In South Vietnam, a primitive backward comer of South East Asia, where Vice-President Johnson had “looked into the eyes” of the people, 20,000 American troops are engaged in an endless struggle – endless that is, unless it should end in something worse. In the past seven years 300,000 Vietnamese and 1,400 Americans have been killed and wounded.

It is a war in which, as one American lieutenant told World in Action, “you don’t know many times who your enemy is until he shoots at you. It’s hard to fight someone when you can’t see them and when a man can lay down his rifle in a rice paddy and pick up a plough after he shoots at you.”

On the night when the Tall Texan and the Man from Arizona were fighting it out at the polls — to the overwhelming victory of LBJ – World in Action presented a programme about Vietnam, a subject that looms large in American minds and one which posed President Johnson with his first major crisis after re-election.

Mike Hodges and Mike Boultbee led the World in Action team into the paddy-fields of Vietnam. Arnold Bulka did the research.

Vietnam is a country of 30 million people, part of what was once called French Indo-China. It is split in two – with the communists holding the North which borders on China. The communist leader is Ho Chi Minh, aged 74, one-time pastry cook in a London Hotel, and now known to his 16 million people as Uncle Ho.

Uncle Ho is a professional communist. He studied the theory well at Moscow’s University of the Toilers of the East, where he graduated with honours. In 1944 he was smuggled back to Vietnam to lead guerrilla partisans fighting the Japanese who had taken over the country from the French. As soon as the Second World War ended, Ho set up his own makeshift regime in the North before the French could come back in and stop him. In the months that followed, the French and Ho found that the country was not big enough to hold both of them. And they went to war.

For eight years Ho and his peasant army, supported by Chinese arms and money, fought a quarter of a million of France’s best troops and killed 94,000 of them. Then on 7th May, 1954, at Dien Bien Phu – a place the French will long remember – they tried to break the ragged communist army. But the day ended with the pride of France’s army captured, scattered, wounded or dead.

The French Empire in South East Asia was now at the mercy of Uncle Ho, the Marxist-Leninist pastry cook. For with the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French could no longer prevent the communists from taking over, not only Vietnam itself, but also their two other protectorates Laos and Cambodia.

The private little war in Indo-China seemed set to develop into a clash between the Big Powers of East and West. So they met together in Geneva in July, 1954 – rivals with one aim in common: to prevent each other from taking over the area. At this Conference three vitally important decisions were made:

One, that Laos and Cambodia should become independent, neutral states;

Two, that Vietnam should be divided in half, with Ho Chi Minh and his Communists taking over north of the 17th Parallel, and the French-backed anti-Communists holding on to the South;

And three, that an election would be held in all Vietnam, north and south, within two years, to decide on a single government for the whole nation.

Lord Avon, then Sir Anthony Eden, was Britain’s representative at that Conference. He told World in Action, “We were trying to bring to an end a very bloody brutal war which had been waging for some time and which was going at that time badly for our French allies who’d had a big defeat at Dien Bien Phu. In those conditions I’m sure that the agreement was the best that we could have got. The working out of it, inevitably, has had many disappointments but fundamentally the idea was sound – to try an create a protective pad between the Chinese forces in the North and to make of these three states, if we could, countries – little countries with an independent way life.”

The Geneva Agreement did not, in fact, bring peace to Indo-China. And principally this was because of the man chosen as the first leader for the new state of South Vietnan – Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem was an aristocrat, a Roman Catholic bachelor, who was opposed to both the communists and the French. His choice by the Geneva powers was by no means unanimous.

“In Vietnam, as it seemed to me,” said Lord Avon, “a wrong turning was probably taken when Diem was appointed as the Head of the Government of that country. That was many years ago. This isn’t hindsight, because the time I and the French representative to Geneva counselled against the appointment. However, it took place, and he ruled the country for many years.”

Diem became a virtual dictator, running the country with a Government that was practically a family firm. Even his sister-in-law, the beauteous and ruthless Madame Nnu, was given office – and with it access to the economic wealth being poured in by the Americans. Comfortably entrenched, Diem refused to risk an election.

From the north, Ho Chi Minh retaliated. He sent in his guerrillas, the terrorist force known as the Viet Cong, which is now harrying the Americans. This underground force opened a savage campaign of destruction and murder. Not even the children were spared.

Diem, meanwhile tried to soothe his people – handing out lollipops to the children and at the same time asking the Americans for military aid. Between 1956 and 1963, the Americans poured in 16,000 soldiers – “advisers” they called them – and enough equipment to arm the 300,000 strong South Vietnamese forces, but Ho Chi Minh continued to win. At the same time. Diem and his regime were in serious trouble from their own people. Diem became more dictatorial. Then he made his worst mistake. He refused to recognize Buddhism, the country’s biggest sect, as an official religion. Buddhist monks committed suicide in public, dousing their clothing with petrol and then setting themselves alight. Students rioted, and finally in November, 1963, the Army took over. They arrested and executed Diem and his brother.

Even then South Vietnam still failed to find a strong government. First they had General Minh – Big Minh. He was ousted by General Khanh, who gave way in turn to another temporary administration. Still, despite more and more American aid, the war in South Vietnam continued to be lost. And among the 20,000 Americans serving there the casualty list grew daily.

The Americans in Vietnam are fighting an enemy who most of the time is invisible. An estimated 30,000 Viet Cong guerrillas – the V.C.’s as the Americans call them – form the hard core of this hidden army. Some of them live in the jungles. And like the animals of the jungle they have learned how to hide well from their enemies. They even dig themselves into holes in the ground and have to be smoked out at bayonet point. Many other V.C.’s, however, live in villages where the local peasants hide them, feed them, and even finance them through an organized tax system.

The V.C.’s fight a hit-and-run war, as one wounded American Army Lieutenant described:

“The military operations are very difficult in a guerrilla type war, because you do not know where the enemy is. The guerrilla, if he sees a big force, disappears – and when he sees a small force he gets enough together to overcome this force and eliminate it. We went this one day to visit this village and everything was going pretty well, we stayed there for an hour or so talking to the people and nothing extraordinary happened and we returned. Unfortunately, the guerrillas were waiting for us. They probably saw us go in – it was about 2 kilometres or so, of undisturbed road – and they were waiting for us to come back. This was probably one of our mistakes. We had two jeeps and a 2½ ton truck with about a platoon of infantry in it. But this did not deter the Viet Cong at all. They planted a 105 round, I figure, with some extra explosive on the side of the road, and as our jeep came near he detonated it.”

The guerrillas move swiftly from place to place, and their task is made all the easier by the continued refusal of the South Vietnamese Government to stop people travelling freely about the country. An American captain explained, “Take for example the man that lives up north in some city. He gets a mission from the V.C. to go down and blow a bridge. He gets his orders, I don’t know where, but he gets them from some Communist leader. He comes down and blows this bridge, turns right round, goes back and he’s been gone only six or eight hours. Who’s missed him. Remember, people saw him walking on the road down here, or coming in a sampan, but nobody stopped him.

“If we don’t have any population controls,” he went on, “this compounds a problem that the military people have in combating these types of people. You don’t know where they are. They don’t as a fact wear uniforms, though some of their hard core units do – they’ve got a type of uniform. But as far as all of them being identifiable we don’t know who they are. This is a terrific frustration as a military type operation for a soldier.”

The main battleground in South Vietnam is the Delta of the Mekong River. This region, twice the size of Yorkshire, is flat and waterlogged, a maze of canals and rivers. It is here that practically all of the rice which feeds people of South Vietnam is grown. And whoever controls the Mekong Delta controls the country. In this flooded area, the guerrillas are hard to find and hard to get at; they are, in their own words, like fish in an ocean of peasants.

“They come down the Mekong by sampan and junk, usually at night,” said a U.S. Navy lieutenant. “When they reach the district they wish to manoeuvre in they go into the small canal. Some of these canals are so narrow that when we take our boats in we are brushing the trees on the bank. The V.C. wear civilian clothes, and they look just like a fisherman or farmer, but when you stop their junks and search them you find weapons hidden underneath, and pamphlets, propaganda material. V.C. also use the sampan and junks to attack civilians, this is another thing we are trying to stop. The V.C. in the area generally don’t appear in uniform, but they will join a hard core V.C. unit that’s been trained in North Vietnam.”

From a base in the Mekong Delta World in Action cameras travelled on one of these patrols. The U.S. Navy Lieutenant aboard explained the risks:

“We lose more boats to mines than by any other offensive means the V.C. employ. They will plant a fix mine of a 200 or 300 kilo strength in a narrow canal. This mine will be connected with electrical wires, to a lookout point on the beach. The wires are buried under the canal and run over to the beach into a grove of trees or into a hidden area. The V.C. put a lookout on the canal and when the boat they want passes over the mine they cross wires over very crude batteries.

“Two days ago we finished a salvage operation on an army personnel carrier that was sunk by a mine in a small canal down the river from here. The V.C. had fixed the mine knowing that the personnel carrier had to cross the river at this point.”

This patrol took World in Action up a small river in the Delta. The force consisted of: a monitor, armed with a heavy gun for shelling the V.C.’s on shore; two small gun boats; and two armed troop carriers with Vietnamese soldiers aboard. The patrol was under complete Vietnamese command. A Vietnamese Naval Captain and a Vietnamese Army Lieutenant gave all the orders. The U.S. Navy officer aboard could only make suggestions with no guarantee they would be accepted.

This patrol was the first to sail up the river for ten months. It was considered important to show the flag to the villagers, because large numbers of Viet Cong had been reported along the river banks.

“We usually operate within easy rifle range of the V.C.”, said the U.S. Lieutenant. “They have rifles, they have machine guns and a few Recoilless rifles. When you fight the V.C. they usually pick the time to fight. We have to look for them, and when they ambush us they usually are in a pretty firm position. So far from what I’ve seen, I couldn’t ask for a better group of fighting men than the ones on these boats because when they find an ambush they go right in after it.”

On this day the patrol did find an ambush. Viet Cong terrorists, hidden in the jungle thickness, opened fire on the patrol. The patrol boats fired back. As the gun boats and the guerrillas shot it out, the troop carrier swung downstream … and crashed into the banks. The troops jumped ashore to circle round the guerrillas and cut them off. But by the time they got there the guerrillas, as usual, had vanished.

The captain of one of the gunboats signalled that his men had killed a lot of terrorists, but not a single body was found. The Viet Cong carry their dead with them. Day in, day out, this is the war in South Vietnam.

Day in, day out, too, another war is being fought – a war for the minds and hearts of the people of Vietnam – a war of propaganda. At the 17th Parallel, the line that divides North from South, the two sides match propaganda poster for propaganda poster, word for word, flag for flag, loudspeaker for loudspeaker. Every day, Hanoi Hannah, the sweet-talking Communist Radio announcer, speaks to the peasants of South Vietnam, promising for everyone the better life.

Despite smooth words the casualty list grows. In one week alone in October, 1964, nearly 3,000 Vietnamese from North and South, were killed or wounded. As the war drags on, bitterness and hatred eat into the hearts of the Vietnamese. For this is a civil war – and civil wars are always the most brutal. North and South equally kill, maim or torture with the cold-blooded enthusiasm of brother set against brother. And as usual there are the bystanders – the people who just happen to get in the way. The American G.I. would be less than human if in the midst of all this he did not find himself downhearted. And back in the United States, the anger, the frustration and the humiliation of Vietnam is felt by the American people.

“There are soldiers over there,” said one man who was interviewed, “dying in this war without a name. We’re getting nowhere, we’re just sitting there. They’re not doing anything. There’s no sense in it. And you have to pay money to keep them there, so there’s no sense in it.”

Said another, “I think we should invade Vietnam.”

And a third, “We should just not let our men get knocked off one at a time, we should put our foot down and get out, one way or the other.”

Amid emotions like these, Senator Goldwater found willing listeners in his election campaign.

“Where has weakness brought this world since the end of the Second World War?” he demanded of his supporters at one meeting. “Twelve nations have fallen to Communism. In the past three years alone, Laos has been torn apart. Indonesia has been set afire. And South Vietnam has been soaked with American blood.”

The tough talk sometimes explodes into action. In August 1964 two American destroyers patrolling off North Vietnam were attacked by North Vietnam gun boats. As a reprisal, aircraft of the U.S. 7th Fleet bombed and strafed North Vietnamese naval bases, carrying the war over the border for the first time. China and Russia protested – but back home in America there were those who were heartened by the attack being carried into Communist territory.

Some American politicians, however, do not see this as the way to win in Vietnam. Among them is Democratic Senator William Fulbright who is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “I think that this tough talk, which is sometimes called brinkmanship, is irrelevant to modem conditions and it is also very dangerous. In the days of simple gunboats and very limited weapons you could engage in this kind of psychological warfare with impunity. If you did make a mistake it was not particularly disastrous in most cases, but today with nuclear war and with the highly sophisticated world we live in, I think this kind of policy is both dangerous and is irrelevant to the problem, in the sense that it isn’t designed in any way to solve the problems or to get at a solution.”

