1950s: Train, plane and car crashes claim scores of lives

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Nicola Rippon reviews the year 1955 when a new era of economic growth was being heralded for the people of Derbyshire.

INDUSTRIAL prosperity – that was the message for the people of Derby half way through the 1950s. After the austerity of the ration-hit post-war years, town and county alike were at last beginning to enjoy the fruits of a new age.

As 1955 dawned, the Evening Telegraph was heralding a new era of economic stability and growth. “Industrial Derby,” it declared, “is entering a new phase of tremendous possibilities.”

Indeed, with almost full employment – the unemployed stood at only 0.4 per cent of the insured population – even the borough council was prepared to invest in the anticipated prosperity.

Industrial estates were established on the new ring road – at Raynesway, in Alvaston, where the dual-carriageway and footpaths had only just been completed – and on land off London Road, on the site of the former Osmaston Park that had several times played host to the Royal Show.

A new, reduced, park was to be created elsewhere, while the old grounds were to be laid out with roads to be named after British racecourses: Haydock Park, Kempton Park, Sandown, and the main road through the estate, Ascot Drive, among them.

There was no clearer sign of economic prosperity than in the announcement by Royal Crown Derby – so long a symbol of ultimate luxury – that the company was to expand its workforce.

Along with many other local companies, the porcelain works had enjoyed a record year and a spokesman noted: “We shall start 1955 with an enlarged staff which has risen from about 500 to 600.”

Nestle Ltd, too, was negotiating to build a new factory at Mickleover to produce “chocolate confectionary”.

Nestle was to occupy a 15-acre site, about a mile from the centre of the village, at the foot of Station Road, beside the Mickleover for Radbourne railway station, through which ran the Great Northern line from Derby’s Friargate Station.

However, if industry was prospering, quite the opposite could be said of the town’s most important distraction from the working week.

Derby County ended the 1954-55 season with relegation to the Third Division North, for the first time in its history, bringing to a close an era of buoyancy that had followed the club’s victory in the first post-war FA Cup Final.

Indeed, so poorly were the Rams faring that the directors, fearful that a fixture clash with Derbyshire County Cricket Club would affect their attendance, postponed the kick-off of the Rams’ match against Mansfield Town – the first fixture of the 1955-56 season – to the evening.

Then, in December, came ignominy as the Rams crashed out of the FA Cup in the second round at the hands of Midland League side Boston United.

In what was certainly one of the greatest shocks in the competition’s history, Boston scored six goals to the Rams’ one.

Adding insult to injury, no less than six former Rams players, among them Cup-winner Reg Harrison who had left the Baseball Ground only six months earlier, took the field for the Fenland team, who were managed by another ex-Rams player, Ray Middleton.

Derby County did recover, eventually narrowly missing out on promotion, while Derbyshire’s cricketers, hindered by an injury to fast bowler Les Jackson, finished only eighth in the County Championship after a promising start.

For one former Rams player, a new life beckoned. Ex-England full-back and Chester Green native Bert Mozley, and his wife, Jean, herself a Derby girl, had decided to emigrate to Canada with their daughters, Lynne and Lea.

In January 1955, Bert had gone ahead to prepare the way. After a long sailing, he landed in Nova Scotia and, after a three-day railway journey, arrived in the Mozleys’ new home in Calgary. Some 51 years later, they are still living happily in Canada.

Closer to home, snooker and billiards star Joe Davis, a native of Whitwell, made history by recording the first recognised maximum break of 147.

For Bemrose School headmaster Eric Bennett there were greater concerns than sporting records. At the school’s speech day, he told his audience that he had made enquiries among the Bemrose fifth form and discovered that half the form had television sets at home and were spending on average 90 minutes every evening watching the set.

He accepted that “some of the programmes may well have an educational value” but felt that “nevertheless, television is a supine affair”.

For another headmaster, it was pupils’ behaviour, rather than academic achievement, which preoccupied him. A report in the Daily Mirror, which that year was making something of an issue out of the rights and wrongs of corporal punishment, reported a trial at Heanor magistrates’ court in which a 14-year-old pupil, from an unnamed school, was accused of assaulting his headmaster as the head tried to administer a caning.

