"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
There was something about the immediate post-war period that made its most notorious murderers remain long in the public's memory. There was Christie at 10 Rillington Place, Haigh the acid-bath murderer and Neville Heath.
Heath had already murdered one woman in a London hotel when he arrived in Bournemouth. Lindsay Neal takes up the story:
A wanted suspect for the Margery Gardner killing, Heath fled London with the police on his heels and ended up in Bournemouth where, calling himself Brook after the World War I poet (but without the poet’s final ‘e’), he met ex-Wren Doreen Marshall, who was staying at the Norfolk Hotel on Richmond Hill as she recovered from ’flu.
He invited her to afternoon tea that day, Wednesday 3 July [1946], at the Pavilion and met her again that evening for dinner at his hotel, after which they left together, saying he was going to walk her back to the Norfolk.
On the Friday, the manager of the Norfolk reported her missing to the police and contacted his counterpart at the Tollard Royal, who advised his guest Group Captain Brook – Heath – that he should contact the police, which he did by phone on the Saturday.
He then walked into Bournemouth Police Station where, quite by chance, he met Doreen Marshall’s father and sister who had come to Bournemouth to find her and joked with them that he looked like the fugitive Heath.
Under questioning later that evening, he confessed to being Heath and was taken to London before Doreen’s body was found the next day.
I wondered whether the Tollard Royal still stood, but not enough to go hunting for it. Then I saw this sign and realised that it still stands. Not only that, it is next to the Highcliffe, which was the conference hotel.
The building has been altered several times in its history, but I think this may be the part of the hotel shown in the photo from 1946.
This is what was the front of the hotel today, and you can learn all about the latest alterations to the building in the edition of Grand Designs embedded below.
Nottinghamshire Live, the online version of the Nottingham Post, has launched a legal challenge against the refusal by the Reform UK leader of Nottinghamshire County Council to speak to its journalists.
The authority's leaders have until Thursday (October 2) to respond to the legal letter, which warns further steps may be taken if the council does not respond by reversing the ban.
The letter, sent to the county council by CMS LLP on September 25, sets out the position adopted by Reach Midlands Media Limited, the publisher of Nottinghamshire Live and our print title the Nottingham Post. The letter, written in conjunction with Nottinghamshire Live's in-house legal team, sets out the belief that the decision to issue the ban was without legal basis "due to its irrationality".
The letter, it goes on to say, also suggests that the council leader's decision is in breach of local government regulations, Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights and Nottinghamshire County Council's councillor code of conduct.
As I said when the ban was first imposed, it is a reminder of how much Reform politicians admire Donald Trump. I hope this challenge succeeds: there's little enough political coverage in many local newspapers as it is.
A man who started a vigilante group to ‘protect women and children’ has admitted carrying out a shocking attack on his former partner.
Reece McCarron started his controversial patrol group ‘The Corby Guard’ just three weeks ago, claiming he and his pals were carrying out public protection duties, to widespread public condemnation. He has also been responsible for putting up some of the town’s lamp-post flags, regularly posting footage on his social media accounts.
But this weekend he carried out a shameful drunken assault on his former partner, a video of which has been shared by people across Corby.
There was more about the Corby Guard in the NN Journal earlier this month.
Steve from What Once Was takes us to Ingarsby, one of the best preserved deserted medieval villages in the country, and explores the site thoroughly. It lies six miles from Leicester, in beautiful, empty countryside that is typical of the eastern side of its county.
The site's entry on the National Heritage List for England says:
The village earthworks at Ingarsby are exceptionally well preserved with a wide diversity of features and good documentation with the rare mention of the construction of a pond.
Ingarsby is also interesting as being the site of a moated manor that was subsequently purchased by an abbey. Religious ownership provides a date of village desertion and important documentation for a site that was the richest possession of Leicester Abbey in the county.
Ingarsby must be the only deserted medieval village that had its own railway station. It stood on the Great Northern branch that ran to the company's terminus at Leicester Belgrave Road. In such a landscape, it must have seen as good a spot as any.
The Liberal Democrats’ new Climate and Nature policy For People, For Planet, adopted at Bournemouth, has won approval from anti-cracking campaigners in Yorkshire, reports York Mix:
Chris Garforth, from Frack Free Coastal Communities, said: "Finally, a clear-cut, no-nonsense proposal from a major political party that leaves none of the wiggle room that oil and gas companies and politicians have been using to their advantage for so long.
"Time now for Ed Miliband and the Labour government to take a similar unequivocal stand for the climate, environment and economy."
This praise, explains the website, comes as North Yorkshire Council is assessing an application to extract gas at Burniston, near Scarborough using the proppant squeeze method. This has been described as "small-scale fracking" and is seen by campaigners as a loophole in the UK’s moratorium on fossil fuel extraction.
Schuyler Mitchell argues that the national security state is a wonderful tool for a skilled authoritarian to crush American democracy: "If you tell an FBI agent to proactively go out and find anarchists, violent extremists, before they can act, they’re going to look for someone with that ideology. Now you have Trump telling people to go out and look for antifa, which means they can be opening assessments on people who they, for whatever reason, feel have this nebulous, broad ideology."
