Southern Television's Midnight is a Place from 1977

The whole of the Southern Television adaptation of Joan Aiken's Midnight is a Place from 1977 has turned up on YouTube.

Aiken was a wonderful writer for children – her gothic tales were at once funny and scary. Often there's an element of pastiche of 19th-century writers in her work. If she's pastiching anyone here, it's the Charles Dickens of Hard Times.

Because this adaptation dates from the Seventies, it runs to 13 episodes and stars Simon Gipps-Kent ("Master Bell"). You can play a short extract from episode 1 above.

If I remember the book correctly, the steam press was used to stamp the pattern into carpets because it was cheaper than weaving it.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I love publishing guest posts here on Liberal England. Why not try writing one yourself?

It could be on the Liberal Democrats, politics more generally or… anything really. Why not an article about a local campaign or quirky piece of history?

Please drop me an email if you want to discuss your idea first: I’d hate you to spend time on a piece I really wouldn’t want to publish.

Here are the 10 most recent guest posts published here:

• What is the technical debt of Thames Water? – Peter Chambers
• The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle – Anselm Anon
• Defections Update: Lib Dem Conference Special – Augustus Carp
• Artist Nick Jensen steps into history's shadow at Belvoir Castle – Matthew Pennell
• Reform are still gaining councillors and Labour and the Tories are still losing them – Augustus Carp
• In the cause of duty: Walter Stolworthy is remembered at Wymondham station – Neil Hickman
• Understanding the views and worries of the city of Oxford Lib Dem – William Lane
• Local councillors changing party: Augustus Carp’s review of 2025 – Augustus Carp
• Lib Dems must be "Tough on billionaires, tough on the causes of billionaires" – Anselm Anon
• The Red Lion, Evesham, and the Warwickshire Avon – Peter Chambers

The Joy of Six 1484

"It’s easy to believe that this is all a blatant and shameful effort by Republicans to distract from the Epstein files, shift focus from ICE’s domestic terrorism, seize another massive cache of global oil production, and fuel the cancellation of an upcoming election reckoning. These would all be correct assessments, at least from Trump’s self-serving, narcissistic point of view, but there’s another, more alarming motivation for religious Conservatives dragging the planet into a self-destructive, full-scale bomb-a-thon: the second coming of Christ." John Pavlovitz takes us inside a scary place – the Republican-Evangelical mind.

Helen Amass talks to Uta Frith about her current understanding of autism. Professor Frith says: "People still hang on to the idea that there is something that unites all the people who are diagnosed as autistic. I don’t believe that any more."

Richard Toye warns against simplistic invocation of Winston Churchill's name as a way of supporting military action: "Churchill once observed that war, once unleashed, rarely follows the tidy paths imagined by those who start it. That warning may be as relevant as any of his more famous phrases."

A leading judge has as issued new guidance saying unregulated psychologists should not be called to give expert evidence in family courts, reports Hannah Summers.

"Both – and they were truly intertwined for decades – made their mark at Oxford University: Potter, the controversial working-class voice who shocked viewers on BBC Television’s Does Class Matter? (1958); Trodd, the provocative editor of university mag Isis who got removed from his post in favour of the milder-mannered David Dimbleby in 1959." Ian Greaves celebrates the career of Kenith Trodd, the television producer who worked closely with Dennis Potter.

Libby Brooks finds the children of Lanark enjoying Whuppity Scoorie.

The Housemartins: Build

The Housemartins once appeared as guests on Mavis Nicholson's afternoon chat show. 

They sang a perfect live a cappella version of Caravan of Love, and Paul Heaton (often billed as P.D. Heaton in this era) said he didn't like discussing his lyrics because it was "like having your work read out in class".

Jane Dodds says she won't be beaten by online death threats

Embed from Getty Images

Jane Dodds, the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats and are only Senedd member, told a BBC Radio Wales phone in today that death threats won't force her out of politics.

BBC News quotes her remarks:

"I've had a number of threats made against me, all online, they are very serious threats... for being a politician, for the views I've held and sometimes they are not extreme.

"For example when I made a statement when I came off [social media platform X] and somebody wasn't happy with that because they wanted to scrutinise me and made threats to kill me in essence.

"That is with the police, as are others."

She spoke of the security precautions she now has to take, but urged people to come into politics even so:

"I know that's a difficult place to be, but we do this because we don't want to be beaten by people who make these threats.

