The idea of a county of Wessex was certainly conceivable in the 1970s-80s.
By 1974, four years after the UFO series was made, there was a major re-organisation of UK counties & local government. This saw a number of old counties disappear and merge into larger ones. e.g Cumberland, Westmoreland and some of Lancashire disappeared into the merged 'Cumbria' county. Similar mergers happened in Scotland leading to the creation of Strathclyde, Tayside and Highland regions for example.
It's therefore entirely believable that at the time UFO was conceived, a similar merger could have happened by 1980 in the south of England to producethe county of Wessex from parts of Dorset, Wiltshire Somerset & Hampshire etc. It's possible that this might have been on the minds of the writers atthe time, as the eventual 1974 reorganisation was under political debate at the time UFO was written.
e.g see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Government_Act_1972 for furtherdetails.
> Wessex, as written on the envelope in ESP, is an ancient administrative area of south-western England, fell out of use about 1000 years ago (!) and owes most of its present day popularity to the author Thomas Hardy who set his novels (written in the mid - late 1800s) in "Wessex". It isn't actuallya county (like Devon or Somerset) or a defined administrative region. It is frequently used in business or event names though.
>
> I've always thought that Wessex as a location for Harlington-Straker was odd - although, as I'm sure I've read previously on SHADO, in the 60s therewas a lot of UFO activity (allegedly!) around Warminster in Wiltshire which, at a stretch, is "Wessex". Perhaps that was the thinking behind the choice of region. Or maybe the Andersons just had a holiday home in Dorset. :-)
>
> --- In
[hidden email], Dave T <myspeedometer@> wrote:
>
> << There also seems to be a business called Harlington-Straker Group:
>
>
http://harlington-straker.co.uk>
> I'm not sure if it's legit, or a joke.
>
> Dave in Canada >>
>
> It seems to be real because if you whois the domain name it's a firm in the north of England and if you then Google harlington-straker concorde house stockton then H-S appears in a number of business directories. Must be a fan, though. And rather kewl to have built a group of companies around the name. Though the H-S website is, to say the least, lacking on detail. Whichrather fits, really. LOL.
>
> Carole
>
Locked
