I WOKE up in a hammock in the middle of a funfair wondering where I was that lovely May morning. Nearby, my 15-year-old son Joe and other Ramsgate boatmen were preparing for a normal day’s work.

But it was a bit of a mystery why we had suddenly been told, the day before, to “kip” at the funfair, instead of going home as usual.

And I wondered even more when an Admiralty messenger arrived, as we were unloading mail from a foreign ship, and warned us: “Stand by for a special job after lunch. Have your boat at the east pier.”

We were told to lay in extra fuel, although we were going to be towed out.

There was a tug out front with a Naval Commander on board, and four or five drifters, each of them making ready to tow a boat like ours.

“Take as much drinking water as you can,” someone said.

Another puzzle. The Navy boys brought us stacks of tinned corned beef, biscuits and cocoa, so I knew now we must be going on a long trip. But no one told us where.

The next thing they produced properly foxed us … a batch of ladders.

Along with the mystery was the suspense. It was now four hours since the “stand by” order, and I sent Joe briefly back to his mother, telling her that we might not be home that night.

Then, at 4.30, we got the signal, and the “mystery” trip started. The tug led the way, the drifters left the harbour with our 23 ton boat, and others like her, in their wake.

The tug led us steadily on, until it grew dark, and the Kent coast had vanished.

Finally, well past midnight, we anchored near a destroyer. In the distance there were heavy rumblings. Yet our “patch” of sea seemed still and quiet and, a bit tired, we wondered what the next day would bring.

It was not until dawn broke that we had an inkling of the mission we were on. For, on the beach, barely 150 yards away, there were thousands of khaki-clad soldiers.

They were waiting, helpless, starving, bewildered, for our little convoy to take them home.

My boat, the New Brittanic, is licensed to carry 120 passengers. But the tug sent out a row-boat, we threw those ladders across; and, in half an hour or so, about 200 tired, hungry men made us look like a floating sardine can.

We gave them all the food we had — then transferred them to the destroyer.

Again and again, we ferried survivors to the waiting warship, and we saw screaming bombers dive so low you could pick out their swastikas.

Our rescue operation lasted two long days.

Then, in the early hours of Friday, May 31, 1940, we rounded the Goodwins and anchored back in Ramsgate.

We were home safe. And, thanks to our boat, so were nearly 3,000 soldiers.

– WALTER READ, as told to Bill Evans

That was one man’s view of the miracle of Dunkirk, 25 years ago this week. Monday’s edition of All Our Yesterdays will show film of those history-making days between May 27 and June 4, 1940, when 299 British warships and 420 other vessels brought off 335,490 officers and men, despite constant enemy attacks. Here now is another man’s view of the great life-saving operation

… but first — ‘Find the boats’

THE finding of the little ships for the Dunkirk armada is one of the little-known sides of the story.

The operation was code-named Dynamo — and caught up in it was Mr. Ian Christie, now landlord of The Oak at Surbiton, Surrey.

He told me: “I was working for a boat firm at Teddington when, one May evening, I — and others — were summoned to the private office.

“We were handed a list of river craft to be commandeered immediately, and told it was top secret. There wasn’t written authority for seizure, but we were not to take ‘No’ for an answer.

“We started at Maidenhead and worked downstream. I was amazed how smoothly it went. Some people were aghast — but no one argued about giving their boat. No one asked for authority. We stripped the boats bare, took them to the assembly point, formed a convoy of up to 30 craft and started for our destination, Sheerness.

“At Gravesend, we stopped to pick up iron rations. At Sheerness, the Navy took over, and we went back by train to Teddington to assemble another convoy. It went on, round the clock, for about 15 days. I think I made eight journeys. The round trip took about two days.”

During this time Mr. Christie received three sets of call-up papers — but was told to ignore them until Operation Dynamo was completed. “It is that important,” he was told.

Mr. Christie continued his story: “The most extraordinary thing about the whole operation was the way people just gave up their boats.

“There was a wonderful spirit from everyone. One man left a bottle of whisky on the cabin table with a note: ‘To the future commander of the Scheda — best of luck, and may he have as good a time as I have had!’

“But one ship I took — the Barona – broke my heart. The owner had just finished painting her. She looked spanking new.

“Sometime later, I saw her off Brightlingsea — burnt out. I could have cried my eyes out. But it was nothing to do with Dunkirk.

“I learned that the crew had started to make a cup of tea and were then called away suddenly. They left the gas on — and she blew up.”

– RICHARD POLLOCK

The post Fine day for a sail… appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

FOR at least 10 people out of the millions of regular viewers, All Our Yesterdays will become a heartbreak programme on Monday.