"Please come into politics whoever you are, whatever your background is and make sure we speak about this, we talk about it because it's absolutely not acceptable."

You can listen to the whole programme on BBC Sounds. 

GUEST POST The Red Lion, Evesham, and the Warwickshire Avon

River Avon and Workman Gardens, Evesham

Peter Chambers voyages along the Severn and Shakespeare's Avon, visits an Evesham pub and consults the accounts of the Avon Navigation Trust.

For the English boater who has completed the delights of the Trent and its disappearing power stations and riverside pubs other venues await. One such is a trip down the Severn and up the Warwickshire Avon, with a stay at the tourist trap of Stratford when leaving the river.

It is worth a stay at Evesham on the way. We had embarked a local guide with knowledge of both volunteer water pollution activism and the best drinking places. Before we were done I could identify a CSO (combined sewer overflow) and an Environment Agency solar panel, which indicates a remote monitoring system nearby. If I had watched the documentary Dirty Business before the trip, I might have understood better why they are located where they are.

After a thirsty tour of the Lower Avon we moored at Workman Gardens at Evesham. There is plentiful mooring there although it is not technically flood safe (for example, using tall poles to moor on). However, the weather forecast said we would be safe that week.

And so up hill to the Red Lion for drinks before dinner. This is an unusual pub, aiming not so much for real ale as real everything. Real cider, real music, real atmosphere. It has a shop front exterior rather than a faux olde worlde tourist appearance. The guest ales appear on a hand written list and the tables are small and mismatched. You can even have tea. Well behaved dogs welcome. 

This was a great place to spend an hour before going on to dinner at the River Avon Restaurant. Happily, being up the hill from Workman Gardens, it is not going to flood.

Evesham was a nice break between the Lower Avon starting with Tewksbury on the Severn and the Upper Avon ending near Stratford. A chance to pick up on some local knowledge.

It was also interesting to come across the Charity Commission filings from the Avon Navigation Trust (ANT) that document the state of the trust in 2020 and 2024. In 2020, ANT turned in £959,995 (larger than a parish council but smaller than a principal council) and had a single employee earning a reportable remuneration between £80,0001 and £90,000 (about 8.9 per cent).

By 2024, ANT had an income of £1,058,900 and reportable (individuals on £60+k) of one between £60,001 to £70,000 and one between £100,001 and £110,000 (about 16 per cent). The cost of governance seems to have nearly doubled. Happily there is a lot more detail on file to dig into.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

Mark Twain explains the Fall of Man

Embed from Getty Images

Mark Twain never said or wrote many of the quotations ascribed to him, but this one is kosher. It's the epigraph to chapter 2 of his The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson:

Adam was but human – this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

On New Year's Eve 1892 Saddington played Kibworth at cricket on a frozen reservoir

Here's a another story I discovered when I visited Kibworth Library last week. This report is from the Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail (3 January 1893), but the story appeared in newspapers across the country.

A Novel Cricket Match. Saddington v. Kibworth

Teams representing the respective cricket clubs of Saddington and Kibworth, met in an extremely novel encounter on Saddington reservoir on Saturday, when an amusing match on the ice ended in a draw. 

The match was played on skates, and the ice being in splendid condition, the leather hunting was very considerable, and consequently there were many boundaries scored. The wickets were a combined structure, so that the fall of one occasioned the toppling over of the lot, but despite its drawbacks the game was a very interesting one. Smith, one of the Kibworth players, took four wickets in one "over," while on the opposite side Capell and Richardson were very conspicuous for their good fielding. 

Saddington batted first, and though the wicket of their first player was lowered by the very first ball, they were not dismissed until they scored over 200 runs. Owing to the failing light stumps were drawn before Henson and Badcock, the first two Kibworth men, had been separated. A large number of spectators witnessed the match.

The final score was: Saddington 205, Kibworth 95-0. Match drawn. My photograph shows Saddington Reservoir on a warmer day.

Mercia rediscovered: The Synod of Gumley and Brixworth church

Reviewing Max Adams's The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the Birth of the Anglo-Saxon State AD 630-918 for the London Review of Books, Tom Shippey wrote of the difficulty in recovering the history of the kingdom of Mercia:

Adams’s title is deliberately ironic. There are no ‘Mercian Chronicles’, the fact of which has caused historians headaches for centuries. 

For Northumbria we have Bede’s History of the English Church and People, written in Jarrow and finished in 731. For Wessex we have The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, first compiled under the aegis of King Ælfred in the 890s, but including much earlier information and then kept up in various locations year by year. 

