Gordon & MacPhail
1940
Nineteen-forty was possibly the darkest year in the entire history of Great Britain.
War had been declared against Nazi Germany the previous September, but so far it had been a ‘phoney war’: this would change rapidly in the months to come. In January, the Blitzkreig was unleashed upon Finland and Norway, which were defeated after stiff resistance; Denmark, Belgium and The Netherlands surrendered; Paris was bombed, and in June Marshall Pétain surrendered and France was occupied. The same month Italy declared war on Great Britain, 13,000 British and French troops surrendered to Field
Marshall Rommel at St. Valery and 300,000 Allied troops were evacuated from Dunkirk.
Britain stood alone against the Axis powers, and Winston Churchill (who had become Prime Minister in May) told the nation that “the Battle of France is now over; the Battle of Britain is about to begin”.
And begin it did, in July, with continuous bombing raids by the Luftwaffe, bravely checked by ‘The Few’ RAF fighter pilots: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”. During September and October - the months of the Blitz – London was bombed on fifty-seven consecutive nights; in November, Coventry was utterly destroyed and in December 500 German bombers devastated Sheffield.
The Nazi tactic was to achieve aerial superiority in order to invade or force an armistice. Churchill had made it clear that this would never happen:
“We shall not flag or fail. We shall fight on the beaches…on the landing grounds…in the fields and the streets… We shall never surrender”.
By the end of the year it was clear that the Luftwaffe would not achieve its goal: the first, crucial, turning point in the war had been reached.
Gordon & MacPhail
1963
‘The Sixties’ was an era of profound cultural and political change, and truly began in 1963 with the start of what became known as the ‘counterculture’ – a rejection by the younger generation of the social norms of the 1950s.
The Cold War continued, with the seeds of what would become the Vietnam War being sown in November 1963, when President Johnson increased the number of American troops in South Vietnam. However, many in America and Britain began to doubt the way it was being conducted. In particular they were fearful of the spectre of nuclear war.
There was increasing distrust of the Establishment. In the U.K. the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, lied to the House of Commons about his affair with Christine Keeler. In America thousands of black Americans were arrested while protesting against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, prompting President Kennedy to promise a Civil Rights Bill – a promise which may have contributed to his assassination later in the year.
Key to the success of the counterculture was the increasing availability and quality of popular music, which - supported by the media, and particularly by the now widespread television – embraced new forms. 1963 was pre-eminently ‘The Year of The Beatles’, who twice reached the top of both album and single charts. By October, the press had coined the term ‘Beatlemania’.
| Your Privacy |
Your privacy is important to us and we will do our absolute best to protect it for you.CookiesOur website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our website. A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer's hard drive. You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the below:
Cookie: Google Analytics TrackingPurpose: These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our website. We use the information to help us improve our website. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to our website, where visitors have come to the website from and the pages they visited. Name: _utma (Expires: 2 years after your last visit to our website) Name: _utmb (Expires: 30 minutes after your visit or after 30 minutes of inactivity) Name: _utmc (Expires: when you close your browser) Name: _utmz (Expires: 6 months after it was set)
Cookie: 5fd95fab83d9ca4352aa5022a9938e00Purpose: This cookie is set each time a user visits our website and creates a browser session for the user. Name: 5fd95fab83d9ca4352aa5022a9938e00 (Expires: when you close your browser)
Cookie: agecheckPurpose: This cookie captures the details of the age check which is performed when our website is first loaded. Name: agecheck (Expires: 45 months after it was set)
Cookie: www.addthis.comPurpose: These cookies are set by www.addthis.comfor the purposes of the “share” buttons on our website. Names: _atuvc, xtc,uid,uvc,uit, and psc (Expires: various)
Please note that third parties (including for example the provider of the “share” buttons and YouTube) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. You may block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies you may not be able to access all or parts of our website. By continuing to access our website without blocking cookies you consent to our use of cookies.
Use of your InformationWe will often have news, competitions or promotional offers we think you might be interested in and would like to be able to use the personal details you have given us in the past to let you know about such things, or to help us with our own internal research and analysis which lets us develop our products in the ways we think our customers will want. We will not pass on any of the details you enter when using our site to other organisations. Please let us know you are happy for us to use your details this way by ticking the appropriate box on the form you provide your details on. If you'd rather we didn't do this, or if your details have changed, please contact us by any of the methods set out above to let us know. If you enter a competition, prize draw or similar contest we will need you to supply certain details such as your name, postal and e-mail address. We will use this information principally for the purposes of administering the competition in accordance with the rules. If you win the competition we will publish your name and home town (but not your e-mail or full postal address) on the site. This does not affect any rights you may have under data protection or similar laws, to the extent that such rights cannot be excluded or limited by us.
|
