1966 - Pickles the dog, Kenneth Wolstenholme and World Cup Willy

The biggest story of 1966 was that the England football team won the World Cup when they beat West Germany 4-2 and Geoff Hurst famously scored the only world cup final hat trick ever. The whole country went football mad that year and everyone knows all about the brilliant victory. But Sir Alf Ramsay’s England team were not the only national footballing heroes of 1966. There was also Pickles the dog , without whom there may not have been a trophy for Bobby Moore and his teammates to lift on that glorious day in July.

The solid gold Jules Rimet trophy was stolen while on public display at an exhibition in London and this led to a nationwide search and the FA chairman, Joe Mears, receiving threatening demands for money to ensure its safe return. Brazil, the then holders of the trophy were understandably outraged and accused the English FA of total incompetence. No change there then and they were almost certainly right of course but by a delicious twist of fate the trophy was stolen again in 1983, this time in Rio de Janeiro and this time it was never ever recovered. It is believed that it was melted down for the precious metal and it will almost certainly never be seen again.

Back to 1966 and this is the point where the story becomes unbelievably weird or perhaps just plain unbelievable. One evening a week after the theft, a man called David Corbett was out walking his mongrel dog Pickles, in south-east London, when the dogs attention was caught by a package wrapped in newspaper lying under a bush in somebody’s front garden. It was the World Cup. I’ll say that again. It was the World Cup! No one has ever satisfacrily explained what it was doing under a bush wrapped in the Daily Mirror but David Corbett received a reward of £5,000, which was a huge sum, the equivilent of over £250,000 today and Pickles became an overnight national hero. I am surprised that he wasn’t in the BBC top one hundred greatest Britons. But some people said that the trophy was cursed and within weeks of the cup's recovery and in a remarkable instance of bad luck, Pickles choked to death when he caught his lead in the bough of a fallen tree while chasing a cat.

Apart from the result there were some other things about the World Cup that are also interesting. The official mascot for example was a Lion called World Cup Willy who wore a Union Flag shirt of red, white and blue, which was strange because this was England that were playing and not the United Kingdom, but as none of the other home nations were in the finals I suppose England generously believed that they were representing Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Embarrassingly England’s first defeat after the World Cup was against Scotland at Wembley in 1967 and the Scottish team that included the footballing legends, Denis Law, Jim Baxter and Billy Bremner promptly declared themselves the new World Champions. Sadly for them it didn’t work like that and lets face it they never will be.

World Cup Willy had a World Cup song that was not unsurprisingly called World Cup Willy that made number one in the hit parade and was sung by Lonnie Donegan who was the first person to become famous playing skiffle music in the UK. He was a guitar and banjo player who also played the washboard and the tea-chest bass and who had a lot of chart success in the 1950s and early 1960s. Anecdotally it was Lonnie who inspired John lennon to learn guitar and form his first group, The Quarrymen. What is strange about Lonnie singing the English World Cup song however is that although he was brought up in East Ham he was in fact born in Scotland. I wonder where his loyalties were when Scotland beat England in 1967? Apart from ‘World Cup Willy’, Lonnie is probably best remembered for another number one hit called ‘My old mans a dustman’.

At the end of the world cup final the words of the commentator, Kenneth Wolstenholme, became part of broadcasting history when as the match was coming to the end in injury time a small pitch invasion took place just as Geoff Hurst scored to put England 4-2 ahead and Wolstenholme said 'Some people are on the pitch ... they think it's all over ... it is now!' and these have become arguably the most famous words in English football, and a well known phrase that has passed into modern English usage. Wolstenholme was not a brilliant broadcaster it has to be said but as well as the World Cup Finals of 1966 and 1970 he commentated on the the first ever game featured on Match of the Day in 1964 and covered every FA Cup final between 1949 and 1971 after which he was replaced by David Coleman.

Saturday Morning Pictures

In the early 1960s for a couple of years or so I went every Saturday morning to the ‘Flicks’ at the Granada Cinema at the bottom of North Street in Rugby opposite the posh new Council offices to the Saturday morning pictures. What a fleapit. It was an old brick building built in the late 1950s and totally without character and charm. Present day residents of Rugby will recognise it as the home of Gala Bingo, what a tragedy!

Every Saturday morning we would get the Midland Red R66 bus, which left from the top of the road, into town and our main objective was to get to the cinema early in order to get a seat in the front row of the balcony if we could. We weren't allowed through the front door because of the damage we could potentially do but had to queue down the side of the building and were admitted through one of the exits at the back. It cost sixpence (two and a half new pence) to get in and the queue was always long even before the show opened and the big boys would more often than not push in the front of the queue.

Inside the cinema was dark and smelt of stale cigarette smoke with seats covered in a red sort of velveteen. Unlike real velvet, however, this material was not soft and for boys wearing short trousers it made your legs itch, which made it impossible to sit still and I am sure that it was the same for girls in their little skirts. The noise levels inside were unbelievable. About three hundred children aged between five and thirteen would scream, whistle, shout and boo at any and every opportunity. To try and keep some sort of order the Manager had a cunning plan, which was to give out silver shillings to children who were sitting still and behaving themselves. Throughout the show, cinema staff would pass through the building and randomly hand out the coins to kids who were trying desperately to behave. Once you had got the shilling of course you could do pretty much behave as badly as you liked!

The show began with some old bloke on an organ that would rise out of the stage floor, like a poor mans Reginald Dixon show, and there would be ten minutes or so of community singing. Next came the birthday spot and paid up members of the Rugby Grenadiers Club whose birthday it was this week were invited up onto the stage to receive a present. After the present came the ritual humiliation of ‘Happy Birthday to You’, that was normally sung by kids in the auditorium with all sorts of unsuitable for print alternative lyrics.

There were always cartoons to get things started and then there were usually about three features each week. A serial (to make sure you came back next week), a short comedy (Laurel & Hardy was always my favourite), and a feature film. This was usually a western that had the good cowboys in white hats and smart clothes and the bad guys in black hats and with unshaven faces and who always looked untidy. The camera would pan from the good guys to the bad guys constantly to cheers for the white hats and boos for the black hats. In these films no-one's gun ever ran out of bullets but surprisingly the good guys never seemed to get seriously injured. Bad guys fell over clutching a fatal wound, but there was never any blood and the good guys always got winged in the arm without causing any real damage. This was completely unrealistic of course. Six shooters in the old west were notoriously unreliable and if someone was unfortunate to take a bullet this would have done the most horrendous damage to flesh, muscle and internal organs. Bullets, or slugs, were made of soft lead and of relatively slow trajectory so if they entered the body they would have bounced about doing unimaginably painful damage and if shot it is completely unlikely that anyone would have shrugged it off as a flesh wound and carried on fighting as they did in these films.



If there was a sci-fi feature this would be something like 'Jet Speed and the invaders from the dark side of the Moon'. The special effects left a lot to be desired and the aliens were always ugly creatures that were always after our women, which thinking about it now is a bit improbable. A scaly black lizard creature is probably more inclined to have the hots for another scaly black lizard creature back home on Mars rather than a soft milky white earth female. Like cowboys the space heroes were dressed in white, often with goldfish bowls over their heads. The aliens usually wore black and had ingenious secret ray guns. As with the westerns we cheered at the whites and booed at the blacks.

