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.

A Life in a Year – 24th January, The Death of Winston Churchill

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 Leonard Spencer 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. This 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 Britons 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 herself. John Churchill the 1st Duke of Marlborough, military genius 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. A State Funeral 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, the Queen’s favourite Prime Minister, 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.

A Life in a Year – 23rd January, Liechtenstein and a holiday with my Daughter

As Sally had recently broken the news about having a baby I thought it would be a good idea to have a last bonding holiday together as father and daughter before the big event as it is going to be a long time before we get this opportunity again. I was straight to www.ryaniar.com and I quickly located cheap flights to Germany from where we could visit Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

On 23rd January 1719 Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, decreed that Vaduz and Schellenberg were united and elevated the newly formed territory to the dignity of Principality with the name Liechtenstein in honour of histrue servant, Anton Florian of Liechtenstein and it was on this date that Liechtenstein became a sovereign member state of the Holy Roman Empire.

Liechtenstein is the fourth smallest independent European state after the Vatican City, Monaco and San Marino. It is predominantly Germanic but the only German speaking state that does not have a national border with Germany itself. When the Holy Roman Empire was abolished by Napoleon in 1806 all of Europe seemed to forget about this tiny insignificant Principality and the royal family were able to keep their heads down and have continued to exist as an independent state ever since and as such it is the only state in Europe with a remaining direct continuity with the thousand year old Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. It is one of only two countries in the world that are double landlocked, the other is Uzbekistan, as neither of its neighbours, Switzerland or Austria have access to the sea either. It is therefore safe to say that fishing is probably not an important contributor to the economy in Liechtenstein.

After an excellent breakfast and with Sally in possession of the map and entrusted with navigation duties we set off from the hotel and attempted first of all to plot a route over the mountain behind us. The roads were narrow and after a while it became clear that they just went round in big circles without ever going across the top and down the other side so we had to abandon this course and return to the main road that took us effortlessly to the town of St Gallen, which is a sort of gateway to the Alps. Here things became slightly more difficult and Sally’s navigational skills were tested to the limit as she was entrusted with the task of getting us through the town and on the road to Vaduz. Unusually for a girl it turned out that she is a natural at map reading and she guided us through and then selected a minor road and scenic route where the scenery was wonderful with green fields that looked like watercolours in the rain and clean alpine meadows all bathed under a gentle pastel blue sky. In the fields adjacent to the roads there were honey coloured alpine cattle with full udders feeding on the lush grass and clanging noisily about on account of the huge cow-bells that they had hanging around their necks. They were friendly and inquisitive and when we stopped to admire the view they came close and posed obligingly for photographs.

We climbed the road through the town of Tregen and continued along the scenic route and through the Ruppen Pass with more impressive views and then we picked up a main road that took us south through the low-lying plains of the Appenzell region. This wasn’t quite so scenic but as we drove the Alps got closer and their high peaks began to loom overhead rising in dramatic style from the meadows and arable farmlands of this relatively flat part of Switzerland. Unfortunately the weather ahead was beginning to change and dark clouds were hanging in the mountain passes. Just before we crossed the border into Liechtenstein we came across a picturesque little town called Buchs where we stopped to admire the views of the Alps that completely surrounded this delightful little place and its attractive lake. We didn’t linger for long because by now we were excited about arriving at our destination so we moved on and resumed our gentle drive south.

We passed through the unremarkable state capitol of Vaduz with the castle of the ruling Prince, the Schloss Vaduz, perched high overhead and with magnificent views of all that he possesses stretched out below. Out of the city we began our ascent to the village of Triesenberg a thousand metres above Vaduz into the Alps. As we climbed a road with spectacular hairpin bends it unexpectedly started to rain, gently at first but about half way to the village it really started to fall quite steadily which made driving more difficult than it might have been and we were glad when we arrived at the top. We found a bar with an outside terrace overlooking the Rhine valley below and across into Switzerland and although it was still raining the terrace was sheltered and we took an outside table and enjoyed a drink and the magnificent view. Although the rain was disappointing and the bar staff and the regulars thought we were slightly daft to be sitting outside we wouldn’t have missed this view for the world and it was so good that after the first drink we had a second and stayed a while longer.

