Risotto rice under threat from flamingoes in north-eastern Italy

Despite the judges raising a collective eyebrow at the newspaper's choice of plural for "flamingo", our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Guardian.

Meeting a nephew of Dennis O'Neill

Twenty years ago, I published a chapter (“Histories of child abuse”) in the book Making and Breaking Children’s Lives.

In it, I was feeling my way towards the thesis that child abuse is less a new discovery than a phenomenon that has been regularly uncovered and then forgotten. This belief grew from a time when I was producing psychology newsletters in my day job and studying for an MA in Victorian Studies in the evenings. 

This belief was strengthened as I came to realised that the caring professions knew as much about their own history as they did about 19th-century novels.

I began the chapter with the death in 1945 of Dennis O’Neill, a child in public care who’d been ‘boarded out’ at a farm in Shropshire. His death caused a national scandal, shared the front pages with the last stages of the war in Europe and led to the 1948 Children’s Act. Yet Dennis had clearly been forgotten by 1973, when the death of Maria Colwell shocked the nation to a similar degree.

What led me to the Dennis O’Neill case was a passing mention of him in a book by Bob Holman that had come into the office for review. It sent me – intrigued that Dennis’s death had taken place at a “lonely farmhouse in Shropshire” – to a book by Dennis’s older brother Tom, who had worked in child care. That book, A Place Called Hope, was one of the sources for my chapter.

I may write another paper on this case one day because, though it was forgotten for so long – it has been better remembered since the publication of Terry O’Neill’s book Someone to Love Us – you can find traces of it in all sorts of unexpected places in our culture. 

The most substantial trace is in Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap, which has the Dennis O’Neill case at its root. You can hear Phil O’Neill, one of Tom’s sons, talk about the O’Neill family’s connection with the play on the All About Agatha podcast.

All this is by way of saying that I met Phil O’Neill, who is (or would have been) Dennis’s nephew, for a drink the other day. We’d been in touch by email for a while, which is why I was able to suggest him as a guest to the podcast. 

We had a good chat despite the London heat, and he told me one particularly interesting fact. In the Sixties, the maker of television films Jeremy Sandford, most famous for Cathy Come Home, was interested in writing something about Dennis O’Neill and in touch with his family about it, but nothing came of the idea.

He also confirmed that the photograph  here is the only one of Dennis that is known to exist – he is the dark-haired boy in the middle. Copyright must rest with someone in the O’Neill family, but I hope no one will mind that I have used it here.

Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies on steam threshing machines

Having blogged about the explosion that killed four men at Stonton Wyville, and then about the dangers posed by the boilers that powered steam threshing machines, I thought I would see how two masters of 19th-century rural literature wrote about these machines.

Here's Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d'Urbevilles:

Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.

A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black, with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the primum mobile of this little world. By the engine stood a dark, motionless being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man. The isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines.

What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his Plutonic master. The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his engine to the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line between agriculture and him.

And here's Richard Jefferies in his essay The Countryside: Sussex:

To-day the sparrows are just as busy as ever of old, chatter, chirp around the old barn, while the threshing machine hums, and every now and then lowers its voice in a long-drawn descending groan of seemingly deep agony. 

Up it rises again as the sheaves are cast in—hum, hum, hum; the note rises and resounds and fills the yard up to the roof of the barn and the highest tops of the ricks as a flood fills a pool, and overflowing, rushes abroad over the fields, past the red hop-oast, past the copse of yellowing larches, onwards to the hills. An inarticulate music—a chant telling of the sunlit hours that have gone and the shadows that floated under the clouds over the beautiful wheat. No more shall the tall stems wave in the wind or listen to the bees seeking the clover-fields. The lark that sang above the green corn, the partridge that sheltered among the yellow stalks, the list of living things delighting in it—all have departed. The joyous life of the wheat is ended—not in vain, for now the grain becomes the life of man, and in that object yet more glorified. 

Outwards the chant extending, reaches the hollows of the valley, rolling over the shortened stubble, where the plough already begins the first verse of a new time. A pleasant sound to listen to, the hum of the threshing, the beating of the engine, the rustle of the straw, the shuffle shuffle of the machine, the voices of the men, the occupation and bustle in the autumn afternoon! 

I listened to it sitting in the hop-oast, whose tower, like a castle turret, overlooks and domineers the yard. In the loft the resounding hum whirled around, beating and rebounding from the walls, and forcing its way out again through the narrow window. The edge, as it were, of a sunbeam lit up the rude chamber crossed with unhewn beams and roofed above with unconcealed tiles, whose fastening pegs were visible. A great heap of golden scales lay in one corner, the hops fresh from the drying. 

Up to his waist in a pocket let through the floor a huge giant of a man trod the hops down in the sack, turning round and round, and now his wide shoulders and now his red cheeks succeeded. The music twirled him about as a leaf by the wind. Without the rich blue autumn sky; within the fragrant odour of hops, the hum of the threshing circling round like the buzz of an immense bee. As the hum of insects high in the atmosphere of midsummer suits and fits to the roses and the full green meads, so the hum of the threshing suits to the yellowing leaf and drowsy air of autumn. The iteration of hum and monotone soothes, and means so much more in its inarticulation than the adjusted chords and tune of written music. 

