20th Century
A History of Pop Music – 1955
Featured song: Bill Haley & His Comets with “Rock Around the Clock”. This is a series of articles looking at pop music from 1955 when in my opinion proper pop music began up to 1999 [more…]
20th Century
20th Century
The Spitfire, of course
Ask anyone from the general public to name a great aeroplane or a great British fighter of WWII, and chances are they will say, without hesitation, “The Spitfire of course.” If you ask why you [more…]
20th Century
The Baby Boeing
I think most of us here don’t get terribly excited at the thought of the Boeing 737. It’s quite mundane, unremarkable, pedestrian even. I suspect more than a few of us here have been herded [more…]
20th Century
John Enoch Powell, MBE
If time could be conflated and the men of yesteryear come face to face with those of today…. I have sometimes wondered what JEP would say if he was here to speak to our present [more…]
20th Century
My Dad by Gmbd
We lived together for 16 years yet I hardly know anything about him. He was built like the proverbial brick shit house and all muscle. He never ever laid a finger on me and I [more…]
20th Century
School, and finding a love, of learning
I was an inquisitive child, I wanted to know how, and why. Mum was one of those who thought ‘just because’ was an answer. Dad was much better but worked several jobs so wasn’t around [more…]
20th Century
Off Grid Living, 1945 to 1953
I lived for the first seven years of my life in a hamlet on the western fringe of Salisbury Plain. At about six hundred and sixty feet above sea level it was a fairly bleak [more…]
20th Century
Foraging for food in the Fifties
I was born in 1945, the war had just ended, the world was a very different place then. As a child food was one of my primary concerns, it was difficult to find enough fuel [more…]