Back to the Time Of The Hippie calendar
On 5 December 1958 Britain had its first motorway. The road ran for 8.25 miles (13.3 kms) around the east side of Preston and, with hardly any imagination, was known as the Preston by-pass. The following year a part of what is now the M1 also opened and Britain had the start of its motorway system. It's possible that planning wasn't as good as it should have been or the planners did not foresee how rapidly car ownership would grow.
In 1966 the two lanes of the by-pass were widened to three and in the 1990s it was widened to four lanes. For this they had to rebuild the whole route, including all bridges. Oh well. Don't even ask me about the M25.
However, in this year, another road was travelled for the first time. Do you remember back at the beginning of this century two British explorers were trying to be the first to reach the South Pole. They both failed and one, Scott, did get there, a few weeks too late, but died on his way back. The other Ernest Shackleton decided to then try to be the first person to cross the polar ice cap. He failed too.
In 1958 though a Commonwealth Expedition, led by a man called Vivian Fuchs, succeeded. They set out from one side of the ice cap in November 1957 with a 12 man team travelling in six vehicles. Meanwhile, on the other side, a team were setting out to set up depot bases for Fuchs. This way he didn't have to carry so many supplies on board his vehicles.
This other team was led by Sir Edmund Hilary, the man who climbed Mount Everest four or so years before. He wasn't supposed to go to the pole but after setting up the last depot he thought, why not, and pressed on thereby becoming the first team to reach the pole overland since Scott and the first to do so using motorised transport.
Fuchs eventually got to the pole, and continued on, getting to the other side of the ice cap, after several near disasters, on 2 March 1958.
Just to finish this story Hilary accompanied the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, in a small plane which landed at the North Pole in 1985. He became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. He also had a brief telephone conversation with me in 2005, before telling me his hearing was bad and passing me on to his wife, a charming lady. He was 85 by then so I'll forgive him. He died in 2008.
There was never a suggestion to widen the route taken by Fuchs and his team.
Forward to 1962AD