Laughing, the children romped round the ricks; they love the threshing and flock to it, they watch the fly-wheel rotating, they look in at the furnace door when the engine-driver stokes his fire, they gaze wonderingly at the gauge, and long to turn the brass taps; then with a shout they rush to chase the unhappy mice dislodged from the corn.

This last paragraph is typical of Jefferies' ability to surprise you with an unexpected observation. And I note that he has accepted the steam threshing machine into the agricultural world, whereas to Hardy they remain something entirely alien.

Reform UK councillor was 'pen pal' of top Al Qaeda terrorist who masterminded 9/11

The judges were grateful that, on such a hot day, there was no need to hold a lengthy meeting. By universal acclamation, Nottinghamshire Live wins our Headline of the Day Award.

I'm reminded of an old Julian Clary joke:

"I joined Amnesty International and wrote to General Pinochet. He wrote back and now we're pen friends."

The Joy of Six 1383

“I couldn’t shake the fear that future generations might never experience the world as I had, that we might go down in history as the generation that knew exactly what was coming, but chose to look away. That’s what brought me into parliament.” Roz Savage explains why she supports statutory targets on climate and nature.

Alfie Steer considers the prospects for a new party to the left of Labour: “Peter Mandelson is once reported to have said that disillusioned left-wing Labour voters simply had ‘nowhere else to go’. But Sultana and Corbyn’s left party may be the biggest challenge to that theory that the Labour Party has ever seen. Despite all the problems that face the new party, it would be the absolute height of complacency for the Labour Party leadership to underestimate it.”

John Hyde on the publication of the first volume of the report of the Post Office Horizon Inquiry: “Sir Wyn Williams said it was ‘indefensible’ that the government refuses to pay for claimants in the Horizon Shortfall Scheme to speak to a lawyer before deciding whether to accept a fixed offer of compensation.”

Generative AI is like a friend who's a psychopathic liar, except it's not actually like a friend, says Steve Lane.

“I’m fascinated by this story, partly because I’m fascinated by all alleged liars and the question of why they lie; and partly because it rings bells, reminding me of a strikingly similar story from a century ago, in which another female writer also gained fame through a fake ‘nature cure’ narrative.” Rachel Hewitt offers a different take on the Salt Path scandal.

Stuart Heritage complains that television episodes have become too long, stretching the limits of the medium and reducing our enjoyment in the process.

The belligerent youths are back: The sacking of Christine Jardine

When Christine Jardine was sacked as the Liberal Democrats' spokesperson Women and Equalities and on Scotland, some bright spark briefed the press that:

"We are not in the business of dancing to the tune of the Conservatives through symbolic votes and virtue signalling."

Simon Titley used to talk of the "belligerent youths" who surrounded Nick Clegg. Judging by that statement, they're back under Ed Davey.

Christine Jardine was universally regarded as an effective front-bench spokesperson, and to lose her over what has been called "an arcane procedural matter" - she voted against an appalling Conservative amendment she had been told to abstain on - is poor leadership.

Nor was her vote a matter of "virtue signalling", for reasons she explained in her dignified resignation letter:

As you know, my late husband Calum, was bipolar. Several people around me have mental health conditions the amendment dismissed as ‘minor’, and not worthy of support. I could not in good conscience do anything other than vote against another Conservative attempt to remove help from those who need it the most. Regardless of my personal circumstances, as Equalities Spokesperson, this is an equalities issue and I could not let down those who are relying on people in power to speak on their behalf. The expression of support I have had from members of the public, the membership and members across the House, has reassured me the choice I made was right, and I am content with that.

Some of the other Liberal Democrat MPs who voted against the amendment will have had equally personal reasons for doing so. There were eight: Lee Dillon, Andrew George, Rachel Gilmour, Tom Gordon, Wera Hobhouse, Freddie van Mierlo, Manuela Perteghella and Cameron Thomas.

I do wonder why it was so important for the Liberal Democrats not to be seen to oppose punitive action against people who are sick or have a foreign national in the family. Are their plans to change party policy in an unwelcome direction? 

I've no idea, but already I hear of rumblings of discontent in the parliamentary party and in constituency parties over Christine's sacking.

And to the belligerent youth who briefed the press about "virtue signalling"... 

The Conservatives are His Majesty's Opposition. They're meant to have some influence over the agenda of the Commons. If they had a halfway-competent leader, they would have rather more.

GWR's trial of a battery-powered train on the Greenford branch

This time Jago Hazzard is not looking at the railways' past but their future. He reports on GWR's trial of a battery-powered train on their Greenford branch in West London.

The results look encouraging and, as Jago says, this could be a cheap method of electrification for such lines.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page. And why not follow his YouTube account? I know I do.

In bitter duel with Armenian church, PM Pashinyan offers to show he is not circumcised

"Your move, Armenian church," as one of the judges remarked.

Euro News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Elidor or Narnia? Adam Mars-Jones, Alan Garner and C.S. Lewis

"I remember being disappointed by Elidor," writes Adam Mars-Jones in his essay on Alan Garner for the London Review of Books.

Well, I remember loving Elidor and still admire it, in part because reading it, in contrast to some of Garner other work, does not make you feel as though you're being hit over the head with a compendium of folklore. He is disgraced beyond rescue, but William Mayne used to handle such material with a lighter touch - see his treatment of the legend of the Richmond drummer boy in Earthfasts for an example.

