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.