The Joy of Six 1376

Christine Jardine says it was a privilege to support the Assisted Dying Bill: "The debate has been for all of us MPs a harrowing experience as we welcomed into Parliament the families and friends of terminally-ill adults, who either had to live in pain, or make the heartbreaking trip to Dignitas alone to avoid the risk of their family being investigated for assisting a death."

"Nobody identified more strongly with Britain than that generation, many of whom had a picture of Queen Elizabeth II on their living-room wall. When the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks in Essex, its occupants did not see themselves as 'immigrants', but citizens of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth come to help rebuild the 'mother country' after the war." Dianne Abbott found the Windrush Day reception at No 10 joyous, but it was also a reminder of the ugliness behind the 'island of strangers' rhetoric.

Grieving families are being left without answers because of an overstretched and undertrained coroner's service reports Angela Walker.

Bob Berzins makes the case for banning driven grouse shooting.

John Lanchester discusses the enormous popularity of Agatha Christie. "[Her] great talent for fictional murder is to do with her understanding of, and complete belief in, human malignity. She knew that people could hate each other, and act on their hate. Her plots are complicated, designedly so, and the backstories and red herrings involved are often ornate, but in the end, the reason one person murders another in her work comes down to avarice and/or hate."

Well before streaming and cable TV, the BBC's Moviedrome offered an accessible gateway to cinema. A quarter of a century on from its final instalment, the strand is being celebrated with a two-month season at BFI Southbank featuring some of the most significant titles from its run. Matthew Taylor talks to Alex Cox and Nick Freand Jones about their experiences working on this influential series.

Two frogs fell into a pail of cream - You won't believe what happened next

At Boxmoor County Primary School we had only two pieces of music: Morning by Grieg and Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia. And, as far as I recall, the headmaster, Mr Staten, had only two stories.

That was me writing in 2009, when I found one of those stories repeated in Roger Scruton's Gentle Regrets, where he reports hearing it from Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, who was the Catholic chaplain at Cambridge during his undergraduate days.

As Mr Staten told it, a great artist was painting scenes from the life of Christ. Having begun with the Nativity many years before, he was on the home stretch and tackling the Last Supper. He searched and searched for someone with the right looks to be his model for Judas. He eventually found a beggar who was perfect, only to learn that this beggar had been his model for the infant Christ years before.

These days this story is all over the net, but it's told about Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Summer, with the same man being the model for both Judas and Jesus, which seems less powerful to me. And it's not true, of course.

But what about the other story? This, as I wrote back in 2009:

One involved two frogs who fell into a pail of cream. One swam around for a bit, but then gave up the struggle and drowned. The second frog swam and swan until his strength was almost exhausted. Just when he thought he could swim no more, he found that the cream had turned to butter and he climbed out.

The reason for this post is that I have found the source of this second story. In his book Lost Worlds, Michael Bywater quotes from Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys:

Two frogs were out for a walk one day and they came to a big jug of cream in looking into it they both fell in.

One said: "This is a new kind of water to me. How can a fellow swim in stuff like this? It is no use trying." So he sank to the bottom and drowned through having no pluck.

As you're all sniggering now, let me end with Colin MacInnes's description of the ideology of Scouting, as found in Baden-Powell's works:

the weirdest blend of ritual, non-sectarian religiosity, nature and beast worship, and a passion for peoples (Red Indian, Australian aborigines, African tribesmen) whom Christian imperialism had tried for centuries to destroy.

Another myth that should die: The Victorians covered table legs because they thought were indecent

I think this one is less widely believed than it was, but it never does any harm to give it a hoofing. No, the Victorians did not cover table legs and piano legs because they thought they were indecent.

For a witness let's summon Professor Strange, under whose name I contributed a few columns to Clinical Psychology Forum. This one was in the February 2004 issue:

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boots.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the straitlaced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go than the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

The truth - and this is me, as Mike Yarwood used to say - is that the Victorians were much less Victorian than we moderns imagine. They were, for instance, much more relaxed about male nudity than we are. 

Here's Ronald Hyam writing in his Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience:

Not until 1890 did the Amateur Swimming Association rule that bathing drawers must be worn in competitive schoolboy racing. Cambridge and (even more successfully) Oxford were among the last pockets of resistance to swimming costumes.

Gwen Raverat's rhapsodies about nude swimming in the River Cam reflected a dying practice. It was frowned on by the city fathers after 1894 and finally banned from the town bathing sheds in 1910, although screened and segregated nude sunbathing survived until (ironically) the mid-1960s.

GUEST POST Councillor defections: The trickle becomes a stream

Augustus Carp presents some remarkable figures in his latest report on councillors who have resigned the whip or joined another party.

