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[July 28, 1964] Beatlemania Arrives Down Under!

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by Kaye Dee

I was so excited last month to talk about the first Blue Streak test launch that I completely forgot to mention another huge event occurring in Australia in June — the first tour Down Under by The Beatles! Yes, the Fab Four made a whirlwind visit to Australia and New Zealand last month and Beatlemania took the country by storm. Mr. Kenn Brodziak, the local promoter, made a lucky investment when he booked The Beatles last July to tour here, because they weren’t anywhere near as famous then as they are now. The newspapers are even saying that this tour has been the most successful event in Australian show business history.


The Beatles, arriving in Adelaide

The band arrived in Australia from Hong Kong on 11 June. An unscheduled touchdown in Darwin in the early hours of the morning was a taste of things to come, with 400 fans and journalists turning out to greet them. Unfortunately, when their plane arrived in Sydney it was bitterly cold and pouring rain (remember, it’s winter right now in this part of the world): in fact, the rain was so heavy that I could not even get out the door to go to the university — I’d have been soaked to the skin before I got to the bus stop! Oddly enough, there hasn’t been a drop of rain since and the long-range weather forecaster Mr. Lennox Walker is now predicting a drought over the next year.

To tell the truth, I didn’t mind being stuck at home because of the downpour, since it meant that Faye and I could watch the live broadcast of The Beatles arrival at Kingsford Smith Airport. There is no morning television in Australia, but both Channel 9 and Channel 7, our two commercial stations, had outside broadcast vans at the airport to provide a direct telecast. The pictures were even relayed live to Melbourne via the new co-axial cable. It shows how much everyone wants to see this amazing pop group that has taken the world by storm! There were thousands of fans at Sydney airport, braving the awful weather to catch a glimpse of the Fab Four as they struggled with umbrellas in the driving wind and rain.


The Fab Three and Jimmie Nichols braving the rain in Sydney

I say the Fab Four, but when the band arrived in Sydney, it was actually the Fab Three and a ring-in. Ringo Starr had been hospitalised with tonsillitis and pharyngitis before the start of the tour and his place was being taken by British drummer Jimmie Nicol. Ringo wasn’t able to join the tour until their first concert in Melbourne on 16 June. 


The Beatles with Jimmie Nichols

The Beatles travelled to Adelaide on a chartered plane for their first concert and when they arrived, more than 250,000 people lined the route between Adelaide Airport and the city. According to my WRE friends, this huge turnout was a ‘thank you’ to recognise that the promoter had added Adelaide to the tour schedule in response to a petition signed by 80,000 fans. I’ve read that this is the largest crowd to turn out for the Beatles so far, anywhere in the world! There’s certainly been nothing like it in Australia before: I even heard a commentator on the radio say that the eruption of Beatlemania in Australia has been more intense than anywhere else in the world so far! Mind you, not everyone has welcomed the Beatles so enthusiastically. In Brisbane, where their plane arrived at midnight to be greeted by 8,000 fans, a handful of anti-Beatles protesters threw eggs at the boys, which I think was a pretty stupid gesture.


There's Jimmie Nichol again

The Beatles played 20 shows in Australia — in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and everywhere they were greeted by enormous crowds of screaming fans. There were a lot of reports in the press about ‘hundreds’ of fans in Adelaide and Melbourne being injured in the crowds, although Mr. Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager said in response to a question at the Canberra Press Club that he believes these reports to be greatly exaggerated. The police took them seriously in Sydney, though, and more than 600 officers of the Special B Squad were on duty around their concerts and other appearances in the city, to prevent major disturbances.

Faye and I managed to get tickets to one of the Sydney concerts (yes, I admit we’re fans, even if we might be a little bit older and less-inclined to scream than most of the audience). The tickets cost us 37 shillings ($3.70) each, which certainly wasn’t cheap, but it was well worth it to see the Fab Four performing live. It was just as well that we could see them, because I’ve got to say that we could hardly hear them over the screaming of the young fans. It was even more hysterical than at the Frank Sinatra concert I went to in Sydney in 1961! 


Screaming fans in Sydney

The concert itself was really entertaining. The first half of the show consisted of four Australian support acts, including Johnny Devlin (something of a favourite of mine) and Johnny Chester, who are well-known Australian singers. The local acts performed for about 45 minutes, then, after the interval, The Beatles came on for the second half of the concert. In half an hour, they gave us 10 songs from their first two albums, as well as Can’t Buy Me Love from their ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ album, which has just been released in Australia this month. Of course, I would have loved them to perform more songs, but, as they did two shows every night (one at 6pm and the second at 8:30pm), there wasn’t time for any more. I’m told that the concerts had the same format in each city and it must have been incredibly exhausting for all the performers.


