REWIND: A week of lucky escapes

Only the fact that it was a Bank Holiday averted tragedy.

Next to a photo of a single-decker buried nose-first in an Old Town building we wrote: “A Swindon Corporation bus smashed into the front office of the Hillier Funeral Service on Victoria Hill, Swindon, today.

“The driver, Mr Donald Rocks, of Morse Street, Swindon, was taken to the Princess Margaret Hospital but was discharged after examination.

“The bus, on the Northern Road to Regent Circus and Greenmeadow Estate route, was empty at the time. The accident occurred at 8.40am – the time registered on the large electric clock outside Hilliers, which ended up on the roof of the bus.

“Mr Michael Hillier, managing director, said: ‘If it had been a normal working day, my secretary would have been killed.’ “The secretary’s desk in the downstairs front office was buried beneath the rubble.”

The bus, belching smoke from a damaged exhaust, was later reversed from the building by a relief driver who could only reach the buckled cab via the passenger door. It was then towed away.

The biggest local story of the week was the ongoing preparation for Swindon in the Seventies, an exhibition at the Polo Ground of all things Swindonian with an emphasis on the local economy.

Countless Swindon companies booked stands, and visitors could also look forward to fairground rides, flypasts, a visit by the Red Devils parachute display teams and numerous other attractions.

A touch of glamour was to be provided by the recently-crowned Miss United Kingdom, Yvonne Ormes.

Her duties would include being photographed with RR Dickens, field sales manager of Triumph International, the lingerie firm which had a major manufacturing plant in Swindon.

Miss Wales Sandra Cater and Miss Scotland Lee Marshall were also invited to the event, and would appear in the photograph with Yvonne and the Triumph boss.

There was a celebrity football match refereed by Don Rogers and featuring some names which – mostly – weren’t especially big then but became bigger later.

Among them was a young actor called Jeremy Bulloch, who had appeared with Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday and more recently in a TV series called The Newcomers.

He would later achieve cult immortality with his role as bounty hunter Boba Fett in the Star Wars franchise.

Also playing in the match were Tony Selby and David Janson, who a few years later would become nationally famous for their roles in Get Some In, a bizarrely swearword-laden sitcom about a group of RAF National Servicemen and their tyrannical corporal.

Another player was singer Tony Burrows, whose voice had been heard on many a pop record of the era, including Love Grows (Where my Rosemary Goes) by Edison Lighthouse.

Swindon in the Seventies was officially opened by the mayor, Alderman John Pass, who said: “This is Swindon advertising itself and telling the rest of the country our story.”

Although much of our focus was on Swindon’s future, we still found room for a story about its distant past.

“For six weeks,” we said, “archaeologists have been digging up Roman relics alongside the Stratton St Margaret-Wanborough Road.

“But before they leave the site this weekend, hundreds of pieces of pottery and bone will be buried again.

“The reasoning is simple if rather surprising.

“‘They tell us nothing we don’t already know,’ director of the dig John Wacher – a lecturer in Roman archaeology at Leicester University – said.

“Outside the door of the ‘pottery shed’ is a pile of bits and pieces of pottery and bones – and this is the second heap which has grown up.

“It will be buried before the last digger goes.”

Worryingly, the story continued: “But anyone who finds them in the centuries to come will have a pretty good idea when they were discarded.

“Keeping them company over the years will be a number of 20th century tin cans – part of the diggers’ own refuse.”

Among the artefacts to be preserved were four coins, each from a different century of the Roman era.

The Bon Marche store – now Debenhams – in the town centre played host to a hypnotist called Henry Blythe, who was promoting a record he’d made to help people give up smoking.

We sent a reporter called Ann Coltart to sample his skills.

Bemused but not mesmerised, she wrote: “He told me to stare at the bridge of his nose while he crushed my temples with his hands. I was just getting into the swing of it and cutting out the sound of music and chatter in the store when he began to push me into the chair behind me.

“This broke my concentration entirely, as I half-turned round to grasp the arms of the chair and prevent myself falling off the dais altogether.”

Copies of the album, called Stop Smoking, can still occasionally be found for sale, and recordings taken from the vinyl have been put online.