But for the land in between we have nothing: or rather, "no independent narrative", apart from a short interpolation into two manuscripts of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle known as ‘the Mercian Register’ and covering only the years 902-24. For the rest, the historian has to work from often biased, often hostile enemy sources, and from indirect evidence: coins, charters, archaeology and, on occasion, suggestive silences.

For this reason, Mercia does not perhaps enjoy the prominence in our early medieval history that it deserves.

I looked at Adams's book, and its index in particular, in Waterstones and knew I had to buy it. It discusses the Synod of Gumley of 749, held close by that slightly village near Market Harborough, and also the magnificent Saxon church down the road at Brixworth.

Here is Adams on Gumley:

Two years after the second Clofesho council, in 749, Æthelbald convened a further council at a place called Godmundesleach. This time the site can be identified with satisfying precision. 

The small village of Gumley, lying on a back road between Market Harborough and Leicester, is surrounded by once-tilled arable lands now turned over to grazing for sheep and horses. A couple of hundred yards south-west of Gumley's single, house-lined street, in steeply undulating park lies a natural amphitheatre containing a pond known as the "Mot", overlooked by a prominent tree-covered mound. By general acceptance 

This is the site of the council of 749 and to further royal councils held in 772. and 779. Its present obscurity may be misleading: It lay close. to one of the sources of the river Welland, which may have formed a significant Middle Anglian boundary in the eighth century.

The location of Clofesho is not known. Adams favours a location near Hertford, while other candidates include Brixworth in Northamptonshire.

When Adams does get to Brixworth, he says:

the scale and evident expense of the church here strongly implies royal, possibly episcopal patronage: it is public architecture of the highest order.

He also says that the stone for the bulk of the church originated from quarries near Leicester, implying that it was indeed repurposed after being taken from the ruins of Roman Leicester.

Reader, I bought the book. You can see my photos of Gumley and above and All Saints', Brixworth, below.

The Joy of Six 1483

Taylor Lorenz argues that there is little evidence that social media is driving a mental health crisis among young people and a banning them from it would effect us all: "Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity."

Opponents of traffic-reduction measures in cities sometimes claim that such policies discriminate against people with disabilities because they need cars to get about. In reality, Julia Métraux finds, walkable communities are good for them too.

Jim Waterson, Sophie Wilkinson and Polly Smythe dissect the panic in London over 'school wars': "On Monday night the Metropolitan police confirmed to London Centric that there have been no reported incidents that the force has linked to the supposedly all-pervasive ;school wars'. Despite this, it said it would continue to provide reassurance in the form of a 'strong, visible presence around schools', issuing dispersal orders, and asking social media sites to remove videos."

Is there a Christian revival underway among young adults in the UK? Conrad Hackett thinks the recent surveys suggesting there is may be misleading.

"Research in the humanities is not confined to academic institutions. Particularly in history and archaeology there are many communities focused on the study and interpretation of the past that engage in different ways with academic research." Ben Earley challenges the simplistic view of research impact flowing from institutions to public users.

Leah Broad on the rediscovery of Dame Ethel Smyth and other women classical composers.

Dame Mary Berry "frightened" after being arrested at US border

The judges were heard grumbling about "clickbait; nevertheless, yahoo news! wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Keir Starmer's 10 pledges from his leader leadership campaign

It's clear Keir Starmer never believed in much of what was contained in these pledges. They were written for him so he would appeal to Labour members in the party's last leadership election.

More and more, I favour Neal Lawson's account of how we ended up with a prime minister who possesses so few of the qualities you look for in a political leader:

Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of right-wing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. 

At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grown ups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured. 

But no one reckoned with Covid, Tory turmoil and the collapse of the SNP. Suddenly Keir Starmer wasn’t going to just lead Labour to a better defeat and a springboard for victory next time. Against the odds, he was going to win. Just as Jeremy Corbyn was Labour’s accidental leader in 2015, Starmer was the party’s accidental prime minister in 2024.

John Rogers explores Acton Town, Turnham Green and Chiswick House Park

Time for another London walk with John Rogers:

A walk from Acton Town Tube Station down Bollo Lane looking at the changes taking place there, then across Turnham Green where I talk about the Civil War battle that took place there in 1642. The video ends at the beautiful Chiswick House Park.