It doesn’t just continue, it gets worse. One would have thought that the run up to the last major local elections – held not quite two months ago – would have prompted wavering councillors to reconsider their political affiliations then, but it seems not.

Since 1 May there have been 154 identifiable instances of councillors changing their stated political allegiances. Some of these changes have led to an ostensible change of control of the Council. 

The net figures are:

Conservatives: -56; Labour: -41; Lib Dem: +4; Greens: +3; Nationalists: no change; Reform UK: +16; Independents: +74.

This means that 1.26 per cent of Conservative councillors have defected since 1 May. The figure for Labour is 0.66 per cent.

As ever, the press and broadcast media are obsessed with Reform UK, who are getting all the headlines, but the significant number of councillors leaving the Labour Party is surely worthy of some coverage. Are they going because of Gaza, or the Winter Fuel Allowance, or Sir Keir Starmer, or because they regard their erstwhile group as chumps? More information would be welcome

The defections from the Conservatives replicate the tensions within the wider party, with councillors going off "in all directions at once" – to Reform, to the Lib Dems and even to Labour. 

In several councils (e.g Dumfries & Galloway, Sevenoaks, Solihull, Wirral) former Tory councillors have congealed into new "Definitely Not Conservative" groups, which are regarded as Independents for analytical purposes.

Defections of this order of magnitude must be having an impact on the parties' campaigning ability at constituency level.

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

Manuela Perteghella: "Young people want closer ties with Europe - they know the rights they have lost"

Manuela Perteghella believes Britain will one day rejoin the European Union. 

Asked in an interview with the Europe Street news agency if she thinks such a move will ever take place, the Liberal Democrat MP for Stratford upon Avon replies:

"In my opinion yes, because it is important for the UK to have partners who care about the future of Europe. ... When I speak in schools, it is clear that young people want closer ties with Europe. They know the rights they have lost with Brexit and they want to experience Europe without hurdles, so I hope the new generation will take us back into the EU, where our place is."

She is also critical of Labour's and others' rhetoric on immigration:

"The language that we have heard recently reopened old wounds and reignited the toxic debate of the Brexit campaign, while immigrants have over the centuries enriched massively British society. We need to have an honest debate and my mission will be even more to highlight this."

And, as an expert in the translation of British drama, including Shakespeare’s work, Manuela speaks of the "huge honour" of representing his birthplace in parliament.

It's summer! Coventry schoolboys wear skirts as a protest against not being allowed to wear shorts

We have the final proof that summer's here.

It's not Christmas until we've seen a story about parents complaining about a crap visitor attraction called Santa's Magic Xmasland. And it's not summer until we've seen a story about boys wearing skirts to school as a protest against not being allowed to wear shorts.

And this year's story is in, courtesy of Coventry Live:

Schoolboys are donning skirts after being 'banned' from wearing shorts amid a heatwave in Coventry. Lesley Thompson said they were protesting against the 'unfair' policy enforced at Foxford Community School in Longford.

Temperatures have soared to 27C in recent days across Coventry and Warwickshire. Youngsters who attend Foxford had asked if they could swap their long trousers for shorts, but were reportedly told the clothing item was banned.

The Joy of Six 1375

"As I stood outside the barricaded burial site and watched through a peephole, I felt a sense of joy. The grounds are now full of cabins, small diggers and fencing. There are workers in hard hats, forensic archaeologists and a multitude of others who will keep us up to date on what they find. Hopefully it will be the full number - 796 little bodies waiting for a dignified burial." Catherine Corless refused to give up until she learnt what became of the children who died at the mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway.

Ben Ansell dissects the increasing extremism in British commentary about race: "For a large number of writers - from Matt Goodwin to David Goodhart, Lord Frost to the MP Neil O’Brien - the distinctions among British citizens are apparently important and worthy of what can at best be described as suspicion and at worst denigration."

Olivia Bridgen asks if trail hunting is an important tradition or just a cover for illegal hunting.

"Racism, especially Islamophobia, is impossible to avoid in Farage-adjacent TikTok. Some of it is imbued with nationalist melancholia, the screen dotted with Union Jacks, clips of wartime heroics interspersed with laments for what the country has become. Some of it is didactic, explaining to the viewer where Islam originated, and the dangers it supposedly presents." William Davies ventures into Faragist TikTok.

Josh Jones looks at research that confirms what philosophers and writers have always known: walking fosters creativity.

"The six town centres are now littered with empty and derelict historic buildings, many of which are in the hands of absentee owners. Meanwhile, those that are put to use are often terribly managed by what can only be described as rogue landlords." Dave Proudlove weighs the prospects for postindustrial Stoke-on-Trent.

