THE wife of one of Britain’s most controversial politicians visited Swindon 44 years ago.

A little over three and a half years before Pamela Powell paid a call, her husband, Enoch, had been sacked from Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet.

The move followed the then shadow defence minister’s infamous anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, given to an audience in Birmingham.

He spoke out against laws forbidding racial discrimination and added: “It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

The speech earned Powell, who died in 1998, both fame and infamy. He was widely lambasted as a racist but also rated in a number of polls as Britain’s most popular politician.

As recently as 2002 he was 55th in a BBC poll of the 100 greatest Britons, immediately below polar explorer Robert Scott and one ahead of Sir Cliff Richard.

We said during his wife’s visit: “You don’t have to be Enoch Powell to attract crowds these days.

“If your name’s Pamela Powell you’re as big an attraction as hubbie himself.

“At least, you are in Swindon. Saturday proved it when Mrs Enoch (Pamela) Powell opened the Swindon Conservative Women’s Advisory Committee annual bazaar.

“Crowds flocked to St Aldhelm’s Hall, Edgware Road, to hear the wife of Britain’s most controversial politician declare the event well and truly open.

“And while she was delivering her speech crowds lined up outside the door, anxious to listen to the woman behind Enoch.”

Sadly we didn’t say what she talked about.

A woman in the news for a completely different reason was Jane Richardson, a single parent to children aged two and four.

With a weekly income barely in double figures, she disputed a £182 electricity bill, only for her supply to be cut off.

That was bad enough, but what followed is food for thought for people who believe everything in the past was better than it is now.

“Hopes that the Mayor of Swindon’s Helping Hand Fund could solve the dilemma of the Wroughton housewife whose electricity has been cut off have fallen through,” we reported.

Swindon councillor Ken Savage, a future mayor who would live until 1990, said after visiting her darkened home that he didn’t think the fund could help.

He added: “I saw Mrs Richardson at her home last night. I was particularly concerned that her two small children should not suffer. “But they are able to cook and heat their home on gas.

“The only inconvenience is having no light - but that’s not a great problem.”

Mrs Richardson said she was burning two candles a night.

The year was part of an era in which local newspapers randomly published front-page photos of glamorous women, even if they had no connection to the local area.

That week we published one of an actress called Wendy Richard leaning seductively against a tree.

Within a few years she’d be a celebrity thanks to Are You Being Served? and within a few years more she’d be a national institution thanks to EastEnders. Back in November of 1971, though, she had a minor role as a Miss Willing in Carry On Matron, parts of which were being filmed about 70 miles away in Denham, Buckinghamshire.

She was 28 at the time, although a publicist seems to have been at work, because her age was given as 23.

Something else we published that week was a horror story accompanied by an image of a fleet of Commer vans and another of a man sitting at a console in the back of one.

Our tale began: “As dusk falls in Swindon tonight and curtains are drawn, the chair pulled up to the fire and the television switched on, something like 500 people could be caught watching the set without due care and attention, as the police would say.

“In the street outside a dark shape will move slowly in the air. Beneath it, an operator sitting hunched over a control panel, his face illuminated in the pale green glare of a cathode ray oscilloscope screen, turns knobs and dials…”

Such stories, put out by the TV licensing authorities, were very effective during a period when most people had little or no knowledge of technology.

It was years before the public began to suspect, for example, that the reason why nobody was ever allowed to see inside detector vans was not because they were full of top secret space-age equipment, but rather because they contained nothing more technologically advanced than the driver’s sandwiches.

Even later, it was revealed that not a single scrap of detector van evidence had ever been used in court.

The happiest story of the week was about a rather unusual wedding.

We said: “At 98, Edmund Simpson thought his days of looking for someone to love were over.

“Then he moved into the Westlecot Home for the Blind in Swindon, where he met Mrs Eva Midwinter, just 82. The two became firm friends and inseparable companions, and today they announced they are to marry.

“The wedding will be at Christ Church on December 8, and Mrs Midwinter will be given away by the Mayor of Swindon, Coun Arthur Palmer.”