Random Cutting - Listening to a Wireless on a Train (1923)

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This early attempt at the iPod certainly had it's drawbacks. 

Birth of Baby on TV

Daily Mirror dated Monday February 4^th 1957

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The BBC’s ‘Panorama’ programme started in 1953 and is still running. It hasn’t been backward in dealing with controversial subjects and in 1957 this included the then very private act of giving birth to a baby being shown on TV for the first time (albeit in black and white and very discreetly). Not a programme I would have wanted to watch then at 11 years old. Luckily we didn’t have a TV set.

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Western Swing bandleader turned Rock’n’Roller Bill Haley was heading for Britain and the Mirror was hip to the beat, daddio. Bill Haley at 30 years old, chubby and balding was an unlikely teen hero but he was all they had until Elvis Presley and the younger generation of rockers arrived.

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Hungary was in the grip of a Soviet crack down following the ‘Uprising’ of the previous October/November and was no place to be looking like a beatnik in a duffle coat, a beard and a bow tie. Roger Cooper, Christopher and Basil Lloyd and Judith Cripps had been arrested on January 17^th when they crossed into Hungary from Yugoslavia without proper authorisation. They were threatened with a trial for spying but released, along with two Americans arrested earlier in the month, 

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Flying under the Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol was quite common in the days of bi-planes, but John Crossley successfully flew under in a de Havilland Vampire jet. After going through he tried a victory roll along the gorge but crashed into the bank, killing himself instantly. His was the last flight by anyone under the bridge.

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What the **** is going on at the top of this advert? Ah! I see now. It’s a reference to the popular rhyme of the time - ‘Eany Meany Miny Mo - catch a ni**er by his toe - if he hollers let him go - Eany Meany Miny Mo’. And there he is being caught by the toe!

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Both Liz Taylor and Mike Todd had been married twice before. Just 13 months later Todd was killed in a plane crash.

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In England at this time a youngster could only get married at 16 if they had parental consent, but in Scotland you could marry at 16 without it, but you had to be resident for 21 consecutive days. Gretna Green being traditionally the first village you come to in Scotland when crossing the border north of Carlisle, had long been the venue for runaway marriages.

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The Windmill Theatre, just off Piccadilly Circus, featured a mixture of variety acts, comedians and nude or semi-nude tableaux in shows, usually called Revudeville, from 1932 until it closed down in 1964. Managed by Vivian Van Dam it was the launching pad for the likes of Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers, Jimmy Edwards, Arthur English, Bill Pertwee, Alfred Marks, Michael Bentine, Bill Kerr and Bill Maynard.

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3 of the comic strips in this issue – Private eye ‘Buck Ryan’ drawn by Jack Monk from 1937 until it ended in 1962, ‘Ruggles’ (not to be confused with the US strip ‘Casey Ruggles’) drawn by Stephen P Dowling from 1935 to 1957 and ‘Belinda’ (originally called ‘Belinda Blue Eyes’) which Tony Royle took over drawing from S P Dowling in 1943 until it ended in 1959. 

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Regular readers will know of my complete and life-long disinterest in football, but I must admit as a child I did know the name of one footballer – Stanley Matthews, and this is the man himself in action. 

Random Ad - Psychic Bernadette (1953)

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A bit odd that Dorset's clairvoyante Bernadette has to rely on wishing the new Queen happiness, surely she know exactly how things are going to pan out for Elizabeth II.

Random Cutting - Dartmoor mutiny foiled (1952)

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This is a cutting from 1952, 20 years after the 1932 'mutiny' when about a quarter of the inmates of Dartmoor Prison rioted.

Our King is Dead - George V

Daily Sketch dated Tuesday January 21^st 1936

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George V came to the throne on the death of his father Edward VII in May 1910. He was a popular King with simple pastimes such as murdering wildlife and stamp collecting. After World War I his health deteriorated, mainly due to his heavy smoking habit, and he suffered from pulmonary disease and pleurisy. He died at 11:55pm on May 20^th some say with the help of his physician. I couldn't possibly comment.

