ON the afternoon of Thursday, April, 18, 1972, four specialist military personnel climbed aboard a Hercules aircraft at RAF Lyneham.

Piloted by 50-year-old Squadron Leader George Bain, it headed west.

That night the four men – an Army captain, two SBS members and an SAS sergeant – leapt from the aircraft and parachuted into the inky Atlantic.

Soon they were hauled aboard the world’s most famous liner, the QE2.

All were bomb disposal experts and their mission was to search every inch of the vessel. In New York the FBI hunted an unknown extortionist to claimed to have planted six bombs on board and wanted $350,000 dollars to reveal their locations.

The threat turned out to be a hoax for which an unhappy middle-aged shoe salesman from New York called Joseph Landisi would later be jailed for 10 years, but the bomb disposal team didn’t know that as they searched 13 decks and about 1,000 cabins. The vessel, with 2,150 people board, was heading for Cherbourg.

The following day the story shared our front page along with a report from America about a very real bomb attack in a Pentagon lavatory, planted by anti-Vietnam war protesters.

Hercules pilot Squadron Leader Bain told us: “It was raining heavily and there was a lot of low cloud.

“We had to drop to 250 feet through cloud to sight the ship and then climb back to 800 feet to drop the disposal team.

“When we sighted the QE2 there were hundreds of people on deck taking pictures.

“There were lights flashing all over the place. They were all waving and taking it coolly when there was supposed to be six bombs on board.”

Also suffering trouble of a nautical nature was a Swindon man called Kenneth Whyburd, who had built a 24ft yacht in his Curtis Street garage.

The vessel was called Bokkie – Afrikaans for sweetheart – and was the fifth built by 55-year-old Mr Whyburd. His most ambitious project to date, the yacht had been taking shape since the late 1960s.

Unfortunately Bokkie was so large that her builder was forced to dismantle part of the garage to get her out. Even then she proved too large for the trailer he laid on for her journey to a mooring at Portland.

A bigger trailer was duly found, but in a follow-up piece we reported that her late arrival coincided with an unusually low tide known as dead of the neaps.

There Mr Whyburd and Bokkie sail out of our archives forever, but we hope they enjoyed many a fine voyage together.

On a completely different note there was a healthy dose of 1970s sauciness on offer at the Wyvern Theatre.

The stars of sex comedy Who Goes Bare? included familiar British character actor Sam Kydd, whose CV included classic films such as The Cruel Sea and Reach for the Sky.

Much of the glamour came courtesy of two actresses who would later become household names. Lynda Baron went on to play Nurse Gladys Emanuel in Open All Hours; Sue Nicholls, already a Crossroads veteran, appeared in programmes as diverse as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and Rentaghost but became best known as Audrey in Coronation Street.

Who Goes Bare? was about a health spa being mistaken for a nudist establishment, and our reviewer said: “The obvious happens: several characters lose their clothes, turning up in immaculately-positioned towels, and one girl is reduced to two strands of long hair and a large tennis racquet.

“The characters include an all-purpose twit Scotsman and an all-purpose twit policeman. The jokes are about as subtle as a clout over the head from the Scotsman’s caber, and some of the corn has whiskers.”

On a slightly related subject a woman called Georgina Connolly, who was matron at the Westlecot Home for the Blind in Westlecot Road, was sent an unusual gift by friends in Durban, South Africa.

“She’s small, multi-coloured and worshipped,” we said.

“And in an age of advanced medicine and sex supermarkets, the tribal cultism and mystery of the African fertility doll seems to aid childless couples.

“Mrs Georgina Connolly has a fertility doll and is offering it to any local childless couples who want a baby.

“’You just hang it up in your home and hope,’ she explained.

“She doesn’t think it makes you more sexy, ‘but it seems to work in Africa. Out there the women really believe this doll will make them pregnant. It’s more than simple superstition.

“I’d read reports about the powers of this doll and wrote to my friends about it. The next thing was the arrival of the doll itself.

“If it can help people in Swindon, good luck to them. I am only too willing to let them borrow it?”

But did anybody borrow it, and what was the result if they did?

Are there Swindon-born people heading for their forties who would never have been born at all without Mrs Connolly’s doll?