"Arendt did not strive for consensus – in her view, politics had to be antagonistic and, if needed, controversial. What mattered most was the act in itself. Her whole body of work could be summarised as a call to democratic action. Speak, criticise, engage with others – do anything you can to avoid the peril of silence, and the temptation of violence." Marc Le Chevallier elucidates Hannah Arendt's belief that open dialogue and debate are vital to the health of democracy.
Justin Kadi explains why Vienna has been described as "a renters' utopia".
"He took inspiration from the deluge of countercultural books in the 1960s concerning earth mysteries, typically trying to decode the neolithic constructs of Silbury Hill, Avebury, and the stones of Cornwall. With a Blakean grandness fuelled by a quasi-Situationist eye, he sought to establish a sacred geometry to link the Hawksmoor churches together." Robert Davidson talks to Iain Sinclair to mark the 50th anniversary of his influential book of poems Lud Heat.
Colin Burrow reviews a biography of Muriel Spark and the first volume of her collected letters: "By 1963 she had arrived. She was rich enough to buy green and blue Hermès suede gloves in Paris. She was also suave enough to conceal beneath those gloves (most of the time at least) the knuckle-duster with which she had established herself as a Famous Author."
Modernism in Metroland on Maxwell Fry and the rise of the high-street electricity showroom.
This booklet showcases just some of the achievements of Liberal Democrat councillors, both when running councils and from opposition. There are also many more achievements we hope to share another time.
say Bridget Smith and Joe Harris in their introduction to the latest edition of Liberal Democrat Achievements in Local Government, which is published by the Local Government Association.
A steel sculpture will replace the phone mast in Market Harborough's new friendship park, reports BBC News:
EE is now working to decommission and remove mobile phone infrastructure at the site before owner Harborough District Council can demolish the mast in the park.
A steel sculpture to take its place will then be designed and sent to the council's planning department for consideration.
EE confirmed it had installed a new mast nearby and was working to remove its equipment "at the landowner's request".
Northampton Road will be closed on Tuesday 30 September while work takes place at the park, according to highways authority Leicestershire County Council.
You may recall that the friendship park project, and the participation of the community in planting it, outraged the local Conservatives. This confirms my impression that many Tory activists are now more online than in the real world.
It’s a distinctly Australian sound that had the Guardian’s UK music critic Michael Hann reaching for new genre titles: "Oz thug rock"? "Yob-glam punk"? Others find it hard to place.
And BBC News was on to them and their singer Amy Taylor as early as 2019:
The band take their name from a mix of her own first name and the liquid chemical drug amyl nitrite, which won a late exclusion from the UK ban on legal highs back in 2016.
The Government had planned to prohibit the substance - commonly known in the UK as "poppers" - leading to Tory MP Crispin Blunt "outing" himself as a recreational user and declaring the proposed ban on its supply as "fantastically stupid".
"In Australia we call poppers Amyl," she explains, "So you sniff it, it lasts for 30 seconds and then you have a headache - and that's what we're like!"
I was convinced I had made this my Trivial Fact of the Day years ago, but I hadn't. So now I have.
Ferry and Kendall both attended Washington Grammar School in County Durham. The photo above, borrowed off of the internet, shows them together in the school's under-13 side in 1957/8. Ferry is under the left-hand arrow.
Howard Kendall, a midfielder, played for Preston North End in an FA Cup final when he was 17 and then joined Everton, where he won a Championship medal. He later returned to the club as manager, winning two league titles, an FA Cup and the European Cup-Winners' Cup. He died in 2015.
Athletics Weekly marked the passing of the former Liberal Democrat leader Ming Campbell with a short article on his career as a sprinter:
Despite being best known as a former Liberal Democrat leader, Campbell held the British 100m record in the 1960s.
Menzies "Ming" Campbell, the Scottish sprinter who ran at the 1964 Olympics and held the UK 100m record with 10.2 before a successful career as a politician, has died aged 84.
Campbell was dubbed the "Flying Scotsman" and occasionally "the fastest white man on the planet" and ran for Britain in the 1964 Olympics in addition to representing Scotland at the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games.
His UK record of 10.2 for 100m was set in 1967 – a time he achieved twice, in Modesto and San Jose, to equal MacDonald Bailey's 1951 mark – and the time stood as the national record until 1972.
At the 1964 Tokyo Games, Campbell, who was aged 23, reached the 200m quarter-finals and ran in the 4x100m relay.
As a student at Stanford, he famously raced and beat OJ Simpson, before Simpson switched his attentions to NFL. Campbell also finished runner-up to Tommie Smith, the American athlete who later won the 200m at the 1968 Olympics.
Born in Glasgow on May 22, 1941, Campbell studied at Glasgow and Stanford universities and was a barrister before becoming a politician.
He was initially a quarter-miler while studying in Glasgow – winning four Scottish titles at 440 yards – but gravitated to the shorter distances of 100 and 220 yards and their metric equivalents.
At the AAA Championships he won two titles over 220 yards, equalling the championships record of 21.1 in 1964, and he won medals at three editions of the World Student Games in the 1960s.
At the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 he won his 200m heat in 21.33 but was knocked out in the second round.
His impressive athleticism and natural leadership abilities meant he was named British athletics captain in 1965 and 1966. Similarly, he was the captain of the Scottish team at the 1966 Commonwealth Games.
He retired from athletics in 1968 to pursue his law career.
