Sun dated Friday February 12th 1965
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This is from before the Sun newspaper became a tabloid. It
had evolved out of the old broadsheet Daily Herald in September 1964 and the
first tabloid sized edition wasn’t until 1969.
Richard ‘Ringo Starr’ Starkey, the drummer with the popular
beat combo The Beatles, married Maureen Cox in 1965 and they went on to have 3
children, but divorced in 1975. Later he
married actress Barbara Bach and she married American businessman Isaac
Tigrett. Maureen died of leukaemia in 1994.
The honeymoon in Hove was cut short because Ringo had to
return to London to begin recording the soundtrack for the Beatles’ second
feature film ‘Help’ which they started filming later in the month in the
Bahamas.
Other Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, appear in
the wedding photos but Paul McCartney was on holiday in Portugal with Jane
Asher.
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Ex-Conservative MP Lord Robert Boothby was bisexual at a time
when male homosexuality was a criminal offence. In 1963 he had an affair with
an East End criminal, Leslie Holt, who introduced him to the gangster Ronald
Kray. Kray supplied Boothby with young men and received personal favours from
him in return.
In 1964 the Sunday Mirror exposed Boothby’s underworld
associations. He denied the stories and threatened to sue the paper’s
publishers. Because Tom Driberg, a senior Labour MP, was also involved, neither
the Labour nor Conservative Parties wanted the story followed up, consequently
the Sunday Mirror’s owner, Cecil King, backed down under political pressure and
paid Lord Boothby £40,000 in an out-of-court settlement.
Boothby went on to embarrass the Conservative Party by his continued
support and campaigning for the Krays even after they’d been jailed.
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An extra large amount of gold bullion was being carried on
this trip from Cape Town to England, so a temporary storage area had been
constructed in the hold of the ship. Two members of the crew had found that a
ventilation shaft into this temporary area had not been sealed off and used it
to steal boxes of gold bullion valued at about £100,000. The loss was
discovered when the ship unloaded in Southampton. The police had no clues or
suspects but believed that it had been an inside job and decided that the gold
had never left the vessel.
Undercover
officers posed as crew but nothing happened for a few months. Finally a seaman
tried to sell a couple of the gold bars in Durban. The rest of the gold was
discovered hidden in the false base of a storage locker on deck. Two seamen
were sentenced later to ten years in jail.
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The Queen and Prince Philip were on a 12-day State Visit to
Ethiopia and The Sudan arriving in Khartoum on February 8th. During
a motorcade a student threw the tomato (the Queen was later reported to have
said that it was red) at the Royal car. The student was detained by other
students and handed over to the police.
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The death penalty for murder was still in force in 1965 so a
manslaughter verdict for Philip Meech meant the difference between life
imprisonment and being hung. Luckily for him the court decided that an attack
with an iron bar and stabbing his wife 49 times was still not strictly murder
because it was not premeditated.
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Do that these days and you’ll probably get
stabbed 49 times.
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These were the dark days of Civil Rights unrest in Alabama and
the rest of the South. Sheriff Jim Clarke of Selma, Alabama was notorious
enough to warrant his own entry in Wikipedia and died at the age of 85 in 2007.
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Well we still have a delivery, to our doorstep, of milk in
bottles 3 times a week, so stick that up your plastic container Stuart Allen!
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The Initial Teaching Alphabet (ita) was invented in the early
1960’s to help children start reading. The idea was to then switch to the
normal alphabet. Some children found the switch difficult or confusing and its
use died out, although it was still around in the early 1980’s when my two
sprogs used it.
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‘The Prime Minister, The Boxer and The Footballer’ This time
it’s personal.
