Random Cutting - Kennedy on crutches (1961)

June 9th 1961

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It is now common knowledge that John F Kennedy had suffered from back pain since 1938 and normally wore a corset or back brace, but this and other information about his health issues had been kept secret throughout his campaign and election to the White House. JFK also had Addison's disease and hypothyroidism.

Moon Men on their Way

Daily Mirror dated Thursday 17th July 1969

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Neil Armstrong, 'Buzz' Aldrin and Michael Collins took off from Cape Kennedy in Florida on the 16th July 1969 and reached the Moon on the 20th. They stayed for just over 21 hours and landed back on Earth on the 24th July. 

See this post for coverage of the Armstrong's (and Man's) first step onto the lunar surface.

John F Kenedy's Funeral

Daily Mirror dated Tuesday November 26^th 1963

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The 35^th President of the United States, John F Kennedy, had been assassinated the previous Friday in Dallas, Texas. His alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had in turn been shot while in police custody on the Sunday. JFK’s funeral was held in Washington D.C. on the Monday.

Unfortunately, little John F Kennedy Jr., seen on the front page above, was to die at an even younger age than his father. He was killed in a plane crash in 1999 at the age of 38.

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I don’t think it counts as Congressional inquiry, but the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was set up immediately and worked from November 1963 until September 1964 to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

In 1976 The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations began to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Committee concluded that Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.

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Harold Wilson was the Leader of the Labour Party from 1963 until 1976 and was Prime Minister twice – 1964-1970 and 1974-1976. And Pipe Smoker of the Year in 1965.

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I don’t think it was a coincidence that this article on the state of primary and junior schools in the UK happened to be in the same issue of this Labour Party supporting Daily Mirror as the advert above.

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I’m sure I’ve seen a film with this plot; whether or not before or after 1963 I can’t remember.

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Anarchic comedian and writer Spike Milligan appearing as the godfather.

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Before loyalty cards and reward points there were Green Shield Stamps. Introduced in 1958 they were collected in books and then exchanged for ‘gifts’. They ended in 1991.

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Back in 1958, four years before the first Bond film, ‘Dr No’, Ian Fleming, John Bryce, Ernest Cuneo and Kevin McClory wrote a screenplay for a possible Bond film. To cut a long story short, in 1960 Fleming wrote the book ‘Thunderball’ based on the screenplay and McClory tried to stop publiation in the High Court but failed. In 1963 McClory brought the action referred to in the article above, but by this time Fleming’s health was deteriorating and actually had a heart attack during the case, so he settled out of court giving McClory  literary and film rights for the screenplay, while Fleming was given the rights to the novel. Ian Fleming died in August 1964.

In 1965, the film Thunderball was made after producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman made a deal with McClory. 

Far East Crisis - Premier to Speak

Evening Standard dated Friday September 12^th 1958

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The main story here is whether or not Harold Macmillan’s Conservative Government was going to commit British troops to augment the US Navy’s attempts to help the non-Communist Chinese who were defending Quemoy Island from a sustained artillery bombardment by the Communist Chinese. As it turned out we didn’t get involved. For once. The shelling of Quemoy lasted from August 23^rd until early October.

Sir Winston Churchill, ex Prime Minister, ex Home Secretary, ex First Lord of the Admiralty, ex Secretary of State for War, ex Secretary of State for Air, ex Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nobel Prize winner, author and amateur bricklayer married Clementine Hozier in 1908 and were still married when he died in 1965.

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President Eisenhower’s address to the nation assuring the American people that he would not tolerate Communist aggression in the Far East is strongly reminiscent of Kennedy and the Cuban Crisis 4 years later. Even more so when you know that it was later revealed that the use of Nuclear retaliation against China was considered at the highest level.

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Continued from the front page.

The poet Robert Service died at the age of 84. See also the Random Cutting here. 

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Continued from the front page.

Two things to remember – there’s no such thing as a free lunch and if it looks too good to be true then it ain’t. Oh and don’t buy cheap orange juice by the barrel off a shyster.

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I don’t know how Sgt Florence Little got on in the Lorry Driver of the Year. The only information I can find online is that a ‘Sgt F Tucker’ got 89 points out 100 and came 25^th. Maybe the Evening Standard got the name wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time or the last.

