Merry Christmas to all our readers

"When He is King we will give him the Kings' gifts,
Myrrh for its sweetness, and gold for a crown,

Beautiful robes,” said the young girl to Joseph,
Fair with her first-born on Bethlehem Down.

Bethlehem Down is full of the starlight
Winds for the spices, and stars for the gold,
Mary for sleep, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.

When He is King they will clothe him in grave-sheets,
Myrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown,
He that lies now in the white arms of Mary,
Sleeping so lightly on Bethlehem Down.

Here He has peace and a short while for dreaming,
Close huddled oxen to keep him from cold,
Mary for love, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.

The composer Peter Warlock and poet Bruce Blunt wrote Bethlehem Down in 1927 for a carol competition organised by the Daily Telegraph. They wrote less out of piety than a need for money. 

This beautiful song duly won first prize, which they used to finance an "immortal carouse" on Christmas Eve that year.

Merry Christmas to all our readers.

A disturbing image of two Well-Behaved Orphans digging an escape tunnel

After producing benign images of Freddie and Fiona and of the Elves of Rockingham Forest with Canva, I turned to Grok to help me generate one of the Well-Behaved Orphans. It came up with this - don't have nightmares.

When I tweeted it earlier this evening, someone suggested:

Maybe Musk’s Boring Company never had real tunnelling machines, and were in fact metal tubes full of orphans.

East Langton Liberal Club opened in 1889

I knew Paddy Logan had given a village hall to East Langton and maintained an orphanage there for the children of men killed on his works, but a Liberal in the village is news to me.

This report is from the Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail for 8 January 1889 - two years before Logan was elected to the Commons in a by-election:

East Langton: Opening of the Liberal Club

On Thursday last the opening of the new Liberal Club at East Langton was inaugurated by a dinner provided by the members. Over 50 sat down to the spread, Major Gibson presiding, in the absence of J. W, Logan, Esq., who had met with an accident on the previous day. 

After the tables had been cleared, speeches were given by a number of the gentlemen present, and an enjoyable time was spent. There was a good contingent from Harborough amongst the guests.

Logan, a fearsome rider to hounds with the Fernie, may well have met with his accident in the hunting field.

The Joy of Six 1303

"The safety net once provided by the social security system and council services has been outsourced to a patchwork of grassroots groups, to the point where meeting basic human needs – being fed, clothed and housed – relies on fundraising in December as well as taxation in April." Frances Ryan welcomes us to Britain’s Victorian Christmas, where volunteers in Santa hats fulfil the basic functions of the state.

Keith Edwards argues that the US Democrats need to give youth its head: "Americans are some of the youngest people in the rich world. Yet our elected leaders are easily the world’s oldest."

Patrick Barkham reports that water voles continue to decline in their distribution across Britain, but there are signs of recovery in 11 key areas.

"A few years ago, on social media, I posted the architectural critic Jonathan Meades' description of Birmingham as 'an almost excessively sylvan place' with 'lavishly green' suburbs. It was laughed at in some corners, so at odds was it with many outsiders’ image of the city as a concrete jungle." Jon Neale says that Birmingham's 19th-century 'guinea gardens' gave the city a split personality that it retains to this day.

"I used to know Mary Norton. I played with her daughter. One day I asked her 'What’s this story you have written about little people who live under the floorboards?' and Mary replied 'It's not about little people who live under the floorboards, it’s about Czechoslovakia.'" Chris Wallis asks if The Borrowers is a children’s fantasy classic or a political allegory.

Amanda Craig celebrates the genius of Joan Aiken: "Darkness, injustice and cruelty underlie Aiken’s stories; packed with vivid characters, each can be read as a critique of capitalism, industrialisation and the class system. Her aristocrats are often villains of the deepest dye, never more so than in The Whispering Mountain ... with its cold, murderous, gold-obsessed Marquess of Malyn, searching for a lost tribe of goldsmiths living inside a Welsh volcano."