Mars-Jones's central complaint about Elidor is that, having invited comparisons with C.S. Lewis by packing four children off to a magic kingdom, he treats the story differently in every way:

It turns out that in their role as (exiled) champions of Elidor they must wield magical implements known as the Treasures, but these are issued with little ceremony. C.S. Lewis would have taken at least thirty pages to unite the children with the Treasures; Tolkien might have taken three hundred. In Elidor there’s a gap of only three pages between the news that the Treasures exist and the children acquiring them. It’s not much of a quest – barely a trip to the toy shop.

It's not a quest at all, and it's not a trip to a toy shop either. There is a strong sense that the children are being used: given the Treasures and then bundled back into their own world to face danger when other beings from Elidor try to force their way in.

What Garner does is force the reader to question the deepest assumptions of this sort of story.¹ Did the children really visit Elidor or just imagine it? Is Malebron, the only being they meet there, as good as they found it natural to assume?

C.S. Lewis has his moments - I loved the scene early in Prince Caspian where the boy is told that the legends about a golden age of Narnia and talking animals are all true, and I loved reading the scene from The Magician's Nephew where Jadis drives a London cab like a chariot. But that latter scene, like much that is good in the book, is a pastiche of Edith Nesbit.

So when Mars-Jones commends Lewis to Garner as someone to study on how to write about relationships between brothers and sisters, you feel he has missed the mark. It would be more economical to send him straight to Nesbit.

But then I have always been puzzled by the reverence with which Lewis is treated as a children's writer and, in America in particular, as a religious thinker. Whatever is good about the Narnia books is progressively throttled by allegory until we arrive at the final book in the series, The Last Battle, which is positively unpleasant to read.

While his religious thought, and treatment of the Problem of Evil in particular, combine the faux mateyness that George Orwell complained of, with a near thuggishness. It's like reading theology written by Kenneth More.

Notes

1. Having just written this, I came across an essay on Tyger Tale called The Anti-Narnia: Elidor by Alan Garner.

Electrification of the Midland Mainline is paused yet again

Yesterday the news was full of stories about government investment in the railways: today we heard a familiar story in this part of the world. As BBC News reports:

East Midlands council leaders have said they are dismayed at the government's decision to indefinitely pause the northwards electrification of the Midland Mainline.

The London to Sheffield railway line has been upgraded to take electric trains as far as South Wigston in Leicestershire, but the Department for Transport (DfT) confirmed on Tuesday the further extension of the project was on hold.

The story goes on to quote the Grand Poobah of Leicester, Sir Peter Soulsby:

"Each pause damages confidence, makes delivery more expensive and pushes back the benefits for passengers, freight and the environment."

and Elaine Clark, chief executive of the rail industry body Rail Forum:

"Stopping Midland Mainline electrification makes no sense.

"It is a shovel-ready project that could deliver tangible benefits this parliament.

"It's a bad decision for the UK taxpayer and it's a bad decision for users of the Midland Mainline, with several of our larger cities now condemned to using diesel traction for the foreseeable future."

And for a rail project that would bring great benefits to the East Midlands but is probably even further away than full electrification of the Midland Mainline, see the proposal for a dive-under at Nuneaton, allowing a direct service from Nottingham and Leicester to Coventry again.

The Peatling Parva by-election sounds like an episode of a sitcom

Harborough is a large rural district council taking in all or part of three parliamentary constituencies. In the mid-1980s the only organised branch of the Liberal Party in the district was in Market Harborough, which meant that large parts of it were a bit of a mystery to us.

It sounds like an episode from a sitcom on local politics, but the effect of this was that when we heard the Liberal candidate had won a Harborough District Council by-election in Peatling Parva, we were delighted but had no clear idea where Peatling Parva was.

Soon afterwards, I won a by-election myself and got to know the councillor for Peatling Parva, the lovely Lisa Brown. This was so long ago that I find it natural to describe her as Yugoslavian. (Ask your grandparents.)

Sadly, Lisa did not hold her seat at the all-out elections the following year, even though they saw the Conservatives lost control of the council. She was replaced by an amiable Tory whose appearance gave you the impression he might play in a trad jazz band.

It turned out that Peatling Parva was not quite the backwater it sounds. Yes, it was a large rural ward, but it contained Bruntingthorpe, a military airfield of the Cold War era that was being turned over to commercial uses, including a proving ground for cars.

Not surprisingly, Bruntingthorpe generated much of the casework for the member for Peatling Parva, but the new Tory councillor had business interests there. So every time it came up in council, he had to declare an interest and leave the chamber.

I'm not sure where this rambling memoir is headed, so let's end by saying that this last point is a reminder that standards in local government are higher than they are at Westminster.

Manfred Mann: Semi-detached, Suburban Mr James

This song was written by Geoff Stephens and John Carter as Semi-Detached Suburban Mr Jones. As it became the first single issued by Manfred Mann after Paul Jones departed to be a solo artist and film star, the title and lyric had to be changed so the song wasn’t taken to be a dig at him. 

The band's new singer was Mike d’Abo, who who added further possible confusion by looking rather like Jones.

I remember liking this song when it came out – I was six.

Return to Walnut Tree Viaduct in South Wales

This brief video shows the Walnut Tree Viaduct in South Wales when it was still in use - I hope you don't have a thing about heights.

The viaduct, which carried coal traffic to new docks at Barry, opened in 1901 and closed in 1969.

Last month I posted a video showing what is left of Walnut Tree Viaduct today.