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These articles that ‘look to the future’ never quite get it right. Most of the gadgets featured are spot on but it’s what is not mentioned that shows the lack of foresight. Where are the ‘ready meals’ and the microwave cookers?

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This must be one of the worst pictures of Marilyn Monroe I have seen. It is obviously of such poor quality it has had to be ‘touched in’ by an artist, albeit not very well. Joe E Brown was a circus performer, professional baseball player, vaudeville comedian, and film and TV actor, particularly remembered for his role in the Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon comedy ‘Some Like It Hot’. In fact this photo is one of several that were taken on the porch of the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego during the making of that film.

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Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not sign a contract for a Prize Fight and then tell everyone, because it has been illegal since 1882.

Ruby shoots Oswald

Daily Mirror dated Monday November 25^th 1963

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About 40 minutes after the assassination of John F Kennedy on November 23^rd 1963 a police officer, J D Tippit, stopped his patrol car to question a man he had seen walking along Tenth Street in Dallas. As Tippit got out of his car the man shot him 4 times and the police officer died immediately. The man ran off.

A short while later a shoe store employee saw a man who he recognised as a recent customer acting suspiciously in the entrance to the store. He appeared to be hiding from the police cars that had been called to Tippit’s murder scene. The store man followed the suspicious character to the Texas Theatre cinema and watched him go in without paying. He got the manager to call the police and on their arrival pointed out the man, who turned out to be Lee Harvey Oswald. He was arrested for Officer Tippit’s murder. A witness later claimed that Jack Ruby was among the people in the cinema during the arrest.

Oswald was taken to the Dallas Police Department and questioned. It is not clear when or how the police decided that they had JFK’s assassin but 10 hours after being arrested for Tippit’s murder he was charged with Kennedy’s.

The following day the police decided to move Oswald from the police station to the County Jail. A handcuffed Oswald was led into the basement car-park flanked by detectives Jim Leavelle and L C Graves and past a large crowd of journalists, TV cameras and on-lookers. Suddenly Jack Ruby stepped out and, holding a revolver in his outstretched right hand, shot Oswald once in the stomach. An hour and forty-two minutes later he died.

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Did Jack Ruby kill Oswald because, as he claimed, he ‘did it for Jackie’ or was he eliminating Oswald before he could reveal anything about a conspiracy to murder JFK? 

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Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married John F Kennedy in 1953, became his widow in 1963 and married Greek Shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1968. She and JFK had 4 children, 2 of which died in infancy – one only 2 months before the assassination. Their son JFK Jr died in a plane crash at the age of 38. Daughter Caroline is still alive. Jackie Kennedy Onassis died in 1994.

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Kathleen Heathcote’s killer, Ronald Evans, was caught and sentenced to life imprisonment but in 1975 he was released ‘on licence’. In 1978 Bristol was being terrorised by a rapist nicknamed the ‘Beast of Bristol’.  He was caught by a police woman decoy and turned out to be Evans. He was given a further 9 years on top of his life sentence.  

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Harold Challenor was a Detective Sergeant in the CID in 1963 and was known for planting evidence and beating up suspects. He met his match when he planted a half brick on a journalist for Peace News in order to charge him with carrying a weapon. Other cases then became public knowledge and Challenor appeared at the Old Bailey in 1964, charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, he was deemed to be unfit to plead and was sent to Netherne Mental Hospital with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia

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On several occasions, when I worked in Essex Street in London in the late ‘60’s, I saw Rupert ‘Maigret’ Davies parking his 1930 racing green ‘blown’ Bentley in the road outside our offices.

‘No Hiding Place’ lasted from 1959 until 1967 With Raymond Francis as DCI Lockhart. When Eric Lander left Johnny Briggs, who is now best known as Mike Baldwin in ‘Coronation Street’, took over as the co-star. 

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I thought the sick joke was a modern phenomenon. Canadian presenter and actor Bernard Braden was a popular figure on TV in the early ‘60’s and always quite outspoken.  The usually very outspoken ‘That Was The Week That Was’ team was uncharacteristically reserved in their tribute to the murdered President.

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Burley has a car-park now. I know because a friend of the family lives there. I don’t think she is related to Lord Shackleton.

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A 1963 newspaper wouldn’t be complete without a Beatles item. 5000 queued all night outside the theatre for tickets for the Beatles Xmas Show. This was before Internet and phone ticket sales, so at least the little darlings weren’t ripped off for using a credit card or having the tickets posted to them.