This walking tour explores West London history, urban change, and hidden landscapes, moving through Acton, Bollo Lane, Turnham Green, and Chiswick. Along the way it touches on London regeneration, psychogeography, Civil War history, grand houses, and the last industrial London.

Most signs of the Acton Town to South Acton branch disappeared long ago. Diamond Geezer has an article about it.

John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and he blogs at The Lost Byway.

Some staggering moments from 75 years of The Archers

A fellow Liberal Alliance councillor told me back in the Eighties that, when he was a small boy, he and his friends were avid listeners to Dick Barton – Special Agent. 

When they heard that a new series called The Archers was to occupy its slot, they naturally assumed it would be about Robin Hood and his Merrie Men.

Imagine their disappointment when they tuned in for the first episode...

At the start of this year, the Guardian celebrated 75 years of The Archers with 75 of its most staggering moments. Here are few they chose:

• Outsiders have always been treated with suspicion in Ambridge. In its first year, unrepentant townie Bill Slater was fatally injured in a brawl outside the Bull.
• Nelson Gabriel, once voted the Greatest Rogue in the series’ history, vanished in an alleged plane crash in 1967. Implicated in the Great Borchester Mail Van Robbery, he was eventually returned by Interpol.
• Adam Macy’s overprotective parenting style might be partly explained by the fact that in 1970, at the age of three, he was kidnapped from the Bull by a couple of Brummie bunglers hoping to blackmail his wealthy paternal grandfather. Three days later, he was rescued from the big bad city thanks to a tip-off from Sid Perks.
• Fresh from her adventures at Greenham Common, Guardian-subscriber Pat Archer almost left Express-reader Tony for her women’s studies lecturer in 1984 … until Tony wooed her back with a bold plan to go organic. (On the farm, not in the bedroom.)
• Four years after their first kiss, Emma and Ed Grundy made their relationship public – a delay explained by the fact that in the meantime she had married and had a baby with his brother Will.

The Joy of Six 1482

Writing in the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah White says our political institutions are dangerously underprepared for a multi-party future.

Jane Green and Marta Miori argue that the electoral challenge Reform represents to Labour is widely misunderstood: "Focusing on Labour voters misses the much bigger threats to Labour from Reform, which is Reform overtaking the party in Labour councils and constituencies by continuing to capture Conservative voters and 2024 non-voters – the latter small in proportion, but currently larger in size than for other parties. This is made likelier if Labour’s vote continues to splinter broadly, to ‘undecided’ and to the left, and is a threat to the party in the many seats they won on lower vote shares in 2024 due to fragmentation on the right."

"Cambridge and Oxford are often spoken about as a pair – two high-achieving university towns with highly educated populations, cutting-edge firms and high average incomes. Both are prosperous, yet both struggle with tight housing supply. But beneath these similarities, differences are emerging." Xuanru Lin finds that Cambridge has pulled ahead of Oxford on jobs, productivity and housing.

"Historically, the psychogeographer became associated with the 'flaneur', a lone male wanderer who is able to move unheeded through the city. This romantic idyll doesn’t reflect the reality for many of us, and there are many barriers stopping folk." Morag Rose on exploring cities as a disabled woman.

Clare Bucknell visits the Joseph Wright of Derby exhibition at the National Gallery: "Tenebrism, the 17th-century Caravaggist method of illuminating figures and details against a deeply shadowed background, was admired by connoisseurs, but little practised or understood by Wright’s British contemporaries. Mastering nocturne painting, being able to replicate the way skin glowed in warm or cool light or colours changed in the dark, was a means for the young artist to distinguish himself."

"The club whose sustained excellence made the argument for change most powerfully will now discover that the goalposts have been replaced entirely, swapped for financial sustainability assessments, commercial strength metrics, governance frameworks and geographic strategic value criteria that Ealing were never given the opportunity to meet." James White reacts to the Rugby Football Union's decision to end promotion to and relegation from the Premiership.

Chartwell Dutiro: Mahororo

The opening of Chartwell Dutiro's obituary on Afropop Worldwide:

Chartwell Dutiro has joined the ancestors. More than a brilliant Zimbabwean mbira player and a pillar of Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited during their rise to international fame in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Chartwell was a musical visionary with a deep and abiding fidelity to the Shona tradition in which he was raised, and a wry, witty cosmopolitanism that made him a singularly effective ambassador to the world.

Shorayi Dutiro’s journey began in a Kaganda village in the Bindura region of then-Southern Rhodesia. According to his passport, he was born on Dec. 26, 1957, but he was never certain of the accuracy, given the cavalier attitude of colonial Rhodesian authorities toward the residents of rural communities. 

