Can there be a 70 Up without Michael Apted?

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I remember an English lesson in the lower sixth when we had all watched 21 Up the evening before. The lesson was, for some reason, taken by the head of department rather than our usual teacher, and we spent all of it talking about the programme. Thanks to the wonder of Wikipedia I can date it to 10 May 1977.

Michael Apted, the man behind the Up programmes, died last week. Beginning with 7 Up in 1963, this series followed a series of people through their lives. It may have begun as an exercise in sociology, but it has turned into something extraordinary. What engaged me intellectually when I was 17 can now move me to tears because of the themes of promise, poor health and redemption that have developed.

A New York Times article asks if there can be a 70 Up without Apted. We all hope there can be - "70 and 7 do have a good symmetry," as one of his team says - but the article brings home that if the participants in the Up programmes have grown old then the team that made them has grown even older.

One of them, we are told, remembers:

“Every seven years we’d get a new commissioner and a new executive producer, and they all come into the program thinking they’re going to make some change. Michael saw them all off,” at first politely and then with a colourful two-word phrase.

Lakenheath: The least-used station in Suffolk

Superintendent: It's a country station, rather off the beaten track.

Will Hay: Oh, I don't mind, as long as it's near the railway.

Time for another of these engaging videos. Lakenheath station, Wikipedia tells us, lies some three miles north of the village and is not within convenient walking distance of any sizeable population. 

Rudolf Lehmann was Liberal MP for Harborough 1906-10

The opening of Penelope Fitzgerald's review of a 1998 biography of John Lehmann provides a potted biography of his father Rudolf:

The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts:

"When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp."

He has said a good deal already – the little boy who wants to be like his father, the sheltered child who doesn’t need to know the time or even the season because James, the always reliable butler, deals with that, the illusion of a dedication to poetry. Adrian Wright, in this new biography, refers several times to Lehmann’s half-commitment (in spite of his energy) to the professional life he chose. Fieldhead was the magic enclosure to which, as an adult, he looked back, wishing that it might have been possible to sit there, watching and listening, all his life.

He came of a German-Jewish family, musical, hospitable, successful in business. His grandfather ended up in Scotland, by way of Huddersfield. His father, who built Field-head, was called to the Bar, edited the Daily News, and was returned as Liberal MP for Market Harborough. He was a dedicated rowing coach, and wrote quantities of light verse, often about rowing, for Punch. He married Alice Davis, a strong-minded New Englander, twenty years younger than himself. Their family consisted of three girls – Helen, the indulged Rosamond, Beatrix – and, at long last, the boy John.

Lehmann held Harborough for the Liberals in the landslide election of 1906 and held it until he stood down at the second election in 1910.

Six of the Best 989

Campaigners are urging the government to give poor families cash and not food vouchers, reports Vincent Wood.

"Trump disguised what he was doing by operating in plain sight, talking openly about his intent. He normalized his actions so people would accept them. I’ve been studying authoritarian regimes for three decades, and I know the signs of a coup when I see them." Fiona Hill believes in calling Trump's coup a coup.

Simon Wilson argues that it is not worth trying to recycle plastics.

Karen Liebreich on the othering of cyclists: "For some years people on bikes have been perceived as members of a different, lesser species, not deserving of the basic consideration or courtesy one would usually extend to an equal."

"In the early 1970s British television began to spread the idea that accessing and expressing your feelings was a good thing. Most documentaries still just observed people - or used them to make political or social points. But a number of factual programmes became channels for the new psychotherapeutic ideas." Adam Curtis offers a history of television and hugging.

John Lewis-Stempel names Richard Jefferies among five things that inspired his book The Running Hare.

Lady Sybil Grant and the oldest treehouse in the world

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Lady Sybil Grant,. you may recall, "spent much time in a caravan or up a tree, communicating with her butler through a megaphone".

And this is the tree she spent her time up. It's on the Pitchford Estate in Shropshire and is claimed by them to be the oldest tree house in the world.

There's much more about Lady Sybil, daughter of the Liberal prime minster Lord Roseberry, from Epsom & Ewell History Explorer and on the Pitchford Estate site.

A 1960 film made to promote commercial traffic on the waterways

The blurb on YouTube explains:

This is an edited version of a film made in 1960 to show how British Waterways were upgrading their  broad waterways for more commercial traffic. At that time the container revolution had not really started, but within ten years container ports including inland container ports enabled goods to tranship quickly and without all the handling shown here.

