Christmas

As for most people Christmas was best when I was young and still believed in Santa Claus. In those days we used to alternate between a Christmas at home one year and then at the grandparents the year after. I can remember two of these quite clearly.

My mum’s parents lived in London and they lived in a flat in Catford and when we stayed there I got to sleep in a small box room at the front of the house overlooking the street outside. One year, I was four years old, I had gone to bed on Christmas Eve and sometime during the night I woke up and because of the streetlights outside there was enough illumination for me to see at the foot of the bed that there was a sack overflowing with presents. Sticking out of the top of the sack was a rifle (not a real one of course) so I knew that had got the cowboy suit that was top of my Christmas present list! It was still some time until morning but I am sure that I was able to sleep better after that secure in the confidence that Santa had been.

I used to like Christmas in London, the flat was a curious arrangement that was simply the top floor of a family house with only one front door but it was warm and homely and welcoming. For most of the year everything took place in the small back room but at Christmas we were allowed to go into the best front room for a couple of days. In the morning we would open the main presents and then at tea time there were gifts on the tree to be taken down and given out. Granddad was in charge of this operation until one year when instead of cutting a piece of string holding the present on the tree he cut the tree lights instead and nearly electrocuted himself in the process. After that he lost the job and my Nan took over the responsibility from thereon. There was always a stocking hanging on the fireplace that had the same things in it every year. This was a real stocking mind, not one of the modern pre-packed things that we get today. Granddad was a bus conductor before they went one man operated and every year he used to collect shiny new penny coins and each of us would get a cash bag full of the gleaming treasure. There was an apple and an orange and a few sweets, a dot-to-dot book and perhaps a matchbox car or two.

The other one that I remember was when I got my first train set. This was at my other grand parent’s house in Leicester; actually I think we might have lived there at the time. Christmas morning in the front room there was a square metre of sapele board and a simple circle of track, an engine a tender and two coaches in British Rail burgundy livery. There was a level crossing, a station and a bridge made out of an old shoe box that dad had cut out and made himself. He was good at making things for Christmas presents and at about the same time I had a fort with some US cavalry soldiers that was made out of an old office filing box that he had constructed into a pretty good scale copy of Fort Laramie or wherever, later I had a replacement fort, this time from the toy shop but it was never as good as the cardboard box.

For many years after that there were new additions to the train set until I had quite an extensive network of track and a good collection of engines and rolling stock. But something bad happened to the train set in about 1972 when all of the engines mysteriously stopped functioning. The reason for this was quickly discovered. Brother Richard who has always been more gifted than me with a screwdriver had dismantled them all as part of his engineering education. Unfortunately at this time his skills were not sufficiently developed to be able to put them back together again with quite the same level of expertise and consequently that was the end of model railways in our house.

Christmas was never quite the same of course after you found out the truth about Santa when you were about eight or nine years old. Some spoilsport at school with an older brother or sister would spill the beans on the myth of Christmas and this would be confirmed in the December when you found presents, that were supposed to be still at Santa’s factory at the North Pole, on top of or at the back of your parents wardrobe. I remember when this happened and I discovered the gifts wrapped in mid-December and I sneaked them into the bathroom, locked the door and carefully unwrapped the paper to see if this was true. It was quite a shock to find some new additions to the model railway and quite difficult to wrap them back up again to cover up my snooping. Even more difficult of course to pretend to be surprised when I opened them again a fortnight later on Christmas morning! Richard of course is nearly eight years younger than me so we had to continue to pretend about Santa in our house until I was about fifteen, although I am sure I told my sister straight away!

Snow at Christmas is deep-seated in British culture, and most of us (except bookmakers) look forward expectantly to Christmas Day with scenes depicted on traditional Christmas cards and in works like Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol', but the truth is of course that Christmas is rarely ever white any more. The myth of snowy Christmases has its origins in the colder climate of the period 1550 to1850 when Britain was in the grip of a 'Little Ice Age' and therefore could be confident of snow at Christmas. Winters were particularly persistent and severe but it is now nearly two hundred years since a frost fair was last held on a frozen River Thames in 1813. The trouble is that for most parts of the UK, Christmas comes at the beginning of the season for snow and wintry weather is more likely early in the deepening cold of January. White Christmases were more frequent in the 18th and 19th centuries, even more so before the change of calendar in 1752, which effectively brought Christmas day, back by twelve days. There have only been six white Christmases since I was born in 1954. I can remember it snowing on Christmas Eve 1970 because I was walking to Midnight Mass at Hillmorton Church and according the Met Office the last white Christmas was in 2004, when snow was widespread across Northern Ireland, Scotland, parts of Wales, the Midlands, north-east and far south-west England. I can’t remember that!