Bramber Green: From bombsite to stone circle

I photographed these stones, which you can find off Judd Street to the south of St Pancras International, on the way to a Liberator drink one evening. I looked up their history when I got home.

The open space they grace is called Bramber Green. Until the second world war, says Ian Visits, it was an area of Georgian houses - you can see a photograph of an ornate house that stood there on London Picture Archive.

Then came the German bombers, after which the area lay derelict until the early 1960s, when it was cleared to create the park we see today.

I can't find the sculptor of these stones - the large one seems designed to encourage children to climb it - or when they date from, but the last major renovation of the site was in 2019.

Nina Simone: Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

I didn't discover that Nina Simone had recorded this Sandy Denny song until recently. It is on her LP* Black Gold,  which was recorded in 1969 at the Philharmonic Hall, New York City.

It's a beautiful performance, and I love the spoken introduction too. Even the play out at the end makes you wish you had been there.

* Is using "LP" desperately old fashioned now? I still often write it and then replace it with "album".

The Joy of Six 1302

Clare Coffey watches It's a Wonderful Life: "It is seeing Mary without him that breaks George enough to make him ask for life, as it is her just anger at him that sends him into the most desperate phase of his downward spiral."

"A target will probably be someone who has particular weaknesses that can be exploited, often revolving around money or sex. They are seldom at the very pinnacle of power. But that, in itself, can leave them resentful and hungry for affirmation." Philip Murphy believes the British establishment offers a "target-rich environment" to spies.

Timothy Garton Ash asks what will happen if Russia wins in Ukraine: "Ukraine would be defeated, divided, demoralised and depopulated. The money would not come in to reconstruct the country; instead, another wave of people would leave it ... Europe as a whole would see an escalation of the hybrid war that Russia is already waging against it, still largely unnoticed by most blithely Christmas-shopping west Europeans."

Chris Dillow on the rise of managerialism and fall of British business management: "Managerialism has a messiah complex and belief in great leaders, whereas management looks for good fits between bosses and roles. Managerialism tries to apply the same methods everywhere, whereas management knows it is domain-specific; what works in (say) supermarkets might not work in universities."

The inter-war council estates that George Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier are visited by Municipal Dreams.

"Thirkell makes quite a few stealth jokes about sexuality that have a camp insouciance, in strong contrast to her otherwise default tone of extreme social conservatism." Kate Macdonald considers the contrasting treatment of male homosexuality and lesbianism in the novels of Angela Thirkell.

A brief defence of teaching Latin and natural history in state schools

I went to a comprehensive, I received free school meals, I even had Allison Pearson in the same class. But I still took and passed O level Latin.

Which made me sad to read this story in Schools Week:

Thousands of secondary pupils are facing "significant disruption" after the government scrapped its state school Latin programme mid-year as it seeks to plug a fiscal black hole.

In a letter seen by Schools Week, the Department for Education has informed schools it is terminating its Latin Excellence Programme in February.

The £4 million scheme was supposed to run until 2026, but government has enacted a break clause to end it earlier. The scheme provided a centre of excellence to create resources for partner schools, and also funded teacher salaries and trips to Rome.

Money is tight, but having read recently that the proposed GCSE in natural history is on hold because it's seen as a Tory initiative,* I suspect a combination of inverse snobbery and Gradgrindery is at work here too.

For myself, and perhaps because we received so little formal grammar teaching in English in those days, I found studying Latin invaluable because it taught me how languages work. That was about the most useful knowledge I brought to studying philosophy at university, though those staples of primary school maths, Venn diagrams, proved to he useful in proving the validity or not of syllogisms.

A few weeks ago, Liberal Democrat MPs were posting about their belief in choice in education as a way of justifying their opposition to VAT on school fees. If choice is good for those who can afford private education, then it is good for everyone.

So I hope to see them posting in favour of giving state schools the freedom to offer a diverse curriculum - including natural history and Latin.

