Segrave and World Speed Record

Sunday Pictorial dated April 10th 1927

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Old Etonian Sir Henry Segrave was the first person to exceed 200mph on land and the first Briton to win a Grand Prix.

In March 1926 he set a land speed record of 152mph and, after temporarily losing it to John Parry-Thomas, increased it to 207mph at Daytona Beach on March 29^th 1927. He died in 1930 attempting the water speed record on Windemere.

Oddly, apart from this picture, there is nothing else about Segrave or the record in this edition. 

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Still on motoring, there was a petrol price war going on between the big oil companies (combines) and the independent providers and the result was lower prices at the pumps. The AA guide to petrol prices shows that in 1927 petrol averaged 14.5 old pence (approx 6p) per gallon (or 4.55 litres) and there was no tax on petrol.

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Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italian Anarchists living in the USA who murdered two men while carrying out an armed robbery of a shoe factory in Massachusetts on April 15^th 1920. They were arrested 3 weeks later and after a controversial trial were found guilty. Various appeals delayed their executions for 6 years. In the meantime violent protests by Anarchists, against the verdict, included the horse drawn cart bomb that blew up in Wall Street, New York on September 20^th 1926 killing 38 people.

Sacco and Vanzetti finally went to the electric chair on August 23^rd 1927.

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You could buy this 9 horse-power Fiat (with brakes on all four wheels !) using the ‘gradual payments’ scheme. A much nicer phrase than ‘hire purchase’ or ‘financial agreement’.

No web address but note the ‘Wires: Fiatism, Piccy, London.” for telegrams.

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The ship would turn out to be the RMS Britannic built by Harland and Wolff for the White Star Line and launched on August 6^th 1929. She sailed mostly on the Liverpool-New York route right up to her final voyage in November 1960.

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Obviously size zero models are nothing new.

Beautiful line drawings, by someone called Renee Maude, the like of which you don’t get in newspapers these days. I guess you don’t get a dress being described as a ‘confection’ either.

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What a horrific story. You could be callous and say that’s what you get for parading around in dead animal pelts, but I wouldn’t wish leprosy on the most ardent ‘if it moves kill it, skin it and wear it’ troglodyte.

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Who is this Dora person? I think this snippet is referring to the Defence Of the Realm Act (nicknamed Dora) that was introduced during World War 1 and included such bizarre restrictions on the public as ‘no kite flying’, ‘no feeding wild animals bread’ and ‘no using invisible ink when writing abroad’. It also restricted public house opening hours. WWI was the excuse for creating it but it continued in use afterwards and technically it has never been repealed. 

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In the contest Radium Vs Grey Hair I would back Radium any day. The properties of radium were thought to be so beneficial that the word ‘radio-active’ is in bold type. Not only could you put it on your hair, but you could get it through the post where it could make everyone else’s letters and packages glow in the dark.

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A refreshingly different view of Youth at a time when the flappers and Oxford bags brigade were being criticised by the ‘we fought in the Crimea for you’ old fogies.

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“By gad, Sir! What’s it coming to when a chap can’t put on baggy shorts and play with his woggle in the privacy of his own home, doncha know. The memsahib makes a damn good girl guide too. Pass the brandy!”

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As with all film related matters on this blog I rely on the Internet Movie Database site for info.

Frank Hurlay it seems was primarily a documentary film maker whose career spanned 1913 to 1962 and Charles Ray has 171 titles to his credit between 1911 and 1944 but ‘The Naughty Widow’ seems to be listed as ‘Nobody’s Widow’ and CM Woolf hardly rates a mention.

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Considering the cameras and film available in 1927 these are not half-bad action photos of Middlesbrough vs. Fulham and Cardiff vs. West Ham playing some game called football. 

Blog News - New Feature

Watch out for the new mid-week posts featuring 

Random Cuttings

Rather than add incomplete or badly damaged newspapers to my collection I just cut out anything interesting and discard the rest.

It's time to give those cuttings mid-week airings!

