WATCH THIS SPACE
Fascinating collection of photographs really is out of this world
IT’S all a bit hazy by now – was it the launch of Sputnik in 1957 or Telstar in 1962 that fired my imagination? – either way, like many other children of the so-called Space Race generation, such romantic and exciting exploration turned me into a science fiction addict.
I devoured everything in the school library, from Isaac Asimov’s rules for robots to the pulp fiction of Arthur Zagat, but no one caught the bug so badly as Ronnie Bedford.
When he was 14, the Yorkshire lad was given a copy of the H.G. Wells novel The First Men in the Moon.
It tells the story of a journey undertaken by the narrator, a writer named Mr Bedford, and an eccentric scientist, Mr Cavor. They discover that the Moon is inhabited by creatures they christen “mooncalves”, describing them as “great beasts” and “monsters of mere fatness” that are tended by sophisticated, five-foothigh, insect-like extra-terrestrials they call “Selenites”.
The Selenites capture the two explorers and only Bedford lives to tell the tale in a story he writes and subsequently publishes in The Spectator.
Young Ronnie, blind in one eye from birth, poorly sighted in his other and with a speech defect from a cleft palate, was inspired. Shrugging off his handicaps and determined to become a journalist, he rose through the ranks to become Science Editor of the Daily and Sunday Mirror, roles he held from 1962 to 1986.
He gave millions of readers first-hand accounts from the control rooms or press tables at Cape Canaveral and Houston.
He covered such momentous events as the first circumnavigation of the Moon and return by Apollo 8; the first Moon landing by Apollo 11; the epic flight of the mission that never reached the lunar surface by Apollo 13; the first motor car to be driven on the Moon from Apollo 15; the last manned mission in Apollo 17 and their respective splashdowns.
Collectors of space ephemera have a hard time finding original and authentic material in this country, but throughout his career with the Mirror – from well before Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight in 1961 until his retirement in 1986 – Ronnie was uniquely placed to create a collection gathered first hand.
He chronicled everything and now his fascinating archive is to be sold.
Around 450 folders, contained in 23 ring binders, feature mostly official and many other portrait photographs of US, Soviet and European astronauts and cosmonauts, many of them signed.
All archived in alphabetical order, they are accompanied by more than 200 miscellaneous space-related photographs, many of them NASA originals, illustrating decades of historic space exploration events.
The collection is a magnum opus representing a career-long determination to record every detail of the men and women involved in the Space Race.
In addition to portraits of such famous names as Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova (the first man and woman in space); Alan Shepard (the first American in space) and John Glenn (the first American to orbit the Earth), both of which are signed; Neil Armstrong (the first man to set foot on the Moon) and Aleksei Leonov (the first human to undertake a spacewalk), the archive includes portraits of scientists, mission specialists and military officials, NASA press releases relating to Apollo shuttle lift-offs, numerous Moon surface images, negatives, posters and other ephemera.
To be sold as one lot, it is expected to sell for £6,000 to £8,000, but could make more, particularly in the face of museum or institutional bidding.
Ronald G. Bedford OBE – awarded for his services to journalism in the New Year’s Honours of 1982 – was born in 1921 in Walton, near Wakefield, the only child of a railway footplateman. He was educated at Wakefield Academy and learned to play the piano, winning the open class for under-14s at the 1934 London Musical Festival.
He subsequently joined two jazz bands and continued to play throughout his life wherever there was a piano, be it at a Fleet Street pub or the South Pole. He said it opened many doors for him.
He began his career in journalism running errands and sweeping the printroom floor at the Wakefield Express, before being taken on as a junior reporter at the town’s South Elmsall and Hemsworth Express.
Rejected for call-up in the Second World War owing to his disabilities, he joined the editorial staff of the Daily Mirror in Manchester in 1943, moving to Fleet Street two years later as a feature writer with Reuters.
He was appointed the news agency’s chief reporter (UK) in 1946, but returned to the Mirror in London in 1947 as a feature writer, switching in 1950 to scientific and medical news stories. He was made Science Editor in 1962.
In addition to his coverage of space exploration, he reported on other memorable milestones: the development of peaceful uses of atomic energy; the discovery of the DNA double helix; the first heart and organ transplants and creation of “test-tube” babies by IVF.
He was also instrumental in getting the Corneal Graft Act of 1952 onto the statute book, legislation that was understandably dear to his heart.
His quest for stories took him to the Sahara where engineers were searching for oil and natural gas; India to visit research stations; Greenland and Alaskan sites of missile earlywarning radar installations and medical and scientific centres in Israel, Japan, Australia and French Guiana.
His skill was his innate ability to make the most complex technical detail understandable and interesting to the man in the street.
Ronnie was also a member of the Association of British Science Writers, and a founder member and chairman from 1977 to 1980 of the Medical Journalists’ Association, whose members presented him with a special achievement award some 20 years after had retired.
In his later years he wrote for BMA News and the British Medical Association newsletter, but arthritis and worsening sight blighted his final years, spent in Broadstairs, Kent.