Tommie Smith and his protest at the 1968 Olympics are largely forgotten now. You can read about him in a guest post Matt Roebuck wrote for me some years ago.
And it's possible that I saw Ming as a sprinter myself. I can remember Grandstand - the BBC's Saturday afternoon sports programme - in the 1960s, when "indoor athletics from RAF Cosford" was a recurrent item.
This is the first part of a programme broadcast by the BBC in 2009 – YouTube will offer you the other five.
There is some great music and lots of relevant talking heads, but I have two complaints:
The programme accepts the stereotyped view of the 1950s and even adds to it. It wasn't just sexual intercourse that was invented in 1963, but colour vision too.
There's not a mention of the Spencer Davis Group – see the opening of this documentary on Steve Winwood to see what they were doing in this era.
With Labour returning to its ancestral love of national identity cards, the name of Harry Willcock has been heard again. He was the Liberal councillor and parliamentary candidate who, after being stopped for speeding in 1950, refused to show his identity card with the immortal words: "I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing."
Highgate magistrates found him guilty of refusing to show his card - Wilcox had argued that this police power had lapsed when the state of emergency that gave rise to the relevant act had expired - but gave him an absolute discharge. He was also fined for speeding.
Despite the absolute discharge, Wilcox appealed to the High Court against his conviction for not showing his card.
At this point, as Neil Hickman tells in a letter to The Law Society Gazette, a second and very unlikely Liberal hero emerged in the shape of the ferocious lord chief justice Lord Goddard:
Let’s recall the post-war saga of identity cards. These were introduced as an emergency measure at the outbreak of World War 2. The post-war Labour government, an admirable administration but with a marked authoritarian streak, took a conscious decision not to repeal the relevant legislation; and the police routinely demanded the production of identity cards whenever they stopped someone.
One Harry Willcock, stopped for speeding, refused 'on principle' to produce his identity card. On his appeal from the inevitable conviction before the magistrates, Lord Goddard said [Willcock v. Muckle [1951] 2 KB 844]:
'Of course, if [the police] are looking for a stolen car or have reason to believe that a particular motorist is engaged in committing a crime, that is one thing, but to demand a national registration identity card from all and sundry, for instance, from a lady who may leave her car outside a shop longer than she should, or some trivial matter of that sort, is wholly unreasonable… [and] tends to turn law-abiding subjects into lawbreakers, which is a most undesirable state of affairs.
Further, in this country we have always prided ourselves on the good feeling that exists between the police and the public and such action tends to make the people resentful of the acts of the police and inclines them to obstruct the police instead of to assist them….'
And, though Willcock's conviction was upheld, he was not ordered to pay costs, and Goddard indicated that any future bench of magistrates obliged to convict a citizen of failing to produce an identity card should grant an absolute discharge. Identity cards were, in fact, scrapped the following year.
Neil Hickman, a retired district judge, is the author of Despotism Renewed? Lord Hewart Unburied, which I reviewed in Liberator last year. Hewart was a Liberal politician who later served as lord chief justice between 1922 and 1940.
Oh and Harry Willcock's full name was Clarence Harry Willcock, which may be why Lord Bonkers insists on calling him Clarence "Frogman" Willcock.
"The speech made Labour and Starmer less popular, especially among Labour’s own voters. It significantly boosted immigration as an issue in people’s minds. There is no evidence it helped to reduce support for Reform, or convince Reform voters that they should vote Labour." Tarik Abou-Chadi and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte have researched what happens when mainstream parties capitulate to the far right.
Claire Wilmot examines how the far right has embraced deepfake technology: "A Londoner spreading deepfakes of white women saying they don’t feel safe 'because of migrants' told me impatiently that everyone knows the videos aren't real, but I was missing the point: 'It's about us showing everyone what’s really happening.'"
"Alarmingly, the new data show an accelerating pattern of decline in our bird populations, whether on our farmland, wetlands, uplands or seas, as they are pushed past their limits. Notably, seabirds have crashed in number, many hit hard by avian influenza, on top of a cocktail of growing pressures." Helena Horton finds that wild bird numbers continue to fall in UK. with some species in dramatic freefall.
"Elizabeth I and Mary I are the only women named in the national curriculum, while in 2023 women appeared in just 6 per cent of GCSE and A-level history exam questions." Richard Adams reports on research from End Sexism in Schools.
Pamela Fisher on the days when Nanpantan near Loughborough was an inland holiday resort.
Seth Thévoz asks an important question: which London club did Doctor Who belong to?
Susan Calman and Mike Muncer have begun going through the Carry On films one by one. I listened to their edition on Carry On Sergeant, the very first of them. The makers had no idea they were launching a franchise and national institution, though several actors who were to become Carry On actors were in tha cast. It comes over as a gentle and likeable British film comedy.
Camper Donovan spoke to the Agatha Christie International Festival in Torquay last week and that talk is now an edition of his podcast All About Agatha. His subject was the real-life crimes that inspired some of her best-known novels and her best-known play. Regular readers of this blog will know that The Mousetrap drew upon the death of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill in Shropshire in 1945, but Kemper gave many more examples of such inspiration that were new to me.