Ten more widows, mothers, sisters, brothers and friends will see their loved ones wave farewell and give the thumbs-up sign in one of those cheery newsreel films of 25 years ago. Laughing troops who were later to die in action.

Every week on average, 10 people write to the All Our Yesterdays office asking for pictures of their dear departed.

Brian Inglis and producer Bill Grundy are aware of the heartbreak this weekly peep into the past can bring. They have weighed the cost and decided that this is one of the penalties that must be paid for the privilege of telling the story of Britain’s part in the Second World War.

Bill Grundy told me: “People are always writing to say I got a terrible shock last night when I saw my husband. Please try to let me have a picture of him. After that newsreel shot he was never seen again.’

“And, of course, within reason, we try to satisfy these requests. We have to confine ourselves to outstanding cases. Widows who ask for photographs of their husbands naturally get priority.

“It calls for a weekly picture hunt and a bit of detective work. We have to identify the face, track down the exact frame from thousands of feet of film, and get the picture enlarged.”

As the programme bites deeper into the war, Bill and company are preparing for more photo requests.

Going through the All Our Yesterdays postbag, I found the letters strange as well as nostalgic. A Welshman living in Oxford wrote to say that the war years were the happiest of his life.

He asked for a newsreel picture of his friends singing in the N.A.A.F.I. He wrote: “I am an invalid who has been desperately unlucky in life as a child and as a postwar adult.”

One of the most moving newsreel sequences showed a British European Forces platoon tramping through the snow in France. All Our Yesterdays received a request for pictures of every man in the platoon.

Not one of them had survived. But not one had been forgotten.

An infantryman wrote for a picture of a French farmyard near Gorre. “While I was sheltering from an air-raid,” he wrote, “a jagged chunk of shrapnel ricochettcd off the cobblestones and killed the man next to me.

“He was a Roman Catholic padre from Birkenhead. I want the picture to send to his sister.”

Often, it’s an innocent, cheery looking newsreel shot that brings the memories flooding back. Former RAF Flight Lieutenant Harold Perry, of Thornber Grove, Blackpool, saw himself and his crew clamber out of a battered bomber at Villeneuve, France.

The film was shot in March, 1940, after a typically hair-raising war incident. Mr. Perry takes up the story: “I was a wireless operator in the Whitley Mark V bomber. We had been on a fact-finding mission over Warsaw and landed by mistake at Saarbrucken, 15 kilometres behind enemy lines.

“The bullets began to fly as we tried to take off again on a very short runway. Luckily a drainage trench had been dug across the fields, and when the old Whitley hit it, we literally bounced off the ground.

“The Germans threw everything at us, but we managed to get away by some very fine ‘grass-cutting’ 3ft. above the ground.

I wrote because I am the only survivor of the crew of Old Queenie. We got back safely, but the rest of the boys were killed or reported missing on subsequent missions.”

And so the letters go on. Behind almost every incident and every face in the crowd featured in those newsreel films of 25 years ago is another story to match it in courage or sadness.

The post Pictures from the past appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WILLIAM JOYCE was brought up as an Irish country boy but by the time of his death at the age of 39 he had become — next to Hitler — the most hated man in World War II.

The grotesque mouthpiece of the Third Reich (as far as England was concerned, he was the only ‘German’ who spoke directly to us), was known as Lord Haw-Haw. His story is told in Monday’s All Our Yesterdays.

Joyce, an insular, home-loving traitor and the voice behind the “Gairmany calling” propaganda broadcasts to Britain, got under the skin of the British nation as few other men have done this century.

At first, no one took him seriously. His peak audience of 6,000,000 regular listeners and 18,000,000 casuals was achieved on pure entertainment value.

The Press urged the British public to listen “for light entertainment.” Another reason why he had an avid following was that radio played a far bigger part in the nation’s life in 1940, with no TV and the blackout keeping people indoors.

But after the Blitzkrieg and the fall of France, people began to take Lord Haw-Haw more seriously.

William Joyce, born in America of Irish-American parents on April 24, 1906, moved to Ireland with his mother and father when he was three. He came to England about 12 years later.

He joined the English Fascist movement under Mosley, but when faced with conflicting loyalties in 1939, went to Germany with his wife Margaret.

When war broke out he found employment as a broadcaster in the English language section of the German propaganda ministry.

In his first broadcast on September 11, 1939, he accused the British of hypocrisy and colonialism and scoffed: “England will fight to the last Frenchman.”