If there was a period epic then this would be something Robin Hood, William Tell, Richard the Lion Heart, or my all time favourite, Zorro. Zorro, which is Spanish for Fox, and a by-word for cunning and devious, was the secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega a nobleman and master swordsman living in nineteenth century California. He defended the people against tyrannical governors and other villains and not only was he much too cunning and clever for the bumbling authorities to catch, but he delighted in publicly humiliating them while riding on his horse jet black steed Tornado. Zorro was unusual because he was dressed all in black with a flowing Spanish cape, a flat-brimmed Andalusian style hat, and a black cowl mask that covered his eyes. His favored weapon was a rapier sword which he used to leave his distinctive mark, a large 'Z' made with three quick cuts. It was strange for a hero to be in black, so for Zorro we had to remember to cheer for the blacks and boo and hiss at the Mexican soldiers dressed in white.

For the staff this must have been the worst day of the week, I bet sickness levels were high on a Saturday morning. This must have been a bit like trying to deal with a prison riot. When the films reached the exciting bits we would flip our seats up and sit on the edge and kick furiously with our heels on the seat bottom and make a hell of a din while we reduced the plywood base to splinters. The manager didn’t like this of course and would frequently stop the film and appear on stage to chastise us. This was usually met with a hail of missiles that were lobbed at the stage. The cleaning up afterwards bill must have been huge.

I stopped going to Saturday Morning pictures about 1966 and the Granada cinema closed down because of dwindling audiences about ten years later. I’m guessing it must have been 1975 because I think that the last film shown there was the Towering Inferno, which opened in January of that year. Predictably it was sell-out all week as people of the town flocked to the cinema for the very last time before its conversion to bingo hall.

Predictably it was sell-out all week as people of the town flocked to the cinema for the very last time before its conversion to bingo hall.

1965 - Churchill, Woodbines & Certificates

I have mentioned before that, in his memory box, Dad kept the front pages of three newspapers: 7th February 1958, the Munich air disaster, 23rd November 1963, the Kennedy assassination and finally the Daily Mail of 25th January 1965 which reported the death of Sir Winston Churchill.

I think that few would argue that Winston Churchill was probably the greatest Briton of all time. I know that I can say this with some confidence because in 2002 the BBC conducted a nationwide poll to identify who the public thought this was. The result was a foregone conclusion and Churchill topped the poll with 28% of the votes. The BBC project first identified the top one hundred candidates and the final vote was between the top ten. Second in the poll was the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who received nearly 25% of the votes. These two I fully agreed with but in third place, and goodness knows what the public must have been thinking, was Princess Diana! Now, the only thing that I can see that Princess Diana ever did was to whine a lot about having to live in palaces, wear expensive jewellery and eat gourmet food and try to undermine and destroy the Royal Family. Not so long ago you could have your head cut off for that sort of thing but by some bizarre twist the British have turned her into a heroine. As low down as number twenty-seven was Emily Pankhurst who fought for women’s suffrage and much further down the list at number fifty-two was Florence Nightingale and in my opinion these two women’s personal legacy to the development of Great Britain as a nation is much, much greater than that of Princess Diana.

There were other anomalies on the list as well. There were eleven Kings and Queens and eleven politicians, ten military heroes, eight inventors and seven scientists, which is what I would expect but then there were eight pop musicians including Boy George! Now, surely there must be dozens of people who could be more appropriately included on the list than that. Even if you do accept that pop stars are great Britains what is even more unbelievable is that Boy George beat Sir Cliff Richard by seven places! John, Paul and George were included in the eight but there was no place for Ringo, which doesn’t seem very fair. Enoch Powell was one of the politicians and he was a raging racist. Richard III is in but not Henry VII. There is an issue of equality because of the one hundred only thirteen were women and I can’t help feeling that there must be more than that. Here are some suggestions of mine; the prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry, the philanthroprist Octavia Hill, the pioneering aviator, Amy Johnson, the nineteenth century gardener, Gertrude Jeckyl and the very embodiment of Britishness, Britannia. John Churchill the 1st Duke of Marlborough and ancestor of the great Sir Winston didn’t even make the list.

In fact Winston Churchill was so great that he was awarded a state funeral and that doesn’t happen very often because this requires a motion or vote in Parliament and the personal approval of the Monarch and consists of a military procession using a gun carriage from a private resting chapel to Westminster Hall, where the body usually lies in state for three days. The honour of a state funeral is usually reserved for the Sovereign as Head of State and the current or past Queen Consort. Very few other people have had them: Sir Philip Sydney in 1586, Horatio Nelson in 1806, the 1st Duke of Wellington, 1852, Viscount Palmerston in 1865, William Gladstone, 1898, the 1st Earl Roberts of Kandahar, 1914, Baron Carson in 1935 and Sir Winston Churchill. So this is a very small list indeed although it might have included one more but Benjamin Disraeli who was offered the honour of a state funeral refused it in his will. We might have to wait a very long time for the next one because I really can’t imagine that it is going to be Boy George.

1965 was the hundredth anniversary of the end of the American Civil War and to celebrate appropriately the USA started a new one in Vietnam. US troops had been there for some time of course but on March 2, following an attack on a U.S. Marine barracks, Operation Flaming Dart and Operation Rolling Thunder commenced and the war was official. An estimated six hundred and twenty thousand soldiers died in the American Civil War and one million one hundred thousand in Vietnam. There were many more unaccounted civilian casualties in addition to that.

In politics Edward Heath became leader of the Conservative Party and began the period when he and Harold Wilson alternated occupancy of 10, Downing Street. Although these two party leaders certainly didn’t have the stature of Gladstone and Disraeli it is just about the last time in British politics when the two party leaders were almost evenly matched and this generated an interest in politics that has been sadly lacking since. Around about 1970 I even joined the Young Conservatives but this was nowhere near as exciting as the Boy Scouts and I didn’t renew my subscription when it ran out.

In the early winter of 1965 there was a lot of fog and a series of multiple crashes on Britain’s new motorways, and as a bit of a panic measure, in December, an experimental speed limit of seventy miles per hour was introduced. This really hadn’t been a problem when motorways were first opened because most cars prior to the 1960s would have had difficulty getting up to seventy m.p.h. in the first place let alone maintaining this speed for any distance without blowing the engine to kingdom come but by mid-decade they were starting to get faster. The history of the speed limit is quite interesting, the first speed limit was the ten m.p.h. limit introduced by the Locomotive Act, or Red Flag Act, of 1861 but in 1865, the revised Locomotive Act reduced the speed limit still further to four m.p.h. in the country and two m.p.h. in towns, which, lets be honest is slower than average walking speed and sort of missed the point of automative power. This Act additionaly required a man with a red flag or a lantern to walk sixty yards ahead of each vehicle, effectively enforcing a walking pace, and warning horse drawn traffic of the approach of a self-propelled machine. In 1896 a new Locomotive Act replaced that of 1865 and the increase of the speed limit to a positively reckless fourteen m.p.h. has been commemorated each year since 1927 by the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. The motorway speed limit of seventy miles per hour was made permanent in 1970.

Speed limits didn’t make any difference at all to Jim Clark who was one of Britain’s greatest Formula One racing stars and in 1965 he won both the F1 championship and the Indianoplois 500. He was regarded as the greatest driver of his time and won twenty-five of his seventy-three grand prix starts but sadly died prematurely in an accident at Hockenheim in Germany in 1968 when his car left the track and crashed into trees. This was a time when motorsport was a lot more dangerous and life expectancy was a great deal less than it is today.