1960, Chidren's Toys and Adult Literature

1960! And so the famous decade began, pop music, mods and rockers, flower power and CND. The 1960s changed the world forever and there was no going back.

In 1960 there was an event which I suppose stimulated this part of my blog. In November John F Kennedy was elected the 35th US President, the youngest ever at 43 and the first Roman Catholic. He didn’t become President in 1960 because America has a curious system whereby the winner has to wait two months before officially taking office, but I suppose this at least gives time for the outgoing Chief Executive to clear his personal possessions out of the White House and for the new one to choose alternative wallpaper and soft furnishings.

Staying with politics it was in 1960 that the British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan gave his “Wind of Change” speech to the South African Parliament, on 3rd February 1960 in Cape Town at the end of a month spent in Africa visiting a number of British colonies, as they still were at the time. The speech signaled clearly that the British Government intended to decolonise and most of the British possessions in Africa subsequently became independent nations in the 1960s. The South Africans, being extreme white supremacists, didn’t approve of this and the speech led directly from their withdrawal from the Commonwealth and their continuing support for the apartheid system.

Another significant event of 1960 that was to have far reaching consequences was the formation of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. This was an event that would leave the west dependent on the Middle East for its oil and has resulted in a succession of international difficulties in the region.

Well, that’s the serious stuff out of the way, so on to trivia. 1960 saw the introduction to Britain of two new must have toys. The first was the Etch-a-Sketch, which was a big bag of aluminium dust behind a plastic screen that you scraped doodles into, like you would on the window of a steamed-up car. But rather than use your finger you had to demonstrate enormous amounts of persistence and agility and twiddle two knobs which was an action that required almost impossibly high levels of eye to hand co-ordination. Etch-a-Sketch was invented by a man by the name of Arthur Granjean who developed what he called ‘L'Ecran Magique’, or ‘The Magic Screen’, in his garage. After several years of being ignored as a load of magnetic twaddle L'Ecran Magique was eventually bought up by an American toy firm and renamed Etch-a-Sketch.

Actually Etch-a-Sketch was really hopeless and it was impossible to draw anything really creative. The box suggested all sorts of drawing possibilities but in reality although it was ok for houses or anything else with straight lines beyond that it was excruciatingly frustrating to draw anything that anyone would be able to meaningfully identify.

Much more important than Etch-a-Sketch was the introduction of the construction toy Lego which was seen at the Brighton Toy Fair for the first time in 1960. Lego is a Danish company and the name comes from the Danish words 'LEg GOdt' meaning play well. Now this just has to be one of the best toys ever and when it was first introduced the brightly coloured bricks sold by the bucketful. Pre-Lego I had a construction set called Bako, which was a set of bakerlite bricks and metal wires that could be used to construct different styles of houses but nothing more inspirational than that. Lego changed everything and the only restrictions on creativity thereafter were the number of bricks in the toy box and imagination!

Others agree with me about the importance of Lego and the British Association of Toy Retailers has named Lego the toy of the century.

From Lego to leg over because 1960 was a big year for pornography when the book ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was published by Penguin books and whipped up a legal storm. ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover’ is a novel by D. H. Lawrence that was written in 1928 and printed at that time privately in Florence. The publication of the book caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including previously banned four letter words. When it was published the trial of the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 Act had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could demonstrate that a work was of literary merit and Penguin books took up the challenge. At the trial various academic critics, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2nd November was not guilty. This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the UK and soon newsagent’s top shelves were bulging with glamour magazines with pictures of pretty ladies with no clothes on.

A nice story about the trial which illustrates just how big a watershed 1960 was in terms of changing social attitudes was when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked the jury if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".

