It should have been a poignant reunion, when Bob and Bruce Bogle met their maker at Stonehenge - but they just stared blankly ahead. But then it was quite hard to recognise the student perpetrators of an outrageous stunt among the grey haired, or bald, retired professionals assembled among the stones.
They last all met up at dawn on an icy day in February 1966- and have kept the secret of that meeting ever since. "We never put any money in the collecting box when we went in over the fence all those years ago, so we were a bit worried about owning up," Martin Bergs, a retired chemist, said.
Now it can be told: the infamous 1966 Bogle invasion of Stonehenge, a story that went around the world, was a Manchester student rag-week publicity stunt which went spectacularly wrong since nobody outside the gang of plotters had the faintest clue what it was all about. All the world knew 42 years ago was that staff arrived to find the ancient monument invaded by 16 lifesize wooden stick men. Each had painted Beatles moptop hair, a name on their skinny chest and clutched curious implements. Bruce, Bob, Boris Bogle and their brothers stood, sat, or - having blown over in the wind despite cord supports and sacks of sand weights - sprawled on the stones like students sleeping off a heavy night.
Before the horrified caretakers gathered up and burned them, Austin Underwood, a local school teacher, arrived and photographed the Bogles in situ - images which appeared in many national papers including the Guardian.
By then the plotters, faces still blackened like paratroopers on the advice of a fellow student with a - military background, were scoffing a large breakfast at Bergs' sister's flat in Bristol, before driving back to Manchester in his ancient Ford Popular - bought for £50 after a summer's hard work - and a battered former post office van requisitioned from one of students with wheels.
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