The death of Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the Moon,
on August 25th 2012, brought to mind a flood of memories about that event and a
little essay I wrote 39 years later for the Skeptical
Adversaria, 2007 (4). On this
occasion I have given the essay a title.
Reminiscences on the first Moon
landing and what it meant for the people of Lancashire
On a certain day, almost forty years ago, I was waiting to be served
in a sweet shop in Rawtenstall, a mill town, as it was then described, in Lancashire. The woman in front of me paid for her
purchases and ended her conversation with the shopkeeper with the words
‘Scientists! It’ll rain, just you see!’
The date was July 16th 1969, and NASA was about to launch Apollo 11,
the spaceship that would transport the first human beings to the Moon. It seemed to me unreasonable, to say the
least, that a spaceship taking off in Florida would cause rain to fall in
Lancashire, over 5,000 miles away, on the same day. But that was this lady’s main concern when it
came to the Apollo Moon Mission.
At that time I was doing a vacation job in the local Parks and
Cemeteries Department. The Moon Mission
was a regular topic of conversation amongst the workmen and we were all pretty
much captivated. Interestingly, many of
these men had seen active service during the War and for no good reason, so it
seemed to me, expressed some strong anti-American sentiments. In particular there were two conflicting
complaints: one was that America should have joined us earlier than 1941, the
other that they should have kept out of Europe altogether and ‘left it to the
British to finish Hitler off’. I
wouldn’t be surprised if there were some individuals who espoused either point
of view depending on what company they were in.
Especially vocal on this subject was Harry, a strange man who had in
the past campaigned for the Communist Party but at a later stage had done
something of an about turn and decided that all the ills of the nation were due
to the education of the working classes, night school (‘f***ing neet school’)
being a particular target for his venom.
I think I can still recite Harry’s tirade about the American soldiers
he encountered when in the army during the War.
It started off ‘F***ing Yanks! Their ´eads were so stuffed up with ´ow
good their own country were, they’d never ´eard o´ Lancashire’ and the rest was
75% expletives.
In fact Harry had indirectly put his finger on the crucial point. Like many of his generation, it was Harry’s
head that had been so stuffed up with how good his country was that he expected
everyone else to have heard of Lancashire.
It took some time for it to dawn on him (if it ever did) and the rest of
us that we weren’t top dog anymore – it was America. Even as Harry spoke, Mr Harold Wilson, who
six years earlier had spoken of the ‘Britain that is going to be forged in the
white heat of this revolution’ was busy managing our national decline. And the reality was that it was the Americans
and Russians who were, in the main, responsible for ‘finishing Hitler off’, and
all but ending fascism in Europe. Thanks
to America also, we eventually, saw off communism too.
The Moon Mission was not without its critics in the UK. The historian Mr A.J.P. Taylor declared on
television that it was all a fuss over nothing and of no historical consequence
(‘the biggest non-event of my lifetime’) and his friend Mr Malcolm Muggeridge
opined that, as a human achievement, it came nowhere near the verses of Mr T.S.
Elliot. Many people, myself included,
held that money spent on sending people to the Moon would be better used to
help alleviate world poverty and famine.
On the other hand, a supporter of the mission was, naturally, the
popular astronomer Mr Patrick Moore, who argued that because spaceships have to
travel through radiation and radiation is used to treat cancer, spending money
on space travel would help patients suffering from cancer.
Whatever the case, there are certain things that cannot be disputed
about the Apollo Moon Mission (unless, like some people, you think the whole
thing was a hoax). It was, to be sure, a
triumph for the American people and their leaders, but also a triumph for
humankind, a stunning demonstration of what men and women are capable of achieving
when they work together. For once,
people all over the planet were able to share a collective sense of awe and
wonder at a historical event that wasn’t a war or the imminence of war, or the
detonation of a weapon of mass destruction, or the assassination of a world
leader, or a great natural disaster. It
was something positive and exciting.
There was no anger or bitterness; nobody was threatened and nobody got
hurt. And, of course, it was, and remains, a triumph for science
So, on that day 39 years ago, three men set off on their journey to
the Moon. And – for once – it didn’t
rain in Lancashire.
Michael Heap, December 2007
