Atomic Target Lancashire

  On March 23rd 1963, the Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe formally adopted a new baby, an adoption that had been six months in the making. Morecambe’s mayor had been to visit the chosen infant at its birthplace, the Vickers Armstrong’s shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness, several times, hoping to get acquainted with his town’s new ward. The mayor found that the newborn girl – her present guardians, the Royal Navy, insisted that she was female – was of gargantuan size and tremendous power; she loomed large at 81 meters long and possessed boundless energy thanks to the S5W nuclear reactor lurking inside her. It was evident that the baby girl had some unpleasant traits, namely that she was belligerent, sneaky and capable of wreaking unimaginable havoc on the world, but Morecambe Town Council's publicity department hoped that these faults could be neatly swept under the carpet with some good PR. The adopted girl’s name was Dreadnought, and she was Britain’s first nuclear submarine. The ...

Wet summers have long been a bone of contention for British holidaymakers, and never more so than during the Cold War. In the late 1950s and early 1960s,  atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons provided a convenient – and arguably accurate – scapegoat upon which to lay the blame for soggy summer months. As mushroom clouds rose in Nevada and torrential rains fell in British seaside towns such as Morecambe, it was very easy to make a connection between foul weather and apocalyptic weapons tests.  As I’ve discussed in a previous article, in the early 1960s, a formidable Morecambe town councillor named Nellie Bolton made it her mission to ban nuclear bomb tests, not for ethical or humanitarian reasons, but purely to preserve summer trade in her small toy shop, which she felt had been damaged by atomic test-induced weather. Mrs. Bolton’s regular ramblings at council meetings provided ample amusement in the local press at the time, inspiring other townsfolk to...

Dallas is 4,567 miles from Morecambe. In November 1963, the sprawling Texan metropolis was baking in sweltering sunshine, while Morecambe was lingering under drizzly winter rain clouds. The streets of Dallas thronged with almost 700,00 residents, while Morecambe’s damp streets were largely deserted now that the summer holidaymakers had decamped for the winter. The two towns were continents – and worlds – apart. Then, on 22nd November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead on the streets of Dallas, and that’s where the city’s differences with Morecambe stopped. 4,567 miles were bridged by shock, grief and horror.   Reports that something was amiss across the pond first began to trickle into the UK just before 7.00pm. Morecambe residents were among the first in the country to hear the news, as it was on the local TV network’s nightly news programme,  Scene at 6.30  that the assassination was first announced. People living outside the Granada television region were ob...

Since the dawn of civilisation, when stone age humans began bashing each other around the head with clubs, men have traditionally been the ones who did the fighting. Men went off to war, men did the slaughtering necessary to get the job done; men kept the women at home safe from marauding enemies. Then came the atomic bomb. Suddenly, battlefields were a thing of the past. Men couldn’t attack radiation with bayonets. Firestorms couldn’t be held back by a gun. With the advent of the atomic age, every home in every town, city and village became a target. Home was the new battlefield. In the 1940s and 1950s, the old adage, ‘a woman’s place is in the home,’ was still held as very much true, and as a result women became the new soldiers of the Cold War. Every pantry stocked with enough tinned goods to enable mum, dad and the kids to ride out the (believed at the time) brief period of inconvenience following an atomic attack was a victory for the Western world. Don’t mess with Mum: she’s arme...

July 1962:  Torrential rain lashed against the windowpanes of Morecambe Town Hall. Inside, safe from the unseasonal howling winds, a meeting of the local Chamber of Trade Committee was underway. The weather outside may have been stormy, but international political climates that day were stormier still. The previous day, the United States had detonated a Hydrogen bomb in Nevada, the latest in a long line of tests to determine the apocalyptic power of its weaponry. Only nine months earlier, the Soviet Union had tested Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever unleashed upon the world. Tsar Bomba, looking very much like the sun that Morecambe saw little of in 1962 As the foul weather continued to rage outside, inside Morecambe Town Hall the next speaker stood to address the committee. Councillor Nellie Bolton was the bespectacled landlady of several local shops, including a popular toy shop in Heysham Village. Far from being the adorable lady shopkeeper you might expect to fin...