BEHIND THE HEADLINES
1937: Amelia Earhart disappears
Aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared on a daring mission in 1937 in what became one of the great mysteries of the 20th century. Your forebears read about the increasingly desperate search for her with growing disappointment, as if she was someone they knew in person.
Earhart’s last great flight was to circumnavigate the world accompanied by a navigator, Captain Fred Noonan. They took off from Miami in Florida on 1 June in a Lockheed Electra which was described as the ‘flying laboratory’ because of its array of up-to-date apparatus.
Earhart arrived in Calcutta on 17 June, having covered more than half her journey, flying at an average of 900 miles a day. On 28 June she was at Port Darwin, Australia. On the last fateful section of the journey she left Lac, New Guinea, on 2 July. She was aiming for Howland Island, 2,500 miles away in the Pacific, on the most hazardous part of the flight.
That afternoon a coastguard ship received a wireless message that Earhart and Noonan had enough fuel for only half an hour’s further flying, and there was no land in sight. Later messages were erratic and undecipherable.
The coastguard ship searched for them as other vessels nearby made speed to find the downed plane. A small fleet of rescue ships set out from Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, including a battleship with three aeroplanes that could be catapulted off the deck to do an air search, but these ships had a
1,900 mile journey ahead of them.
There was considerable hope that they would be rescued as Earhart’s plane had large tanks which would allow it to float. There was a two-person rubber lifeboat on board equipped with lifebelts, a Very pistol (flare gun), a yellow signal kite and emergency food and water.
Over the following days, ships gathered in the huge search area and planes flew overhead. There were reports of signals received by amateur wireless operators, but these were wishful thinking or even hoaxes: if the plane was on water with its engines stilled, it could not send messages.
Days became weeks and reports of the search became less frequent until it was abandoned on 18 July after almost 200,000 square miles of the Pacific had been scanned.
Newspapers printed obituaries of Amelia Earhart and your forebears were reminded of why she was such a popular figure. She was born in Kansas in 1898 and served in the Canadian Red Cross during the First World War. She did social welfare work with children, but her passion was flying. She discovered this when visiting an airfield where a pilot would take members of the public up for a few dollars a ride. Earhart said: “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly.” Earhart did odd jobs to pay for flying lessons and soon showed herself an accomplished and daring flyer. She was the first woman to fly solo across the north American continent and excelled in competitive flying, doing a great deal to influence the public into seeing flying as a woman’s job as well as a man’s. She met her future husband, publisher George P Putnam, through their shared love of flying. She accepted him the sixth time he proposed to her and insisted on an equal marriage with “dual control”. She kept her maiden name for flying activities.
Putnam was able to further his wife’s career by publishing books she wrote about her flying life, and promoting her lecture tours. Her picture was used in mass market endorsements for products such as women’s clothes, luggage and cigarettes.
In 1932, Amelia Earhart was the first woman to make a solo transatlantic flight, in a single engine Lockheed Vega setting off from New Brunswick and arriving almost 15 hours later in Ireland. She put down in a pasture at Culmore where a farm labourer asked her: “Have you flown far?” She replied: “From America.” She became a celebrity in Britain, not only for her flying exploits, but for her fashion sense and product promotions. After her disappearance there were numerous claims to have found wreckage and theories about what had happened to her. Some were fanciful and incorporated a spying mission or capture by the Japanese. Probably the truth was simpler: the task Amelia Earhart and her navigator had set themselves of finding a small island in the middle of the Pacific was too much for the instruments on the plane. They failed to find land, ran out of fuel and crashed in the sea.
Emergency services
The emergency 999 system was introduced this year, though only in London for the time being. It was brought in following a letter to the Times from a man who had tried to call the fire brigade to a blaze but was held in a queue at the telephone exchange. Five women were killed in the burning house.
Dance enthusiasts enjoyed a unique event on 19 January at Sadler’s Wells. In the title role of Giselle, a peasant girl who dies for the love of a nobleman, was 18-year-old Margot Fonteyn. Her original name was Peggy Hookham, but that name was thought to be insufficiently elevated for a prima ballerina. From Reigate in Surrey, she had been preparing for this since she first started taking ballet lessons when she was four.
In a more populist vein, this year also saw the first appearance of Korky the Cat on the
SHE WAS THE FIRST WOMAN TO FLY SOLO ACROSS THE NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT
front page of the two-penny weekly comic the Dandy. Another enduring character who appeared in this first edition was the tough cowboy Desperate Dan who was able to lift a cow with one hand. The pillow of his bed was filled with building rubble and his favourite meal was cow pie, complete with horns.
Popular pastimes
Some grown-up entertainments were linked with hope for the big win that would save them from a life of toil. Between 5 and 7 million people did football pools, forecasting the results of games. Every week there was a spike in the sale of sixpenny and shilling postal orders as people paid to take part in the game and posted their sheets of squared paper to Littlewoods, Vernons or Zetters.
In July this year the former Rector of Stiff key was mauled to death by a lion in Skegness. It gave a suitably colourful end to a career that had entertained newspaper readers for decades. The sometime vicar had been defrocked because of his neglect of his duties in Norfolk while he spent time on ‘rescue work’ with prostitutes and actresses in London and Paris. His appearances at seaside resorts, including being exhibited in a barrel in Blackpool, were accompanied by protestations of his innocence. On the fateful day, he was due to enact the Biblical scene of Daniel coming out unharmed from the lions’ den. The lions had other ideas.
JRR Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, published The Hobbit this year about the respectable Bilbo Baggins, drawn from his comfortable home in the Shire to take a journey in which he must confront evil. The story reflected Tolkein’s experiences in the First World War, but it seemed singularly appropriate for the coming conflict. It was instantly recognised as a superior work, destined to become a classic.
Four out of 10 adults went to the cinema at least once a week at this time. They would have seen Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, together on screen for the first time in Fire Over England, a patriotic film about England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada under Elizabeth I. Patriotism was the flavour of the day. The most popular song was a tribute to the national drink: “I like a nice cup o’ tea in the morning, for to start the day you see, and at ’alf past eleven, well my idea of ’eaven, is a nice cup of tea. I like a nice cup o’ tea with me dinner and a nice cup o’ tea with me tea,” and so on. It was written for the revue Home and Beauty and sung by actress Binnie Hale in a partly ‘refined’ but partly ‘common’ accent that underlined national unity for the anticipated war. Class divisions were to be put aside, everyone was in it together now.