There sometimes news items that render you first still then call to someelse's attention. In Nov 1963 I was in hospital when the news of JFK broke. Being by the tea trolley and alone with the TV at the time, I only told the nurses but word soon spread and probably setting back several people's healing progress in the hushed gloom of reflection that followed.

Of course for my parents generation one such event was 3rd September 1939 and the declaration of war: ".... I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, as so consequently, this country is now at war with Germany." My mother was only 14 years old at the time but she always recalled it vividly: that her mother said how old and tired Mister Chamberlain sounded, and how sorry she felt for him after all his efforts for peace - her father apparently just said something like " Oh no, here we go again". But there wasn't any need to tell anyone ... I think virtually the whole country was glued to the wireless that particular Sunday morning.

In the same vein in 1968 (when I was 7) I clearly remember my mother coming into the garage, where I was helping my father while he tinkered with the car, to say that she'd just heard the news that Russia had invaded Czechoslovakia. My father similarly said something like: "Oh no - that's like how it started last time, with Hitler" ... and picking up on the mood of anxiety, and knowing how my parents had suffered in WW2 - I promptly burst into tears!

I can still remember exactly where I was and how I received the news that Walt Disney had died.

By which you suggest that this is a childish topic? Or - no I'll end there!

No.

Ah!

I remember the Cuban missile crisis - the moment the convoy turned back when intercepted by US warships, the deaths of John & Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, and watching the cranes dip in salute as the Havengore took Churchill's body along the Thames.

Yup, all of those Gil and also hearing that George VI had died when the headmaster came into the classroom, told us the news, and then we all stood up and sang 'God save the Queen'.
Not as long ago, on 9/11, I was at an inservice day at work when a colleague's daughter called to tell us to switch on the TV and watch the start of WWIII. Although she had a different kind of war in mind..........

We'd just been taken over, so were at the new site when the member of the Systems Dept left at the old HQ, who had nothing to do if nothing went wrong, emailed us to tell us a plane had hit the WTC, get on line & watch the coverage, so we saw the second plane impact in real time (up to then it was thought to be a tragic accident). Don't remember GVI's death but we got our first telly for the coronation - half the street came round to watch.



Aberfan. Waiting to go in to tea at boarding school when we heard about that one.

Also at tea, same school, Lord Home taking over from Makk-Mil-Enh as Party Supremo. That was thought to be sufficiently important for The Usher to announce it to us.

First messed up quote opportunity from the moon.

My earliest memory of a major event was the moon landing, although I'm sure the memory had more to do with the school hiring a TV for the day and being allowed to skip lessons to watch it, an extra special treat.

Mmm I remember being at home and watching Australian troops land in Vietnam and just moving into my first flat when we heard of the shooting of John Lennon.

Edit. 9/11 we saw first on the internet and just before we were due to meet American friends for coffee. I remember their shock most of all when we told them, it was totally inconceivable to them that such a thing could happen on US soil. Those sort of things just happened to others, not Americans.

The moon landing, yes.... but what were you doing at school, ID... we (me and family) were on holiday, staying in a self-catering cottage on a farm in Northumberland (just down the road from Flodden Field). But I do remember we hurried back from visiting Alnwick castle or somewhere like that, just to watch it on the tiny black and white TV that came with the place. The funny thing is though, while I was interested in science and space and all that... I don't think it made that much impression on me at the time.

I went to school in Australia MM, July being the middle of winter there.

Doh! Of course.

I knew you went to school in Aus' but that seasonal difference never occurred to me! Am I thick or what?!

EDIT : How Anglo-centric can you get, eh? The next thing you'll be telling me is that Mr Armstrong didn't put his foot down at 18:05 British Summer Time - and that I was actually watching news repeats! So much for historic news.

Meles meles wrote:

But I do remember we hurried back from visiting Alnwick castle or somewhere like that, just to watch it on the tiny black and white TV that came with the place.

What were you all doing in Alnwick castle at 2:30 in the morning?

I didn't get to see the first man on the moon until they repeated the highlights next day on TV. Never forgave Armstrong for that one - didn't he know I had been assidiously following every garbled peep of his up to then? He could at least have checked with me first about bedtime ...

What we were up to at Hogwarts, sorry Alnwick Castle, at 2:30 am is our own affair... suffice it to say if I'd had Miss Grainger's 'Time-Turner' (or whatever it was called) I would have been back in front of the TV for the live coverage.... ready for Neil to fluff his one big, really Big line.

Pretty sure I heard it live - no telly at that time, so it would have been radio.

I'm fairly sure our coverage was live, sometime in the late morning I think it was. Australia is about 10hrs ahead of the UK.

In the UK and Ireland he fluffed his line at 02:39am. Landing on the moon with The Eagle was better - that I remember seeing live on a Sunday evening.