Much later than 1960 I found a copy of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ on the top of my dad’s wardrobe and was able to go immediately to the offending passage because the book fell naturally open at exactly the right spot. It’s a boring book and I suspect most of it had not been read at all but the few pages of dirty words were well thumbed and dog-eared and over the next few weeks I contributed to this by sharing it with all of my mates whenever they came around to the house when my parents were out. This all stopped when one day when the book had gone from the top of the wardrobe and although nothing was ever said I think I’d been rumbled.

One final thing about 1960 is that John, Paul, George and Ringo became the Beatles and the world of popular music would never be the same again and Russ Conway never had another number one hit!

Hillmorton County Junior & Infant School

Until I was five we lived in a variety of houses in Leicester and in 1958 we had moved home from Ledwell Drive in Glenfield to Chislehurst Avenue in Braunstone and in September 1959 it was time in life to go to school. The Ravenhurst Primary School was about a five hundred-metre stroll across land waiting to be built on and I used to walk there with my friends John and Michael Sparks who lived over the road. The teacher’s name was Miss Bird and her classroom had alphabet pictures on the wall, ‘A’ for alcohol, ‘B’ for beer, ‘C’ for cider and so on through to 'Z' for zambuca and it was here that I started to learn to read using the ‘Dick and Dora books’.

In the 1950s, Dick and Dora were supposed to be average kids, living a typical English life with their parents and their pets, Nip the dog and Fluff the cat. (You will notice here that even in a children’s book the dog has a name that implies that it will bite you.) Their unexceptional and almost idyllic middle-class existence playing in the garden and once a year going to the seaside was the basis of a series of books designed to teach children to read. I liked Dick and Dora but I didn’t get long at Ravenhurst School because after only a couple of terms we moved to Hinckley where I went to the Grove Road Church of England Primary School and very soon after that moved to Rugby and went to the Hillmorton County Junior and Infants school where they had ‘Janet and John’ books instead which were very similar and taught four to seven year old children how to read by progressively incorporating and repeating key words in the development of reading skills.

With three shools in the first year I wasn’t get a good chance to settle in and I blame this for holding me back and making me a disappointing pupil for the first ten years or so of school.

The Hillmorton County Junior School was an old Victorian building with high ceilings and partitioned classrooms with rows of old fashioned wooden desks and attached lift up seats. The classrooms smelt of furniture polish and chalk dust and the in the corridors there was an ever present odour of carbolic soap seeping out from under the washroom doors. There were two entrances, one said boys and the other girls from a previous time when the sexes were carefully kept apart. This was no longer the case of course and with segregation a thing of the past we were free to choose whichever was the most convenient.

Despite my poor academic record I rather liked going to school! The day started as early as possible with a bit of a play on the way there and then there was fifteen minutes of activity in the playground behind the building, two playgrounds one for the infants and one for the juniors. At the back of the playground were the outside toilets with no roof and completely exposed to the elements. I think it is possible that the girls had inside facilities, I can’t remember, but for the boys it was the most primitive of arrangements. After the whistle blew we lined up and took it in turns to march inside to hang our coats in the cloakroom. In winter there were several rows of identical duffel coats with gloves on strings dangling through the empty sleeves and underneath in neat rows, Wellington boots with puddles of water seeping from the compacted ice in the soles that was melting and spreading over the red quarry tiled floor.

Mr (George Eddie) Hicks was the Headmaster and he generally led an assembly with a hymn and a prayer and a short address. He was a decent sort of chap but he never seemed to take to me and in days when favouritism was acceptable I found him to be quite unsupportive. I just enjoyed being at school, especially the play times, and wasn’t terribly bothered about the learning bits so I think he wrote me off at an early stage as being a bit of a no-hoper and 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 met him years later when he came knocking on the door collecting for the RNLI and I think he was genuinely shocked when I told him that I had been to University and had a nice office job with good prospects at the local Council. For slow learners there was no such thing as special educational needs or additional support mechanisms of course and the class was set out in a strict hierarchy with the fast learning favourites at the front getting all of the attention and the dimwits at the back making table mats out of raffia. I suppose I would have found myself about two thirds back from the blackboard. I was a late developer!

I can only remember two other teachers, first there was Mrs Bull who taught year three and had a ferocious look that made our knees knock with fear and then Miss Roberts who taught year four and was a bit of a pin-up who made our legs turn to blancmange when she looked our way. Oh and Mr Etherington, who always had a cold sore and a drip on the end of his nose, I think he took the top class in juniors but I can’t be sure.

