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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Cont'd from Front

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. 

Rommel Launches Big Blow at Americans

Sunday Graphic dated Sunday April 4^th 1943

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Big blow or not, a couple of days later (April 6^th) the Italians and German Afrikakorps were defeated at the Battle of Wadi Akarit and by May 13^th the German and Italian forces in Tunisia surrendered to the Allies.

Erwin Rommel was well respected not only by his own men, but, surprisingly, by his counterparts in the British and American armies. In 1944 he was involved in a failed conspiracy to overthrow Hitler and was forced to choose between being tried, convicted and executed along with his family or committing suicide. He chose suicide and was buried as a Nazi hero.

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Benito Mussolini had been politically insecure since the war in North Africa had started to turn against the Axis powers in late 1942. Unrest at home with strikes, inflated food prices and an unwelcome German army presence along with the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 led to the Dictator being ousted and arrested. Unfortunately this didn’t mean that the Allies could just walk in and take over. There was another year of bitter fighting before the Germans were cleared from the country. 

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No trains, no petrol for cars and no extra buses, but apart from that, have a good Easter Holiday!

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70,000 children cannot be traced! Why isn’t this front-page news? Are they really lost or just not in London anymore? Are the ones ‘drifting back’ part of the 70,000? Were they ever found? Are they still out there? What is this snippet really about?

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Maybe this is where the 70,000 lost children have gone – to Lord Woolton’s agricultural holiday camps.  Lord Woolton became the Minister for Food in 1940 and it was because of his management of food rationing that on the whole the British people all got a fair share of what food was available. He even had a pie named after him, though I doubt you’ll find one in Tesco’s these days.

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This was a common type of wartime news item; quoting increased production figures to boost moral; rather in the style of the USSR Agricultural 5 Year Plan updates that peppered Russian news in the Communist era. 

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‘Failure to comply’ to the Nurses and Midwives Order 1943 was ‘punishable by fine, imprisonment or both’ Civil liberties? You must be joking – we’re at war, Love.

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In 1940 the clocks in Britain were not put back by an hour at the end of Summer Time i.e. not reset to GMT. From then until 1945 clocks continued to be advanced by one hour each spring and put back by an hour each autumn, so for these summers Britain was two hours ahead of GMT and operating on British Double Summer Time. Note the reminder on the front page.

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After World War I, Sir Percy Robert Laurie KCVO CBE DSO had been a Deputy Assistant Commissioner and an Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police. He retired in 1936 but was recalled in 1939 to be Assistant Chief Constable of the War Department Constabulary and then the Provost-Marshal of the United Kingdom until this little problem got in the way. His conviction was later quashed on the basis that ‘he had simply made a mistake’.

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King Feisal (or Faisal) II of Irak (or Iraq) succeeded his father just a month shy of his 4^th birthday. He was murdered during a coup in 1958.

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Orson Welles' ‘Citizen Kane’ has been long regarded as the best film ever made by those that should know, so it is interesting to see it referred to, along with his second film ‘The Magnificent Embersons’ (sic), as ‘badly received by the British public’.

Johnny Weissmuller (as Tarzan) and Maureen O’Sullivan (as Jane) had made 6 movies for MGM, but when this Tarzan-meets-the-Nazis propaganda flick was made at RKO Maureen bowed out. In the plot Jane is on holiday! She never returned to the jungle. Johnny did 5 more Tarzans plus 13 Jungle Jim films and a TV series.

‘Colonel Blimp’ has a well deserved reputation as a clever satire.  

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Scientists and MPs plan Britain’s post-War future based entirely on the ‘inexhaustible supplies’ of coal – oops! At least they correctly predicted the ‘electrification of the railways’.

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There must be hundreds of authors who were household names in their day, but who are now all but forgotten. Rex Beach was an American novelist, playwright and Olympic silver medallist water-polo player (1904 St Louis) who spent 5 years in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush and wrote several very popular novels in the Jack London idiom. His second, ‘The Spoilers’, was filmed 5 times. After the death of his wife he committed suicide in 1949.

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A lot of the older papers (1920’s-1930’s) I have blogged have had episodes of fiction serials in them, which I haven’t posted because 1 day’s excerpt of a story would be pointless, however this paper has this complete short story written by Wing-Commander (later Group Captain) Leonard Cheshire who went on to win the Victoria Cross in 1944. See this post for more on Leonard Cheshire.

Moscow News 1936

Moscow News Weekly Edition dated September 16th 1936

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The English language Russian newspaper Moscow News was founded by the American socialist Anna Louise Strong and originally ran from 1930 until 1949. The paper was revived in 1956 under Communist Party control.

The front cover picture would look just as appropriate as part of a Hitler Youth recruitment poster.

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Page 2 sets the tone for the rest of the paper with an article about the success of Soviet military manoeuvres.

Kliment Voroshilov (picture above) was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (i.e. Head of State) from 1953 to 1960 when Leonid Brezhnev took over. Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny (the other man in the picture) were 2 of the first 5 Marshals of the Soviet Union, the other 3 were to die in Stalin’s Great Purge. 

