It was the best of times . . .

SIX NATIONS: LOOKING BACK 1948: It was 1948 when Ireland won their last Grand Slam. Sixty-one years on, MARY HANNIGANlooks at the big stories of the day, how much it would have cost to watch the match that day and the price of a pint afterwards

MATCH DAY

1948– Match programme for Ireland v Wales at Ravenhill: 1.5 cent.

2009– Match programme for Wales v Ireland at the Millennium Stadium: €5.32.

1948– Ticket for Ireland v Wales: 64 cent.

2009– Ticket for Wales v Ireland: prices from €21.30-€70.

1948– A pint of Guinness: 6.35 cent.

2009– A pint of Guinness: €2.67 (and it could easily be bumped up this weekend).

1948– Attendance at Ravenhill: 30,000.

2009– Attendance at Millennium Stadium: 74,500.

TRANSFER RECORDS

In February 1948 Sunderland, their wealth earning them the nickname the “Bank of England”, paid a record fee of £20,500 (roughly €531,700 in today’s money) to Newcastle for Len Shackleton. The maximum wage for footballers at the time was £12-a-week during the season (approximately double the average industrial wage) and £10 in the close season. Shackleton, a prolific goalscorer, never earned more than £15-a-week during his career, his win and scoring bonuses taking him to that peak.

Almost 61 years later Manchester City broke the British transfer record by paying Real Madrid €34.45 million for Robinho. The Brazilian earns €170,154 per week; according to the GMB (General, Municipal and Boilermakers’ Trade Union) the average industrial salary in Manchester is €13,825-€15,952 a year.

LONDON OLYMPICS

London had been due to host the Olympic Games in 1944, but the second World War resulted in them being postponed until four years later. Germany and Japan weren’t invited, for some reason. The 1948 Games were the first to be shown on television. Few people, though, had televisions at that time, limiting the audience to 500,000 in the British Isles. The rest of the world made do with radio coverage. For the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing 4.7 billion viewers worldwide, according to Nielsen Media Research, tuned in at some point. NBC announced that their coverage had reached 211 million viewers over the 16 days, making it the most viewed event in US television history.

NBC paid €2.58 billion for the rights to all Olympic Games between 1996 and 2008, while the European Broadcasting Union paid €326.6 million for the rights to the 2008 Games alone.

ADA FISHER

In 1948 the United States Supreme Court ruled in favour of a black woman, Ada Fisher, who had been denied entry to the University of Oklahoma law school because of the colour of her skin. When she finally began her course she was forced to sit separate from the white students, behind a sign reading “Colored”. She also had to sit in the “colored” section of the cafeteria – using a side door to enter – her table separated by a chain from the rest of the room. A guard stood watch to make sure blacks and whites did not mix. She graduated in 1951. Sixty-one years later, lest you didn’t hear, another black law graduate became president of the United States.

INVENTIONS

VELCRO

Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral began inventing when he was a child, most of his designs – notably the asparagus peeler – were not quite up there with the wheel in the world-changing stakes. But a walk with his dog in 1941 set him on the path to his most famous invention, Velcro.

Noticing that his jacket, socks and the dog’s coat were covered with burrs from burdock he examined them under a microscope and noted that their barbed, hook-like seeds interlocked with the looped fibres in his clothes. He had a think and reckoned if he could use the same principle in the design of a fabric fastener he’d be laughing.

And he was, in 1955, when – after years of research, and not a little ridicule – his hook-and-loop fastener was finally patented under the name Velcro, a combination of the French words for velvet (velours) and hook (crochet). The rest is, admittedly noisy, history.

SCRABBLE

The board game had been around since 1938, invented by Alfred Mosher Butts and called Criss Cross Words, but had no success in attracting the interest of games manufacturers. Ten years later, a James Brunot, who owned a copy of Criss Cross Words, decided the game could be a winner if it was well marketed and if it had a catchier name. Like Scrabble.

Brunot did a deal with Butts, getting the rights to the game in exchange for a royalty on every copy sold. The project didn’t start well, Brunot losing money in the first four years, but after Jack Strauss, president of the Macy’s chain of stores, played the game on holidays he put in an order for his New York store – within two years it had sold two million copies.

Brunot could no longer keep up with the demand and sold the rights to a company that had earlier rejected Criss Cross Words. Today, Scrabble ranks just below Monopoly as the second best-selling board game in American history.

LPs

As one youngster was recently heard to ask, “what’s an elpee?” Indeed, anyone under the age of 12 has probably never heard of a long playing vinyl record. They’re still available, but have long since been overtaken by, first, CDs, and then MP3s.