A poll showed that more than a quarter of the British public had heard him, and that he reached his radio peak 25 years ago this week.

Jonah Barrington, a national newspaper reporter, wrote: “A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen. He speaks English of the haw haw-damit-get-out-of-my-way variety.” A few days later Barrington bestowed on him the title Lord Haw-Haw and it stuck.

By May, 1940, the Germans were themselves using the title Lord Haw-Haw, but his “popularity” was already on the wane.

His last broadcast to Britain, the Commonwealth and America was in April, 1945. With Germany on her knees he described Hitler and Goebbels as “barricaded heroes in Berlin.” His broadcast ended: “You may not hear me for a few months. Heil Hitler and farewell.” He was captured in a wood while trying to escape to a neutral country, convicted of high treason at the Old Bailey and hanged.

The pompous propaganda peddler of the Third Reich was dead.

The post Gairmany calling! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Sir Winston Churchill is 90 on Monday, when, as a birthday tribute, All Our Yesterdays will devote its entire programme to him. TV Times asked Randolph Churchill to write about his father. The result is a unique tribute, perhaps the most remarkable ever paid to this great man.

SEAHAM HARBOUR, November 30, 1964

TODAY, on what would have been the ninetieth anniversary of my father’s birthday (if only he had survived), I sit down to tell a tale of the sad state of what was once the free world.

Ever since 1940, when Hitler occupied our country, I have been prisoner in a slave-labour camp in County Durham and have been forced to work in the coal mines.

My readers are too young to remember the past — the golden, free world in which we used to live. Now the Swastika flies all over Europe — over the Louvre, over the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace.

Over the White House itself, and the Federal Reserve Bank in Fort Knox.

People of my generation, if any survive, will realise the full irony of the fact that I have had to smuggle this story to the only country in which it can be published — the Chinese Peoples’ Republic.

All else has succumbed to Hitler. He is now a venerable and largely benevolent figure aged 75.

He administers his colossal empire — the largest since the days of Rome — in a paternal fashion from his palace in Potsdam. He does not condescend to spend more than a week at Buckingham Palace, or more than three weeks in the White House. He leaves the administration of these vast territories to his able but not so benevolent, gauleiters.

For the record we may as well know, now there is an opportunity of a free Press in the Chinese Peoples’ Republic, how these events came about. The year 1939 saw the culmination of the Baldwin-Macdonald decade.

During this time the English people were lulled into a sense of lethargy and apathy.

They were taught by their masters to place their reliance upon the League of Nations — a bogus absurdity which President Woodrow Wilson was not allowed by the American Senate to adhere to, and from which Germany and Italy were to resign.

The defence of the country had been scandalously neglected by the Conservative Party with the willing co-operation of the Socialist Party. Even the timid and tardy attempts of the Secretary of State for War, Mr. Hore-Belisha, to introduce conscription in 1939 were voted against, not only by the Socialist Party.

Sir Archibald Sinclair also led the Liberals into the Opposition lobby with this caitiff and recreant attitude.

All this, of course, is old history. Any of my readers who have not been permanently brainwashed will recall how in June, 1940, France was overwhelmingly defeated, and how Chamberlain called in Lloyd George to play the role of an English Petain and negotiate terms for surrender with the Germans.

They will remember how the Germans, to begin with, treated us with consideration because of our handing over our Fleet in good order to them; how the Germans used this Fleet, joined with theirs, to protect their convoys for the peaceful takeover of Latin America.

How the Americans were supine spectators of this flagrant breach of the Monroe Doctrine; How the Americans eventually in 1943 reacted; How they were defeated by the Germans and the Japanese.

It is too late to lament those events.

Of course the bravest of our race resisted. Duff Cooper and Anthony Eden made impudent and saucy speeches. Hitler indicated in the early 1940’s that London would be obliterated unless they were silenced. Silenced they were.

Now, nearly 25 years later, we are all so numbed by the slavery in which we dwell, where no revolt, no resistance is any longer possible without even a handful of people in whom a spirit of freedom still resides.

Can anything be better than to escape to the Chinese Peoples’ Republic? It is reputed that there, thousands of miles away, whither it is practically impossible to escape, a few breaths of freedom can still be drawn.

At the age of 53 I am too broken in mind and spirit to think of escaping myself. It is only through the kindness of a few friends, who have supplemented my rations, that I have been able to summon up the energy to write this brief account which a more adventuresome friend of mine hopes to smuggle to China.

I don’t suppose any Englishman or American will have an opportunity of reading this. But perhaps it will give a few Chinese comfort in their lonely freedom.