The headmaster was “about to use the cane when the boy rushed at him and grabbed it,” stated the prosecution.

“He struck the headmaster two savage blows in the face and kicked him. When the headmaster sat down, the boy hit him twice on the head and then ran away.”

As if that ordeal was not enough, the boy’s mother later arrived at the school to confront the teacher and, several days later, his sister entered his office and threw papers and files around the room, even pelting the headmaster himself.

The court fined the mother £3 for assault and £4 for behaving in a disorderly manner. Her daughter was fined £5 for assault and £5 for disorderly behaviour and, later, the Heanor juvenile court fined the boy £3 for assault.

That errant pupil was not the only Derbyshire native whose behaviour made national headlines in 1955. Derby-born socialite Lady Norah Docker happily admitted to Life magazine that she had assaulted an employee of the casino in Monte Carlo.

“It was a good sock I gave that man and he deserved it,” she told the magazine.

Never far from the gossip columns, she had earlier that year been spotted arriving in typically decadent style for a marbles match between the team from her millionaire husband’s British Small Arms factory and a Castleford factory girls’ team: the entire away team was driven to the match in Lady Docker’s zebra fur-lined, gold-plated Daimler.

At Ascot races, Lady Docker received a more favourable press for her wide-brimmed hat, lace suit and mink stole. Not bad for a girl born in a flat on London Road.

The year 1955 was an important one in the careers of several entertainers with Derbyshire connections. Ronald Binge, the hugely successful Derby-born composer and arranger for the world-famous Mantovani orchestra, was rewarded with his own radio show on the BBC Light Programme.

Binge’s own composition, String Song, provided the theme.

Actor Eric Lander, who was educated at Bemrose School, made his feature film debut in 1955. Among several movies he completed that year was The Colditz Story, with John Mills and Eric Porter.

Another young local thespian, Allestree’s Alan Bates, who had graduated from RADA and just completed two years’ National Service, made his stage debut with the Midland Theatre Company at Coventry.

In June, a trainee accountant left Lings in the Wardwick to begin his National Service. He would not return to Derby.

Instead, James Bolam enrolled in the Central School of Speech and Drama and would go on to become one of Britain’s best-loved character actors.

In the world of science, Chesterfield-born Robert Robinson, son of William Bradbury Robinson, founder of the successful Robinson’s Healthcare company, and himself recipient of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, announced his retirement.

However, Robinson had no intention of staying idle: he was appointed an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College and director of the Shell Chemical Company.

International attention, meanwhile, was focused on the complex political nature of post-war Europe and beyond.

With Germany now seemingly permanently divided into capitalist and communist halves, the Cold War between members of NATO and those of the Soviet-inspired Warsaw Pact became the over-riding concern of governments the world over.

For the average Briton, these issues seemed largely remote. But, for one Derbyshire native, such concerns had a more immediate and personal nature: he was to become an important cog in the machinery to fight the “Red Threat”.

Peter Wright was born in Chesterfield in 1916, the son of a Marconi engineer. He served with the Admiralty’s Research Laboratory during the Second World War and also acted as an unpaid advisor to MI5.

In 1954, he had been called in to help the CIA deal with bugging devices installed in the American embassy in Moscow. Now, in 1955, he was to join MI5’s A2 branch as principal scientist.

In his controversial autobiography Spycatcher, Wright would later recall the words of one of his bosses when he asked about MI5’s legal status: “It hasn’t got one. The security service cannot have the normal status of a Whitehall department because its work very often involves transgressing propriety or the law.”

Derbyshire-born Wright also recalled that the organisation worked on the basis of the unofficial 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not get caught.”

The mid-1950s were indeed a time of enormous political intrigue and instability, but if one son of the county was fully enmeshed in this James Bond world, for the people of Derbyshire, generally, there was comfort in a time of peace and prosperity.

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