John Lennon shot dead in New York December 8th 1980
One day in December 1980 I was working as a bus driver and I was driving one of our old half cab buses into Manchester. My conductor, Bob, was kept pretty busy as we took a bus load of passengers into Manchester city centre for their jobs in shops, offices and other places. At one point Bob poked his head through the little window into the cab and told me that he had heard from a passenger that John Lennon had been shot in New York. It was shocking news and when we arrived in Piccadilly, we both ran to the news stand to read the news in the morning papers. There was nothing about Lennon in any newspaper and we wondered if it had been just a mad rumour. Later when we went back to the canteen for our break, we heard the news either on the TV or the radio. Lennon had indeed been shot and was dead.
I can’t claim to be a great fan of John Lennon. I liked him and his music and had a copy of one of his albums, Walls and Bridges and a few years later I bought Double Fantasy, his last album and the last vinyl album I would ever buy but what did happen that day back in December, 1980?
It was a cold day in New York and a man called Mark Chapman took a .38 calibre revolver out of his pocket and calmly fired five shots at John Lennon who had just exited a limo outside his home in the Dakota building, just across from Central Park.
Chapman had a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, a novel by JD Salinger with him when he shot Lennon. In his copy Chapman had signed ‘from Holden Caulfield to Holden Caulfield (a reference to the main character in the story) This is my statement’. He had hung around the Dakota building in New York where Lennon lived with his wife Yoko Ono and son Sean and when Lennon left for the Record Plant recording studio, he had pushed forward his copy of Double Fantasy, Lennon’s latest album, for the singer to sign.
The last vinyl album I ever bought and the last one that John Lennon made. Double Fantasy. £2.99, what a bargain!
Lennon wrote ‘John Lennon 1980’ on the record and handed it back to Chapman asking ‘Is this all you want?’ Chapman took the album back and Lennon jumped into a limo and was gone. A photographer named Paul Goresh was there and snapped a photo of Lennon signing the album. Chapman was excited about it and asked for a copy before Goresh left. Goresh promised to return the next day with a print.
Later the Lennons returned to the Dakota and Chapman was still there waiting. Yoko entered the building and Lennon was following when Mark Chapman pulled out his .38 revolver and fired five times at the ex-Beatle. Lennon staggered into the Dakota entrance saying ‘I’m shot’. Chapman dropped his gun and began reading The Catcher in the Rye until the police came and arrested him. Another Police car arrived and seeing that Lennon was losing a lot of blood carried him to the police car and took him directly to Roosevelt Hospital. Staff there tried to revive Lennon but the wounds were too severe and he was pronounced dead at 11:15pm.
Mark Chapman is still alive today. He is still serving his life sentence in Wende Correctional Facility in New York and first became eligible for parole in 2000. All Chapman’s applications for parole have so far been denied.
King Edward 8th Abdicates December 11th 1936
The story of King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson remains one of the most dramatic turning points in modern British history. A collision of personal desire, constitutional duty and public expectation. Edward was charming, modern and hugely popular but it seemed to me that he wasn’t strong enough to carry the weight of the monarchy on his shoulders. His deep attachment to Wallis, an American divorcee, placed him on an unavoidable collision course with the Government and the Church of England. At a time when divorce was still not really socially acceptable, the idea of a king marrying a twice-divorced woman was more than a social scandal, it was seen as a direct threat to the stability of the Crown itself.
It was all terribly inconvenient for Edward, who seemed far more interested in cocktail parties and Wallis’s company than in matters of state.
His radio address to the nation was quiet and deliberate with a hint of regret. He emphasised that he could not carry on his duties ‘without the help and support of the woman I love.’ The episode left deep rifts within the royal family and cast a long shadow over the Windsors for decades, a reminder of the delicate balance between individual freedom and constitutional responsibility.
The former King, now the Duke of Windsor, left for France and prepared for his marriage to Wallis, while his shy younger brother suddenly found himself as George VI, the new King. Edward spent the rest of his life swirling around Europe in a haze of glamour, gossip and lingering tension with the royal family. When his mother, Queen Mary, died the Duke was not allowed to bring his wife to the funeral. The next time Wallis came to England was in 1972 for the funeral of the Duke himself. Honestly, it’s one of those moments in history that still feels like a cross between a constitutional crisis and a tabloid love story.
December 16th 1984 Gorbachev visits the UK
Image courtesy Wikipedia creative commons.
When Brezhnev the leader of the Soviet Union died, a succession of old men took over the leadership and within a few years, all of those had followed Brezhnev to the grave. Mrs Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, felt it was time to try and improve relations with the USSR and so she decided to attend the Moscow funeral of Yuri Andropov in February of 1984. To build on this she invited Mikhail Gorbachev to visit the UK. She guessed that Gorbachev might be a possible future leader and a break from the old elderly Soviet leaders of the past.
Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, arrived in the UK on December 16th 1984 and Mrs Thatcher announced famously after their meeting that ‘I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together.’ Gorbachev spent a week in the UK visiting places that Lenin and Karl Marx had frequented. Mrs Thatcher later flew to the USA to brief her ally President Reagan who later began his own talks with Gorbachev.