* Mary Colwell once wrote a guest post for this blog making the case for this qualification, The idea that natural history is somehow Tory reminds me that George Orwell began one of his As I Please columns in Tribune: "Last time I mentioned flowers in this column an indignant lady wrote in to say that flowers are bourgeois." 

Bob Trubshaw on the ironstone railways of Leicestershire

A thorough survey of a vanished local industry and its associated railways. At 33:20 we visit Nevill Holt, which is believed by many scholars to be the inspiration for Bonkers Hall.

"A handbag?" Edward Fox hears about Michael Medwin's childhood

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I've found it!

When I disappeared down the rabbit hole of the childhood of the British film actor and producer Michael Medwin in August, I came across an account of talking about it at some event where he shared the platform with Edward Fox. But I couldn't find it again after I emerged into the fresh air.

Now I have. I was thinking of an interview with Andrew Young of The Herald - Medwin was about to play Colonel Pickering to Fox's Professor Higgins in a touring production of My Fair Lady that was coming to Glasgow.

Young writes:

It was my innocent question about what I supposed to be his own Cockney roots that brought about the most remarkable revelation concerning his background. Home truths about which even Edward Fox (who was sitting in on the chat) had be en completely unaware.

''I was one of life's social indiscretions,'' he said. ''Adopted and brought up by two maiden ladies in Dorset. In other words, I'm a bastard.'' This bold, freely-offered information provoked paroxysms of mirth in Fox.

A lucky bastard, as it happened. ''It was a most felicitious adoption. I had a halcyon upbringing and was not prepared for the world at all. Things were very quiet and lovely. The maiden ladies were a Dr Mary Jeremy, OBE, and a Miss Clockton Roberts. The former was an OBE because there were not many lady doctors around at the time and she had done much good work in India before the 1914-18 war.''

The ladies then ''put me through the local public school and then sent me off to what you might call a finishing school in Switzerland. Being maiden ladies, presumably they had it in their heads that that was the natural progression.

''I was with them until they died, Dr Jeremy when I was 12, and Miss Roberts when I was in my twenties. So I have no-one in the world. I have no relations that I know about.''

In tracing his ancestry back to his mother and father, all he had ever learned was that his mother came from Dublin and his father was Dutch.

''For a long time I kept hoping that I would be traced by someone who would tell me that I was a Guinness heir and that all this was mine.''

Fox, who would be an asset to any audience, had by this time gone into spasms of laughter that were obviously causing him great pain. ''A handbag? A handbag?'' he shrieked, Lady Bracknell-like, although, so far as he knew, Medwin had not actually been found in one.

Honestly, what is Edward Fox like? I can't understand someone who finds orphans funny.

The comforting lie de Gaulle told France after the second world war

This blog's hero Neal Ascherson has a piece in the new London Review of Books. It's a review of Julian Jackson's France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain.

Pétain, a hero of the first world war, headed the collaborationist Vichy regime after the German invasion during the second. After the Allied victory, he was tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. Because of his age (he was 89), this was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in 1951.

Ascherson writes of the detailed charges bought against Pétain:

Nothing shows better than this trial the way perspectives on the Second World War have changed almost out of recognition in the course of the last eighty years. In much of the world, children can now leave school vaguely believing that the war was fought to save the Jews from the Holocaust. 

But in 1945 Pétain’s indictment included only a brief mention of ‘abominable racial laws’, referring to Vichy’s antisemitic discrimination, and said nothing specific about the mass round-ups and deportations to the gas chambers that were made possible by the collaboration of French police, ministry officials and railway managers.

Incredibly, no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation. 

Almost everyone, it ran, had supported the Resistance in thought if not in deed, and France had been let down only by a small clique of traitors. This new myth plastered over the fact that Vichy and its policy of keeping the Germans contented had been accepted, with intense and bitter reluctance, by most of the population during the early war years.

Josh Reynolds takes no nonsense from Amazon boss

Josh Reynolds MP repeatedly attempts to get Amazon boss Jennifer Kearney to answer his question about why so many of her staff have chosen to go on strike.