So long as the war in Vietnam continues to go against the Americans, so long will a threat remain to Britain’s interests in South-East Asia. For if Vietnam falls to the Communists the way will be open to Laos and Cambodia, through them to the pro-western nation of Thailand, and through Thailand to Malaysia, the new federation which provides most of our tin and rubber.

The strength and morale of Communism in the Far East got a new boost on 16th October, 1964, when China exploded her first atomic bomb. Today many Americans talk tougher than ever on Vietnam.

But the American soldiers in Vietnam, the weary and the wounded, know better than any civilian that this is not a war that can be won with guns or bombs alone. As the wounded lieutenant said to World in Action: “This is a guerrilla war – a war for people’s minds, and hearts.”

The post The V.C War appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

At its Convention in the Cow Palace, San Francisco, on 15th July the U.S. Republican Party picked the man to fight Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 American Presidential Election. Against all the earlier odds, the outsider who suddenly came right out in front was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater represented the extreme far Right of his party. He stands for talking rough and tough to the Communists. He voted against the Civil Rights bill which aims to bring equal rights to the American Negro. Goldwater’s views have alarmed a lot of people – including many American Republicans — but his supporters, not unnaturally, are fanatically “pro-Barry”. A fortnight before the Republican Party convention. World in Action, with some prescience, went West to look at the man from Arizona who had become big news for the world.

Barry Goldwater was born and bred in the West – in Phoenix, Arizona. His grandfather, “Big Mike”, came to the territory less than 100 years ago. He came out to trade with the miners, ranchers and cowboys who were opening up the West. Like all true Westerners, even today, Barry Goldwater has built himself a homestead in the wide open spaces. He has a wife and four children – two girls and two boys.

Barry Goldwater ran the family department store in Phoenix, founded by his father, until World War II, when he served in the American Air Force. He only entered big-time politics in 1952 when he became a Senator for Arizona.

Most of Goldwater’s political henchmen also come from Phoenix. Stephen Shadegg is one of them. We asked him what he thought about Goldwater, the Westerner:

“He has an honest respect for the necessity of paying your debts. This is something we seem to have lost sight of in this country; we postpone it. He believes that every tub should stand on its own bottom, every man should sleep in his bed, and this is something that we have in the West. I think that in the more collectivized societies and in the big urban centres they’ve lost this. He has an intense interest in all people. He could not be a bystander while someone else was being involved in an unfortunate situation such as that incident we had in New York when 36 or 28 people watched while someone was being murdered. He has to be a participant, he’s an activist. Everything he does he has to do well. When he became a photographer he had to do it well enough to achieve membership in your Royal Photographic Society, and when he got in the war he had to fly an aeroplane. He was a pilot before he entered the service, but he was over age. He still managed his way round the red tape and became a service pilot and flew all during the war. In politics he’s much the same way, he s a very intense man about whatever interests him and he explores all of the possibilities – contrary to the present impression that he goes off half-cock; this is completely untrue. He’s a man who wants to examine all of the alternatives so that he can make a reasonable judgement.”

What is it about Barry Goldwater and his beliefs that appeals to his followers? Alistair Cooke, broadcaster an journalist, explained:

“I think that the appeal of Goldwater is a distortion of a very healthy impulse and it’s something that’s present in 19th century, the middle 19th century, especially out West where people who were frustrated by the congestion of cities and so on could move into open land which reached to the horizon and could stake out their own home and their own way of life and control their environment. Now the big argument inside the Republican Party is just how far you can go to control your own environment, that of your city, that of your county, that of your State, or whether the Federal Government has to move in into vast areas which are now controlled by the individual States. And I think this is a form of what you might call ‘Wyatt Earpism’. In other words, to simplify it – probably grossly – the appeal of Goldwater is the appeal of Wyatt Earp who says ‘Let me have ten minutes with Khruschev in Tombstone, Arizona at high noon and I’ll bump him off and lower taxes and everybody will be happy.’”

World in Action went with Goldwater supporters to Republican Convention in Dallas. Like many Westerners they talked about “the old frontier”. Said one man with enthusiasm, “He’s the spirit of the old frontier that we’ve always had in this country – to do something yourself rather than depend upon somebody else to do it. Like he wants to own his own business, go to his own doctor, go to his own church, take care of his own family rather than depend upon the State to do it. And this is where most people go for him because he is for the very thing that widens the frontiers of America – the reason that the English colonists came over to this country to begin with. The whole thing to me is something that goes back to the original conception of why the Constitution was first … I don’t know whether I make sense or not, but it sure feels good! I’m for him because I am in business for myself and I don’t like to be dictated to by someone in Washington on how to run my business, because I know more about how to spend my money the way I want to than someone in Washington.”

“This is the entire Goldwater concept,” said his companion, “the government is best which governs least.”

“People who make in this country 50 dollars [about $500 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] a week and are supporting a family,” went on the first man, “it’s not unusual for them to contribute anywhere from five to ten dollars [$50 to $100] a month towards Barry Goldwater’s campaign. This is how strongly they believe in individualism.”

Said a girl with them, “Well, I’m too young to vote, but I can talk loud and I can run around and call out signs and sell hats and pass out badges and do just as good even though I can’t vote.”

Those Americans who “go” for Goldwater really “go” for him all the way. One of the factors that contributed to the Senator’s surprise success has been the passionate zeal of his volunteer helpers. Eleven thousand Republicans attended this Dallas Convention – almost all of them were “Barry’s Boys” the name given to Goldwater supporters. They arrived wearing Goldwater badges and slogans “Au H₂O,” the chemical formula for gold and water.

The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party which fought the Civil War to end slavery of the Negroes, seemed suddenly to have gone to the far Right. This upheaval in the Party took many people by surprise. But it did so, Alastair Cooke explained, in a gradual way:

“What I think nobody figured on was the fact that for the first time in modern history a Republican really excited the South, and that’s because the new test of liberalism in this country is now race relations. Usually a Republican candidate isn’t going to start counting his votes in the South because they aren’t going to be any use to him the moment he starts running for the Presidency since the South is a Democratic kingdom, more or less. Now, for the first time, a Republican started with this enormous popular support – the whole of the South behind him. This gives him overwhelming power at his Convention to get his nomination. But the moment he starts running for the Presidency he’s still got to try and beat a Southerner in the White House.” At the Convention in Dallas Senator Barry Goldwater made his bid for the Southern States:

“My good friend John Tower, fellow Americans, fellow Republicans,” he said, “I’ve looked forward to this for a long, long time and I never in my wildest dreams imagined that the reception would be anything like this, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. (cheers) If anyone wants to know why and how we’re going to win the 1964, let him come here and get his answer. We’re going to win, we’re going to win because we are now truly a national party. We are no longer a party that has to write off one great section of this nation, the South, (cheers)

“From the courthouse to Congress, we’re going to concede nothing here in the South this year. For the first time in American history Republican candidates are going to contest more than 70 Congressional districts that have always been foregone by default and for the first time in the history of this country all twenty-three Congressional seats in this great State of Texas will be contested and we’re going to win them.

“I intend to lead a united party on a platform of principles, the same platform and the same principle in every part of this nation, (cheers) I mean principles of leadership, principles which will preserve our Federal Republic, principles of respect for constitutional government, for law and order. I mean principles that look upon violence in the streets anywhere in this land, regardless of who does it, as the wrong way to resolve great moral principles. (cheers) This is the way that will destroy the liberties of all our people.

“I come before you today to make no sectional appeals. The issues now confronting our nation go beyond any one section or any special interest. They go right to the heart of our destiny as a free and constitutional republic and they involve the hopes of freedom everywhere in the world, (cheers)

“The peace of the world and the defence of this nation go hand in hand. It’s the destiny and the responsibility of this nation to keep the peace and there is no other way to do it than remain as we are today, the strongest nation on earth in all ways – spiritually, morally, economically and militarily. (cheers)

“Now those of us who live away from the coast of this country are often accused of being isolationists, of wanting to close our eyes to the rest of the world. I need not remind you Texans that nothing could be further from the truth. We are not isolationists. The real isolationists are the men who can’t see beyond the ballot box, who talk and talk… (cheers) who talk and talk but fear to act, who can only mumble when the American flag is tom down and trampled on and spat upon. (cheers) You and I and millions of Americans want to hear someone speak up for America in this troubled world. (cheers) We know that the world cannot be inspired by turning out the lights in the White House. (laughter) That’s L.B.J. now – Light Bulb Johnson (laughter and cheers), and you’ll find him out in November. (laughter and cheers) We know that the real need is to turn on some light. We need more light at the White House, not less. We need more light around the world – the light of American leadership, the light of freedom.

“I intend to speak plainly about all these matters, because I have a deep feeling of responsibility that those who are coming on after me, my children, my grandchildren, and your children and your grandchildren – I have a great feeling of responsibility for a heritage that must be passed on, and when I’m gone and there’s trouble in this country I don’t want my children to point to me and say ‘If father had only said this at the right time maybe things would have been different.’ I intend to speak as I feel because I am concerned about our country and I am concerned about our world. (cheers)

“This nation today is being dishonoured. Not a single new major strategic weapon system has been introduced in the past three years. The very strength we hold is the result of the sound, resolute planning of General Dwight Eisenhower. This Administration has nothing to do with it. (cheers) And this disarming means that America stands still while the Soviet is free to advance. As we go into the 1970s, there are plans to leave us a Strategic Air Command with no new bombers, with a damaged force of old ones and with just a minimum of the strength with which it has been able to keep the peace so far. The business of the S.A.C. is peace and if you don’t allow the Air Force and the Strategic Air Command, the Air Wing of the Navy, the Army and the Marines to make progress in the air, then we are heading for trouble, and real trouble, because this power is what the Soviets understand.

“There is no magic in winning elections. There’s no secret word. There’s no certain amount of millions of dollars that must be spent. There’s no cut-and-dried television image. There’s only one way that wins elections and that’s people like you. (applause) So I implore of you, act as adults; don’t cany your grudges into the ballot boxes: carry your hearts and carry what’s good for Texas and what’s good for the United States, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican – America is our first ballot. Thank you. (prolonged cheers, applause, and singing)”

The rise of Senator Goldwater within the Republican Party caused many people to ask if America as a nation was turning away from Liberalism and moving towards the extreme right wing in the political spectrum. World in Action put this question to Alistair Cooke. “No, absolutely not,” he replied emphatically. “I think this in fact is a proof that this whole movement of the extreme Right – which by the way is absolutely minute; the Birchites, for instance, in the California local elections have had their brains beaten out – has no power whatsoever. But I think that this movement of Goldwater’s is the last exertion of the Old Frontier. You know, this is Gary Cooper running for President, and an awful lot of people would wish it could be so. Like the devotion to the Western on television, its the last gasp of individualism.”

And so in November the Man From Arizona rode to meet The Tall Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson. It was a Presidential Election very much in the tradition of The Old American West.

The post Au H₂O appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

On 15th April, 1865, in the last weeks of the American Civil War, Vice-President Andrew Johnson became the seventeenth President of the United States. He succeeded Abraham Lincoln who had been shot while attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre the previous evening. Ninety-nine years later a second Vice-President Johnson succeeded to the Presidency after another assassination.

The week after its programme from Dallas World in Action moved to a second town in Texas to investigate the background of the West’s new leader. Tim Hewat took the team to Johnson City.

Life for the people of Johnson City is slow. The motorist, hurrying along Texas route 281 linking San Antonio and Wichita Falls, could well fail to notice the town. Its people are typical hill folk, unhurried, with plenty of time to talk. Many of them work in the saddle, although today most cowboys drive their horses from one part of the range to the other – and some of them just drive all the time.

The people of Johnson City are modest people, like George Biars, who has been mayor for fifteen years, largely, he says, because no one else wants the job at a salary of eight shillings a day [40p in decimal, about £7 in today’s money allowing for inflation – Ed].

The biggest thing in town is, of course, Lyndon B. Johnson himself, whose grandfather gave his name to the place. Mr. Johnson was born in a two-room home and he went to school at Johnson City High School. His first job was shining shoes. Then he worked on the roads. Today, Mr. Johnson lives in his own ranch, the L.B.J., on the banks of the Pedernales River. And, partly through his marriage to “Ladybird” Johnson, he is comfortably off. Mrs. Johnson was the chairman of the television and radio station, K.T.B.C. in Austin, Texas, until her husband became President when all the Johnsons’ wealth was put in the hands of trustees.

Highpoints in Johnson City life are the barbecue parties that Mr. Johnson gives from time to time at the L.B.J. for visiting V.I.P.s. One such party was for President Ayub Khan, of Pakistan, who was showered with gifts. Another party was for thirty ambassadors from newly-independent African nations.

