Age of Innocence – 1961, The Berlin Wall and Emma Peel

Through 1961 the Cold War continued to worsen with the USSR exploding some very large and nasty bombs during testing and then commencing the building of the Berlin Wall to separate East from West Berlin.

The Wall was over a hundred and fifty five kilometers long and in June 1962 work started on a second parallel fence up to ninety meters further into East German territory, with houses in between the fences torn down and people displaced and forcibly relocated.  A no man’s land was created between the two barriers, which became widely known as the ‘death strip’.

It was paved with raked gravel, making it easy to spot footprints, offered no cover and was booby-trapped with tripwires and, most importantly, it offered a clear field of fire to the watching guards.  Between 1961 and 1989 over five thousand people escaped from East Germany over or under the wall and according to official sources one hundred and twenty five were killed trying to do so although the actual figure may be much higher but we will never know.

A number of walls were built over the years, each becoming more escape proof and sophisticated than the last.  The fourth and final wall was completed in 1980 and was constructed from forty-five thousand separate sections of reinforced concrete, each three and a half meters high and over a metre wide. The top of the wall was lined with a smooth pipe, intended to make it more difficult to scale.  It was reinforced by mesh fencing, signal fencing, anti-vehicle trenches, barbed wire, over one hundred and sixteen watchtowers, and twenty bunkers.  These are the lengths some people will go to simply to subjugate others.

By the late 1980s however the Iron Curtain across Europe was being thrown open and border restrictions between east and west were rapidly disappearing.  Thousands of East Germans were escaping to the west through Hungary and Czechoslovakia anyway and the wall became obsolete.  Finally in 1989 East Germany gave permission for people to leave into West Berlin and the wall was quickly demolished by ecstatic Berliners and normality restored to a great European city.

In 1961 it never crossed my mind that I would ever visit Berlin and see the Wall but in 2019 I visited with my brother Richard…

… You can read that story HERE.

Also in 1961, to make matters worse, the new American President, Kennedy, financed an anti-Castro Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs which was an unmitigated fiasco ending in a humiliating climb-down and withdrawal by the Americans to avert the threat of another major world conflict.

1961 was not a good year for the Americans at all because also this year the Soviet Union beat the United States in the race to get the first man into space when in April Yuri Gagarin was fired beyond the atmosphere and orbited the Earth for a hundred and eight minutes travelling at more than twenty seven thousand kilometres an hour before landing safely back on earth.

It was a blow to the Americans who had hoped to be the first to launch a man into space and they could only follow a month later in May when astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to do so.  Later in the same year the disgruntled United States announced the beginning of the Apollo Space Programme with the objective of a manned lunar landing.  Some say that this was achieved in 1969 when two men landed on the moon but there is speculation by many that this was an elaborate con filmed entirely in an empty aircraft hanger in Nevada simply to achieve the Kennedy boast that man would land on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

My favourite story about the space race is that because a standard ballpoint pen would not work in zero gravity, NASA spent millions of dollars developing the zero-g Space Pen, while the pragmatic Russians came up with the alternative of using a simple pencil.  It’s a good story but sadly there is no truth in it at all.  The pen was actually developed by a man called Paul Fisher and he did not receive any government funding at all for its development.  Fisher invested millions of his own money and invented it independently, and then asked NASA to try it.  They liked it and bought four hundred at $2.95 each!  After the introduction of the Space Pen, both the American and Soviet space agencies adopted it.   An amusing footnote to the story is that apparently it turns out that a standard biro will work in space after all.

There were two changes to British currency in 1961 when the old black and white £5 note was discontinued because it was too easy to forge and the farthing ceased to become legal tender.  The farthing was one quarter of the old pre-decimal penny and due to inflation had simply outlived its usefulness and minting ceased as early as 1956 even though the farthing’s buying power then would be almost two pence in today’s values.  It is also interesting that but for an infinitesimal difference, the current penny coin, which was introduced when decimalisation of British coinage took effect in 1971, is the same size as the last minted farthings.  The farthing ceased to be legal tender after 31^st December 1960 and the fact that the farthing had recently ceased to be legal tender is referred to in the first episode of Z Cars, which was broadcast in January 1962.