"And Wendy's stealing clothes from Marks and Sparks"

There was a Bluesky meme the other day asking you to post a song from the year you turned 12. I chose this one – Ian Hunter sings David Bowie.

Early on in it comes the lyric:

"And Wendy's stealing clothes from Marks and Sparks."

When I was young, Marks and Sparks was both an affectionate nickname for Marks & Spencer and the abbreviation that everyone used. Today, everyone follows the company's own branding and calls them M&S.

I wondered when the change took place. The earliest use of Marks and Sparks I could find in the British Newspaper Archive is more recent than I expected: it dates from 1957.

Marks & Spencer dropped St Michael from its clothing labels in favour of M&S in 2000, and my feeling is that M&S was being pushed for some time before that.

I do remember using "Marks and Sparks" when I worked at Golden Wonder, which dates it to 1988 at the latest, and it had a retro feel to me even then.

The crisis of hardship calls for action beyond the welfare system

“Children shared harrowing accounts of hardship, with some in almost Dickensian levels of poverty. They don’t talk about ‘poverty’ as an abstract concept but about not having the things that most people would consider basic: a safe home that isn’t mouldy or full or rats, with a bed big enough to stretch out in, ‘luxury’ food like bacon, a place to do homework, heating, privacy in the bathroom and being able to wash, having their friends over, and not having to travel hours to school.”

That’s the children's commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza talking to the Guardian today about her report Growing up in a low-income family: Children’s experiences.

Dame Rachel is surely right when she tell the newspaper that the two-child benefit limit must be scrapped. But so deep is the “crisis of hardship” her report reveals that I doubt the welfare system alone can resolve it.

In recent years society has become more and more unequal. Executive pay raises ahead – apparently mundane British managers are constantly on the point of being poached by multinational corporations – while lower down the scale many employees have not seen an increase in real terms since the Credit Crunch of 2008.

To reverse some of this trend, government could look to an increase in the higher rate of income tax and a wealth tax to raise the funds to cut the basic rate or increase the tax allowance. This wouldn't help the poorest, which is why increasing benefits is important, but there are many people in work who are still struggling to get by.

I am struck, too, by the appalling housing conditions  the report reveals. I assume that this accommodation is rented and mostly in the private sector, though there is also poor housing in the public sector.

Landlords have a duty to ensure the properties they rent out are fit for human habitation, but clearly some are getting away with breaking this law. Is it because local authorities are too stretched to take them to court? Certainly, if the onus is placed on impoverished tenants to bring cases, the law is unlikely be enforced.

Yes, we've ended up at my new favourite bugbear, landlordism.

The Joy of Six 1382

Alexandra Hall Hall lists 10 things Britain could do if it really cared about Palestinians.

"If this plan is about prevention, then nature should be central to it. The science is unequivocal: contact with the natural world supports human health in wide ranging and profound ways. It lowers stress, improves mood, and alleviates symptoms of anxiety." Andrea Mechelli et al. argue that there is a striking omission from the NHS's 10-year plan.

"I recently wrote an article for the Telegraph about a series of unexplained electrical substation fires across the country. There had been eight in the space of a few weeks between March and mid May, when normally you might expect one or two every few years." Coincidence or enemy action? Jonathan Ford investigates.

Henry Jeffreys has the latest on the Unbound scandal: "Pete Brown, Britain’s best-known beer writer, said: 'I don’t think I got a single UK review or mention anywhere apart from those I generated myself. It was then that I realised the model gave Unbound absolutely no incentive to try to sell a book post-publication.'"

"In late May he secured an incredible coup over Caroline’s chief advisor, the Whig MP Henry Brougham, who was trying to negotiate a behind-closed doors settlement. Instead, Wood met Caroline in Calais and convinced her to return from exile, take up residence in his London home and from there claim the right to be crowned Queen of the United Kingdom." Martin Spychal on Matthew Wood, who took up the cause of Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of George IV.

B.D. McClay speaks up for her favourite Jane Austen novel: "It’s not my intention to turn Northanger Abbey from a gleeful romp into a treatise on human judgment. It is a light novel – Austen’s lightest – and that lightness should be burdened as little as possible through overthinking it. Nevertheless, at risk of weightiness, it’s worth exploring how Northanger Abbey is more than a satire of other novels. Managing disastrous first impressions, discerning the sincerity of another’s intentions, seeing into somebody’s character: these are all here, explored in just as nuanced a way as they will be in Emma or Pride and Prejudice."

John Rogers takes a stunning walk along the White Cliffs of Dover

John Rogers forsakes psychogeographic London and walks along the white cliffs from Dover to Deal.

As his blurb on YouTube says:

The glorious walk takes us over the famous White Cliffs of Dover. We get amazing views across the Channel to the coast of France around Calais. I stopped for lunch at South Foreland Lighthouse then strolled through St Margaret's Bay, Kingsdown Beach, Walmer with its castle and the site where Julius Caesar led the Roman invasion of Britain in 55BC. Our beautiful South Coast Kent walk ends at Deal.

John blogs at The Lost Byway and has a Patreon to support these videos.

Lisa Nandy, the BBC, antisemitism and the Israeli ambassador

Embed from Getty Images

Over on Twitter, the independent journalist Matt Kennard claims:

A source within the UK civil service has seen briefing notes prepared for a private meeting between Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Tzipi Hotovely, scheduled for tomorrow.