In Mrs Bull’s class it was time to learn arithmetic and to prepare us for adding up and taking away we would sit and chant out the times tables over and over again until we knew them off by heart. That was boring but useful because I have never forgotten them. Doing sums was a lot harder then because we were still ten years away from decimalisation and had to add things up in pounds, shillings and pence. There were twelve pence in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound and that was difficult let me tell you. Try adding this lot together and you will see what I mean:

£ 4.12.06
£ 1.15.11
£ 0.19.11½
---------------

After morning lessons there was break time with more play and a bottle of milk for every pupil courtesy of Warwickshire County Council. The 1946 School Milk Act had required the issue of a third of a pint of milk to all school children under eighteen and this was a nice thought if not always a pleasant experience. In the summer it stood outside in the sun and it was warm and thick because this was full cream milk, not the semi-skimmed coloured water that we have today, and in the winter it had a tendency to freeze and pop through the foil cap in an arctic lump that had to be sucked away before you reached the semi-liquid slime underneath. But no one knew about lactose intolerance in those days and it was compulsory for everyone and there were always teachers on hand to make sure that everyone finished their drink of milk. Free school milk was discontinued in 1970 by the future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and which earned her the unflattering nickname of ‘Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”, but I think she was called far worse than that later on! Actually however she only stopped free school milk for eight to eleven year olds because Harold Wilson’s labour government had stopped free milk for secondary schools two years earlier in 1968 (notice how Wilson, Wilson milk snatcher doesn’t have the same newspaper headline appeal) so perhaps Oxford University was a bit mean when in 1985 it prevented her from receiving an honorary degree because of her history of education spending cuts.

More late morning lessons then lunch break with a quick dash home and return as quickly as possible for more recreation in the playground. Afternoon lessons and then it was soon all over and we were released onto the streets to make our way home. Outside the school at the end of the day there were no rows of cars clogging up the streets because everyone walked to school in those days. And we weren’t kept inside, in a state of paranoia until we were collected either. There was no need to worry you see, children knew instinctively to keep away from the strange people in the village and there were not nearly so many cars on the road at that time to knock us over.

The Hillmorton County Junior and Infant School was demolished sometime in the 1970’s and a featureless replacement was built at the top of Watt’s Lane. They built some houses on the site and my sister Lindsay lived in one for a while which surprised us all on account of her previous history of serious allergic reaction to anything to do with being anywhere near a school building.

Like most things in life going to school was a completely different experience from that of today both for the pupils and the teachers. Years ago I had an ambition to be a teacher but am so glad that I didn’t pursue it. How proud I am now however that my daughter Sally has done just that but I wonder just how different she would have found teaching children like us in the 1960’s from the modern teaching methods that she is accustomed to now.

The answer to the sum by the way is seven pounds, eight shillings and fourpence ha’penny. I told you it was hard!

1959, Motoring, Missile Mail & Russ Conway

In 1959 there were two important news items that celebrated significant events in British motoring. First of all the southern section of the M1 motorway which started in St Albans in Hertfordshire and finished just a few miles away from Rugby at the village of Crick was opened in 1959. The motorway age had arrived and suddenly it was possible to drive to London on a six-lane highway in a fraction of the previous time, helped enormously by the fact that there were no speed limits on the new road. In fact there wasn’t very much about the original M1 that we would probably recognise at all, there was no central reservation, no crash barriers and no lighting. The new motorway was designed to take a mere thirteen thousand vehicles a day which is in contrast to today’s figure of nearly one hundred thousand vehicles a day. When it first opened this was the equivalent of a country road and it certainly wasn’t unheard of for families to pull up at the side for a picnic! This first section was seventy-two miles long and was built in just nineteen months by a labour force of five thousand men that is about one mile every eight days.

