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.