Nandy will tell the Ambassador she believes the BBC is “institutionally antisemitic” and that “one mistake is an editing error but if you have multiple mistakes you need to look at the leadership”.

I don't know if this will come to pass, but the story does give me an excuse for remembering just how weak Lisa Nandy grasp of the concept of "antisemitism" is.

Interviewed for BBC Radio 4 in October 2020, she told us:

“Antisemitism is a particular kind of racism, that punches up instead of punching down.”

The Skwawkbox has the audio.

If you find it natural to deploy an antisemitic trope while explaining antisemitism, you really shouldn't be setting yourself up as an expert on the subject.

Is Reform UK relaxing its vetting of election candidates?

Embed from Getty Images

Rejected Reform UK candidates in East Thanet are being encouraged to apply again under what are described as a new set of “common sense” standards.

Josiah Mortimer on Byline Times reports:

A post on July 4 by Reform UK’s official East Thanet Facebook page stated the party has adopted a new set of vetting standards as of July 7, which are “more proportionate than before”. They claim to give more weight to “individual freedom of expression” – despite following a slew of scandals involving Reform candidates posting racist content online. 

In a call for candidates following the apparent overhaul of their vetting standards, the East Thanet Reform post states: “We’re treating this as a blank slate. If you have previously failed vetting, you are strongly encouraged to reapply under the new standards…Priority will be given to re-vetting” – i.e. giving people previously rejected as unfit for office a second bite of the cherry. 

The question is whether this is the first sighting of a new national Reform policy on candidate approval, or just one local party going rogue or getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.

If it is a new national policy then, given the problems Reform was having with the candidates who emerged from its more restrictive system, we'd better lay in supplies of popcorn.

The Stonton Wyville boiler explosion led to manslaughter charges

Back to the inquest into the deaths of the four men killed by the explosion of the boiler of a steam threshing machine at Stonton Wyville in 1862.

The Gimson who gave evidence to the inquest, as the Leicester Guardian for 1 March 1862 reported, was Josiah Gimson from the Leicester engineering family. He described the condition of the engine which made it, or at least the way it was operated, sound dangerous (Josiah was the father of the architect and furniture designer Ernest Gimson, incidentally.)

Having heard his and others' evidence, the inquest jury returned its verdict. The Leicester Advertiser (8 March 1862) described what happened:

The coroner told the jury he should not make many remarks as it was a case entirely for them. They were to consider whether the parties died from the effects the explosion, why it happened and whether it happened from negligence or from accident or from some deficiency in the boiler or want of skill on the of the parties in charge. 

The jury retired and after deliberating two hours returned the following verdict: 

We find that William Woolman George Woolman Thomas Lee and Samuel Ashby killed by the explosion of steam thrashing machine boiler January the 13th 1862 and that the deaths were owing to the culpable negligence of William Bloxam and Henry Butcher. We also beg to suggest that machines of this kind are now use and many eases are managed inexperienced hands the propriety of appointing an inspector to report on their safety – Thomas Burnaby foreman

The coroner told the jury that was a verdict of manslaughter, but the jury said they did not intend to return a verdict of that kind, although all agreed in the words of the verdict. After some time the coroner, finding there was no chance of the jury agreeing, said he would enter the verdict received and leave it for the magistrates to take it up if they thought fit.

They did think fit, and Henry Butcher, the owner of the machine whose boiler exploded was tried for the manslaughter of the four men at Leicester Assizes, which were held in the courtroom at Leicester Castle. This was sited in the castle's medieval great hall, which lies behind the Georgian facade you see in the photo above.

 The Leicester Journal of 25 July 1862 reported his acquittal on these charges.

So that's the end of the Stonton Wyville story, but I wondered how common such accidents with steam threshing machines were. I did a little googling, and what I found was alarming.

Here's a piece written for the Prairie News Room from North Dakota by Steve Hoffbeck:

From the 1880s through the 1920s, steam-engines powered threshing machines. The boiler-men tending these tractors had the serious task of preventing pressure build-ups that could shatter boilerplates into shrapnel and release the fiercely-hot steam.

In the fall of 1889, about fifty men in threshing crews perished in such explosions. Similarly, in 1895, there were 'numerous boiler explosions' in the state, 'in which numerous lives were lost, and many persons [were] maimed and disfigured.'

At times, these tragedies happened because careless or incompetent operators refused to use good sense. Newspaper headlines shrieked: ;Water Is Low, Boiler Lets Go,' telling of a boiler-man who brought catastrophe 'by running his engine short of water to rush the head of steam,' his body 'blown to atoms.' In another boiler-explosion, the deathly headline read: “Blown Into Eternity.”

The deepest blame went to farmers who used 'old and worn' machines. Indeed, the 'gradual deterioration of boilers' was the number-one cause of their failure. Corrosion caused weaknesses in boiler-metal so that the simmering strain of high-pressure steam would find a fatal defect, perhaps a single rivet, leading to explosive rupture. Engineers also faced dangers from worn-out safety valves or inaccurate pressure gauges.

Reformers called for inspectors to examine boilers, believing that the explosions were preventable. And state law eventually did provide for inspections, seeking to halt the 'terrible slaughter.'

Was the situation any better in Britain? I'm sure the British Newspaper Archive will help me find out.

Ed Davey takes aim at Keir Starmer and the BBC

Embed from Getty Images

Keir Starmer risks turning into "continuity Rishi Sunak" and the BBC has Nigel Farage on so often that it risks becoming his mouthpiece - "and this is a guy who wants to destroy them".