And Andrew Hickey has taken time off from his own magisterial music blog to talk to Goon Pod about the 1962 film It's Trad, Dad! He regards it as the best British pop music film made before A Hard Day's Night. (Lord Bonkers once claimed to have made a controversial film in the same era - I'm a Jihadi, Daddy.)
During her last weeks, I played my mother music on my phone. and she surprised me a couple of times by asking for Wuthering Heights bu Kate Bush.
The other LP I played to death while I was in the sixth form, besides Bush's The Kick Inside, was Songs from the Wood, but sadly my mother never asked for anything by Jethro Tull.
Peter Black says the Liberal Democrats must continue to oppose national identity cards.
Wealthy donors are increasingly funding political campaigns, eroding the public’s trust in the political process. The government has the opportunity to reverse that trend by limiting the allowed individual donation amounts and capping campaign spending by political parties, argues Rose Whiffen.
"Our results showed that being bullied was associated with significant reductions in extrovert traits and conscientiousness (that is, being dependable and organised). The drop in conscientiousness could be because the target feels demotivated by the unfairness of being bullied – or the bullying may even take the form of removing meaningful tasks from the colleague." Samuel Farley, David Hughes and Karen Niven have researched how bullying can affect your personality.
Cambridge Town Owl introduces us to Cambridge's Elspeth Dimsdale, a pioneering woman Liberal parliamentary candidate.
Moon In Gemini calls Barry Lyndon (1975) a masterpiece: "He is despicable in many ways, but are the aristocrats he so desperately wants join really that much better? Do they snub him because he is cruel to his wife and stepson, or because he isn’t one of them?"
"He was so worried about being late, for example, that he would invariably arrive hours ahead of time – he once had to scale a wall at Lord’s after arriving so early that the ground was still locked. In 1984, confused about the regulations during an early-season Benson and Hedges Cup tie between Scotland and Yorkshire at Perth, he called two tea intervals. Whether it was bomb scares or pitch invasions, reflecting greenhouses or errant pigeons, they all conspired to trouble him." David Hopps has written the Guardian obituary of the umpire Dickie Bird.
Bournemouth was my first Liberal Democrat Conference in I don't know how many years - I suspect the last one was in the same town in 2008.
And, of course, many of the people I knew then aren't at conference these days. So next time I attend Conference, and I don't intend waiting another 17 years, I shall make more effort to go to events and fringe meetings.
I was more ready for the internet cafe (ask your parents) in St Michael's Road from which I posted an edition of the Britblog Roundup (ask your parents) no longer being there.
Anyway, this time I kept passing a fascinating piece of Victorian Nonconformist fantasy on the way from the Metropole back to my own hotel.
The Unitarian Church, designed by Lawson & Donkin and built 1890, had seating for 400 persons. When the dwindling congregation sold the building it became a "mediaeval" banqueting hall, then a burlesque and cabaret venue, before a more sympathetic restoration and conversion to offices.
He also quotes its Listing as saying it offers:
A very rich mannerist interpretation of mediaeval items coupled with imaginative freestyle touches.
The big news from today at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth is that the leadership wants to change the party's policy of opposing the introduction of a compulsory national identity card.
A fringe meeting at eight o'clock this morning, reports the BBC, showed strong support for the our existing policy of opposing the introduction of compulsory national identity cards:
The majority of those present argued against digital ID cards, over civil liberties and data security concerns, among other things.
Veteran MP Alistair Carmichael told the meeting: "It seems to me if we are going to go along with the Labour Party on this then we are saying 'we are quite happy to trust the government on this'.
"And I think the day we start saying we trust the government is the day that we stop being a liberal party."
He added: "I think it is ocean-going nonsense to change our mind at that this stage."
But Ed Davey, in a question-and-answer session later in the day, said "times have changed" and the party should look at the issue again and not be "knee-jerk" in its opposition.
The same BBC report says:
He said he had been impressed by a visit to Estonia, where a liberal government had brought in digital ID that he said was "very different" to the scheme proposed by Tony Blair when he was prime minister.
If a UK system was about "giving individuals power to access public services" Sir Ed said he could be in favour because "that could increase people's freedom and rights", but he warned against a model that could be abused by an "authoritarian" government.
The journalist chairing the session then called for a show of hands on the idea of reconsidering our policy of opposing compulsory ID cards. Someone who was there told me there was 40 per cent supported for the idea, but the BBC report claims that two-thirds of those present supported it.
So what headlines are we hoping for if Labour brings a bill forward?
"Liberal Democrats call for different sort of national ID card" doesn't sound like something that will enthuse journalists or voters. Maybe we will end up abstaining on this too?
This, says Rhino, was the sound of the summer of 1967 in the United States, but it wasn't in the UK, where it reached only no. 63 in the singles chart.
Windy was written by written by Ruthann Friedman, who gave two different readings of the song. First she said:
I have heard so many different permutations of what the song was about. Here is the TRUTH. I was sitting on my bed – the apartment on the first floor of David Crosby’s house in Beverly Glenn [sic] – and there was a fellow who came to visit and was sitting there staring at me as if he was going to suck the life out of me. So I started to fantasize about what kind of a guy I would like to be with, and that was Windy – a guy (fantasy).
Later it was:
These days, looking back at myself in my mid to late 20s, I finally realized I was talking about me in that song, and how I wanted to be.
