* After the election, Clement Attlee stayed on as Leader of the Labour Party, with Herbert Morrison as his deputy; Aneurin Bevan was unofficial leader of the Labour left; Hugh Gaitskell, future leader of the Labour Party.
* Richard Coppock was General Secretary of the National Federation of Building Trades’ Employers and President of the Building Industries’ National Council. Luke Fawcett was General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers and a member of the Federation’s Executive.
* Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Paris, the administrative centre of the forerunner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).
* Winston Churchill’s niece; Eden was twenty-three years her senior.
* ‘Bread and circuses’ – a political policy of Roman origin to distract and appease the populace through the satisfying of basic wants and banal, shallow spectacles.
* John (Jock) Colville died in 1987. General (Ike) Eisenhower, who had been in Supreme Command of the Allied Forces in Europe during the war and later Supreme Commander of NATO, replaced Harry Truman as President.
* Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, whose volatile marriage ended in 1960.
* Iain Macleod, Minister of Health; Mary and Christopher Soames, daughter and son-in-law of the Churchills.
† Dr D. F. Malan, leader of the Nationalist Party in South Africa, was a leading proponent of apartheid and Prime Minister of South Africa from 1948 to 1954.
* NBC, ABC and CBS all broadcast the ceremony, CBS after the event. Eighty-five million Americans watched it, though the proceedings were interrupted with advertisements at critical moments.
* On 12 April 1953 Eden had had an operation to remove gallstones during which his bile duct was damaged, leading to heath problems for the rest of his life.
* David Butler, a political analyst, author of the indispensable series British Political Facts (10th edn, 2011); a close friend of Tony Benn.
† Edward Cavendish, the 10th Duke of Devonshire, died in mysterious circumstances in 1950; his death resulted in 80 per cent death duties on the estate. His son Andrew was heir to the dukedom. Harold Macmillan was married to Dorothy, sister of Edward.
* The cartoon by Leslie Illingworth in Punch and an accompanying article by Punch’s new editor Malcolm Muggeridge was the first public indication of Churchill’s poor health.
* The Mau Mau was an anti-colonial group comprising mainly the Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya. They led a rebellion against British rule from 1952 until 1960.
* Bob Boothby, later Lord Boothby, had been Conservative MP for East Aberdeenshire since 1924.
† Barbara Castle, MP for Blackburn; Ian Mikardo, MP for Reading.
* George Brown was Labour MP for Belper and a member of the Shadow Cabinet.
* Peter Townsend, a Battle of Britain pilot and an equerry to the Queen, had been divorced in 1952.
† From April to December 1955 Harold Macmillan was Foreign Secretary. In December he became Chancellor of the Exchequer.
* Following Stalin’s death in 1953, a period of ‘de-Stalinisation’ took place in the Soviet Union. In a ‘secret speech’ delivered to the 20th Communist Party Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev had denounced Stalin and his purges, ushering in a period of liberalising internal reforms and a foreign policy of peaceful coexistence with the West that became known as the Khrushchev Thaw. Khrushchev’s reforms were controversial amongst hardliners in the Soviet Union and divided the international Communist movement.
* A reference to the red telephone boxes – in which the caller paid 4d (four old pennies), and either pressed button A to connect, or B to get a refund. (Children learned very quickly how to empty the box of its coppers.)
* Hugh Gaitskell’s diaries suggest that George Brown said ‘God forgive him (Stalin)’ but was mistranslated.
* The British Motor Corporation, the predecessor to British Leyland. The strike was prompted by an attempt to remove one in eight of the workforce without any redundancy compensation.
* The construction of a new dam on the Nile was considered a vital part of Nasser’s industrial policy in order to regulate the annual flooding of the Nile and harness the water for agriculture and hydro-electric power.
* Riots erupted in Cyprus in response to the British government’s deportation of the head of the island’s Greek Orthodox Church, Archbishop Makarios. The Archbishop was accused of ‘fostering terrorism’ by supporting a campaign to unite Cyprus with Greece.
* Sir Maurice Bonham Carter, Violet’s husband, known as Bongie.
† Anthony Eden went on holiday to Jamaica in order to rest and recuperate, after the Suez Crisis had provoked another bout of ill-health. Various colleagues plotted his removal from office during his absence and he resigned on 9 January 1957. Despite the Conservative MP’s prediction about Rab Butler, it was Harold Macmillan who succeeded Eden.
* The agriculture review inquired into prices, markets and subsidies within the farming industry, and resulted in the 1957 Agriculture Act.
* Sidney and Cecil Bernstein, cinema and television entrepreneurs who started Granada TV in Manchester.
* William Penney was a British mathematician who had worked on the Manhattan Project. He was appointed Director of the British nuclear weapons programme based at RAF Aldermaston in Berkshire.
* Mark Bonham Carter, elder son of Violet Bonham Carter (and married to Leslie), failed to hold the constituency in the October 1959 General Election. The constituency then called Torrington included the port of Bideford, where the count was held.
* Britain controlled the southern part of Yemen as a Protectorate centred on the strategically useful port of Aden. British rule of the Aden Protectorate ended in 1967 and in 1990 southern Yemen united with the north to form the Republic of Yemen.
† There were ultimately four more nuclear tests at Christmas Island between August and September 1958.
* The Cotton Industry Act provided for grants for new machinery costs in return for redundancies and destruction of obsolete machinery in the Lancashire cotton mills.
* Robert Kee, writer, broadcaster and campaigner.
* At Sharpeville, outside Johannesburg, sixty-nine people were killed and another nineteen died at Langa, near Cape Town.
* The Daily Sketch, a right-leaning tabloid, was owned by Associated Newspapers, who in 1971 merged it with its sister paper, the Daily Mail. The TUC still held a substantial stake in the Daily Herald, which in the 1920s had been its official organ. It supported Labour. In 1969 the paper was sold to News International who relaunched it as The Sun.
* The older of the Mountbattens’s two daughters, the younger being Pamela.
* Edward Heath was Lord Privy Seal, and in charge of Britain’s negotiations to join the Common Market.
* A conference in London called to discuss the future of the Central African Federation, set up by the British government in the 1950s to join together Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Africans had not been consulted and Joshua Nkomo in Southern Rhodesia, Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia and Hastings Banda in Nyasaland led African nationalist opinion against the Federation.
† Jo Grimond, Violet Bonham Carter’s son-in-law, and Leader of the Liberal Party, was inaugurated as Rector of Edinburgh University on 24 February 1961.
* This was probably John Lennon.
† Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, was the first man to travel to outer space, orbiting the earth in Vostok 1. He died in 1968 in a plane crash.
* The philosopher Bertrand Russell was amongst those imprisoned for failing to agree to an order not to take part in a non-violent ‘sit-in’ at Trafalgar Square.
* The seven were Lord Kilmuir, Selwyn Lloyd (Chancellor of the Exchequer), David Eccles, Harold Watkinson and Lord Mills, all Conservatives; and John Scott Maclay and Charles Hill, who were ‘National Liberals’ in the Conservative government.
† Some railway workshops (e.g. Bromsgrove, Caerphilly, Darlington, Earlstown, Gorton and Lancing) were to close within three years; others merged or ceased certain functions.
* President Kennedy had reversed the former US policy and approved the selling of Hawk missiles to Israel in August 1962.