Watch this space 

(Sunday posts will carry on as usual)

2 Million say "No" (Anti Iraq War demo)

Sunday Mirror dated Sunday 16th February 2003

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Two million British people say “No” to a decision to go to War based on false evidence and the Government of the day ignores them. The 2^nd Gulf War started on March 20^th 2003 and went on for 8 years. 8 years of death and destruction on all sides – military and civilian, including, according to some sources, over 100,000 civilian deaths.

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When does a freedom fighter become a terrorist? When he points the gun, you supplied and trained him to use, at you. 

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Newspaper editors must miss having Jacko around for fillers like this.

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A young and hirsute Rooney!  Just the sort of article you’d usually look back on and say, “I wonder where she is now?” In fact they married in 2008. All together now, “Aaaah.”

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You can tell a classic scandal story by the inclusion of phases like ‘Love cheat’, ‘shamed TV star’ and ‘cocaine-fuelled sex session’.

A quick look at the Internet Movie Database shows Deayton’s career has continued unabated.

A quick look at Amazon shows no results for a search for Stacy Herbert or her book.

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Koo Stark and Prince Andrew’s affair happened in the early 1980’s and according to this article floundered when it ‘was revealed that she starred in a soft porn movie’. If only the Royals had had access to the Internet Movie Database at that time, they would have seen the words ‘sex farce’ in the description of her first entry; ‘illicit photographs of young girls’ in the third, ‘The Blue Film’ as the title of the fourth, ‘erotic coming-of-age film’ in the fifth, ‘thrust into a depraved world of prostitution, predatory lesbians, a fugitive murderess, bondage, branding, and one supremely sadistic monk’ in the sixth – all made before she met Prince Andrew.

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No, not Germany in 1933.

As a result of the 2003 UK local elections the BNP held 16 councils seats, mostly in the North and in the West Midlands.

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I once read that to get to the truth in any tabloid ‘news’ story you should read the last 2 paragraphs first. ‘Nuclear Lorry Hit’ sounds like a headline that should be on the front page until you read the phrases ‘small amount of radioactive waste’ and ‘No one was hurt’ near the end.

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Sinead Quinn? A product of TV show Fame Academy. After that number 2 hit she released one more single that peaked at 19. Oasis? Never heard of them.

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Some familiar names here, including the long dead Elvis Presley and (from the sublime to the ridiculous) The Cheeky Girls. The only one of these acts that I have seen live is George Thorogood and the Destroyers.

Titanic Victims and Survivors

The Daily Mirror dated Wednesday 17th April 1912

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I try not to be too predictable but on this day of all days the post has to be about the Titanic. The ship hit an iceberg and sank in the early hours of the 15^th April 1912. The news was read in the UK morning papers of the 16^th. Unfortunately there are many reprints of The Daily Mirror for the 16^th so I have never tried to add one to my collection.  This is The Daily Mirror for the 17^th and concentrates on naming the more note-worthy (i.e. rich) survivors and lost.  

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Certainly a sign of the times when ‘women and children first’ can be referred to as ‘White Man’s 

Law’.

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Note the 13th name on the list of 2nd Class survivors - Edith Brown. She was one of the longest surviving people rescued from the Titanic and died at the age of 100 in 1997 in Southampton. My daughter, a Funeral Director, arranged and conducted the funeral.

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One crew member, Violet Jessop, survived a collision between Titanic’s sister ship the Olympic and a Royal Naval vessel HMS Hawke, the sinking of the Titanic and the 1916 sinking of the Britannic, the third ship of the class.

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That’s a big boat. And it was fast. Apparently the Memorial cruise that went from Southampton this week took 6 days to reach the site whereas Titanic only took 4.

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Pictures taken at Queenstown (called Cobh since 1922) in County Cork on Ireland’s southern coast. Titanic was too large to get into the harbour so moored off shore and tenders were used to transfer passengers and goods.

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In 1910 Frederick Henry Seddon had a wife, five children, and a lodger. She was Eliza Barrow and Seddon spent the following 18 months fleecing her of money, property and stocks. In August 1911 Eliza Barrow became ill and in September died.