Over here Armstrong came down the ladder about 3am, we were sitting up in bed watching having rigged up the TV in the bedroom with a dodgy portable aerial and taking turns to have a doze while we waited for the big moment.
I also remember seeing the first transatlantic satellite broadcast while on holiday in Jersey in '62. What the broadcast consisted of, I have absolutely no recollection, I just recall a very murky picture and rather a lot of 'It's just coming, oh no, it's not' going on.

Why did Armstrong wait 21 minutes before coming down the ladder in Scotland?

Arranging his kilt - it was the wrong tartan first time.

I passed my driving test in 1969 while they were on their way to the moon.

I watched Neil stepping out live on TV, and the foreman I was working for at the time told me it was all nonsense, 'cos it was not mentioned in the Bible, so it could not have happened.

It was a long time ago and I didn't make a note of the time! However, the infallible Wiki says we are both wrong

Quote :

The actual night of the moon landings on 20/21 July was also historic for British TV, as it was the first ever all-night broadcast on British television, with both BBC1 and ITV remaining on air for 11 hours from 11.30 p.m. (20 July) to 10.30 a.m. (21 July). Neil Armstrong stepped on to the surface of the moon at 3:56 a.m. British time. His comments were interspersed with commentary from James Burke, often to fill in the silences.

so there!

Good old Wikimissleadia has Neil placing his precious boot on the surface of the moon at 2.56UTC on 21 July 1969.

Had to look up UTC and found that it is Co-ordinated Universal Time, which is very confusing and even worse, it is apparently based on International Atomic Time! Have absolutely no idea how any of that relates to time in Australia, UK, or anywhere else really.

My memory is that I was in my room listening to the radio when the moon landing took place, and I think of it as mid-afternoon. But the memory is vague.

When Winston Churchill died we were shearing and I was helping my father. I think that might have been the time when he wasn't feeling well and got me to shear about 50 sheep - that took a very long time since I wasn't particularly adept at it. But we got there.

And I woke up to the news of 9/11 on the radio; I remember saying a little sleepily that thousands of people had been killed in America, and then worrying whether it meant my sons would have to go to war. My husband said No but he'd have probably said that no matter what the circumstances at that time of day.

I remember hearing of Elvis's death too - my eldest son was just three months old. The Erebusdisaster of 1979 has remained in my memory when 257 people were killed when the plane hit a mountain - my husband wandered down the hall, saying they couldn't find the plane. It seemed to me an odd thing to bother him - he didn't usually concern himself with small plane crashes. Till then I hadn't heard the Antarctic flight was late.

But some things oddly don't stay in the memory. At Easter 1968 the Wahine went down in Wellington Harbour, killing over 50 people, and I have very little recollection of this happening. I would have just started university and maybe was going home for the holiday time.

And one I remember quite clearly was more local. A viewing platform collapsed and killed 14 students studying at the local Polytech. I had been up town that lunchtime and a shop assistant and I wondered why there were so many ambulances around and decided there must be a training exercise on. It was only when I got home that I heard what was happening. I remember fuming because the local radio station told us of this tragedy (admittedly not knowing the extent of deaths) and followed with a very loud aggressive advertisement for something trivial. I complained but never received an answer. It was the year my son went to Russia as an AFS student and everyone said how brave we were to let him go; it seemed ironic that it was in our own backyard that students died.

All my memories seem to be of disasters rather than achievements. But Priscilla's opening scenario did rather invite that, I think.

One of the great lines in reporting was Brian Hanrahan from the Falklands Task Force "I counted them all out and I counted them all back", after the first Sea Harrier mission.

So, according to Wiki, poor Armstrong was up and down the ladder like a hoor's knickers. Good job for him he wasn't really in a kilt!

The Hanrahan comment was cited almost immediately on the BBC news as one of those lines which will go down in history. I was watching the news bulletin when they said it while sitting in a Dublin pub, to which the lad sitting next to me at the bar muttered audibly into his Guinness, "Christ, we're in trouble now. The Brits have learnt to count!"

(Not verbatim, you understand. He used stronger language but I don't dare put "hoor" twice in the same post. Oops - just did!)

Nordmann,do you remember the MOD spokesman who gave the daily briefings about the Falklands?. I don't remember his name,but he was like a funeral director,spoke very slowly and deliberately, "In the course of her duties, HMS Sheffield was hit by a missile" [can't remember the exact word]

T.

Ian McDonald was the lad - a real bundle of joy alright.

My father got us up in the middle of the night to watch the moon landings as he said it was history in the making and we should see it. I was working at a bank when 9/11 happened and we were all taken in groups to watch the television so that if customers called we would know what they were talking about.