Tintern Abbey: Vacuum Cleaner

All Music explains:

British psychedelic band Tintern Abbey were active for only the blink of an eye in the late '60s, leaving behind just one single, "Beeside"/"Vacuum Cleaner," made for Deram in 1967. But on the strength of that sole 45, they qualify as one of the very best (if one of the more obscure) one-shots of the British psychedelic era. 

The band formed in 1966 and was gone before 1968 came to a close, but accrued a wealth of unreleased recordings that were eventually collected on the 2021 anthology Beeside (The Complete Recordings).

Their only single became a collector's item, fetching up to £1000, because of this track and its guitar solo. But you can enjoy if here for free.

There's much more about Tintern Abbey from The Strange Brew, which interviews their bassist Stuart Mackay.

Fears of lead poisoning killed off the idea of a new Snailbeach

All you Snailbeach fans out there are in for a treat. Remember 1946 and the plan for this former lead-mining village to be moved to a new site?

I know why it didn't take place. 

So do you because of the headline, but let's start with a letter in the Shrewsbury Chronicle (18 January 1946) from F.H. Edwards of Snailbeach:

Housing at Snailbeach 

I would like to congratulate Mr. William Humphrey for the way he is putting the most serious housing problem to the Clun R.D.C. No wonder the chairman, Mr. J. Norton, wants a move in this housing business. I personally have been in contact with Government officials regarding housing water and electricity. I have explained how we are in need of at least 60 houses in the Heath Ward for Service men and girls alone, and another 20 for couples who are not in the Forces but have got married during the last six years. ...

I can well imagine the Minister of Town and Country Planning having a good laugh when learning there was no electricity and water in the Snailbeach district, and we applied for industry to be brought here. Probably we shall have to wait until March before being able to get a move on, when we may see fresh faces on the council.

So it sounds like there was a plan, not just to move Snailbeach, but to expand it because of the the local housing shortage and lack of amenities.

Wondering exactly where the Heath Ward of Clun Rural District was, I googled it, though without much expectation of success.

But I can tell you that it covered the villages of Snailbeach, The Bog, Stiperstones, Pennerley and Tankerville. (The Bog was largely razed in the early Sixties, and you wouldn't call Tankerville a village today.)

I got this information from the preamble of a thesis submitted to the University of Edinburgh [this link will download a pdf] in 1951 by a George Kenneth McKenzie:

The investigations recorded in this thesis were initiated as a result of a report sent to the surveyor of the Clun Rural District Council, Shropshire, by Professor W.G. Fearnsides, MA, FRS, FGS, MIME, senior geological consultant to the National Coal Board.

Professor Fearnsides had been asked to investigate the suitability of a site in the Snailbeach District for the erection of a new housing estate. In his report he had stated that in his opinion the site was unsuitable, because the tenants would be exposed to lead poisoning from the slag heaps deposited by the old mines in the area; and that the anaemia which past doctors in the area had believed to be present, was in all probability due to lead intoxication.

If I'm reading the thesis correctly, McKenzie found from his testing of people of the district that there was a high incidence of anaemia, but no reason to think that it was caused by lead poisoning. 

It sounds, though, as if this finding came too late to save the dream of New Snailbeach.

GUEST POST Shut it! Two words of advice from Jack Regan

Peter Chambers doesn't want any Barney Rubble as he looks forward to owning some television history.

tl;dr – Series One of The Sweeney is shortly to be released on Blu-Ray.

More – Initially in 4:3 with original ad-breaks, later in 16:9 continuous, somehow.

Any mention of the 2012 shambles – Shut it!

To describe The Sweeney as iconic would be a damp British understatement. It drew a line under what had gone before – Dixon of Dock Green, Z-Cars, and Softly Softly – and then threw the book away.

It did this using a small team of ‘guerilla film-makers’ at Euston Films, a subsidiary of Thames. Directors such as Douglas Camfield – who made Inferno for Dr Who – were given 10 shooting days and £40,000 budget to go out on location in London in small teams carrying 16 mm equipment and using the background they found. 

Producer Ted Childs created the role of Jack Regan for John Thaw and picked writers such as Ian Kennedy Martin to provide the outstanding scripts. Much of the action happens in pubs, where the characters consume unbelievable amounts of alcohol and smoke like chimneys.

The dense use of London criminal slang changed crime writing forever after. Many later shows pay obvious homage – Endeavour is replete with seemingly linked references. Swapping the Ford Granada for an Audi Quattro – and adding SF – gives Ashes to Ashes. Swapping the genders of lead characters, and shifting to Manchester gives Scott and Bailey (“Ours not to reason why. Ours just to catch the bastards.”). Moving the Jags from the villains to the cops, and re-locating to Oxford is the obvious evolution to Morse – losing the London lager and gaining real-ale. Your round George.

