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: