Remember, Remember...

 

It may seem hard to credit in an age when every supermarket is piled high with pumpkins around mid-October, but back in the 1960s, in Britain, there was no Halloween industry: no orange and black decorations, no ‘creepy comestibles’, no dressing up as witches, ghosts or zombies, nothing. The season was still essentially a religious festival, the Eve of All Hallows; and barring a few nods to the gothic such as an occasional item on Blue Peter, or a spooky Jackanory, it tended to pass off quite uneventfully. By the age of nine or ten, I knew about ‘apple bobbing’ (and if you didn’t have a barrel, a plastic washing-up bowl would do), and I’d seen pumpkin carving done on Blue Peter... but did you ever go looking for a pumpkin in Britain in the 1960s? There weren’t any. Maybe a few specialist farmers and gardeners grew their own, but on nothing like a commercial scale. Our mum tried make a Jack-O-Lantern out of a turnip. It wasn’t quite the same, plus you had to actually hollow the thing out. Halloween was something we did projects about at school, but we definitely did not dress up and go from house to house begging for sweets. Trick or Treat did not exist.

I first encountered the concept in a Peanuts comic strip collection, where it felt as alien and un-British as the schoolroom ‘show and tell’ sessions also seen in Charles M. Schulz’s cartoons. Judging from depictions in popular culture, the whole phenomenon of Halloween as a kind of celebratory holiday had been firmly entrenched in America since at least the 1940s, but Britain, even in the 1960s, remained strangely resistant. Perhaps it was because we had our own, home-grown late autumn event in the form of Bonfire Night, which incorporated various aspects of what any American youngster would think of as Halloween celebrations... the wearing of masks (predominantly styled after Guy Fawkes, but also depicting various horror characters) and canvassing for money on the streets, which in Britain took the form of ‘penny for the guy.’

I doubt anyone beneath the age of 40 has ever seen this taking place, and coming from an aspirational middle-class family, I didn’t participate myself, but I do remember seeing kids of a certain stripe (‘from the council estate’ as our mum would say) pushing guys in barrows around the streets in hope of soliciting money from strangers. The guys were usually fairly rudimentary, consisting of a bunch of old clothes, stuffed with newspapers, and topped with one of the green papier-maché Guy Fawkes masks you could buy in Woolworths. They tended to be pushed around in hand carts of home-made origin, essentially an old fruit crate with pram wheels... sometimes the whole pram, rusty and long past its prime, would itself be pressed into service.

Unlike the average Trick or Treater, who can usually be fobbed off with a fun-size Milky Way, the Penny-for-the-Guy brigade were after your money, and they wanted it to buy fireworks – an alarming reminder that there was then no age restriction on the sale of pyrotechnics. Any of the ranges of small to medium sized garden fireworks could be bought over the counter by any child in possession of sufficient funds.

This state of affairs remained unchallenged until relatively recently, but from the late 60s onwards, the media began a long campaign aimed at raising awareness of firework accidents and ultimately changing legislation governing their sale. The move was spearheaded by the BBC's Man Alive film of 1968, Remember Remember, which included graphic film of children who had suffered firework-related accidents. I saw the programme on at least two occasions (It was much repeated) and it certainly helped to change the way I thought about what had formerly seemed like an innocent back garden entertainent.

In 1970, the BBC's Nationwide showed us how certain children's comics were still setting a bad example with depictions of firework mayhem in various forms. The item included a page from a firework number of Whizzer and Chips wherein Ginger (a tom cat) proposed some manner of mischief with the aid of a ‘Mount Vesuivius firework.’ Where would the madness end? In hospital, of course...

The Central Office of Information weighed in with a series of public information films dealing with the dangers of fireworks, but their sombre little films were utterly eclipsed by a chorus of advertising jingles, of which the most memorable was ‘light up the sky with Standard Fireworks’. I can still sing it to this day.

Personally, I never did ‘fool with fireworks’ as the COI had it. I wasn’t actually afraid of them, like the lad two doors down our street, who used to watch our displays from his bedroom window, but I had enough sense to leave them to the grown-ups. Sparklers were okay (and the COI’s ad illustrated them in the hands of children), but I remember being astonished to see some of the smaller ‘fountain’ type garden fireworks declaring that they could be held in the hand.

For me, the appeal of fireworks was twofold. Firstly, you got to look at the wrappings, the design of which must have kept several graphics departments in gainful employment for decades. The formula was simple: two or three-colour separated artwork in bright shades of red, yellow, green and blue, stylised sparks, floral explosions and the name spelled out in exciting jagged lettering. Alonside the familiar Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels, an average selection box might contain such goodies as ‘Flower Pot’ (multi-coloured floral type popping stars), ‘Traffic Light’ (a kind of signal flare that started by emitting red smoke before shading into amber and green), ‘Screech Owl’ (a cross between a garden firework and a rocket which, when lit, took off on a small plastic wing, – resembling a V1 rocket – and emitted a piercing shriek) and the triangular ‘Mount Vesuivus’ type from which you got a fountain of golden sparks. 

