Cutting - Demoted General (1944)

8th June 1944

Click to Read

A little tit-bit following the D-Day landings from an American paper. On the 18th April 1944 in the Claridge's Hotel restaurant in London the rather drunk Ninth Airforce Services Commander, Major General Miller complained to a nurse that something he had ordered from the States would not arrive in England before June 15th "well after the invasion". 

This wasn't the only breach in the extremely secret D-Day plans. For instance back in March Basil Liddell Hart, a militery expert, had been with Duncan Sandys, the Minister for Supply, at another London hotel when he showed the Minister what appeared to be details of the invasion and complained to Sandys that he hadn't been officially consulted. Sandys notified Churchill and Liddell Hart had his knuckles rapped.

Cutting - Blonde Spy in Flat (1938)

4th February 1938

Click to Read

The trial of the Woolwich Arsenal spies and a tale worthy of John Le Carre complete with the mysterious Miss X. The whole story is very nicely written up at this website.  

Random Cutting - Georgi Markov affair (1978)

30th September 1978

Click to Read

Georgi Markov was a Bulgarian novelist, playright and disident who defected to the West in 1969 and subsequently worked for the BBC. He was attacked at a bus-stop near Waterloo Bridge on the 7th September 1978 and died in hospital on the 11th of ricin poisoning. The killer, believed by British Security to have been working for the Bulgarian Security Forces, has never been identified.

Princess Margaret Wedding

Daily Sketch dated Saturday May 7th 1960

 Click to Read

 Click to Read

Click to Read

In 1953 the new Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister, Margaret Rose, accepted a proposal of marriage from RAF Group Captain Peter Townsend. Unfortunately Townsend was divorced and with Margaret now 4^th in line to the throne, the Queen, the Church of England and the British Government all opposed the union. After a couple of years Margaret finally gave in and announced that she would not marry Townsend. In 1960 she decided to get hitched to society photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon). Their very stormy marriage lasted until 1978 when they finally divorced.

Click to Read

The Queen not smiling at a State occasion, well there's a surprise.

Click to Read

I think there is some photographic trickery going on here – I can definitely see a join across the middle. If only they had had Photoshop.

Click to Read

Taxi driver Thomas Leslie Harvey decided to decorate his mother’s house as a surprise while she was in hospital. He opened a cupboard door at the top of the stairs and found a mummified body.

His mother, Sarah Harvey, had always told him that the cupboard contained some leftover items belonging to former wartime tenants.

64 year-old Sarah was questioned by the police and eventually identified the body as that of a former tenant Mrs Frances Knight, who was estranged from her husband. One night in 1940 Sarah found Mrs Knight dead and instead of reporting the death she put the body in the cupboard. Over the following years she carried on collecting Mrs Knight £2 weekly allowance from the Post Office.

In the subsequent trial Mrs Harvey was cleared of murder but was found guilty of obtaining money by deception and was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment.

Click to Read

As mentioned before in this post, the Pop comic strip is one of my favourites. I must admit I didn’t realise it lasted so long, although this is obviously a different artist to the 1933 example. In fact I have just consulted the oracle and find that Pop’s creator John Millar Watt left the strip in 1949. It ended in this year of 1960.

Click to Read

This small piece heralded one of the most famous spying incidents of the Cold War when CIA pilot Gary Powers was flying a U2 high altitude jet over Russia and was shot down on May 1st by a ground-to-air missile. Powers was tried, found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 10 years but was exchanged for a Russian KGB spy in 1962.

Back in the USA Powers was criticised for not using the self-destruct on the plane before ejecting and therefore letting the Soviets investigate the wreckage.

He was a civilian test pilot until 1970 and then became a helicopter pilot for TV companies. He was killed in a helicopter crash in 1977.

Click to Read

In 1955 Peter O’Donnell (also creator of Modesty Blaise) and Alfred Sindall created the cartoon strip ‘Tug Transom’. It featured the adventures of a cargo boat captain (wow! move over James Bond) and lasted in the Sketch until the paper closed down in 1971.

Click to Read

Lots of goodies here – ‘Ivanhoe’ starring Roger Moore, ‘Sea Hunt’ with Lloyd Bridges (father of Jeff and Beau), ‘M Squad’ with Lee Marvin, ‘77 Sunset Strip’, ‘The Four Just Men’ with one or more of Richard Conte, Dan Dailey, Jack Hawkins or Vittorio De Sica, ‘Colonel March of Scotland Yard’ with Boris Karloff sporting an eye-patch, ‘Dial 999’ with Robert Beatty and ‘Robin Hood’ played by Richard Greene.

Click to Read

About 700 of the Fairthorpe Electron Minor kit cars were produced between 1957 and 1973. A partially restored 1960 Electron Minor would set you back about £9000 today. Ugly little thing, isn't it?

Click to Read

Click to Read

The 1960 FA Cup Final was between Blackburn Rovers and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Wolves won with a 3–0 victory that included a Blackburn own goal.