A significant event of 1965 was the banning of cigarette advertising on television. I am thankful for that because at eleven years old I was at my most impressionable and I am quite convinced that I might otherwise have been seduced by the macho image that cigarette advertisements used to lure teenageres into tobacco dependency. It was about this time that I enjoyed, or perhaps more correctly endured, my first cigarette. My friend David had slipped some woodbines from his dad’s half empty packet and we went into the fields behind his house for a smoke. David’s dad, Harry, wouldn’t have noticed a few fags going missing because he used to smoke about sixty a day and that certainly helped to bring his days on earth to a premature ending. Woodbines were untipped and maximum strength and we lit up and I can clearly remember trying to adopt an adult demeanour and puffing away but without inhaling until an unfortunate combination of sucking in and speaking at the same time involuntarily drew the foul vapour into my lungs, filled my brain with noxious gasses and made me giddy and unsteady. I literally fell over as though someone had punched me in the head, turned an unpleasant shade of green and was violently sick, much to the amusement of my pals. I tried cigarette smoking a few more times after that, as we all did, but I have never forgotten that thoroughly unpleasant experience and gladly never became a real cigarette smoker at any time ever after that. In 1968 Lotus started advertising tobacco on their Formula One racing cars. That didn’t do Jim Clark any good did it!

1965 was a mixed year for me when it came to passing exams. As predicted I failed my eleven-plus in Spring and was sent to secondary school in September in the bottom grade at Dunsmore (or Duncemore) but to compensate for that I did get my Leaping Wolf certificate in the Wolf Cubs and passed my Elementary Test for swimming a whole length of the swimming baths and that was quite something let me tell you, look at the certificate, it is signed by the examiner, Mrs Dick, who was a fearsome creature, Councillor Pattinson, the Chairman of the Baths Committee and Jim Duffy, the Town Clerk no less! Who needed the eleven-plus? Not Me!

Boy Scouts

Two years ago was the one hundreth anniversary of scouting that began in 1907 when Robert Baden-Powell, a Lieutenant General in the British Army, who had served in India and Africa in the 1880s and 1890s, held the first Scout camp at Brownsea Island in Dorset. Since his boyhood, he was fond of woodcraft and military scouting, and therefore, as part of soldiers training he showed his men how to survive in the wilderness. He noticed it taught them to develop independence and to think for themselves, rather than just blindly follow orders and so towards the end of his military career he wrote the principles of Scouting in his book ‘Scouting for Boys’ which was based on his earlier military experiences, and in so doing started the Scouting movement.

I joined the Wolf Cubs when I was seven years old and after I had passed all the tests and received my Leaping Wolf Certificate moved up to the Scouts when I was eleven. At first I was in the Paddox Troop but later transferred to the Hillmorton, which was good for me because dad was the Scoutmaster, which gave me a bit of an advantage when it came to passing tests and getting badges. I liked the Scouts and the quasi-military organisation that came with it with the uniforms and the kit inspections, the law book and solemn promise and the fact that I could legitimately carry a hunting knife on my belt without being challenged; it was a bit like the Hitler Youth Movement but without the nastiness! My only regret about the uniform was that by the time I was in the scouts that old pointy khaki hat had been replaced by the beret; I always lamented the passing of that hat.

Being in the Scouts was genuinely good preparation for later life because it taught discipline, purpose and respect and some truly useful skills like first aid and survival, using an axe and a compass and lighting fires without the aid of a cigarette lighter. Looking now at the Scout progress card however there is one thing I’m not so sure about and that is stalking. In the Scouts you got a badge for being good at that but these days that sort of thing is likely to land you in a whole lot of trouble!



And it wasn’t just stalking because lots of things about the 1960s were more casual than they are now and whilst it seemed normal at the time I suppose today this might be interpreted as naïve. No one questioned the motives of people who gave up their time to be Arkela or Baghera in the Wolf Cubs, Skip or Bosun in the Scouts because these were decent people who gave up their time for the benefit of others. They certainly didn’t have to have checks by the Criminal Records Bureau and there was no sex offender’s register to refer to before they were allowed to do it, they were just good men and women, like my dad, who volunteered because they had a sense of duty and because they enjoyed doing it. Even Robert Baden-Powell's sexuality has been brought into question by modern biographers, who claim to have found evidence indicating he was attracted to boys but this has never been proven and was probably just a mischievous attempt to discredit a genuine British boys hero. In 1899 during the second Boer War Baden-Powell was promoted to be the youngest colonel in the British Army and became famous for resisting the siege of Mafeking when the town was surrounded and outnumbered by a Boer army of eight thousand men but which, under his command, withstood the siege for two hundred and seventeen days until relieved.

Other interesting badges were backwoodsman, explorer (but our troop never got sent to the Amazon or anywhere else remotely interesting) and a woodcraftsman, but I don’t think I managed any of those. I’m fairly sure that I didn’t manage the aircraft modeller either and it didn’t help that my dad was giving out the badges and he had obviously seen my hamfisted attempts at assembling the Avro Lancaster Airfix kit!

When you weren’t getting badges scouting was good for toughing you up. I can recall my first camp in 1965 when I was eleven when I spent my first time away from home and my parents. By the second day I was so desperately home sick that I was feeling really ill. The Scoutmaster, Mr Pointon, or Skip, took me aside and gave me a good talking to about growing up and enjoying the experience and I don’t know how he did it but in a matter of just a few minutes he removed my anxiety and my tears and I was back with the rest of the boys cooking sausages over an open fire and it never troubled me again. I can still recall the conversation as one of life’s defining moments when he explained that if I gave up and went home everyone would think that I was a big girl and I would probably be dismissed from the troop with dishonour and someone would break my staff in two over their knobbly knee! Anyway next day was parents visiting day and it never occurred to me for one moment to pack up my sleeping bag and groundsheet and go home early.

As well as the training and the tests there were a lot of games as well. British Bulldog was a good toughen you up sort of game, which is probably not allowed anymore because it was a bit rough and inherently dangerous. It started with one poor boy, usually the smallest, being picked out to stand at the bottom of a hill while the rest of the Troop charged down and through with the objective of getting to the other side without being caught and wrestled to the ground. This was the job of the boy in the middle who had to intercept one of the charging boys, pin him to the floor and shout British Bulldog 1-2-3. If he was sensible the little boy in the middle would try to intercept the next smallest boy and so on. This boy then joined the first at the bottom of the hill and the rest charged again. This carried on until only one boy remained who had avoided being caught and mugged and he was declared the winner, as he was stretchered off and taken to the infirmary.

Boys stayed in the Scouts until they were sixteen but I never saw it through to the end, dad fell out with the Group Scout Master, Harry Newman in 1969, walked out of a meeting and never wiggled his woggle again and that November I discovered girls and that hanky-panky was more fun than gin-gan-gooly and that was goodbye to the Scouts, which was a shame because I was only a couple of tests away from my First Class Scouts badge at the time and I never got to go on to the Seniors.


Dad (Skip) in the middle, me bottom right:

1964

In 1964 the USA passed its official verdict on the Kennedy assassination when ‘The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy’, known unofficially as ‘The Warren Commission’, produced an 888 page report that concluded that the gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of John F Kennedy. The Commission's findings have since proven extremely controversial, and have consistently been both challenged and continuously reaffirmed. Debate and speculation however refuses to go away.

Kennedy wasn’t the only US President to be assassinated and before him Presidents Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901) died at the hands of assassins, while many other presidents have survived attempts on their life. But not only is being US President a high risk job because this is an occupational hazard for other high profile people. In Russia for example, four emperors were assassinated within less than two hundred years of each other, Ivan VI, Peter III, Paul I, and Alexander II. In Europe the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 by Serb nationalist insurgents started World War I and soon after achieving independence from British occupation, Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the freedom struggle was gunned down. In Britain the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was shot dead by a madman in 1812 but happily remains the only British Prime Minister to suffer this fate.

