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When Yuri Gagarin gave Britain’s ruling class a headache
MAT COWARD recalls the occasion when the first man in space paid a visit to our shores in 1961
A crowd of people at Heathrow Airport, who had waited to see Major Yuri Gagarin (centre) the first man in space, as he arrived at the airport to fly home after a four day visit to the country, July 15, 1961
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YURI GAGARIN, the first human to travel into outer space, was born on March 9 1934, so let’s celebrate his birthday by remembering the time he embarrassed a British Tory government simply by being charming.
The Soviet Union’s achievement in April 1961, in sending a crewed spaceship into orbit and bringing it safely back to Earth, was greeted worldwide as the start of a new scientific and historic epoch. Humankind had entered the space age, and as the cosmonaut at the centre of it, Gagarin, this humble, smiling son of a carpenter and a farmer, overnight became the word’s biggest celebrity.
He was sent on a celebratory world tour, which reached Britain in July. This was a political headache for the British government; the cold war meant that Britain, as an ally of the US, was reluctant to give a hero’s welcome to a representative of the enemy. It was particularly embarrassing to do so at a time when the US’s own space programme was struggling, and failing, to catch up with the USSR’s.
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