The most important television event of the year in the UK just has to be the very first episode of Coronation Street.  The show had been tried out on regional television in 1960 to see what the reaction would be and in 1961 the show went nationwide for the first time.  It went out twice a week, with Friday’s episode being shown live and the following Monday’s edition shot straight afterwards.  Despite some scepticism by the Television bigwigs the nation took Ena Sharples, Ken Barlow and Elsie Tanner to their hearts, and tuned in their thousands.  By the end of the year it was the highest rated show in the country and is now the longest running soap opera in the world.

In the US Dr. Kildare was a medical drama television series starring Richard Chamberlain which ran from 1961 to 1966, with a total of one hundred and ninety episodes.   This sounds like a lot but is easily eclipsed by the British hospital drama Casualty which has been running since 1986 and has had over eight hundred episodes.

These might have been important TV shows but the most significant event for me was that 1961 saw the beginning of The Avengers when Patrick McNee strode onto the small screen as John Steed complete with bowler hat and umbrella and every inch the English pre-Bond secret agent gentleman.  In the early days Cathy Gale who was played by Honor Blackman in a sexy black leather cat suit assisted him but she left the show and went on to be Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and that introduced the delectable Emma Peel played by Diana Rigg.

Emma Peel was my first fantasy pin-up and I used to scour the television magazines and newspapers for pictures of her that I cut out assembled into a scrap book of cuttings that I carried with me at all times.  Once (about 1966, I guess) some school pals happened to mention this to the English teacher, Mr Howe, who demanded sight of the book and immediately confiscated it for a couple of days.  I thought that this was some sort of punishment but I have subsequently reached the conclusion that he must surely have shared my fantasy and probably spent a couple of enjoyable evenings with the book.

In sport there was bad news for dad, when Leicester City reached the FA cup final for the second time and were beaten 2-0 by Tottenham Hotspurs who did the league and cup double that year.  Leicester reached the cup final again in 1963 and lost to Manchester United and again in 1969 and lost to Manchester City.  They had been there before in 1949 and lost to Wolverhampton Wanderers and this means that they have the unenviable record of being the only team to reach four FA cup finals and lose them all.

A Personal Reassessment of Germany

On 3^rd October 1990, East and West Germany are reunited, ending 45 years of Cold War division. At midnight the Freedom Bell, a gift from the United States, was rung, and Germany was again a united nation. The East German state, which had essentially collapsed in 1989, was dissolved, and its people became citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Germany was divided between the four major Allied powers; the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France. In 1949, the United States, Britain and France combined their occupation zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany in West Germany, while the Soviets established the communist German Democratic Republic in East Germany.

At this time, and for some time after, I had never visited Germany but in 2007 I found cheap tickets to Friedrichshafen.  I really had no idea where this was and I really didn’t care, I was determined to have the flights so I booked them without giving the transaction a second thought.  After it had been confirmed I set out to discover where it was exactly and to learn something about our destination.  I was delighted to find that it was in the far south of Germany sitting alongside Lake Constance and within easy reach of Switzerland and Austria.

When we arrived in Friedrichshafen the weather was perfect and the sun was shining and we quickly took a taxi to the city that drove us through some, quite frankly, uninteresting suburbs, and it was a lady taxi driver to take us there so there was nothing very exciting about the drive either as she took us to our hotel with a sedate efficiency.

As it was about lunchtime we quickly organised ourselves and made our way out of the hotel and down to the lake to see what the city had to offer and we were absolutely delighted as the place immediately exceeded our modest expectations.  We had had no idea of what we might find so we were surprised to discover a broad sunny promenade with bars and restaurants overlooking the lake and a genuine holiday resort atmosphere.