1964 was a busy year in all respects. In politics there were a lot of changes around the world; in the USSR Khrushchev was deposed and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, Lyndon B Johnson became the elected President of the USA with the fourth highest ever presidential victory and in Britain the Labour Party won the general election and returned to power after thirteen years of Conservative rule. The new Prime Minister was Harold Wilson who was one of the most prominent modern British politicians. He succeeded as Prime Minister after more General Elections than any other twentieth century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, with majorities of four in 1964, ninety-eight in 1966, five in October 1974, and with enough seats to form a minority government in February 1974.

In the world of entertainment Radio Caroline became the first pirate radio station which played continuous popular music and directly challenged the BBC light programme for radio supremacy, the Rolling Stones released their first album and BBC2 was introduced. These exciting developments meant that we needed new entertainment equipment around the house and it was at about this time that we had our first record player to replace a creaky old radiogram that was difficult to tune in and only played 78 rpm records. Now for the first time we could play singles and long players and the first two records that were bought to accompany the new record player were a Jim Reeves single and a Black and White Minstrels EP. Later that year Jim Reeves was killed in a plane crash so we never added to that collection and thankfully I don’t think we added any more Black and White Minstrels either.



I used to hate the Black and White Minstrel show that was generally shown on TV at Saturday teatime and was one of the most politically incorrect programmes imaginable with white men ‘blacking-up’ as negroes and singing songs from deep south Dixie. And this was at a time when the Civil Rights movement in the US was moving up a gear or two in the US and demands for social justice were leading to violence and confrontation. During this time there was one of the last great efforts by white supremacists to frustrate the introduction of equalities. The Ku Klux Klan was a bunch of racist bigots that dressed in white cloaks and pointy hats and advocated white supremacy, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, racism, homophobia, anti-communism and nativism. This was a bunch of genuinely nasty people who often used terrorism, violence and acts of intimidation, such as cross burning and lynching, to oppress African Americans and other social or ethnic groups.

BBC2 was the third UK television channel and unlike the other channels available at that time was broadcast only on the 625 line Ultra High Frequency system, so was not available to viewers with 405 line Very High Frequency sets. This created a market for dual standard receivers which could switch between the two systems and anyone who wanted to receive the new channel was obliged to go to the expense of upgrading their television sets. This sort of thing still goes on today. Last week I was looking for a new computer and was advised that I would have to buy a PC with Windows Vista which has replaced XP. This sounded all well and good until I was told that I would have to replace most of my software as well because it would be incompatible with the new operating system. What a con! On the subject of computers the computer language BASIC was first introduced in 1964, which was a real breakthrough and led to the greater accessibility and later the introduction of home computers.

Also this year the Sun newspaper was first published to replace the old fashioned Daily Herald. At about this time I had my first paper round and earned fifteen shillings (.75p) in return for getting up at six o’clock, six days a week, to lug a bag of newspapers around the village before going to school. Thursday was a bad day because of the Radio and TV Times magazines but Fridays was by far the worst because the addition of the Rugby Advertiser doubled the weight of the bag. Later I had a Sunday round as well and that paid fifteen shillings for the one day but that stared an hour later so that thankfully meant a bit of a lie in. One of the occupational hazards of being a paper boy was dogs, and I really don’t like dogs! One I can remember used to scare me witless when it would jump at the letterbox and pull the newspaper through whilst I was delivering it. One day I hung on to the other end and the dog shredded the outer pages. I think it must have got a kick up the arse or something because it didn’t do it again for a while. I would be surprised if Sunday paper rounds exist anymore because to deliver to fifty houses or so would need a dumper truck to replace the old canvas bag on account of the size of the newspapers and the weight of all of the supplements.

The paper round was important because towards the end of my career I used to assist the newsagent, Mr Dalton, to sort out the rounds and this taught me new skills that I was able to put to good use later in life when it was my job at the council to organise the refuse collection rounds.
Before this year going to the pictures had been restricted to Saturday morning children’s picture club at the Rugby Granada Cinema but by 1964 I was old enough to be taken to see proper films in the evening. I am sure that we went to see Mary Poppins that year but the two films that I remember most were 633 Squadron and Zulu. 633 Squadron was a war film where the RAF carried out a daring bombing mission to destroy a Nazi armaments factory. The planes were mosquitoes and this quickly became my favourite Airfix model after seeing the film.

Zulu was much more important. These are the facts: On 22nd January 1879 the Imperial British army suffered one of its worst ever defeats when Zulu forces massacred one thousand five hundred of its troops at Isandlhwana in South Africa. A short time after the main battle a Zulu force numbering over four thousand warriors advanced on a British hospital and supply garrison guarded by one hundred and thirty nine infantrymen at Rorkes Drift. The film tells the true story of the battle during which the British force gallantly defended the hospital and in doing so won eleven Victoria Crosses, which is the most ever awarded for one single engagement. Dad liked military history and tales of heroic deeds and he took me to see the film and then probably watched it every year after when it popped up on TV at Christmas. The film takes a few historical liberties but it remains one of my favourites and of course I have a copy of it in my own DVD collection. Interestingly one of the Black & White Minstrel singers had a singing role in the film!



What else is interesting is that the if you buy the DVD now, Michael Caine is billed as the star but if you watch it Stanley Baker had top billing and he was the film’s producer as well, the film simply introduces Michael Caine in his first big film role. That’s how easily history is rewritten.

Later that year dad bought the theme tune to 633 Squadron single and I got the Zulu soundtrack LP for Christmas to play on our new record player. I’ve still got it but I don’t play it any more. I’ve also got dad’s book on the Zulu wars and his favourite Royal Doulton water colour painting of the defence of Rorkes Drift.

After the summer holidays I went back to school for my final year at Hillmorton County Junior School which was going to include preparing for the eleven-plus exam next year. No one was very optimistic about my chances of success because to be fair I wasn’t the most gifted child at the school. My reports consistently reported to my parents how I didn’t try hard enough, didn’t show interest and could do better. The Headmaster, George Hicks, advised my parents to buy me some clogs and prepare me for working life in a factory as he was certain that I was destined to be one of life’s academic failures. I blame the school because they simply didn’t make it interesting enough. Going to Chapel on the other hand was quite stimulating, I enjoyed that and with the helpful guidance of the Reverend Keen and Sunday school teacher Christine Herrington I got a First Class pass in the Methodist Youth Department Scripture Examination for the third year running. I wasn’t worried about working in a factory I was certain I was going to be a vicar.

Danger

When I was boy there were exciting places to explore and play and there was lots of time to do so because parents were not nearly so paranoid about children wandering off to enjoy themselves as they are today. In those days it wasn’t uncommon to go out in the morning and only return home when you were hungry and there certainly weren’t search parties out looking all over the place. It’s a shame that these days children are confined to their back gardens or have to be taken back and forth to school by car because there was so much more fun when young lives were not subject to so many safety restrictions.

It wasn’t that our parents were irresponsible or didn’t care about us it’s just that they were somewhat oblivious to risk. I suppose when you have been brought up in London during the blitz when Hitler’s bombs were dropping every night and there was always imminent danger of sudden death then life in the 1960s almost certainly would have seemed a whole lot more sedate and certainly less dangerous. This didn’t mean that there weren’t hazards of course and as boys we used to like to hang around the dangerous places.

First of all there was the railway line and you don’t get much more dangerous than that. It was relatively easy to get up on the tracks and put half pennies on the line for the trains to squash and expand to the size of a penny in the optimistic hope that this would double the value of the coin and shopkeepers wouldn’t notice. (This never worked by the way). A couple of miles from home we used to dare each other to walk into the inky blackness of the Kilsby Tunnel but I seem to recall that none of ever got more than a few feet before beating a hasty retreat for daylight and safety. The Kilsby Tunnel is near the village of Kilsby in Northamptonshire on the West Coast Main Line and was designed and engineered by the engineer Robert Stephenson. The tunnel is two thousand two hundred and twenty four metres long yards long and took one thousand two hundred and fifty men nearly two years to build. It was opened in 1838 as a part of the London and Birmingham Railway and is today the eigteenth longest tunnel on the British railway system. We used to think it was cool to play there but I realise now that it was totally stupid.