Gorbachev became the General Secretary and leader of the USSR when Konstantin Chernenko died in 1985 and he began a policy of openness (glasnost) and democratisation which ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet regime.
First episode of Coronation Street 9th December 1960
I thought I might finish with something a little lighter than Lennon and Gorbachev and King Edward 8th and so that brings me to Coronation Street. I can’t say I’m the greatest fan of TV soaps in general although I do watch Coronation Street. When you watch something like Corrie over a long period of time you do get quite attached to the characters. Soaps, I suppose, do have their place in the TV schedules.
Coronation Street was the idea of writer Tony Warren who wrote the first 13 episodes. He based the fictional suburb of Weatherfield on his home town of Salford, just over the river Irwell from Manchester. Coronation Street is a small cobbled street in Weatherfield and the stories of the various residents have entertained many of us over the years. Elsie Tanner, Annie Walker, Bette Lynch, Mavis Riley and the Jack and Vera Duckworth have long gone to be replaced gradually with new characters, some good and some not so good. I like Corrie because Manchester is my home time and it’s nice to hear the characters talk the way I talk although proper Mancunians on the show are sadly becoming fewer. These days Coronation Street is broadcast in three hourly chunks per week and as much as I enjoy it, I doubt we will ever see a moment as memorable as that one back in 1984 when Hilda Ogden returned home from hospital after the death of her husband Stan. She opened a small parcel containing Stan’s effects including his old spectacles and slowly began to cry her eyes out. Probably the saddest thing I have ever seen on television. (For some reason I couldn’t seem to add the video clip of that moment but click here to see it on YouTube.)
I published a post quite a while ago about the month of January. January of course is cold and believe me, I hate the cold so I thought I’d get a lot of cold and chilly feelings off my chest by writing about my least favourite time of the year. Today I’m going to go the opposite way and write about the month of July, generally the warmest month of the year. In fact the warmest month ever recorded was 
The story of the Titanic, the ship that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, is one of those stories which seems to be forever in the news. It’s a story that has caught the imagination of pretty much everyone. Even the other day, just scrolling through the BBC news page, I came across an item about some new digital scan of the Titanic wreck which revealed new information about the disaster.
This was a film produced by TV mogul Lew Grade who was wanting to move his TV production company ITC Entertainment into the world of cinema. He had read the original book and thought that it might be possible to make a film series about US government operative Dirk Pitt in the manner of the Bond series.
I only have one book in my collection about the Titanic. It’s a big glossy picture book, not about the actual ship, but about the shooting of James Cameron’s film. It documents Cameron’s twelve dives in a tiny submersible which gave him the idea of the treasure hunters looking to find the necklace the ‘Heart of the Ocean’ and his realisation as Cameron himself mentions in the book’s foreword that the main thrust of the story should be a love story with the Titanic disaster almost as a backdrop.
Looking back at the past is always interesting, at least I’ve always found it so. I love reading about history and I watch lots of TV history documentaries. Shakespeare once said ‘what is past is prologue’ and he was right! One area of the past I’ve been looking into recently was my own and my Christmas present to myself was a DNA test.
Khrushchev was the first Soviet leader who tried to humanise the Soviet Union. This huge monolithic state that represented tyranny and state control had been created by Stalin and though Stalin himself brought Khrushchev into his inner circle, it was Khrushchev who later rejected the brutality of the Soviet State.
I can’t really remember when I became interested in Red Indians, or to be more precise, Native American Indians. In a way it was an interest in philosophy and the meaning of life that led me to them. I liked the idea of the Great Spirit and the Mother Earth. Those intrinsic ideas of nature and faith greatly appealed to me and showed me a different Indian to the one I have seen on feature films, here was a thoughtful race, in tune with nature. A speech made in 1854 by Chief Seattle has always moved me and in part says this:
The dead man looks like Himmler, as much as any corpse resembles the living person it once was but are the officials telling us all they really know about the event?
Now with a title like that, you might automatically think this book is a work of fiction, or at least something actually about James Bond or his creator, author Ian Fleming. Well, you’d be wrong. Fleming is involved as it happens, because in WW2 Commander Ian Fleming of the Royal Navy was assigned to Naval Intelligence and Fleming came up with an ingenious plan to spirit Martin Bormann out of Berlin and into allied hands.
The Last Brother by Joe McGinniss
For one man though, sitting alone in a Nevada hotel suite, sealed off from the world by his Mormon minders, the death of Bobby Kennedy was an opportunity. The elderly Hughes, lying naked on a bed watching TV, his hair, long and unkempt and his finger and toenails uncut, was a far cry from the young film maker, aviator, and entrepreneur he had once been. Immediately he wrote a memo to his chief executive and public alter ego, Robert Maheu. He said basically that now Kennedy was lying dead or dying on the pantry floor of a California hotel this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to put on the payroll the entire Kennedy election team, in particular electoral strategist Larry O’Brien. O’Brien had served under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and would later become chairman of the Democratic National Convention. Not a thought for the dying Kennedy, just the opportunity to get hold of a ready-made election team and put his own man in the white house. At the time Hughes had the idea of promoting Governor Laxalt of Nevada for the job. Fantastic as it may seem the genesis of what would become Watergate lay in Hughes actions on that night.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 