Lake Constance is a vast freshwater lake on the upper River Rhine situated between Germany, Switzerland, and Austria and is the third largest in central Europe after Lake Balaton which is in Hungary and the second largest, Lake Geneva which lies between France and Switzerland.  It is sixty-three kilometers long and one-hundred and eighty-six kilometers around, at its widest point it is nearly fourteen kilometers across and it covers approximately five-hundred and thirty-nine square kilometers of total area.  Ninety per cent of the water is melted floodwater from the Alps and this supplies three-hundred and twenty cities and towns and four million people with drinking water, so this is a very big lake indeed and it is fairly important to an awful lot of people.

It is an interesting fact that there is no legally binding agreement as to where the boundaries lie between the three countries that border the shores of Lake Constance.  Switzerland holds the view that the border runs through the middle of the lake, whilst Austria is of the opinion that the lake stands in condominium of all the states on its banks. Germany agrees with neither of these points of view and doesn’t care too much anyway.

We walked for a while along the sociable waterfront and before very long selected a table at a bar with an expansive view of the water and in the full glare of the midday sun.  This was a perfect spot for a lunchtime sojourn and we sat in the warm sun and looked out over the water towards the snow capped Swiss Alps.  The water was busy with ferry boats either crossing over to Switzerland or simply stopping off at all the little towns that border the lake so later we walked along the promenade to check the schedules for our planned trip to the other side of the water.

The timetables were even more difficult to understand than the menus so after quickly running out of patience we returned to the waterfront and walked back along the promenade past the zeppelin museum and with the afternoon sun still pleasantly hot we found another bar and sat and enjoyed another beer.   We sat and enjoyed the beer and the wine in the afternoon sun and watched the people walking back and forth along the lakeside boulevard stopping frequently to buy ice cream or to stop like us for refreshment in one of the many bars overlooking the lake.

Even on this our first day, I found that I was being forced into a reassessment of the German people.  Here in their own country they were so obliging and polite and not at all like the loud pushy archetypes that I had encountered before usually on holiday in Spain or Portugal where in the 1938 style of the Sudetenland they notoriously commandeer the best pool side seats.  I have to say that it was a real pleasure to be here and not really what I was expecting, it felt relaxed, refined and cultured and I was glad of that and to have my national prejudices so quickly readjusted.

A Year in a Life – 3rd October, Germany Reunited

On 3^rd October 1990, East and West Germany are reunited, ending 45 years of Cold War division. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Germany was divided between the four major Allied powers; the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France. In 1949, the United States, Britain and France combined their occupation zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany in West Germany, while the Soviets established the communist German Democratic Republic in East Germany.  At midnight the Freedom Bell, a gift from the United States, was rung, and Germany was again a united nation. The East German state, which had essentially collapsed in 1989, was dissolved, and its people became citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.

At this time, and for some time after, I had never visited Germany but in 2007 I found cheap tickets to Friedrichshafen.  I really had no idea where this was and I really didn’t care, I was determined to have the flights so I booked them without giving the transaction a second thought.  After it had been confirmed I set out to discover where it was exactly and to learn something about our destination.  I was delighted to find that it was in the far south of Germany sitting alongside Lake Constance and within easy reach of Switzerland and Austria. 

When we arrived in Friedrichshafen the weather was perfect and the sun was shining and we quickly took a taxi to the city that drove us through some, quite frankly, uninteresting suburbs, and it was a lady taxi driver to take us there so there was nothing very exciting about the drive either as she took us to our hotel with a sedate efficiency. 

As it was about lunchtime we quickly organised ourselves and made our way out of the hotel and down to the lake to see what the city had to offer and we were absolutely delighted as the place immediately exceeded our modest expectations.  We had had no idea of what we might find so we were surprised to discover a broad sunny promenade with bars and restaurants overlooking the lake and a genuine holiday resort atmosphere. 

Lake Constance is a vast freshwater lake on the upper River Rhine situated between Germany, Switzerland, and Austria and is the third largest in central Europe after Lake Balaton which is in Hungary and the second largest Lake Geneva which lies between France and Switzerland. It is sixty-three kilometers long and one-hundred and eighty-six kilometers around, at its widest point it is nearly fourteen kilometers across and it covers approximately five-hundred and thirty-nine square kilometers of total area.  Ninety per cent of the water is melted floodwater from the Alps and this supplies three-hundred and twenty cities and towns and four million people with drinking water, so this is a very big lake indeed and it is fairly important to an awful lot of people. 

