I have three so I’ll go by dates:
16th August 1977
I was a teenager and had gone to bed, listening to Radio Luxembourg on my transistor radio. There was an announcement from the DJ (it might have been Stewart Henry?) that Elvis Presley had died. The poor DJ was in bits and very distressed. Crying his eyes out and sobbing over the airwaves. For the rest of the show he played Elvis records.
31st August 1997
We were living in Singapore and a few hours beforehand I’d flown with my children at the end of ‘home leave’ on a 13 hour flight from London to Singapore, which was 7 hours ahead of British Summer Time. I was jet lagged and woke up very early and turned the bedside radio on to the BBC World Service.
Reports were coming in that Princess Diana had been involved in a car crash in Paris with her companion Dodi Fayed and he and the driver had been killed. Her security guard was unconscious and the Princess had a broken leg and possibly a broken arm.
I kept the radio on and it became more ominous….the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook was in the Philippines and was being recalled to London. The Princess was thought to have had a heart attack. Sadly, in the next couple of hours it was thought that she had died but they were awaiting confirmation from Buckingham Palace (by this time I’d put the TV on in the lounge). It was so weird knowing this when everyone back home in the UK was still in bed - although I did call my sister and she was cross that I’d woken her up!
11th September 2001
We had relocated to the USA and spouse was working in Times Square. On this particular morning he had to meet clients from Goldman Sachs at the WTC and take them to his company’s main technical centre in Long Island. I was in the shower as I had a meeting to attend and he called me to say that they were in a car but the radio wasn’t working but could I put the TV on in the bedroom as they could see a lot of smoke coming out of a WTC tower,
I did so, and the TV helicopter showed quite a large ‘gash’ in the side of the tower and they were getting reports that a plane had gone into it.
I had to get ready for my meeting so I turned on a local NY radio station (might have been 1010 WNS). There was a discussion going on between the radio reporter and someone else at the station; one of them was a qualified pilot and they were saying that initial reports were that it might have been one of the pleasure flights which go around the city…but the other guy was saying that the hole in the building was just too big…also how could it have happened when the visibility was perfect on such a clear day, with the WTC towers visible to pilots from 50 miles away?
They then said it was possibly a Boeing 737 (the smaller jets which would be similar to the size of Easyjet or Ryanair planes) but then they were getting reports that there was a possibility of a hijack that had gone wrong. Suddenly there was a shriek…..the second plane had gone into the south tower and they saw it happen live on their TV screens in the radio station. I rushed into the lounge to watch the news on the TV.
I can still vividly remember almost every minute of that fateful day, and as I drove to my meeting a reporter on the radio was saying that all flights in the US had to be grounded and no international flights allowed to land anywhere in the USA…and that it was thought that 8 flights may have been hijacked (this was shortly before the planes crashed into the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania). It was noticeable that you could sense the fear in the radio reporter’s voice.