60 years and it still is news

Description:

It’s now 60 years-plus since the Profumo scandal – but some things don’t change.

The young Mandy Rice-Davies knew something about human nature, how people tell the odd porky or dissemble when it suits them - and according to Lady Astor, Mandy was one of them. But the high-flyers of England weren’t the only ones with something to hide back then, or more recently for that matter.

The scope makers of America had a new product. Their latest models with ‘constantly centered reticles’ were cheap to assemble and made mounting a breeze – but came with a couple of problems.

Before 1957 most scopes had been strong. Some had just two or three small moving parts inside and some held the reticle rigidly in Oldham couplings, while others had no internal adjustments at all. The advertising had extolled their strength with good reason.

By the 1960s, though, new models were rarely so secure. Except for Bausch & Lomb’s taking to their scope with a hammer to show the resilience of their mounts, American ads fudged the strength aspect and concentrated on other matters. Bill Weaver said his reticle was fixed, which it was, and that the adjustments only moved the image to get zero. (What could possibly go wrong?) Conversely, Redfield’s patent claimed its scopes superior because the reticle was part of the new, articulated erector tube, thus maintaining alignment with the lenses inside it (never mind alignment with the ocular and objective lenses, when skew-whiff from bad mounting). Leupold came late to the party but, instead of claiming strength in its new mechanism, just reminded us of the ongoing lifetime warranty.

These days, the erector tubes responsible for that loss of old-time stability are more complicated than ever and, if made of brass to prevent galling in variables' power scrolls, probably heavier. Yet makers and merchants even of cheap models often claim their brands are shockproof.

But as Mandy might have put it, they would, wouldn’t they?

‘LIGHT AT THE START OF THE TUNNEL …’ still $20 (plus $4.30 postage) with 20 extra pages sent by email; 16 extra pages pasted-in and/or with the stamped or drawn reticle, by special order - $30-$45 posted with tracking.

The portraits h/w show Mandy enjoying her celebrity (by the author's daughter) and his own take on the day Miss Rice-Davies went to court.