Something

ITEM: Something is finally happening with regards to the missing issues of “The Twelve”. Over 12 months ago I posed the question of what had happened to issues 9 onwards. This one-shot comic dated May 2010 recently appeared out of the blue. An untold story of how The Twelve first came together in WW2 it doesn’t really advance the story much but on the last page it does at least confirm that the last 4 issues of the original series will finally appear. It’s always nice to tie up loose ends.

ITEM: Something I never used to pay any attention to was the obituary columns in the newspapers. Suddenly the local paper no longer features my Grandparent’s generation with “fascinating” tales of their hobbies of doing Jigsaws, keeping Budgies and watching television but obituaries of my own contemporaries. Sometimes their demise is self-inflicted but more often it is due to natural causes. In the national newspapers obituaries of war heroes seem to have been replaced by 1960s pop singers. Scary. Alex Chilton (of Box Tops and Big Star fame) and DJ/Author Charlie Gillett (the thinking man’s John Peel) died recently. Fred Wedlock has also passed away. Surprisingly I discover he was barely 38 years old when he recorded his one novelty hit in the early 1980s. So perhaps he wasn’t “The oldest swinger in town” at the time after all.

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ITEM: Also in the recent obituaries was a large article about Dorothy Calvert. The Calverts first hit the news with their involvement in Radio Sutch which metamorphed into Radio City (the original offshore one) broadcasting from the Shivering Sands forts. A number of forts were built in the Thames Estuary by the Army and the Navy circa 1942 to house anti-aircraft guns. By the mid 1960s they had been abandoned for 20 years and must have been cold and damp places for DJs to live and work. Those catwalks between the towers look particularly dangerous. Although Reg Calvert met his demise in 1966 (which I’m sure is recounted in detail elsewhere on the Interweb) in the “Pirate Wars”  Dorothy continued to run Radio City after her husband’s death. It was one of the more interesting pirate radio stations with a varied output that even stretched to the odd comedy show. Alas the original Radio City didn’t even last until August 14th (when most of the original offshore pirates closed down) but finished in February 1967. I believe the authorities had decided that Shivering Sands was within the “3 mile limit”. I’m off to “google” the Shivering Sands and all those other forts such as Sealand right now.