It is an interesting fact that there is no legally binding agreement as to where the boundaries lie between the three countries that border the shores of Lake Constance.  Switzerland holds the view that the border runs through the middle of the lake, whilst Austria is of the opinion that the lake stands in condominium of all the states on its banks. Germany agrees with neither of these points of view and doesn’t care too much anyway.  I expect they would get their own way if they really had a mind to.

We walked for a while along the sociable waterfront and before very long selected a table at a bar with an expansive view of the water and in the full glare of the midday sun.  This was a perfect spot for a lunchtime sojourn and we sat in the warm sun and looked out over the water towards the snow capped Swiss Alps.  The water was busy with ferry boats either crossing over to Switzerland or simply stopping off at all the little towns that border the lake so later we walked along the promenade to check the schedules for our planned trip to the other side of the water.  The timetables were even more difficult to understand than the menus so after quickly running out of patience we returned to the waterfront and walked back along the promenade past the zeppelin museum and with the afternoon sun still pleasantly hot we found another bar and sat and enjoyed another beer.   We sat and enjoyed the beer and the wine in the afternoon sun and watched the people walking back and forth along the lakeside boulevard stopping frequently to buy ice cream or to stop like us for refreshment in one of the many bars overlooking the lake.

Even on this our first day, I found that I was being forced into a reassessment of the German people.  Here in their own country they were so obliging and polite and not at all like the loud pushy archetypes that I had encountered before usually on holiday in Spain or Portugal where in the 1938 style of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland they notoriously commandeer the best pool side seats.  I have to say that it was a real pleasure to be here and not really what I was expecting, it felt relaxed, refined and cultured and I was glad of that and to have my national prejudices so quickly readjusted.

1961 – Berlin Wall, Coronation Street and Emma Peel

Through 1961 the Cold War continued to worsen with the USSR exploding some very large and nasty bombs during testing and then commencing the building of the Berlin Wall to separate East from West Berlin.

The Wall was over a hundred and fifty five kilometers long and in June 1962 work started on a second parallel fence up to ninety meters further into East German territory, with houses in between the fences torn down and people displaced and forcibly relocated.  A no man’s land was created between the two barriers, which became widely known as the ‘death strip’. It was paved with raked gravel, making it easy to spot footprints, offered no cover and was booby-trapped with tripwires and, most importantly, it offered a clear field of fire to the watching guards.  Between 1961 and 1989 over five thousand people escaped from East Germany over or under the wall and according to official sources one hundred and twenty five were killed trying to do so although the actual figure may be much higher but we will never know.

A number of walls were built over the years, each becoming more escape proof and sophisticated than the last.  The fourth and final wall was completed in 1980 and was constructed from forty-five thousand separate sections of reinforced concrete, each three and a half meters high and over a metre wide. The top of the wall was lined with a smooth pipe, intended to make it more difficult to scale.  It was reinforced by mesh fencing, signal fencing, anti-vehicle trenches, barbed wire, over one hundred and sixteen watchtowers, and twenty bunkers.  These are the lengths some people will go to simply to subjugate others.

By the late 1980s however the Iron Curtain across Europe was being thrown open and border restrictions between east and west were rapidly disappearing.  Thousands of East Germans were escaping to the west through Hungary and Czechoslovakia anyway and the wall became obsolete.  Finally in 1989 East Germany gave permission for people to leave into West Berlin and the wall was quickly demolished by ecstatic Berliners and normality restored to a great European city.

Also in 1961, to make matters worse, the new American President, Kennedy, financed an anti-Castro Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs which was an unmitigated fiasco ending in a humiliating climb-down and withdrawal by the Americans to avert the threat of another major world conflict.