Sometime in the early 60s the line was electrified and this made it even more dangerous. I remember a man from British Rail came to school and addressed morning assembly to warn us about playing on the railway. He looked a lot like Norman Wisdom in both appearance and stature and was a bit like the railway equivilent of the Green Cross Code Man, without the muscles. His name was Driver Watson and he proudly wore his navy blue uniform with red piping and told us that the electricity was so powerful that we would need to wear wellington boots forty-two feet thick if we were to be safe from electrocution if we were to touch the overhead wires. That sounded convincing enough to keep me away from the tracks in future and anyway British Rail started putting up fences so it was difficult to get there anymore.

Running parallel to the railway line was the Oxford Canal that had been commissioned in 1769 and built by the canal builder James Brindley. The canal was an incredibly dangerous place really but of course we didn’t realise that at the time. During the summer we used to wait at top lock and offer to open and close the gates for passing canal craft in the hope that we would receive a few pennies for our labours. If the canal was dangerous then the locks were doubly so but this didn’t stop us from daring each other to jump from the elevated tow path down about three metres and two and a half metres across to the central section of the double locks. I shudder to think about it now. We used to swim in the canal too and that was a stupid thing to do as well. Not only was the murky water about two metres deep and lurking with danger but it was also full of bacteria and germs especially in the black cloying mud on the bottom that would ooze through your toes so it’s a miracle that we didn’t catch typhoid or something else really, really awful.

Talking of catching things, we used to go fishing down the canal and this wasn’t quite so dangerous except when my friend Colin Barratt (who was forbidden to go to the canal on account of not being able to swim) fell in while struggling to land a four-ounce Perch with a home made rod and line. We fished him out and took him home and didn’t see him again for about three months after that but to make him feel better we told him that it was a monster Pike that had pulled him in.

Water always had a special attraction and when we weren’t messing about on the canal there was always Sprick Brook where we used to fish for minnows and red-breasted Sticklebacks and take them home in jam-jars in the days before goldfish. Sprick brook ran under the railway bridge on Hillmorton Lane and was just the sort of place where you could have an accident and no one would find you for days.

One place that wasn’t nearly so dangerous as it is today were the roads and we used to play on our bikes without any real sense of danger and certainly without those silly cycle helmets that kids wear today. Cycling however did get me into trouble once when I was about ten and persuaded some friends to tackle a cycle ride one afternoon to Leicester to see my grandparents without checking with anyone first. I have to confess that this was both ambitious and thoughtless especially on a Raleigh Junior bike with 18” wheels and no lights and not in any way suitable for a fifty mile round trip. Getting there was reasonably straightforward but the return journey was a bit more difficult on account of it being dark and us being completely knackered. There was a search party that night for sure and I can remember being astonished about how much fuss was made over such a trivial incident when Dad intercepted me at Abbots Farm and sent me home immediately for a good telling off from Mum which turned out instead to be an emotional and tearful reunion and I can remember being thoroughly confused by that.

Apart from the dangers presented by the transport system there were other equally hazardous places to play as well. Building sites for example. There was a building boom in the 1960s and this presented all sorts of opportunities. Especially good fun was climbing ladders and playing on the scaffolding and hiding in part constructed rooms. There were piles of bricks to build camps (much better than Lego), sewer pipes to crawl through, sand and cement to kick around and oil drums and bits of timber to take away and use to build rafts to sail on the canal but this never worked either. Once a passing police patrol car stopped to watch us building a waterways craft. They teased us by asking to see our boat license and then told us to hurry up and get on because they wanted to see us fall off before getting on with their duties. We clambered aboard and didn’t disappoint them. I can still hear them laughing as I write this.

Most of these dangerous places are closed off to children these days, the railway line is fenced, building sites are fenced, the canal locks have wooden guardrails and you would have to be just plain daft to take a bike out on a main road. Given the modern restrictions it’s hardly any wonder I suppose that today children have to stop at home and watch the television or play computer games and are denied the pleasure of real dangerous activity and that is a real shame.

1963 - X Ray Spectacles, Railways and JFK

The ZIP code is the system of postal codes used by the US Postal Service. The letters ZIP, an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan, were chosen to suggest that the mail travels more efficiently, and therefore more quickly, when senders use it. By the early 1960s improvements were needed in the postal service due to increasing volumes and on 1st July 1963 ZIP codes were announced for the whole country. This might not sound like a really really big news item but I mention it because for many years I had a lot of difficulty understanding what a ZIP code was as post codes were not introduced to the whole of the UK until 1974.

As a teenager I used to read American superhero comics like DC and Marvel and I was always tempted to respond to the full page advertisements for such things as a complete two hundred piece civil war army for $1.49, a miniature secret camera for only $1.00 or a free Charles Atlas body building course. What stopped me filling in the order form and sending off the cash was not the rather critical fact that I had no idea how to exchange my paper round money into dollars but rather the fact that I had no idea what a ZIP code was. I concluded that it was some sort of secret code that prevented overseas orders from being processed and so never had the pleasure of sending off my order form for those intriguing items.

Most of all I wanted a pair of X-ray specs, mostly because the advert seemed to suggest that whilst it might be fun to be able to see the bones in your hand, it would be a whole lot more fun to be able to see through girls clothing and there was always a curvy girl in the advert that suggested that this was a real possibility. But, let’s think about it for a minute. This is how my science dictionary explains X-rays:

‘X-rays are a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths of around 10-10 metres. When X-rays are being produced, a thin metallic sheet is placed between the emitter and the target, effectively filtering out the lower energy (soft) X-rays. This is often placed close to the window of the X-ray tube. The resultant X-ray is said to be hard. Soft X-rays overlap the range of extreme ultraviolet. The frequency of hard X-rays is higher than that of soft X-rays, and the wavelength is shorter. During an X-ray the electrons decelerate upon colliding with the target and if enough energy is contained within the electron it is able to knock out an electron from the inner shell of the metal atom and as a result electrons from higher energy levels then fill up the vacancy and X-ray photons are emitted.’

Well, that all sounds rather complicated to me, and X-ray machines costs many thousands of pounds so thinking back it seems highly unlikely that a pair of cardboard specs costing a mere $1.00 was going to be able to deliver this advanced level of technical procedure. Actually the lenses consisted of two layers of cardboard with a small hole punched through both layers. A feather was embedded between the layers of each lens and the vanes of the feathers were so close together that light was diffracted, causing the user to receive two slightly offset images. Where the images overlapped, a darker image was obtained, supposedly giving the illusion that one is seeing an X-ray image of dark and light. I know now of course that this isn’t a real X-ray machine at all and I would never have been able to see through girls clothing after all and I am retro spec tively glad that I never sent off my money and purchased a pair.

1963 was a bad year for railways and the Beeching report in March proposed that out of Britain's then twenty-nine thousand kilometres of railway, nearly ten thousand of mostly rural branch and cross-country lines should be closed. The name derives from the main author of the report ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, Dr. Richard Beeching, and although this report also proposed the development of new modes of freight service and the modernisation of trunk passenger routes, it is best remembered for recommending the wholesale closure of what it considered to be little-used and unprofitable railway lines, and the removal of stopping passenger trains and closure of local stations on other lines which remained open.






