Random Cutting - Anti-Vietnam War demo (17/3/1967)

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I have this cutting because I was in Grosvenor Square on March 17^th 1967. I had gone with a friend to take photos of the demonstrators who originally gathered in Trafalgar Square then marched up Charring Cross Road, along Oxford Street and into the Square that housed the U.S. Embassy. I had a SLR with a 70mm – 135mm zoom lens. This being before digital, what I didn’t have was enough film. I ran out before we reached Grosvenor Square.

Sinking of the General Belgrano

Daily Mirror dated Tuesday May 4^th 1982

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A month to the day after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands (see post), the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano was sunk by HMS Conqueror using 3 torpedoes. 770 of the Belgrano’s crew were rescued but 323 died.

This was the day the Sun newspaper went with the headline ‘GOTCHA!’ which was changed for the later editions to something a little more appropriate

‘It’s a Knockout’ started in France as ‘Jeux sans Frontier’. Stuart Hall, who has been in the news lately and in the nick for a while yet, hosted the UK version. About 800 people were using the stand when it collapsed and about 60 were taken to Scunthorpe General Hospital.

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A potpourri of Falkland related news. Like the RMS Queen Mary and RMS Queen Elizabeth, it was the QEII’s turn to be used as a troop ship.

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Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev had met in Vienna in 1979. By 1982 Brezhnev was ailing and in November he died. Reagan actually had 5 summit meeting between 1985 and 1988 but with Mikhail Gorbachev.

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The original Mods had died out by the late 1960’s, some having morphed into skinheads or just grown too old. The skinheads in their turn died out, but in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s both subcultures enjoyed revivals and, evident from this article, emulated their cultural forefathers by spending Bank Holidays causing mayhem at seaside resorts.

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To celebrate the 10^th anniversary of Mastermind they held this Champion of Champions contest. Sir David Hunt answered questions on Alexander the Great to get 13 points and increased this to 28 in General Knowledge.

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A warning to those that take what they read on the Web as gospel – several sites including the Oracle, sorry, Wikepedia, state that this experimental 3D broadcast on TV South’s ‘The Real World’  happened in February 1982. I notice that all the sites seem to have cut and pasted the same wording from one another. They also claim that the first full 3D programme – a showing of the 3D western film ‘Fort Ti’ was shown in December 1982. Or November. Or even October.

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This appears to be a fairly early satellite tracking and positioning system probably using the first GPS satellite that had been launched in 1978. I can’t find any reference to the acronym SARGOS anywhere.

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The Advanced Passenger Train or APT was designed to run on existing track at speeds of up to 155mph so had a hydraulic tilting system to keep the train on the track on bends. The first passengers were carried in December 1981 but there were problems from the start and the APTs were withdrawn from service. High Speed Trains with a top speed of 125mph replaced them.

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Over the next 10 years ‘Wogan’ ran to 252 editions during which the Irish mumbler interviewed everyone from Eddie the Eagle Edwards to Vincent Price to Roy Orbison via Paul McCartney and Fanny Craddock.

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Wrong. Faye Dunaway didn’t appear in Octopussy, the 4 years younger Maude Adams took the role.

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Wandsworth boy Frank Bruno had his first professional fight in March 1982, which he won along with his next 20 fights. He won the European Boxing Union Heavyweight Title in 1985 and the World Boxing Council Heavyweight Title in 1995.

The end of the Berlin Wall

Today dated Saturday November 11^th 1989

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For many years I didn’t realise that Berlin was actually 100 miles inside East Germany and thought that the Wall was just part of the East/West border. Actually its 96-mile length encircled West Berlin while the 866-mile border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran from the Baltic Sea in the North to Czechoslovakia in the South. This border had been closed in 1952 and by 1960 the East German government had realised that the Berlin road and subway access to the West was a gap through which more and more of their citizens were ‘escaping’, so the work on building the Berlin Wall started in 1961.

In the summer of 1989 thirteen thousand East Germans fled across the open borders between Hungary and Austria to West Germany. In September the leadership of the Social Unity Party that ran the GDR started to give in under pressure from a growing protest movement and on November 9th 1989, the government relaxed travel regulations and allowed East Germans to cross directly from East to West Berlin. When hundreds of thousands of people gathered at the checkpoints in the Wall later that day and demanded to be let through, the leadership was unable to withstand the pressure, and the Berlin Wall was opened.

Over the following days the Wall was ‘occupied’ by both East and West Berliners and was breached in several places both unofficially and officially to create new crossings. The total demolition of the Wall followed in June 1990 and the reunification of Germany followed on October 3^rd 1990.

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Oops. Apparently the mistake cost about £180,000 in printing costs. I wonder if anyone kept one from being burnt. It would probably be worth a bob or two to a collector.

