Last known at ……….

You will have to be of a certain age to remember those public service announcements about a missing person.

They were broadcast after the news on the wireless when I was growing up in the 1950s.

There weren’t many of them, but there were enough for the appeals to have stuck with me for well over 60 years.

Today they are more likely to turn up on social media, and occasionally if it is deemed newsworthy enough, they will hit the television news channels.

But back then it was the wireless and perhaps a faded and badly written postcard pinned up in a local newsagent’s window.

All of which is a random reflection on how far we have come in just a few decades.

Back then there were also those short film clips on the television showing how RAF aircraft with nuclear payloads could be airborne in under 4 minutes, which was not calculated to make a child of seven feel any more secure and would not today pass for good telly.

Go back to the very beginning of the last century and it was possible for my great grandfather to fall off the radar, abandon a partner and four children and marry and raise another four children without ever being found out.

Such were the lack of identity trails …… no street CTV, no monitoring of Facebook presence or withdrawals from a cashpoint and no Amazon message inviting you to follow up on your last purchase with a similar product.

Before the introduction of National Insurance there will have been very few ways to track an identity and with the lack of joined up government men like my great grandfather and one of my uncles could just disappear and create a new life.

Which brings me back to those missing person’s messages, and how by the late 1960s I seem to think they were a thing of the past.

But at the time they were a perfect use of what was still for many the only way of receiving the news and entertainment. 

Pictures; unknown women, dates unknown from the collection of Ron Stubley