My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 15: Swingin' London

 

Time magazine cover, April 15, 1966

Nearing the end of our European Adventure, we skipped a scheduled overnight on the Continent and spent it sleeping in our van in Canterbury (see previous post, "Chapter 14," below this post) so that we could have a full day in London before heading home.

Our primary objective for that extra day wasn't the British Museum, the National Gallery, or the V&A Museum.  It was someplace more compelling and top of mind for a group of American teenagers in the mid-1960s:  Carnaby Street.

On April 15, 1966, less than three months before we set out on our trip, Time magazine published its cover story on "London: The Swinging City" (see photo at the top of this post.)  Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:

In this century, every decade has had its city. . . . Today, it is London.  In a decade dominated by youth, London has burst into bloom.  It swings; it is the scene.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the new swinging London better than narrow, three-block-long Carnaby Street, which is crammed with a cluster of the "gear" boutiques where the girls and boys buy each other clothing. Nine of the shops for boys on Carnaby Street are owned by Designer John Stephen, 29, who last week took his tattersall shirts, Dutch boy caps, form-fitting pants and vinyl vests to Manhattan to put the fear of God into parents there. 

With hype like that, we had to go!

Carnaby Street looking NNW at the intersection with Ganton Street

Carnaby Street looking SSE toward the intersection with Ganton Street

When we were there in August of 1966, Carnaby Street was the epicenter of  British music and fashion that powered much of the cultural revolution of the 1960s.  The Beatles, The Stones, movie stars, models . . . all came to Carnaby Street and exported the Carnaby Street zeitgeist to the world.

Geographically, the Carnaby Street shopping district is only 3/10ths of a mile from Savile Row -- a 6-minute walk.  But culturally it was a world away from the ruling class custom menswear shop at  #1 Savile Row where I had bravely ventured in to buy a tie at the beginning of the trip five weeks earlier (see "Chapter 2" below).  I don't remember buying anything on Carnaby Street, nor did I see any rock stars, movie stars, or supermodels.  But I can say I was there when it was the cool place to be.

Next post:  Heading home . . . and what we saw at Heathrow.

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 14: Racing Across the Continent

 

Nearing the end of our six-week tour of Europe, we were moving fast,​ trying to cram in all the places we wanted to visit​ while sticking to our planned itinerary . . . except for one risky change of plan that resulted in a very uncomfortable night in Canterbury.

From Munich we headed north to Frankfurt am Main, where we had an unique experience:  afternoon tea with the Methodist bishop of West Germany, Friedrich Wunderlich, in his home.  The visit was arranged by a friend of my family who was in the U.S. Army stationed in Frankfurt.

From Frankfurt we motored on to Cologne, with its iconic twin spire cathedral.

The next morning, before we left, I photographed the great cathedral.  It's so huge I couldn't get it all into one frame.  It seats approximately 4,000 people.

According to Wikipedia, "Construction of Cologne Cathedral began in 1248, but was halted in the years around 1560.  Attempts to complete construction began around 1814, but the project was not properly funded until the 1840s.  The edifice was completed to its original medieval plan in 1880."

After its completion in 1880, at 515 feet the cathedral's towers were the world's tallest building until the Washington Monument was completed in 1884.  When we visited it in 1966, the cathedral was the second tallest church building in Europe -- tallest was the Ulm Minster in Ulm, Germany -- and with the completion of the Sagrada Familia towers in Barcelona last year, the Cologne cathedral is now the third tallest.  It was declared a World Heritage site in 1996, and is Germany's most visited landmark.

Later that morning we drove to Amsterdam, where we visited the Rijksmuseum, and stared in awe at Rembrandt's "Night Watch" and other paintings from the Dutch Golden Age (1588-1672), the period when the Netherlands became one of the leading commercial and maritime powers in Europe.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The next few days are fuzzy in my memory.  From Amsterdam we traveled to Brussels, where I found that record shop I reported in the post before this one.  But I do remember that by this time we were so eager to get back to the U.K. we decided to leave the Continent a day ahead of schedule, even though we had no place to stay in England that night.

We took the ferry from Ostende back to Dover and then drove 16 miles to Canterbury in hopes that the hostel we had booked for the next night (and had paid in advance for) would have room for us.  They didn't.

So we spent the night in the van -- all nine of us -- in the parking lot of Canterbury Cathedral.  None of us slept well.  At some point during the night -- I think it was about 1:30 or 2:00am, but who knows? -- a Bobby knocked on the window and asked if we were OK.  Tom, our adult leader, explained our situation, and the Bobby told us we would need to leave at dawn . . . at least that's how I remember it.  

Canterbury Cathedral is located on the site of one of the oldest Christian structures in England.  It was founded in 597 CE, but over the centuries it has been destroyed, rebuilt, and enlarged many times.  Its history is far too long and complicated to be recapitulated in this post, so if you're interested, check out the information at Wikipedia here.  Nevertheless, before we left town I took a few pictures of the cathedral.

After Canterbury, we headed back to London, where we had a few more tourist-y objectives.  I'll elaborate on that -- and what we encountered at Heathrow Airport on departure day -- in my next post.

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Musical Interlude #2: I Saw Her Again

After the profound sadness of my previous post earlier this week, let's take a break with a lighter episode.

