crew successfully splashed down at about 6pm GMT April 17^th.

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The newspapers have always demonised the young – from flappers to zoot-suits to teddy boys to mods and rockers, hippies, skinheads, punks and up to hoodies. So it is nice to see a positive youth story.

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I include this because in 1970 I’d been ‘in computers’ for 4 years and people really did say “Wow you must be clever. Computers are the job of the future.”

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This new TV series ‘Family at War’ ran for 3 seasons with a total of 52 episodes. According to IMDB.com Coronation Street, which started in 1960, is still on season 1 after 51 years with over 7700 episodes to date. So no contest.

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A quick look online shows prices for 5 bedroom semi’s in Wimbledon from £695,000 to £2,450,000 so £7,500 looks like quite a good bargain.  I’d snap it up if I were you.

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Cassius Clay changed his name to Mohammed Ali after joining the Nation of Islam in 1964 (it seems no-one had told the Standard). In 1967, three years after he’d won the World Heavyweight Championship, he refused to be conscripted into the U.S. military, based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. He was quoted as saying "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.  No Viet Cong ever called me nigger".

Ali would eventually be arrested and found guilty on draft evasion charges; he was stripped of his boxing title, and his boxing license was suspended. He was not imprisoned, but did not fight again for nearly four years while his appeal worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was eventually successful.

At a cost of so much a line it would have been cheaper just to write ‘Thug wanted – apply box A934’

Dortmund Bombing Raid

The Daily Sketch dated Tuesday May 25th 1943

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Back Page continuation - 

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Seven days after the famous Dambusters Raid, Bomber Command dispatched 826 aircraft on the night of 23^rd/24^th May 1943. Their target was the heavily industrialised town of Dortmund and it was the largest raid of the Battle of the Ruhr. The operation comprised: 343 Lancasters, 199 Halifaxes, 151 Wellingtons, 120 Stirlings and 13 Mosquitoes.  38 aircraft - 18 Halifaxes, 8 Lancasters, 6 Stirlings, 6 Wellingtons – didn’t return.   There were at least 654 ground fatalities.

The Second World War had been going on for 3 years and 8 months when this issue of The Daily Sketch was dropped through letterboxes to be read over heavily rationed breakfasts.  For most British people it would have been seen as good news – our lads giving the Nazis a good thrashing – but with the safety of hindsight I can’t help but feel depressed that people, on all sides, should have been put into a situation where blowing the smithereens out of other people was good news. 

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I believe that this is a picture of Bournemouth’s Hotel Metropole, which stood at the junction of Old Christchurch Road and Holdenhurst Road.  It was being used to billet mostly American and Canadian Airmen and 21 were killed in the bombing on the 24^th May.

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This letter suggesting that if Hitler’s Deputy, Rudolf Hess, who was in prison in Britain, was getting a £10000 per annum payment from the British Government, people would not be best pleased, is ‘signed’ by Sax Rohmer. Is this the Sax Rohmer?  Creator of the criminal mastermind Fu Manchu?  I see no reason why not – he was 60 years old in 1943 and was still actively writing.  He penned 30 novels of which 14 were about stiff upper-lip English hero Nayland Smith and his nemesis Doctor Fu Manchu.

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The bazuka had actually been in development since 1918.

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Some humour does not age well. This strip relies entirely on knowing what the word ‘boiked’ means and I don’t.  I tried Google and 'boiked' seems to be modern slang for high on drugs, which gives the strip an unlikely punch-line.  Chambers Concise Dictionary has no entry for the word.

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Language develops and words change their meaning, possibly few more emphatically than ‘gay’.  In 1943 it meant ‘happily carefree’ so there was no reason for Disgusted of Godalming to get hot under the starched collar about a breakfast time BBC Home Service programme called ‘Let Us Be Gay’.

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Kia-Ora conjures up memories of cinema adverts followed by intervals between the ‘B’ picture and the main feature, when a lady at the bottom of the centre aisle would dispense ice-creams and these exotically named orange drinks from a tray.  I’m not sure the nostalgia would be the same for ‘SDI’, which is too close to ‘STD’ for my liking.

How I Did It - Yuri Gagarin

Daily Mail dated Thursday April 13th 1961

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Lady Gaga the first person to orbit the Earth? No – that’s Gaga as in barmy, this is Gaga as in Gagarin. 