In 1948, at a press conference in New York’s Waldorf Astoria, Columbia Records unveiled the LP. It came in two formats, the 10-inch and 12-inch, and played at 33 and a third rpm (revolutions per minute).

The first 10-inch LP was The Voice of Frank Sinatra (a reissue of a set of four 78 rpm records) and the first 12-inch was the Mendelssohn Concerto in E Minor for Violin and Orchestra played by Nathan Milstein with the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York.

Under-12-year-olds, armed with their iPods and such like, have, then, never experienced the joy of the sound of a scratched vinyl record. Bless them.

BIRTHS

Pat Kenny, Rory Gallagher, Moss Keane, Christy O’Connor Jr, Chris de Burgh, John Magnier, Johnny Ramone, Prince Charles, Cliff Thorburn, Alice Cooper, Sinead Cusack, William McCrea, Sven-Goran Eriksson, Shakin’ Stevens, Billy Crystal, Peter Robinson (Northern Ireland First Minister), Brendan Foster, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Al Gore, Leo Sayer, Cat Stevens, Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury), Olivia Newton-John, Gerry Adams, Jackson Browne, Lulu, Ozzy Osbourne, Samuel L Jackson, Noel Edmonds, Gerard Depardieu.

DeVALERA IN HAWAII

After losing the 1948 general election Eamon de Valera set off on a world tour with Frank Aiken, a minister in his cabinet and founding member of Fianna Fáil, the chief purpose of the trip to gather support for a campaign to end the partition of Ireland.

In this photograph (above right) the pair are shown on a stopover in Honolulu in April 1948.

DEWEY TRUMAN

“Dewey Defeats Truman” is, perhaps, the most (in)famously inaccurate newspaper headline of these or any other times. The Chicago Tribune, on November 3rd, 1948, declaring that Thomas Dewey, the Republican Governor of New York, had beaten United States President Harry Truman in the election of that year. He hadn’t. With some glee Truman waved the paper in the air during a stopover at St Louis Union Station. “This is one for the books,” he beamed.

FORD STATION WAGON

The Ford “Woodie” Station Wagon was unveiled in 1948, but the wood was dumped and replaced with steel for the 1949 season. Wise move.

SOAP

1948 began with a bombshell for Irish Times’ readers — on New Year’s Day, in an advertisement in the newspaper, Palmolive informed them that washing themselves from there on in would be more expensive – a bar of soap rose to seven pence.

NEWS HEADLINES

After 16 years in power Fianna Fáil were removed from Government following the 1948 election, Fine Gael, under John A Costello, forming a coalition – the first Inter-Party Government – that included Labour, Clann na Poblachta, Clann na Talmhan and the National Labour Party. The coalition lasted just over three years in office.

The 1948 Republic of Ireland Act repealed the 1936 External Relations Act and the state ceased to be a Dominion of the Crown, the last constitutional links to Britain cut.

The Palestine Post, which was renamed the Jerusalem Post in 1950, announces the birth of the State of Israel on May 14th, 1948 (above).

Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement and his country’s chief spiritual figure, was assassinated, while out walking in New Delhi, by a Hindu radical, Nathuram Godse.

Apartheid was enforced in South Africa, resulting in the legal racial segregation of the country’s people. It lasted until 1994.

The Berlin Blockade began, the Soviet Union blocking rail and road access to the US, British and French-controlled sectors of Berlin. The Cold War was up and running.

The population of the Republic of Ireland was fast approaching three million (the 1946 figures put it at 2,955,107). The 2008 figure was 4,422,1006.

Waterford won their first ever All-Ireland senior hurling title, beating Dublin 6-7 to 4-2, while Cavan took the football title, beating Mayo by a point. Dublin won the first of eight camogie finals in a row.

Now and then: World records

100 METRES

Men: 1948:Jesse Owens – 10.2 seconds (set at the 1936 Olympic Games)

2009: Usain Bolt – 9.69 seconds (set at the 2008 Olympic Games)

Women 1948: Fanny Blankers-Koen – 11.5 (set in 1943)

2009: Florence Griffith Joyner – 10.49 (set in 1988).

THE MILE

Men 1948:Gunder Hagg – 4:01.3 (set in 1945)

2009: Hicham El Guerrouj – 3:43.13 (set in 1999)

Women 1948: Evelyn Forster — 5:15.3 (set in 1939)

2009: Svetlana Masterkova — 4:12.56 (set in 1996).

THE MARATHON

Men 1948: Suh Yun-Bok — 2:25:39 (set in 1947)

2009: Haile Gebrselassie – 2:03:59 (set in 2008)

Women 1948: Violet Piercy – 3:40:22 (set in 1926).

2009: Paul Radcliffe – 2:15:25 (set in 2003). Piercy's unofficial mark stood until 1964.