He is the youngest Liberal Democrat MP, sitting for Maidenhead. Slightly mysteriously, Wikipedia says he was born in 1998 or 1999.

The Joy of Six 1301

"The international community has failed to rise to the occasion. Western governments have largely confined their responses to handwringing statements of “concern” over the violence, and the introduction of travel restrictions on a few government officials. The EU’s hands have been tied by Hungary and Slovakia, who have threatened to veto any effort to introduce tougher measures, such as sanctions." Alexandra Hall Hall says the West will regret abandoning the Georgian people to the clutches of Russia.

Gilo dissects the culture that prevents Church of England bishops from speaking out on abuse in the Church of England.

Jonathan Liew finds that the brave new world of cricket is now so new after all: "All over the world, at differing rates, players are learning that cricket’s new dawn is really the oldest tale of all: a game that was always rigged against them. Where a few get rich, and the rest simply fight over the scraps."

New research reveals that Doggerland - a sunken swath of Europe connecting Britain to the mainland - was more than a simple thoroughfare. It was home, reports Tristan McConnell.

"'I loved that man,' Kenneth Williams wrote that night in his diary. 'His unselfish nature, his kindness, tolerance and gentleness were an example to everyone'. Barry Took, one of Horne's regular scriptwriters, was similarly moved, describing him as 'one of the few great men I have met, and his generosity of spirit and gesture have, in my experience, never been surpassed'." Graham McCann looks back on the career of the comedian Kenneth Horne.

Francis Young considers a seasonal theological dispute: "It does seem that in the minds of some clergy, Jesus Christ and Santa Claus exist in a kind of cosmic opposition, with belief in Santa representing a hindrance to faith in children because it keeps faith always at the level of childish fantasy. The trouble with this approach, however, is that it fundamentally fails to understand the nature of faith and belief - and speaks, in fact, to a deep lack of faith in those religious believers who feel threatened by myth and story."

GUEST POST Councillors changing party: Christmas update

Augustus Carp finds that 84 councillors have changed allegiance since his last report.

The last time I reviewed the state of political defections by councillors was in October, so a brief update is probably in order. The rate of change seems to have picked up since the autumn - 84 councillors on first-tier authorities have changed allegiances in the last three months.

The significant beneficiary has been Reform UK, which has picked up 16 councillors from the Conservatives and the Independents. There are some examples of 'slow burn' defections, with councillors going Independent before joining Reform.  It will be interesting to see if more of these become apparent in the spring, particularly in the run up to council elections in May (assuming, of course, that the Labour government allows us to have them).

The Conservatives have lost 22 councillors, Labour 19, the Lib Dems six and the Greens two. The Nationalists have acquired one new councillor.  The balancing figure is 32 new Independents.  Note that these are net figures, which can disguise a lot of movement – even Reform lost one councillor to the Independents. There are also a few examples of 'double hatting', where one individual has defected from two council groups.

Aberdeenshire seems to have had the most febrile body politic recently, with five individuals responsible for seven events - two of those being delayed defections to Reform from the Conservatives via the Independents. Newcastle has experienced 6 defections from Labour, who have formed a new Independent group, and North East Derbyshire has seen four new Independents, with three from the Lib Dems and one from the Tories.

No other authorities have seen more than three recorded changes of political allegiance, but for all we know there might be turbulence beneath the surface which will only become apparent when political pressures (or personal animosities) become too great to bear.  

As ever, these figures have been taken from reliable sources, but might not stand up to rigorous forensic scrutiny, so are provided on an “errors and omissions excepted” basis.  I will try to do a full tally scorecard for 2024 some time in the new year, but in the meantime, "a deep and meaningful Yuletide scenario to you all".  

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Snailbeach like it used to be

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This is Snailbeach as I first saw it. The white heaps of spoil from the lead mines made it a miniature version of the china clay country in Cornwall.

That was on 3 June 1989 - I can date it so accurately because I remember it as the day England best  Poland 3-0, the unexpectedly comfortable victory doing much to secure our qualification for Italia 90.