At the heart of the film is a trip up the Trent with nice shots of Newark and a river freight depot at Nottingham.

"Welcome to the Brexit, sir." Remainers knew British drivers' sandwiches would be confiscated but reacted wrongly

 

The Independent reports:

Border officials have been confiscating sandwiches and other foodstuffs from drivers arriving in the Netherlands from the UK after Brexit, TV footage has revealed.

A Dutch TV clip showed a driver had his ham sandwiches taken away by border officials as he arrived – with one border guard joking: "Welcome to the Brexit, sir."

This development should not have come as a surprise.

In April 2019 The Scotsman warned:

Britons travelling to the EU will no longer be able to carry meat and dairy products with them in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the European Commission warned. 

EU Customs Commissioner Pierre Muscovici said the risk of a no-deal Brexit and major disruption was increasing, and said customs checks would "apply to all goods arriving from the UK". 

Tourists would be prevented from carrying British cheeses and meats with them to the continent.

A good point for Remain campaigners to make, you might think, but it didn't turn out that like.

As I blogged at the time:

Almost all the comment on this story I have seen from our side of the debate has been concerned with laughing at people who might want to take British food with them.

Some Remainers have gone on to list all the Continental foods they enjoy in a self-congratulatory way.

I stand by the conclusion to that post:

I am a Liberal. I want to be able to get on a train at St Pancras and take a pork pie anywhere I damn well please.

Introducing Lady Sybil Grant

A footnote in The Quest for Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy (edited by Hugo Vickers) runs:

Lady Sybil Grant (1879-1955), eccentric daughter of 5th Earl of Roseberry. She was a writer and designed of ceramics. In later life, she spent much time in a caravan or up a tree, communicating with her butler through a megaphone.

Sir John Farr remembered

When we moved to Market Harborough in 1973 its Conservative MP was John Farr, who was to be knighted 11 years later. 

He once toured my school without speaking to a single student (or pupil as we may still have been then).

Sir John died in 1997 and was remembered like this in Chris Mullin's diary, later published as A Walk-On Part:

John Farr, a ruddy-faced knight of the Shires with whom I formed an unlikely alliance over the Birmingham Six, has died. He dropped dead while out grouse shooting, which I am sure he would regard as a good way to go.

I once asked whether his stand on the Birmingham bombings had caused problems with his Conservative colleagues. "Only from the lawyers - and they are all arseholes," he replied.

A difficult year: Lord Bonkers in 2020

Putting my life back in order will be more of an undertaking, but I can at least start returning Liberal England to normality. So let's begin by looking at what Lord Bonkers got up to last year.

February

The old boy was fully in support of Harry's decision to elope with Meghan Markle:

Congratulations to the Duke of Sussex for making it over the wall and quitting the Royal Family, together with his delightful wife and child.

In my experience his family are a ghastly crew – in my young day it was common knowledge that the Jack the Ripper murders had been committed by Queen Victoria – and he is well shot of them.

April

By now the coronavirus was affecting life on the Bonkers Hall Estate:

Meadowcroft has taken this damned virus badly, locking himself in his potting shed and  morning, noon and night. You may very well feel he is Going A Bit Far, but he is determined not to pass the virus on to his beloved geraniums. As I gaze out of the window I see Cook pushing slices of cheese on toast under the door. What a fine woman she is!

June

This month saw some characteristically forthright comments on the leading lights of the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition years:

Whenever I questioned their actions, Clegg and Alexander assured me they were making Britain a better place to live. Yet now I find that the former has upped sticks to Seattle and the latter has fled to China. 

You may feel that rather gives the game away.

July

Lord Bonkers paid tribute to the Liberal Democrat MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross:

Jamie Stone telephones, full of his plans for his new spaceport in Sutherland; no wonder they call him the Wernher von Braun of the Flow Country. 

August

I made a personal donation to the Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans after publishing an inaccurate post about Sir Nicholas Clegg.

September

Readers were treated to my employer's recollections of the the Stilton strike of 1919 when the miners came out demanding better pay and Lloyd George sent the troops in:

I recall telling LG at the time that this was Going A Bit Far, but by then he only had ears for his new Conservative friends and the trade with Japan never recovered. Really, I wonder what they teach in school History classes nowadays.

October

Most scholars now accept the theory that the model for Bonkers Hall is Nevill Holt Hall near Medbourne in Leicestershire. 

