Yesterday we were pleased to continue our wedding anniversary celebrations carried over from the day itself which was on Monday. The Waitrose staff were exceptionally good to us, donating a special chocolate cake to the five of us which we consumed with much relish - and many thanks to the staff. I wore the special 'psychodelic' tie that I generally reserve for birthdays and anniversaries after which it will certainly be relegated to the tie rack once again. I have recently learned that a special concert is to be held in our local Anglican church on Saturday morning and the timings are excellent for us from 10.30-12.00. So I have found a way in which I can get Meg's wheelchair up the hillock and into the church so that is something to which we can look forward.
After I had joined the Central Office of Information in 1964, little was I to realise that this was going to be a most significant year in news terms. One event was the death and subsequent funeral of Winston Churchill and the world's press were going mad to verify each bit of Churchilliana it was possible to find. So the whole of our team was immensely busy and then there was the lying in state. I actually did queue in, I think, Westminster Hall and we filed slowly past the coffin as I had the sense of 'history in the making' Together with several other hostel residents we went down to be part of the crowd that watched as Churchill's body was drawn past us on a gun carriage. Our hostel warden who was both Australian, racist and a monarchist allowed us boys to go down the watch the procession and arranged that a dinner be available to us half way though the afternoon when we returned. A second major event was the fact it exactly 700 years since the founding of the first Simon de Montfort Parliament in 1265. This was an important step in extending the role of ordinary people in government and Simon de Montfort’s 1265 parliament deserves to be remembered as a crucial step on the road to modern democracy. The British government devoted much energy and resource to this celebration of Parliament and again meant quite long but interesting days as we tried to feed the world's press with whatever we could muster. There were some remarkable individuals employed at COI and quite a sense of history as well. For example, Sir John Betjeman the one time poet laureate was employed at the predecessor Ministry which the wartime Ministry of Information. Many of the older generation may remember the lines penned by John Betjeman in 'A SubAltern's Love Song' of which the most famous couplet is 'Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn/ Furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun' Now the person to whom the poem was actually addressed (not the Joan Hunter Dunn as in the poem indicates) was well known to personnel in the Ministry as a clerk with whom Betjeman was besotted so her identity was an open secret. In theory, we were meant to supply information only to the rest of the Whitehall machine but occasionally illegitimate queries got through. Members of the public were directed to their local reference library but on one famous occasion I answered the telephone at about 1 minute before 9 and on the phone was the managing director of a company that made water pumps. The Queen was due to arrive later on that day and he wanted to let her Majesty know how long it would take one of his pumps to empty all of the water in the Serpentine (which is a 40-acre recreational lake in Hyde Park, London, created in 1730 at the behest of Queen Caroline). Obviously I could not answer this question but I referred him to the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works who might have been able to give a guesstimate of the answer. On another occasion is was asked the colours of the Union Jack and upon replying 'Red, White and Blue' was then asked to specify which shade of white, which red and which blue were to be used. The Pantone system was only developed in 1963 and this was only one year earlier than my period of employment. But the Exhibitions Division of COI must have known the exactly right paint hue and so the query was transferred onto them. Occasionally, a query would be addressed to us and we would transfer the enquirer to a body better able to answer the query which occasionally got back to us as it was assumed that the COI should have the answer to everything. I did notice that to get any kind of promotion within the COI I would get nowhere without a degree so I needed to some GCE 'A' levels as soon as I could. I chose 'Economics' because I was desperately short of money but it seemed an interesting social science and then 'Logic' because it was the shortest possible syllabus I could find in the information available to me. To help me study the course in Logic, I did purchase a set of duplicated copies of a course from a correspondence college called Wolsey Hall College, Oxford. I had known about this so-called College because my mother had used these notes to help her prepare for some 'O'-level courses that she need to pass in order to get in the then teacher training Colleges in 1955. In the event these notes served me well and I studied them whilst I could which was generally on my journeys along the Bakerloo line between the hostel and my place of work. Upon learning this, I was rescued by my life-long friend, Jo, who let me go along to her house for the three weekends before my examinations so that I could revise intensively whilst she fed me. This undoubtedly help me to do well in the examinations which of course I studied completely on my own and without the benefit of any submitted any work to get marked. I applied to a variety of universities mainly in the North of England to study practically anything. I did gain two good 'A'-level scores (an A in Economics and a B in Logic) on the basis of which I finished up at Manchester University, where I read for a BA(Econ) which was the generic title of a degree course in the social sciences. There it was that I met Meg within the first few weeks of arriving at University and the rest, as they say, is history.
© Mike Hart [2024]