He often told the story of how a white doctor, not his parents, decided to call him Chartwell, after Winston Churchill’s summer home. Only years later when he actually visited the place did Chartwell learn that this was the derivation of his name. Nevertheless, the name Chartwell has always appeared on his official documents.

And Wikipedia takes up the story:

As a teenager Chartwell moved to the capital, Harare, and became saxophonist with the Salvation Army band. A little later, in 1986, he joined the world-famous band Thomas Mapfumo & the Blacks Unlimited. Touring the world for eight years with that band, he was their arranger, mbira player and saxophonist. From 1994 until his death in 2019, Chartwell based himself in Britain where he continued to teach and play mbira.

Chartwell had academic qualifications in music, including a degree in Ethnomusicology from SOAS in London where he also taught for many years.

Ben McGuire fights to save Sharp's Brewery in Rock

Ben McGuire, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Cornwall, has called the planned closure of Sharp's brewery in his constituency "devastating" and urged its American owners to think again.

ITV News reports that he has also said it would be "unacceptable for Molson Coors Beverage Company to market its products as Cornish if it moved out of the Duchy".

The brewery at Rock, which produces the UK's best-selling cask ale Doom Bar, is due to close by the end of the year with the loss of 50 jobs.

Ben told ITV News:

"I’m really disappointed to hear this devastating news that more than 50 local people are going to lose their jobs at this iconic local brewery. We have been so proud to see their beers sold the length and breadth of this country. ...

"I hope the parent company approaches the consultation in the spirit that it should be approached with and they listen to local residents and they come up with a solution to keep those jobs here, or at least some of the skilled jobs. They cannot use our Cornwall brand without production here in Cornwall."

Boak & Bailey wrote about the rise of Doom Bar back in 2008. And Rock always used to be where the upper classes dumped their unwanted teenage offspring for the summer, though I don't suppose they interfered with the brewing.

Derby councillors clash over cost of Snickers bars in heated council tax row

 Derbyshire Live wins our Headline of the Day Award. 

One of the judges was heard to ask what the point of Reform UK is if their councillors don't insist on calling them "Marathon bars".

How Charley fooled the Luftwaffe and saved Midland cities

Here's the blurb for one of the short Secret Leicestershire features on BBC Sounds – The secret RAF base which foiled the Nazis:

Slightly north of Coalville in the Leicestershire district of Charley are the remains of a secret RAF base which foiled Nazi bombing raids during WW2.

The RAF 80 Wing was formed in 1940 and comprised a team of specialist wireless operators who sent radio signal beams to throw German pilots off course, tricking them into releasing their bombs away from their intended targets.

Charley was one of those specially chosen sites, being close to the important manufacturing centres of Leicester, Derby, Coventry, Nottingham and Birmingham. That secret RAF team was nicknamed "The Beambenders".

You can read more about this operation in the Wikipedia entry for Battle of the Beams, and there's more about the site at Charley on the parish council's website.

The Joy of Six 1481

"Other guests at the party included Mandelson’s good friend Nathaniel (Nat) Rothschild, a financier and heir to the Rothschild fortune (Mandelson often stayed at his villa in Corfu), and Rothschild’s old schoolmate, the then shadow chancellor George Osborne." Tamsin Shaw looks back to the Yachtgate scandal of 2008 and argues that we misread it at the time.

"Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are 'being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention'." Julia Lurie on the cruelty of the Trump regime.

Tanya Park believes Liberals should care about the collapse of serious Conservative journalism: "Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren't), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols predicts that general-purpose AI will poison itself: "We're going to invest more and more in AI, right up to the point that model collapse hits hard and AI answers are so bad even a brain-dead CEO can't ignore it."

"Alcohol has its many downsides as I can attest having a childhood punctuated by my father’s alcoholism, but it lowers people’s inhibitions making them willing to talk. It’s why you’re more likely to spark up a conversation over an interesting cask beer instead of waxing lyrical to the person next to you about the smooth flavour of an Arabica coffee bean." When it comes to social cohesion, beer beats coffee, says David Jesudason.

Ian Jones reminds us that Kenneth Williams was never off the television: "Yet over the next two decades he failed repeatedly to be – in one of his catchphrases from the BBC radio show Round The Horne – 'properly serviced' by the small screen. Despite all that graft on stage, he never landed a leading role in a TV drama series. For all the comic virtuosity that poured out of him in the Carry On films and his radio series with Tony Hancock and Kenneth Horne, he not once played lead in a TV sitcom." 

