It Was Sixty Years Ago Today.

These days sometimes I can barely remember what I did yesterday, but I can still vividly remember the events of sixty years ago today, November 22 1963. I had just turned twelve years old and was in my first year at the Kings School, Peterborough. My main interests at the time were pop music and sports, especially football. That week Gerry & The Pacemakers were number 1 in the charts with You’ll Never Walk Alone. The Beatles were number 2 with She Loves You. Other great songs in the charts that week were by The Searchers, The Ronettes, Roy Orbison, Billy J Kramer, Chuck Berry, The Crystals, and Trini Lopez. Peter, Paul & Mary had just entered the charts with Blowing In The Wind written by an almost unknown in Britain singer called Bob Dylan. School had finished for the week, it was a Friday, so I was looking forward my team Peterborough playing Brentford the next day. We had only got a TV in our house in 1960, and colour TV was still five years away, so my memories of that fateful evening are in black and white. In Britain in those days you had a choice of only two channels BBC or ITV. We were gathered around the telly in the living room watching the Tonight programme on BBC presented by Cliff Michelmore and then switched to ITV to watch a popular quiz show called Take Your Pick hosted by Michael Miles. Towards the end of the show the transmission was interrupted by a NEWSFLASH which said that news was coming in that President Kennedy had been shot and injured in Dallas Texas. It was a huge shock. We switched back to BBC to see if there was any more news. On the screen was just a globe going round and round… and then a voice said, “It has just been announced that the President has died”. It was chilling news. I think all scheduled programmes apart from News were cancelled for the rest of the evening. 

My dad had been on the afternoon/evening shift at Perkins, and when he got home he was really upset about the news. My parents were Irish and catholic, so as you can imagine with President Kennedy’s background being of Irish descent and being the first catholic President he was extremely popular in our household. Being so young and having such an attractive wife as Jackie Kennedy also added to his charisma. Just a few months earlier he had made a very successful state visit to Ireland which my parents had followed with great interest. Later that evening we heard that Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested for the slaying of JFK. First thing the next morning I ran up to Wrights the newsagents on Oundle Road and bought the Daily Mirror which was the popular newspaper for working class Labour Party supporting people like us. The Headline on the front page just said KENNEDY ASSASSINATED. The whole paper, even the back page was covered in the almost unbelievable news. Two famous writers, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis both died on the same day, but that news barely got a mention in the papers. 

That Saturday evening the BBC showed the first episode of Doctor Who which was to be extremely popular with young viewers especially when The Daleks were introduced. That show is still going sixty years later. Another interesting fact is that Lee Harvey Oswald was paraded before the press in a midnight press conference. A young British disc jockey called John Ravenscroft who was working on a Dallas radio station bluffed his way into the press conference by claiming to be a newspaper reporter from England. Apparently, he can be seen in the TV pictures, but I have never spotted him. He later returned to England, got a job on pirate radio, changed his name to John Peel and became one of the most influential figures in British music. Another person who used his connections to the local police to attend that press conference was a local strip club owner who also had connections to mobsters named Jack Ruby, who the following day filmed live on television shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

There were many other events in the 1960s and 70s that have stayed in my mind to this day. Cassius Clay against all the odds beating Sonny Liston to become World Heavyweight Champion and changing his name to Muhammad Ali, England winning the World Cup, the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon, the deaths at the Munich Olympics, and the death of Elvis Presley to name but a few. However, no news has ever shocked me more than the tragic event that shook the world on November 22 1963.