Naturally the people of Johnson City admire Mr. Johnson greatly. And, naturally, they are all watching closely to see how he is getting on as President in Washington. But the event they all remember, and indeed the Texas politicians in the State capital at Austin also remember, is Mr. Johnson’s speech at his old university in 1961, for that was the time, they say, when he recorded his philosophy and his beliefs.

Mr. Johnson was Vice-President at the time and he was speaking to students on graduation day at the State College of South-West Texas, near Austin, 42 miles from Johnson City.

“I have a long, well-worded, carefully-drafted speech, he began, “all of which I’m going to stand behind and none of which I’m going to read, because we are faced with the hour of decision and it is you that is going to make the decision.

“In the world today we have two great systems; strong systems competing with each other for the mind of man. One is the collective communist system. One is the democratic system. One is the system of slavery. One is the system of freedom. And each man in each country on the face of the globe is sitting up there in judgement on those systems. The average father and mother want for their children just what you want for yours – relatively simple tastes they have. They want a place to worship, a school to train their minds, food for their stomachs, clothes for their back, a roof over their head, and a little recreation now and then. And that’s about all the average man and woman, wherever he lives, desires. That’s about the extent of his ambition. And now he’s looking at these two systems to see which one offers him and his family the greatest promise for the future.

You are a product of the democratic system. Because of your sacrifices and your diligence, you are concluding a course today and going out into the world. You are some of he privileged people because a relatively small percentage of our total population has the privilege of sitting here with caP and gown on. And therefore you have a very special responsibility to the system that produced you; the system at made it possible for you to have a trained mind and a sound body.

“The three greatest friends that Communism has are illiteracy, poverty, and disease. And they’re the three greatest enemies that our democratic system has. And if you haven’t learned it, you ought to hear it now – that our nation, the richest in the world, the most powerful in the world, is out-numbered 18 to 1 in the world. And no nation can long enjoy great applause when all of its neighbours and all of its friends and all the other nations are impoverished.

“So you, as the leaders and the products of our system, have got to help us in the years ahead to find a solution to eradicating poverty, to improving the standard of men and women and children’s living, to improving their housing, to cleaning their slums, to stamping out the diseases of cancer and heart and all the other killers, so that in your time and my time when these two systems come in mortal combat with each other, you can proudly say Democracy has worked; the proof of the puddin’s in the eatin’, and the coon’s skin’s on the wall: we have educated all our young; we have provided security for our old; we have cleaned our slums; we have made home-owners of our people; we have driven disease underground. We have not sat back and lived with our selfishness and with our greed. We have not been content to be misers. We have practised the Golden Rule. We have done unto others as we would have them do unto us. Yes, we have marched forward like zealots – with a missionary zeal to try to make San Marcus and South-West Texas College and Central Texas and Johnson City a better place than we found it. We have tried to make this a better world than we were born into, and we are determined and dedicated to reward our Maker with the fruits of our labours and we are determined that they shall be made.”

Then Mr. Johnson talked of his visit to South-East Asia, to Saigon, the capital of troubled Viet-Nam.

“When I went into the dark streets of Saigon,” he continued, “my secret service men had cables from our Intelligence people saying that ‘you must be very careful and not get out of your car, you must be surrounded completely with security people, and never shake hands, because this is a very dangerous period – 14 were killed in the town last night – 4,000 mayors and city officials have been killed in this area this year.’ And I said ‘If they don’t want me to speak to them and to talk with them, then let’s don’t go.’ Because I want to know them and I want them to know me. I want to know Asia and I want Asia to know America. And I have learned in my limited experience in this world that you can usually look into a person’s eyes and see what is in his heart. And I want them to look into my eyes and into the eyes of the United States of America.

“We tore the big Air Force signs off of our plane and just painted on Old Glory. We tore the United States Military Air Transport sign down and we just put ‘The United States of America’ on our 707 jet. And we looked into their eyes and we think they could see what was in our hearts because they came in thousands and tens of thousands would surge forward like an Atlantic wave just to touch the hands of someone from America; just with the hope that maybe, perhaps, somehow, somewhere, their little child could get rid of the tape-worms in his stomach and have a chance, that only one out of ten there now have, of getting into school.

“And I’ll tell you that after three or four days we not only looked in their eyes and saw what was in their hearts, but we instilled in them a determination to climb and climb and climb until they reach the top of the hill so that their children could have a school and their children could have food and their children could have clothes on their back.

“I came back to Washington, not distressed, not discouraged; I came back strong in the belief that when people know each other, they understand each other, and if they understand each other, they don’t need to fight each other.

“So if they ask you what he said at your graduation address, you try to remember that he said that you were walking into a world of opportunity, not a world of obstacles; that you were a special missionary for democracy; that you owe freedom and liberty so much that you wanted everybody to have a little bit of it; and that you realized the principal enemies of freedom and liberty were illiteracy and impoverishment and disease; and that you in your own little way with your sheepskin, regardless of how much they paid you per hour or per day or per week, if there was enough to sustain you, you were going out to make war on these things, so that the people of the world could live in peace and prosperity.”

The post L. B. J. appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

On 22nd November, 1963 John F. Kennedy, thirty-fourth President of the United States was shot dead in Dallas, Texas. For a cataclysmic moment it was as if the sun had gone out. The world became suddenly unfamiliar; the darkness of evil seemed to close in on it. Without Kennedy what would happen? There was horror, anger, shock, sorrow, fear. And bitterness too – bitterness that the first modern man to reach world leadership had been so cruelly destroyed.

Tim Hewat flew out to Dallas with the World in Action team and a few days later, Thanksgiving Day, he presented this portrait of the city where Kennedy was murdered.

This is a special day in the city of Dallas in the State of Texas, U.S.A. It is what the Americans call “Thanksgiving” – the 342nd anniversary of the day the first British settlers put aside to give thanks to God for their new home, new life, new hopes. But in Dallas, where the people probably have more riches to give thanks for than any other city on earth, there is no thankfuness. For it was here that President Kennedy was shot down. And it was here – in the basement of a police station – that the man accused of killing him, Lee Oswald, was shot down in turn by the operator of a strip-tease joint, the Carousel burlesque house.

In Dallas this Thanksgiving Day, the people know that the eyes of all America and indeed the whole world are upon them. And those eyes see not just the outward signs of affluence, of violence, and of sheer bigness which they might expect of a city whose citizens rejoice to call it Big D. Instead they see a city of fantastic opposites. Dallas is rich all right. It is also grinding poor. Many a home less than a mile from the central post office looks out on an unmade dirt road. One in five of Dallas’s million and quarter people are Negroes. Another forty thousand Mexicans, peasants who came north across the border. A further handful – perhaps four thousand – are Red Indians, Apaches and Cherokees. The riches of Dallas are not for them.

Dallas has not always been rich. 120 years ago when Queen Victoria was on the English throne, it was a township, an unimportant part of the Lone Star State – the independent Republic of Texas. Fifty years ago it was what they call a cow town, a rough, tough centre for ranching. It was only thirty-three years ago that one Columbus M. Joiner brought in a gusher, struck oil in East Texas and started the richest field in America.

Dallas grew up on oil and became perhaps the biggest boom town of all time. Today the oil fortunes of just one generation have been directed into making Big D one of the most important banking, insurance and space-age industrial cities in the U.S. The Chamber of Commerce cannot say how many millionaires live in town, certainly run into thousands. And they tend to live up the Texas legend for bigness. Many of them use aeroplanes in much the same way other people use the family car. At their own particular shop, Nieman-Marcus, they can go shopping for a £7,000 midget submarine; or a £4 their dog. At the fine art shops scattered everywhere they are able to satisfy their expensive hunger for culture.

But at the other end of town, down Deep Elm Street where the shops are mean and garish, people go shopping for other merchandise. They go shopping for gun. Strangely, while one can buy a gun and ammunition for dollars in Dallas, one cannot buy whisky or gin in a bar. For the power of the churches – and there are all sorts in the city, including separate ones for Negroes – is such that their campaign for temperance affects the law. To drink spirits legally it is necessary to buy a full bottle from shop. This you carry into the bar or restaurant which sells you ice and soda water. It is only from the sale of beer and wine – and soda water – that the bars make money.

Odd frustrations like this help to explain, perhaps, why Dallas not only has the very rich and the very poor, but also the most outspoken political extremists in America. Men like General Walker, who, during President Kennedy’s administration, flew the Stars and Stripes upside down on his front lawn, who constantly attacks the United Nations, and sets about the churches.

There are more dangerous people. Like those who distributed in Dallas loathsome allegations about John Kennedy’s private life – all of them lies. Like those who spat on Adlai Stevenson. Like those who roughed up Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife.

On the day of the assassination, the Dallas Morning News, itself right-wing, published an unknown committee’s advertisement, which is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation after Congressmen described it as: “Vicious, cruel and abusive; the kind of verbiage that tends to incite fanatics.”

The most extreme group of all is the John Birch Society – militantly anti-Negro, anti-Government, anti-United Nations.

World in Action visited the home of Mrs. Beth Anderson Rachel who has done publicity work for the Society.

“I feel keenly the personal loss of Mr. Kennedy among my friends,” she said, “but I disagreed with him diametrically politically and I don’t feel the loss in that respect. We disagreed with the extensive Federal programme of aid, financial aid, to the people of the States. We feel this should be handled primarily by the States if there needs to be any aid. We think the American people are quite capable of shouldering their own responsibilities whether it be their school lunch programmes or aid to their aged or dependent relatives, or aid of whatever nature.

“We certainly disagreed with Mr. Kennedy on foreign affairs particularly in his support of the United Nations which many of my associates and I feel is just about the worst instrument to have hit this earth. We disapprove of sitting down and collaborating with people who are known to be our enemies. We would not think, at the local level, of sitting down and conniving, if you will, with robbers, murderers, thieves, and we do not feel we should do this on a national or international level.

“Federal aid or the shouldering of the people’s responsibilities, taking on the responsibilities that people should assume for themselves, leads we feel quite strongly to a police state. This is the threat of the Federal shouldering of persons’ responsibilities. We think of it and often refer to it as ‘Big Daddy Government’.”

World in Action talked about extremists to the Mayor of Dallas, Earle Cabell, who is, inevitably, a millionaire:

“We have extremists on the one side who want no participation whatsoever by the Federal Government in the affairs of the nation that are not matters of national defence, for instance. These are the extreme right. We have another group on the other side of that spectrum that want the Federal Government to take over all of the operation of business, and railroads, and let the Federal Government operate a municipal and State government – these are the extreme Liberals. Although all these groups are definitely in a minority in so far as our whole population is concerned, they are rather articulate and the fact that they make a lot of noise sometimes gives the impression that they are greater in numbers than they actually are.”

The Mayor was echoed by Captain Glen King, spokesman for the Dallas police department: “We have within the Department a Criminal Intelligence Unit whose responsibility it is to investigate the activities of these groups. We have people who are racists who believe in the supremacy of one group over another group. These are not unusual. We haven’t any kind of an extremist group that you won’t find anywhere else.”

Another man keen to talk about the political outsiders was Tom Howard, the cigar-smoking lawyer who defended Jack Ruby, accused of murdering the assassin Oswald. Mr. Howard’s office is opposite police headquarters and more than fifty alleged murderers have come to him for help. He has saved them all from the death sentence.

“The extremists in Dallas are quite fierce,” he said. “They are primarily the John Birch Society group. They have received a great deal of encouragement particularly from one of our local newspapers. I might say that this group is a very small group and do not represent the views of the majority of the people of Dallas by any means, but as I said, they have been encouraged by people that have a great deal of wealth, that have very extreme right-wing views.”

Of course, extremists are not typical of the people of Dallas; but they have their influence. For all, however, the highpoint of Thanksgiving is the family dinner party, usually held at about half past five in the afternoon. The almost obligatory dish: roast turkey. World in Action went to a typical wealthy family’s dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. John Wisenbaker on the outskirts of Dallas. John Wisenbaker is a geologist and runs an international oil engineering business. He is, of course, a millionaire and he has furnished his home with oriental furniture, an indoor garden and a valuable bird. At gratce before the meal he said, “Now let us observe a moment in silent meditation. Our Father, we thank Thee for this wonderful land of ours. We thank Thee for peace and for freedom. We thank Thee for this lovely sunny Thanksgiving Day. We thank Thee for our family and for our friends. We thank Thee for this food and for good health. We pray that Thou will continue to bless this household and ail mankind throughout the world – Amen.”

Very different, but certainly not an isolated case, was the Thanksgiving dinner of Mrs. Pearl Fuller, a 79-year-old Negro widow whose two children have moved to California. Her menu, in her shack among acres of shacks, was tinned meat and boiled beans, beans provided free by the Government.