1961 was not a good year for the Americans at all because also this year the Soviet Union beat the United States in the race to get the first man into space when in April Yuri Gagarin was fired beyond the atmosphere and orbited the Earth for a hundred and eight minutes travelling at more than twenty seven thousand kilometres an hour before landing safely back on earth.  It was a blow to the Americans who had hoped to be the first to launch a man into space and they could only follow a month later in May when astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to do so.  Later in the same year the disgruntled United States announced the beginning of the Apollo Space Programme with the objective of a manned lunar landing.  Some say that this was achieved in 1969 when two men landed on the moon but there is speculation by many that this was an elaborate con filmed entirely in an empty aircraft hanger in Nevada simply to achieve the Kennedy boast that man would land on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

My favourite story about the space race is that because a standard ballpoint pen would not work in zero gravity, NASA spent millions of dollars developing the zero-g Space Pen, while the pragmatic Russians came up with the alternative of using a simple pencil.  It’s a good story but sadly there is no truth in it at all.  The pen was actually developed by a man called Paul Fisher and he did not receive any government funding at all for its development.  Fisher invested millions of his own money and invented it independently, and then asked NASA to try it.  They liked it and bought four hundred at $2.95 each!  After the introduction of the Space Pen, both the American and Soviet space agencies adopted it.   An amusing footnote to the story is that apparently it turns out that a standard biro will work in space after all.

There were two changes to British currency in 1961 when the old black and white £5 note was discontinued because it was too easy to forge and the farthing ceased to become legal tender.  The farthing was one quarter of the old pre-decimal penny and due to inflation had simply outlived its usefulness and minting ceased as early as 1956 even though the farthing’s buying power then would be almost two pence in today’s values.  It is also interesting that but for an infinitesimal difference, the current penny coin, which was introduced when decimalisation of British coinage took effect in 1971, is the same size as the last minted farthings.  The farthing ceased to be legal tender after 31^st December 1960 and the fact that the farthing had recently ceased to be legal tender is referred to in the first episode of Z Cars, which was broadcast in January 1962.

The most important television event of the year in the UK just has to be the very first episode of Coronation Street.  The show had been tried out on regional television in 1960 to see what the reaction would be and in 1961 the show went nationwide for the first time.  It went out twice a week, with Friday’s episode being shown live and the following Monday’s edition shot straight afterwards.  Despite some scepticism by the Television bigwigs the nation took Ena Sharples, Ken Barlow and Elsie Tanner to their hearts, and tuned in their thousands.  By the end of the year it was the highest rated show in the country and is now the longest running soap opera in the world.

In the US Dr. Kildare was a medical drama television series starring Richard Chamberlain which ran from 1961 to 1966, with a total of one hundred and ninety episodes.   This sounds like a lot but is easily eclipsed by the British hospital drama Casualty which has been running since 1986 and has had over eight hundred episodes.

These might have been important TV shows but the most significant event for me was that 1961 saw the beginning of The Avengers when Patrick McNee strode onto the small screen as John Steed complete with bowler hat and umbrella and every inch the English pre-Bond secret agent gentleman.  In the early days Cathy Gale who was played by Honor Blackman in a sexy black leather cat suit assisted him but she left the show and went on to be Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and that introduced the delectable Emma Peel played by Diana Rigg.

Emma Peel was my first fantasy pin-up and I used to scour the television magazines and newspapers for pictures of her that I cut out assembled into a scrap book of cuttings that I carried with me at all times.  Once (about 1966, I guess) some school pals happened to mention this to the English teacher, Mr Howe, who demanded sight of the book and immediately confiscated it for a couple of days.  I thought that this was some sort of punishment but I have subsequently reached the conclusion that he must surely have shared my fantasy and probably spent a couple of enjoyable evenings with the book.

In sport there was bad news for dad, when Leicester City reached the FA cup final for the second time and were beaten 2-0 by Tottenham Hotspurs who did the league and cup double that year.  Leicester reached the cup final again in 1963 and lost to Manchester United and again in 1969 and lost to Manchester City.  They had been there before in 1949 and lost to Wolverhampton Wanderers and this means that they have the unenviable record of being the only team to reach four FA cup finals and lose them all.