So Liberal England was interested in the news that the 17-year-old son of the owner of Nevill Holt has received a garnt of £85,000 from the Culture Recovery Fund.

The lad is "patron" of Nevill Holt Opera, but I concluded that "it does sound more Darren Grimes than Peter Grimes".

November

Things were getting factitious in Rutland's alternative medicine sector:

Lunch with the High King of the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who tells me of their plans to help during the new lockdown: "We like to think of ourselves as putting the 'elf' into 'welfare'." ...

In the afternoon I call on the Wise Woman of Wing and purchase some of her herbal remedies as a precaution against the virus. "I’m much cheaper than those elves, dearie" she tells me, "and what’s more my shit works."

December

At the end of the year I took to reprinting Lord Bonkers' thoughts from 30 years ago, as his diaries have been appearing there that long.

Here he is on the 1990 Eastbourne by-election:

I presented myself bright and early at the committee rooms and was asked to drive some pensioners to the polls. A menial task for a man of my experience, you might think, but we Liberals are nothing if not democratic and I went about it with a will.

Fortunately, I had brought with me my collapsible travelling horsewhip and this eased matters considerably. the elderly voters made a terrible fuss and were constantly tripping over each other's Zimmer frames, but I got them all into the booths eventually.

London from the Regent's Canal in 1924

Click on the image above to new a gem on the British Film Institute site.

This 1924 film shows a journey through London along the Regent's Canal from the docks in Limehouse through east London, under Mile End Road, past Whitechapel, Kentish Town, King’s Cross, Camden Lock and London Zoo to Paddington basin.

There are good shots of trams and buses in the streets surrounding the canal too.

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Bruno Maçães says the attempted coup in Washington this week is further proof that we live in an age that is collapsing the distinction between fantasy and reality.

"Any story which depends on obtaining documents from US government sources will become impossibly dangerous. No British journalists would dare to handle it, let alone publish it." Writing before the unexpected verdict, Peter Oborne and Millie Cooke considered what the extradition of Julian Assange would have meant for journalism.

William Yang asks if the mass arrest of pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong signals the beginning of the end for the territory's civil liberties.

Gillian Darley mourns Coventry's failure to cherish its modernist architecture.

"The jargon made you part of the country’s largest and least violent gang, the drifts of boys of all ages and social classes who gathered at the edge of cuttings, the ends of platforms and the mouths of tunnels: the fellowship of the number and the name." Ian Jack on the history of trainspotting.

"In St Mary’s Church, in the village of Frensham, Surrey, the strangest object can be found. Propped up on a tripod, near the pews, beneath the arched windows, in among all the other fittings you’d expect in an English country church, stands what appears to be a witch’s cauldron." David Castleton tells a strange story.

A memory of the days when you could explore Lubenham station

Lubenham railway station used to stand just to the north of this bridge at the western end of the village. It closed, along with the rest of the Market Harborough to Rugby line, in 1966.

It's all fenced off now, but in 1973 you could wander up what had been the station approach and explore its remains. What I remember most is that one of the platforms looked as though it had just been resurfaced.

And that may well have been done just before the station closed. Matthew Engel, in his history and survey of the state of Britain's railways Eleven Minutes Late, published in 2009, records an incident at another station on this line, Clifton Mill:

The departments of British Railways didn't talk to one another. David St John Thomas noted that some of the maddest acts of all came because the commercial and engineering departments failed to communicate.

"During the 1950s several branch lines were extensively relaid or resignalled shortly before closure. At one station - Clifton Mill [in Warwickshire] - the office was actually being enlarged to take a new stove, which had just arrived, two days before total closure."

Dickie Attenborough, David Hemmings and Sunday League cricket

I caught the end of Only When I Larf on Talking Pictures TV when I got home from my mother's this evening. Based on a Len Deighton novel about jet-setting confidence tricksters, it starred Richard Attenborough, David Hemmings and Alexandra Stewart.

The theme has not been on television for years, but if the theme tune sounds strangely familiar to people of my vintage, it may be because it was also used to introduce BBC2's coverage of the early years of Sunday League cricket.

Wikipedia adds an interesting note:

Credited to Whistling Jack Smith, the record rose up the UK singles chart. When it was featured on Top of the Pops, actor Coby Wells was used to mime the whistling, and later toured as the public face of Whistling Jack Smith. (Wells' real name was Billy Moeller; a brother of Tommy Moeller, lead vocalist, guitarist, and pianist with Unit 4 + 2).