A Life in a Year – 31st January, Compulsory Seat Belts

Like a lot of families in the 1950s we didn’t have a car and had to rely instead on public transport. Dad leaned to drive in 1962 when he took lessons with Terry Branston’s school of motoring. Terry lived opposite to our house and well as being a driving instructor was a professional footballer who played for Northampton Town. He was a tough tackling centre-back who helped Northampton achieve the impressive feat of moving from Division Four to Division One in three successive seasons in the early 1960s.

Once he had passed his test he bought his first car, an old fashioned white Austin Cambridge A55 registration number SWD 774. The Cambridge had been introduced in January 1957 and was in production for two years. It had a straight-4 pushrod B-Series engine with a maximum power output of 42 brake horse power and an alleged top speed of 71 miles per hour at 4,250 revs per minute, power was transmitted to the back wheels by means of a four speed gear box controlled with a column mounted lever.

It was a big heavy thing and by modern standards hopelessly inefficient, it only managed a disappointing 30miles to the gallon or so but with a gallon of leaded petrol costing only five shillings (twenty-five new pence) this really didn’t matter too much. I can remember dad pulling into a garage where an attendant put four gallons in the tank and dad handed over a crisp green one pound note! I wish I could do that! Dad always insisted on buying Shell petrol because he thought it possessed some sort of magic ingredient but at one point we successfully nagged him to buy Esso so that we could get the gold and black striped tail to hang around the filler cap to show other motorists that the car had a tiger in the tank!

On the outside it had a lumpy bulbous body shape, chrome bumpers and grill, round bug-eye lights with chrome surrounds, the Austin badge in the middle of the bonnet and the flying A symbol on the nose at the front. It was a curious shade of white, a bit off-white really but not quite cream with ominous flecks of rust beginning to show through on the wing panels and the sills.

I would like to be able to take a drive in it now to fully appreciate how bad it must have been and with narrow cross ply tyres it must have been difficult to handle. Dad obviously had some problems in this department because he had two minor accidents in it. On the first occasion he misjudged his distances when overtaking a parked car and clipped a Midland Red bus coming the other way, he was upset about that especially when he got a bill to pay for the damage to the bus. The second occasion was a bit more dangerous when a car pulled out on him from a side street somewhere in London and dad couldn’t stop the car in time and did a lot of damage to the front off side wing. Fortunately this wasn’t his fault and someone else had to pay for the repairs this time.

Having an accident like this in 1964 was potentially quite serious because cars didn’t have seat belts and in a crash passengers could be tossed around as though they were in a tombola drum. Drivers and front seat passengers were not compelled to wear seatbelts until 1st February 1983 by which time the Department of Transport estimated that thirty-thousand people a year were being killed or seriously injured in road accidents. It seems bizarre now to think that there had been a long running row over making front seatbelts compulsory which had been going on for fifteen years with eleven previously unsuccessful attempts to make it law.

And it wasn’t just seat belts that the A55 lacked because in the interior this was a car with few refinements and even lacking modern day basics such as a radio, air conditioning or satellite navigation! There were no carpets and the seats were made of imitation red leather that were freezing cold in winter and if you weren’t especially careful burnt your arse in the summer if the car had stood out in the sun. For the driver there was a big skeletal steering wheel, column mounted gear stick and a hand brake that was adjacent to the steering column on the left hand side.

For the controls there was a simple dashboard display with a basic speedometer and warning lights for oil and water, headlamps and indicators. The ignition key was in the middle of the dashboard alongside the manual choke and the knob to control the windscreen wipers. There were air vent controls for the driver and the front seat passenger, a long open shelf for keeping miscellaneous motoring clutter and a glove box for the AA book and important membership details.

