Daily Mirror dated Tuesday September 24th
1968
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When the front page of a newspaper features a story about a
dancing mouse you can rest assured that no wars have broken out, no Popes
assassinated, no famous film stars died and no planes have crashed. To a lesser
degree the same can be said for a paper that leads with a headline about the
price of cigarettes. Combine the two and you have a ‘slow news day’.
I’ve never been a smoker. I tried but nearly choking and watering
eyes just didn’t appeal and, as my grey-haired old mother used to point out,
I’ve always been ‘as tight as a mackerel’s arse’, so I didn’t see any sense in
paying for the displeasure. The prediction that small shops would suffer from
supermarkets’ price-cutting was true and still is.
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Cont'd from Front
The Ford factory in Dagenham produced its first
vehicle in 1931 and its last in 2002. Some say the Unions ruined the British
car industry and some say the Unions were necessary because the employers put
profits before people. I lived in Dagenham but never worked at Ford’s or in any
other factory so I really couldn't comment.
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Farmer John Derek James sought refuge in a
derelict cottage near Weston-under-Redcastle, Shropshire, after being
challenged by the police over the illegal possession of a shotgun. He took a
woman hostage and held out against a combined force of police and
soldiers for 17 days. The siege ended when the woman took the gun off him while
he was asleep. At the subsequent trial he was sent to Broadmoor Mental
Hospital.
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Dr Christian (or Christiaan) Barnard had
performed the World’s first successful human heart transplant in 1967 on Louis
Washkansky, who died 18 days later of pneumonia. I'm sure there is something to say about white South Africans receiving black South Africans' hearts but I'd rather not go there.
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Tony Blackburn and Ed Stewart posing with two
young ladies. Let’s hope for the DJs’ sake the ladies are older than they look.
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British Rail and its French equivalent, SNFC,
operated the Princess Margaret hovercraft from 1968 until 2000 jointly. The
craft was seen in the Bond film ‘Diamonds Are Forever’.
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These days I imagine that an insurance company
setting a 25 mile limit on a driver would constitute a breach of human rights
and be earning some lawyers a few bob in The Hague or Strasbourg.
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In 1968 there were just over 18,000
drink-driving convictions in England and Wales. In 1988 there were over 105,000
but the figure has been stabilised at about 85,000 in recent years. Oddly the
number of fatalities due to drink-driving dropped steadily between 1979 at 1640
to 430 in 2006, possibly due to a series of December TV campaigns have
informed, cajoled and shocked drivers into not drinking and driving.
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The General Certificate of Education exams were introduced
in 1951 to replace the old School Certificate and Higher School Certificate
exams. Results were originally graded 1 – 9 with 1 – 6 being passes, but this
was later replaced with A – E for passes and U for fail. In 1988 the GCE’s were
replaced by GCSE’s using A – G and U, but recently there has been talk of
reverting to a number system of 8 – 1 with 8 being the top grade. Fun isn’t it?
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Jennifer Croxton only appeared in the 1 Avengers
episode – she played Special Services agent Lady Diana Forbes-Blakeney in
‘Killer’ a story in the 1968/69 Linda Thorson season.
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Strange how our attitude to words change. The
word ‘cripple’ would never appear in a headline these days and is even mildly shocking
when seen in print, but in 1968 you, and I, would probably not have even
noticed it. At least the policeman was convicted and received a jail sentence,
which is surprising.
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This could well have been printed last September
following the appallingly wet summer we had in 2012.
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Let me get this straight – printer Edward Wilson forged
£1.25million to sell to Argentine rebels and planned to use the proceeds to help
the needy in Nigeria, and was talked into this by a ‘total stranger’. Was
Jonathan Routh doing ‘Candid Camera’ in 1968?
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The Larks, drawn by Jack Dunkley lasted from 1957 until
1985. I liked it because the father character looked just like my
brother-in-law did at the time. Its demise can be added to the list of crimes
committed by Robert Maxwell who took over the Daily Mirror in 1984.
I
can’t find out anything about ‘The Flutters’ but I thought I’d give it an
airing.
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The great Roy Kinnear who did everything from
Shakespeare, Hammer Horror, ‘The Avengers, ‘That Was The Week That Was’,
Sherlock Holmes, The Beatles’ ‘Help!’, Dickens, ‘Sparrow Can’t Sing’ and
‘Jackanory’ to ‘The Return of the Musketeers’ in 1988 during the filming of which he
fell from a horse and died in hospital the next day. His son Rory Kinnear was
in the recent Bond films ‘Quantum of Solace’ and ‘Skyfall’.
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In August 1968 the Soviet Union had invaded the Czechoslovak
Socialist Republic because the Communist government of Alexander Dubček was contemplating liberal reforms. When there is nothing else you can do humour can
help.
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The Queen’s sister Princess Margaret Rose had
married the society photographer Anthony (or is it Antony?) Armstrong-Jones in
1960. They were divorced in 1978.
Wikipedia calls him ‘Antony’, the BBC ‘Anthony’, the Telegraph ‘Antony’, Pathe News ‘Anthony’. All together now
- “You say Antony, I say Anthony, You say Christian, I say Christiaan, Let’s
call the whole thing off.”