It is tempting to think of what might have happened if there had been a man who, in 1940, could have rallied the British nation to a sense of its duties and responsibilities.

A man who could have gained a breathing space in which the United States might have come into the war.

My father, Winston Churchill, who is little remembered today was, alas, killed in Flanders in 1915 on his 41st birthday. Is it fanciful to suppose that if he had lived all might have been different?

Could he, perhaps, have galvanised the British peoples, with the blood of Marlborough and Lord Randolph Churchill in his veins, into a heroic resistance?

More extraordinary things have happened than this in the history of the world.

Perhaps he could have held the ring and formed a grand alliance which would have beaten hell out of the Hitlerian hordes.

Perhaps, at least, part of Europe, the United Kingdom, India and the United States might still be free if he, or some other equally audacious spirit, had been available, even at the age of 65, in the early summer of 1940.

It was not to be. And it is vain to make such speculations.

All resistance is now impossible, but some of the older ones like myself can still record their recollections and their fancies, writing on scraps of lavatory paper in cellars late at night by the light of improvised tallow candles.

The post The most unusual birthday tribute a son has ever paid to his father appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IT was on December 12, 1960, that All Our Yesterdays was first presented. I came to it a year later when James Cameron, who had launched it, decided to go back to his old addiction—the life of a roving foreign correspondent.

I would get letters (as doubtless he did) pointing out how much better it would be for all concerned if he could be induced to return to the programme, while I went to Jericho.

But then, the Abdication came up. By the time we had got through that nostalgic period, the producer Jeremy Isaacs, now running This Week, in which he has since been joined by James Cameron, the director, Peter Plummer, and myself felt so much a part of the 1930s, we sometimes had difficulty in remembering that we were living 25 years on.

I still often find myself, particularly after writing the script, thinking that it is 1939 now, and feeling the same irritation with Kingsley Wood (or whoever it may be) and the same delight at some tune of the time, “Music Maestro’’ or “Indian Summer”.

Incidentally, we’re going to devote the December 28 programme to the music of the period, with the Derek Hilton Trio and singers Pat O’Hare and Chris Langford — on the lines of the August Bank Holiday show.

The other night it was suggested on another TV programme that All Our Yesterdays might skip a few weeks, from time to time, when nothing much was doing, in order to concentrate on the big events. We might compress the phoney war period, for example, to move on to the blitzkrieg and Dunkirk.

It’s a tempting idea, but in fact we have found that much of the pull of these old newsreels lies not in what they show of great events, but in the ordinary occasions — a football match with a glimpse of Stanley Matthews, a parade with King George VI making some wry aside to Queen Elizabeth. We saw that in the cinema! We remember, or we read about it. Just occasionally, we were there.

The war is a great stirrer-up of these memories. Most of us would be hard put to recall what we were doing in, say, June, 1939. But nearly everybody over 30 remembers vividly where they were and what they were doing three months later. And there is more chance of seeing yourself, or people you remember on wartime newsreels because they showed so much more of ordinary folk at their jobs — in the Forces, in A.R.P., in industry.

If only there were some way to give notice that you were going to see yourselves, or members of your family! We are constantly getting letters saying that there, third from the left in the front rank of a squad of A.T.S. was Aunt Mabel — but she happened to be out of the room at that moment, letting in the cat.

“My phone hasn’t stopped ringing and people stop me in the street,” Sam Costa wrote to us the other day when we had shown him at the piano. “The one person who didn’t see the programme was me.”

But of those who have seen themselves on the programme, and written to us about it, the viewer whose comments gave us most pleasure was Lord Avon.

For some of us, in the years immediately before the war, Anthony Eden represented the true voice of his country — even more than Churchill.

I even noted with regret in my diary — normally used only to record “dates” and other trivia — that Eden had resigned from the Cabinet in February, 1938; “Chamberlain blackmailed by Musso” was my diagnosis, which was not so far out. That Lord Avon should be appreciative of the programme’s handling of that black year was praise indeed.

The post Catching up with the past appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the first attempt on Hitler’s life by the German underground movement — to be dramatically recalled in Monday’s All Our Yesterdays. The story of the German anti-Nazi resistance movement is told here

by TERENCE PRITTIE

Diplomatic Correspondent of The Guardian, 16 years a foreign correspondent in Germany, and author of the book “Germans against Hitler.”

IT was in November, 1939, that the first attempt was made on the life of Adolf Hitler.

A bomb exploded in the Buergerbraukeller, a beer-hail in Munich, where Hitler had just been addressing a rally of the “old comrades” of the Nazi Party.

