JFK Assassination Shocks Morecambe: How a Lancashire Town Reacted to a Huge World Event
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 oblivious to President Kennedy’s fate for a further six minutes, until an announcement was made at 7.05 on BBC television and across the BBC’s three national radio stations.
If we are to believe the Morecambe Guardian, news of the assassination immediately plunged the town into a state bordering on hysteria. ‘As the dreadful news spread’, the paper tells us, ‘women were seen weeping in the town centre’. Naturally, no men seem to have been afflicted by this infectious bout of public blubbering. I suspect that this report of wailing women may be a case of sensationalism on the paper’s part. What exactly were all these people doing wandering about the freezing cold streets of Morecambe at 7.30 night? The weather forecast for 22nd November was ‘inclement and cold, with frequent heavy downpours’; maybe the people of 1963 were made of tougher stuff, but I wouldn’t be out in that. Still, public outbursts of emotion are always going to be more dramatic than private ones, I suppose.
More believable is the report from Evelyn’s Hair Styles, a popular salon on Woborrow Road, which was open until 8.00pm that Friday for late night weekend styling. The Morecambe Guardian tells us that ‘customers heard the announcement over the radio while waiting attention’, and similarly descended into frenzied panic. We can only hope that the stylists managed to keep their hands from shaking in their agitated state, or several disgruntled customers may have left the salon with lopsided hairdos that night…
Across town at the Odeon cinema, several hundred people were enjoying a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The film was nearing its dramatic climax, when the cinema manager, Mr. J. Sanders, unplugged the film projector, blinded everyone by flicking on the house lights and burst onto the stage to blurt out that the President was dead. He then insisted on pausing the film for another ten minutes, presumably while he scooted to his office to listen to the news. Given that the movie only had ten minutes left to run, I can’t help but think it would have been better to wait until the credits were rolling before making the announcement. I’ll bet half the people in that cinema had to go back to watch The Birds again the following night, given that they were somewhat distracted at the film’s conclusion the night before.
Over at the town hall, a maintenance man who was most likely about to head home to enjoy his Friday night was tasked with the job of clambering onto the roof in the dark to hoist an American flag halfway up the flagpole. Likewise, both of Morecambe’s piers, the Central and West End, flew the Stars and Stripes at half mast the next day. At the West End pier, this must have annoyed the maintenance team, who only the week before had removed the flag pole for repair after it was damaged in a violent storm. This tempest had snapped the flagpole in two and also caused ‘considerable damage to the Lucky Ducky stall.’ Despite the continuing high winds, the wonky flagpole was nevertheless reinstated and bedecked with the Star Spangled Banner in tribute to the late President. The fate of the ransacked Lucky Ducky stall remains unknown.
While world leaders reeled at the brutal killing of one of their own, local politicians who were usually preoccupied with political crises as pivotal as deciding what day the bins would be collected suddenly found themselves commenting on international affairs. The mayor of Morecambe seems to have revelled in the melodrama of the moment. He employed flowery Shakespearean language when asked for his opinion by the local press, mere minutes after the news of the assassination broke: “This is one of the greatest tragedies of our modern times,” he declared. “In my estimation, [Kennedy] was a tremendously great statesman. I fear his assassination could have some terrible repercussions.”
Exactly what he believed these terrible repercussions would be, we shall never know, for the mayor cut his interview short to skedaddle off to the annual Morecambe Golf Club Ball at the Midland Hotel. According to the Morecambe Guardian of 29th November 1963, the Mayor was ‘just about to leave the town hall for the Golf Club Ball when he was told the news’ of President Kennedy’s murder. The Ball was scheduled to begin at 8.00pm, so it’s safe to say he’d have missed the welcome drinks and canapes by the time he finally made it to the party. Howbeit, Mr. Mayor wasn’t going to let something like the assassination of the US President and impending ‘terrible repercussions’ ruin his Friday night: he certainly doesn’t look too troubled in photographs taken later that evening, as he digs into the massive buffet and open bar provided by the Golf Club!
One week after the assassination, Morecambe, along with the rest of the world, we’re still struggling to comprehend how to express their grief for a man they had never met. So says the Morecambe Guardian of 29th November 1963: ‘the death by an assassin’s bullets of John F. Kennedy has been on the lips, in the minds and in the hearts of the people of Morecambe this past week’. Tributes to the President continued to be seen around town, ranging from the kindly and sincere to the downright silly and insensitive: on 29th November, the Plaza cinema showed a special newsreel entitled, ‘President Kennedy’s Assassination’. This sounds fine and dandy until you read the list of films the newsreel was chosen to play alongside: The Man Who Finally Died, The Quick and the Dead, Curse of the Undead and Vengeance, a thriller about a dead man who returns to hunt his murderer. Hmm, tactful.
For every ill-chosen cinema lineup, however, there was a genuine expression of sympathy. At least one Morecambe man wrote a personal letter to the widowed Mrs. Kennedy. An ‘amazing number of messages, prayers and even poetry’ poured into the local newspapers, while children held minute silences in schools and youth clubs.
Before 22nd November 1963, the people of Morecambe had not felt close enough to a US President to mourn his loss. John F. Kennedy, however, seems to have captured the imagination of a town which, since the earliest days of British seaside holidaymaking, has prided itself on being optimistic and forward thinking. In his weekly address to the town, the editor of the Morecambe Guardian lamented the loss of ‘a man of the New Frontier, who was poised to lead the world out of the morass in which the old men of politics still dragged their feet.’
Finding an appropriate way to mark the passing of such a hero figure was always going to be hard. But then, the most meaningful things are those we choose to do not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
By Rebecca Shaw
Sources
The Morecambe Guardian, 27th November 1963; 29th November 1963.
The Lancaster Guardian, 29th November 1963.
The Visitor, 22nd November 1963; 4th December 1963.
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