"A Personal Stab of Shock and Horror"

Chris Hallam looks back on the British reaction to President Kennedy's assassination

On Friday 22 November 1963, Violet Bonham Carter went to the cinema on her own. She watched the film I’m Alright Jack, a 1959 comedy starring Peter Sellers, before returning home by bus to cheerfully tell her daughter Cressida all about it. But before she could begin, Cressida’s words caught her short: “Kennedy has been shot – he was killed.”

“I felt a personal stab of shock and horror more strongly than I could have thought possible,” Violet wrote in her diary. “And with it a sense of terror for the world of which he was the Atlas – the only leader above lifesize. His stature, power, courage and judgement gone.”

Her reaction was not unusual. She was a woman of 76, who could clearly remember both world wars. Yet for her and many others who lived through it, the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, would remain the single most shocking and dramatic news story to break during their lifetime. In the 60 years since, only the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 and the terror attacks of 2001 have had a comparable impact.

It is often said that everyone old enough at the time will always be able to remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot. The actor Leslie Phillips had been in the process of being interviewed. The question-and-answer session was interrupted by a phone call which the interviewing journalist took. Phillips recalled: “A few moments later he let out a great shout of despair and collapsed as if he’d been sandbagged.”