Rugby Central Railway Station. Thie ticket office was at road level and passengers had to go down steps to get to the platform.

The report was a reaction to the significant losses which had begun in the 1950s as the expansion in road transport began to transfer significant passenger and goods traffic from the railways and British Railways continued making increasingly large losses despite the introduction of the railway modernisation plan of 1955. Beeching proposed that only drastic action would save the railways from increasing losses in the future. Thousands of kilometres of railway track were removed and hundreds of stations were closed in the decade following the report and many other rail lines lost their passenger services and were retained only for freight.

This was significant for us because the Beeching Axe closed the Great Central Railway that ran from London Marylebone to Manchester Piccadilly but rather critically for us connected Rugby to Leicester and my grandparents. Every other Saturday we used to use the steam train to Leicester via Lutterworth, Ashby Magna and Whetstone to Leicester Central and then a bus to Narborough Road (if we were lucky) to visit the folks. With no convenient alternative route available to visit them, or to get to the football matches, this must have been an important factor in dad’s decision to learn to drive and join the motoring age.





Rugby Central Railway Station in 1966

http://www.railwayarchive.org.uk/map/allLinks.php?mapid=450271.jpg&mlsref=1044&cmn=Rugby&pn=1&mp=3

In 1963 President Charles de Gaulle denied the United Kingdom access to the Common Market. Membership applications by the United Kingdom to join the European Economic Community were refused in 1963 and 1967 because de Gaulle said that he doubted the UK's political will and commitment. It is generally agreed however that his real fear was that English would become the common language of the community and replace French. Britain was not admitted to the EEC until 1973, three years after the pompous stubborn old farts death. And the French are still precious about their language even today but their reluctance to communicate in or even simply acknowledge English gives me the opportunity to demonstrate my fluency in everyday essentials and I have to use all of that knowledge on my occasional visits there:

‘Vin blanc sil vous plait’
‘Vin rouge sil vous plait’
‘bier grande sil vous plait’
‘bier grande vite’. And so on. As Ricky Gervais advises if they don’t understand you, talk louder, if they still don’t understand you, then trash the place!

This was the year of the Great Train Robbery when Ronnie Biggs and co. stopped a train in an audaciously simple sting and stole £2,631,784 from a mail train in Buckinghamshire, that is the equivalent of about forty million pounds at today’s values so was a fairly important event.

On a black note Myra Hindley and Ian Brady began their campaign of abduction and murder of young people in the UK and in the US the notorious San Francisco jail of Alcatraz was closed and the prisoners dispersed to more hospitable establishments.

The world finally came to its senses and realised that a nuclear war would most probably destroy the entire world and everyone in it, including those who dropped the bomb, and the US, the USSR and bizarrely the UK (this must have been a recognition of former greatness) signed the partial nuclear test ban treaty which banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater and in space, sadly however, neither France nor China, signed the treaty and continued with the dangerous practice of exploding nuclear devices.

Popular music was becoming increasingly culturally important in the world and in 1963 the Beatles released their first LP record ‘Please Please Me’ and Beatle mania followed almost immediately. I never understood this; I was a Rolling Stones man and always considered the Beatles to be overrated, which was a shame because I had a lot years of not enjoying their music. My personal conversion came in 2003 when I bought ‘Let it Be, Naked’ and the penny finally dropped. Since then I have bought the entire back collection and kick myself for not having appreciated it the first and original time around.

On November 22nd 1963 President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas…

Hillmorton

The family settled in Hillmorton in 1960 when Dad got a new job at the Rugby Rural District Council (created 1894, abolished 1974) and we moved from Hinckley in Leicestershire, about fifteen miles away. In those days Hillmorton was only a small village and although there was no discernable boundary from the town it was undeveloped and had only a fraction of the population that it has today.

We moved into a new bungalow at 47, The Kent that was one of the first new developments in the village at that time. All around there were exciting places to explore and play and there was lots of time to do so because parents were not nearly so paranoid about children wandering off to enjoy themselves in the 1960’s. In those days it wasn’t uncommon to go out in the morning and only return home when empty tummies demanded that food was required and there certainly weren’t search parties out looking all over the place. It’s a shame that these days children are confined to their back gardens or have to be taken back and forth to school by car because there was so much more fun when young lives were not subject to so many restrictions on movement.

I did get into trouble once I recall when I was about ten and decided with some friends to tackle a cycle ride one afternoon to Leicester to see my grandparents without checking with anyone first. I have to confess that this was a both ambitious and thoughtless especially on a Raleigh Junior bike with 16” wheels and not entirely suitable for a fifty mile round trip. There was a search party that night for sure and I can remember being astonished about how much fuss was made over such a trivial incident when Dad intercepted me at Abbots Farm and sent me home immediately for a good telling off from Mum which turned out instead to be an emotional and tearful reunion.

The house we lived in was built on an old tip and over the back was a big hole perfect for sifting through and finding old junk and behind that was ‘The Bank’, which was a strip of trees and undergrowth that was good for playing jungle war games. A narrow path ran from Sandy Lane to Tony Gibbard’s garden at no. 37 where two trees, one large and one small, were converted into tree houses and frequently doubled up as a Lancaster bomber and a spitfire fighter. You certainly had to have a vivid imagination to achieve this transformation!

What is now Featherbed Lane used to be Sandy Lane which was a unpaved track and beyond that was the ‘Sand Pit’, which was a bit of a forbidden zone on account of the large number of rats that lived there. Mum didn’t like us going there and with her exaggerated warnings of how they would either dash up your trouser leg and chew your penis off or alternatively take a flying leap and rip your throat out was enough to make you think twice about venturing too far inside. A few years later they built some houses on the sand pit and a lot of them fell down quite soon after because of inadequate foundations in the soft sand.

Further down the road there were some derelict old terraced houses that we convinced ourselves were haunted, they were knocked down a few years later and some flats built there to replace them. On the road down to the Locks and the canal there was the site of the old Hillmorton Manor House that lay in ruins surrounded by dense undergrowth of trees and vegetation. This is where Constable Road is now. Around the Manor House the bigger boys in the village had constructed a scramble track (a sort of pre-BMX thing) where we had bike races and pretended to be the Brandon Bees motorcyclists. This wasn’t my favourite game I have to say because I used to prefer to go down to the canal and mess about on the locks. This is where David Newman lived and his parents allowed us to build a camp in an old outbuilding in the garden. The canal was an incredibly dangerous place really but of course we didn’t realise that at the time. During the summer we used to wait at top lock and offer to open and close the locks for passing canal craft in the hope that we would receive a few pennies for our labours.

School was about three hundred metres away and to get there we had to pass what was euphemistically called the ‘corn field’. There never actually was any corn in it of course it was just a piece of uncultivated land with long grass that was waiting to be developed and it wasn’t long before the Council built a clinic and some houses on it and took away another useful recreation site.

At the back of the school was the Elder Forest, which wasn’t a forest at all just an area of overgrown vegetation with a predominance of Elder Trees. That’s all been grubbed up and built on too of course now. Given the shortage of playing space it’s hardly any wonder I suppose that today children have to stop at home and watch the TV or play computer games and are denied the pleasure of real play!

1962 - Birth of a Brother, Death of an Icon

February of 1962 and along came Richard to complete the Petcher family. This came as a bit of a surprise because this was in the days when women disguised their pregnancy under a flowing smock for fear that anyone noticed and realised that they had had sex. It certainly wasn’t discussed in the house and the first I knew of this was when a midwife greeted me home from school, announced the news and introduced me to my new brother. I had no idea where he had come from but it looked like from now on I would have to be sharing my bedroom.