You can read these views from Ed Davey in an exclusive interview he granted Peter Walker of the Guardian.

After listing the deficiencies of government policy on health, welfare and defence, he turns to Starmer's performance as a leader:

"There needs to be something that people can get behind. He needs people to understand where we’re going. And I don’t think anyone, even his own party, have a real feel for where he’s going."

A Starmer supporter may ask how a Liberal Democrat chancellor would finance the extra spending implicit in Ed's criticisms, but it's clear that this government is going to have to increase taxation before the next election. 

Ed could call for tax increases or simply say they are inevitable. Vince Cable had a neat trick of sounding as though he was above politics while being very political, and Ed comes close to adopting such an approach in this interview.

And on the BBC is undoubtedly right:

On the rise of Reform, Davey argued that one factor was the disproportionate coverage given by the BBC to Nigel Farage and his party, something he said was "just completely disproportionate". 

"I come to this debate as essentially someone who supports the BBC," he said. "But I fear that they’re allowing themselves to be seen, by some at least, as an organ of Reform. They seem to bend over backwards to please Nigel Farage. They’re almost like a mouthpiece for Nigel Farage, he’s on so much, and this is a guy who wants to destroy them."

JJ Cale: Clyde

Neil Young has said that JJ Cale's guitar playing was a huge influence on him. 

Eric Clapton recorded an album with Cale because "I've never really succeeded in getting a record to sound like him and that's what I want." He also described Cale's music as "a strange hybrid. It's not really blues, it's not really folk or country or rock'n'roll. It's somewhere in the middle."

But it was a songwriter that Cale, who died in 2013, found most success. Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded Call Me the Breeze, while After Midnight and Cocaine have become essential parts of Clapton's repertoire.

He was born John Weldon Cale in 1938, but later styled himself JJ to avoid being confused with John Cale of the Velvet Underground. Clyde is a track from his 1971 album Naturally.

The Joy of Six 1381

"Any real 'change' promised in Labour’s manifesto has been betrayed by a continuity with tired and damaging tropes of deserving and undeserving people. This is contributing to the sense, a year in, that this Labour government is merely repeating past government failures rather than striking out in a new direction." George Newth identifies the paradox at the heart of Keir Starmer's first year in power.

Aisha K. Gill sets out how we can make sure that the new grooming gangs inquiry is the last.

Andrea Pitzer on why we shouldn't talk about 'Alligator Alcatraz': "It’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed."

"While terms like 'gaslighting' have existed in therapeutic practice for decades or longer, most only started to become common lingo within the past few years, fuelled by use on social-media platforms. One viral Reddit post or TikTok video is all it takes for the masses to latch onto a previously overlooked word." Angela Haupt picks 10 such terms and explains their precise meaning, which can soon be lost when they escape the consulting room.

"Despite extensive state support for over-the board chess, the longed-for international ascendancy was never to return. Furthermore, no significant new talents emerged apart possibly from Klaus Junge; as Taylor Kingston shows, this contrasts tellingly with the Soviet Union whose policies quickly generated a massive growth in registered players, as well as world-beating players who would become dominant after the war." Tim-Jake Gluckman reviews a new book on chess in the Third Reich.

Dan Liebke considers the overlap between cricket and comic books, and asks if Ben Stokes is Alan Moore.

The Victorian age and the 1950s both took place in colour

Embed from Getty Images

One of the best things about subscribing to the London Review of Books is that it grants you access to the magazine's archives. So it was that I was reading a book review by Jonathan Meades from 2018.

I've not read the book he is discussing – The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain by Lynda Nead – a lot of caveats apply to this post. And I'm pleased to see it has a photograph of St Saviour's Road, Leicester, on its dust wrapper. It's the same photo you see above.

Meades writes:

In The Tiger in the Smoke, fog and smog are ubiquitous. They are past and present, a continuum from the High Victorian age to the New Elizabethan age, which was also, according to Nead, the first neo-Victorian age. They possess a palette that is specific to them­.... The 'characteristic colour' she assigns to the period – 1945-60 – is a foggy sort of greyish brown.

He questions whether this is an adequate account of Victorian Britain, suspecting that Nead has been too influenced by Dickens and his fog, when in reality:

He lived in an age of polychromatic brickwork, dazzlingly bright inflammable crinolines, gilded smoking rooms, saturated ottomans, luminous painting, garish advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s 'rank growth'.

And I am going to question the book's account of the post-war era, at least as it is seen in this snippet on audience reaction to David Lean's Great Expectations that Meades quotes:

'What,' she wonders, 'did this fabulous cinematography mean to postwar audiences and how did it relate to the greyscale aesthetics of the fog and the bombsites?'

But bombsites weren't grey. Here's J.K. Adams writing the Guardian's Country Diary for 1 September 1948:

A gentle breeze was blowing as I walked through the badly bombed Cripplegate area of London the other day, and the feathery seeds of the rosebay willowherb were drifting before it like snowflakes. In the basements of what seven or eight years ago were shops, warehouses, and dwellings a waist-high tangle of willowherb, spear-plume thistle, and Oxford ragwort bore witness to the thoroughness with which nature reclaims the land as soon as man’s back is turned. More than that, here and there were birches and elders and various sorts of willow that had grown to a height that fully entitled them to be called trees.