Dad only had the A55 for a couple of years and 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 flashy chrome grill. Then he had a two tone blue and white Ford Cortina Mark I and he must have liked the Cortina because after that he had first a blue one and then a white one. Sometime in the early 1970s he traded up from a Mark I to a Mark II and had a model in a curious duck egg green. These were all second hand cars of course but then in 1975 he had his first brand new car when he paid £800 for a metallic gold Vauxhall Viva, which he kept for four years before selling it to me. After that he had a succession of red Escorts before finally downsizing to Fiestas, and back to blue again.

A Life in a Year – 30th January, Towering Inferno and the closing of Rugby Granada Cinema

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 there 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, sinews and important 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 and 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, a jet black stallion called 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 who were 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. The Granada cinema closed because of dwindling audiences but predictably the last film was a sell-out all week as people of the town flocked to the cinema for the very last time before its irreverant conversion to a bingo hall.

A Life in a Year – 29th January, Eugene Schieffelin and Starlings in the USA

The European Starling is resident in the US because in 1890, a wealthy American businessman, Eugene Schieffelin (born 29th January 1827), introduced sixty Starlings into New York Central Park and then another forty the following year. In doing so he radically and irreversibly altered America’s bird population because today European Starlings range from Alaska to Florida and even into Mexico, and their population is estimated at over two hundred million.

Schieffelin was an interesting man who belonged to the Acclimation Society of North America, a group with the seemingly laudable, if misguided, aim of aiding the exchange of plants and animals from one part of the world to another. In the nineteenth century, such societies were fashionable and were supported by the scientific knowledge and beliefs of an era that had no way of understanding the effect that non-native species could have on the local ecosystem.

Actually some recent revisionist thinking has concluded that the introduction of the Starling was perhaps not as devastating has had previously been suggested and one thing is certain and that is that is was not nearly so thoughtless as the introduction of the European rabbit to the continent of Australia in 1859 by a certain Thomas Austin who wanted them for his hunting hobby. The effect of rabbits on the ecology of Australia has been truly devastating and entirely due to the rabbit one eighth of all mammalian species in Australia are now extinct and the loss of plant species is at present uncalculated. They have established themselves as Australia’s biggest pest and annually cause millions of dollars of damage to agriculture. The introduction of the rabbit was an ecological mistake on a monumental scale!

When he wasn’t tinkering with the environment Eugene Schieffelin liked joining clubs and societies and his obituary in the New York Times in 1906 listed his membership of The New York Genealogical and Biographic Society, The New York Zoological Society, The Society of Colonial Wars, The St. Nicholas Club, the St. Nicholas Society and the Union Club of New York which in the 1870’s was generally regarded as the richest club in the world. Obviously Schieffelin had too much money and too much time on his hands!

An alternative theory behind the introduction of the European Starling is often quoted but is probably not true. It is said that he belonged to a group dedicated to introducing into America all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works because they imagined the sound of Shakespeare’s birds warbling their old world songs on the tree branches of America. If this were true he must have been unusually familiar with the works of the Elizabethan bard because Shakespeare’s sole reference to the starling appears in King Henry IV, part 1 (Act 1, scene 3): “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer.’”

As well as the Starling Schieffelin was also responsible for introducing the House Sparrow, which was released into Brooklyn in New York, in 1851 and by 1900 had spread as far as the Rocky Mountains and is today common across the entire continent. The sparrow too is regarded as a pest as it is in Australia where it was introduced at roughly the same time, paradoxically as an experiment in pest control. How badly wrong can an experiment go I wonder?

Schieffelin wasn’t always successful however and his attempts to introduce bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales, and skylarks were not successful.

