FRANCE burned this week in 1968, and plenty of Swindon people were there to feel the heat.

The riots of that year are as much iconic parts of 1960s history as the Kennedy assassinations or Woodstock.

Millions of striking French workers joined forces with radical students to protest against capitalism, corruption, imperialism and the ongoing war in Vietnam.

Before the summer was out, they brought down the government.

Like any good local newspaper, the Adver looked for Swindon angles to major international stories, and found one courtesy of a local shop.

We said: “People from the Swindon district who were stranded in France earlier in the week because of the transport stoppages there are now either home or on their way.

“Mr C FitzGerald, manager of Yeomans Miller travel agency in Commercial Road, is now concerned about the people who plan to travel to France during the next few weeks.

“'A dozen people have cancelled their trips but there are between 60 and 100 prospective travellers to France who are waiting for President de Gaulle’s speech tomorrow,’ and the reaction to it,’ Mr Fitzgerald said.

“Some clients were feeling ‘very unsettled’ about the situation, and if they did not make cancellations, arrangements were being made for them to enter France via Belgian airports or car ferries.

“'But we’re holding on until after the speech,’ said Mr Fitzgerald. ‘People feel that the present state of affairs will then either worsen or end altogether.’”

Another band of local people facing peril – albeit voluntarily rather than through unfortunate timing – were the members of Swindon Caving Group.

“Whispering in the Dark Down Below,” ran the headline above a story in which an Adver reporter called Hugh Clayton recounted a visit to Goatchurch Cavern in the Mendip Hills.

He and photographer Dave Evans were guided by Swindon cavers Mike Collins, Bob Wotton, Michael Hale, Gavin McCourt and Peter Clitheroe. We’d be delighted to hear from any of the five.

Caving in those days was just as thrilling as it is now but rather more perilous. Lightweight batteries were still in the future, so cavers used headlamps with acetylene-fuelled flames. Sudden dangers such as flooding were not as well understood, and only a year earlier six cavers had drowned when Mossdale Caverns in the Yorkshire Dales suddenly filled because of rain.

That didn’t stop the general public from wandering into the more accessible sections of caves, though, and sometimes they showed a lack of respect which horrified ardent cavers.

Our reporter noted at one point: “Our next port of call was another small chamber with striking rock formations.

“Some of the surfaces were more jagged than others and Bob Wotton confirmed that souvenir hunters snapped off the more interesting bits.

“Unrestricted entry to the cave certainly seemed to be a mixed blessing. I had spotted several cigarette packets, sweets papers and a beer can on our route.

“There were names scrawled on many of the walls, including one of a scout troop, and on one small ledge, which someone might have used as a handhold, there was a broken bottle.”

Back in Swindon, the town’s best-known high technology firm announced a major breakthrough – a major reduction in the size of radios. Judging by the pictures, this consisted of shrinking them from ‘big’ to somewhat 'less big’ but it was a major advance for the period.

We revealed: “Those doyens of the ‘mini’ radio business, the Japanese, are about to get a run for their money. And it’s official... from Plessey.

“One of the Plessey Company’s ‘whiz kids,’ 30-year-old Mr Michael Gay, chief circuit engineer (linear) at Cheney Manor, Swindon, has come up with something likely to make the Japanese sit up.

“Called the ‘monolithic integrated circuit,’ this latest development by Plessey fulfils all the functions of a radio with the exception of tuner and loudspeaker, and will halve the size of car and portable radios.”

The week also saw us begin a series of aerial photographs of Swindon schools. The first showed St Joseph’s Lower School on Queen’s Drive, along with the ambulance station and the as yet non-Magic Roundabout.

The second was of another bygone, Park School, and the image included the old Kex industrial laundry.

We also found space for a couple of animal stories. One was about an abandoned owl fledgling which found its way to the Avebury Road home of a Mrs Margaret Kearley and became firm friends with her cat, Sandy.

There was no pea-green boat in evidence, but that didn’t prevent us from referring to Lear’s most famous poem in the headline.

As if this were not a cuteness overload, we also revealed that a mother cat and her four kittens had been found living in the growing shell of the new police headquarters in Fleming Way.

Site electrician John Roscoe invited would-be adopters to call him. His number had only four digits, suggesting there were less than 10,000 private phone lines in Swindon at the time.