ICONIC women’s hairstyles of the Sixties included the beehive, the pixie cut, the bob and the bouffant.

This week half a century ago Swindon tried for its own piece of tonsorial immortality but didn’t make much of an impact.

The cut itself was perfectly fine, but the name didn’t exactly evoke Carnaby Street, the King’s Road or Monte Carlo.

We said: “With deft, confident strokes of the comb, Tommy Pickering, once holder of Britain’s top hairdressing award, brought into being in Swindon last night the Quantock style, which he had specially created for Swindon.

“The occasion was a demonstration at The Goddard Arms for hairdressers from Swindon and District of the products of an international firm of hairdressing suppliers.

“Mr Pickering, who held some years ago the Gold Cup of the Guild of Hairdressers, Wigmakers and Perfumers, said that in designing the Quantock style he had thought of the hills and valleys of that part of the country.

“The style was built up high at the crown, with little backcombing – more teasing – and allowed to tumble in its natural direction.

“He had cut the hair into this tumbling style.”

The look was modelled by a young woman called Elizabeth Lee.

That week in 1966 saw the Adver run pictures of two Swindon locations which will be familiar to older Rewind readers. Years later, the passing of one was mourned and the passing of the other was ignored by most and celebrated by some.

One of the images showed a vista of large and well-tended cacti and succulents against a magnificent painted background. The other showed a group of men in dark suits standing around a concrete cube, looking for all the world like members of some strange cult.

The cacti and succulents were part of the much-visited collection in the Show House at Queen’s Park, a glass building with a large central area and two wings.

One of the wings would be removed in the late 1980s, and the rest would be wrecked by storms early in the next decade.

And the cube? It was, of course, the controversial town centre sculpture and water feature designed by London artist Geoffrey Wickham and unveiled in The Parade earlier that year.

Its visitors were members of the Institute of Municipal Engineers.

We reported that some were less than impressed by what they saw. One wonders what they would have made of it in later years, when algae grew on the cube and the pool around it became a popular draw for litterers with rubbish to dump and drunks unable to reach a public convenience.

The seven-foot structure, which had cost the equivalent of about £50,000 in today’s money, was removed in the late 1970s.

In the 1960s travelling circuses were still immensely popular with the public, and the Robert Brothers’ Circus announced its arrival by having its elephants parade trunk-to-tail from the station to Westcott Recreation Ground.

The Adver, as was traditional with local newspapers, selected a young reporter to enter the lion’s cage.

The reporter in question was called Graham Forrester, and nobody could have accused him of false bravado.

“I have never been so terrified in my life,” he wrote.

“Last night as I stood three feet away from a huge lion in the ring of Robert Brothers’ Circus, my wildest illusions were shattered.

“In many an idle moment my natural cowardice has turned to a dream-like bravery. I knew all about Tarzan. He killed lions with his bare hands. He throttled them.”

The journalist had also thought punching a rampaging lion on the nose might be a good idea.

On meeting the beasts, he revised his opinion: “It was then that I realised you could not do a thing if one of them jumped on you.

“They didn’t seem to have a nose. There was just a vague soft area where they breathed from. The rest was all jaw and teeth and claws.”

To be fair to the young Mr Forrester, he didn’t flee the cage and was also willing to have a human performer shoot steel-tipped arrows at a balloon he held in his mouth.

Christmas was three months away but Swindon’s business people were already discussing how to manage the season. Their strategy would be completely alien to their modern counterparts in this era of 24-hour opening.

“Swindon housewives face four days of shut shops over the Christmas holidays this year – if a recommendation by the Chamber of Commerce is accepted.

“The plan is for all-day-closing on Boxing Day, Tuesday, December 27 – a public Holiday – and Wednesday. This is on top of the usual Sunday closing.

“The motion suggesting the big shut down was passed by members of the Chamber at their meeting last night.”