THE LITTLE BOOK OF THE 1960s

• 191 pages
• The History Press, Sept 2012
• £9.99 RRP
• Available for purchase from Amazon, Waterstones, W. H. Smith, The History Press and from all good bookshops
• Also available in Kindle format, £3.99

♦ “Full of quirky, off-beat information on the 1960s“
(www.guardianbookshop.co.uk)

 In 1966, the Beatles were forced to flee Manila in the Philippines after they were said to have refused to have tea with the President’s wife, Imelda Marcos. They denied all knowledge of the invitation – but in any case, would she have wanted them to drink it out of one of her 3,000 pairs of shoes?

After appearing on The London Palladium Show in January 1967, the Rolling Stones were the first – and probably the only – stars to refuse to stand on the revolving stage for the programme’s finale. [Bet they don’t like roller coasters, either.]

When The Dave Clark Five had a hit with ‘Glad All Over’ in 1963, it was banned from football grounds because of the risk of potential damage of thousands of feet stamping along with the chorus.

 A fan dancer at the Windmill Theatre in London, Janie Jones, was charged with running a brothel in 1967, which also allegedly provided her with people she could blackmail. But she was acquitted and continued with her recording “career”.

When Barbara Windsor and the cast of Sparrers Can’t Sing were filming around Cambridge Heath Road and other parts of the East End in the early ‘60s, the Krays were hired to provide security on the set and can be seen – briefly – on screen.

Go to work on an egg
This was an advertising campaign (which ran from 1957 to 1971) featuring such well known names as Tony Hancock and Patricia Hayes. It was responsible in part for the peak in egg consumption in the U.K. during the 1960s – reaching five eggs per person per week. One person who took note was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Derick Heathcoat-Amory, who collapsed in 1960 while delivering a budget – confessing that he had eaten nothing but a poached egg “for days”.

The British, and Quaker, film-maker David Lean claimed that all the movement in his smash hit of 1962, Lawrence of Arabia, was intentionally left to right to emphasise the journey involved. Peter O’Toole, rather less pretentiously, claimed that during the making of this film he constantly referred to Omar Sharif as Fred because “no one” is
called “Omar Sharif”! At 227 minutes, this has been logged as the longest film without a woman in a speaking role (early days, ladies), and is additionally remarkable for the number of “real” soldiers used in the casting – many of which were loaned by King Hussein of Jordan.

The Dick Emery Shows clocked up an amazing 18 years, from 1963, perhaps due to Randy Mandy, or Camp Clarence (with Benny Hill following in Dick Emery’s footsteps from 1969).

It wasn’t only dogs (in the 50s) and chimps that were sent into space – the first tortoise in space was a Horsfield’s tortoise that circumnavigated the moon in September 1968, making it the fastest tortoise in history.

When Stirling Moss was banned from driving for a year in April 1960 for dangerous driving, he was still eligible to drive (dangerously?) in Grand Prix races. Which was lucky for him as he won the Monaco Grand Prix in May of that year.

Barbara Cartland was the unchanging face of the novel. She published her 100th romance in 1963, and, by 1969, was still selling over a million paperbacks every year. The American author, Jacqueline Susann, found a different way of achieving impressive sales. When her second novel, Valley of the Dolls, was published in 1966, she was said to have bought up large quantities from the bookstores that the New York Times used to determine their listings, and that did the trick: she went to No. 1 on their bestseller list, justifying her heavy expenditure.

In January 1963, French artist Robert Filliou announced that Art had started exactly one million years ago when someone dropped a sponge into a bucket of water and saw the result. He proposed an annual public holiday to celebrate the event – but, sadly, no one was listening.

Viv and Keith Nicholson (factory worker and miner respectively) won the equivalent of well over £3,000,000 on the football pools in 1961, and Viv became famous for her declaration that she intended to Spend, Spend, Spend. And spend she did: pink Chevrolet, Harrods gold watch, racehorse … By 1965, Keith had been killed in a car accident, and Viv was declared bankrupt. Spent, Spent, Spent.