An elephants' graveyard: Toton sidings and locomotive depot today

Years ago, I was on a rare passenger working through Toton. The ranks of stored wagons and locomotives made it feel like an elephants' graveyard,

As Our History Underfoot – the new name for the old Trekking Exploration account – discovers here, the vast yards and loco depot Toton are largely derelict today. This was to have been the site of the East Midlands Hub for HS2, but that won't happen now.

Besides Toton, we see the River Erewash and some of the tangle of lines that makes Long Eaton a railway labyrinth.

Generate your own Allister Heath headlines with one click!

The absurd headlines it gives to Alister Heath's opinion pieces are one of the most florid symptoms of the Telegraph's sad descent into madness.

Now, thanks to The New World, you can generate Alister Heath headlines yourself.

But be warned: it's hard to replicate the craziness of the originals.

Jackie Trent: Where Are You Now, My Love?

This took Jackie Trent to number one in May 1965 – she wrote it with Tony Hatch, to whom she was married for many years. Their suburban take on Bacharach and David is very effective here.

The song owed part of its success to its use in the television series It's Dark Outside, which featured Oliver Reed among its cast.

But the footage in the video does not come from that but the film Four in the Morning. This ominous downbeat piece of late kitchen-sink suggested it could be grim in London too – Billy Liar might have been no better off if he had caught that train. It starred Judi Dench in a rare early cinema appearance. This was years before it was made compulsory for her to appear in every British film.

My latest article for Central Bylines... Paddy Logan: Harborough’s radical Liberal hero

I've had another piece published on Central Bylines this morning. It looks at the career of J.W. "Paddy" Logan, who was Liberal MP for Harborough from 1891 to 1904 and 1910 to 1916.

Here he is speaking in the Commons in 1897:

In the Board Schools the children were not taught to curtsey to the squire or to the parson. In the Church Schools the children were taught to fall down and worship the great god of the Clerical party – the landowner. Hon. Gentlemen might laugh, but he knew what he was talking about. He saw it too frequently.

What the children were being taught in thousands of villages today might be summed up in the words: “God bless the Squire and the Squire’s relations/And make us know our proper stations.” … The Church had always been against progress.

Uncannily, I invented Lord Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans years before I read of Mr Logan's cottage home at East Langton.

Fighting breaks out at Kibworth vs Gumley cricket match in 1873

At Kibworth library today in connection with a thing, I came across this report from the Leicester Chronicle (2 August 1873):

The cricket match which took here on Saturday between the Kibworth and Gumley Clubs was wound up with a scene - we might almost say a tragedy - which, with the exception of occasional poaching affrays, is happily seldom heard of in the rural districts.

It appears that a quarrel arose through some objections taken as to the fairness of certain individuals engaged in playing quoits. High words were soon followed by blows, and the pugilists were speedily reinforced by their friends on either side. The fight went on for some time until at length a perfect riot took place, and bats which for some time had been flourished in the air, began to alight on the nasal organs of the combatants.

Seven or eight men are reported to have been on the ground together and the disputants ultimately became so fighting or thrashing mad as to rush into the melee and knock down irrespective of friend or foe any person who came within reach.

The scene which beggars description went on until all appeared to have had enough, the office bearers of the Kibworth club utterly powerless to restrain the "dogs of war". Those who figured most conspicuously in the fracas we are told were from Gumley and Smeeton. Kibworth was also fairly represented. 

The greater proportion of the rioters were apparently maddened by drink; and their conduct will probably induce the members to forswear the future admission of intoxicating drinks on the ground.

I like to think that Kibworth vs Gumley remains a needle match to this day. Gumley cricket ground, incidentally, has a feature that must disconcert visiting teams.

Labour embraces rewilding in an attempt to stymie the Greens

We have another illustration of the truth that governments are much nicer when they are afraid of losing. 

White-tailed eagles, pine martens and beavers will be released across England before the May elections as the Labour government attempts to staunch the flow of nature-loving voters to the Green party.

Plans to reintroduce these lost species to the country have been mooted for years, but the previous Conservative government failed to get them over the line after opposition from landowners and its own MPs. 

Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, is understood to have told the regulator Natural England to dust off these plans and expedite them so there is a flood of good nature news before the polls open.