Now I am sure I had fifty quid around here somewhere…

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

David Boyle: Remembering a friend and important Liberal thinker

I learnt this afternoon that David Boyle, the author, thinker and former editor of Liberal Democrat News, died suddenly yesterday.

My happiest memory of him is at the Alternative Summit that took place alongside the G8 Summit in Birmingham in May 1998. This was so long ago that the Alternative Summit produced, not a Bluesky account, but a daily printed newspaper.

David was the editor, and he asked me to come to Birmingham to write a column for him each day. I remember him being in his element as he dealt patiently with crises and contributors, and ordered taxis, only to keep them waiting while he solved some new problem. Clad in a pale linen suit, he resembled a very English Tom Wolfe.

It was when he asked me to write for Lib Dem News, the weekly newspaper published by the party until 2012, that I first got to know David. As an editor he was always encouraging, and when I noticed that he removed all the brackets I put in my writing, I stopped using them.

David was an immensely productive writer, yet always thoughtful and entertaining. His label on this blog brings up dozens of links to explore. I can't promise they will all work now, but many of them will.

He had the ability to notice social trends early and to sense where they might lead. You see this in what was perhaps his best book - The Tyranny of Numbers: Why counting can’t make us happy, which was published in 2001, the heyday of Blairite targets and benchmarking.

For an introduction to David's work and personality, I recommend you listen to the documentary he made for BBC Radio 4 in 2015: Clinging On: The Decline of the Middle Classes.

I knew David had been unwell for some time, but news of his death still came as an awful shock. My thoughts are with his wife Sarah and their sons Robin and William.

Medbourne station and the emptiness of the countryside between Leicester and Peterborough

I went to look for Medbourne station, which closed as long ago as 1916. You may remember that I blogged about a 1922 campaign to reopen it.

The station master's house survives, but you can't get a good photo of it from the public road. You can see a picture of it on the Medbourne village website.

So all I can show you is the pillars at the entrance to the station, which are quite a way from where the platforms would have been. The second pillar is next to the litter bin, if you're struggling to locate it.

And below is a heavily altered (Notswoldised?) terrace of railwaymen's cottages, which stands close to the station entrance.

In 1910 the Great Northern Railway ran a service from Leicester Belgrave Road to Peterborough North (the present-day Peterborough station), which called at Medbourne. It probably took a more direct route than the Leicester to Peterborough trains via Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Stamford do today.

What brings home the emptiness of this part of the world is the list of stations the GNR trains called at between Leicester and Peterborough. After the Leicester suburb of Humberstone, there was not a place of even middling size among them.

The list ran: Humberstone, Thurnby & Scraptoft, Ingersby, Lowesby, Tilton, East Norton, Hallaton, Medbourne, Rockingham, Seaton, Wakerley & Barrowden, King's Cliffe, Nassington, Wansford, Castor.

“Historically, no one lived past age 35”: The myth that won't die

Thanks to Dr Jenn Dowd for spelling it out so clearly:

I’ve heard *so* many versions of this claim over the years, including recently from a prominent menopause doctor/influencer (implying that menopause is not “natural” because no one lived long enough to go through it). Every time someone states this “fact,” a demographer loses a piece of their soul.

What’s the truth?

When life expectancy was in the 30s, you were more likely to die in your 70s than in your 30s.

Why?

• Life expectancy is an average
• Mortality under age 5 was extremely high historically
• If you survived to age 5 your chances of living to old age were decent.

I’m sure if you think about this for a minute it this will be obvious. But a picture is worth a thousand words...

Go to the full post for graphs that make the truth clear.

What was the children's book involving Bourton-on-the-Water?

That news story about Bourton-on-the-Water, which provided a recent Headline of the Day, was everywhere. Not least, it provided liberal Bluesky with a target for the day's Two Minutes Hate.

But Bourton-on-the-Water put me in mind of a book I read at primary school. And a big of googling showed that I'm not the only one with that memory. Over to Mumsnet:

I read this book at primary school, when it was at the back of a dusty "free reading" cupboard and would love to find it again.

The story is, a group of children are out on holiday by themselves and someone offers to drop them off at an unknown destination so they can play at being explorers. They make their own names up for the towns they pass through and draw up maps etc. After a while they decide to pretend the "natives" are hostile and travel at night and/or hide in trees whenever someone comes past. One of the towns they went through they named "Million Bridges" At the end of the book we discover they've been walking through the Cotswolds (so I assume it was really Bourton on the Water or somewhere). ...

Anyone have the least idea what I'm talking about?