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I think there may be a printing error here – ‘£179.6’ – for what, a litre? A gallon? A tanker full? According to www.theaa.com the price in 1989 was about 185.8 new pence per gallon, so I reckon the above should read £1:79.6p a gallon or 39.5p a litre.

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The final paragraph of this article about Myodil is typical of the response from a big company like Glaxo – “we did warn you in the leaflet”. Who, when about to be injected by a nurse in prep for an X-ray asks to read the leaflet that was supplied with whatever is being administered? 

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What’s acid house music? Apparently it’s a variant of house music characterized by the use of simple tone generators with tempo-controlled resonant filters primarily using bass-line synthesisers and a drum track. It originated in Chicago and arrived in England in the late 1980’s. The word ‘acid’ doesn’t refer to LSD. Quite what it does refer to I can’t work out. The drug choice of Acid House fans was Ecstasy and it was the media fuelled moral panic over the use of this drug that led to the police raids and arrests of party organizers like Robert Darby.  Doncha just love it when someone in their late 60’s tries to explain youth culture? Almost as bad as some spotty TV presenter who was born this side of 1990 trying to tell us what it was like to live through the 1960’s.

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Maureen Lipman’s Beattie in the British Telecom (get it? Beattie – BT – British Telecom) adverts was for a while one of the most popular characters on TV and as instantly recognisable as Alexander the meerkat is now.

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An odd competition – win a house but, by the way, you’ll have to sell your own home to make up the £66,000 shortfall on the purchase price.

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The TV viewing charts and predictably the top 10 programmes by viewing numbers are all soaps. ‘Naked Video’ was not what it sounds like – this was the comedy sketch show that gave us Gregor Fisher’s Rab C Nesbitt and, my favourite, John Sparkes’ Welsh poet Siadwel.

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The puppet based satire show Spitting Image ran for 19 seasons between 1984 and 1996 and featured the voices of such household names as Steve Coogan, Alistair McGowan, John Thomson, Jan Ravens, Harry Enfield, Enn Reitel, Hugh Dennis, Phil Cornwell, Jon Culshaw, John Sessions, Phil Cool, Rory Bremner and Pamela Stephenson.

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Regular readers of this blog will realise that it isn’t the exploits of David Bryant or an interest in bowls but the drawing that attracted me to this item.

Condoms in Court

Daily News (New York) dated Thursday March 28^th 1991

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Judge Gustin Reichbach was a student activist at Columbia University during the 1960’s and then became a lawyer in New York. This condoms incident happened just three months after he became a judge and had been assigned to the ‘grave-yard shift’ or Night Court. As a result of the Daily News front page he was transferred to the Civil Court. A long and sometime controversial career followed and he died of cancer this year (2012).

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Alfred Visconti was apparently murdered because he was gay and/or a police informer, neither of which would have been tolerated by his Mafia bosses.

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4 men escaped from a high security (obviously not high enough) prison in upstate New York but 2 were retaken the same night. Kenny Ryan was arrested as he left the 53^rd Street subway station in Brooklyn on March 20^th and George Gatto was caught on April 16^th.

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For any ‘Dr Who’ fans that are interested there is a YouTube film of the Bonhams Auction here at the end of which a Dalek is sold for £6400.

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Aldo Ray started his film career in 1951 and by 1955 was co-starring with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov in ‘We’re No Angels’. By the 70’s he was appearing in small roles in small films and had been diagnosed with throat cancer. Hollywood, showing its infinite good will to all men, revoked his Screen Actors Guild membership because he was acting in non-union films just to pay his medical bills. 

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Democrat Douglas Wilder never made it to Pennsylvania Avenue. Having declared as a candidate in 1992 he withdrew early in the race. He was the first Black Governor of Virginia from 1990 to 1994 and Mayor of Richmond from 2004 until 2009.

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Anthony Riggs’ wife Toni Cato Riggs and her brother Michael Cato were tried for his murder and Michael Cato was convicted but Toni was acquitted.

And that could have been the end of the story, but a year later an undercover DEA operation accidentally filmed Toni Cato Riggs confessing to the murder of her husband. She was re-arrested, tried and convicted.

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Donnie Walhberg went on from ‘New Kids on the Block’ to join his brother Mark Walhberg as a film actor.

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Elevator surfing apparently became a popular way of killing one’s self at American University campuses (campi?) in the early 1990’s and is still going on.

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Chester Gould created the Dick Tracy comic strip in 1931 and he wrote and drew it until 1977 when Max Allan Collins took over the writing. By 1991 it was being drawn by Dick Locher who carried on until 2011.

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Doonesbury has been written and drawn by Garry Trudeau since its creation in 1970. Both Dick Locher and Gary Truseau have won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.

Random Ad - Lambretta Scooter (1960's)

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To many who were teenagers in the 1960's it was the scooter rather than the Mini that epitomised the era. Decked out in a parka over a mohair suit and a pair of chisel-toed shoes from Raoul, the typical Mod just needed a Lambretta to complete the look.