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The Perishers comic strip was created by cartoonist Maurice Dodd in 1959 and lasted until 2005 although reprints are still being published. 

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It’s always fun to look back at future predictions from the advantage point of that future. I’m still waiting for a home free of plugs and wires and for an end to washing up, ironing and dirty clothes. As for microwave food that ‘tastes good but looks raw’ we’re almost there with ‘looks cooked but tastes like cardboard’.

Flying Enterprise sinking

Daily Graphic dated Wednesday February 9th 1952

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I think Health and Safety would have a thing or two to say about this way of travelling!

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The American owned ship the ‘Flying Enterprise’ left Hamburg on December 21^st 1951 bound for the New York.  As well as a cargo of mainly pig-iron there were 10 passengers aboard. The ship was caught in a severe storm on Christmas day, which damaged the hull and by the 28^th it was listing at 45 degrees so an SOS was sent out. The following day all those onboard except Captain Kurt Carlsen were evacuated. For the next 13 days the World’s media watched while the tug Turmoil tried at first to get a line to the ship and then to tow it to safety, but on the 10^th January 1952 Captain Carlsen abandoned ship, the tow lines were released and the Flying Enterprise sank.

The exact make up of her cargo has never been fully disclosed. It has been rumoured that, although the manifest said ‘pig-iron’, she may have been carrying zirconium destined for the US nuclear submarine program.

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Winston Churchill had been re-elected as Prime Minister the previous October and the main purpose of this visit to Washington was to re-new the ‘special relationship’ that had been created between the UK and the USA during World War II. It was during the meetings between Churchill and President Truman that they agreed to allow the US to use British bases for the ‘common defence’ of the two countries. 

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The 56 year-old King George VI had been diagnosed with lung cancer and had had an operation to remove a lung in September 1951. Despite this offer, which wasn’t taken up, the King had less than a month to live and died on February 6^th 1952.

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 “Spare the rod and spoil the child” used to be the motto of all right thinking parents in the 1950’s, including mine. As a family, we moved to Becontree (more precisely Beacontree Heath) when I was 7 and I don’t remember meeting any kids that exercised ‘free expression’ – at least not when there was an adult around.

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This can’t be the 1950’s Britain of Everest, Norman Wisdom, What’s My Line, standing for the National Anthem at the end of the cinema show, PC George Dixon, kids wearing Davy Crockett hats, and the Goon Show. But of course its those coloured people with their strange ways, jazz music and reefer cigarettes – “if they can’t live like civilised folk they should go back to where they came from” was the commonly held view.

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This was the ‘Cold War’ with ‘Reds under Beds’ and the ‘4 Minute Warning’ a seemingly real threat. As with most knee-jerk Security measures it didn’t do a lot of good though as the Portland Spies could have testified if they hadn’t been too busy sending secret messages to Moscow.

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Well someone must have taken heed because the Irish are still there, and here, and everywhere.

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Gilbert Harding was a TV personality (what would now be called a ‘celeb’ by those who can’t complete a word let alone a sentence) and he earned the title ‘rudest man on TV’. Not that he had a lot of competition. 1950’s BBC was all terribly decent and well spoken and, for a lot of the time, ‘live’, so Harding’s unscripted outbursts were exciting and refreshing to many viewers, but unfortunately a lot of others complained. He died of an asthma attack outside Broadcasting House in 1960.

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“I have a flat round thing with a hole in the middle – is this a record?” An example of a dated joke that no one under 40 would appreciate. Anyway this run down of the latest groovy platters throws up some familiar (to us oldies) names – Joe Loss, Pearl Carr, Jimmy Durante, not to mention Erich Kuntz. The name that jumps out for me though is Josh White and his ‘Free and Equal Blues’. White was an accomplished blues singer and guitarist who moved from the South to New York and became a favourite of the Liberal white audiences at folk concerts and political rallies. He was black-listed by the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee and spent most of the 1950’s in Europe. He was re-introduced to American TV audiences in 1963 at the request of John F Kennedy.