I remember it as "Hundred Bridges" or "Thousand Bridges", and am sure it did turn out to be Bourton-on-the-Water at the end of the story, but this is clearly the same book.

What I now wonder, given that our class library was also housed in a cupboard, is whether the writer was a fellow pupil at the old Boxmoor Primary School in St John's Road.

But what was the book called and who wrote it?

Hunting for the Bonkers Arms in Medbourne

I went to Medbourne today. The county's new on-demand bus service has made dozens of villages easy to reach - it's just a shame that so many rural pubs are closing.

One that is thriving is Medbourne's Nevill Arms (on the left of the photo above). Some scholars have concluded it is  the model for the Bonkers Arms (I would say it is at most one of the models), and if it is then it's more Freddie and Fiona than Meadowcroft these days.

But it was a lovely day to sit outside above the brook. I drank Birrificio Angelo Poretti, because it was chilled and I liked the cinema advert, and enjoyed the entertainment in the water.

The Joy of Six 1374

Andrew Chandler makes a Liberal case for the right to die with dignity: "There’s a peculiar cruelty in forcing someone to live in unbearable pain for the comfort of others."

Last year, Ofsted investigations revealed the existence of more than 900 mostly single-occupant illegal children’s homes in England, over six times the number it had found three years earlier. And The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found a council spending £29,000 per week to place a vulnerable 10-year-old in one of them.

Keith Frankish, a philosopher looks at what it is that large language models are doing. (The link will download a pdf.)

"While cranes have been elevated by rarity, gulls were once quasi-angelic, their clinging to inhospitable coastal rocks evoking the monks who established their cells at the extreme edges of these islands. Now diminished in popular perception, they are seen as gutter-life, scavengers on the trash-tides of our consumerism." Amy-Jane Beer reviews The Cuckoo's Lea by Michael Warren - "a magical ornithological history of Britain."

"The third 'fun fact' about Truro Cathedral is that it’s one of three Cathedrals in the UK with three spires. This is bollocks. I have no idea why people say this. There are four spires. I will elaborate later, but I have become a Spire Truther." Jay Hulme looks round - and climbs - Truro Cathedral.

Film-Authority.com watches the 1977 British thriller The Squeeze: "[Michael] Apted died not so long ago, and while his obituaries found much to discuss in his ground-breaking 7 Up documentary series, or his Bond movies, his first feature film is a fearsome beast, recommended but with the strongest of warnings; this really ain’t a pretty sight."

12 opening scenes from Malcolm in the Middle

History suggests that the planned revival will turn out not to have been well advised, but Malcolm in the Middle was brilliant in its first incarnation between 2000 and 2006.

The slightly larger-than-life performances of Jane Kaczmarick and Bryan Cranston as the parents were particularly memorable.

So enjoy. This is the internet: there's no copyright.

Solar farms could be the saving of insects and birdlife

Photo by Bango at Morguefile.com 
  

Here’s the thing: to our untrained eye, a corn field looks more "natural" than an array of solar panels. But a corn field is a biological desert - basically there are no pollinators there at all (corn is self-pollinating) because they are sprayed with pesticides and herbicides. Put up some solar panels, and add some plants that only need to be mowed once a year or so (sometimes with sheep) and you see an explosion of life.

That's Mike Kiernan talking. He's set up a small non-profit business that grows plants that native pollinators like between the rows solar farms in Vermont and is a neighbour of Bill McKibben, who writes The Crucial Years blog.

And Bill has some more good news about solar farms from pv magazine:

Biologist Matthias Stoefer said the high density of breeding larks in one of Germany’s largest solar parks in Brandenburg, north of Berlin, is astonishing. In his breeding territory mapping, he counted 178 spots within the solar park and surrounding areas. 

On average, there are 21 to 47 breeding pairs per 10 hectares. This is the highest lark density he has ever encountered. The reference area on a nearby field has only 33 spots, equivalent to 7.6 lark pairs per 10 hectares. Whether they can breed successfully there when the farmer sprays, fertilizes, and harvests throughout the summer is questionable, however.

The high numbers in the ground-mounted PV systems are also surprising because larks avoid vertical structures. The birds prefer open, wide landscapes away from forests and forest edges. However, the long photovoltaic rows with six modules stacked on top of each other do not seem to bother them. Instead, they benefit from the advantages of the location.

People rarely visit the fenced-in facility. The vegetation is kept short by sheep, which are currently lying in the sun with their lambs between the rows of modules. The sheep’s droppings and a changing selection of flowering herbs provide the birds with a varied insect buffet.

I'm not one to rage against Nimbys: people are bound to be attached to green spaces where they walk their dogs or played as children, and there are other villains in the housing debate who get off too lightly.

