The Yellow Glass (38 page)

[1]
Paul Nash (1889-1946).
 
British artist, a
Modernist and Surrealist greatly influenced by the British landscape.
 
Also a prominent war artist in both WW1 and
WW2, painting some of the most powerful images of war that we have.

[2]
Ernest Bevin (1881-1951).
 
British trade
union leader, Labour politician and statesman.
 
Minister of Labour in the war-time coalition government, where he
improved wages and working conditions for ordinary people.
 
Foreign Secretary in the post-war Labour
government, where he acknowledged that Britain’s efforts to maintain its place
among the global powers, to hold onto its Empire and to subsidise its
considerable armed forces, was leading it towards bankruptcy.
 
Bevin was pragmatic enough to negotiate
financial support from America, to withdraw from India and the Middle East and
to support the beginning of NATO.
 
In
other words, he changed foreign policy in a way that still influences the UK
today.

[3]
John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie (1917-1993).
 
US virtuoso jazz trumpeter, bandleader and composer, known for his skill
at improvisation.

[4]
US
musician Bill Haley (1925-1981) was one of the first white musicians to
popularize rock and roll with his band, Bill Haley & His Comets.
 
Shake,
Rattle and Roll
and
Rock Around the
Clock
struck a chord with the new teenagers all around the world, although
Rock Around the Clock
only took off in
the UK after the release of the first teen high school movie
Blackboard Jungle
in 1955, where it was
played over the opening credits.

[5]
The USA, UK and Canada formed the Manhattan Project to develop and manufacture
the first atomic bombs during WWII.

[6]
Dame Peggy Ashcroft (1907-1991), English actress renowned for her Shakespearean
heroines among many other wonderful performances.
 
She played Viola in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
many times, but Rosa would
have seen the 1950 production at the Old Vic.

[7]
Chesney ‘Chet’ Baker (1929-1988) charismatic US jazz musician associated with
West Coast Jazz.
 
Baker played the
trumpet and flugelhorn, but was also known for his striking vocals.
 

[8]
Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Sir Anthony Eden (1897-1977) British
politicians, Prime Ministers and members of the Conservative party.

[9]
The Marshall Plan (1948-1952), in which the US and Canada gave economic support
to help war-damaged western Europe get back on its feet.

[10]
The Korean War (1950-1953), came about as a result of the division of Korea
after WWII, when Japan surrendered and the Allies created a border between
North and South Korea at the 38
^th
Parallel.
 
Tension mounted when the United Nations sided
with South Korea and Russia and China with North Korea, in a classic Cold War
stand-off.
 

[11]
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), leader of the Soviet Union from the 1920’s until his
death and one of the world’s most murderous dictators.

[12]
British Film Studios.

[13]
Bond.
 
James Bond.
 
Ian Fleming’s superspy owned a pale blue
Aston Martin, of course.

[14]
Sir Joseph Bazelgette (1819-1891) one of Britain’s most celebrated civil
engineers, remembered primarily for designing and building the London sewer
system, thereby saving many lives.
 
Bazelgette began the project after what became known as ‘The Great
Stink’ of 1858 when warm weather produced such a foul miasma from the River
Thames – where all London sewage had hitherto been dumped – that the entire
city was choked.

[15]
Chancery Lane deep shelter was never used by the public but became the
emergency command HQ for various government bodies, including the ‘Inter
Services Research Bureau’- a branch of MI6 that aided the Resistance in
German-occupied countries.
 

[16]
Sir Roger Bannister (born 1929) is an English athlete and doctor who ran the
first mile under four minutes in 1954 (3 minutes 59.4 seconds, to be precise),
while he was also practising as a junior doctor.
 

[17]
The British Board of Film Censors was set up in 1912 to monitor standards in
films nationally.
 
Fears of political
propaganda in the war years changed to concerns over sex and violence in the
1950’s, but, by the 1980’s the name had been changed to the British Board of
Film Classification in an attempt to distance themselves from the idea of
censorship and that name remains today.

[18]
Diana Dors (1931-1984) home-grown, British, blonde bombshell film star.
 
By the mid-Fifties she was known as
‘Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe’.
 
However, being born in 1931, she was only fourteen years younger than
Kathleen.

[19]
Kathleen’s favourite Polish café is actually Daquise, which still remains on
the same site near South Kensington tube station.

[20]
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is a statue of J.M. Barrie’s famous character
by the sculptor Sir George Frampton, which was erected near the Long Water in
1912 at the site in which Peter Pan landed after he flew out of the window in
The Little White Bird
.
 
It has long been a landmark for London
children.

[21]
George Orwell was the pen-name of British author, journalist and essayist Eric
Blair (1903-1950).
 
Best known for his
Socialism and concern with social justice as exemplified in his most famous
novels
, Animal Farm
(1945) and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949), he was also
one of the most important left-wing commentators on all of the political and
cultural issues of his day.
 