In 1959 cars were still a bit old fashioned and basic design hadn’t changed much since the 1940s but the new motorway age needed a new breed of car and in August 1959 the world saw the introduction of the Austin Seven, Morris Mini-Minor and Morris Mini-Minor DL 2-door saloons, all with transversely mounted 848cc engine and four speed gearbox and known collectively as the MINI! The car was designed by Sir Alec Issigonis who had previously designed the Morris Minor and was intended as a small economic family car. The Mk 1 Mini was immediately popular and sold nearly two million units and by the time production ceased in 2000 a total of 5,387,862 cars had been manufactured. Nearly everyone has owned a Mini at some time, I did, it was a blue 1969 model, registration BUE 673J.

Not that all of this mattered a great deal to us however because like lots of families in 1959 we didn’t have a car and dad didn’t even learn to drive until the early 1960s and mum not until ten years after that. His first car was an old fashioned white Austin A35, SWD 774, which was a car with few refinements and even lacking modern day basics such as seat belts, a radio, door mirrors or satellite navigation! There were no carpets and the seats were made of cheap plastic that were freezing cold in winter and if you weren’t especially careful burnt your arse in the summer. After that he had a white Ford Anglia, 1870 NX, which I always thought was a bit chic and stylish with that raking back window and after that he had a couple of blue Ford Cortinas before he moved on to red Escorts before finally downsizing to Fiestas, and back to blue again. My first car was a flame red Hillman Avenger, registration WRW 366J, in which I did hundreds of pounds worth of damage to other peoples vehicles because it had an inconveniently high back window which made reversing a bit of a challenge for a short person.

I remember car registration numbers because this was something we used to do as children. Car number plate spotting was a curiously boring pastime and on some days it would be possible to sit for a whole morning at the side of the road outside of the house and still only fill one page of an exercise book. These days you would need a laptop and a million gigabytes of memory. Ah happy days!

Since the 1930s there had been various attempts at speeding up postal services and in 1934 for example a rocket was launched over a sixteen thousand metre flight path between two Hebridean islands in Scotland with a fuselage packed with mail. Unfortunately the rocket exploded and destroyed most of its cargo but in 1959 the U.S. Navy submarine USS Barbero assisted the US Post Office Department in its search for faster, more efficient forms of mail transportation with the first and only successful delivery of ‘Missile Mail’. Shortly before noon on 8th June, the Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile with its nuclear warhead having earlier been replaced by two official Post Office Department mail containers from the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Mayport, Florida and twenty-two minutes later, the missile struck its target at Jacksonville.

Only the American Government could waste thousands of dollars on such a pointless exercise because it must have been obvious even to a five year old that this was never going to be a commercially viable proposition. Even so the US Postmaster General declared it a great success and instantly proclaimed the event to be "of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world", and predicted that "before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail." This was probably one of the most inaccurate predictions ever made by a Government official and nothing more was ever heard of’ ‘Missile Mail’. Bill Bryson in “The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid” sums up exactly why:

“Perhaps it occurred to someone that incoming rockets might have an unfortunate tendency to miss their targets and crash through the roofs of factories or hospitals, or that they might blow up in flight, or take out passing aircraft, or that every launch would cost tens of thousands of dollars to deliver a payload worth a maximum of $120 at prevailing postal rates”

In the world of entertainment the big star of 1959 was the plinky plonky pianist Russ Conway who had five top ten hits this year with the first two going all the way to No 1. One of these, Side Saddle, stayed at the top spot for four weeks, and Russ was the top-selling UK artist of the year. On the sheet music chart, three of his compositions were at number one, in total, for over six consecutive months. Russ was a big star and famous as a pianist for having only seven fingers having lost the tip of one of his little digits in an accident whilst serving in the navy.

In world politics Fidel Castro became President of Cuba after overthrowing the corrupt pro-American Government and after getting a frosty reception from the United States, partly because he had closed down the casinos and seized the assets of the American owners, declared his friendship for Russia and established the first communist regime in the western hemisphere. This was going to be a bit of a problem in the future.

1958, Munich Air Disaster & Icelandic Cod Wars

The most distressing piece of news in our house in 1958 was most undoubtedly the Munich air disaster of 6th February when an air crash at Munich Airport in Germany caused the deaths of eight Manchester United players and several club officials and sports journalists. In 1958 the Manchester United team was one of the most talented in the World and was known as the Busby Babes, which was a reference to their manager Matt Busby and to the average age of the players, which at 24 was unusually young.