Seddon became her sole executor and claimed for himself her remaining assets, but Eliza’s cousins, who had expected to inherit, became suspicious, managing to get the police to exhume her body, which was found to contain arsenic poisoning.

Seddon was arrested, tried and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Pentonville on the 18^th April 1912. 

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In 1911 Harriet Quimby was the first woman to get a pilot’s license in the United States and the first woman to make a nighttime flight. On the 16^th April 1912, she flew across the English Channel in 59 minutes flying a 50hp Bleriot monoplane.

On the 1^st July 1912, she was performing at the Third Annual Boston Aviation Meeting with the show’s organizer as a passenger. The plane suddenly nose dived at an altitude of 1500 feet and they both fell out of their seats to their deaths.

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‘Rust-Proof Corsets’ - not a phrase I ever imagined I’d be typing.

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Picture the moment at the What-Shall-We-Name-Our-Product meeting when young Fanshaw (who’d only been with the Company for 6 months but was the MD’s nephew) suddenly shouted, “I’ve got it – Spungola!” Oh, how they cheered!

The Girl Who Tried to Save Brian Jones

Daily Mirror dated Friday 4th July 1969

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Brian Jones was a founding member of the Rolling Stones, but by July 1969 had left the group to follow his own musical ideas. He was living at Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, formerly the home of author A. A. Milne. In the early hours of the 3^rd of July Jones was found dead in his swimming pool. The coroner's report stated "death by misadventure", but over the years various theories have surfaced, including murder by builder Frank Thorogood.

In 2009 journalist Scott Jones managed to get the case of Jones’ death re-opened but the original verdict was upheld.

See this 2008 Daily Mail online archive article by Scott Jones

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Looks like the Employers and the Unions were limbering up ready for the Industrial chaos that was the 1970’s.

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They blamed the warm summer evenings for their loss.  Does the good weather only occur where there are BBC viewers and not where there are ITV viewers? Or are BBC viewers more partial to outdoor pursuits?  Do they own more garden Jacuzzis? Or could it be that the ITV programmes are so much better that they hold their audience even on warm summer evenings?

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In 1966 Irishman Sean Bourke helped Michael Randle and Pat Pottle to arrange the prison escape of the Soviet spy George Blake. He then joined Blake in Moscow before travelling back to Ireland. The British Government tried to get him extradited but the Irish court said that the escape was a political act and refused.

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Tricia Nixon married Edward Finch Cox, a Harvard Law student, at the White House in 1971. Charles married someone else.

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Radio licenses for home receivers date beck to 1922 but separate Car Radio licenses were introduced in 1938. From 1946 you didn’t need a home Radio License if you had a TV License, but you did need a Car Radio License up until 1971. Just thought you’d like to know.

This is the same John Stonehouse that faked his suicide in 1974 by leaving a pile of clothes on a beach in Miami. He was presumed dead, but in reality, was on his way to Australia to set up a new life with his mistress. He was arrested on Christmas Eve 1974 in Copenhagen and deported back to Britain where he stood trial on charges of fraud. He was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Earlier in 1969 he had been accused of being a Czech spy, which he successfully denied. Although it was later revealed that in 1980 Margaret Thatcher knew Stonehouse had been a spy since the 1960’s.

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A unusual take on the scaling down of the US involvement in the Vietnam War.

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Cartoonist Reg Smythe created Andy Capp in 1957 and it has been running ever since. The strip has been accused of perpetuating the Northerner stereotype, but Smythe, from Hartlepool himself, loved his jobless, lay-about, hard-drinking, gambling, lazy ‘hero’.

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200 – 250 guns for only £250!  That can’t be right. He’d have got more on E-bay. Unless it means £250 per gun, in which case whoever wrote this article should have learnt to rite proper.

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Well, doesn’t he look manly? You had to be tough to smoke Weights. They didn’t call them ‘coffin nails’ for nothing.