But much of the debate about development and the environment is wrongheaded. Suburban gardens are usually much richer in life than the fields they replace; while everyone's favourite target for development - brownfield sites in towns and cities - can be ecologically valuable too.

And now is sounds as though solar farms, properly managed, could be the saving of wildlife on farms.

Duke of Rutland is urged to sell 'trashed' grouse moor to the people of Sheffield

The campaign group Reclaim Our Moors wants the Duke of Rutland to to sell Moscar Moor near Sheffield for £1 because they think it is in such poor condition, reports the Sheffield Star:

Members say they walked across part of the 6,000-acre estate, between Stanage Edge and the A57, and found "almost no insect life, few birds and no grouse".

They claim it has been "trashed" by the duke, "who sets it on fire - sending smoke into people’s homes, worsening flood risk downstream and releasing carbon that adds to the climate crisis."

They also state it has been “scoured of wildlife by gamekeepers who kill anything that could affect gamebird numbers.”

The report goes on to say that in October 2023 deliberate fires on the moor blanketed Sheffield in smoke and caused a city-wide pollution incident. Heather is burnt to encourage the growth of green shoots that grouse can feed on.

It also says Moscar has received an average annual subsidy of £175,400 since 2012 under a Natural England stewardship scheme.

The Duke declined an invitation to comment.

Lord Bonkers is, of course, chuckling at this story. I get the impression he finds grouse shooting rather ungentlemanly:

"Shoot at a Rutland partridge and it will take cover and fire back. Now that's what I call sport!"

Anyway, there is more about Reclaim Our Moors online.

Jago Hazzard goes in search of the oldest bridge in London

London Bridge was first bridge over the Thames in London, but it's been rebuilt several times.

The oldest surviving bridge on the Thames is now Richmond Bridge, which dates from 1777.

But it's not the oldest bridge in London. To find one that's centuries older, head for Kingston and the Hogsmill River.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page and follow his YouTube account.

The Joy of Six 1373

"Weaponising food deprivation has been Israeli policy for decades. As a senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it in 2006, the government’s aim, in strictly restricting the entrance of foodstuffs into Gaza, was to 'put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.' Now, Israel seems to have committed fully to the latter goal." Jennifer Zacharia details the sufferings of the Palestinians.

Roland Smith weighs the objections to the European Convention on Human Rights and says we'll need good arguments against them if we're to resist the coming campaign for Britain to withdraw from it. 

"I moved to the city eight years ago to study neuroscience at University College London. Since then, rents have nearly doubled but the square footage of my digs has stayed the same. As I grow up in age and out in size, I begin to see that the hoped-for upgrade that should come with time now looks impossible. My generation is running but we’re not moving." Rose Dodd reports on life as a private tenant in London.

Michael Rosen proves that educational research did not begin with Michael Gove.

Londonopia tells the story of a unique London store: "Arthur Liberty wasn’t just flogging  fabrics. He was hawking a vision - a sensual rebellion against the stiff moral corsetry of Victorian Britain. Where others sold sensible serge, Liberty offered peacock-feather glamour, hand-painted decadence, and the vague but thrilling possibility that you might run away with an artist and spend your life eating figs in an atelier."

"War is a dreadful thing, amongst all of the horrific things that human inflicts upon other human in the name of 'war' there are some events that stand out as atrocities: one such atrocity took place in the aftermath of the battle of Naseby." Keep Your Powder Dry tries to pin down the exact location of The Farndon Massacre in the villages just south of Market Harborough.

High Court overturns approval of 200,000-bird intensive poultry unit in River Severn catchment area near Shrewsbury

River Action is hailing a "turning point" for the movement against polluting factory farming. The High Court has overturned the planning permission Shropshire Council granted for a 200,000-bird intensive poultry unit near Shrewsbury in the River Severn catchment area,

The campaign group says:

The case was brought by local campaigner and River Action board member Dr Alison Caffyn, supported by River Action. The judgment quashes Shropshire Council’s planning decision and marks a major turning point in the fight against the irresponsible and harmful spread of factory farms and the protection of the UK’s iconic rivers.

This victory sends a clear message that planning authorities must:

• Assess the cumulative impacts of having multiple intensive agricultural developments in one river catchment before granting permission for another. 

• Consider how livestock production units dispose of the waste from treatment facilities downstream, including from anaerobic digestion plants.

You can read the full High Court judgment online. Shropshire Council, which has been run by the Liberal Democrats since last month's local elections, has announced that it will not appeal against it.

The Rockingbirds: Restless

The Rockingbirds were that rare thing, a North London country rock band. They gained some success in the early Nineties, split in 1995, reformed more than a decade later and are still around today.