I don't know which polls the writer has in mind, but if she's thinking of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour are cutting it rather fine.

Still, this is welcome news. It was only October that Steve Reed, the housing, communities and local government secretary, refused to support an amendment that would have mandated the installation of a swift brick in every new home. Apparently swifts are anti-growth. Yet Reed assured campaigners they were "pushing at an open door" when he was in opposition.

Whether the move will win back Labour voters from the Greens, however, remains to be seen. What has been notable about Zack Polanski since he became the Greens' leader is how rarely he mentions the environment. His talk is of taxing billionaires: pine martens and beavers hardly get a look in.

The Joy of Six 1480

"The memoir shows that for Mandelson the cast of people who matter is very narrow, he is always the betrayed rather than the betrayer, his press critics are always acting in bad faith, and he is never adequately rewarded or appreciated." James Butler on the fall of Peter Mandelson.

"'At the moment, you’ve got Reform, who are weaponising concerns around net-zero', she says, and 'the Conservatives recklessly rowing back on the very infrastructure they created to tackle climate change, which is the Climate Change Act;". Noah Vickers talks to Pippa Heylings, the Lib Dem spokesperson on energy security and Net Zero.

Gemma Motion makes the case for raising England's age of criminal responsibility: "Internationally, the UK’s position is becoming isolated. Article 40(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges states to establish a minimum age of criminal responsibility. While no specific age is prescribed, 14 is the most common minimum across Europe. Several other countries set it higher still. Even our devolved neighbour Scotland, which historically had a lower threshold at eight years of age, has now raised it to 12."

Tourettes Hero discusses the fallout from the BAFTA awards ceremony.

"The central strategic question is not whether non-host counties will survive. They will. The question is whether they will retain any meaningful competitive agency within the professional game. On the evidence available, the answer is no. Not under the current framework." Gary Mason and Simon Aldis argue that the future is bleak for most of cricket's first-class counties.

Discontinued Notes has been to Oxford to see the exhibition at the Bodleian about John Le Carré.

Martin Stephens remember making The Innocents (1961)

It wasn't only Jack Clayton who identified with the themes of The Innocents. Here's Martin Stephens who, at the age of 11, played Miles, remembering the making of the film. 

He has spoken about his career in general to filminc blog.

I can’t say that I was a natural actor but what I would say is that I was very directable. If you look at my fifteen, sixteen, eighteen films, whatever it was, you will see that when it was a good director I tended to be reasonably good and when it was a weak or poor director I was relatively mediocre. I would absorb what was going on. Also, to be honest, I didn’t have much of an ego in terms of what I was doing. ...

I’ll give you an example. I played Oliver in the musical in London when I was twelve. I did that for about seven months and my mom used to come a collect me.  Every day she would come up and sometimes she would be a few minutes early so she would go into the wings and see the final curtain calls before she would whisk me off to go to bed. 

One day the stage manager actually turned to her and said – as I was taking the bows and there was uproarious applause going on, and curtain call after curtain call – the stage manager actually turned to her and said "do you know that Martin couldn’t care less?" It was just doing a job.  I was enjoying it, but it didn’t really matter to me too much, I didn’t invest my ego into it.

And isn't the opening scene from the film disturbing? I do wonder if Clayton had seen Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

Ed Davey flattens Nigel Farage on human rights

On 29 October last year, Nigel Farage put forward his European Convention on Human Rights (Withdrawal) Bill. You can read his speech in Hansard.

This, in full, was Ed Davey's reply:

The speech we just heard totally misrepresents the European convention, and the failure of the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) to mention the huge benefits and rights that the European convention has brought to millions of British people says it all. Let me give those attracted by the argument we have just heard one strong reason to think again. Russia under Vladimir Putin is the only country to have withdrawn from the European convention on human rights. Maybe that is what attracts the hon. Member—after all, he said that Putin is the world leader he most admires.

Russia: a country where those who oppose the regime are mysteriously pushed off balconies, and where, if it is not enough to murder a political opponent like Alexei Navalny, Putin has even jailed lawyers who dared to represent him—things not allowed under the European convention. As we have seen Nathan Gill, a leading political ally of the hon. Member for Clacton, imprisoned for taking Russian bribes, perhaps we should not be surprised that the Reform party is so keen to follow Russia.

