Interesting Facts

The first woman to ever fly into space was a Russian woman called Valentina Tereshkova. She was born on 6th March 1937 in the small rural town named Maslennikovo, Russia.

Valentina only attended part of her schooling and undertook most of her education through correspondence courses, but she was always fascinated with parachuting.

She trained as an amateur skydiver and made her first jump aged 22 years old. At the same time Valentina also became the secretary of the Komsomol (Young Communist League) and later joined the Communist Party.

At 25 yeas old, Valentina was selected for the female cosmonaut corps. She was chosen mainly due to her expertise with parachuting/skydiving, but also met the other criteria, which was being under the age of 30, less than 5ft 7 inches tall and weighing less than 154 pounds.

Valentina was chosen from more than 400 applicants and five finalists to pilot the spacecraft Vostok 6 in 1963.

On the 16th June 1963, Valentina took off on her solo mission and became the first woman to fly in space and as she was only an honorary member of the Soviet Air Force she also became the first civilian to do so.

Valentina spent 3 days in space and orbited Earth 48 times during her flight.

During this time, she made notes of her observations, photographed the horizon and during those three days in space, logged more time in space than the combined total of any American (male) astronauts that had gone before her.

After Valentina returned to Earth, it would be another 19 years before another female would take to orbit. The Soviet Union closed down the all female cosmonaut group in 1969.

After her space flight, Valentina became a well respected politician and engineer. She studied at Zhukovsky Air Force Academy and became a cosmonaut engineer with a PhD in engineering.

She still remains a hero in post Soviet Russia and was honoured as a flag-carrier at the 2014 Winter Olympics.

She’s was also part of the Soviet Unions Peace Council and has been awarded many medals and honours in her lifetime, which includes the Hero of the Soviet Union medal (Russia’s highest medal of honour), the United Nations Medal of Peace and the Simba International Women’s Movement Award.

Valentina Tereshkova is considered to be one of the Soviet Union’s top three cosmonauts, which includes Yuri Gagarin and Alexey Leonov.

The Moon’s Tereshkova Crater was named after her and despite being in her eighties now, she has said that she would be willing to go on a one way trip to Mars if the opportunity ever arose.

Rachel Elizabeth Johnson, known as Betty, was born in Butetown, Cardiff back on 6th November 1934. She had a Jamaican father and a Barbadian mother and was brought up in the town of Tiger Bay.

Betty’s father was killed during World War II and her mother struggled to make ends meet.

Betty attended a local school and loved reading Enid Blyton books about girls at boarding schools. She later won a scholarship to Lady Margaret High School for Girls in Cardiff which set her on her path to achieving her goals.

However, Betty was surrounded by mostly white, middle-class girls and it was here that the headteacher almost crushed her dreams. When she told the headteacher that she to wanted to become a teacher, the response was “Oh my dear, the problems would be insurmountable”.

Although at first these words devastated Betty, they also made her more resilient and focused. She was always near the top of her class and couldn’t see why she shouldn’t be awarded with the same opportunities as all the other girls.

She became pregnant at 17 whilst doing her A-Levels and consequently married Robert Campbell in 1953.

Even though she had three young children she heard that Cardiff Teacher Training College was admitting women for the first time. Betty became one of only six female students to attend in 1960.

Betty overcame racism and setbacks along the way and whilst she juggled to look after her young family, she qualified as a teacher.

She took up her first teaching post in Llanrumney, before returning to teach in Mount Stuart Primary School, Butetown, where she still faced some hostility from parents.

Not only did she continue to teach and defy all the doubting parents but Betty went on to become the first black female headteacher in Wales in the 1970’s.

Having been influenced by a trip she took to America, Betty Campbell began teaching children about slavery, black history and the apartheid system which was happening in South Africa at that time.

Putting black culture on the Cardiff curriculum, she also taught the children about Harriet Tubman and other civil right activists.

Also Betty’s pupils learned about the contribution people of colour gave to British society and helped to create the Black History Month.

She also became a member of the Commission for Racial Equality, and it was through this that Nelson Mandela requested a meet with her on his only visit to Wales in 1998.

She also served as a councillor for Butetown from 1999 to 2004.

Whilst Campbell was the headteacher at Mount Stuart School she raised its profile in the United Kingdom. Even Prince Charles attended a school’s annual St David’s Day Eisteddfod in 1994.

Betty was also awarded an MBE in 2003 for her services to education and community life.

Betty Campbell died on 13 October 2017, having been ill for some time.

Recently, in a campaign launched by BBC Wales, Betty Campbell won a public vote and will become Wales’ first statue of a notable Welsh woman forgotten to history.

