Prospects rosy for leavers

Prospects for girls leaving school are rosy, Lady Howe told a large audience at Berkhamsted School for Girls on Thursday. After presenting prizes she created interest among girls when she told them that if the present ratio of boys to girls continued, they would need to be strong to remain single. Some may even have to take on two husbands!

[June 1, 1973]

Monster attraction

Huge holiday crowds lined the streets to watch one of the brightest-ever carnival processions pass through Watford on Monday. Over 50 gaily decorated floats snaked from North Watford to the carnival showground in Cassiobury Park, cheered on by thousands of onlookers. The procession show-stealers were two giant mock prehistoric monsters, on loan from an Essex model-making firm.

[June 1, 1973]

Books boom in Herts

More than 12 times as many books are being lent in Hertfordshire as there are people, according to county librarian Miss Lorna Paulin. Statistics show that some people must be devouring books at a rate of between 50 and 100 a year.

[June 1, 1973]

Flying saucer

A number of local witnesses saw a flying saucer which was stationary above a field next to the A414 Hemel Hempstead-St Albans Road, at about three o’clock in the morning. The large yellow glowing “ball” seemed to be at a height of 20 or 30 feet from the ground and finally departed by shooting straight upwards, as usually happens in these cases.

[June 8, 1973]

Fish gasping as Colne dries

Fish in the Colne were left stranded and dying and leaks were plugged with plastic sheeting and mud when the river nearly dried up this week. Mrs Dennis Lennon, who lives at Hamper Mill House, told the Watford Observer: “The water just disappeared.”

[June 15, 1973]

Drugs, rock and sex

Tomorrow’s leaders are on drugs, rock and sex, and they refuse to look the future in the face. So said Chancellor Herbert W. Armstrong at Ambassador College, Bricket Wood, on Friday. Speaking at a graduation ceremony, he said corruption in high places is increasingly common. “Society today is in the same state of decay as the last days of Imperial Rome,” he said.

[June 15, 1973]

Row over grammar schools

The “recalcitrant” governors of the Watford Grammar Schools have no intention that their schools should go comprehensive. They have gone back on their understanding that they would eventually admit children of all abilities, Labour members of the County Education Committee claimed.

[June 22, 1973]

Tex gets married

Country and western fans flocked to Hemel Hempstead on Saturday to see Britain’s number one country male singer, Tex Withers, married at St Barnabus Church. Tex and his wife Jan, who wore the dress of an Indian princess, live in London but chose to have their western-style hitching at Hemel Hempstead because of friendships Tex has with members of Adeyfield Country Music Club.

[June 22, 1973]

Thrill crowds

Those magnificent men in their flying machines were very much in evidence at the Tiger Club air display at Elstree Aerodrome on Sunday. The huge crowd were thrilled by the Tiger Club flyers in their string and canvas Tiger Moths, some of which date back to the First World War.

[June 29, 1973]

A ghost walks

Things go bump in the night at Smiths Industries, Watford – and it’s not just the night shift working. For an article in the June issue of St News reveals that the factory has a ghost. And the figure, wearing a foreman’s white overalls and often smoking a pipe, haunts the foundry much to the horror of night workers. His description fits a foreman who suddenly collapsed and died in the foundry over 15 years ago. He always swore he would never leave the place and has been seen by workers regularly since first “reappearing” a year after his death.

[June 29, 1973]

What was happening in the world in June 1973?

• The Greek military junta abolishes the monarchy and proclaims a republic (June 1)

• At the Paris air show a Soviet supersonic airliner crashes and kills 15 people (June 3)

• A patent for the ATM is granted to Donald Wetzel, Tom Barnes and George Chastain (June 4)

• The Soviet satellite Kosmos 562 is successfully launched into low Earth orbit (June 5)

• The Provisional IRA detonates two car bombs in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, killing six people and injuring 33 (June 12)

• A lunar eclipse occurs (June 15)

• The stage show of The Rocky Horror Show is premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London (June 19)

• The Ezeiza massacre occurs in Buenos Aires, Argentine, when a crowd of people gathered to acclaim Juan Peron’s return from an 18-year exile. Snipers kill 13 and injure more than 300 (June 20)

• Two British soldiers are killed by IRA booby-trap bombs (June 21)

• A house fire in Kingston upon Hull which kills a six-year-old boy is passed off as an accident; it later emerges as the first of 26 fire deaths caused by arsonist Peter Dinsdale (June 23)

• Leonid Brezhnev is the first Soviet leader to address the American people on television (June 24)

• The London production of the musical Grease premieres (June 26)

• Live and Let Die, the first James Bond film to star Roger Moore, is released in the US (June 27)

• The President of Uruguay dissolves Parliament and heads a coup d’état (June 27)