I can join in discussions about my books, because I too have read them, but my opinions have no greater authority than anyone else's just because I wrote them.
Chris Grey analyses the dangers of the new far right in Britain: "It seems to be quite different to earlier versions of far-right politics which, whilst aggressively anti-immigration, were not, apart from a very small fringe, intent on a wholesale overthrow of the established political order. Yet, now, it is becoming almost mainstream to speak as if that political order has entirely failed."
"It saddens me to say that Israel today seems to be a world away from the inclusive, pluralistic, open and democratic principles on which it was founded in 1948." Labour MP Peter Prinsley, who is a doctor and Jewish, writes about his experience of being denied entry to Israel.
"The exact movements of the train are kept secret for fear of terrorism – in 1886, Queen Victoria’s train was reportedly targeted by Fenians. But we know the train is only used very infrequently, not least because it is so expensive to move out of its shed at Wolverton near Milton Keynes." Christian Wolmar agues that the demise of the Royal Train was inevitable.
Owen Hatherley says one of the clearest markers of Britain’s civic downslide in recent decades is the slow cancellation of its once plentiful provision of public toilets.
"[Herbert] Howells and [Ivor] Gurney walked the streets of Gloucester into the early hours that night, excitedly debating what the Tallis Fantasia might mean for the future." Terry Blain tells the story of the first-ever performance of the Tallis Fantasia in the city's cathedral as part of the 1910 Three Choirs Festival.
Roger French takes the bus from Nuneaton to Leicester.
Senior party figures have told PoliticsHome that the Liberal Democrats will reshuffle their frontbench after their party conference in Bournemouth this weekend.
Among the names tipped for promotion in Harriet Symonds' article are Alex Brewer, Jess Brown-Fuller, Josh Reynolds, Anna Sabine, Mike Martin and Bobby Dean.
Given the calibre of the new Lib Dem MPs elected last year, this sounds like a positive move.
But don't get too excited:
Continuity will prevail in some key areas: deputy leader Daisy Cooper is expected to remain in the Treasury brief, as are Callum Miller in Foreign Affairs – seen as a "safe pair of hands" –and chief whip Wendy Chamberlain.
What do we know about Britain in the Fifties? Well for one thing, people couldn’t get enough of films about the recent war, could they?
Not so fast. Here’s the beginning of a film review from Picturegoer (24 October 1953):
Hold your groans about yet another war film. This one really is different. The war flashbacks are just the frame for an enthralling postwar story about an ex-soldier who goes to the dogs.
What turns a good combat-man into a bitter delinquent? Colonel Jack Hawkins makes it his conscience-stricken duty to find out.
And to make sure you’ve got the message, it concludes:
If you're tired of war films, this is the one to kill the yawns.
It seems the conventional view of the Fifties needs a bit more work.
The great thing about Jack Hawkins
The film being talked about in Picturegoer is The Intruder, which was directed by the future James Bond director Guy Hamilton and based on the novel Line on Ginger by Robin Maugham. He was the nephew of the writer W. Somerset Maugham, and his first novel, The Servant, was adapted by Harold Pinter for the celebrated film directed by Joseph Losey.
That review tells you enough to see the parallel between The Intruder and another film involving Colonel Jack Hawkins and men who have not coped well since the war. And indeed, Hawkins’ Colonel Merton in The Intruder is a benign prototype of his bitter Colonel Hyde in The League of Gentlemen, who puts together a whole team of such former soldiers to rob the Bank of England.
The great thing about Jack Hawkins in such roles is that he has an authority that makes you absolutely believe he has commanded men in battle. And he did see action as an officer in the war, though he ended it with ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association), which organised entertainment for troops. He reached the rank of Lieutenant and was made an honorary Colonel in 1946.
In The Intruder, Hawkins’s Colonel Merton arrives home from an evening out to find an armed burglar in his house. He recognises him as Ginger Edwards, one of the men he commanded in the war – and one of the bravest. He starts to talk to Edwards, but then there’s a misunderstanding and Edwards, thinking the Colonel has called the police, flees.
The rest of the film sees Merton tracking down Edwards, who has escaped from prison, to see if he can help him. Merton has left the Army, but has a crisis of conscience that he has not, as a good officer should, still been concerned for the welfare of the men he commanded. In the course of the film, part of which is told in flashbacks to the war, we see why Edwards has turned to the bad.
There turns out not to be much of a mystery to that, but there is much to enjoy from the talented cast as we follow the Colonel on his journey.
The amazing Michael Medwin
Ginger Edwards is played by Michael Medwin, who was a popular young actor in 1953. Helped by his “cheeky chappy” looks, he often played Cockney characters. Yet his background was not what you would expect from his performance in The Intruder. He came from a Dutch and Irish background, but was adopted from an orphanage by two rather grand English ladies who were to send him to public school – for American readers, in Britain a public school means a private school. Obviously.
When Medwin died in 2020, the Guardian quoted Michael Caine in its obituary:
"I was amazed when I met him to discover that he had a very upper-crust accent. Cockney is a hard accent to do and he did it brilliantly."