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The new King was George V eldest son who reluctantly took on the role of Edward VIII. Of course he was never crowned because he abdicated before his coronation to marry Wallis Simpson (who was not Marge, Patty and Selma’s secret 4^th sibling).

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Lord Hewart served as the Lord Chief Justice from 1922 until 1940. He popularised the aphorism "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done."

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Bertrand Russell is now best remembered (if at all) as an anti-war campaigner and pro-nuclear disarmament demonstrator, but he much more – a mathematician, philosopher, historian, teacher, TV celebrity (when that meant something), author and plane-crash survivor. He died in 1970 at the age of 97.

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From December 1934 until July 1935 Florence Blenkiron and her friend Teresa Wallack travelled from London to Cape Town on a motorcycle and sidecar combination with no support team, satnav and, for a lot of the time, no roads. When they reached South Africa they quarrelled and Florence made the return journey alone.

If you look this up online you will find Teresa taking all the glory mainly due to her still in print book of the journey ‘The Rugged Road’. I can’t find anything about Florence’s return trip, not even if she made it home safely.

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This Winchester By-Pass was the first all dual-carriageway by-pass in England and opened in 1940. Since the late 1960’s and before the co,pletion  of the M3 I used the By-Pass many many times on journeys between London and Dorset and ‘fondly’ remember the hours spent queuing for the lights at the junction with the A333 (now B3335).

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I didn’t realise that the old ‘canned’ laughter debate was this old. I’ve been in the audience for several TV recordings recently; and radio audiences back in the 1960’s, and it’s true that being there does make even the feeblest jokes funnier. Modern TV audiences are encouraged to laugh out loud at ‘something you would merely smile at when watching at home’.

Random Ad - Twiglets (1952)

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The rather more-ish savoury snack Twiglets first went on the market in 1929. This American advert is from 1952.

Random Cutting - Yuri Gagarin killed (1961)

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Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born in 1934 and died in 1968 when a MiG 15 training jet he was piloting crashed. In 1961 he was the first human to go into Space, when, on his one and only spaceflight, he completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961.

The Bradford City Stadium fire

Sunday Mirror dated Sunday May 12^th 1985

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The Bradford City stadium fire on May 11^th 1985 was truly horrific. Two and a half weeks later 39 people were killed at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels and 4 years later 96 at Hillsborough. All three tragedies can be watched on YouTube although why anyone would want to is beyond me. Reading about it is painful enough.

The Popplewell Inquiry that followed the Bradford fire led to the introduction of new legislation, which improved safety at many of the UK's football grounds. 

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By the time the Labour Party got back into power in 1997, Denis Healey had retired and moved to the House of Lords. This is a pro-Labour Mirror newspaper in full anti-Tory flight.

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I know the photos in this paper aren’t the clearest but on first glance I took this to be a picture of a late 18^th century portrait painting. That aside I think Alf Avison is being treated a bit harshly. Surely the first requirement of a budding novelist is a vivid imagination.

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What would Mrs Waterbury think of how her little daughter Phyllis had grown up? Not to mention Chrissy who would certainly have been shocked at her ex-flatmate Jo’s attire. Sally Thomsett a few years on from 'The Railway Children' and 'Man About the House'.

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Oh, look, the Royal Family is human after all. They swear and get annoyed when they cock something up and Princesses even carry their own children. So they aren’t lizards after all.

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Presumably these look-a-like Princess Diana dolls are based on how she looked as a baby, although you can’t tell from this photo. I wonder if Lenci of Turin produced Camilla Parker Bowles dolls when the time came. I hope not.

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The good news? You have inherited £20,000. The bad news? Your father was a murderer

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The recent cooking show winner, Ade Edmondson, and the fabulous Lady Connie from ‘Blandings’ looking like impossibly young ones.

Random Ad - Alien film advert (1979)

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The first of the Alien franchise released in 1979. According to his autobiographical book ‘Film Freak’, the tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’ was written by the Bryant and May crime series author Christopher Fowler.

Random Cutting - Germany's Commercial Airships (1934)

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This really must have looked like the future of air travel in the early 1930’s with the luxury of ocean liners and the speed of aeroplanes of the time.