JFK Assassination

Daily Mirror, Daily Sketch, Daily Mail and Daily Express

dated Saturday November 23rd 1963

     

   

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This is the 1^st anniversary of this blog so a slight departure from the usual single front page. 
4 front pages that say the same thing – John F Kennedy assassinated, and show the same thing - a picture of Secret Service agent Clint Hill riding the back of the Presidential limo as it accelerated out of Dealey Plaza on its way to Parkland Memorial Hospital

The President of the most powerful nation on Earth gunned down in the street. It was the biggest news story that had happened during my life until then, and would be until 2001 and the destruction of the World Trade Centre. 

 

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On their back page both the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch use the same photograph of Oswald being taken into the Main Street Police Station in downtown Dallas. 

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Was it Wittgenstein or Homer Simpson that said that we could never know the absolute truth about anything? Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest solution to any question is probably the correct one. So who did shoot John F Kennedy from the 5^th floor of the Book Depository? Was it the lone loony Lee Harvey Oswald or imported Marseilles drug gang gunmen from behind the grassy knoll? The CIA? The Mafia? Cubans? Lyndon Johnson? Logic tells us that Oswald acted alone, as did Jack Ruby when, ‘for Jackie’s sake’, he shot Oswald. But that’s boring. Conspiracy theory is more fun and makes for better books, TV programmes and films. Sod Wittgenstein, take it from me – Oswald was a patsy. 

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Not the right time to mention that father Joe Kennedy allegedly ‘bought’ his son the Presidency by paying Mafia boss Sam Giancana to get their Union members in West Virginia to vote JFK and swing the election. Nor the time to mention his alleged affairs with film stars (including Marilyn Monroe), White House workers, a reporter, a Mafia girlfriend and even a suspected East German spy. 

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The new President – 55 year-old Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson.

He was hated by the anti-war left wing youth of America for escalating the US involvement in Vietnam. Remember the chant? –

“Hey! Hey! LBJ!

How many kids did you kill today?”

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I didn’t see any TV that Friday evening because I was out with friends at the local flea-pit, so I was unaware of the shooting until the cinema manager super-imposed a note over the film saying ‘Kennedy has been assassinated’.

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Saturday night TV – note the new space and time programme Dr Who. I have always thought that the first episode (An Unearthly Child) was postponed until the following week, but the IMDb claims that it was broadcast on November 23^rd 1963. Other web sites concur, including one that says it was also repeated the following Saturday before episode 2. Who knows? Who cares? I do actually. I don’t like not knowing which of my memories are true and which false.

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An anonymous face in the crowd just 27 years after being one of the World’s most recognised. The King who never was – Edward VIII.

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In 1963 the papers would use any excuse to mention the Beatles, who were, I am told, a popular beat combo.

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It had been alleged that in 1962 5 Sheffield policemen had been involved in beating a suspect while in custody, one of them using a rhino hide whip. They said that their senior officers had not only condoned but encouraged the action. 

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The Perishers daily cartoon strip started in 1959 and lasted in one form or another until 2006. In the 1970’s it was made into an animated TV series.

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Jimmy Gauld, whose football career spanned 1948 to 1961, bet on matches that, in collusion with players from one of the teams, he ‘fixed’. 

This trial for attempted bribery cost him £80, but worse was to come.

In 1964 he sold his story to the Sunday People for £7,000, incriminating three Sheffield Wednesday players. The revelations resulted in a criminal trial for fraud and he got four years in prison. 6 co-defendants, all players, also got jail sentences.

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I bought my one and only cine camera from Dixons (other stores are available or have gone bankrupt). The film stock came in a cartridge and had a shooting time of 4 minutes. Afterwards it had to be sent off for processing. I wonder if Zapruder got his from Dixons?

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A speed trap detector that doesn’t let you know there is one there until you have been trapped is fundamentally flawed. I wonder what the Dragons would have said about it?

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‘That Was The Week That Was’ (aka TW3) was a live satirical show, hosted by 24 year-old Cambridge graduate David Frost, known for its combination of satirical sketches, serious interviews, political songs and occasional punch-ups. It took the Saturday night post-10 O-clock News slot on BBC1 and often overran its scheduled 11:10 finish time. It was shown in 1962 and 1963, but using the excuse that it was an election year and the BBC had to be politically unbiased; the show was not renewed in 1964.

They got another pat on the back, this time from the Sunday papers, for their Saturday night tribute to Kennedy.

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There are 5½ pages worth of these small ads in this 32 page Daily Mirror!