Plotted to Split Britain and Russia

Daily Mirror dated Tuesday June 19th 1945

This edition of the Daily Mirror was printed only 6 weeks after the end of the War in Europe and it obvious from the layout that paper was still in very short supply. There are no less than 6 news stories on the front-page alone.

As it contains only 8 pages I thought I would post the whole paper.

Click to Read

Front Page - 

The trial of 16 ex-members of the Polish Resistance, who throughout WWII had fought against the occupation of Poland, first by the Nazis and then by the Soviet Union, was just one of many of Stalin’s show trials. The accused had been tricked into visiting Russia by the promise of a ‘safe passage’ but were arrested by the Soviet Secret police. They were tortured for several months until all but one of the 16 confessed to trumped-up charges. The trial lasted 4 days. Leopold Okulicki was sentenced to 10 years, Jankowski to 8 years and the other sentences ranged from 5 years to 4 months. Three were actually acquitted.

For more information about William ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ Joyce see this post.

At the end of WWII King Leopold III of Belgium was under house arrest in Germany but when freed he didn’t return home but spent the next few years in Geneva. He finally abdicated in 1951.

Conservative MP for Oxford, Quintin Hogg (later Lord Hailsham) had written his book ‘The Left was Never Right’ in answer to the 1940 book ‘Guilty Men’ which, using modern parlance named and shamed public figures who were pro-appeasement in the years leading up to WWII.

Click to Read

Page 2 -

This first post-War election turned out to be a victory for Clement Attlee’s Labour Party and a surprise defeat for the ‘war hero’ Winston Churchill and his Conservatives.

Click to Read

Another example of the space saving layout is the use of the gutter between pages 2 and 7, which is used for the Radio programmes and part of the crossword. After the War the General Forces Network became the Light Programme, which in turn became Radio 2 in 1967.

Click to Read

Page 3 -

Baby Marie Osborne appeared in 20 or so silent films between 1914 and 1919 then ‘retired’. She started a film career again in 1934 but only as an extra and a stand-in, making her last screen appearance in 1950. Between 1956 and 1976 she worked in the wardrobe department on several well-known films including ‘The Godfather Part II’. She died at the age of 99 in 2010.

The story lower left about Mr Claude Baker appears to be an early case of identity theft – literally.

Click to Read

Page 4 -

General Noel MacFarlane won the Labour seat for Paddington North at the General Election but resigned in 1946.

That’s the way sport should be reported –less than a third of an inside page, in fact if I'd been in charge it would have been relegated to the page 2/7 gutter and the Radio promoted.

Click to Read

Page 5 -

It isn’t until near the end of the piece headed ‘Took Pupils for a Lesson in LAW’ that you realise that the pupils are all 15 or older. Why is the word ‘LAW’ in capitals?

If the mosquitoes are that big in Oxfordshire I’m staying away. There’s not even a barrier across the road – were the Health and Safety people on holiday?

Click to Read

Page 6 -

Surprisingly ‘Buck Ryan’ was British comic strip and ran from 1937 until 1962. 

‘Beelzebub Jones’ was another British strip that looked like a US import. It died in December 1945.

‘Popeye’ was a US import that started in 1929 and is still running, although the artist has changed several times over the years.

‘Garth’ began in the Daily Mirror in 1943 and lasted for another 54 years.

From 1935 until 1990 ‘Live Letters’ replies and comments were by the ‘Old Codgers’ who were actually journalists Brian McConnell and possibly Peter Reed.

Click to Read

Page 7 -

By today’s standards the Agony Aunt column is very tame.

The ‘Just Jake’ comic strip was odd in that the title character rarely appeared having been eclipsed by the villain Captain A.R.P. Reilly-Ffoull.

‘Jane’ was the Daily Mirror’s most famous strip and was published from 1932 until 1959. It spawned book, TV and film versions.

Click to Read

Back Page -

The only news in this edition from the war in the Far East and it’s looking like the beginning of the end for the Japanese, but it was another 2 months and 2 atomic bombs before they finally surrendered.

Labour won the Election and the coal industry, which had been taken over by the Government during the War, became officially Nationalised on January 1^st 1947.

Tom Driberg was, among other things, an MP, a poet, a communist, a homosexual, an author, a friend of Evelyn Waugh, black magician Aleister Crowley and the Kray Twins, the original ‘William Hickey’ columnist, a CND campaigner, a Baron and possibly an MI5 spy and/or a KGB agent. 

Petain calls for French Ceasefire

Evening Standard dated Monday June 17th 1940

Click to Read

Click to Read

The German Army had marched into Paris on June 14^th 1940 and on the 22^nd an armistice was signed and France was divided into the Occupied Zone and the so-called Free Zone under the control of Marshal Philippe Pétain. The occupied zone covered most of Northern and Western France, which brought the German Army to within 22 miles of the English coast.

Marshall Pétain had been a National hero for his military leadership during World War I, but by 1945 he was on trial as a traitor to France. He was sentenced to death but Charles de Gaulle commuted this to life imprisonment. He died in 1951 at the age of 95.

