A date with Destiny! - or is it History?

Today, 23rd November, is a day that will always stand out for me, for several reasons.

Reason 1

On this day in 1969, I made my first parachute jump. At about 1220 hrs I climbed out onto the wheel of a Cessna 172, registration 5B-CAR, 2500 feet above Kingsfield Airstrip, in Cyprus.
John's first jump, 23 November 1969

Some 2 minutes later I was safely on the ground, surprisingly close to my intended landing site.

Parachutes were nowhere near as sophisticated in those days as today, and the landings alone were enough to put most rational people off, but I persisted, slowly, making an average of one jump per week for the next 2 years, and graduating to rather better parachutes as time wore on.

I quickly progressed from basic *static line* jumping, where the chute opens as one falls away from the plane, to free fall jumping, and before I left Cyprus in 1971 I had progressed to delayed falls of over 30 seconds.

Back in England I found some good groups to jump with, although I never became terribly proficient at formation jumping (*relative work*), though i did some nice *small stuff*, but i found that I enjoyed demonstration and accuracy jumping.

I became a sport parachute instructor in 1973, and worked until 1977 for two different clubs, The Sport Parachute Centre, at Grindale, and the Peterborough Parachute Centre, which was an amazing experience.

Instructor Kiwi John at the Peterborough Parachute Centre

In 1977 I was about to take up a job with a major parachute company, when i was invited to be Chief Parachute Instructor of The Free Fall Parachute Club at Langar, near Nottingham.

It was weekends only, and for a few months of the summer it was a wonderful time, but eventually I had to quit, in favour of my job. Plus I found myself at odds with other instructors, because i was siding with a renegade operator....

In another blog I mention some of the work I did for the parachute company I worked for, and that too was a fantastic time. I had the opportunity to work with the military sometimes, and get behind the scenes in curious situations.

I almost became the first UK civilian to jump from a Royal Air Force Chinook helicopter in the course of my association with the RAF, but they declared that it hadn't been cleared for free fall yet. Like - all you did was jump over the back - people had done that for years with other services!!! Typical military thinking in Britain!!

But i did get to ride in some other military aircraft, and often jumped the RAF's remaining Argosy, as well as a Hercules. My 600th jump was from the tail of a Hercules, dressed more or less like this....

Kiwi John dressed for action, military style!!

One curious aspect of my demonstration parachuting was an involvement, through one of our company directors, in aerophilately. Crudely put that's stamp collecting with an aviation theme, and in this case the theme was commemorative covers delivered by parachute. These were decorative envelopes issued to celebrate special events, and I found myself making several demonstration jumps into strange and wonderful places carrying boxes of covers. On one occasion i dropped into the RAF Museum at Hendon, to hand the covers to legendary fighter pilot Sir Douglas Bader, and on another I landed in the grounds of Sandringham Castle with covers to celebrate the royal wedding of Charles and Diana. (see below).

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My last season of jumping was in 1983, shortly before I was married, and I think my last jump was a demonstration into the local mental hospital - they always said you had to be mad to go there!!!

In all I made just short of 700 jumps, some far more memorable than others. The final picture is one of the best - a solo drop into Kensington Palace, London, carrying a box of commemorative covers.

Free fall over London

Reason 2

On this day in 1963, the first episode of Doctor Who was shown, in Britain, and I watched it with my brother.

Doctor Who has become the longest-running science fiction series on TV, although it started out with an educational intention. Much, much more about the programme can be found in this Wikipedia entry.

That I saw the programme at all was amazing, since we didn't have a TV at home at the time, but my brother and I were on a permanent invite to go *two doors down* to our neighbour, whose son we went to school with.

We would watch the evening children's broadcast, which would include such stuff as Captain Pugwash and Noggin the Nog, together with Popeye the Sailor and Looney Tunes, and as soon as the theme for the evening news began, at 6 pm, we would troop home again for dinner.

It was when I was getting my facts straight for this blog that I realised how much my memory had changed events, however slightly, and this brings me to Reason 3 for remembering this date.

Reason 3

For years, in fact until this week, I had somehow believed that when we got home from watching the first episode of Doctor Who, we found our parents in a state of shock over the assassination of President Kennedy.

But in researching for this blog i realised that JFK had been assassinated at 6.30 pm (our time) on Friday, 22nd November - that is, 24 hours earlier.

It's not impossible, but highly improbable, that our parents didn't find out until the evening radio news on Saturday, and so my memory of those days must have been combined.

History, they say, is not what happened, but what we remember happened, and for 43 years I have associated JFK's assassination with Doctor Who - close, but not close enough......