All the fun of a Grease fair
QUESTION Where was the opening beach scene and closing fairground scene in Grease filmed? The film Grease was the top box office hit around the world in 1978, confirming star status for Olivia Newton- John and John Travolta as the leads Sandy and Danny in the clever pastiche of an American high school in the late Fifties.
The opening beach scene was shot in the Leo Carrillo State Beach along the Pacific Coast highway in Malibu, California. The scene opens to the sight and sound of crashing waves, and to the strains of Love Is A Many Splendored Thing.
Sandy and Danny exchange the romantic lines: ‘Danny, I’m going back to Australia, is this the end?’ Danny: ‘Of course not, it’s only the beginning.’
This beach has been featured in many films including John Wayne’s Sands Of Iwo Jima (1949) and director Clint eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima (2006).
The end scene of Grease featured a fairground in the grounds of the John Marshall high School, Los Feliz, Los Angeles, voted the best-looking high school in LA. This school has been seen in many films and TV shows, including Rebel Without A Cause, Pretty In Pink and Uncle Buck. The whole cast are in the scene, singing to the song We Go Together, a faster spoof of the popular doo-wop sound and ramalamading-dong lyrics of that era.
The interior scenes, the classroom and end-of-term prom dance were filmed at the huntingdon high School in LA.
I last saw Grease as a drive-in movie in a field near high Wycombe, and when the song You’re The One That I Want came on, during the ‘Woo woo woo’ parts, all the drivers tooted their horns to it. It was like we were in the drive-in movie featured in the film. It was a real hoot.
Danny Darcy, Reading, Berks.
QUESTION Did the word ‘garage’ exist before cars were invented? AS The motor-car age got under way at the start of the 20th century, a gap opened up in the lexicon for a word for ‘car-storage place’.
Carmakers, eager to make the automobile a status symbol, went to France to polish their terminology. The first garages were large commercially run shelters housing many vehicles.
The word was considered foreign enough to put between single quotes or italicised in periodicals, as in the January 11, 1902, edition of the Daily Mail, which reported: ‘The new “garage” founded by Mr harrington Moore, hon. secretary of the Automobile club, which is situated at the city end of Queen Victoria Street, has accommodation for 80 cars.’
Other early but unsuccessful synonyms were the ‘motor stable’ or ‘station’.
It was not long before houses got more personalised garages, and the application to an establishment where vehicle repairs are carried out and fuel sold followed.
The French word garage is itself a derivative of the verb garer, which originally meant ‘dock ships’ and comes from the Old French garer, to ‘protect, defend’.
Bob Holdsworth, Sheffield.
QUESTION Why did the postwar British government waste millions on planting groundnuts in Tanzania and on egg production in Gambia? The Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) was established in 1947 as an arm of the Colonial Office, with access to £100 million. It was implemented by Clement Attlee’s Labour government and aimed to prevent colonial unrest by creating jobs and sowing the economic conditions for self-government.
The plan was to grow peanuts as a contribution to the African and British economies and to alleviate a world shortage of fats. It called for the clearing of five million acres of land in the first five years and the creation of a deep-water port and railway.
It was expected to create 32,000 jobs for African workers. But the scheme was illplanned, failed to allow for the area’s soil and rainfall, and employed unsuitable agricultural methods, including the wrong kind of machinery for the terrain.
Local traditions and attitudes were not taken into account.
By 1950 it had completely collapsed with staggering debts of £36.5 million (about £1 billion in today’s money).
In a similar vein, the £1 million Gambia Poultry Scheme was designed to produce 20 million eggs a year for the British market, and about £1 million of dressed poultry. It was the brainchild of Lord Trefgarne, who had been persuaded it would work by an American colleague.
The project was launched without adequate consultation or a pilot scheme to discover whether the poultry could be kept in healthy production in the colony. By 1951 a negligible quantity of poultry and just 38,000 eggs had arrived on British shores, and most of the chickens had been killed by typhoid.
Alan Lennox-Boyd, Conservative MP for mid-Bedfordshire, argued in Parliament that for the same money British farmers could have produced 72 million eggs. he further pointed out the supreme irony that Gambia was particularly well suited to producing groundnuts and already exported 60,000 tons each year.
Mr T. Ward, Wolverhampton.
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