A FULL-page advert we ran this week 42 years ago is proof that in 1974 the world was a different place.

The colour image shows the hand of a man – an airline pilot, judging by the braid on his sleeve – grasping the gearstick of an expensive car.

Clasped between his first and second knuckle is that symbol of all things glamorous, exotic and macho - a premium brand cigarette.

For a touch of home-grown sophistication, we managed to include a home-grown property magnate, one Ramon Greene.

Our reporter wrote: “When I asked Ramon Greene, the 42-year-old joint managing director of the English and Continental Property Company Limited, if he was a property millionaire, he corrected me.

“‘A multi-millionaire,’ he said, with what seemed to be mild conceit.

“Which is nice going, considering that ten years ago he was no more than a moderately successful businessman running his Swindon estate agency.

“Now he jointly heads a company that occupies a lush suite of offices at Upper Brook Street, Mayfair.

“The softly carpeted room in which he greeted me would make a full-sized flat for a family. Mr Green, balding but athletic – he played scrum-half for Berkshire Wanderers until he was 32 and still keeps fit by running – seemed disappointed that I had failed to notice the piano in the corner was a Steinway.”

Mr Greene and his business partner, Jack Walker, were among a swathe of entrepreneurs who spent the early 1970s buying up and renovating properties in London. His coups included acquiring the prestigious Cunard House office building for £8.5m in 1971.

A little later, he bought up acres of farmland at Groundwell in Swindon for £800,000 before selling it on to the old Swindon Corporation for £4m.

By 1978, though, a property crash, taxes and other complications had brought him to bankruptcy. The following year, he was discharged from bankruptcy by a court and pledged to start again in business.

There are no further mentions of him in the Adver’s archives, although online searches turn up somebody of that name involved in civil court business in the British Virgin Islands as recently as 2008.

In other property news, a big payday was in the offing for homeowners in Villett Street – provided they were willing to move out and let the bulldozers move in.

“£14,000 Each for Terrace Houses,” said our headline.

Today’s incarnation of Villett Street is a narrow town centre lane with a multi-storey car park on one side and the backs of shops on the other.

The 1974 version, now covered by the car park, was a little distance from that location and had been home to generations of Swindonians.

By mid-January the council tenants along one side had been moved to other places and their house bricked up. The private residents on the other side were waiting to move as soon as an unexplained delay in the purchase deals could be ironed out.

Later in the week we were able to report: “Residents of Swindon’s Villett Street, caught up in a property bonanza, will get the cash promised for their homes.

“This assurance came today from agents representing Bellstan Properties which also has further plans for Swindon central area development.

“The deal, worth £270,000, means a cash swap of more than £14,000 for each of 18 terraced houses – probably more than double the true market value.”

Two of the era’s most famous British actresses, Diane Cilento and Fiona Fullerton, also featured in our pages that week.

Diane, who had divorced Sean Connery and made cult classic The Wicker Man the previous year, lived near Malmesbury at the time.

She revealed she’d just returned from Turkey, where she had a brush with death while directing a documentary. Their car had been in collision with a car on an icy road.

“We got out of the car,” she said, “and a second later a big passenger bus ran into us and smashed the car to pieces.”

Fiona, 17, was a celebrity thanks to her starring role in a 1972 film adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. More than a decade later she would play a Soviet agent in 1985 Bond film A View to a Kill.

She had until recently been a Shrivenham resident, thanks to her Army officer father being stationed at the Royal Military College of Science for the three years.

When he took a new posting in London, it was time for the family to move on.

Fiona said: “I will miss this part of the world because it is the first place I have lived permanently.”

The most startling image we published that week in 1974 was surely one showing a Ford Escort standing on its nose against a telegraph pole on the A420.

Quite how it had come to be in such a position during a journey toward Swindon was something of a mystery.

Mercifully, the driver escaped unhurt, so we could afford a little levity. Later editions headlined the story: “Elop Eht Pu.”

That, of course, is “Up The Pole” backwards…