Parents who had grown up in the 1930s and 1940s were a bit prim and shy about sex and this certainly went for my mum and dad neither of whom ever provided me with any useful sex education lessons, except for dad carelessly leaving ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ lying about that is. We had to find out about this for ourselves through playground talk with better informed school pals, watching the girls in their navy blue knickers in P.E. lessons and putting two and two together and looking up the dirty words in a dictionary. There were some hard lessons to be learned and I can remember one friend fell out with us all because he refused to believe that his parents could ever have conceived him through the sex act and thinking about his mum now I can fully understand the difficulty he must have had in coming to terms with this piece of information.

In 1962 world news broadcasting took a giant step forward with the launch of Telstar, which was the first active communications satellite designed to transmit telephone and high-speed data communications around the World. It was launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral on 10th July and was the first privately sponsored space launch. Telstar was a medium altitude satellite and was placed in an elliptical orbit that was completed once every two hours and thirty-seven minutes, revolving at a 45 degree angle above the equator. The first trans-Atlantic television signal was ground breaking space age stuff but because of its orbit there were enormous operating restrictions and transmission availability for transatlantic signals was only about twenty minutes in each orbit.

Telstar inspired the composition of a number one hit for the pop group, The Tornados, which was the first US number one by a British instrumental group. Up to that point there had only been three British artists that topped the US chart: ‘Stranger on the Shore’ by Acker Bilk; ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’ by Laurie London and ‘Auf Wiedersein Sweetheart’, the first, by Vera Lynn in 1952. I liked The Tornados but they split up soon after this and my favourites then became the Shadows and the very first long playing record that I owned was ‘The Shadows Greatest Hits’, and I’ve still got it in what is now my redundant vinyl collection.



The biggest tragedy of 1962 was probably the death of Marilyn Monroe who died prematurely when she committed suicide at her Beverly Hills Mansion. Or perhaps she was murdered by the US secret service because of embarrassing rumours that she was having an affair with President Kennedy. This story is a bit like the ongoing speculation into the death of Princess Diana and in both cases it is doubtful that we will ever be absolutely sure. One thing that is certain however is that her death launched her as an iconic image of the 1960s and an enduring representation of perhaps the World’s most sexy and desirable woman since Helen of Troy.

International relations took a down turn when following the Bay of Pigs incident in the previous year Nikita Khrushchev gave the go-ahead in the summer of 1962 for Russian nuclear missiles to be installed on Cuba to protect it from any future US led invasion and also to counterbalance US superiority in long and medium range nuclear weapons based in Europe. After a US spy plane spotted the missile bases, the news was announced by President Kennedy and for a week the world hovered on the brink of all out nuclear war while everyone waited to see what the hawkish President would do. This time it was the Soviets who eventually backed down after Khrushchev accepted a Kennedy promise not to invade Cuba and to decommission nuclear missiles based in Turkey. Kennedy publicly agreed to the first request and secretly agreed to the second. The US ended its blockade in November, the Soviets removed their nuclear weapons by the end of the year and US missiles in Turkey were withdrawn in 1963. One good thing however was that a hot line between the USA and USSR was set up to prevent such a crisis happening again.

1962 brought a welcome end to fascism in Britain when the former fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley was assaulted at a rally in London's East End when he and members of his anti-Semitic Blackshirt group were punched to the ground when he tried to address a meeting. A crowd of several thousand had gathered in the area, where Sir Oswald, leader of the Union Movement formerly known as the British Union of Fascists, planned to speak from the back of a lorry but his speech was drowned out by continuous boos and a chorus of ‘down with the fascists’ which perhaps confirmed that Britons really had never had it so good and there was no appetite for political rabble rousers. Sir Oswald was a former Labour MP and junior minister who became leader of the British Union of Fascists in 1932. During the war, he and his wife were interned for being a threat to national security and then in 1948 he formed the Union Party but failed to ever make a breakthrough in post-war British politics. No more was heard of Sir Oswald after 1962 and he retired into exile in France.

Religion

One of the good things about growing up in our house was that Dad like reading and there were always plenty of books around. When I was quite young my parents gave me an impressively substantial ‘Children’s Picture Book of Bible Stories’. It had a burgundy cover with its title in gold letters and inside it contained water colour comic strip style stories of the scriptures. God was depicted as a booming voice from heaven, angels would swoop about in the sky and occasionally descend to earth to give helpful advice and the stories were full of sagely old men with kind faces, white beards and flowing robes. I read the stories over and over again, for me some of the best were David and the slaying of Goliath, Moses and the parting of the Red Sea and then, best of all, there was Samson who used his tremendous strength to defeat his enemies and perform other heroic feats such as wrestling a lion, killing an entire army with nothing more than a donkey's jawbone, and tearing down an entire building with his bare hands. At the time my favourite was always the story of Noah and his Ark and I can remember being slightly sceptical to read that he allegedly lived until he was nine hundred and fifty years old which even at seven years old seemed a bit far fetched to me. Adam, the first man, did nearly as well but only lived until he was nine hundred and thirty. My favourite story about Noah now however, is not the Ark, but the fact that after the great flood he settled down and became a farmer, experimented by planting some vines and invented wine. We should all be eternally grateful to him for that!

I found that book most inspiring and it stimulated in me an interest in the stories from the Bible and although a lot of the learning bits about going to school I found thoroughly disinteresting and a bit of a chore I did enjoy religious education and especially used to look forward to morning assembly when once a week the Minister from the Methodist Chapel nearby used to attend and tell a story or two in a children’s sermon. Some of my school reports from this time revealed quite stunning results in religious education and at the same time as I was without fail picking up a disappointing sequence of Ds and Es for the important subjects like Arithmetic and English I was consistently being awarded As and Bs in religion. In 1963 I scored 100% in the end of year exams.

In 1961 the New Testament of the New English Bible was published which to date was the last major translation of the Bible and to commemorate this all pupils at the school were given a copy courtesy of the Warwickshire County Council. It was quite a plain book with a green cover and with only a few black and white illustrations it certainly didn’t compare with my ‘Children’s Picture Book of Bible Stories’ in all of its technicolour glory.

Strictly speaking we were a Church of England family but the Parish Church of St. John the Baptist in Hillmorton was in a sorry state of neglect and significant disrepair on account of the fact that the Vicar had little interest in his parish or his congregation because like Father Jack from Craggy Island he was an alcoholic. People use to say that you always knew when he was coming because the beer bottles used to rattle in the basket that he had attached to the handlebars of his bike. He didn’t hold many services in the Church, well, certainly not as many as he was supposed to, and there was certainly no Sunday school. For this reason I was sent to the Methodist Church where the Reverend Keene and the Sunday school teacher Christine Herrington made us feel most welcome. I liked the Reverend Keene, he was down to earth and amusing and later he used to come to secondary school to teach religious studies and take a weekly assembly there as well. I remember that he smiled permanently and had a most pleasant disposition that was appropriate to a minister of the church. One morning the Headmaster announced at assembly that he had died suddenly and I was really sad about that.

I don’t suppose so many children go to Sunday school any more but I used to really enjoy it. The origin of the Sunday school is attributed to the philanthropist and author Hannah More who opened the first one in 1789 in Cheddar in Somerset and for the next two hundred years parent’s right across the country must have been grateful to her for getting the kids out of the way on a Sunday morning and giving them some peace and quiet and a chance of a lie in and who knows what else?