The newspapers reported that in his cell in the City court house, Jack Ruby ate a hearty Thanksgiving meal. Rut shortly afterwards his lawyer, Tom Howard, said: “He’s always, to my way of thinking, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He is just the type of man to be affected by the events that occurred in the forty-eight hours before Oswald’s death. He’s just the kind of man that would become terribly mentally disturbed and mentally deranged by a thing like this.”

But in every Dallas home Thanksgiving dinner was haunted by three questions. First, why did it have to happen here? Some Dallas people, like the Reverend Wilfrid Bailey, Minister of the Casa View Methodist Church, say that the climate of the city was such as to encourage a fanatic; that years of extreme politics had poisoned the place. Also, it was a fact that Mr. Kennedy knew he was venturing into enemy territory – his trip was designed to rally again his waning supporters.

Second, was 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald the man who killed Mr. Kennedy, and if so, why? The evidence – of fingerprints, of opportunity, of the rifle itself – suggest he did. Certainly he was capable of killing, as the honour role of policemen killed on duty testifies, for, in the last remaining space, is the name of patrolman Tippett, seen by witnesses to be shot dead by Oswald. Why might Oswald do it? It is now clear beyond doubt that he was not only a most unpleasant young man, but an unstable one. He was clearly unbalanced. Most observers on the spot reject the idea that Oswald was either a hired assassin or that he acted as key man in a cruel plot. He was too unreliable for either proposition.

The third and last question is: how could the police allow another unstable man with criminal tendencies, Jack Ruby, to shoot Oswald in the basement of police headquarters. The Mayor, Mr. Cabell, offered one explanation:

“There was a terrific amount of confusion due to the hundreds of media people, television cameras, and so on. Permitting these television and news media people in wasn’t done for purposes of publicity, but was done in order to let the world know that Oswald was properly treated in order that when he was brought to trial there could not be the accusation that he was brutally treated or that his rights were in any way taken away from him. He was shown to news people regularly so that they know that he was being treated properly. Then, of course, when this one man was able to break that cordon, that is just one of those things that can sometimes happen. May I say that sometimes in football a full-back can break a terrific line where you would think it would be impossible. That would be comparable to this situation.”

For Big D families who stayed at home on Thanksgiving night there was a macabre piece of film on television. Dallas police reconstructed the assassination – using two stand-ins in a car similar to that used by Mr. Kennedy – but substituting a camera for the rifle in the right-hand window fifth floor of the book warehouse.

Many people did not stay at home, however. By Thanksgiving Night, the assassination was six days old and, like so many of Dallas’s businessmen, newspapermen and hotelmen, people were anxious to forget and to believe that Big D was a swinging town still. They filled the clubs and the late-night restaurants — remembering, of to take their own bottles.

Only in Jack Ruby’s Carousel was business slow. The girls worked to a handful of curious sightseers from out of town.

The fact of the matter is, that, try as it may, Dallas will find it hard to forget what happened here at half-past twelve on 22nd November, 1963. Indeed, it never will.

The post Big D appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

The Church of England is the third largest landowner and one of the biggest investors in the country; its total assets are incalculable. It is our national church. Its task is to care for the spiritual welfare of 42 million people. In 1963, although 47 per cent of all marriages were in church, 53 per cent of all children were baptized, and 23 per cent of all young people were confirmed, only 7 per cent of the population can be counted as active adult members of the Church.

To find out how well it is doing the Church commissioned a sociologist, Leslie Paul, to write the first comprehensive report on the organization of the Church at parish level. After two years research he concluded that the Church has been “a bad steward.” The Paul Report made two fundamental observations:

That there are not enough clergy – only one for every 6,000 of population.

That because of an outdated parish system, those there are are in the wrong place – one third of the clergy are in the country whereas four-fifths of the people are in the towns.

Like the Paul Report, World in Action was not concerned with the spiritual aspects of the Church – aspects which Christians would say is the Church’s ultimate justification. Like the Paul Report we were concerned with how the Church works in its front line, the parish.

What is a parish priest for? World in Action went first to a typical English village to find out.

Francis Barrie Flint, aged 59, educated at Dulwich College and London University, has been a clergyman for 34 years. He writes books on moral education and letters to The Times newspaper. He has worked in six parishes and is now Rector of Longborough in Gloucestershire. He describes his parish thus:

“This is a Cotswold village of roughly 600 people. I am in charge of two parishes, two separate parishes, run as a single living. One is 300 or thereabouts, and the little one is a hundred. These two churches are separate in that they have their own parochial church councils, their own wardens everything is separate – and I take separate services. The parish is entirely rural. The people are nearly all farmworkers or farmers themselves.”

On a Sunday in Longborough you may well find Morris dancers. On a Sunday, too, Barrie Flint has his most clearly defined job to do – to take services. But only one in ten of his parishioners attend.

“There’s definitely a decline in church-going,” he said. “I’ve noticed a decline in the five years I’ve been here. Our numbers are very small, although proportionately to the town parishes, proportionately we do better; but that better is not very good. There are various reasons for this declension of interest in and support of the church. There is, of course, the very large number of alternative interests on a Sunday. When I go down to Evensong on a Sunday night I frequently see a group of my own people waiting for the bus to take them to the nearest town and the cinema. When there were no buses those people would most certainly have come to church.”

In cities like Sheffield the problem is even more acute. The Reverend Flint has 600 parishioners – the Reverend Frank Hone of a Sheffield parish has 12,000. Few of them have ever been near the church.

“We have an evening service, Evensong – it isn’t as well attended by a long way as the Morning Service. This seems to be the pattern in these kind of areas,” Hone said. “People tend to come in the morning and not in the evening, and we don’t particularly mind this as long as we can create a group of people who come regularly to their communion on a Sunday morning. It’s a very small number – it’s only about 60, an average of 60 out of a population of round about 12,000 in the parish. But that isn’t too bad, I suppose, in comparison with the other denominations and similar parishes of this kind.”

Whether people use it or not, most parishes are dominated by the church building itself. Barrie Flint not only has one ancient monument to look after, but two. Whatever value they have as works of art, the Church of England’s 18,000 churches are in many ways a liability. As Flint said,

“I do feel that many people would regard it much more favourably if they could see, for example, that the money raised is wisely spent; that the upkeep of our buildings is realistic; that we don’t hang on to churches which have out live their usefulness. In this Deanery practically all of our clergy are in charge of two churches. There is only one I can think of out of 15 clergymen, only one priest who is in charge of a single parish.”

Even if they want to, the clergy have enormous difficulty in discarding any of the Church’s priceless, yet obsolete, equipment. The Reverend F. S. Skelton of Bermondsey in London gave an example of this difficulty.

“Five years ago in this parochial area,” he said, “there were three churches – two proper buildings and one the remains of a bombed church that was still being used as a place of worship. This meant that within a very small area there were these three places of worship which really seems quite unnecessary. But it entails an enormous amount of fuss and bother trying to get a church pulled down and parishes united. In fact it’s taken at least five years to get this done. As a matter of fact this very week we’re getting an Act through Parliament to enable us to go ahead to unite the parishes and pull the church down. All over the country the Church is faced with this sort of business. It takes an immense amount of time and energy and money, and I feel it is quite unnecessary. There should be far simpler ways of doing this sort of thing.

“If I was starting off from scratch in a new housing estate,” he continued, “I would be very reluctant to start by building a church. I would proceed in quite different ways, I think, to try to make the Church live in people’s homes. One might have to have some sort of central building, a hall to begin with, but as soon as you start building an ecclesiastical building known as a church, this immediately seems to centralize everything on to that building and this continues the old pattern of church life which, it is being proved up and down the country, is not cutting any ice. We’ve got to be bold enough to experiment.”

One of the boldest experiments is actually going on in Sheffield. The Reverend Michael Jackson’s church is the shop floor at the English Steel Company.

“One of the problems of the ministry,” said Jackson, “is that it has to spend energy and money in keeping up expensive plant, whereas a functional ministry can be run in economic terms pretty cheaply. You simply need to put a man into the field and pay him and that’s that. He doesn’t need a plant. And if we’re to use our resources of men and money wisely we need to review the duties to which we send people and see whether we shouldn’t increase the number of men in functional ministries.”

Only 30 priests in the Church of England are doing work like Michael Jackson’s. 90 per cent of clergymen have at least one parish church to run and this is expensive. There is a dramatic example of this proliferation in the City of London. Within one mile of St. Paul’s Cathedral there are 30 churches, most of them of historic value.

Where does the Church’s money come from? At Longborough, the Reverend Flint gets a salary of £1,000 per year from the Church Commissioners, the Church’s paymaster. The Church Commissioners are one of the top ten property developers in the country. In fact, they own £118 million-worth of property, and £200 million-worth of stocks and shares. This brings them an income of £17 million a year, most of which goes in vicars’ wages.

To maintain his church and to contribute to charities Barrie Flint raises £900 per year by collections, fetes and appeals. In 1963 the Church as a whole collected £28 million in this way. But in 1956 it collected only £17 million. This increase of £11 million in seven years was due mainly to payments through what is called “planned giving” — regular financial contributions to the church. Planned giving has jumped from £2.6 million to £9.2 million a year.

The man who first introduced big business methods to fusing was a young American called Frank Wells.

“When we arrived in Britain,” Wells told World in Action, “we discovered that the churches in this country did not receive funds through direct giving the way they do in the States and other parts of the world. They’re dependent to a greater extent on fêtes, bazaars, and outright pants from central funds; and there’s quite a scope here for teaching the actual parishioners more responsibility and better habits of giving towards their own parish.

“Its a financial commitment which most of the fringe people understand more clearly than someone knocking on their door for a missionary appeal. They don’t understand the word to begin with and it frightens them. But if you say St. Bartholomew’s needs £30,000 over the next 3 years or 5 years; ten thousand of that is to go towards keeping the church open, another fifteen for providing a new hall, and another five for various restorations of the church, the people will understand that.”

At a fee of £700 the church at Deddington in Oxfordshire hired the Wells organization to teach it how to raise money. Apart from fund-raising the clergyman has sources of indirect income. He has a house, rent and rates free. But this can have disadvantages as the Reverend Flint explained:

“One of the things which not all parishioners realize is that a parson has, perforce, to live in his vicarage or rectory. It is a tied cottage, only an outsize one. He has no alternative – he has to live there. It may be a delightful house with extensive grounds, but a house of this size with such grounds has to be kept up and this is, of course, a costly business. Normally, unless a rector has private means, he must run the garden himself and his wife must run the house without help, and this is a very considerable chore which can very quickly become a burden. Indeed it does become a burden to many of us, especially as we grow older.”

When the Rector of Longborough is not taking services, what does he do with his time? He spends one hour a day on correspondence and administration; two hours a day reading, writing and praying; two hours a week teaching at his church schools; and several hours a week attending committees. But by far his most important and time-consuming job is visiting. He spends an hour a day being either friendly or helpful to his parishioners.

“I am on friendly relations with, I think, everyone in the parish,” he said. “I don’t feel that I am so much apart from them that I am distinct and separate, although I would very much like to feel that they would make more use of me pastorally than they do. You see, in this age in which we live, the age of affluence, apart from sickness or bereavement there aren’t a great many problems that seem to disturb people sufficiently to suggest that they should come and talk to the parish priest about them.”

With 12,000 on a bleak housing estate, the Reverend Hone in Sheffield has more people than he could ever hope to see.

“We would like to have more time for visiting because there are an awful number of people who quite clearly we’ve had no contact with at all over the period of years. When one has done the visiting attached to baptisms, marriages and funerals, and also the sick visiting and then the other kinds of visiting where there are problems in which you try to help people – all this takes a good deal of one’s time and doesn’t leave very much time for getting round the parish to visit people who have never been visited, probably for years, by a clergyman.”

What is most depressing for the clergyman is that he is often providing a service that people don’t want. The Reverend F. S. Skelton explained:

“In an area like Bermondsey in the old days there used to be quite a number of people coming to church, and the church really did do social work – provided a centre, provided much of the care and welfare which nowadays is provided by the State; and what we found in the old days was that a lot of people came into Bermondsey because it was an area of need, and they came and did a great deal of good work here. Now, I think that the younger generation still associates in its mind in some way — hearing it from its parents – the church with charity; charity which was needed in those days, but is not needed now, and there’s a sense of prosperity and independence and not wanting to go back to the old way of receiving and being on the receiving end of being done good to.”

The clergyman’s problems are not confined to churchgoing in his parish. He is a human being. Barrie Flint’s first reaction to the Paul Report was that it may remedy his personal feeling of isolation.