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The trial of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center, which Lenin’s widow (Nadezhda Krupskaya) is writing about in this article, was the first Moscow Show Trial and set the stage for subsequent trials based on trumped up charges. 

Gregori Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev and 14 others were charged with, among other anti-Soviet actions, conspiring to murder Joseph Stalin. The defendants were found guilty on August 24, 1936.

Prior to the trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev had agreed to plead guilty to the false charges on the condition that they would not be executed, a condition that Stalin accepted. Immediately after the conviction, Stalin ordered their execution.

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And for your reading pleasure the transcript of the Show Trial. I don’t think it’s available on Kindle, although I see you can get it from Collet's in the Charing Cross Road.

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Drawn by Boris Yefimov who had a career as a political cartoonist from 1919 until his death in 2008 at the age of 108!

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In 1949 the Editor-in-Chief Mikhail Borodin, was tried for being an enemy of the State (i.e. Joseph Stalin), and he died 2 years later in a Siberian prison camp.

Anna Loiuse Strong was a strong supporter of Russian Communism until 1936/37 when Stalin’s Great Purge started. She went back to America and switched her allegiance to the fledgling Chinese Communist cause. She spent the last 20 years of her life in China and died in 1970.

The strength of the Red Army was much appreciated a few years later when Russia's help in defeating Hitler was critical.

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Vladimir Kokkinaki was a test pilot that set numerous records from 1932 until 1960. In 1936/37 he broke his own altitude record 6 times.

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The Nottingham tournament was the first victory by a Soviet chess master outside of Russia and Mikhail (Michael) Botvinnik went on to be the World Chess Champion for 13 years.

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This article by Anna Louise Strong herself shows how obsessed with productivity the Soviets were.

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It is now known that Joseph Stalin was a monster who had the blood of millions on his hands - not only those who died in the Gulags but the countless peasants that died as a result of his Collectivist policies. And who was his biggest trading partner? The UK.

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The 1936 Nuremberg Rally or The 8th Party Congress was known as the "Rally of Honour". Leni Riefenstahl filmed the 1934 Rally as ‘Triumph of the Will’.

The Soviets calling the Nazis hypocritical is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

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The name Dynamo Moscow goes back to 1923 when the team was managed by the head of the Russian Secret Police (CHEKA). In 1936 they won the Soviet Championship. Who can forget such players as Mikhail Semichastny, Vasili Pavlov, Vasili Smirnov and Sergei Ilyin? I just have.

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If all this jollity has whetted your appetite why not visit the USSR? Oops too late.

Random Cutting - H G Wells warns of Fascism (1934)

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H.G. Wells, the author of classics like ‘The War of the Worlds’, ‘The Invisible Man’ and ‘The Time Machine‘, succeeded John Galsworthy as President of the P.E.N. Club in 1933. The Club had been founded in 1921 to promote ‘friendship & intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere’.

Wells was a complicated man, basically a Socialist who, like many intellectuals of the 1930’s, let his hatred of Fascism lead to a blind approval of Stalinist Russia, but he was also anti-Semitic and believed in eugenics; both Fascists traits.

Queen Mum is 100

International Express dated August 8th-14th 2000 

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This is the overseas weekly edition of the Daily Express.

Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon married into the Royal Family in 1923 when she got hitched to Albert Frederick Arthur George Windsor the 2^nd son of George V. When the 1^st son, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor abdicated before being crowned it was up to Albert to become George VI and Elizabeth to be his Queen. George VI died in 1952 and their eldest daughter Elizabeth Alexandra Mary became Queen Elizabeth II and her mother became (you’ve guessed it) The Queen Mum.

She outlived her husband by 50 years and died on 30^th March 2002.

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Porton Down, where the package of ‘germs’ should have gone, has been involved in secret research on chemical weaponry from as far back as 1916 and has, allegedly, carried out tests on humans. I don’t think Debenhams has.

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Both my parents smoked like factory chimneys. I never have. One of my offspring smokes and the other doesn’t. So there may be something in this. Or not. 

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This is from Peter Hitchens’ column and it comes as no surprise that he would support George W. 

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These items are side-bars to a larger article about the end of the News of the World’s Name and Shame Campaign, which encouraged the revealing of the names and addresses of sex offenders to the public and led to a lynch mob mentality. A classic example of a newspaper-provoked ‘moral panic’ that even led to a paediatrician being targeted by a mob of ignorant ‘concerned citizens’. 

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This is a list of the 100 favourite films up to 1999 based on reviews on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). Having seen 79 of them I note that only 6 of my personal top 50 films of the 20^th century appear in their top 50. Does this means that I have crap taste or does the rest of the World?

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The Monument to the Women of World War II did materialize and was dedicated by the Queen in July 2005. There is a good photo of it here.

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Having had a liver transplant in 2002 George Best died in 2005 at the comparatively young age of 59.

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There are fewer celebrity biographies and cookbooks than these days, although the dreaded Jamie Oliver does appear (twice!). Nice to see Kathy Reichs, James Lee Burke and Thomas Harris representing the Crime writers and Bill Bryson the travel writers, even if ‘Down Under’ was, in my humble opinion, his least interesting travel book.