It may have been a far cry to the complete return to nature envisaged by Richard Jefferies in After London, but the germ of that great reversion, one felt, was there. Even the birds have begun to return to this as to other parts of London that have gone wild. Within the past two years a linnet and both pied and grey wagtails have been seen there, and at migration time in 1946 three birds on passage looked in – a whitethroat, a wheatear, and a whinchat. Even more remarkable was the visit paid by a little owl during the autumn of that year.

Or to make it sound more exotic, here is Lucy Scholes writing about Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness:

Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

I suspect London bombsites became less exotic as they were gradually cleared for redevelopment, but I still think of them as a home to lush vegetation and providing unexpected new vistas of Italianate churches.

Let's finish by going back to Victorian polychromatic brickwork. Here's something else I've found recently - a charity-shop copy of Nairn's London. In it, Ian Nairn writes of All Saints, Margaret Street:

To describe a church as an orgasm is bound to offend someone; yet this building can only be understood in terms of compelling, overwhelming passion. 

I'm not sure that it advances my argument, but I really want to quote it.

The Brecon and Radnor by-election: Myths and memories from 40 years ago

Peter Black reminds us that the Brecon and Radnor by-election took place on 4 July 1985. I was there, so he is surely wrong when he says that this was 40 years ago.

I went down for the last two or three days of the campaign with the Liberal Party's regional agent for the East Midlands, Chris Rennard. I wonder what happened to him?

So here are a jumble of memories from those days and a couple of myths that I hope are true.

I remember setting off with a couple of other Liberals in a car to deliver blue letters to the area around Pontneddfechan. It turned out to be an intensely rural area with no house numbers. Instead there were house names in Welsh, so every letter we delivered felt like a victory.

Still in a rural area, perhaps doing some clerical work, we were regularly visited by a Labour loudspeaker van. This felt somehow threatening, until someone christened it "the Willey Wagon" after Labour's candidate Richard Willey. After that we were impatient for it to reappear so we could laugh at it. again. Ah, the power of nicknames.

Then I was delivering in the a solid Labour area in the very south of the constituency - I was told we were going to use cars with no Liberal branding there on polling day. Certainly, I remember a cul-de-sac in which every house had a Labour poster, but I still had a gang of small boys practically fighting for the honour of delivering my Liberal leaflets.

I remember sitting in the garden of the Castle Hotel on the eve of polling day - it was thronged with Liberal workers. The sky was still light at 10 in the evening and there was a hot-air balloon above the town.

And on polling day, back in the Labour-leaning south of the constituency, I remember telling at Cwm-twrch Isaf or Cwm-twrch Uchaf. The polling station was in the local community centre, and it was quite the friendliest I have ever encountered - tellers from all parties were kept supplied with tea and Welsh cakes.

I've written about one of the myths before:

I once heard a story about polling day in the Brecon and Radnor by-election of 1985, which saw a gain for the Liberal Alliance candidate Richard Livsey. 

A hirsute Young Liberal was telling on the day at a remote rural polling station when an old farmer arrived and challenged him.

"What are you doing? I always take the numbers for the Liberals."

It turned out that he had for years been coming here on polling day for an hour or two, taking voters' numbers and then going home with them.

This was a folk memory of political organisation. All that remained of it was the notion that taking voters' polling-card numbers somehow helped the Liberals.

The other myth is that at least one of our leaflets in the by-election mentioned David Lloyd George.

Cornish museum devoted to the life of Emily Hobhouse wins architectural award

The Story of Emily, a museum celebrating the life of the humanitarian Emily Hobhouse, has been named the Royal Institute of British Architects' South West and Wessex Building of the Year.

Emily Hobhouse campaigned against Britain's use of concentration camps in the Boer War. The Story of Emily is located partly in her childhood home, the rectory in St Ive, near Liskeard.

It is the new buildings on the site, which house the immersive displays about her work in South Africa and a restaurant for visitors, that have won the RIBA award. You can see something of them in the video above and read about them in depth on the RIBA site.

Emily Hobhouse was the sister of the Liberal philosopher L.T. (Leonard Trelawney) Hobhouse. Her campaigning against the camps in South Africa was hugely controversial in Britain - watch Kenneth Griffith's Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman to learn more about the way it was received.

Kingsthorpe Liberal and Radical Hall, Northampton

In June 2013, wandering the back streets of Northampton, I discovered Liberty Hall on Washington Street. It was a depot for an ice cream company and had once been a cinema:

But I suspect that Liberty Hall had a life before it became a cinema. A church mission hall perhaps? Or does its name point to a connection with the Liberal Party?

Indeed it does. Thanks to the wonders of the British Newspaper Archive, I can reveal that Liberty Hall began life as Kingsthorpe Liberal and Radical Hall.

Here's the Northampton Mercury for 20 August 1887:

Liberal and Radical Hall for Kingsthorpe 

Generous Offer by Lady Robinson

We are very pleased to be able to announce that Lady Robinson has generously offered the Kingsthorpe Liberal and Radical association a fine sight for building a Radical Hall, the only condition being that it is to be conveyed to trustees for liberal and radical uses.

Three pieces of land were offered to choose from and the site chosen by the Committee of the Association is a plot of ground with a frontage to Lincoln-street 

Things moved ahead rapidly. Here's the same paper for 26 November 1887:

The Proposed Radical Hall for Kingsthorpe

We have just had the pleasure of inspecting the plans which have been prepared Messrs. Dyer and Son, architects, for the Liberal and Radical Hall. We are very pleased, indeed, with them. The hall will be large, handsome, commodious structure, an ornament to the place, and every way suited to the requirements. 