The final paragraph of this cutting taken from the pro-European multi-lingual paper The European Herald critising Britain for not jumping in is prophetic but in the wrong way. With the fatal crash of the Hindenburg airship in 1937 putting an end to that future, it looks like Britain was right to ‘wait and see’. 

Labour’s Most Critical Week

The Pall Mall Gazette dated Monday February 21^st 1919

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The Pall Mall Gazette was founded as a pro-conservative evening paper in 1865 and lasted until it merged with the Evening Standard in 1923.

The War may be over but the Versailles Peace Treaty is still being forged, labour unrest in Britain increases and Germany is politically and economically unstable.

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All this talk of Germany paying for pensions etc was changed when the total amount of reparations was fixed in 1921 on the basis of the German capacity to pay, not on the basis of Allied claims. The debt was set at about £1billion and by 1931 they had repaid less that 20% when the debt was suspended indefinitely, although it was revived in 1953 and paid off in full by West Germany.

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Demobbed soldiers found a very different Britain to the one they left in 1914. High unemployment, a rising cost of living, strikes by newly organised unions and a severe shortage of houses were the order of the day.

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As George Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister and President of the Paris Peace Conference, was leaving his house the previous Thursday, a man fired several shots at his car. Clemenceau was hit once between the ribs, just missing his vital organs. His attacker, Emile Cottin, was seized by the crowd and nearly lynched. Clemenceau died in 1929 with the bullet still in him.

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The Pall Mall Gazette, being an evening paper, is commenting here on the news that Kurt Eisner the Socialist who had declared Bavaria an independent state, had been assassinated in Berlin earlier in the day. Immediately following The Great War Germany was in turmoil with various factions for or against the terms of the surrender and the occupation of the industrial Ruhr by the French. Bavaria was strongly anti-French and became the breeding ground for Nazism as the 1920’s progressed.

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The Late News tells us that Prince Leopold of Bavaria had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the plot to murder Eisner. 

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No great mystery really – the retired actress Jessie Francis, wife of actor/manager Frederick Wright Sr. and mother of comedians Huntley and Fred Wright, died of a heart attack during or after a burglary. 

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The Melville Brothers (Walter and Frederick) owned and managed theatres, including the Lyceum in London, as well as writing and directing plays like this melodrama of German spies that ends with a British General shooting his traitorous wife, the Female Hun of the title.

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Special constables as we know them now date back to the First World War. The case of Herbert Stanton Moss can’t have helped the distrust the public had for the Specials as reflected in the lyrics of the popular 1919 song ‘My Old Man (Said Follow the Van)’ – ‘…you can’t trust a Special like an old-time copper…’

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There are no photos in the Pall Mall Gazette so this fashion drawing is a nice relief from the pages of text.

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With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that Prohibition in the USA between 1919 and 1933 did not work and even had a detrimental effect on society with the criminalisation of social drinking and the rise in organized crime to support the supply of alcoholic drinks. This article is referring not to the 18^th Amendment and the Volstead Act that brought in National Prohibition on January 1^st 1920, but to the temporary Wartime Prohibition Act that preceded it.

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I wonder if Lt.-Col PSC was at all mollified by the 1920 issue of the Bronze Oak Leaf to all service personnel mentioned in despatches. I doubt it.

Random Ad - The Hystogen Institute (1930)

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A 1930 advert for 'plastic surgery' by the Hystogen Institute. A quick look online shows that the Institute went into voluntary liquidation in 1929, but apparently survived or was resurrected. They were also sued by an ex-employee who was talked into having unnecessary surgery and left scarred in 1927. So if you are looking for rhinoplasty (the phrase 'nose job' conjures up unwanted images) then beware.

Random Cutting - Gangsters Wear White Collars Now (1952)

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The United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, better known as the  Kefauver Committee, existed from from 1950 to 1951 and investigated organized crime which crossed state borders. The hearings were held in 14 cities and some were televised live. Kefauver never became President despite standing for nomination in 1952 and 1956.