The London Daily Newsletter Thursday 9 February

On 9 February 1965, the United States sent its first combat troops to South Vietnam A U.S. Marine Corps Hawk air defense missile battalion was deployed to Da Nang. President Johnson had ordered this deployment to provide protection for the key U.S. airbase there. This was the first commitment of American combat troops in South Vietnam and there was considerable reaction around the world to the new stage of U.S. involvement in the war. Predictably, both communist China and the Soviet Union threatened to intervene if the United States continued to apply its military might on behalf of the South Vietnamese. In Moscow, some 2,000 demonstrators, led by Vietnamese and Chinese students and clearly supported by the authorities, attacked the U.S. Embassy. Britain and Australia supported the U.S. action, but France called for negotiations.

Barnes Cray
Barnes Cray is located on the Greater London border with Kent, bordering Dartford.

Barnes Cray is named for the Barne family, who owned land here in the mid-18th century. Up until the Victorian era it was a hamlet a kilometre downstream of Crayford where no more than sixteen homes were clustered. A calico-printing works drew water power from the culverted River Wansunt in early Victorian times, being later adapted for the manufacture of rubber goods, then felt and finally Brussels carpets. This carpet mill was demolished by 1890 and Barnes Cray House, the next largest building, was cleared by 1933, ending its days as a nursing home. The remnants of the settlement became absorbed into Crayford with the building of a garden village to facilitate the expansion of Vickers’ armaments factory during the 1915 to 1919 period. Six hundred cottages were built in a variety of styles. In 1920 the area became part of the Crayford Urban District of Kent (having previously been in Dartford Rural District). Following World War I, Crayford Urban District Council erected further housing estates to the north, eventually merging with estates spreading southwards from Erith. In 1965, under the London Government Act 1963, the urban district was abolished and its area transferred to Greater London to form part of the present-day London Borough of Bexley. The Geoffrey Whitworth Theatre is in Barnes Cray.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

‘Piccadilly Circus, London’ (1960)

L.S. Lowry

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