Along with the Reichstag fire, this bomb-plot remains one of the two unsolved mysteries of the Nazi era.

A man called George Elser was later arrested by the Nazis and murdered by them in prison. Elser was a Communist, and he may have been the instrument of a Communist plot.

It is also possible that there was no genuine plot at all and that the explosion was engineered by the Nazis, and timed to take place after Hitler had left the beer-hall. The Nazis used the incident as a pretext to send armed men across the Dutch frontier at Venlo where they kidnapped two British secret service agents — Captains Best and Stevens.

The Buergerbraukeller incident is a reminder that active opposition to Hitler among the Germans did not begin with the July, 1944, conspiracy organised by Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and his friends.

There was opposition to Hitler from the moment he seized power in 1933. But his opponents were at first not able to visualise resistance in terms of physical force or in terms of killing him.

This was because generations of Germans had eagerly embraced the teaching of Bismarck, that the citizen must serve the State unquestionably if the State is to be strong.

To almost all Germans in the first 40 years of this century, a strong Germany was their ideal. To them the assassination of the Head of the State was unthinkable.

Yet in March, 1933, the Social Democrats voted against the Enabling Act which gave Hitler the powers of a dictator. They refused to dissolve their party, and many of their members went into exile in order to fight Nazism.

Others distributed illegal pamphlets, organised cells in factories or crossed to and fro between Germany and the surrounding countries bringing information and money.

The Communist underground movement was also active and more than 250,000 Communists were sent to prison during the first six years of Nazi rule.

Individual members of the Roman Catholic and Evangelical churches did not hesitate to speak out against evil doings, even if this brought them into conflict with the authorities.

The youth of Germany could scarcely have been expected to oppose Nazism, for they grew up in the first flush of enthusiasm for the material achievements of the regime. They found themselves pitch-forked into a war which they believed had been forced on their country.

Yet there is the shining example of the White Rose group in Bavaria, whose members were distributing leaflets as early as 1942. Long before the lost battle of Stalingrad and the consequent anticipation of Germany’s defeat.

There are lots of other examples, too. of individuals who showed their loathing of Nazism and paid the penalty for it.

It was particularly difficult for German Conservatives to focus their minds on active resistance to Hitler. They were bound to Bismarck’s creed of service to the State.

Those of them who were soldiers were bound to the cause by a personal oath of loyally to the Fuehrer and were susceptible to zenophobia [sic] — “our country, right or wrong.” Even so, the German Conservatives, largely because they were men of action, were behind the serious attempts to kill Hitler.

In 1943 and early the following year, there were at least four such efforts. In three of them, the conspirators were quite prepared to blow themselves up together with Hitler. They were foiled only by last-minute changes in his plans.

In March, 1943, a bomb was smuggled into Hitler’s plane, shortly before he boarded it. He might have been blown to pieces in mid air, had not a tiny part of the mechanism failed.

The German Conservatives debated a coup against Hitler in 1938 and 1939. They planned to kill him in 1941 as the Nazi armies drove deep into Russia and the war looked like being won. To me, this is at least as significant as the final drama in July, 1944.

The truth is that there were many Germans who did their best to oppose Hitler — even though their numbers were small in comparison with the mass of their sheep-like fellow citizens.

Their story should not be forgotten, least of all by the Germans of the post war era. For the memory of their courage and independence of mind will do more than anything else to help Germany to grow up self-reliant and self-aware. defenders of human liberties and rights.

The post Blind faith protected Hitler appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WHAT are you doing this Bank Holiday? Off to the seaside again, or the country, perhaps?

Or maybe you’ve decided to stay out of the way of all the hazards of August Bank Holiday? Perhaps the garden will get the going over you promised it weeks ago?

Bank Holidays have not changed all that much over the years — as Granada’s All Our Yesterdays on Monday will show, when Brian Inglis looks back 25 years.

What were they up to — the Bank Holidaymakers of 1937?

Well, there was a heatwave then. That’s worth remembering. And it was King George VI’s Coronation year. That might jog a memory.

But has the passing of 25 years changed the pleasures and pursuits of Bank Holiday all that much?

As you prepare for the weekend, heatwave or no heatwave, you’re probably more concerned about what to put in the sandwiches than about Mr. Macmillan’s reshaped Government, the Common Market, who is orbiting the world, or Berlin.

In the same way that people carried on regardless 25 years ago. when China and Japan were at war, and Neville Chamberlain, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, complained of “that fear of attack which is almost universal, but which may yet rest on nothing more solid than imagination.”

