FROM THE ARCHIVE
Continuing our tour of high spots and forgotten corners of five eventful decades, as seen in the pages of The Sunday Telegraph
To celebrate its first birthday, The Sunday Telegraph ran a short quiz about a British institution of rather longer standing, having first appeared 150 years earlier – namely Charles Dickens, “who stirred the conscience of the country with his books and wished ‘to leave his hand lastingly upon time’.” But as this was the 1960s, the quiz, aimed squarely at the paper’s younger readers, was headlined, with all the cool of a dad at a disco: “Do you dig Dickens?”
The paper was clearly in a mood to “get down with the kids”, and also cleared space on the front page for sad news about one of the era’s most popular children’s entertainers having been taken ill during a live performance. “Coco the clown is under observation at a London hospital,” the report began. “His condition is described as ‘not serious’. On admission to hospital, he was thought to be suffering from bronchitis.” However “not serious” he was, the thought of Coco the coughing clown was enough to put an upside-down smile on every child’s face.
Coco’s lot had not been a happy one, as the report outlined. “Crippled in a road accident some time ago, he had taken little part in circus work, but appeared occasionally with Bertram Mills during their Christmas season at Olympia. Shortly before the end of the show last night, Coco – Russian-born Nicolai Poliakoff, 62 – became ill.” Such was the nation’s affection for Coco that Poliakoff (who was actually born in Latvia) was awarded the OBE by the Queen for the road safety work he had done, touring around Britain’s schools.
The Sunday Telegraph followed in his oversized and safety-conscious footsteps with a strident column by Ann Dally, the paper’s medical writer, about the need to stamp out underage smoking. Beneath the headline “If your children must smoke…”, Dr Dally argued that “as parents we ought to be able at least to prevent our children from literally smoking themselves to death”.
“Smoking cigarettes is often regarded as clever and grown-up, worldly and sexy. And young people don’t worry much about what may come in 20 years’ time.
“I spoke to a boy of 18 the other day. He already smokes 20 cigarettes a day. ‘I’m not worried,’ he said. ‘There is only one chance in eight that I’ll even get cancer.’ One in eight! Seems an awful lot to me – enough to make me determined to do all I can to see that my children don’t take the risk.”
So what could be done? Dr Dally – who famously suggested that heroin addicts be supplied with methadone – knew what wouldn’t work. “One can, of course, forbid one’s children to smoke. Such a course would be the surest way to turn many of them into smokers. One can bribe them. This was fashionable when I was a child. The trouble is that once the promised sum of money is handed over, say, at 21, all obligation ceases. And if one smokes oneself, preaching to them isn’t likely to be successful.”
She did, finally, offer one practical – if unconventional – solution to curb the cigarette habit. “If they feel they must smoke, cigars and pipes are much less dangerous.”
What we need is an extremity of suffering. The British are brought back to life by adversity.