And Edward Fox heard of Medwin’s childhood for the first time when he sat in on a press interview Medwin gave as the two of them were about to open a touring production of My Fair Lady (Fox was Professor Higgins, Medwin Colonel Pickering) in Glasgow:
Fox, who would be an asset to any audience, had by this time gone into spasms of laughter that were obviously causing him great pain. ''A handbag? A handbag?'' he shrieked, Lady Bracknell-like, although, so far as he knew, Medwin had not actually been found in one.
As the years went on, Medwin acted less and became more involved as a successful producer in both films and the theatre. If he’s remembered now, it’s as Don Satchley, the radio station boss, in Shoestring, the late-Seventies private detective series that launched the career of Trevor Eve.
Jack Hawkins turns to his old comrades
The first old comrade Jack Hawkins turns to in his hunt for Medwin, is John Summers, who is played by George Cole. Summers has returned to running his wholesale greengrocery business in Covent Garden market. We learn that Hawkins promoted him from the ranks and that we see him struggle with the snobbery of the officers’ mess and go carousing with Edwards for old times’ sake. Nevertheless, Hawkins refuses to listen to him when he wants to hand back his commission.
After Cole, Hawkins meets his former second-in-command, and we find him played by Dennis Price in a typically cool, disengaged performance. We learn that an act of cowardice on Price’s part would have cost an injured soldier his life if Medwin had not risked his own to save him. Angered by Price’s lack of cooperation, Hawkins tells him that if it weren’t for Edwards he would have had him court martialled. After Hawkins has left, Price phones the police and tells them that Hawkins may know the whereabout of Medwin.
Then Hawkins visits Arthur Howard, who is now the headmaster of a private school. Arthur Howard was the younger (by almost 20 years) brother of the film star Leslie Howard and specialised in small comic parts. Sure enough, he is in The Intruder to provide comic relief. His character was not a member of Hawkins’ tank corps, but became mixed up with them and .through a chapter of accidents set in motion by his showing a good-time girl played by Dora Bryan the inside of a tank, was the subject of a famous photograph depicting a heroic British tank driver. Dora Bryan is, of course, wonderful – she brightened any film by her presence.
Finally, Medwin runs Hawkins to ground at a farm in Wales belonging to another of his former soldiers. There is at last some tension, as Hawkins has to reach him while avoiding the attentions of the police. Medwin is persuaded to give himself up and Hawkins promises to help him when he leaves prison.
What turned Ginger bad
What did happen to turn Ginger Edwards bad? The answer is simple: he came home from the war to found his girl (played by Susan Shaw) with another man. He also found his younger brother was being beaten by the uncle who was raising him (and had raised him the same way). When the boy was knocked down and killed running into the road, the uncle blamed Edwards, who punched him and sent him crashing down a conveniently placed flight of stairs to his death. Edwards was then imprisoned for manslaughter.
It's not a great film: the pleasure lies not in the unravelling of the mystery so much as the comic interludes and the tension at the end when Hawkins fears arrest himself for helping an escaped prisoner. And its unchallenging moral is that things would be fine if only a benign upper class helped the lower orders.
There is an unexpected twist involving Dora Bryan though, and I won’t spoil that for you.
I phoned in to the meeting from Bournemouth, only to find that the judges had already decided that this blog's Headline of the Day Award should go to Kenilworth Hub News.
When I was reviewing Liberalism by Jonathan Parry for the latest issue of Liberator, I thought of saying that he argues that Liberalism doesn't have a single essence but is rather a collection of family resemblances.
Here John Searle and Bryan Magee discuss Wittgenstein's later theory of meaning and his concept of a family resemblance in particular. I think they make it wonderfully clear.
"I’m more interested in what the stratospheric rise of a person like Charlie Kirk says about the state of political discourse. He was in many ways representative of a type that has come to dominate the internet’s ‘infotainment’ ecosystem in recent years. His purported renown among a section of the youth probably explains the urge among certain mainstream newscasters to conjure away the nasty bits. They too desperately want to be down with the kids." James Bloodworth on the meaning of Charlie Kirk.
European Powell claims that Labour’s "reckless data-centre dash" will gut the planet, fleece the public –and leave only noise, heat and hollow promises.
"As so often in higher education policy, it seems as though the context and focus of these comments is the industrial value of the sciences (engineering departments are mentioned). Yet the wider implication is worrying: much of what is published in humanities departments is 'unfunded' research in the sense that there is no designated external grant money attached to it." Jeremy Noel-Tod is concerned by the president of Universities UK's condemnation of "hobbyist research that's unfunded".
Sandra Laville reports on the disappearance of bus services in Shropshire: "The city of Birmingham lies just over 40 miles north-east of Ludlow, but to the 10,000 residents of the quiet Shropshire town, it may as well be on the moon."
Yasmin van der Poel introduces us to the Red Vicar of Thaxted: "Conrad Noel, a Christian Socialist, was appointed vicar of Thaxted in 1910. He fused Anglo-Catholic ritual with radical politics, transforming his parish into a sanctuary of spirit-inspired rebellion. His sermons, described in a question in Parliament as ‘sedition’, championed Irish independence, workers’ rights, and land reform."
"I know the NHS is under strain and imperfect, and I’m aware that it was my good luck to find myself at St Thomas’s. But while I was waiting to be sent home on Sunday, the doctor in charge of intensive care at the hospital walked past on his rounds. I told him that while it had been in most respects the worst week of my life, it had also been among the richest. I’d been given an unexpected opportunity to experience and be grateful for human relationships in public service – comradeship among workers, empathy for strangers – at their best. Something I’ll never forget." Richard Williams experiences a sudden health crisis and thinks about the NHS and rhythm.