In his 1945
essay ‘
You and the Atomic Bomb
’ for
the Tribune newspaper, he discussed the post-war future living in the shadow of
nuclear war, the “peace that is no peace”, which he termed a “permanent cold
war”.
 
This was the first use of the term
to describe relations between the United Nations and the Communist Bloc.

[22]
Punch, or the London Charivari
, was a
British satirical magazine that was first published in 1841 and became
immensely successful.
 
However, by the
Fifties it was in decline and, though it continued to languish in dentist’s
waiting-rooms for the rest of the century, it’s poor circulation figures
finally killed it off for good in 2002.

[23]
Kingston Upon Hull was bombed heavily by the Nazis throughout the Second World
War, being an easy target on the North East Coast of Britain, with docks and
heavy industry located in the heart of the city.
 
95% of all buildings were damaged, which made
it the worst affected city after London.

[24]
Richard Burton (1925-1984) and Claire Bloom (born 1931) starred in
Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
at the Old Vic
theatre in 1953/1954.

[25]
Charlie “Bird” Parker (1920-1955) US jazz saxophonist and composer, along with
Dizzy Gillespie, was one of the inventors of bebop.
 
Parker died in March 1955, just before this
book begins.

[26]
Johnny Ray (1927-1990), US singer, songwriter and pianist, one of the first
white teen idols before the advent of Elvis Presley.
 
Ray sold millions of records in the 1950’s,
particularly 1952’s
Cry
and
The Little White Cloud That Cried
.
 
When he performed he would often fall to the
floor or cry with emotion, producing hysteria in his young audience.

[27]
Art Blakey (1919-1990) US jazz drummer and bandleader.
 
His brand of ‘hard bop’ added influences from
blues and gospel to jazz with a rhythmic drumbeat that eventually led to
‘funk’.

[28]
Bernard “Acker” Bilk (born 1929), English jazz clarinettist and vocalist.
 
Acker Bilk was part of the traditional,
easy-listening, type of jazz that became popular in the Fifties.
 
He and his band - sporting their striped
waistcoats and bowler hats - would have been familiar on the London jazz
circuit
 
in 1955, although they were yet
to experience the international success that came in 1962 with
Stranger on the Shore
.

[29]
Myxomatosis is a disease that specifically kills rabbits.
 
It began in South America, spread through
Australia and was deliberately introduced in France to control the rabbit
population, from where it spread like wildfire to the UK.
 
By 1955, 95% of UK rabbits were dead and
there had been little or no attempt to find a cure.
 
While a vaccine is now available for tame
rabbits, wild rabbits can still suffer myxomatosis, despite increasing immunity
to the disease.

[30]
 
This is where I admit that I’ve stolen the
houses and given them false identities.
 
White Cliffs
was one of four houses left
on the beach at St Margaret’s Bay after the war.
 
When playwright and actor Noel Coward
(1899-1973) bought it in 1945, it had suffered after being used by the army,
but he and his friends refurbished it and he spent six happy years there.
 
Coward loved being so close to the elements
and so did his many famous friends, including film star Katharine Hepburn
(1907-2003), who regularly swam in the cold sea.
 
In 1951 he sold it to another friend, the
author Ian Fleming (1908-1964), who already had ties with the Kent Coast,
living nearby and playing golf at Royal St George’s club in Sandwich.
 
Fleming lived at White Cliffs until 1957 and
set the entirety of his 1955 James Bond novel
Moonraker
in the area
.
(See
excellent website
www.dovermuseum.co.uk
for further info.)

[31]
Doctor in the House
was a UK box-office
smash in 1954, a British comedy adapted from the
Doctor
series of books written by real-life surgeon, Richard Gordon
(born 1921).
 
It was the first in a
series of seven films set in a fictional hospital and it made a star out of
Dirk Bogarde (1921-1999), the British actor and writer who began his career as
a matinee idol, but gravitated to acting in art-house films, such as
The Night Porter
(1974).

[32]
The Belles of St Trinians
came out in
1954, the first of a series of films about the anarchic girl’s school, which
were developed from the work of British satirical cartoonist and artist Ronald
Searle (1920-2011).

[33]
Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was a Finnish author, artist and cartoonist.
 
Finn
Family Moomintroll
(1948) was the third of her many books for children
about a family of round, white trolls - the Moomins – and centred around the
discovery of a magician’s hat.
 

[34]
Gone with the Wind
(1936), written by US
author Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was made into the enormously successful
film of 1939.

[35]
Georges Simenon (1903-1989), prolific Belgian writer best known for his
detective fiction featuring the calm and tenacious Parisian Inspector Maigret.

[36]
Bulldog Drummond was a fictional character in the book of the same name by
British author H.C. Macneile, writing under the pen-name ‘Sapper’
(1888-1937).
 
Drummond was a “Detective,
patriot, hero and gentleman!”
 
He
appeared in many thrilling adventures, which continued to be written by others
long after Sapper’s death.