No, it wasn’t all that different, was it?

The newspaper headlines blared: “Most amazing Bank Holiday homecoming on record. Everything on wheels on the road.”

“Blackpool and the sun smash records. Record crowds by rail and road.” “10.8 hours sunshine. 76 in the shade.”

Not so many families had cars in 1937. But it was the same old story …

One newspaper demanded: “What of the roads? They are congested. We haven’t enough long, loud, straight, ugly roads … what’s the good of a motor car if you’ve no road to put it on?”

In fact, in 1937 there were three million vehicles on our roads. East year, there were 10 million. Goodness knows what sort of chaos we shall read about this weekend.

Of course, prices were different. Very different. As you fill up the tank at the weekend, consider that it could be filled up 25 years ago at 1s. 7d. a gallon.

In 1937, holiday-makers spent £1 million on ice cream. This year they are expected to spend £9 million.

A penny cornet bought on the promenade 25 years ago costs 4d. or 6d. now.

First-class hotels in Blackpool then provided fully inclusive accommodation from 12s. 6d. a day.

A good three course lunch, with coffee, cost 2s. A large breakfast cost the same, and a fish and chip supper with bread, butter and tea was 1s.

But what were the other attractions? There was a great thing about keeping fit. Walking holidays were popular with young people.

In London, the advertisements said: “Come to ‘appy ’Ampstead … all the fun of the fair.” The new Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races was showing.

In Blackpool, the stars at the Grand Theatre were Gracie Fields and Frank Randle. George Formby was at the Opera House. Roy Fox and his band topped the bill at the Palace (now demolished). More than 100,000 people visited the Tower to dance, tour the zoo and listen to Reginald Dixon at the organ.

Harry Porter, Blackpool’s publicity director, told me: “Today, you see more and more bikinis, shorter shorts, and the youngsters on scooters and motor bikes are more exuberant. But things haven’t changed much. People still enjoy themselves in the same old way.”

Talking about bikinis, there was a great fuss over the beach fashions in America in 1937. Men’s bathing suits that season were of the topless variety.

And bathers on Long Island beach were asked by officials: “Why isn’t your chest covered, sir?”

In Britain, the youngsters were dancing the Lambeth Walk and a popular dancehall version of Knees Up Mother Brown. Now they have the Twist.

They were listening to “pop” records of a popular crooner called Bing Crosby. Now it is more likely to be Cliff Richard.

For the stay-at-homes, radio was a big thing.

This year you can take your choice of television programmes, which include a huge coverage on ITV of the day’s top sporting events. The Lancashire v. Yorkshire cricket match, for example.

In 1937, visitors to London were able to watch television at a big demonstration at Olympia, which was billed:

“Judge for yourself what television can do.”

Today, of course, we are judging what Telstar can do.

A friend of mine suggested that the habits and manners of holiday-makers have changed drastically in the past 25 years.

“Going to the seaside was a big thing in those days,” he said. “Now it isn’t. People just accept it as they would accept the fact if the Americans landed on the moon tomorrow.”

But I don’t know. Basically. I don’t think Bank Holiday has changed all that much. We’ll still be doing the things this weekend that we did 25 years ago.

And. who knows, we might even be blessed with a heatwave.

The post All Our Yesterdays looks back on Bank Holiday 1937 appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

RAIN lashed the Shannon River and a strong, cruel wind rocked the flying-boat as we prepared for take-off on that early July evening 25 years ago.

But the weather didn’t worry the four of us who had been chosen to crew the Caledonia on her epoch-making Transatlantic flight.

All we wanted was to be off. There had been months of preparation. Take-off and landing spaces had to be chosen. We four had to be specially trained.

The boat had to be strengthened, prepared, tested retested … and tested yet again.

The waiting had taken its toll. We were eager, impatient almost, to go.

And we couldn’t get through the formal ceremonies with the Ministers and the mayors and the Press and the officials soon enough.

It had been a trying time. But it was worth it. Because the exhilaration and relief we felt as we watched the Irish coast disappear behind us was indescribable.

We were away — doing something no one had ever done I remember thinking: “I only hope Newfoundland is where they say it is.”

The final decision to make the flight had not been taken, until the afternoon we left.

“You will have low cloud and rain for the first 500 miles,” the weather men predicted. “Then it will be clear and stay fine to Newfoundland.”

It wasn’t the weather at take-off that worried me. I just wondered how accurate they were about conditions at the other end. But I needn’t have bothered.

We took the bad weather with us for nearly 1,500 miles. We couldn’t go up because the wind was too strong, so most of the time we were flying at about 1,000 feet. And it was raining.