Manchester United had been to Yugoslavia to play the second leg of a European cup match against Red Star Belgrade. The match had ended in a 3-3 draw and United had won the tie 5-3 on aggregate. In the 1950s domestic league matches were played on Saturdays and European matches were played midweek and there wasn’t the same amount of flexibility around fixtures that there is today and having played the match there was no alternative but to return home to England immediately despite poor weather conditions.

The club had chartered an aeroplane to fly them home but the takeoff from Belgrade was delayed for an hour as one of the players had lost his passport, and then the plane made a scheduled stop in Munich to refuel. The plane was a British European Airways Airspeed Ambassador, which was an aircraft that had carried 2,340,000 passengers on eighty six thousand flights since it began service in 1952 and had an immaculate safety record. After refueling the pilot tried to take off twice, but both attempts were aborted. When a third take off was attempted the plane failed to gain adequate height and crashed into the fence surrounding the airport, then into a house, and caught fire. Although the crash was originally blamed on pilot error, it was subsequently found to have been caused by the build-up of slush towards the end of the runway, causing deceleration of the aircraft and preventing safe flying speed from being achieved.

Seven players died in the crash, Roger Byrne, the captain, Mark Jones, Eddie Colman, Tommy Taylor, Liam Whelan, David Pegg and Geoff Bent. Probably the most famous Busby Babe of all was Duncan Edwards who was tipped at the time to become one of the World’s greatest footballers but although he survived the crash he died from his injuries a few days later in hospital. In 1953 he had become the youngest footballer to play in the Football League First Division and at the age of 18 years and 183 days, he had made his international debut for England in April 1955, and became England's youngest post-war debutant. This record was not broken for forty-three years, when Michael Owen made his England debut in 1998.

Matt Busby who was himself very seriously injured in the crash resumed managerial duties the following season and eventually built a second generation of Busby Babes, including George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, who also happened to be one of the original Busby Babes, that went on to win the European Cup ten years after the disaster in 1968.

As a football fan this was devastating news for my dad who for many years afterwards always remembered the tragedy and spoke fondly of the Busby Babes. In a scrap book that he kept at the time he kept the front page of the Daily Mail which covered the story on the next day. The only other two newspaper front pages that he kept were those that reported the assassination of Kennedy and the death of Winston Churchill. That’s how much it meant to him. And he never bought me an Airfix model of the BEA Airspeed Ambassador either.

Other significant events of 1958 included a revolution in Iraq that overthrew the monarchy, murdered the King and triggered years of instability in the Middle East which continues today; Charles de Gaulle became President of France, which was bad news for those wanting to join the Common Market; and Nikita Khrushchev became President of the USSR, who although a liberal by Communist standards was the man who would later approve the construction of the Berlin Wall.

And Britain went to war again – this time with Iceland. The First Cod War lasted from 1 September until 12 November 1958 and began in response to a new Icelandic law that tripled the Icelandic fishery zone from four nautical miles to twelve to protect their fishing industry.

The British declared that their trawlers would fish under protection from their warships in three areas, out of the Westfjords, north of Horn and to the southeast of Iceland. All in all, twenty British trawlers, four warships and a supply vessel operated inside the newly declared zones. This was a bad tempered little spat that involved trawler net cutting, mid ocean ramming incidents and collisions. It was also a bit of an uneven contest and in all fifty-three British warships took part in the operations against seven Icelandic patrol vessels and a single Catalina flying boat.

Eventually Britain and Iceland came to a settlement, which stipulated that any future disagreement between the two countries in the matter of fishery zones would be sent to the International Court of Justice in The Hague and the Icelandic Minister Bjarni Benediktsson hailed the agreement as "Iceland's biggest political victory." And it wasn’t the end of Cod Wars either because there was a second in 1972 and a third in 1975 when on both occasions Iceland further extended their territorial fishing waters and continuing to protect these is what keeps Iceland from joining the European Union even today.

Before the Credit Crunch it is interesting, and perhaps a little surprising, that Iceland was one of the most prosperous countries in the World and according to the UN index on human development had just overtaken Norway as the World's most desirable country in which to live. Norway was second and Australia, Canada and Ireland made up the rest of the top five, while the place not to be is the sub-Saharan African states, which are firmly placed at the bottom of the league. I visited Iceland in 2007 and it was a lovely place to go even though it was a bit expensive.