“We are moving towards a grouping of parishes,” he said, “although not exactly on the lines of the Paul Report, because there – and this is the strength of the suggestion of the Paul Report – it says that parishes should be so grouped that the individual clergyman should not be left alone. It’s this aloneness of the priest that can be so devastating during the passing of the years. The loneliness of his reading, his prayer life, every side of his life; if there is one other priest who can be his colleague, he will probably administer five or six churches more effectively than administering two by himself. He doesn’t mind how hard he works, provided he’s got spiritual and intellectual stimulus and that is one of the weaknesses of the present system.

“The parson is in a peculiar position. He is a member of a group of people who have been trained along certain lines and his interests are in a measure, could one say ‘technical’ rather like the medical fraternity – I think he needs to have the impact of other clerical minds to stimulate his own thinking.”

In Bermondsey, F. S. Skelton is luckier. “I’m fortunate – I have three colleagues here, and in fact I wouldn’t work in a place like this if I was working alone. I think I just couldn’t take it – I wouldn’t cope at all, I know. Many of the clergy, like myself, come from a different background to those amongst whom we live and work here in Bermondsey, and this can lead to the danger of patronizing people unless we’re very careful. And if you do patronize a person – well, you isolate yourself from them.”

The same can be just as true of a country parish.

The Church of England is concerned with the need for change. In London at Church House, the centre of its administration, calculations are made on modern machines, and commissions and committees sit discussing everything from divorce to the appointment of bishops. But for an organization set up 1,500 years ago change is not easy. What makes change even more difficult is the fact that the Church is “by law established” – in many ways the servant of the State, as Sir John Scott, the Secretary of the Church Assembly, the Church’s Parliament, explained:

“At the Reformation the picture was this – every man, woman and child in England had, by law, to be a member of the Church of England, and therefore the conception which Hooker and others had at the time of the Elizabethan Settlement, that the Crown and Parliament could represent not only the English people but also the Church of England was a perfectly reasonable conception. Since that time there’s been the Toleration Act which has resulted in membership of the House of Commons being opened to members of all faiths or no faith, with the result that many members of the Church of England now feel there is a very good case for a modification of the establishment to meet these altered circumstances, and a modification of the establishment which would result in the Church having greater freedom than it has now to order its worship, and certainly its doctrine, without reference to the House of Commons which they would regard as being basically unsympathetic.”

In July 1964, the Church’s Parliament under the presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury met, as it does three times a year, to discuss among other things, the Paul Report. But no action can be taken on the decisions it reached without the consent of both Houses of Parliament.

Just as the Queen, the head of State, chooses the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church, so many of her Ministers of the Crown still have their traditional responsibility of choosing parish priests. The Lord Chancellor chooses 600; the Prime Minister – 160: the Home Secretary – 40; and the Admiralty too has some. This is State patronage. In addition there are 2,780 private patrons. Barrie Flint at Longborough has a private patron who not only chose him for the job, but also pays him his traditional wages of £120 a year.

“I am not particularly happy about private patronage,” he confessed, “I think it would be better if patronage were concentrated in the hands of either the Bishop or Diocesan boards who are in a much better position to know the needs of the parishes and the qualifications of individual priests, rather than patrons, some of whom may live in their village and others of whom may be absentee patrons or patrons who have no religious convictions at all.”

The desire for reform in the Church of England is stronger now than it has been for over 100 years. One of its mos outspoken reformers is the Right Reverend Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark. He told World in Action:

“We need greater freedom than we’ve got now to implement our ideas of reform and to run the Church m a more business-like way. Let’s face it, if a business concern tried to run itself as the Church does, it would probably bankrupt and have to pack up. I want the freedom to close churches which aren’t wanted, to use our resources in best possible way, to meet the needs of the people, organize ourselves along new lines of development in new housing areas. Time and time again we are prevented from doing these things either because some law of Parliament stops us or because of the Charity Commissioners or the Church Commissioners. Well, so much of that needs to be scrapped. Give us the freedom and let us get on with the job.”

The final word was with Barrie Flint’s own Bishop speaking at a Diocesan Conference: the Right Reverend Basil Guy, Bishop of Gloucester.

“We cannot go on much longer in our own way of thinking about these matters without doing enormous damage to our witness in the world. We cannot, I believe, claim to be the Body of Christ talking about the ideal of service in the world, bringing to people the gospel, the good news of salvation, inviting them to join with us in the joyful discipleship of our heady religion, and on the other hand, and at the same time, go on begging people for their support, taking our money from under their noses, begging them for subscriptions, selling them raffle tickets, talking about the burdens of church maintenance and generally giving the impression too often that our chief concern is not in the Church but in the preservation of our own class.”

The post A Cure of Souls appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

“Chambers coffins are just fine
Made of sandalwood and pine
If your loved ones have to go
Call Columbus 690.

If your loved ones pass away
Have them pass the Chambers way
Chambers customers all sing
Death, O Death, where is thy sting?”

That advertisement comes from America where funerals, like nearly everything else, are big business. In the United States, funerals cost an average of £500. In a year this adds up to a total of £750 million – big business indeed.

The unashamed commercialization of death in the United States might shock and even horrify many people in Britain. Here people prefer to think that the British Way of Death is more dignified, more respectful – and less commercial. But there are signs that, like the American Way of Life, the American Way of Death is crossing the Atlantic. In one of its editions, prepared by James Hill and Mike Hodges, World in Action examined the Business of Death.

Not so long ago in Britain the local undertaker was the man who, perhaps, usually drove a taxi or made furniture. He fashioned the coffin himself and polished it. He hired a hearse, chaulfeured the mourners, and so provided a simple funeral at moderate cost.

Today there are still a few such part-time undertakers. But in Britain, as in America, undertaking is becoming increasingly big business. The average spending on a British funeral is £150. The average number of deaths each year for British undertakers to cope with is 600,000. So, at £150 each, the annual gross income of the British funeral industry is £90,000,000.

The cost of £150 per funeral is an estimate generally agreed by the undertakers themselves. Our researchers give this general breakdown of where the money goes:

• £55 is the average undertaker’s bill for providing the coffin and carrying out the funeral arrangements.
• Another £20 goes to the cemetery for the grave.
• Another £40 is usually spent at the monumental mason’s – on the gravestone.
• And the remaining £35 is spent at the florists, by family and friends buying wreaths and cut flowers.
• Cremation generally costs the same as burial when a manorial stone or urn for the ashes is bought.

The paraphernalia of death is clearly expensive. The question is: is it too expensive? Examine the costs more closely to see exactly where the money goes.

First, cremation. Mr. Horace Carter is managing director of a London Crematorium. He explained the costs.

“The average cost of a cremation is nine guineas. This provides for the use of the chapel, attendants, and also provision of an organist to play for the service. There are, of course, other extra charges, one being that the ashes can be dispersed on the Garden of Rest for a fee of two guineas.

Then there is the Book of Remembrance, in which names are recorded under the date of death. The average cost of an inscription is three guineas. In the Chapel of Memory at Golders Green, and so far exclusive to this crematorium, is an alternative type of commemoration vase – a slim long vase to hold a small posy of flowers with its own name plate. For a fee of four guineas a year a vase can be used at will.”

But cremation can and often does involve other and more expensive extras. For example: If relatives wish to keep the ashes, they must buy an urn. These cost anything from nine pounds to ninety guineas. If the urn is kept in crematorium it will cost still more – anything up to £200 to rent a niche for 20 years.

Some relatives like to remember their dead by having, say, a rose tree planted. This costs anything from twenty-five pounds to fifty pounds. And a garden seat memorial can cost another sixty pounds – with a further charge for the nameplate.

Cremation in Britain, introduced in the face of intense public opposition, is still less than 80 years old. The first crematorium – at Woking, in Surrey – was opened in 1885. The idea of cremation was not popularly accepted until after the Second World War. In 1945, fewer than one in ten funerals went to a crematorium. Today in Britain it is four in every ten – and increasing steadily. But the growth is still held in check by certain personal and religious convictions.

Next, examine the costs of burial. The charge for a communal grave can be as little as two pounds. Private graves normally start at sixteen pounds, but can go as high as £100 for, say, a quiet corner with a good view. But it costs time – and more money – to keep graves neat and tidy; and relatives complain that this is often not done by cemetery authorities. This, in fact, is another reason for the declining popularity of cemetery burial.

Twenty years ago, 500 acres of land were taken over every year for graves. Today this has fallen to 300 acres a year – a trend welcomed by local authorities desperately short of building land for houses for the living. It is estimated that all the graveyards in the land would cover an area roughly as big as the City of Birmingham.

Further, gravestones and memorials are expensive. The director of a firm of monumental masons told us about prices:

“The average, I suppose, is about £40 to £50. Of course you can have any price – you can give three or four hundred pounds if you wish. But the general run is about the fifty pound mark. There are still quite a number of people who want carved figures of various sorts and sizes. We do, in fact, what anybody wants us to do.”

So much for the last resting places. What of the funeral itself ? Although the direct costs are generally paid by the dead person’s family aided by a £25 National Insurance Grant, mourners at most funerals also spend large sums at the florists. One florist listed the prices for us:

“A wreath costs from thirty-five shillings to £2 – and that is a small wreath made of small flowers with no spray at all. Then they rise up to about seven or eight guineas according to the choice of flowers. We have made a horse recently of all small flowers, and then we made a Gates of Heaven which had a spray of roses and carnations in it.

“We find that the poorer people spend much more on wreath work because they think that’s their way of giving respect to the person that’s dead. They can spend anything up to thirty and forty pounds. But I always think that they should give it to the people remaining – not to the people that have gone,” the florist concluded.

Beyond doubt, the biggest single expense remains the undertaker’s bill. So look now at how the undertakers of Britain operate; how much they charge, and how they draw up their bills.

There are some 4,300 undertaking firms, large and small, in the country today. Most of them belong to their own trade association, the National Association of Funeral Directors. Every year the N.A.F.D. holds a get-together. In 1963 it was at the Hotel Majestic in Harrogate. It publishes a handbook – giving vital information about such things as cemeteries, coroners, hospitals and institutions, public mortuaries, and Registrars of Deaths. The Association also has its monthly trade magazine, full of items of peculiar interest to undertakers. Further, the Association trains undertakers and holds examinations and tests. For instance, customer relations are regarded as a highly important part of the undertaking business. So the Association takes particular care to teach its members how to deal with relatives. World in Action attended one of these training sessions.

The Association is deeply concerned with raising the status of the British undertaker to that of funeral director. The President of the National Association of Funeral Directors is Mr. Stanley Gilman.

“Very many years ago,” he said, “the undertaker was almost invariably a tradesman employed in some other business and he could do little more than perhaps just provide the coffin and arrange for its conveyance to the cemetery or churchyard. The modern funeral director assumes the whole responsibility for the funeral service. He will make arrangements with the church, the cemetery, press notices and the hundred and one other things that the family requires.”

Despite their efforts to create a new image, undertakers have always had their critics. In 1938 Sir Arnold Wilson, M.P., and Professor Herman Levy had this to say in their book Burial Reform and Funeral Costs:

“The manufacturer or seller is in a far stronger position than in any other trade. The buyer does not and cannot know the true value of what he buys. He can seldom compare prices.” They went on to say, “The instinct of the masses for a ‘respectable’ funeral is pampered to by the industry. Those who can least afford to spend money in this way are encouraged to do so. There is little evidence of profiteering, but none of any attempt to reduce expenditure.”

Today, 25 years after those words were written, World in Action found that there is still little attempt to reduce spending.

Obviously the next-of-kin, grief-stricken and distressed, want the best funeral possible. Said one relative, asked by World in Action how much a recent funeral in the family had cost.

“I suppose it was somewhere about £130 to £140 – that was with the stone and the surround, and the ground we had to pay for, and the funeral expenses. But the undertaker done us well.”

Said another, “Well, my father got this stone from Italy, you see; he ordered it from Kensal Rise and it came from Italy. It cost £300, the headstone and border. And then the statue of St. Patrick came from Italy – that cost £78; and then under the wreath is a holy bible costing £78.”

A third epitomized the common attitude, “We could only ask the undertakers for the best they could give us. We said ‘The money’s no object, it’s the last thing we can do for her’ – so we said ‘Give her the best.’”

And a fourth summed it up for the majority of those bereaved, “I mean, when you love them and that, you just want them to have the best of everything.”

Clearly, money is often of secondary importance to relatives at the time of a funeral. Canon Thomas Fitzgerald works in a poor London parish. We asked him if undertakers do, in fact, encourage over-spending.

“To some extent they have to,” he replied, “by which I mean that many of them are the employees of big combines and they get commission on these extras. If, for example, you put a rug under the coffin in the church – well, that’s an extra. The widow says ‘I think I’d like my poor husband to have a carpet under his corpse’ – well, that’s 30/-, at any rate it used to be; it’s probably gone up now. But those and many other accessories – a walnut coffin rather than an oak coffin, bound with brass or aluminium as the case may be; I don’t see how you can avoid a good salesman from trying to persuade people to have them, because he gets commission on it all – it’s part of his livelihood.”