Interestingly the House Sparrow gets four mentions in Shakespeare’s works, in Hamlet, As You Like It, The Tempest and Troilus and Cressida. The full list of avian references in the works of Shakespeare were researched by the Scottish geologist Sir Archibald Geikie and recorded in his book published in 1916, ‘The Birds of Shakespeare’ and they are the Blackbird, Bunting, Buzzard, Chough, Cock, Cormorant, Crow, Cuckoo, Dive-dapper, Dove and Pigeon, Duck, Eagle, Falcon and Sparrowhawk, Finch, Goose, Hedge Sparrow, House Martin, Jackdaw, Jay, Kite, Lapwing, Lark, Loon, Magpie, Nightingale, Osprey, Ostrich, Owl, Parrot, Partridge, Peacock, Pelican, Pheasant, Quail, Raven, Robin, Snipe, Sparrow, Starling, Swallow, Swan, Thrush, Turkey, Vulture, Wagtail, Woodcock and the Wren.

A Life in a Year – 28th January, Lego patents its building bricks

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 nonsense 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 alright 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 Bayko, which was a set of bakerlite bricks and metal wires that could be used to construct different styles of houses but nothing more exciting than that. Lego changed everything and the only restrictions on creativity thereafter were the number of bricks in the toy box and a child’s (or an adult’s) 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.

A Life in a Year – 27th January, the World goes Nuclear and introduces the Bikini

In 1954 the United States began serious nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean on the island of Bikini Atoll and they carried out the detonation of a massive bomb codenamed Castle Bravo. This was the first test of a practical hydrogen bomb and the largest nuclear explosion ever set off by the United States. In fact, a bit like a ten year old with a box of fireworks, they really had little idea what they were doing and when it was detonated it proved much more powerful than the boffins had predicted, and created unexpected widespread radioactive contamination which has prevented people from ever returning to the island.

Castle Bravo was the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States, with a yield of 15 Megatons. That yield, far exceeding the expected yield of 4 to 6 megatons, which, combined with other factors, led to the most significant accidental radiological contamination ever caused by the United States. In terms of TNT tonnage equivalence, Castle Bravo was about one thousand, two hundred times more powerful than each of the atomic bombs which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

This event was important for two reasons, firstly it signified the state of tension in the world called the cold war that was around for the next thirty years or so but secondly and much more importantly it inspired the introduction of the bikini swimsuit and I’ve always been grateful for that. According to the official version a French engineer called Louis Réard and the fashion designer Jacques Heim invented the swimsuit that was a little more than a provocative brassiere front with a tiny g-string back. It was allegedly named after Bikini Atoll, the site of nuclear weapon tests on the reasoning that the burst of excitement it would cause on the beach or at the lido would be like a nuclear explosion. Plenty of fallout and very hot!

Nuclear testing was a big thing in the 1950s as Washington and Moscow prepared enthusiastically for wiping each other of the face of the earth on the day of Armageddon. The fact that a major explosion even on the side of the world might have serious consequences for both sides and everyone else in between just didn’t seem to occur to them. Years later I visited the United States and although I didn’t know this at the time travelled along a road in Nevada that was only a hundred kilometres or so southwest of the Nevada Test Site that is a United States Department of Energy reservation which was established in January 1951 for the testing of nuclear weapons. The location is infamous for receiving the highest amount of concentrated nuclear detonated weapons in the whole of North America.

The Nevada Test Site was the primary testing location of American nuclear devices during the Cold War and began here with a one kiloton bomb on January 27th 1951. From then until 1992, there were nine hundred and twenty eight announced nuclear tests at the site, which is far more than at any other test site in the World, and seismic data has indicated there may have been many unannounced secret underground tests as well.

During the 1950s the familiar deadly mushroom cloud from these tests could be seen for almost a hundred miles in all directions, including the city of Las Vegas, where the tests instantly became tourist attractions as Americans headed for the City to witness the spectacle that could be seen from the downtown hotels. Even more recklessly many others would thoughtlessly drive the family to the boundary of the test site for a day out and a picnic to view the free entertainment. In doing so they unsuspectingly acquired an instant suntan and their own personal lethal dose of radioactive iodine 131, which the American National Cancer Institute, in a report released in 1997, estimated was responsible for thousands of cases of thyroid cancer in subsequent years.