On stage at Sydney

On 18 June, while The Beatles were in Sydney, Paul McCartney celebrated his 22nd birthday, with a party thrown by the Daily Mirror newspaper. After the Sydney concerts, the Beatles made an eight-day tour of New Zealand, where they performed 12 concerts in four cities. 10,000 fans saw them off from the airport in Sydney. There was an article in the newspaper saying that Johnny Devlin actually helped to solve major sound problems at the concerts in Wellington, which had annoyed John Lennon so much that he threatened to cancel the remainder of the tour. Fortunately that didn’t happen and the Fab Four were back in Australia at the end of June for their final concerts in Brisbane.


The Beatles, off to New Zealand

The Beatles tour has been a major event in Australia, with more media coverage than just about anything apart from a Royal Tour! I suspect that it’s going to have a big impact on music and teenage culture in this country. I also suspect that these talented young men from Britain are destined to go on to achieve great things in the world of music and entertainment.

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Science / Space Race

[June 6, 1964] Going Up from Down Under (The launch of the Blue Streak rocket)

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by Kaye Dee

I’m so excited at the moment because, after several cancelled launch attempts, the first test flight of the Blue Streak rocket went off successfully yesterday (June 5) — it makes me wish I was back at the Weapons Research Establishment right now working on the trials computing! This is the first time such a large rocket has been launched at Woomera. The Blue Streak is just on 70ft tall and 10 ft in diameter, so it made quite a sight sitting on the launchpad at the edge of Lake Hart, which is a salt- lake that only occasionally gets filled with water. I went out there a few times when I visited Woomera and the contrast between the red earth, the deep blue sky and the white salt-lake is quite striking.

The Blue Streak rocket has something of a chequered history. When it started development in 1955 as a long-range ballistic missile for Britain’s nuclear deterrent, I don’t think anyone imagined it becoming a satellite launcher. The idea then was to fire it at targets in Eastern Europe or the USSR from either Britain or British-held territory in the Middle East. In fact, the Blue Streak design was based on the American Atlas missile, although Rolls Royce developed its new RZ-2 LOX/Kerosene engines for the British version.

When the Commonwealth Government agreed in 1956 to allow Blue Streak to be tested in Australia, it led to a huge development programme to open up the full length of Woomera Range for use, because the trial flights were planned to cover well over one thousand miles, travelling north-west from Lake Hart almost to the Indian Ocean! From Lake Hart, tracking, measuring and recording instruments had to be installed across the deserts of central Australia all the way to the Talgarno impact area in Western Australia. They even built a small town at Talgarno to house the researchers who would examine each missile when it impacted at the end of its test flight. Mr. Len Beadell, who is a real character and an incredible bush surveyor (he actually surveyed the area for the Woomera Range when it was first established), put together a road building team and they have graded hundreds of miles of new roads through the outback, along the length of the downrange to Talgarno.

So it was a big shock to us here in Australia when Britain decided that Blue Streak was already obsolete as a weapon and cancelled the programme in April 1960, without any real consultation with the Australian Government. As you can imagine, this caused a major outcry here and in the UK and there was a lot of political embarrassment all round. 

But as early as 1957 I was reading articles in British aerospace magazines about the possibility of turning Blue Streak into the first stage of a satellite launch vehicle using a Black Knight, which is a large British sounding rocket used for defence research at Woomera, as the upper stage. This sounded like a great way for Britain to develop its own launch capability, but the UK Government wasn’t interested until it started looking for a way to recoup some of the enormous investment in Blue Streak after they cancelled it as a missile. The initial idea was for a Commonwealth satellite launcher to be developed and used by Britain and other Commonwealth nations. However, New Zealand was the only Commonwealth country that expressed any interest in that project — even the Government here didn’t show any interest, which really surprised me given how much work we do with sounding rockets at Woomera and space tracking for NASA. Anyway, with so little interest that idea went nowhere.