In the last weeks of my European Adventure, all of us were getting a little homesick.  I don't know how others in the group dealt with that, but I was looking for some sort of escape from Europe's rich and unfamiliar cultural environment when I wandered into a record shop in Brussels during the final week of the trip where, yes, they sold vinyl LPs and 45s.

The shop had private, soundproof listening booths where you could choose a 45 and listen on headphones.  I don't know why, but I picked "I Saw Her Again" by The Mamas & the Papas, which I had not heard before.  It had been released only a few weeks earlier in Europe as a follow-up to their #1 hit, "Monday Monday," released in March.

The story behind the song is interesting and very typical of the music scene of the mid-1960s.  According to Wikipedia,

      One of three songs co-written by the two male members of the group (the others being "Got a Feelin'" and "For the Love of Ivy"), "I Saw Her Again" was inspired by [Denny] Doherty's brief affair with Michelle Phillips, then married to John Phillips, which, combined with an affair between Michelle Phillips and Gene Clark of The Byrds, resulted in the brief expulsion of Michelle from the group. 

       While mixing the record, engineer Bones Howe punched in the coda vocals too early, inadvertently including Doherty's false start on the third chorus ("I saw her..."). Despite attempting to correct the error, the miscued vocal could still be heard on playback. Producer Lou Adler liked the effect and told Howe to leave it in the final mix.

The song's lyrics -- the singer's ambivalence about his relationship with a woman -- had no personal significance for me.  Heck, I didn't even have a girlfriend at that point in my life, much less one that I might have had ambivalent feelings for.  That sort of thing would come a few months later during my senior year in high school.

But the song's driving rhythms, with multi-layered vocals and instruments, were pure American sound . . . the sound of home for me.  And for 3 minutes and 10 seconds I was back in familiar territory.

You can listen to "I Saw Her Again" by clicking here.  The false start mixing mistake (mentioned above) happens at 2:42 into the song.

Enjoy!

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 13: Dachau

 

                                                               Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

                                                                                      -- Terry Pratchett, in I Shall Wear Midnight

In January, 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Nazi Party took control of the government.  Two months later, March 22, 1933, the first Nazi concentration camp opened in Dachau, a town founded in the 9th century CE about 12 miles northwest of Munich.  In its operation it served as a prototype and model for all other German concentration camps that followed.

The camp was established on the grounds of a munitions factory abandoned after WWI.  It was originally used to intern political opponents of the Nazi Party, which consisted of communists, social democrats, and other dissidents.  Soon, however, it was enlarged to imprison Jews, Sinti and Romani, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, immigrants, Germans, and Austrians that the Nazis regarded as criminals, and finally prisoners of war from countries that Germany invaded or occupied, including Poland and the Soviet Union.

When a contingent of SS soldiers arrived in May, 1933, to operate the camp, their commander gave a speech, leaving no doubt as to the purpose of the camp:

Comrades of the SS!

You all know what the Führer has called us to do. We have not come here for human encounters with those pigs in there. We do not consider them human beings, as we are, but as second-class people.  . . . The more of these pig dogs we strike down, the fewer we need to feed.

This is an actual photo of the SS commander giving the speech above.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-01-16 / Friedrich Franz Bauer / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5420179

Dachau was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and others, but during the 12 years of its existence, over 32,000 died there, mostly through disease, malnutrition, and suicide, or were murdered by forced labor, torture, and execution.  Thousands more deaths are undocumented.  When the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945, 10,000 of the 30,000 in the camp were sick.

Dachau prisoners at liberation.  Photo by unknown author - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Photograph 45075, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=542805

We entered the camp in silence, generally aware of the history but unaware of the horrible details of how people were treated, and not really capable of processing the enormity of the evil that was committed on the land under our feet.

I took color photographs, but for this post to convey something of the emotions I felt, I have intentionally processed all but the final two images in black-and-white, with all the dust spots, scratches, and blemishes that have accumulated since 1966.

The barracks in which thousands tried to survive had all been removed . . . only the outlines of the foundations remained.

Here's what they looked like in 1945:

By T/4 Sidney Blau, 163rd Signal Photo Company, Army Signal Corps - U.S. Holocaust Museum photograph #37255 (also here)Credit: SC 206310, Credit NARA, College ParkSubject Classification: MAJOR CONCENTRATION CAMPS 1940-45 -- Dachau -- LIBERATION -- Views -- GeneralKeywords: DACHAU, CONCENTRATION CAMPS, BARRACKS, VIEWS, SURVIVORS, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=542794

Below is the Maintenance Building, which housed workshops, equipment storage, laundry, and kitchen facilities.  It was also where incoming prisoners were processed and humiliated by stripping them naked, shaving their heads, and collecting all personal items.  The large open space in front was the roll call assembly area.

With so many deaths, Dachau had a crematorium, not as large as the ones in the death camps, but still . . .

But not far away, there were two memorials with messages for all of us.  The first is a statue called the Statue of the Unknown Prisoner:

The inscription on the plinth says ""DEN TOTEN ZUR EHR / DEN LEBENDEN ZUR MAHNUNG," which translates as "To honor the dead, to admonish the living."

The other memorial is the Jewish memorial, with a menorah at the top and the Star of David inscribed in a circle:

 

The marker at the front of the memorial, in German and English, says "Grave of Thousands Unknown."

But what you can't see in this photo, inscribed on the horizontal bar below the circle with the Star of David, are the words in German, Hebrew, and English:

                                                                  DO NOT FORGET

I will not forget.