But Mr. Lawrence Ashton, head of a chain of undertakers, sees it differently:

“Well, experience tells me that people are so widely different that I have to decide what particular class of funeral, what particular charge to make to them, and I have the greatest difficulty in doing so. Consequently never would I arrange any form of funeral service, and never do I, without finally mentioning an approximate cost of the entire service before they leave my office, or before I have finished the interview. I make the going and they don’t.”

Can all undertakers be trusted to make the going? Some people seem to think not. In 1944 Dr. Edith Summerskill, M.P., asked for government control of funeral charges because families of air-raid victims were, she said, being overcharged. In 1947 Mr. Garry Allighan, M.P., demanded that the whole undertaking business should be taken away from private concerns and nationalized. In 1949 the Labour Government agreed with the National Association of Funeral Directors that a simple, minimum-priced funeral – £20 was the cost at the time – must be available to everyone. But this agreement lasted only four years, for in 1953, after repeated petitions by the undertakers, the fixed minimum charge was scrapped. The undertakers maintain, however, that despite the ending of the agreement, cheap funerals are still available. Their President Stanley Gilman, explained:

“Our Association plays no part in price-fixing but our members do voluntarily agree to provide a basic simple funeral service for not more than £35. I must add, of course, that this amount can’t include grave fees and other amounts that the funeral director actually pays out on behalf of the family.”

The minimum £35 funeral is simple. It is also completely adequate. It includes a straightforward but dignified elm coffin, generally with brass handles and fittings, a hearse, four bearers, and one car to take the mourners to the cemetery and back home again. It also includes the undertaker’s services in preparing the body for the funeral and arranging all details. More elaborate coffins obviously cost more. And it seems that the cost of services goes up hand-in-hand with the price of coffins.

Few people ever buy the cheapest funeral. Most are even unaware that the £35 one exists. On average people spend more than twice as much. And the undertakers fight fiercely among themselves for this money. Already there are indications that the American pattern of big funeral business has crossed the Atlantic. Consider these two examples of the finance of the British undertaking world:

The London Necropolis Company, recently taken over by the massive Alliance Property Company, owns Brookwood Cemetery covering 500 acres of Surrey. Brookwood’s net profit in 1962 was £18,309. But the Company’s accounts also show a further £36,060 received in dividends from seven subsidiary companies also in the funeral business. Some of these dividends were contributed by Frederick Paine & Company, an undertaking firm with fifteen branches. Their net profit in 1962 was £36,617.

Next, the case of Golders Green Crematorium, one of the best known in the country. Together with the Woking Crematorium it was taken over in 1937. The buyers: a tobacco company. Five years later the tobacco company sold its holding to the Cremation Society. That year the cremation profits were £36,412.

The American Way of Death is coming to Britain in another form – in the trappings and equipment used for funerals. American undertakers complain that “England is fifty years behind us”, and they want radical changes in the British Way of Death. An official of the American National Selected Morticians, one of the big undertakers’ associations, even made this suggestion: “I think we should send some missionaries over there – we would do them a world of good.”

The main aims of these American undertaking ‘missionaries’ would be to encourage us to use more embalming; to use caskets instead of coffins: Chapels of Rest instead of having the body lying at home – all highly profitable sidelines. Mr. Colin Cocks, of one London undertaking firm, agrees with his American colleagues.

“We are trying to break away from the old-fashioned idea of the gloomy undertakers.” he said. “In fact this firm once had as its telegraphic address, ‘Gloomy, London’. We are trying to break away from this; indeed, we have broken away from it. The emphasis is more on service to the relatives and those who need help at this particular time, which has not been given by many firms in the past, and in effect isn’t being given today.

“Our service is typified by the fact that we have light, cheerful, bright premises always supplied with fresh flowers. Relatives coming here can have coffee in the morning if they like. Our bearers are dressed in normal dark grey suits – we don’t use mourning coats, top hats and high wing collars any longer – and generally the whole atmosphere is one of a business-like presentation. We also have a white ambulance, which goes to hospitals or nursing homes. This we feel is a lot less distressing to to relatives or passers-by, or observers from windows of the particular premises.

“We do, of course, offer a conventional coffin, but we would sooner use the casket shape. It has, we think, a nicer line and it is again less harrowing to look at as against the shoulder tapering to the foot. The caskets are purchased in America; we buy them in America and have them shipped over; they are really for export only. They are hermetically sealed, with an interior-sprung mattress.”

Mr. Cocks also showed a casket of Bermudan mahogany with a metal liner, produced in England. “It has a glass lid, full length glass lid inside, with hermetic sealing once again, and is used for vaults in this country. Another facet of the service that we offer,” he went on, “is a private chapel with fresh flowers on the altar, and candlesticks. We find that many people today prefer to use this method of having the deceased available to be seen at any time of the day or night, as against having them retained in their own homes. I must, of course, add that embalming is a normal part of our service.”

Indeed embalming is becoming more and more popular as part of the British Way of Death. An expert embalmer talked about his job to World in Action.

“In this country,” he said, “embalming entails quite a simple injection of preserving and disinfecting fluid. The features are composed and set to a restful condition. Cosmetics are not used unless they are requested by the relatives – apart from a little powder to take the shine from the features, perhaps. The relatives should be left with a pleasant memory for the rest of their lives, and not an unpleasant one.”

It is clear that British undertakers will stress more and more their service to the living as well as to the dead. It is clear too, they are likely to find an increasing number customers who believe that even in death it is important to keep up with the Joneses.

The last word, as always, was with the undertaker.

“No one,” said Stanley Gilman of the N.A.F.D., “would expect a funeral director to say that he found his work enjoyable; but nevertheless it can be, and is, immensely satisfying.”

The post Mourning Business appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

“These men,” the model story began, “are creating a modern goddess. For creating goddesses the pay is enormous – up to £50,000 a year.”

“These men” were some of the world’s most famous fashion photographers. Their goddess is the model girl, the face on the cover. The top goddess of them all is Jean Shrimpton – “The Shrimp”. It is her face which stares at you from every newstand. In one single week she was on the cover of all the eight top fashion magazines of the world. Other models, photographers, fashion editors and those who just look at her with admiration, all testify to her queenship:

“Well, she is just the most beautiful girl I know, that’s all.”

“I think Jean has more influence than anyone else in my time.”

“I think she has got the most marvellous body.”

“I think she looks so terrific – I don’t think anyone’ll ever be able to beat her.”

“You can put her in any shape you like and she still looks elegant.”

“There won’t be another Jean Shrimpton for a long time because it’s like trying to top the Beatles.”

This is Dick Fontaine’s and Jenny Isard’s story of The Shrimp.

Jean Shrimpton is 21. She’s also 34-23-35. Height 5 feet eight inches, mostly legs. Weight 114 pounds. She has mousey hair, blue eyes and a mole in the middle of her back. With this conveniently packaged equipment she can earn more money than Dr. Beeching by simply standing very still and looking beautiful. Her fantastic success is something new. It’s the result of a fashion revolution which has made her the front girl for an industry with an annual turnover of £800 million. She is the world’s top model because she represents the Girl of the Age. Everybody wants her.

To stay at the top a model girl has to endure hours of tedious preparation before each photographic session. “I don’t really feel about the day at all,” Jean told World in Action. “I am miles away a lot of the time. What does anyone think about? Tick-tick-tick-tick – nothing special, nothing specific. When they’re doing my hair, it’s just a job to me. It’s probably less tiring than standing up posing – at least I’m sitting there and I haven’t got to think and I haven’t got to bother. I’ve done shots where they’ve put nine pairs of eyelashes on me, sprayed my hair gold, and I’m in agony and they keep fiddling and then I could scream. You feel like saying “Christ, I’m human!” I’m not here to project Jean Shrimpton. I project what I’m paid to project.”

Where do goddesses come from? Jean Shrimpton comes from a farm in Burnham, Buckinghamshire. Her father is a builder who does farming on the side. She has a brother and a sister. Said her sister, “I was terribly jealous of her when I younger, of course – I suppose anybody would be. I should think most girls would be.” Said her mother, “She was very much a country girl, you know – pets. I think she still is at heart. She’s always liked dogs. She’s not terribly interested in clothes or anything.”

For a time Jean thought only of ponies. Then, like lots of others, she went to one of London’s biggest model agencies. Twelve thousand girls apply to London’s twenty model agencies each year – ready to go through a ruthless inspection. If a girl is accepted it takes her four weeks and 28 guineas to learn the first steps of the modelling business. The average working life of a model is eight years. At twenty-five you are getting old.

Most of London’s 3,000 working models would like to be photographic models. But 2,500 of them have jobs as showroom models at an average of nine guineas a week. The photographic model is a rarity; top photographic models can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

After four weeks of pummelling themselves into the shape of the moment, many girls start their modelling far from the world of high fashion. One showroom model described her work:

“I come in about nine o’clock in the morning, and I clean coats – that is taking off stray threads and little bits of fluff. Then we allocate them to the models they’re to go to. Meanwhile you’ve probably got six or seven customers coming in. You’ve got to try the coats on, model them in front of the customers, and then when they’ve gone you get the designer down and he comes in and then you stand for hours and hours while they sort of pick the coat to pieces on you and your feet are aching, but you mustn’t show it.”

A few years ago two plump unknowns were luckier. The day they left model school they got their pictures in the paper. Their names were Celia Hammond and Jean Shrimpton. Today Celia Hammond is one of Jean Shrimpton’s closest rivals. She remembers how they both began:

“Jean left me behind. She went to Vogue and immediately she got started. But for about 18 months nothing happened to me at all, and I very nearly gave up.”

Lady Wrendlesham [sic – Rendlesham], then at Vogue, also remembers how Jean started; “When she went there somebody said ‘You’d make a good model’ and she came in and we looked at her and she was rather fat and she didn’t know what to do in front of the camera.”

No one realized straight away that Jean was a goddess – nor did Jean herself. “I didn’t take it seriously,” she said. “It was just that it seemed easy money. I’d get on the set and go through my routine of posing and it didn’t mean anything to me. I wasn’t aware of clothes or shape or feeling or mood or the atmosphere that different clothes have to project a different feeling, and I wasn’t aware of the photographer or anything.”

But within two years the fashion trade realized that Jean Shrimpton’s was the face it had been waiting for. The Shrimp had made a perfectly timed entrance. The top models of the past recognized a new star. Madame Saignon, famous model from Norman Hartnell’s, said: “Her timing was right. Her face was required, and the clothes at the time were being made for a girl like her.”

Barbara Goalen, the most famous English model before Shrimpton, said of her, “I think Jean Shrimpton has an enchanting little face. I don’t know her so the fact that I say this shows that it means quite a lot to me. I think she’s very much part of her time; it is a face that just appeals at this particular time. Because of the young feeling in clothes, everything is for the under-25s now, which is quite the opposite from how it was in my time.”

And John French, one of the “greats” in fashion photography commented, “It was wonderful that at that moment this live figure appeared with her own way of putting across her own personality. Instead of making the clothes into a certain shape she made them part of herself, part of her own life.”

But until photographer David Bailey took a deep personal interest in her no one had seen in her the makings of a goddess. Jean Shrimpton’s partnership with David Bailey was so close that they became engaged to be married. Between them they probably earned about five times as much as the Prime Minister.

“Just being with David is an influence,” Jean said. “And then he began to influence my movement and my dress, and then when he’d get me on the set he’d put me into shape, you know, and he’d encourage certain expressions, and then I began to feel something inside that I didn’t know existed. And it gradually sort of builds up and when it’s going well there’s a lot coming out of you and there’s a lot going on between you and the person photographing you, and the clothes are good and you know you look good. You work much better than if you think you look awful and nobody’s particularly interested.”

Norman Parkinson, another of the great English photographers, has discovered several of today’s top models. For it is the photographers who transform the raw material into the finished product. Like other leading photographers, Parkinson works in close partnership with a few favourite girls – Celia Hammond is one of these.

“I don’t think anyone can get started.” Celia told World in Action, “until they get someone who is prepared to spend really a long time with them, and get them through all the bad bits, because if you don’t find someone who is really interested your first pictures are inevitably appalling and you lose confidence.”

“When I see dozens of girls,” Parkinson said, “I just sit there rather like a pudding, rather like the dullest reader of any magazine you know, and I just sit there, and I look at the girl and I say to myself ‘This girl must send me some signal.’ I don’t make an approach to the girl. She has got to send a signal of looking different, of reacting to what I say, because the whole model-photographer relationship is one of reaction of one to the other.”