However, Britain wasn’t giving up on the satellite launcher idea and started to canvass European nations for their interest in developing a European launch vehicle so that they would not have to rely on the Americans to launch satellites for them. Of course, the British probably also thought that this project might help to smooth its way into the European Economic Community, which they are very keen on joining. By 1962, France, Belgium, West Germany, Italy and the Netherlands all agreed to participate in the rocket project. This has led to the formation of the European Launcher Development Organisation, which we call ELDO. Because of the complexity of the international negotiations needed to ratify its charter, ELDO didn’t formally come into existence until 29 February this year, but work has been going on since 1962.

Under its charter, ELDO is going to develop an independent, non-military European satellite carrier rocket, to be called Europa. The Blue Streak will be the first stage of the rocket. France will provide the second stage, which is going to be called Coralie (and I’m told that’s partly because Coralie rhymed with Australie, the French word for Australia). West Germany is going to produce the third stage: I think is going to be called Astris. The test satellite that will be launched by the Europa is being developed under the leadership of Italy, while The Netherlands and Belgium will be responsible for the development of telemetry and guidance systems. So all the countries in ELDO will have a part to play in the programme.

Australia’s part will be to provide the launch site for the Europa rockets. Since the Blue Streak is the first stage, it makes sense to use the launchpad and other facilities already built at Woomera for ELDO’s launch operations. This makes us the only non-European member of ELDO. In fact, the Commonwealth Government has insisted that Australia be considered a full, but non-paying, member of ELDO, contributing the Woomera facilities and their operation in lieu of the financial commitment that the other member states are making.

Because Britain and France are the two largest contributors to ELDO, both English and French are working languages in the consortium. The official ELDO logo carries the acronyms of both its English and French names. The French version CECLES stands for Conseil européen pour la construction de lanceurs d'engins spatiaux, which is a bit of a mouthful! It’s going to be really interesting to see if all the member countries can overcome their different national rivalries and their different languages to make the complete Europa rocket successfully come together.

At least yesterday’s first test launch of the Blue Streak was a success. Although there was a problem with sloshing of the propellant as the fuel tanks emptied which caused the rocket to roll about quite a bit in the last few seconds of its flight and to land short of its intended target zone, the instrumentation along the flight corridor acquired a huge amount of useful information about the rockets performance. I was so thrilled with the news of the Blue Streak flight that I even phoned my former supervisor Mary Whitehead last night to hear more about it (and I’m going to have to give my sister the money for that long-distance trunk call, which I’m sure will be expensive).

Mary was at the Range for the launch and she told me that the rocket looked spectacular as it rose up into the blue sky out of its cloud of orange exhaust. She’s especially proud of the fact that the zigzag pattern you can see on the Blue Streak was her idea. It enables the tracking cameras to make very accurate measurements as the rocket rolls after leaving the launchpad. Using the pattern, the cameras can easily measure if, and how far, the rocket rolls depending on where that diagonal was relative to the top and bottom stripes. I know she’s looking forward to seeing how well this worked.

I’m looking forward to the next test flight, and Australia's further involvement in the Space Age!

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Science / Space Race

[May 14, 1964] Special delivery!  (getting your mail via rocket)

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[We were saddened to learn that our science writer, Ida Moya, had to go on an extended leave of absence due to her work at Los Alamos heating up (hopefully not to the point of reaction!) However, as a door closed, another opened — one of Ms. Moya's colleagues, Kaye Dee, indicated that she would be delighted take over Ida's column.

Kaye Dee lives in Sydney, Australia. She's a career woman with a degree in physics who loves science fiction and is interested in everything, but especially space exploration and astronomy.  She worked for a few years as a Computer at the Weapons Research Establishment, under Ida Moya's colleague Mary Whitehead, and is currently a tutor at the University of Sydney while she undertakes a higher degree. While in Sydney, she is boarding with her married twin sister Faye and her family.  Kaye loves to travel, reads voraciously and enjoys writing to penfriends overseas.

We hope you enjoy this article, planned to be the first of many!]


by Kaye Dee

I read in the paper today that Mr. Gerhardt Zucker’s latest attempt to demonstrate one of his mail rockets in West Germany on May 7 ended in tragedy, with at least one person killed when the rocket exploded. Rocket mail seems to be one of those things that people are always predicting will be part of the future, just like flying cars, but nobody seems to be able to successfully develop.

I first got interested in rocket mail when I read a piece on “missile mail” by Mr. Willy Ley, who writes such interesting articles and books about space travel. That was ten years ago, in the August 1954 issue of Galaxy Magazine. According to the article, the oldest idea for any kind of rocket mail goes back to a German newspaper editor in 1810, but the first person to actually fly mail in a rocket was an Austrian chap, Mr. Friedrich Schmiedl. He began experimenting with rockets in the 1920s as a way to overcome communications difficulties between villages in the rugged Austrian Alps. Mr. Schmeidl flew the first rocket mail in February 1931, selling the stamped envelopes he carried in his rocket to finance his research.