This photograph was taken in 1995, which I suspect was the year the bulldozers moved in to landscape the tips.

You can read more about Snailbeach in the old days in guest posts by:

• Christina Samson - Memories of Snailbeach in the 1950s
• Eric Loveland Heath - Snailbeach and the music of abandonment

This video explains the thinking behind Tiny Forests

A Tiny Forest is coming to The Headlands in Market Harborough. This video tells you all how Tiny Forests are grown and what they are intended to achieve.

Judge who took bribes in return for locking up children given clemency by Joe Biden

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Joe Biden had managed to grant a pardon more controversial than the one he gave to his son Hunter..

Democracy Now explains:

Biden announced nearly 1500 commutations and pardons last week in what the White House described as the largest single-day act of clemency from a president, but among those whose sentences were reduced is former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan - one of two judges in the notorious "kids for cash" scandal. 

In 2011, Conahan was sentenced to 17.5 years for accepting nearly $3 million in kickbacks for sending 2,300 children, some as young as 8 years old, to for-profit prisons on false charges. His co-conspirator, former Judge Mark Ciavarella, remains in prison.

Offenders guilty of sexual or violent offences were not eligible for this clemency. An exclusion should also have been made for judges convicted of conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice.

This kids for cash scandal was shocking, but should not have been surprising in a prison system designed to generate private profit. 

I have tended to see things this way since reading Crime Control as Industry by Nils Christie.

First newspaper listing for what became the Spencer Davis Group?

It's not much to look at, but this notice from the Birmingham Mail for 23 October 1963 sets a new record for the earliest press mention of Steve Winwood I can find.

The previous record was 3 December 1963, and because new titles are being added to the British Newspaper Archive all the time, it's possible that this one will be broken too.

Here again, though he was only 15, Steve Winwood shares top billing with Spencer Davis. The band has not yet become the Spencer Davis Group.

This notice is on page 2 of the newspaper. Stories on page 1 include:

• Final moves made to allow prime minister Alec Douglas Home to renounce his peerage;
• All seven aboard a test flight of the BAC III die when it crashes in Wiltshire;
• Michael Foot continues to recover from a serious car accident.

Spencer Davis is in the Manchester Evening News for 18 October 1963, but it looks as though he was sitting in with the Graham Bond Organisation the following evening rather than playing with the rest of the SDG.

The Joy of Six 1300

"The lesson of the 1974 reorganisation is not that it put in place a robust system of local government which would survive for 50 or 70 years like the previous arrangements, but that it heralded a near-permanent revolution of structures and types of leadership." Tony Travers on the perils of reorganising local government.

Freethinking Economist asks why Labour expects to improve Britain's record on economic growth when its policies are so similar to those that have been tried in the past.

"In the years AD ('after Dennett'), the story continues and - in large part because of Dennett - philosophy of mind divested itself of its obsession with our ordinary thought and talk about the mind, and instead took its inspiration from science - in particular, neuroscience." Tim Bayne examines Daniel Dennett's contribution to philosophy.

"When the Prince of Orange marched in triumph into London, in December 1688, he did so after ordering all the remaining English troops in the capital to withdraw a minimum of 20 miles from the city. The bulk of the Dutch army was brought into, or placed around, London; Dutch Blue Guards took up all the posts around Whitehall and Hyde Park; and London remained under Dutch military occupation for 18 months." An old article by Jonathan Israel challenges the Whig account of the Glorious Revolution.

Olivia Petter explains why digital cameras are back.

Jonathan Nunn argues that the East End's pie and mash shops were responsible for their own demise: "Outside the East London hipster stereotype, there is still a working-class in Cockney heartlands – in Bow, in Whitechapel, in Dagenham, in Romford – they just happen to not all be white. Pie and mash shops could and should have adapted to bring this demographic in. They could have ensured their survival by instilling a new generation with some sense of ownership over it. Instead, they have chose"n to become ossified.