First, a confession: the idea of a Japanese attack on Poole Harbour is stolen shamelessly from Milton Jones. Second, some good news: earlier this year Jones announced he was taking time off to be treated for prostate cancer. but he is now free of the disease and has begun touring again.
And with that, another week at Bonkers Hall draws to a close.
Sunday
When I heard there had been a fire at the Bournemouth International Centre, I naturally assumed it was the latest ruse by the party’s high-ups to justify the cancellation of our Autumn Conference. In recent years this gathering of the Liberal clans has been canned because of, variously, the Covid pandemic, the death of Her Late Majesty and a threatened bombing campaign by Isle of Wight Separatists.
Fortunately, the excellent men and women of the Dorset & Wiltshire Fire Service slid down their poles with the utmost dispatch and extinguished the blaze before serious damage was done. And so, failing another Japanese attack on Poole Harbour, I shall see you all at the Liberator stall in Bournemouth.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
The new political season is well underway, so why not have your say by writing a guest post for Liberal England?
I'm happy to entertain a wide range of views, but I'd hate you to spend time writing something I really wouldn't want to publish, so please get in touch
first.
Or you can talk to me at the Liberal Democrat Conference, where I'll be for the first time in far too many years.
These are the 10 most recent guest posts on Liberal England – you can see that I'm publish posts on subjects outside politics:
Peter Gabriel wrote Here Comes the Flood soon after he left Genesis in 1975, and it appeared on his first solo album. This stripped-down version comes from a 1979 Kate Bush Christmas special.
If I were Freddie and Fiona, I would be looking to spend less time in Rutland in future: this is starting to sound ominous. At least the old boy got Meadowcroft out of clink.
Saturday
What a way to start the day! I am summoned to Oakham nick to stand bail for Meadowcroft, who has spent the night in the cells. It transpires that he was arrested in the village yesterday afternoon for carrying a dangerous weapon; this turns out to be the Japanese pruning sickle that Freddie and Fiona gave him the other day. (To be fair to the rozzers, is does look like something a samurai would take with him if he was going to have it out with another samurai.) I really think those two will have to be Dealt With.
To cool myself down, I spend the evening sharing a bush with a rather put out mallard and one of my gamekeepers and his orchard doughty. We Midland landowners have been on our toes ever since word got about that the British foreign secretary (at least he was this morning) David Lammy and America’s VP JD are in the habit of fishing without licences.
I tend to leave questions of fishing rights on Rutland Water to my old friend Ruttie, the Rutland Water Monster, who is equally adept at dealing with lone poachers and foreign-owned trawlers, but I retain command of the lakes on the Bonkers Hall Estate. Neither bigwig puts in an appearance, but we shall be ready for them when they do.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
I liked John Rogers' video on Fulham so much that I've gone back there with Jago Hazzard.
He sets out the history of Fulham Broadway station on the London Underground. And, in passing, he gives us our Trivial Fact of the Day: the terraces at Stamford Bridge were built using spoil from the excavation of the Piccadilly Line.
You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page. And why not follow his YouTube channel? I know I do.
Peter Jukes argues that Peter Thiel’s name "now sits at the centre of a transatlantic web stretching from Epstein to Boris Johnson’s Downing Street, through the NHS’s largest ever data contract, and into Labour leader Keir Starmer’s recent trip to Washington".
"Federal Council turned out to be the worst committee that I've ever served on. And remember, I've been doing this for the best part of forty years." Mark Valladares has found the first three years of the Liberal Democrats' Federal Council to be an exercise in futility.
"It's easy to condemn anti-migrant protests on moral grounds. What such condemnation misses, however, is that there's also an intellectual error here – an excessive focus on individuals and insufficient attention to structural societal problems." Chris Dillow says we should spend less time looking for scapegoats and more time thinking about socio-economic failure.
Danny Chambers discusses how his varied veterinary career now shapes his work in politics: "I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t look after animals – or other people – unless you look after yourself first. Whether you’re a vet or an MP, it’s incredibly easy to let your own wellbeing slide, to say yes to everything, and to push yourself to the point of burnout."
"'If you love cider, this is cider to the power of 10,' says Barny Butterfield, speaking about the flavours packed by some of this year’s 'special' apples. Indeed Butterfield, the owner of Sandford Orchards, near Exeter, is buying extra tanks to increase cider production after the UK’s hottest summer on record resulted in an abundance of fruit." Zoe Wood reports on the prospects of a vintage year for English cider.
Andrew Hickey celebrates Jethro Tull and Living in the Past.
Lord Bonkers may have hunted Trotskyists in his younger days, but there's no doubt he's on the side of the working man and woman.
Friday
Freddie and Fiona’s friends will be popping champagne corks, but I think the resignation of Angela Rayner is a damned shame. For an outfit that styles itself “the Labour Party”, the present government is notably short of people who give you the impression they’ve ever done a hard day’s work.
And given that half the last Conservative cabinet owned more houses then even I do, they should have kept their snoots out of the affair. Who knows what close scrutiny of their paperwork would reveal?
