The Postcard
A postcard bearing no publisher's name that was printed in Great Britain. The card was posted in Evesham using a 3½p stamp on Thursday the 27th. September 1973. It was sent to:
Mr. & Mrs. C. G. Short,
Littles Manor,
Sheldwich,
Faversham,
Kent.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"Thursday,
Broadway.
Dear H & D,
We stopped here (Broadway)
to have a look at. We've been
to Evesham and had a picnic
lunch at the roadside.
It has been a good day out
but the weather has gone
against us now.
It is all very pretty round here
as you know.
Hope you are both OK.
Love to you both,
Sylvie."
The Round House
The Round House is home to the local branch of the NatWest Bank. It is the oldest building in which they have a branch. The sign in the photograph refers to the National Provincial Bank, which was merged into NatWest in 1970.
Even long ago when Evesham was as full of black and white buildings as a flock of magpies, it must have stood out.
It dates to the 15th. century, and the framing is very much as it would have been then - quite close-studded woodwork, with jetties (overhangs) to both upper floors.
The windows are later - they are in fact fairly recent replacements made mostly along the lines of the 19th-century windows that were there before the building was restored in the 1960's.
Other post-medieval additions include the massive props to the left-hand side (visible in the photograph). They were put there to stop a pronounced westward lean becoming terminal. They worked.
It was obviously built by someone prosperous - the ample timber work and jetties suggest that. The builder could well have been a merchant.
Its usual name, the Round House, seems rather perverse. However, the building on its island site in the marketplace can be walked around, so that is presumably the reason for the name.
The building's alternative name, the Booth Hall, suggests that it was once a market building. However the authors of the Pevsner Worcestershire volume doubt that its lower floor ever housed booths, as there are no traces of the open arches that would have allowed this.
Pevsner thinks that the building may have begun life as an inn. It is possible, as it has an important position in the centre of the town.
Soyuz 12
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 27th. September 1973, Soyuz 12, the first Soviet crewed space flight in more than two years, was launched in order to test new pressure suits and the redesigned Soyuz capsule, the 7K-T.
With revisions to have Soviet launches crewed by two people instead of three, cosmonauts Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov were launched at 6:18 p.m. local time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
They spent two days in orbit, landing on the 29th. September. The flight was the first for cosmonauts since the Soyuz 11 tragedy that killed all three crew on the 29th. June 1971.
A Plane Crash in Arkansas
Also on that day, all 11 people on board Texas International Airlines Flight 655 were killed in the U.S. state of Arkansas when the turbojet plane crashed during part of its multi-stop journey from Memphis to Dallas.
The Convair 600 took off from El Dorado, Arkansas on a 22-minute flight to Texarkana. After the pilot ordered the first officer to descend to 2,000 feet (610 m), the officer consulted a chart, discovering that the airplane was too low.
The last words on the cockpit voice recording were the first officer telling the pilot:
"Minimum en route altitude
here is forty-four hun..."
At that moment, the airplane crashed into the side of the 2,600 feet (790 m) high Black Fork Mountain, near Mena, Arkansas.
Three more people were killed during the four-day search for the missing airliner when their helicopter crashed.
The wreckage was finally located on the 30th. September, 85 miles (137 km) off course from its intended destination of Texarkana.
Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
Also on the 27th. September 1973, the popular syndicated TV show Don Kirshner's Rock Concert made its debut with The Rolling Stones and The Doobie Brothers as its first featured acts.
Lasting 90 minutes, the program ran for 230 episodes until 1981.
An Execution in Chile
Also on that day, a firing squad in Chile carried out the first execution of a high-ranking ally of the late president Salvador Allende.
German Castro Rojas, the deposed Governor of Talca Province was shot after being convicted by court-martial of killing a Carabinero policeman and attempting to destroy a dam.