Mr. Schmeidl’s idea quickly caught on and the 1930s was a period of rocket mail experimentation around the world. There were rocket mail societies and experimenters in many countries, including Germany, England, America, India, Cuba and even here in Australia. The Australian Rocket Society operated in Brisbane, Queensland, from 1935 to 1937, but they never managed to successfully fly the mail from one place to another. They were actually influenced by Mr. Zucker’s work, as he was one of the early German mail rocketeers and began launching mail rockets in 1931.

My uncle Ernie, who collects air mail and rocket mail and has started collecting stamps marking space missions, tells me that Mr. Zucker had a very chequered career promoting rocket mail and that he was really something of a fraud. His mail rockets, with their shiny metal hulls that looked like the illustrations from science fiction magazines and Buck Rogers serials, were only powered by home-made gunpowder charges and they were more likely to blow up than to fly: too bad for all those collectors who paid in advance for their envelopes to fly in the rocket!

Mr. Zucker tried to interest the Nazis in his rockets (as a way to deliver bombs) and then in 1934 tried to interest the Royal Mail in Britain in mail rockets. However, his rocket demonstrations were spectacular failures and he was deported from Britain as a 'threat to the income of the post office and the security of the country'.

When he arrived back in Germany he was immediately arrested on suspicion of espionage or collaboration with Britain and narrowly escaped arrest and commitment to an asylum, although he was forbidden to make further rocket experiments. Mr. Zucker has recently started his rocket mail flights again, but after this latest tragic incident, I don’t think there will be too many more. Uncle Ernie has heard a rumour that the West German authorities are now going to ban all non-military rocket launches, which would mean the end of all amateur rocketry in the country.

In his article about “missile mail” Mr. Ley made the point that since the War, fast transatlantic air travel has pretty much rendered long-distance mail rockets un-necessary. Even so, the idea of rocket mail persists. In 1955, I read E.C. Eliott’s Tas and the Postal Rocket, a juvenile science fiction adventure that revolves around a rocket mail service based at the Woomera Rocket Range, in South Australia. There was also an article I enjoyed in the January 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated that suggested we would have rocket mail by 1965 — so we’ll soon see if that prediction comes true.

In 1959, looking for faster ways to deliver the mail, the US Post Office Department enlisted the help of the Navy for a demonstration of “missile mail”. On June 8, the submarine USS Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile, carrying two containers with about 3,000 pieces of mail. After a 22-minute flight, the missile delivered its cargo, right on target to Naval Station Mayport in Florida. When it arrived safely, the US Postmaster General, who was waiting to receive the mail said; “before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."

Well, we here Down Under would certainly like to see our mail arrive from overseas at the speed of a missile. Will we see operational rocket mail next year? I doubt it, but if we do, maybe after it arrives here via rocket, the mail will be delivered by a flying postman, wearing a rocket-belt like I saw demonstrated at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney in March. The Easter Show is the local equivalent of a state fair and the performances by American rocket-belt flyer Robert Courter were a huge attraction. On the first day Mr. Courter flew a mail delivery across the main showring and delivered it right into the hands of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies.

But maybe the development of satellite communications will do away with some of the need for superfast mail delivery anyway. In North America and Europe, you’ve already had the opportunity to make phone calls and see events delivered live on television via a satellite, but none of the communications satellites so far launched have been in the right position to provide a connection to Australia. The government here is talking about whether it will join the global satellite communications system that has been proposed by the United States and I think that would be a fantastic idea.

Australia is such a huge country, with a very small population, that providing a phone service to everyone in remote areas is difficult or incredibly expensive. People who live on remote stations (enormous sheep and cattle ranches) in the Outback have to rely on radio to call the Flying Doctor in an emergency. The kids also have their school lessons over the radio, through the School of the Air. Just imagine how much of an improvement it would be if they could phone anywhere via satellite and get television for education and entertainment. 

It’s only two years since Sydney and Melbourne were connected by the Co-axial Cable, so that we could make direct dial calls between the two state capitals, and only last year that we had the first live television broadcasts between Sydney and Melbourne. It’ll be great to see Australia connected to the world via satellite…

I just hope it won’t be too expensive for me to call my cousins in Scotland!

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