Launde Abbey: Thomas Cromwell's little heaven here on earth

There is an abbey, Launde, in the heart of England. The air is always sweet there and it's quiet. A little heaven here on earth. And I think to myself: "I'll live here one day, when all my work is done."

These were Thomas Cromwell's last words in the wonderful Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light yesterday evening.

Launde is a real place and still much as Cromwell described it - a green bowl in the hills of High Leicestershire.

Today Launde Abbey is a Church of England retreat house. Its website sets out the site's history:

Launde Abbey was founded as an Augustinian priory in 1119 by Richard Basset, a royal official of Henry I. During the first century of its life the community buildings, cloister and garth were built, including an imposing church of which one side chapel still survives, now used as the Chapel at the present-day Abbey.

Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries, found Launde’s location very desirable. After visiting the priory in April 1540 he wrote in his Remembrances (a kind of personal journal) "Myself for Launde," although he never occupied the house as he was executed just three months later for treason. 

His son Gregory, however, had kept royal favour – no doubt helped by his marriage to Elizabeth Seymour, sister to Henry VIII’s beloved wife Jane – and lived at Launde Abbey with Elizabeth for ten years; during this time he had some of the dilapidated monastic buildings restored or rebuilt. Gregory was buried at Launde and a monument erected by his wife remains in the Chapel to this day.

I took these photos at some sort of open day back in 2008. I understand the buildings at Launde have been fully restored since then and the site is looking far more prosperous. You can find a photograph of the interior of the chapel, including the monument to Gregory Cromwell, on the Launde Abbey website.

We knew how to celebrate election victories in Harborough in 1892

This blog's hero J.W. 'Paddy' Logan gained Harborough from the Conservatives at a by-election in May 1891 and held it at the general election the following July.

The Leicester Chronicle (8 August 1892) reported the resultant celebrations:

On Saturday afternoon the Liberals of the Harborough Division visited the residence of Mr, J.W. Logan, M.P., at East Langton Grange, to celebrate the triumphant return of that gentleman to Parliament. 

An immense number of people were present from all parts of the division, long special trains running from Leicester. 

Tea was partaken of in the riding school, and in the evening a public meeting was held, when congratulatory speeches were delivered, to which Mr. Logan responded.

Good news: Tiny Forests are coming to Harborough

From HFM News:

Tennis-court sized areas of woodland known as ‘Tiny Forests’ are set to be created in two parts of the Harborough District.

Areas on The Headlands in Market Harborough and Devitt Way in Broughton Astley have been selected for the project, which will see hundreds of fast-growing trees put in the ground.

Tiny Forests? Earthwatch explains:

A Tiny Forest is a dense, fast-growing native woodland, about the size of a tennis court. These forests are not only great homes for butterflies, birds, bees and other wildlife but also a place for people to connect with, and learn about, nature. Each forest is a unique public asset – planted and cared for by the local community.

These super tiny, super powerful forests aim to mimic natural forests but in a small space. They include a mix of native trees which, over time, will create a wildlife-rich woodland. Tiny Forests don’t require much space and they can be planted anywhere that land is available – in a park, school or on a brownfield site.

Neil Sedaka: One-Way Ticket to the Blues

I came across a singles chart from 1979, and there among the New Wave classics was a disco track: One Way Ticket by Eruption. I was pleased to be reminded of it - it's a good record - and almost chose it for today's Sunday music video.

But then I got into the history of One Way Ticket and found that the original version had been on the B-side of Neil Sedaka's 1959 hit Oh! Carol. (Carol, as you probably know, was Carol Klein, a former girlfriend of his, who we know as the singer and songwriter Carole King.)

One Way Ticket, though, is not a Neil Sedaka song - it was written by by Jack Keller and Hank Hunter. Keller, like Sedaka and Carole King, was one of the Brill Building stable of songwriters.

There's a lot wrong with One Way Ticket - the very 1959 backing singers, the cutesy references to other songs in the lyrics, Sedaka's 'laugh in the voice' singing style - but it's still an exiting record and must have sounded even more so when it was first released.