Restless is a track from their first LP The Rockingbirds (1992), but I first heard it on a Q Magazine sampler CD.

Market Harborough goes bananas on Carnival day

Saturday was Carnival day in Market Harborough. The crowds were so large in town that I gave up trying to photograph the parade and headed for the showground in the afternoon.

The lovely Debbie, who I used to work with, was on the Co-op stall. She's worth knowing as she gives out free bananas.

A boiler explosion at Stonton Wyville in 1862 killed four men

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After covering its lost gardens and the drought of 1947, we're going back to Stonton Wyville.

Reader's voice: At least it's not bloody Snailbeach again.

Jeremy Benson, who has visited every village church in Leicestershire and put together a Bluesky thread with photos of each one, told me Stonton Wyville was one of those villages where he struggled a bit to find something interesting to say.

But I think he found something very interesting, because he put me on to another forgotten disaster. Over to the Leicester Advertiser for Saturday 18 January 1862:

Dreadful Boiler Explosion. - Four men killed at Stonton Wyville

One of the most dreadful boiler explosions occurred on Monday last, the 13^th inst., at Stonton Wyville, that has ever been reported in this district. Stonton Wyville is a small agricultural village in the county of Leicester, about six miles from Market Harborough. 

Mr. Dunmore, a farmer, has a stackyard upon his farm, about half a mile from the village, and on Monday hired a small thrashing engine, which is owned by a man named Butcher, who resides at Debdale Wharf, Gumley. This engine was about three or four horsepower, but from the remains of it, it did not appear in working order, and this was confirmed by the evidence we could glean. 

It appears the pump as it is called that feeds the boiler with cold water, was in a bad state of repair, and had been repaired on several occasions. About twelve o’clock in the day they were obliged to stop working to again repair this pipe, and were wrapping it with string and red lead. nearly the whole of the men, 13 in number, were gathered round the engine while the repairs were going on and it was while they were thus engaged that the explosion took place.

The report goes on to give details of whose body parts were blown off and where they landed, which I shall spare you. But I can say that Thomas Lee, William Woodman and Samuel Ashby were killed at once, and George Woolman died a few hours later. The inquest was held at the Fox and Hounds Inn at Stonton Wyville - there is still a Fox and Hounds Farm there, so this was probably that building.

One point of interest about this inquest is that it had called for expert evidence about the condition of the boiler:

Mr. Gimson, engineer, of Leicester, was present, and made a thorough examination of the wreck of the engine, and will give his evidence at the adjourned inquest, so it would not be fair to give his opinion stated privately, at the present time.

Gimson and Co. was founded in 1840 by Benjamin and Josiah Gimson on Welford Road in Leicester. The firm, says Wikipedia, was listed as "Engineers, Ironfounders, Boiler Makers & General Machinists". it later moved to the still-standing Vulcan Works in Leicester.

So it looks as though the expert witness was Benjamin or Josiah Gimson, or perhaps another member of their family. This is the Gimson family that produced Sydney Gimson, who helped turn Desford Approved School, into a force in Leicestershire junior chess, and Boris Johnson's serial biographer Andrew Gimson.

The Leicester Advertiser report said the inquest was due to be reconvened on 29th January 1862. I'll see if I can discover what happened then.

Family's horror seeing tourists eat from saucepans in idyllic Cotswolds village

Gloucestershire Live wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale of tourism in Bourton-on-the-Water.

The judges left me to comment, so I shall merely point out that all tourist areas have honeypots where visitors tend to congregate. 

If you go to the Shropshire hills but don't want crowds, then avoid the Carding Mill Valley at Church Stretton. And if you find St Ives in Cornwall too crowded, walk a mile along the cliffs towards Zennor and you'll have an amazing landscape all to yourself.

Or you could forget the Cotswolds and visit the Notswolds.

This post is sponsored by Visit the Notswolds - The Official Notswold Tourism Site.

In 1946 there was a plan to move Snailbeach village to a new site

Here's a discovery. In 1946 there was a plan to move the Shropshire lead-mining village of Snailbeach to a new site nearer Minsterley.

It was reported in the 15 March issue of the Shrewsbury Chronicle:

SNAILBEACH TO LEAVE ITS SHELL

Plan For New Village In Green Meadows 

If the plans now being prepared by the Clun Rural District Council come to maturity the village of Snailbeach will leave its shell among the scars of old industry on the flank of the Stiperstones, and move down to a new site among pleasant green meadows a mile or so nearer to Minsterley. 