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born in 1934 and died in 1968 when a MiG 15 training jet he was piloting crashed. In 1961 he was the first human to go into Space, when, on his one and only spaceflight, he completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961.

Suddenly all those yellow covered Golanz Sci-Fi novels we borrowed from the local library were about to come true.  A colony on the Moon by 1969? No problem.  Next stop Mars?  Why not?

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Or we could leave it to the expert – Russian Space Scientist Blogonravov - who gets it equally wrong.

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Whilst still on the front page – it was not a good day for Television Producers – one is caught trying to murder a fellow producer and another is indicted in the USA for importing a woman for the purpose of prostitution.  These days they just inflict ‘X Factor’ and ‘Big Brother’ on the viewing public.

Coal vending machines - how hard would you have to hit it if the bag got stuck halfway down the chute?  

The website for the Lincolnshire Film Archive has this entry for an unmissable film from 1961 -

“Frederick Clegg’s ingenious coin-in-the-slot machine for selling small quantities of coal.  Intended to benefit flat-dwellers and others for whom the traditional one ton delivery was impractical, the machine is shown being used and heartily endorsed by Lord Robens, Chairman of the National Coal Board; but sadly it failed to catch on – though the retailing of coal in relatively small bags did indeed become quite widespread.”

I wonder if Lovefilms has it?

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The lad on the left is the Chelsea, Tottenham and England footballer Jimmy Greaves.  He was in the news because he was due to join the Italian club A C Milan. In fact he was back in England before the end of the year and went on to play for England in the 1962 World Cup and to just miss playing in the 1966 World Cup Final due to an injury.

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Not exactly wide-screen 3D with surround-sound, but this is what Herge’s Adventures of Tintin looked like in those far off days.  The bowler-hatted Thompson Twins haven’t aged a jot.

Diana Dead

News of the World dated Sunday 31^st August 1997

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Diana, Princess of Wales, died at 3a.m. on a Sunday morning, which rather caught the newspapers on the hop.  Most had already not only gone to press but were being distributed to retailers. So this edition of the News of the World stands in stark contrast to the blanket coverage that was to follow on the Monday morning when everyone had got their act together.  Just a sombre cover and a 2-page summary of the facts known by 6a.m.  On the Monday The Mirror had 25 pages of text and pictures plus a 48 page supplement devoted to the woman. Personally I think that the story, which boiled down to single mum of two killed in car crash, was better served by this edition than any other.

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Three things to muse upon here. 

What ever happened to mystic Meg?  Did she finally get a prediction true and win the lottery for herself, subsequently retiring to a life of luxury? 

Why oh why oh why do modern tabloids have to use pointless puns in their headlines?  Is this even a pun? ‘One punter scoops 9.5m potto’  What the **** is a ‘potto’?  If they can’t fit ‘Lottery’ in then why not use the generally accepted abbreviation ‘Lotto’?

Last, but not least, are they asking for a weather based scandal? If not then why include it in the weather box? Why include it at all – this being the News of the World, didn’t they have private detectives for this sort of thing?

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Guess who?  See below for the answer.

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Aaaaargh – another pun! I live on the South Coast and I haven’t noticed any Hoverplanes whooshing past my window at 200mph.  Surely by the time this craft had accelerated up to 200mph it would be time to put the brakes on to avoid ending up several miles down the E15 motorway to Paris.

This appears at the bottom of a story about a road-rage attack.  Notice that the request for information suggest calling the NOTW first and only as an after thought call the police.

But then the police probably already knew full well who they were looking for – this is one of the pictures that accompanied the article. Isn’t that a clear number-plate? Don’t the police have access to the DVLA database that would tell them who owned the car?  Call me cynical but I believe that all the NOTW was looking for was some juicy gossip and couldn’t care less if the road rage attacker got caught.

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Electronic Smart Pets – how sweet. I wonder where they all are now. In some old pets home or the local land-fill?

I can’t help wanting to add an entry to this list of things to do if you owned an Electronic Smart Pet – Get a Life!

The mystery picture? Dressed as a Smurf was Swedish-born ex-weather presenter Ulrika Johnson.  Don’t ask why.