The statue will be placed in Central Square in Cardiff City centre and will be unveiled in Spring 2020.

A difficult decision for any new parent will be choosing the right name to suit your child, so here is the top ten list of most popular girls names in Wales for 2017.

1. Olivia – 294
2. Amelia – 230
3. Ava – 181
4. Isla – 179
5. Ella – 154
6. Emily – 136
7. Sophia – 133
8. Evie – 127
9. Mia – 124
10. Poppy – 122

Olivia, Amelia, Ava, Isla and Ella were the top five most popular names in Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics.

There are six new girls names that now appear in the top 100 list for girls and these include Aurora, Orla, Edith, Bonnie, Lyla and Hallie. These names have pushed out the names Lexi, Zoe, Maddison, Sarah, Felicity and Lydia.

There isn’t much regional changes of popular girls names throughout England and Wales, with Olivia coming top in every region.

The only place that Amelia didn’t come second in a region was the South West, whereby Isla took second place instead of fourth.

Some of the names that have declined include Ruby, Grace, Jessica and Chloe, which have been given to 50% less babies over the past 10 years.

For the first time ever the name Sarah dropped out of the top 100 most popular girls names since records began back in 1904. Whilst two new names entered the top 100, and they are Aurora and Hallie.

Sir Nicholas Winton has become known as the humanitarian who helped devise a plan to rescue 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in 1939 at the dawn of World War II.

He was born Nicholas George Wertheimer on 19 May 1909 in London. He was the son of Jewish German parents, Rudolf and Barbara Wertheimer, but the family decided to change their surname from Wertheim to Winton to blend in, in Britain.

His father was a successful banker and the family lived in a 20-room mansion in West Hampstead, London. Sir Nicholas attending Stowe School in Buckingham, and afterwards followed in his father’s footsteps and became an apprentice in international banking. He worked in banks in London, Berlin and Paris and returned to England in 1931 to begin his career as a stockbroker.

A planned skiing trip to the Swiss Alps in December 1938 was skipped when Winton decided to visit his friend, who was working with refugees in Sudetenland in the western area of Czechoslovakia. It has fallen under German control and it was here that Winton witnessed first hand the dreadful situation in refugee camps there. The camps were overflowing with Jewish families and other political prisoners.

Upset by what he saw he went back to England and started organising a rescue effort to evacuate Jewish children from Austria and Germany to England. He organised a tight group of trusted people and worked under the guise of the British Committee for Refugees where he began taking applications from Czech parents at a Prague hotel. As you can imagine thousands lined up outside the hotel.

Winton found adoptive parents, secured entry permits and raised funds to cover the costs of the children’s travels. If the donations didn’t cover these costs then Winton paid for them out of his own pocket.

On 14th March 1939, just before Adolph Hitler and the German Nazis took Czechoslovakia, the first train carrying Jewish children left the country. During the course of five months, Winton and the small team he’d assembled managed to successful evacuation seven more trains, bringing a total of 669 children to safety.

Unfortunately, as the ninth train was set to leave on 1st September 1939, with another 250 Jewish children, it never left the station as on that day, Hitler invaded Poland and closed off all the borders under German control.

This was the start of World War II and regrettably brought Winton’s rescue work to an end.

Only the small group of people knew of Winton’s great work, that is until in 1988 his wife, Grete Gjelstrup, whom he’d married in 1948 and had three children with, found an old scrapbook stuffed with letters, pictures and travel documents, regarding his efforts to bring Jewish children to safety.

Winton was initially reluctant to discuss his rescue operation, but his wife Grete Gjelstrup, with his consent in the end, turned the scrapbook over to a Holocaust historian.

Winton became known as the British Oskar Schindler, who was the German businessman who saved some 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

After news broke of Winton’s rescue mission in 1939, he received an American Congressional resolution and also an honorary citizenship of Prague, the Czech Republic’s highest honour.

Not only were streets named after him, and statues erected in his honour, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2003 followed by a Hero of the Holocaust medal in 2010. There is also a Czech school named after him and a small planet.

On 1st September 2009, Winton whom by now was 100 years old, greeted some of the original evacuees as they came into London on a special train marking the rescues from Prague to London.

The rescued children call themselves ‘Winton’s Children’ and they often visited his house to thank him.

Winton decided to celebrate his 100th birthday by flying in a small plane which was piloted by the daughter of one of the Jewish boys rescued all those years ago in 1939.

Nicholas Winton has been awarded the OBE and the Pride of Britain Award. There is a Czech school named after him, as well as a small planet.

Sadly Sir Winton is no longer with us having died in Slough, England, on 1st July 2015, aged 106 years old.