First of all before setting back to Rorschach we drove to the very top of the mountain above the town to the winter sports resort of Malbun. The road was quiet and we made a leisurely ascent through small villages with an abundance of unoccupied winter ski chalets and as the road became steeper the car began to strain in objection to the uphill task. The smell of burning clutch was enough to confirm that it wasn’t altogether enjoying the assignment of taking us to the top. When we completed the drive and stopped in Malbun we were one thousand six hundred metres above sea level and there were good views to be had all around us. The place was almost completely abandoned because by May there is no snow remaining in the valleys or on the ski slopes and only the very tops of the mountains still retained a covering.

We didn’t stay long at the top and not being able to get across the mountain because the road terminates at Malbun we returned down the mountain stopping in the Hamlet of Steg where we looked at the charming little chapel of St Wendelin that stands next to the River Samina that was flowing swiftly, full as it was of the last of the melted snow from the mountain top, and babbling excitedly as it surged towards the river valley below. The views were excellent and we stopped a time or two to enjoy them, although we were reluctant to leave them behind we wanted to leave the Alps and return to the lake where to the east of us we could see that the weather looked much better.

So we drove out of Liechtenstein the way that we came, back through the unremarkable Vaduz and then across the Rhine and back into Switzerland. Vaduz was a bit disappointed but I don’t really know what I was expecting really, it just sounded as though it should be more interesting than it is, the very fact that it has been able to remain independent through two hundred turbulent years of European history should have given me a clue. If none of its more powerful neighbours had taken a fancy to it or annexed it for themselves in all of that time that probably says a lot. Although it is regarded now as a wealthy country this hasn’t always been the case because in the immediate aftermath of the Second-World-War the Prince of Liechtenstein had to sell off family heirlooms to stay solvent but in response to this sorry state of affairs the economy of Lichtenstein was completely modernised and the advantage of low corporate tax rates attracted many foreign companies to the country. These days the Prince is the world’s sixth wealthiest head of state, with an estimated wealth of three billion Euro (by comparison, the personal fortune of Queen Elizabeth II of England is estimated at seven and a half billion Euro) and the residents of the country enjoy one of the world’s highest standards of living. And that’s not bad for the world’s sixth smallest country!

A Life in a Year – 22nd January, Zulu and the defence of Rorke’s Drift

Zulu has to be one of my favourite ever films because it was one of the first grown up films that I was ever taken to see at the cinema. As I have explained elsewhere dad was fond of anything military or heroic and stories don’t come much more heroic or military than this.

These are the facts: On 22nd January 1879 the Imperial British army suffered one of its worst ever defeats when Zulu forces massacred one thousand five hundred of its troops at Isandlhwana in South Africa. A short time after the main battle a Zulu force numbering over four thousand warriors advanced on a British hospital and supply garrison guarded by one hundred and thirty nine infantrymen at Rorke’s Drift. The film tells the true story of the battle during which the British force gallantly defended the hospital and in doing so won eleven Victoria Crosses, which is the most ever awarded for one single engagement. The film takes a few historical liberties but it remains one of my favourites and of course I have a copy of it in my own DVD collection.

Talking about historical liberties what I find interesting is that if you buy the DVD now, Michael Caine is billed as the star but if you watch it Stanley Baker had top billing and he was the film’s producer as well, the film simply introduces Michael Caine in his first big film role. That’s how easily history is rewritten.

I like battle films and perhaps could have chosen ‘Waterloo’ or ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ but the fact is that none of these comes close to the dramatic impact of ZULU! Later that year dad bought the Zulu soundtrack LP for Christmas to play on our new record player. I’ve still got it but I don’t play it any more. I’ve also got dad’s book on the Zulu wars and his favourite Royal Doulton water colour painting of the defence of Rorke’s Drift.