It will have frontage to Lincoln-street and Washington-street. The names of these streets seem to be particularly appropriate, being called after two men whose labours for liberty the other side of the Atlantic have become historic. 

The hall will be of red brick, handsomely faced with white stone. It will constructed to possess excellent acoustic properties. Underneath the platform at the end of the room is kitchen, and accommodation for refreshment buffet. In addition to the hall and its adjuncts there is still left a good piece of ground, which may be useful at some future time.

The hall opened on 21 June 1888 - this notice appeared in the Northampton Mercury for 18 June:

There is a very full report on the opening in the Northampton Mercury for 23 June 1888 - Earl Granville stans should hurry to read it.

How long the building remained in Liberal hands is not clear. In my 2013 post I quoted a cinema history site:

Pictures were shown here as early as 1898, but on a temporary basis. The 1910 Kelly’s Guide to Northampton, lists it as Liberty Hall, secretary: Patrick Flynn. 

Writing in the August 1975 Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin, Marcus Eavis referred to it as the Kingsthorpe Picture Palace ‘definitely in business before December 1912’. Local sources also note it as Kingsthorpe Electric Palace, with an opening date of 21st October 1912. 

"He's not your dad. We never knew who your dad was"

I thought of this old television commercial a while ago, but I've only just found it because I had convinced myself it was advertising Viennetta.

What I also found, thanks to a Guardian article, is that Alan Bennett praised it in his diary of 2003 for the London Review of Books:

30 August. A commercial for Carte D’Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have written. A family which includes the aged grandmother is having Sunday dinner. ‘Pass your father the potatoes,’ the mother says to the grown-up son. ‘He’s not your father,’ snaps the grandmother. ‘We never knew who your father was.’

There is an awkward silence, then the mother ushers the grandmother from the table saying: ‘Come along, mother, I’ll take you upstairs.’ On the way out of the room the old lady passes an open piano on which (this is the stroke of genius) she suddenly hits a petulant discord. It lasts all of a minute and is worth a dozen pages of dialogue. Why it’s advertising ice cream I’m not sure.

But, says the Guardian, despite Bennett's misgivings, the commercial helped double Carte D'Or's sales.

Zarah Sultana quits Labour to found new party with Jeremy Corbyn

Embed from Getty Images

It's a development that's been rumoured for days, and earlier this evening Zarah Sultana send this tweet to confirm that it's happening.

Today, after 14 years, I’m resigning from the Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn and I will co-lead the founding of a new party, with other Independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country.

Join us. The time is now.

Sign up here to stay updated: https://t.co/MAwVBrHOzH pic.twitter.com/z91p0CkXW0

— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) July 3, 2025

A lot depends on how many MPs and members the new party attracts in the days to come, but my immediate reaction is that the Greens in general, and Zack Polanski in particular, have had their fox shot.

This just in...

EXCLUSIVE: I understand Jeremy Corbyn has not agreed to join the new left party with Zarah Sultana yet

He is furious and bewildered at the way it has been launched without consultation. https://t.co/zEKwC8YUuk

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) July 3, 2025

The Joy of Six 1380

"Since the Truss debacle, the UK has had to pay a substantial premium over other G7 countries to borrow in the bond markets. In other words, it has to pay a higher rate of interest on its gilts than it normally would. A similar message is being sent by the stock market where, since Brexit, UK shares have traded at a huge discount to European and US shares." Simon Nixon says Rachel Reeves' misfortune is to be the teller of hard truths in a country only interested in easy answers.

Emily Kenway asks why carers are so often made to feel invisible: "To be an unpaid carer is to be deemed not credible, according to Mary, Ada and several other carers in this study. Mary feels this is especially apparent higher up the professional ladder. The community-based staff listen to her, perhaps because they see what she does for her son on a daily basis. But of consultants and doctors, she said: 'I’m lucky if they’ll even look at me.'"

"The big problem with the DfE’s campaign to improve attendance is that no-one – really, no-one: not a single person – truly believes that attendance at school is the most important factor determining an individual’s attainment or lifetime earnings. Class, status, income, connections, quality of educational provision, home circumstances, breadth and depth of experience… there are a hundred and one reasons why private schools can achieve good academic outcomes without being bound to the 190 day school year which everyone else has to operate." John Cosgrove on government's repeated attempts to improve school attendance.

Ben Cornwell reports that two of the UK’s biggest outdoor media owners have blocked a youth-led anti-junk food advertising campaign, despite its full regulatory approval and recent national acclaim.

Adam Mars-Jones surveys the writing career of Alan Garner: "Even when Garner started writing, it was hard to keep modernity at bay. It must have been unusual as late as 1960 for a dairy farmer like Gowther Mossock to get about in a horse and cart."

"You climb the stairs at Old Street station, hauling a cumbersome cricket bag into the east London sunshine. The hipsters and creatives barely give you a cursory glance, presumably unaware of what lies a five-minute walk away. Take the left bend on Old Street, veer down City Road, past some corner shops and the Bunhill Fields burial grounds where William Blake now rests, and there, through a black iron gate, you find an oasis." Daniel Gallan takes us to the ground of the Honourable Artillery Company Cricket Club.