David Bailey confirmed this. “I think the only way you can get a really super image and a super model is if a photographer takes a personal interest in the girl. Otherwise she’s going to wander around and work for this fellow and for that fellow, and she’s not really going anywhere. I mean he’s got to sort of fall in love with her – not love like taking her to bed, but love the image, you know, and the image he wants to create. 1 think this is very important. I think each time you have a girl in the studio and you’re taking pictures against a piece of white paper, you’ve got to make the girl feel she’s loved and that she’s wonderful and beautiful. When I first met Jean she just walked into the studio that I was working in at the time and it was sort of instant, you know. I knew that she would be great. She was just the country waif then, you know, and not much at all. She didn’t know a thing, really. But she’s a born model. There’s not many. Her legs and everything – she’s got the longest legs I’ve ever seen, I think, and the very big mouth. The weaknesses are the small eyes, and the bags, I suppose. She won’t like that.”

David Bailey’s grooming paid off. Jean Shrimpton is now the most sought-after model in the world. In New York everyone wants her at their parties. Not that she is a great party person. “I don’t find conversation easy,” she said. “It’s difficult to talk to people. I can’t bear those cocktail parties for cocktail talk, you know, where nobody really wants to talk to anyone. I don’t think I react frightfully well to new people. I’m just quiet and polite, I think.”

Where can Jean Shrimpton go from here? How long can a goddess last? Her throne is a shaky one because she can keep it only as long as her face stays in fashion. Already people are naming successors. Unlikely girls get predicted because glossy magazines like the Queen have a problem. The Editor, Jocelyn Stevens explained:

“There’s this tremendous restless search for new faces. I think part of the thing from a magazine proprietor’s point of view is that one’s always trying to make one’s editorial better than the advertising, and if you have your advertising photographed by the same photographers using the same girls as the editorial, the magazine has a sort of curious sameness; it goes right through. So we’re always trying to find a new girl for editorial, and as soon as you find a new girl the advertisers want to use her, and as soon as they start to use her the Americans want to use her, so there’s this terrific turnover of girls.”

And Clare Wrendlesham, Fashion Editress of the same paper was “terribly glad that Jean has gone to New York because the photographers will have to train new talent.”

A goddess can lose favour. But worse still, a goddess can start believing her own myth. “If you’re told every day how wonderful and how fabulous you are and what a wonderful person you are, and you’re the best, the most desired girl in the world – the fashion world anyway — it’s very difficult to keep control and this,” said David Bailey, “this is going to be Jean’s problem. What she must watch now is this image thing. Top Models become this sort of great image, and then they start believing they really are the image. That’s the terrifying thing.”

Jean Shrimpton was to have married David Bailey on 2nd June, a week after the programme. The wedding did not take place – but the photographs go on being taken — every day, every hour. At twenty-one, Jean Shrimpton has become an international name with a five-figure income, simply by looking beautiful. She can go no farther as a model. Where can she go?

Said Jean herself, “I’m not very bright at making decisions, but I think I’m shrewder than I was a year ago. If I’m in a film it’d have to be a film that had a character like me in which I could be almost myself, you know. In ten years time I’d like to be married and have a home of my own – I could have animals there and I’d have a donkey in the field or something – I love donkeys.

“Life’s been pretty good,” she added.

Indeed life has been good for Jean Shrimpton who had the luck to have the face of 1964.

The post Top Goddess appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Smugglers are international: the Englishman, the Belgian, the Siamese, and the man from Andorra, high in the Pyrenees. Of course, they never meet. But they are partners in the trade which for every pound invested, pays the biggest profits of them all. They operate with sampans, with mules, with fast cars, and by plane. They smuggle anything from bullion to butter, from diamonds to opium.

To the smuggler it doesn’t matter what he carries; only the profit counts. And the profits are immense. For every year, according to Interpol – the international police organization – the smugglers of the world swindle the customs with such rich loads as: £300 million of gold, £100 million of drugs and narcotics, £30 million of diamonds, and £70 million of such highly taxed goods as cars, radios, and perfume.

Britain, as befits a nation of traders, is an active smuggling centre. The illegal import of watches alone tells the story. In 1963, the Customs seized watches valued at £200,000. But for every watch they confiscated, it is reckoned ten more got through. So, about £2,000,000 of watches were smuggled into Britain in one year. How?

Of the 20,000 people who arrive in Britain every day, most come by air. They are people like the businessman, the housewife, the holiday-tripper. They sit in the arrival lounge of London Airport awaiting their summons to the Customs. To the Customs officer this collection of passengers is fairly typical. The woman says she has nothing to declare, but in fact she has. For she fails to mention the new skirt bought in Paris for herself and the purse brought back as a present. The Customs man decides that this is a case of genuine misunderstanding, needing no more than a warning. The young man, the holiday-tripper, is next. Slung casually over his shoulder is an expensive new camera. He says he bought it last week just before leaving London. But he cannot produce a receipt. So he is taken away to see a senior officer who will find out if the camera was really bought in Britain, or whether it was another amateur attempt at smuggling – an activity many travellers consider fair sport, without realizing it is also a dangerous one. Coming to the businessman, the Customs officer decides to examine his suitcases carefully. He feels for hidden compartments in the lid and sides. Next he searches the contents. A first batch of watches is found between scooped-out hairbrushes. But the bigger haul comes from the tin of talcum. For, packed under a top layer of powder, are two dozen watches – a load which would earn a smuggler around £250.

The main watch smuggling routes from Switzerland into Britain are through Belgium and across France. To make watch smuggling profitable, and at the same time to keep the risks down, the professional smugglers try to bring in very big loads at a time.

One favoured way is to hide them in cars with specially built secret compartments. The holidaymakers’ car route from the Continent – the Cross-Channel ferries arriving at Dover – is used by the professional smugglers, hoping to pass undetected among the tourist cars. World in Action showed a special reconstruction of such an attempt being made:

A Customs man asks what there is to declare. The driver produces the normal 200 duty-free cigarettes. His brief-case yields no contraband. Nor does his luggage, brought out from the car. But the Customs man, having been told by the driver that he had come from Paris, spots yesterday’s date on a Swiss hotel bill. He calls over a colleague and a search of the car begins. First the boot, inch by inch, till a secret compartment containing boxes of watches is discovered. Then on to an inspection pit for a thorough look at the underside. The exhaust silencer and the petrol tank are tapped to make sure they are not dummies, too. Mirror and torch are used to look inside the wings to examine the upper side of the chassis. Then inside the car another secret compartment is uncovered. Here are 100 more watches, making a total haul of 250, worth around £4,000. Finally the driver himself is taken to a private office and searched.

Like all confiscated goods, the watches eventually find their way to a warehouse in London’s dockland. The door is number 007, but it belongs to the Queen’s Warehouse, not to James Bond. Here there are rooms crammed with thousands of pounds worth of contraband: cigars, cigarettes and leaf tobacco, wines and spirits, and, of course, watches. All the goods find their way on to the market in the end, for when the Warehouse is full the Customs auction them off to reputable dealers.

For nearly seven centuries the British have been building traditions in smuggling as eccentric as most of the nation’s other cherished traditions. Smuggling has been with us since 1275 when Edward the First first levied Customs Duty on the export of wool. As the levies increased in number the smuggler came into his own, mainly running brandy and wine from France at a handsome profit, and not hesitating to fight it out with the British Customs man if necessary. And because he supplied black market liquor at cheap prices the smuggler was popularly regarded as a hero not a criminal-an attitude which is still widespread.

In Britain today the Customs men no longer have to learn how to shoot it out with the smugglers. Instead they are scientifically taught such things as the design of ships, and where and how to search them. They are taught how to recognize all the apparatus of opium smoking, the pipe, the lamp, and the hard wooden pillow used by the addict. They are shown how cigarette lighters can be smuggled in body belts, how watches can be hidden away in hollowed-out books and shoes.

Britain, of course, has no monopoly on smuggling. It is a truly international racket. Indeed the smallest state would go bankrupt if it were not for smuggling. Sitting astride the snow-covered Pyrenees between France and Spain is Andorra, only 18 miles long and 12 miles wide. It has no income tax and even the fountains in the streets supply hot water, free. And it is a smuggler’s haven. For on either side are countries with high taxes on luxury goods. The shops of Andorra are stacked with cheap tax-free whisky, tax-free razors, tax-free lighters. But official frontier posts are closely watched and every car is searched.

There are, however, other routes into Spain. Late in January, 1964 World in Action cameras joined a smuggling expedition.

First we watched as goods, bought openly in Andorra’s tax-free shops, were assembled and stowed in packing cases. Cameras, sparking plugs for cars, cosmetics, and long-playing records-all high-tax luxuries in Spain today. From Andorra La Vella, the capital of the pocket republic, the packed crates were driven up the icy roads to a mountain village to be handed over to tough mountain men for the crossing over the 10,000 feet high Pyrenees. This particular load was worth £300 in Andorra. Its price just a few hard miles away over the mountains: £630 – more than double.

No one turned out to see our mule-train set off: for convoys such as this are a regular happening. And to Andorrans smuggling is just another way of earning a living. At the summit, the unposted frontier, there was a moment’s rest before the down-hill slither to our rendezvous on a Spanish mountain road, where the contact man from Barcelona was due to meet us. When he did arrive, he was at first, and not unnaturally, surprised and worried to find a camera team with the Andorrans. But the leader of the smugglers managed to reassure him. So we recorded the loading of the goods into the Spaniard’s van – though he prudently insisted that he cover up his number plates!

Without doubt the most loathsome though certainly the most profitable form of smuggling is the squalid traffic in drugs. In Far Eastern ports, such as Hong Kong, the Customs Officer’s main task is to try to stop this traffic, mainly in opium. A constant check is kept on all junks putting into port. But much of the opium still gets through. Some of it is smoked locally, sending its addicts into stupefied sleep. The remainder filters along the Dope Route to the West. Starting in far-off places like Siam (Thailand) further supplies are fed in from the poppy fields of Turkey. And thus to France where the stuff is processed into heroin and morphine, and then smuggled across the Atlantic to the main customers – the dope addicts of America.

Recent laws in America have made dope-peddling a crime almost as serious as murder. But many still consider the risks worth while. According to Interpol, an ounce of opium which is worth ten shillings in, say, Hong Kong or Turkey is worth £300 by the time it is refined in Europe, and no less than £1,500 an ounce to the drug addicts in New York.

The dope growers and exporters do not want payment in money. They prefer gold. So the other main smuggling route runs West to East. Gold flows out from America to France. Some is filtered to Turkey to pay for opium. But the main stream flows eastward via India to South-East Asia.

Certainly the oddest form of contraband in the world today is smuggled within an hour’s flight of any British airport. On the frontier, between Holland and Belgium is the small town of Kieldrecht, centre of a thriving industry for smuggling, of all things, butter.

One side of Kieldrecht is in Holland; and here butter costs sixty-four francs, fifty centimes a kilo – that’s 4/6 a pound. A few yards away is the Belgian frontier post. Here Customs Guards check all cars to see if they are carrying butter, for on the Belgian side of the border butter is heavily taxed and costs no francs a kilo-that’s 7/- a pound – half-a-crown more. Not that many housewives of Belgian Kieldrecht buy it at that price; they have only to walk around the corner, down a side-street where there is no customs post, and stroll into Dutch Kieldrecht to buy cheap butter.

But most Belgians don’t live near the frontier. So smugglers run van-loads of butter from Holland into the interior of Belgium, reckoning to make anything up to £100 for a two-hour drive. Once the van is loaded, as a World in Action reconstruction showed, the smuggler rigs an improvised but effective self-defence system against Customs patrol cars. Boxes are filled with nails soldered together in pairs in criss-cross fashion so that when they fall to the ground hundreds of sharp points stick upwards to puncture the tyres of the pursuing car. The boxes are set, ready to be tugged open by a piece of twine.

At nightfall, the vanload of butter is driven out of the garage, passing along quiet country lanes to cross the frontier into Belgium at one of the many places where there are no custom posts. The smuggler knows that even when well inside Belgium he cannot count himself safe from Customs cars on patrol. Such patrols in 1963 arrested 85 smugglers, confiscated 221 cars and seized half a million pounds of butter. Sometimes the smuggler wins. But, after all, it’s only butter. The pity is that too often it is the dope smuggler, quite apart from the gold smuggler, or the watch smuggler, who wins in this the most profitable business on earth.

The post Nothing to declare appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

On Easter Saturday, 28th March, 1964, a new sound spread over East Anglia and south-east England; or rather, it was not so much a new sound as a trad sound from a new place. On Easter Saturday, Radio Caroline, the first of Britain’s radio ships, broadcast its first programme of pop music. This broadcast was like a bolt from the blue-in more senses than one! The launching of Caroline had been a well-kept secret.

But there was another surprise to come: a second pirate ship with a different group of backers was nearing completion. This was Radio Atlanta.

At 6 o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 12th May, Atlanta went on the air. At 10.05 that night, its usual transmission time, World in Action presented a report on these new type pirates showing who had got them on the air, and who was trying to get them off it.

