1966

What do I remember about 1966?  In the summer of 1966 I was 7 and England won the World Cup, most of my memories from this year revolve around football, my earliest football memory is not from the World Cup, but from just before.  My dad was an Everton supporter and they came back from 0-2 down to win the FA Cup final 3-2 in 1966.  Its the 1st football match I remember sitting and watching, but the thing I remember most about it was dad jumping up in the air and breaking the brand-new armchair when Everton scored their 3^rd goal, we still had the chair years later and it was never repaired, you always had to “be careful if you’re sitting in that one.”

If I was looking back at the music of 1966 and choosing what has had the most influence on my musical tastes I wouldn’t choose Green, Green Grass of Home but it’s the song I most remember from the year so Tom Jones it is. Who knew at the time it was about coming home from a stretch in Gaol I certainly didn’t… anyway we won the world cup nothing else mattered much to a 7 year old boy or 59 year old man for that matter.  I would have wanted to be Bobby Charlton but for the comb over.

Action man is launched, I never had one. Depending on who you were talking to, they were considered “dolls for boys” or “war toys” neither of which could gain approval with both parents.  I do remember having a parachute figure that you threw out of an upstairs window and watched it drift slowly to the ground until it got caught up in the telephone wires, where it then stayed until the cheap plastic slowly disintegrated in the sun’s rays and it fell to the ground some time towards the end of the summer.

Another fondly remembered toy from this era was a deep sea diver and a submarine with air tubes attached to them that you played with in the bath, blowing or sucking through the tube to get them to float or sink, the submarine was always a bit rubbish, getting air trapped in one end or the other and floating with the bow or the stern pointing right out of the water.  The ones we had would have almost certainly been cheap imported imitations, but the deep sea diver worked fine, you just had to remember when to stop sucking the water in, I was the oldest and therefore last one in the bath so by the time I got there the water had become a bit cloudy and rather unsavoury.

What Else Happened in 1966.

Not a lot really, we were all watching the football; Britain’s 1^st Polaris submarine is launched, we get our 1^st imported Japanese cars, that I didn’t know anything about.  And 100 mph electric trains on the West Coast main line, which I did, because they went past about a hundred yards from the bottom of our garden and you could hear the whoosh from my bedroom window.  Till Death Us Do Part and Camberwick Green start on BBC1.