Besides Russia, where else are people’s hard-fought-for rights under attack? Trump’s America. Of course, the US is not part of the European convention, yet its citizens have benefited from something similar: the US constitution, which was designed to check the power of tyrants and protect the individual from the state. Just as the hon. Member for Clacton desires to remove people’s rights here, his hero Donald Trump is doing the same in America, attacking the courts and the rule of law, and even inciting a violent mob against the US Congress to overturn an election. But of course, the hon. Member has called President Trump “an inspiration”. If we want to know the hon. Member’s intentions for British people’s basic rights and freedoms, we only need to look at Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America. That is not patriotic. It is deeply un-British, and he should be ashamed.

Unlike the hon. Member for Clacton, I am proud of our country; I love our country. I am proud that Britain helped to create the European convention on human rights, championed by Winston Churchill himself. The convention protects the very people who need it most: our elderly and most vulnerable, so that they may live and grow old with dignity; and our children, so that those facing horrific abuse have better protection. It also upholds our freedom of speech so that the press and public can criticise those in power without fear, and it protects our right to peaceful protest.

Seventy years ago, Britain became the first country to ratify the convention, as a leading voice on the global stage for human rights and the rule of law. That is our history. That is who we are. That is Britain at our best. Yet the hon. Member for Clacton wants us to forget our history, dump British values, undermine the rule of law and row back on people’s hard-won rights. I say no.

To help get across how wrong the hon. Member, the Reform party and the Conservatives are on this, let me give some examples. When people died because of poor care at Stafford hospital, their families secured change—because of these laws. When British troops died in Iraq because of poor equipment, the Supreme Court ruled that the Government were accountable—because of these laws. After 96 people were killed in the Hillsborough disaster and the victims themselves were blamed, their families finally got to the truth—because of these laws. When the Metropolitan police failed to properly investigate the horrific assaults of John Worboys, his victims were able to take the police to court—because of these laws.

Time and again, the European convention and its British twin, the Human Rights Act, have brought justice for our people, and protected them from gross misconduct and unfair treatment. These laws help individuals hold the powerful to account—to hold Governments to account. These laws can get justice when the elite and powerful cover up and abuse their power. So it is clear, is it not, that the hon. Member for Clacton is not about standing up for the individual—for the ordinary person, for the people with no voice—but that he is the friend of the elite and the powerful?

If we do not defend our human rights here at home, how can we possibly persuade other countries of the importance of human rights for their own people? If we do what Reform wants, the biggest cheers will come from the Kremlin, from Beijing, from Tehran, from Pyongyang, and from dictators and authoritarian regimes the world over. That would be a betrayal of everything our country stands for. The hon. Member’s plan would damage our country’s ability to shape our world.

Leaving the convention would be another nail in the coffin of Britain’s unique soft power. We have so often influenced world events for the better by being part of international agreements, by upholding international law and by leading. Of course, the hon. Member for Clacton has made his career by damaging our country and our influence. Remember how he led the campaign for Brexit with his Conservative friends? We know what a total mess that has turned out to be. He and his friends argued that Brexit would cut immigration, but immigration has gone up. Just look at how badly he has betrayed the people he claims to speak for. Brexit made the small boats crisis possible.

Before Brexit, we effectively had a returns agreement with every EU country: the Dublin system—a deterrent that worked. Now, undocumented migrants are trying to reach the UK because they know they cannot be returned. Thanks to the hon. Member, his Brexit ripped up Britain’s rights to return people with no right to be here and people who should have claimed asylum elsewhere in Europe. [Interruption.] Conservative Members may shout—they caused it!

Let us look at one of our closest allies, the Republic of Ireland, and a vital part of our country, Northern Ireland. The Good Friday agreement references the European convention seven times. The guarantee of basic rights and freedoms in the convention was fundamental to securing the Good Friday agreement, to ending the conflict, to stopping the bombs and to getting peace, yet the hon. Member for Clacton stands here today prepared to risk peace in our country—how utterly shameful.

As we approach Remembrance Sunday, let us never forget the sacrifices made for our freedoms today, and let us never forget the lessons that that greatest generation of British people learned and passed on to us— Interruption.] I think the veterans will notice this barracking. Our greatest generation showed us that we needed these laws to protect people from state abuse, to stop authoritarian Governments and tyrants, and to defend people’s rights. The post-war generation knew how costly far right-wing populism had been for our country and our people, so for our greatest generation, for British people today and for our democracy, I urge Members to vote against this Bill.

If the Liberal Democrats could talk about the economy with the same clarity and passion we display when talking about foreign policy and civil liberties, we would sweep the country.