'Hoor' in Ireland, Nordman, is a bit like 'bastard' in Australia - when it is not an insult, it is a compliment. The voters in the South were so proud of the 'cute hoor' (compliment) politicians who ran the Celtic Tiger, until they ran it into a wall, and now they want to jail the 'hoors' (insult) instead!

I was brought up on a small farm in the deepest countryside, so until about the age of 20 or so, I thought that an 'oul Hoor' was a cow that would not go into the field when told . . .

The Berlin Wall (both its sudden rise in 1961 and its equally sudden fall in 1989) made the news. This week sees the time elapsed since its fall surpass the wall's 28 year history:

The Berlin Wall has now been gone one day longer than the 10,315 days it stood

How the fall of the Wall was reported by the Morning Star:

I'd forgotten about this thread.

Radio announcer Herbert Morrison "Oh, the Humanity":

I clearly remember this one:

Triceratops wrote:

How the fall of the Wall was reported by the Morning Star:

My late father’s take on the fall of the Berlin Wall was equally leftfield but for different reasons. By co-incidence he happened to be on a business research trip to East Berlin on 9th November 1989. He was in a restaurant bar that evening when a murmur arose among the people there as the news came in that the wall had just opened. Gradually the bar emptied as customers (and staff!) headed off to see if it were true. This left my father and a couple of other non East Germans in the deserted establishment debating among themselves whether the end-of-days / zombie-apocalypse scenario there were witnessing somehow entitled them to at least serve themselves the bottles of beer behind the counter. Fortunately they were saved from having to take that step by the manager who returned to say that she had just gone down the road to check on her family at her flat and that the rumour was indeed true. She (and my father and the other 2) then spent the rest of the evening chatting excitedly and nervously about how wunderbar and unmöglich this all was.

Does anyone else recall the 1952 drama about the SS Flying Enterprise? I actually heard the SOS calls when messing about with our radio dials  a war time child who understood the importance of radio. I've just looked it up and was bemused by the odd mixed cargo; among other odd stuff, peat moss?

I’m not familiar with that broadcast P but coincidentally I also have a connection with a maritime disaster involving a ship with the word 'enterprise' in its name. It’s not something I like to recall but I’ve been thinking about it a bit recently for some reason.

In the early afternoon of Friday 6 March 1987 I was on the cliffs above Dover where the Duke of York Military School has its playing fields. The location provides a commanding view of the port below. Ships, ferries and hovercraft etc were coming and going, mainly to and from Calais or Boulogne to the south-east. One ferry, however, had just left port and was heading out north-east. A friend of mine remarked upon this but we didn’t think much of it as Dover is always a very busy port. It was only later that nite when watching the ITN News at Ten that we heard that the Townsend Thoresen ferry Herald of Free Enterprise had capsized on its return journey from Zeebrugge and that that was the self-same ferry which we had seen earlier in the day on its penultimate crossing.

We didn't have a television while my father was alive - he died in 1965, and then I went to live with my aunt and uncle, but we were allowed to watch TV at the hostel where I boarded mid-week. The programme I most remember was a NZ pop half hour called C'Mon. Boyfriends knew not to come before 7.30 when we were at home. My father was most peeved when my aunt (the fore-mentioned one and his favourite sister-in-law) didn't come to Saturday night euchre evenings because she wanted to watch Bonanza.

The main news item I remember was JF Kennedy's assassination in 1962, or more accurately the funeral procession after it. The other funeral procession I remember was that of Aotearoa's PM Norman Kirk in 1974. We passed it on the road (going the other way of course). People were really upset about his sudden death - he was very popular at the time. A Labour politician.

When I was 15 I remember my mother and brother setting off on a school trip by train.  It was on a Thursday "Holy Day" when Catholic schools used to have a holiday (so we could go to mass).  I had the radio on later that day and it said there had been an accident with a train taking some school children on a trip.  Of course I thought is that the train Mum and [my brother's name] are on? I went to see a neighbour.  She rang up - it WAS the train but they said that nobody of our family name had been reported hurt.  It was a terrible shock and it was a long day waiting for my Mum and my brother coming home.  I'd seen my Dad in the interim.  It was in the national news at the time - the accident happened near Cheadle Hulme in Manchester but you don't hear of it nationally now though it's sometimes commemorated locally by people who were alive then.  I think being in that accident may have given my mother a predisposition for the arthritis she developed about three years later - she was healthy before that and I think it scarred her emotionally.  My mother and brother didn't lose life or limb - there were a boy and girl who were killed* and another girl list a leg and a boy lost an arm - or part of one.  He was incredibly brave.

*They were both from quite large families but I don't think their parents or siblings ever really got over the loss.

Vizzer and Caro I remember the loss of The Herald of Free Enterprise and J F Kennedy's assassination though I wasn't there in person for either event - I didn't see the ferry leave port as Vizzer did.  I was at Guides when the news about JFK came out.