 

The examples above (scanned from Robert Opie’s excellent ‘1950s Scrapbook’) are entirely typical of the types that were on sale in the 1960s and 70s, and their appearance had most likely not changed in several decades. I liked these designs so much that, on November 6^th, I would sometimes collect the burned-out husks from the garden and, on at least one occasion, brought them into the house where our mum allowed them to be displayed on the fireplace for a day or so – until the smell of sulphur necessitated their removal.

Our dad took charge of the actual business of lighting fireworks and the occasional building of bonfires: you had to take care not to set the fence on fire, if your Catherine Wheel hadn’t already done so. For years, one fence post in our garden bore the scorch marks of a stalled Catherine Wheel.

The fireworks themselves were never disappointing. Those on sale today seem to be over in mere seconds, whereas I remember getting a good long show of sparks from most of the ‘stick it in the flowerbed’ varieties, and one particularly explosive example sent us all scurrying around the side of the house to take shelter. Rockets, however, were always a let-down, and never equalled the huge blossoming explosions you saw at organised displays. It was a fair few years before I attended one of these local events, held in a nearby farmer’s field, with a huge bonfire and a few stalls selling hot dogs and baked potatoes – the latter subequently becoming a November 5^th tradition in our house, long after we’d lost interest in the actual fireworks

As mentioned above, most British comic papers tended to offer a ‘firework number’ on the week of November 5^th but by the late 60s the tradition was tending to fizzle out (if you’ll pardon the pun), in a move that reflected growing awareness of firework accidents amongst children. Nationwide’s feature shaming IPC’s Whizzer and Chips had appeared in 1970, and the following year, D.C. Thompson’s 4^th November dated edition of The Beano contained not a single reference to fireworks. My own personal favourite firework ‘text’, if you will, was a strip book from Enid Blyton's now forgotten Mary Mouse series, charmingly illustrated in naive pen-and-ink by watercolourist Olive F. Openshaw. When the doll’s house family children Melia, Pip and Roundy decide to hide their illicit box of fireworks up on the roof next to the chimney, you just know it's not going to end well...

 

Happily none of our own fireworks ever went awry, and the worst we suffered was an occasional ‘damp squib’. But Bonfire Night itself could, occasionally, be a washout. This was the case in 1966, when our dad came home with a box intriguingly labelled ‘indoor fireworks.’ These appear to have been more of a Boxing Day tradition and were mostly about as interesting as watching a smouldering cigarette. Some of them were, indeed, merely matches that flared for fractionally longer than the average Swan Vesta. The one that remains in my mind was called ‘snake in the grass’, and when lit, created a long, coiling serpent of brown gunk that looked like something an errant pet might leave on the hearthrug...

From the early 70s onwards, media scare tactics began slowly to diminish the appeal of Bonfire Night as an event for children, and as the years went by, other Guy Fawkes traditions like masks and penny-for-the-guy have dwindled away. But popular culture abohors a vacuum and the way was now clear for the wholesale importation of Halloween in its American incarnation. Bonfire Night lingers on, but increasingly in the shadow of All Hallows. What was once an officially sanctioned day of public celebration has become a simple social occasion: and with the prospect of organised bonfires unlikely under the present climate, 2020 could prove to be a genuine ‘firebreak’ that could well end the four-hundred-and-fifteen year old festivities for good. Fireworks will, of course, never go away, but since the millennium they’ve become increasingly associated with New Year’s Eve. And the stylised face of Guy Fawkes is now a symbol of anti-establishment protest, which almost brings us back to square one. 

Thunderbirds Toys, for Girls and Boys...

 

...such was the slogan appearing on a series of lavishly-painted advertisements designed to sell Thunderbird models to young fans of the series. Possibly the easiest marketing gig ever, with an audience of youngsters fairly drooling to get their hands on plastic replicas of their favourite craft...

* * *

1966 was truly the year of Thunderbirds... the year in which Gerry Anderson’s greatest success was consolidated across every available medium of popular culture. By the end of the year, International Rescue, its hardware and characters had appeared in books, comics, annuals, trading cards (from manfacturers of bubble gum and what were then still referred to as ‘sweet cigarettes’), jigsaws, rub-down transfers, plasticene moulding sets; on breakfast cereal packets, bars of chocolate and any number of other commercial products. An enterprising retailer could easily have opened a store selling nothing but Thunderbirds-branded items and, for a year or two, done very well out of it. Profit margins were Go! Never mind the secrets of International Rescue, the Hood would have done better by stealing their mechandising rights...