But by dawn we ran out of the bad weather and found ourselves flying over fog around the Grand Banks. For the rest of the trip it was like flying over the Med on a summer day.

Throughout the flight we used vessels to check our course. We had to do so — radio navigational contact with land each side ran out 250 miles from the coast.

Wc were on our own — and that meant any ships we flew over were useful for course reference. For example, we used the Empress of Britain for two or three hours, and we were jubilant. It all fitted in with our dead-reckoning navigation and we were never in doubt as to our position or course.

This was a tremendous relief for me, because we earned fuel for only 21 flying hours — so if we missed the southern tip of Newfoundland there wouldn’t be much hope.

As it was, we had reckoned on doing the flight in 15 hours — and it took 15½.

By about two in the morning we were able to take our first navigational fix from the stars — and we were bang on course. After that it was simple.

Our reception at Batwood, in Newfoundland, was fantastic. Everyone seemed to go crazy. I had expected the place to be cold, but the temperature was in the top 80’s. And in my blue uniform I just fried.

This was the first serious commercial flight across the Atlantic. And it proved that this gigantic ocean presented no problems.

If the war had not come, flying boats would dominate the air today. It was only because of the war that so many airfields were built — and airfields are so expensive that aircraft which operated from the water would, but for the war, have been the only economic method.

As it is, I feel sure that the flying-boat will come into its own for the carriage of world trade. Small countries have to build bigger and bigger air fields to accommodate aircraft they don’t operate themselves.

Suitable landing areas are more plentiful on water than on land. In my days we didn’t need much water to launch a flying boat — a mile long by 300 yards wide was enough.

After a lifetime concerned with flying-boats I was bitterly disappointed that Britain’s Princess boats never came into general use. They were marvellous craft.

But I am glad to see something will be done with them. I understand all three of them were recently sold to America for less, than £1 million — about a tenth of what they cost this country.

They will at last be put to good use. They are to be used as laboratories to test atomic aero engines. And with the wider use of atomic power in the future, I don’t see why you can’t have a Queen Mary of the air.

Flying-boats are in the same stage now that sailing ships were in before luxury liners were dreamed of.

The post A pilot remembers… appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IN mid-Atlantic a storm rages. Two men in an open biplane fight for their lives. They are caught in the flier’s nightmare — cumulo-nimbus cloud. Gales threaten to tear their plane apart. Their air-speed indicator has failed. Their radio transmitter has failed. The heating in their suits has failed.

Down, down, down — the cloud-blinded pilot can do nothing. Suddenly the clouds break—only feet above the raging sea. The plane skims the waves. Spray splashes the fliers.

Their lives — and history — hang in the balance. Then, miraculously. the plane pulls out and zooms back into the sky …

All this happened to John Alcock and Arthur Whitten-Brown in June, 1919, when they were the first men to fly the Atlantic non-stop. Today more than 500,000 people fly by commercial air line between Britain and America each year.

They travel in foam-rubber, air-conditioned, pressurised luxury. Pretty girls wait on them. They can drink champagne and enjoy a six-course meal.

The hazards of an early Atlantic flight are vividly recalled in Granada’s All Our Yesterdays on Monday, when the newsreels of a quarter of a century ago remember the unsuccessful Transatlantic flight of Merrill and Richman.

On September 14, 1936, the fliers set off from Liverpool in a Vultee II called Lady Peace. Destination: New York. They never made it.

Their plane ran into trouble over Newfoundland, and they had to put down in Musgrave Harbour.

All Our Yesterdays traces the Transatlantic story — from the pioneering of Alcock and Brown to the last days of the great airships.

The flight of Alcock and Brown, both Manchester men, has been claimed to be the greatest flying feat of all time. This is understandable.

Time and again they escaped death by inches.

Time and again only sheer courage carried them through.

After escaping from the cumulo-nimbus cloud, their plane flew into rain, ice and snow — and the port engine iced up.

Brown crawled across the wing and used a knife in his bare hand — in the freezing propeller slipstream — to chip ice away.

Brown climbed out on to the wing six more times before landing.

And even the final touchdown was dramatic.

The fliers thought an Irish bog was a landing field — and put their plane down in the middle of it!

First solo flight of the Atlantic was by Charles Lindbergh in his single engined monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis in 1927.

After a completely uneventful journey, Lindbergh nearly lost his life — being mobbed by admirers.

When his plane landed at Le Bourget 120,000 people were waiting. They trampled down fences, broke police cordons, and hauled Lindbergh from the plane in hysterical adulation.