In contrast to the Hillmorton County Junior School I seemed to be learning something at Chapel and what’s more I was being really successful. Every year we used to take an exam, well, more of a little test really, and if you passed there was a colourful certificate with a picture of Jesus and signed by absolutely everyone who was anyone in the Methodist Church hierarchy. I was awarded a first class pass three years running and even though the school headmaster had written me of as an educational no-hoper I wasn’t in the slightest bit concerned because I was convinced that I was going to be a vicar. I’d heard it said that people went into the clergy after getting a calling from God and I used to lie awake at night straining out listening for it. It never came. I also understood that it might alternatively come as a sign and I used to walk around looking for anything unusual but this never happened either.

One night, some time in 1966, I think God dialed a wrong number and got Dad instead because overnight he suddenly got religion in a very big way and we all started going to St John the Baptist which by now had got a new vicar. His name was Peter Bennett and he was starting to deal with the problems left behind by the previous man who had retired somewhere into an alcoholic stupor. At twelve years old I was too old for Sunday school and went to church now instead, I was confirmed in 1967 which meant that I could drink wine at communion (thank you Noah) and joined first Pathfinders and then the Christian Youth Fellowship Association or CYFA for short which was (and still is) a national Christian youth club. The good thing about CYFA was that I got to go away to youth conferences and camps and there were lots of girls there too. I auditioned for the choir but was rejected on account of being tone deaf but to compensate for this disappointment the Vicar appointed me a server which meant that I got to wear a red cassock and had the important job of carrying the cross down the aisle at the beginning of evensong and putting the candles out at the end.

None of this could last of course and with no sign of the calling, and with Dad’s religious fervour waning, my attention began to drift off in other directions such as pop music, girls and woodpecker cider and gradually I just stopped going to Church and to CYFA, left the bell ringing group and all of my scripture exam certificates were put away in an envelope in the family memory box and simply got forgotten.

The only time I go to Church these days is for a wedding or a christening or a funeral or to visit a cathedral when I am on holiday.

1961 - The Cold War, the Space Race & Emma Peel

The Cold War continued to worsen with the USSR exploding some very large and nasty bombs during testing and then commencing the building of the Berlin Wall separating East from West Berlin. The Wall was over a hundred and fifty five kilometers long and in June 1962 work started on a second parallel fence up to ninety meters further into East German territory, with houses in between the fences torn down and people displaced and forcibly relocated. A no man's land was created between the two barriers, which became widely known as the ‘death strip’. It was paved with raked gravel, making it easy to spot footprints, offered no cover and was booby-trapped with tripwires and, most importantly, it offered a clear field of fire to the watching guards. Between 1961 and 1989 over five thousand people escaped from East Germany over or under the wall and according to official sources one hundred and twenty five were killed trying to do so although the actual figure may be much higher but we will never know.

A number of walls were built over the years, each becoming more escape proof and sophisticated. The fourth and final wall was completed in 1980 and was constructed from forty-five thousand separate sections of reinforced concrete, each three and a half meters high and over a metre wide. The top of the wall was lined with a smooth pipe, intended to make it more difficult to scale. It was reinforced by mesh fencing, signal fencing, anti-vehicle trenches, barbed wire, over one hundred and sixteen watchtowers, and twenty bunkers. These are the lengths some people will go to simply to subjugate others. By the late 1980s however the Iron Curtain across Europe was being opened and borders were opening up all over between east and west. Thousands of East Germans were escaping to the west through Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the wall become obsolete. Finally in 1989 East Germany gave permission for people to leave into West Berlin and the wall was quickly demolished by ecstatic Berliners and normality restored to a great European city.

Also in 1961, to make matters worse, the new American President, Kennedy, financed an anti-Castro Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs which was an unmitigated fiasco ending in a humiliating climb-down and withdrawal by the Americans to avert the threat of another major world conflict.

1961 was not a good year for the Americans at all because also this year the Soviet Union beat the USA in the race to get the first man into space when in April Yuri Gagarin was fired into space and orbited the Earth for a hundred and eight minutes travelling at more than twenty seven thousand kilometres per hour before landing back on earth. It was a blow to the Americans who had hoped to be the first to launch a man beyond Earth's atmosphere and they could only follow a month later in May when astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space. Later in the same year the disgruntled US announced the beginning of the Apollo Space Programme with the objective of a manned lunar landing. Some say that this was achieved in 1969 when two men landed on the moon but there is speculation by many that this was an elaborate con filmed entirely in an empty aircraft hanger in Nevada simply to achieve the Kennedy boast that man would land on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

My favourite story about the space race is that because a standard ballpoint pen would not work in zero gravity, NASA spent millions of dollars developing the zero-g Space Pen, while the pragmatic Russians came up with the alternative of using a simple pencil. It’s a good story but sadly there is no truth in it at all. The pen was actually developed by a man called Paul Fisher and he did not receive any government funding at all for the pens development. Fisher invested millions of his own money and invented it independently, and then asked NASA to try it. They liked it and bought four hundred at $2.95 each! After the introduction of the Space Pen, both the American and Soviet space agencies adopted it. An amusing footnote to the story is that apparently it turns out that a standard biro will work in space after all

There were two changes to British currency in 1961 when the old black and white £5 note was discontinued because it was too easy to forge and the farthing ceased to become legal tender. The farthing was one quarter of the old pre-decimal penny and due to inflation had simply outlived its usefulness, and minting ceased as early as 1956 even though the farthing's buying power then would be almost two pence in today’s values. It is also interesting that but for an infinitesimal difference, the current penny coin, which was introduced when decimalisation of British coinage took effect in 1971, is the same size as the last minted farthings. The farthing ceased to be legal tender after 31st December 1960 and the fact that farthing had recently ceased to be legal tender is referred to in the first episode of Z Cars, which was broadcast in January 1962.

This brings us nicely on to the subject of TV. The most important television event of the year just has to be the very first episode of Coronation Street. The show had been tried out on regional TV in 1960 to see what the reaction would be and in 1961 the show went nationwide for the first time. It went out twice a week, with Friday's episode being shown live and the following Monday's edition shot straight afterwards. Despite some scepticism by the Television bigwigs the nation took Ena Sharples, Ken Barlow and Elsie Tanner to their hearts, and tuned in in thousands. By the end of the year it was the highest rated show in the country and is now the longest running soap in the world!

In the US Dr. Kildare was a medical drama television series starring Richard Chamberlain which ran from 1961 to 1966, with a total of one hundred and ninety episodes. This sounds like a lot but is easily eclipsed by the British hospital drama Casualty which has been running since 1986 and has had over six hundred episodes.

These might have been important TV shows but the most significant event for me was that 1961 saw the beginning of The Avengers when Patrick McNee strode onto the small screen as John Steed complete with bowler hat and umbrella and every inch the English pre-Bond secret agent gentleman. In the early days Cathy Gale who was played by Honor Blackman in a sexy black leather cat suit assisted him but she left the show and went on to be Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and that introduced the delectable Emma Peel played by Diana Rigg. Emma Peel was my first fantasy pin-up and I used to scour the TV magazines and newspapers for pictures of her that I cut out assembled into a scrap book of cuttings that I carried with me at all times. Once (about 1966, I guess) some school pals happened to mention this to the English teacher, Mr Howe, who demanded sight of the book and immediately confiscated it for a couple of days. I thought that this was some sort of punishment but I have subsequently reached the conclusion that he must surely have shared my fantasy and probably spent a couple of enjoyable evenings with the book.

In sport there was bad news for dad, when Leicester City reached the FA cup final for the second time and were beaten 2-0 by Tottenham Hotspurs who did the league and cup double that year. Leicester reached the cup final again in 1963 and lost to Manchester United and again in 1969 and lost to Manchester City. They had been there before in 1949 and lost to Wolverhampton Wanderers and this means that they have the unenviable record of being the only team to reach four FA cup finals and lose them all.