Click to Read

During the 1930’s America’s most famous aviator Charles Lindbergh made no secret of his admiration for Adolf Hitler’s new Germany and in particular Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe. He had visited Germany and had even been awarded the Service Cross of the German Eagle by Göring. He lectured widely in America in support of the non-involvement of the US in the European War even going so far as to blame a conspiracy of ‘Britain, Roosevelt and the Jews’ for trying to get America to join in the conflict.

Click to Read

Look out! Spies are everywhere – some clever than others.

Click to Read

I wonder if any of these volunteers flew in that summer’s big event – the Battle of Britain? Or possibly even one of the 544 Allied airmen killed? 

Click to Read

I don't mind telling you, Mate, you just can’t trust them aristocrats.

Click to Read

Times change along with attitudes. Some for the better and some not.

Click to Read

The Soviet Union and Germany had signed a mutual non-aggression pact in 1939. This article by Left Wing journalist and politician Michael Foot calling for an alliance between Stalin’s neutral Soviet Union and Britain against Nazi Germany was published just 5 days before Hitler’s army invaded Russia. The non-aggression pact was torn up and Russia joined the Allies.

Click to Read

Seems a lot of trouble to con a few pence each time. 

Click to Read

An advert for ‘Gaslight’, the classic melodrama with jewel theft, murder and a husband trying to send his wife mad. Just the thing to take your mind off the War. Not to be confused with the 1944 US version.

Click to Read

Edith decided that today of all days was the wrong one to have gone ‘commando’.

Click to Read

The first casualty of War may be truth, but the second is free speech. The B.E.F. was the British Expeditionary Force most of whom were evacuated at Dunkirk.

Click to Read

With the Blitz less than 3 months away I’d sign up asap if I were you.

Get My 3 Kids Out Of Russia says Mrs Maclean

Sunday Pictorial dated Sunday 12th January 1958

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge 

Donald Maclean was one of the Cambridge group, along with Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, who spied for Soviet Russia.

Maclean and Burgess defected to the USSR in 1951 having been alerted by MI6 agent Kim Philby that arrests were probable.

Maclean left his pregnant wife and two children behind, but they joined him in Moscow in 1953. Maclean’s heavy drinking and affairs, along with Melind’a dis-satisfaction with life in Russia, probably led to this plea to get her children back to England.  In fact they all stayed in Moscow until 1979 when she and the now grown up children left for the West. Donald Maclean died in Moscow in 1983 and Melinda died in New York in 2010.

Click to Enlarge 

The 19-year-old au-pair from Holland, Mary Kriek, was found murdered in a ditch near Colchester. She disappeared on the 5th January 1958, after getting off a bus only yards away from the house where she was employed, and her body was found the next day 10 miles away. She had been viciously beaten about the head.  Despite a wide-ranging investigation the case remains, to this day, unsolved

In January 1961 the body of 20 year-old Jean Constable was found close to where Mary Kriek’s had been.

Click to Enlarge 

R-875 or Dextromoramide was discovered in 1956 and was used to treat pain and, in combination with other drugs, as an anaesthetic. Its main proprietary name was Palfium but was discontinued in the UK in 2004 because of how addictive it was compared to morphine.

Click to Enlarge 

It beggars belief that a member of the Local Council can be so out of touch with reality that he doesn’t realise that increasing someone’s rent from one sixth of their income to one third would cause financial problems. Actually, then as now, it doesn’t really surprise.

Click to Enlarge 

The threat of Nuclear oblivion aside, the 1950’s were an optimistic time especially when it came to the benefits computers were going to bestow on our world. They would solve all the World’s problems, give us more leisure time than we’d know what to do with and even replace politicians. Pity the hardware looked like something out of an early episode of ‘Dr Who’.

Click to Enlarge 

For only £10 9s 6d you can become the next Rock’n’Roll sensation, but don’t forget to pick a suitable name – Marty Wilde, Cuddly Dudley, Red Price, Dickie Pride, Vince Eager, Conway Twitty, Rory Storm, Wee Willy Harris, Billy Fury, Eden Kane, Screamin’ Lord Sutch – sorry all taken.

Click to Enlarge 

I see a great answer for Alexander Armstrong’s  ‘Pointless’ quiz. If the question were to name as an obscure as possible presenter of London Palladium’s Beat the Clock surely the portly actor Robert Morley would get you a zero.

Click to Enlarge 

The English Coronet Camera Co. introduced this stereo camera in 1953 and it produced 4 pairs of 3D photographs on a reel of 127 type film.

If you are interested (and know where to get some 127 film (and get it processed)) there are a couple of these cameras on E-bay at the time of posting.

Anyway I was a Scott's Porridge Oats lad myself. With the cream off the top of the milk and Golden Syrup! They hadn't invented cholesterol in 1958.

Click to Enlarge 

If you want to hear this gem you’ll need a copy of the CD ‘Just About as Good as It Gets! Great British Skiffle Vol. 3’.  By the way the ‘B’ side of the single was that old whistle-along favourite ‘Boodle-Am-Shake’.