At the age of four-going-on-five, I was firmly in the crosshairs of those merchandisers with en eye to flogging Thunderbirds tat. Not all of it was tat, mind. In fact, most of the toys that found their way into our house were thoughtfully designed realistic representations of the hero craft.

At first, however, young fans of the series had to play a waiting game. Surprising as it may seem in these days of excessive character merchandising, there would be no Thunderbirds toys in the shops in time for Christmas 1965 – Thunderbird One opened the batting in January of 1966. So what was the average young fan to do? We wanted to play at Thunderbirds, but to do so, we had to use our imaginations. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was forced to improvise, using whatever futuristic toys I already had available. A Triang model of a Gloster Javelin – which, with its delta wings looked nothing at all like Thunderbird One – stood in for the hero craft just as a plastic aeroplane had once filled in for Fireball XL5. J. Rosenthal toys – who would soon be bringing officially-licensed Thunderbirds products to the shops – had a lorry-mounted spacecraft on the market at around this time which, with its three wing-mounted rocket nacelles was a passable imitation of Thunderbird 3 (and of course a rocket on the back of a lorry would soon become the subject of an entire Thunderbirds episode). 

Ready to drill all the way to the sun... Somportex cards's unique Mole/Sunprobe hybrid features in this selection of the first series of Thunderbirds gum cards.

Bubble gum cards were among the first bona fide items of Thunderbirds merchandise to appear, featuring a range of occasionally odd photographs from the series (what, we asked ourselves, was Sunprobe doing sitting on the tractor unit of the Mole?) The backs of these cards made up into a jigsaw depicting another early entry in the merchandising fray, the 7” EP record Introducing Thunderbirds, which reached the shops (and our BSR record player) in October 1965. The sleeve, featuring a colour photo of TB1 (the first I’d ever seen) was great, but I never thought much of the actual record – it wasn’t a proper Thunderbirds adventure: there was no rescue; no Scott, Virgil or even Brains; just Jeff talking to Lady Penelope and Parker. But better things were on the horizon...

The second set of Thunderbirds gum cards, issued in 1966, featured colour photographs. I'm still waiting to see the episode with the monster (this, in fact, was one of a series of stills specially shot for use in TV Century 21 and related publications).

Oddly enough, it wasn’t any of the actual Thunderbirds that I asked for at Christmas of 1965. What I wanted most of all was a model of the Fireflash airliner, whose two appearances in the series had clearly left a huge impression. Our dad gamely tried, and most likely asked the kindly ladies who ran Osborne’s Toy Shop in Lichfield only to be told: sorry, no Fireflash... As compensation, he bought me a model of the most futuristic real-world aircraft of the day – the Tactical Strike and Reconnaissance nuclear bomber TSR-2, whose anti-flash white paint job and streamlined wings gave it a certain Fireflash-y quality, never mind that its real mission was to deliver armageddon to the Russians. With its sparking, flashing engine nacelles, the TSR-2 was nevertheless a cool toy, and I still own it, along with a near-mint, fully functional example.

My Gloster Javelin was eventually retired from service when a plastic model of Thunderbird One finally found its way into my hands. The fuselage was blue, but having only seen the craft in black and white (aside from a couple of colour photos), I saw nothing wrong with this. What was wrong with the toy was the bloody great red wheel below the nose cone, a feature I hated so much that our dad ended up having to remove it with a Stanley knife... the need for wheels on toy aeroplanes and space rockets always bothered me. On JR21’s TB2 toy it was less of an issue, with the friction motor thoughtfully concealed behind the pod, and only a tiny directional wheel below the nose. This duly arrived in our house as soon as it landed in the toy shop. A new one was called for almost immediately after I dropped (and broke) the pod, and managed to mangle one of the retractable legs. USN Sentinel had nothing on a five-year-old child...

Playing at Thunderbirds with toys was a sure way to consign many a fine model to the dustbin. The trouble was, every piece of hardware encountered in the series usually ended up in a million pieces and one’s games tended to reflect this. I can remember smashing up at least one really nice toy in the course of a Thunderbirds game, but fortunately there was always Lego available for the building of something like the Sidewinder, which could be dispatched and rebuilt into some other doomed piece of 21^st Century hardware without the need for another visit to the toyshop.

It took me until March 1967 to acquire a full set of Thunderbirds toys. TB4 was the last to arrive, with JR21’s big plastic battery-operated model coming as a birthday present. I’d previously had a simple motorised kit version (built, like all my other model kits by our dad on a wet Saturday afternoon), and a smaller, snap-together model (hey, even I could do that!) acquired as a send-away offer from Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, and perfectly scaled to fit inside the pod of JR21’s TB2. Of the models then on the market, I had every one bar the motorised TB1, examples of which I still eye speculatively on ebay. The only real disappointment among them was what I’ll refer to as the ‘comedy Thunderbird 5’: it certainly amused us, spinning around on the floor with its unrealistic lights flashing whilst inside John Tracy must have been getting thoroughly sick... I’ve often wondered whether this hadn’t started life as a generic flying saucer toy, requiring the mere grafting-on of TB3’s docking annexe in order to do double duty as International Rescue’s space monitor...