Among those who welcomed Radio Caroline and Radio Atlanta – which later joined forces to become Caroline North and Caroline South – were some pop music publishers who saw in the ships an opportunity to get more of their music played on the air. One of these publishers explained to World in Action, “At the present time,” (this was before the pirate ships had started to operate) “at the present time there are only two outlets in sound broadcasting into England. One, of course, is the BBC and the other is Luxembourg. Luxembourg is held by all of the major record companies. A third and alternative outlet such as a radio ship arrives on the scene; it can be appreciated how very undesirable this could be from the record companies’ point of view because they cannot control it.”

The pirate ships are only one aspect of a business that is big and booming – so big that in 1963 the pop business took £22 million in record sales alone. Six months after Radio Caroline’s first broadcast, on the night of the Beatles’ return from one of their American tours. World in Action went back to the pop business to take a look at another side of it – the flip side. This report, like the earlier one on the pirates, was prepared by Mike Hodges.

Symbolically, this edition of World in Action opened with a shot of a goldfish. “With luck and skilful judgement,” said the narrator, “this fish will sell a million pop records.” The fish belongs to Roy Tempest, a trader in Britain’s fastest growing industry – pop groups.

Roy Tempest speaks lovingly of his fish. “I’ve got a tropical fish tank with my Top Twenty fish in. I call them my Top Twenty fish because they represent my Top Twenty rock ’n’ roll groups. Now these fish, the first one of them to enter the Hit Parade … what I will do? I will isolate the fish in a little bowl and I will give him all the tit-bits, and naturally this will make all the other nineteen fish rather envious and they’ll be hopping mad and hoping like hell to get into the Hit Parade.”

The pop business as the customers see it is one thing. The groups and the fans see pops as one long swinging ring-a-ding rave-up, a ball, a good time. But the agents, the managers and all the other promoters see it differently. To them it is business and the pop groups are the human merchandise.

It all began with the Beatles. Thousands of British teenagers bought guitars and drum kits on the never-never. They let their hair down over their eyebrows and the group stampede was on. But at the same time another, and a quieter rush started. The operators moved in too.

Eddie Rogers, author of a book about Tin Pan Alley, and an old hand in the pop business told World in Action, “Everywhere you go there is a group and what’s more important, every group has a manager – oh, and they’ve all got the greatest group in the world. Every group they manage is the greatest discovery since penicillin. Since the advent of the Beatles everybody thinks they can get on the bandwagon.”

In the pop business they talk about the flip side – that’s the tune on the other side of a hit record – the tune not usually played. But the whole pop business has its own flip side – the side not usually talked about.

A typical group, recently turned professional, is the Four Plus One. Keith is the group’s vocalist – he’s nineteen. Junior, who plays lead guitar, is sixteen, and used to be a sheet metal worker. Boots, the bass guitarist, is nineteen. Ken, the drummer is seventeen and gave up a place at college to play with the group.

When these boys first got together a youth club worker moved in on them quickly, waving a contract. We looked carefully at this and found:

It tied the boys up for the next five years.

It could tie them up for another five years after that.

For all of these ten years the manager would have complete control.

In all this time, no matter how much they earned, the manager would take 20 per cent, a fifth, of all the money.

The manager would also control all the advertising and publicity – but the group would pay the bills.

The boys would also have to pay a 10 per cent agent’s fee for every booking, so that, in all, they stood to pay out at least ten shillings of every pound they earned.

Luckily the Four Plus One read every clause and threw the contract out, and signed up with another agent. These four boys form one of the 10,000 beat groups fighting to get to the top. It’s a struggle, and a hard one at that.

Said Ken, “We are working about seven nights a week now, earning about £30 to £40 each. That’s not much though, when you consider we are doing concerts every night, also rehearsals all day.”

Boots agreed that it wasn’t all that much. “I think it’s very expensive starting a group,” he said. “I’ve got about £300-worth of gear. Keith’s got £300-worth, Ken’s got £200-worth. But it’s the HP as well, you know – it drags you down a bit when you have to pay out a lot every week.”

To Junior it was well worth it. His ambitions were clear: “Wanna be known when I walk down the street, sorta thing, instead of just working as anybody else – regular hours. Get up when I want, finish when we’re able to, have something to show for it instead of nothing at the end of the week, you know. It’s better all round and you enjoy yourself when you’re on stage – you have a big rave-up and everything, you know. It’s a right giggle.”

Keith agreed. “We have a ball on stage, one of the main things. We all sort of rave about and everything and the kids like it and everybody enjoys themselves, you know, and it’s great, you know – great life.”

All of today’s up-and-comers depend heavily on their promoters. And the promoters are always enthusiastic about their latest finds. Eddie Cox is one agent who does not restrain himself in describing the fine points of a young man named Rhett Stoller.

“Rhett Stoller,” said Cox. “Yes, I think you’ll be hearing about Rhett Stoller one of these days as I think he’s the greatest – what shall I say – multi-guitarist in Europe, if not the world. He’s already done quite a number of recordings which have absolutely astounded electronic engineers who say he can’t do more than nine, ten, eleven or twelve dubbings on one tape, but he’s already recorded twenty-two guitars on one tape and it’s a noise that sounds like a symphony.”

Any one of today’s newcomers might make the Top Twenty by next month. But the chances are that when they get there they will find the middle-men have moved in ahead of them. Roy Tempest is one of the new-style pop impresarios: a man who backs the outsiders. He described how he does it:

“We look through the charts, we buy the new records of the new releases of the groups which are not signed with our agents, and if we like the record – if we think they’ve got a fair chance of going into the Hit Parade, then we buy them for ballroom dates from their agents, and if they do hit the charts in a big way, then we’re on a very good profit.”

Having bought a group when they were unknown and cheap. Tempest waits till they become successful and expensive. Then he moves in. World in Action listened to Tempest on the phone to a ballroom manager:

“I don’t know if you’ve seen these guys perform, but they go over like there’s no tomorrow. Now I’ve got a Thursday for you, Peter. You know what they’re going out for, don’t you. They’re asking now £200. Well, now. I’ll tell you what I’ll do – they’ve got a date, if you’re interested. It’s in November – I’ll give you the date, Peter – Thursday, 19th November. The only Thursday they’ve got left. I can let you have it for £120. That is an absolutely unbelievable price, because they’re number five in the charts next week. I’ll be honest with you – I’ve had about seven offers, quite seriously, but as I offered them to you in the first place… At that price Peter, I’m practically giving it away to you.”

Peter accepted the present.

“That’s fine, yes. Fine – I’ll put it in the book,” said Tempest. “You’ll ruin me, Peter; my life, you will.”

Roy Tempest gauges the value of his stars by their place in the record charts. Indeed the success or failure of any pop hope lies in the record shops. A star is as big as the sales of his last disc. Each week the musical papers publish a guide to these sales known as the Charts. These are the barometer of success – the Stock Exchange list of the pop world. They are all compiled from weekly lists supplied by record shops selected by each of the musical papers.

But many people in the business doubt the reliability of the charts. Walter Beaver, a Mersey-side record dealer is one of them:

“For instance, a little while ago the record by the Animals called ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ was first published. Immediately it shot into the charts but into the chart compiled by the Musical Express it came in at number ten. The Melody Maker showed it at number nineteen, and the Record Retailer at number thirty-one – all of these, mark you, on the same day and all of these are national charts. Now who is correct? I don’t know, but two, possibly all three of these charts, must be hopelessly inaccurate.

“A dealer can be over-enthusiastic in his ordering,” Walter Beaver continued, “and there’s no surer way of getting rid of stock than by putting the record in question into the dealer’s return to the charts and hoping that it will climb. Believe me, this can be very successful. I think the simplest reason for these discrepancies is merely the fact that in most record shops the girl is simply asked to send her returns to the charts and this she does by writing down fifty record titles as fast as she possibly can.”

But Jack Hutton, editor of the Melody Maker, defends the chart published by his paper.

“This is the cheapest and quickest way that we can think of,” he said. “On compiling such a list you could spend a fortune. I don’t honestly think there is a fairer reflection of record sales in the country; but it must be remembered that this can be only a guide to record sales and through that a guide to the popularity of different artists and groups. We can only reflect the trend of sales in the country as far as we can see them.”

The charts are also closely watched by a band of men known in the business as song pluggers. It is their job to get records played on radio and television so that they become popular. Eddie Rogers is a professional song-plugger who distrusts the charts:

“I remember many years ago I was associated with a number. Four musical papers gave this a number one in their charts. The fifth musical paper didn’t even show it anywhere in the Top Twenty, so I phoned the man that compiled the charts in that paper and I said ‘Do me a favour, I mean every paper’s given it number one – give me a number thirteen or something.’ And he said ‘Why should I? You don’t advertise with us.’”

The song-pluggers today have one powerful target – the men who put the music on the air. Eddie Rogers remembers how it used to work:

“For instance, I have been in the studio and on a live broadcast and made signs at the artist on the stage about how much 1 was going to pay him if he did one more chorus of my song. But even if I paid him as much as forty quid, which I have paid for one chorus of a song, it wasn’t money thrown away because the next day I would sell 40,000 copies of sheet music.”

Today it isn’t sheet music that matters – it’s the records themselves.

The money spent on records in Britain explains why everyone in the pop business keeps a jealous ear on what is being played. In 1950, British record sales totalled a mere £3½ million. By 1960 this figure had risen to £15 million. In 1963 sales shot even higher – to £21¾ millions – nearly seven times up on the 1950 figure, and in 1964 it was higher still.

Two big companies alone have cornered four-fifths of this money. The smaller of these, which sells nearly four of every ten records in Britain is Decca under such labels as: Warner Brothers, R.C.A. Victor, Coral, London, Vocalion, Brunswick.

But easily the biggest is Electric and Musical Industries – E.M.I. – which sells just under half of all the records. E.M.I.’s labels include: Parlophone, H.M.V., Capitol, United Artists, Columbia, M.G.M.

E.M.I. is the world’s largest record company. Its chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, keeps a realistic eye on the competition.

“Well, it’s a free-for-all,” he told World in Action. “The competition is absolutely terrific and anyone who thinks this is an easy business should come and have a try. People who rush in knowing very little about the business can lose substantial sums of money very quickly. Last year (1963), for instance, in Britain there were 2,133 pop records produced. Of these only 80 got into the Top Ten. So that I should think about 1,700 of those records that were issued last year lost money.”

One man who tried to compete with the giants like Sir Joseph was Joe Meek, songwriter and creator of the hit record ‘Telstar’, one of the biggest pop sellers of all time. He started up his own company.

“This was a complete unit to produce and press the records,” he explained, “and the third record turned out to be a hit. It was ‘Angela Jones’ by Michael Cox. But this brought on a lot of difficulties because the major record companies decided that they didn’t want small operators and so they did their best to squash us out of the shops.”

Joe Meek now produces recording tapes only, leaving the giant record companies to make and distribute his records.

The middlemen of pop, each in his own way, keep on making money in a shifting market. Even the men who write the tune on the flip side do all right because the flip side earns exactly the same amount in royalties as the main side. Whenever the main side is played the flip side automatically earns a royalty too. But the stars themselves, the poods in thi smarket, fade – and then what happens to them?

Only three long years ago there were two young men who were making money for themselves and for lots of other people besides. One of them was Terry Dene, born Williams, once hailed as Britain’s Elvis Presley. He spoke to us as he walked, 24 years old and alone, among the empty dreams of Denmark Street in London – in Tin Pan Alley itself:

“I went to the top very, very quickly – in fact I think far too quickly. I was 18 years old and at the top, earning roughly £150 a week. Then, everything crashed. My stardom disappeared almost overnight. I went to various doctors and people for advice – I even spoke to some people in the business – but it’s very, very difficult sometimes to explain some things inside you that seem to go wrong. 1 tried desperately to get back on my feet again, but every time I made the attempt something seemed to go wrong again. It seemed to be a vicious circle.”

In 1960 – which is all of five years ago – Ricky Valance sang a song called ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’. The record sold a quarter of a million copies and so won a silver disc. Today Ricky Valance can walk along the crowded promenade at Bridlington in Yorkshire and nobody turns a head.

In a seafront cafe Ricky, aged 25, looked back on the young Ricky, aged 21:

“As one can imagine, at this particular time I made quite a lot of money from ‘Tell Laura’ and the records; but I was an idiot at the time because I felt that there was plenty more where this came from. Unfortunately this was my big mistake, and other people’s too. But, of course, by that time it was just vanished. Anyway, after that I went away from London and started trying to sell myself. I had a lot of heartbreak and worry and in the end I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“But anyway,” he concluded more hopefully, “the thing is at this particular moment I would like to say that I have learned from my mistakes – I really have learned and I feel that given another chance – I really feel this after studying it from quite a wide angle – that if I could just get another chance again, I could really make it again.”

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