The site selected is near to the old Smelthouse, the derelict building which stands at the side of the field path from Minsterley to Snailbeach. Over a cup of tea at the Stiperstones Inn Mr. William Humphrey, a member of-the Clun Council, explained to our reporter that it is hoped to build a first instalment of 16 houses out of a total of 40 to 50 within the next year. Provision has been made for a children's playground, and eventually a church and school will appear. 

Temporary houses are out of the question, as at present there is no gas or electricity, but every effort will be made to provide modern amenities for both the old and new villages. Lord Bridgeman was interested himself in a project for bringing a light industry to the village, but it is yet too early to say what developments are likely.

Nothing came of the plan, but villages do get moved. Arkwright in Derbyshire was moved to a new site 30 years ago because of the danger of methane gas from a disused coal mine.

I suspect this scheme for Snaibeach is confirmation of what John Wood wrote in his 1944 book Quietest Under the Sun:

Sad to say, this became in the between-wars period one of the most utterly derelict areas in Britain proportionate to its size.

Later. Now read why this plan came to nothing...

The Joy of Six 1372

"What's happening in Gaza is a humanitarian and existential tragedy for the people living there, a moral and political disaster for Israel, the indirect, long-term result of past European barbarism and the subject of a damaging present European failure." Timothy Garton Ash reflects on European double standards and German cognitive dissonance.

Séamas O'Reilly reports from Ballymena: "To their credit, the PSNI have been clear-cut on this point, with the chair of their police federation Liam Kelly describing the violence as 'mindless, unacceptable and feral' and the actions of the rioters as 'a pogrom'. There is no interpretation of these acts, no nuance or context that can be added, that points in any other direction.

Hannah Al-Othman and Jessica Murray on increasing concerns over the quality of 'expert witness' evidence in British courts.

"I wanted to go back into the past and look at it with fresh eyes, to better understand the roots of this uncertainty. What I began to find was twofold: first, there were major shifts in power during the 1980s and ’90s – primarily away from politics and mostly toward finance, though also other areas. Second, there was a significant internal shift in consciousness. We are very different creatures from the human beings of 1978." Frieze interviews Adam Curtis about his new television series Shifty.

The car made pedestrians second-class citizens, and we shouldn't let driverless vehicles push us off the road altogether, says Adam Tranter.

Northolt Park Racecourse near Harrow was superbly equipped and the headquarters of pony racing in Britain, yet it had an active life of only 11 years. This local history site tells its story.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: “Oh Mr Meadowcroft, you’re so sweet!”

I hadn't been intending to do this. Instead, I had been dreaming of a public row at Liberal Democrat HQ that would give me a pretext for getting rid of Freddie and Fiona altogether. But having had the idea, I realised that their buying a weekend cottage in Rutland might have hilarious consequences.

Fiona's “Oh Mr Meadowcroft, you’re so sweet!” was inspired by a half-remembered Posy Simmonds strip about the manners of the weekending classes.[Amazingly, after writing this I found it online.] And with it, we finish another week in the company of Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer.

Sunday

As the Revd Hughes Went On A Bit at St Asquith’s, I have called in at the Bonkers Arms for a restorer before lunch. To my horror, I encounter Freddie and Fiona at the bar. “We’ve just exchanged contracts on a weekend cottage here,” they announce. “We love your Notswolds”. 

Worse than that, Meadowcroft is playing up to them shamelessly, singing folk songs of his own invention and retailing country lore that I for one have never heard before. “If polling day falls when the wheat be green, then turnout will exceed the mean” is just one example. 

“Oh Mr Meadowcroft, you’re so sweet!” exclaims Fiona, kissing his beaming, rubicund face. Feeling suddenly unwell, I make my excuses and leave.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• From the pubs of Oswestry to the crumbling walls of Ludlow
• Matron told me at the party last night
• Commander Gideon, Dr Simon Sparrow and the girls of St Trinian's
• Rescuing fallen women or scourging himself
• We feed them sausages and plum bread
• My failure to make a television detective of Jeremy Thorpe

Scaffold: Liverpool Lou

I remember liking this when it came out in 1974 - it reached no. 6 in the singles chart that June.

One of the members of Scaffold was Mike McGear, who was Paul McCartney's brother. And the track was produced by Paul, who had suggested recording the song to the band.

More than that, in his interview for The Strange Brew podcast, Mike seems to be saying that Wings were the band playing on Liverpool Lou, with the addition of Norman Yardley on harmonica.

The instrument used in the break (played by Paul McCartney) was the Gizmo. This was a device developed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme of 10CC, who partly owned Strawberry Studios in Stockport where Liverpool Lou was recorded. The pair were eventually to leave 10CC to promote the Gizmo.

Though the song Liverpool Lou had been around for years, it had somehow been copyrighted by Brendan Behan’s brother Dominic. As a result, he made more money from Liverpool than anyone.