Late '66 or early '67 also saw the arrival – and immediate disappearance from toyshops – of a range of Thunderbirds 'dolls' (or action figures as we'd call them today). These were clearly taking a line from Palitoy's hugely successful Action Man who had debuted in the spring of 1966. A lad in our class at school brought in a Scott Tracy example, which remains the only one I've ever seen to date. By the time we got down to the toyshop, every Tracy Brother was sold out with the exception of John. Jeff, Brains, Parker and Penelope were all accounted for, but Scott, Virgil, Alan and even Gordon had sold out. John's plastic alter ego bore a very good resemblance to International Rescue's least interesting character, but he was to prove somewhat less enduring than his Action Man inspiration... within a few years the elastic string that held his limbs in place had perished, causing John to go a bit floppy, and eventually go all to pieces. Perhaps he'd inhaled too much OD-60 during that Ocean Pioneer rescue...

 

Sold out across the land... the coveted Scott Tracy figure, a fully poseable (until he falls to bits) Action Man type doll, available in all good toy shops for about ten minutes...

The end of 1966 brought the almost unbelievable excitement of seeing Thunderbirds in colour, at the cinema. The fact that this trip also involved my first journey by rail made for a doubly memorable occasion. The train, despite looking as if it might be bound for Anderbad, was a slight disappointment, as I’d been expecting a proper steam loco rather than the multiple unit deisel that rolled into Lichfield City Station. The film itself did not disappoint (that would come later). I still remember hearing another young audience member telling his parents: ‘there’s Thunderbird One’ when what he was in fact looking at was Zero-X’s Lifting Body One, being trundled out of its hangar. The fool! (I thought to myself). I’d only been introduced to Zero-X a minute ago, but I could already tell it apart from Thunderbird One.

As a model, Zero-X was a cinch to make: all you needed was about six empty cigarette packets, and there were plenty of those to be found around the house with our dad on 20-a-day. All you had to do was sellotape the packs together in a line, then wedge the top of the front one in at an angle to form the MEV (these were Embassy Cigarette packets, which were clearly designed in collaboration with Century 21 toys...) As for Lift Bodies and the heat shield... who needs ‘em? 

We got it all for real a year later when Century 21 toys unveiled what was probably their greatest-ever model, the battery-operated Zero-X toy. I still have it, complete with the original box and all the bits. Okay, it had wheels, but you hardly noticed them. And there were flashing lights, but I was one of those who rarely put batteries in battery-operated toys, preferring to rely on imagination for motive power. When you did put the batteries in, they often stayed there for life. My TB4 still has its original 1967 set of Ever Ready (for Life!) batteries fused into the internal cavity to this day. 

 

Direct from London Airport, via Cape Kennedy... the Matchbox 'Cooper-Jarrett' Inter-State Double Freighter, based on a vehicle from a real life Chicago-based trucking company.

Something I began to notice about Thunderbirds, particularly as more photographs became available to me, was how many items out of my toybox were already in the episodes. A notable model was the Matchbox ‘Inter-State Double Freighter’, which can be seen in both Trapped in the Sky and Sun Probe. Whenever I made up a London Airport model (Lego control tower, TSR-2 Fireflash, etc), this die-cast would appear on the runway alongside an American ambulance, a Ford Galaxie police car and a fire tender (‘Crash crews to centre of 2-9... Roger!’) Add a couple of Lego trees and streetlamps, and you could hardly tell it from the ‘real’ thing. In my imagination, at any rate... 

While Thunderbirds was now all systems go in every toyshop, book retailers were similarly taking advantage of pop culture's biggest merchandising phenomenon since the Daleks... or maybe the Beatles. Thunderbirds had arrived on television a bit too late to capture the Christmas book market of 1965, but the following year saw the publication of a range of paperback books from the Armada imprint, who had already produced a Stingray novel penned by John W. Jennison under his nom de plume, John Theydon. I remained unaware of these until much later, and in any event, they didn't have enough pictures to interest me. Much more in my line was the Thunderbirds Annual which appeared at Christmas 1966 and would be a yearly event for the rest of the decade (finally doubling up with Captain Scarlet in 1969). I can still remember opening this on Christmas morning and gazing at the the inner cover photo of Thunderbird One in its launch bay, the pages still fresh and new with that distinctive 'brand new annual' smell of barely dried printers ink.

In the final part of this retrospective, I'll be looking back to the later years of Thunderbirds... the final foray into cinemas, and the Friday afternoon repeats that felt as if they would never end.