A Life in a Year – 26th January, Australia Day and Ten Pound Poms

Australia Day is the official national day of Australia. Celebrated annually on 26th January and the day commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788, the hoisting of the British flag there, and the proclamation of British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of New Holland. I mention this because I have family living in Australia who will probably be joining in the celebrations today.

Created as part of the “Populate or Perish“, the assisted passage policy was designed to substantially increase the population of Australia and to supply workers for the country’s booming industries. In return for subsidising the cost of travelling to Australia adult migrants were charged only £10 for the fare and children were allowed to travel for free. The Government promised employment, housing and prospects for an improved lifestyle.

Assisted migrants were obliged to remain in Australia for two years after arrival, or alternatively refund the cost of their assisted passage. If they chose to travel back to Britain, the cost of the journey was at least £120, a large sum in those days and one that most could not afford.

The primary source of immigration to Australia in the 1960′s was from Europe, and in particular Great Britain. The reason was World War II. The people were looking to get away from the depressing economic situation back home and Australia was everything that Europe was not. In the 1950s and 60s, there was the rise to undreamed-of affluence. During the 1950s, Australia enjoyed the most even income distribution of any western industrialized nation and the 1960s were the really affluent years.

More than 2 million migrants arrived between 1945 and 1965, and Australia’s population increased from 7 to 11 million. These “New Australians” were much of the workforce behind many of the intense development of Australia in the 1950s and 60s, providing manual labour in steelworks, mines, factories and on the roads.

It was the promise of a new life that took my Uncle Brian and his family to the new world of Australia in the mid 1960s. After a string of jobs following National service in the Royal Navy he was by then a bus driver with London Transport and for him the transformation of British society and the arrival of many immigrants from the Commonwealth convinced him that England was a spent force with few prospects for him and his family and he was seduced by the offer of the assisted passage. Before he left he came to stay with us one last time at our house in Hillmorton near Rugby and then he and his wife Pat and his son Glen were gone for good. During this visit I recall conversations with my parents explaining how Australia was the land of milk and honey and how the pavements were made of gold and for a short while mum and dad actually considered it themselves but luckily dad didn’t have an adventurous bone in his body so we were certain never to follow them.

After six weeks at sea they arrived in Adelaide and started a new life in the sunshine of South Australia and shortly after that they had a second son called Gavin and this is a cousin that I have never met because I have a family on the other side of the World who, let’s face it, I may never ever see.

My grandparents visited Australia a few times, once for six months and my parents went to visit but dad didn’t especially like it so didn’t ever want to go back. Brian and Pat have been home only once, in 2003, but they don’t regard it as home anymore so have no plans to ever come back again.

A Life in a Year – 25th January, The Victor Comic and German Lessons

The Victor was a story paper in comic book format published weekly that ran for 1657 issues from 25th January 1961 until November 1992. It featured many stories that could be described as “Boy’s Own” adventures. In particular, each week the front cover carried a story of how a medal had been won by British or Commonwealth forces during the Great War or the Second World War. That’s a lot of British war heroes and to put that into perspective there were over 1,600 editions of the Victor but only one hundred and eighty one Victoria Crosses awarded during the entire Second World War. Associated with the weekly comic was the annually published Victor Book for Boys which first appeared in 1964, with the last edition published in 1994.

My only real knowledge of the German language is what I learnt as a boy from the Victor, which was a jingoistic publication for boys that featured stories about British gallantry in the two world wars of the twentieth century, and as these were stories about British heroes the comics were restricted to a handful of often repeated German phrases ‘Achtung’, ‘Luftwaffe’, “Hände Hoch!’ and my personal favourite ‘donnerwetter!’ that translates strictly as ‘thunder weather’. I am not at all sure if that is a real German word and I can’t find it in the dictionary but I suppose it was meant to be a curse and realistically it was a kids comic so I don’t suppose they could use the more appropriate ‘fücken hölle’ without getting a postbag full of complaints from angry parents.