He was in danger of being putted to pieces until the French pilot, Raymond Orteig, came to his rescue. He put Lindbergh’s flying helmet on the head of a journalist.

Before the astonished journalist realised what was happening he had been swept upon the shoulders of the crowd and acclaimed as Lindbergh, while the flyer was smuggled away.

But if Lindbergh was the darling of the crowds, James Mollison, the first man to fly both the North and the South Atlantic solo, was the darling of the Press.

Mollison was in evening dress in a New York night club when he was told that weather conditions over Atlantic were favourable.

Mollison went to the field, climbed into his Havilland Puss Moth, and flew the Atlantic — without even bothering to change.

The post Courage in the clouds appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WOMEN waiting anxiously at the pit-head for news of their husbands and sons … rescuers going down the shaft with a canary to detect poisonous fumes … a clergyman praying for the entombed men … Salvation Army workers serving tea to the waiting families as the agonising suspense drags on …

… These are the poignant scenes which will be recalled in Granada’s All Our Yesterdays on Monday when the newsreels of 25 years ago tell the tragic story of the disaster at Wharncliffe Woodmoor Colliery near Sheffield.

At 3.30 a.m. on Thursday, August 6, 1936, an explosion in the Lidgett Seam, more than 1,000 ft. below the surface, trapped 58 miners.

The force of the blast was so great that it lifted the heavy coal tubs like match-boxes and flung them in a heap. When rescue parties reached the seam they found bodies huddled together. Only one of the 58 miners was still alive and he died later in hospital.

Since 1936, fortunes have been spent on modernising the mines both under private ownership and under the National Coal Board.

But does all this modernisation, mechanisation and improved efficiency mean that the man at the coal face is any safer?

A leading expert in mining safety, Mr. James Fletcher, North West Divisional Safety Engineer of the National Coal Board told me: “The hazards are the same, the human failings the same, and there is no doubt that—given a certain set of circumstances or mistakes – a pit disaster is still a possibility.”

Apart from major explosions and fires, British miners are still paying — with their fives — the terrible price of coal. In the Lancashire and North Wales coalfield alone, an average of 30 are killed and 170 seriously injured every year.

Research is continuous. At centres like the Safety in Mines Research Establishment near Buxton. Derbyshire, coal dust explosions are simulated with a fierce realism in specially-constructed galleries in the hills. The blast, which sends flames leaping long distances, becomes doubly horrific when the imagination transfers it underground.

In recent years there has been a mass of legislation on mining operation, and some of it is confusing even to experts. But they do not object to it. They say: “If every regulation were properly observed all the time the risk of disasters would be greatly reduced. But we are always up against the human element.”

Safety in British mines today is on two levels. First, there are the specialist advisers headed by the Chief Safety Engineer of the National Coal Board in London and by his nine divisional safety engineers. Second, there are the pit safety officers responsible to the pit managers, who are ultimately answerable at law for safety precautions.

It was during the 1930’s about the time of the Wharncliffe Woodmoor explosion, that the idea of specialist safety engineers first gained ground and some mining companies began to employ them full-time. A Royal Commission on mining safety made recommendations which, though delayed by the war, have become accepted practice.

A great deal of work has been done on fire-damp (methane) ignition, which causes coal dust to explode, as in last year’s Six Bells pit disaster in South Wales when 45 miners were killed.

Modernisation has led to one great safety improvement — the widening and heightening of the “roads”, which has brought freer ventilation. Most pits have their own ventilation officer.

The danger from coal dust is being reduced by the infusion of water, under pressure, into the face workings. In some cases, the rich methane is being drawn off through pipes driven ahead of the workings and sold to the Gas Board. One of the first pits to introduce this idea was Point of Air, in North Wales.

Disasters caused by conveyor belt fires, as at Creswell, near Worksop in 1950 when 80 men died, are less likely today because the belts, once made of rubber and other inflammable material, are being made of materials that will not ignite.

What, if anything, has disappeared from pre-war mining, apart from antiquated cutting methods? Not much.

Canaries, like the one used by rescuers at Wharncliffe Woodmoor, arc still kept in case of need, because a canary will succumb to carbon monoxide, which has no smell, before a human does.

A safety engineer said: “If all the safety recommendations made even up to 1950 were faithfully put into force, we should be well on the way to cutting the accident toll.

“But there are always those who take risks, don’t bother, or simply forget. In mining, more than in most industries, it is human weakness that is the most dangerous.”

Memories it seems, are short. Even for pit disasters.

The post The tragedy that struck 1,000 ft down appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.