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Back in July, I wrote that the death in 1945 of Dennis O’Neill, a child in public care who’d been fostered with his younger brother at a farm in Shropshire, had caused a national scandal and shared newspaper front pages with the last stages of the war in Europe.
I've not seen a more striking illustration of this than the Daily Mirror's front page for 14 February 1945.
The text of the story runs:
Reginald Gough, farmer, and Esther Gough, his wife, were at Pontesbury, near Shrewsbury, yesterday committed for trial at Salop Assizes on a charge of the manslaughter of thirteen-year-old Dennis O'Neill, placed in their care by Newport Education Committee.
Both pleaded not guilty and reserved their defence. Bail was refused.
When Mr. Gough Thomas, defending, asked for bail Mr. Maddocks, prosecuting, said he could not possibly consent. The Justices had to consider the gravity of the case and the evidence that had been given, he said.
"There is another matter to be taken into consideration. A tremendous amount of indignation has been aroused, and it might be for their own safety if they were not allowed bail," he added.
When Mr. Thomas pointed out that Mrs. Gough would have to go to Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, the chairman said that that point had been considered.
Mr. Thomas: In the interests of decency and justice, will you give some indication to the ladies and gentlemen, as I will call them, at the back of the court, that in England we have British justice and not German justice?
The chairman made no comment in reply, and Gough and his wife left the court in complete silence.
And the photograph caption says:
Terence O'Neill was 4½ hours in the witness box, Tuesday and Yesterday, telling about life on the Gough farm, where his brother died.
When the trial took place, it was held in Stafford because feeling was running so high in Shropshire. Reginald Gough was given six years for manslaughter and Esther Gough six months for neglect.
Though all the contemporary press reports say Dennis O'Neill was 13 when he died, he was in fact 12.
The photograph below shows the old police station and court in Pontesbury. For as long as I can remember, the building has been the offices of an insurance company, but when I saw it in the summer it appeared to be empty and was looking rather run down.
I imagine Dennis's brother Terry, who was the chief prosecution witness, is standing in the left-hand doorway of this building in the newspaper photograph.
The Conservative and Labour Parties are continuing to lose councillors in significant numbers, finds Augustus Carp in his latest survey of political defections.
Danny Kruger, MP for East Wiltshire, may be getting the headlines in the defection newsfeeds, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg. The rate at which councillors are changing their political allegiance doesn’t seem to be slackening.
Since June, 39 councillors have defected from the Conservatives and 56 from Labour. The Lib Dems are unchanged, Nationalists have lost 1 and the Greens are up 4. Reform UK has gained 29 and the Independents (widely defined) make up the balance with 63.
The pattern over recent years has usually been for defecting councillors to become Independents and then, if so inclined, to join a new party after a respectable period in the wilderness. Straight switches from Party A to Party B are not as frequent, but they do happen – 18 of the former Conservative councillors have moved straight to Reform UK, but one has joined them from the Greens.
The Lib Dems have lost one councillor to Reform UK (in Burnley). Three Labour councillors have moved to the Lib Dems, with the same number joining the Greens and one going to Reform UK. The remainder of the departing Labour councillors have aligned themselves with a variety of Independent political mini-groups, ranging from the Broxtowe Alliance to the Potteries Party.
The net figure of departing Labour councillors would have been much higher had it not been for a large number of suspended and unwhipped councillors being readmitted to the party over the summer. One hopes that the majority of them have learned their lessons regarding the inappropriate use of social media.
Some of these defections have had a significant impact on the local councils – Labour have lost notional control of South Tyneside, and the Labour group on Reigate and Banstead has evaporated. Senior figures have been involved in recent defections – the former leader of the Conservative group on Aberdeenshire Council is now an Independent, as is the former Labour leader in Caerphilly.
As Jonathan Wallace has noted in his blog, we are now also seeing defections from Reform UK – perhaps the most curious of which is a councillor in Kent moving from them to UKIP. Jonathan has provided some useful background on the defections of Reform UK office holders in the North East of England, but only elected councillors have been included in these figures.
Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.
Before Zack Polanski was keen to fight a plum seat for the Liberal Democrats – before even he was a hypnotherapist who claimed exceptional abilities – he was an actor. He has an IMDb entry to prove it.
PopBitch recently included a link to this video, which is the trailer for the last film he made.
It's puzzling that the Conservatives were so insistent that Kemi Badenoch's fantasy that she was offered a place to read medicine at Harvard when she was 16, based purely on aptitude tests, was true. They may have reasoned that she will be gone before the next general election so it's not going to matter, or perhaps they just really admire Donald Trump's and his approach to facts.
And, while it's good to see that Lord Bonkers has respect for learning, what is the old brute suggesting about Nick Clegg?
Thursday
A lunch invitation from the Professor of Hard Sums at the University of Rutland gives me the opportunity to put to bed once and for all a story that the leader of His Majesty’s opposition has been putting about. I can confirm that La Badenoch was not offered a place in his prestigious department without even having applied for one, let alone a fully-funded scholarship and chauffeur-driven Rolls.
Next time I find myself in one of Fleet Street’s watering holes, I shall whisper this news in the ear of someone from the Manchester Guardian. Meanwhile, my efforts to discover Nick Clegg’s A level grades will go continue.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
