The Polly Bolton Band: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I wrote this in 2008 about a memory that was already more than a dozen years old:

Much Wenlock is not just the spiritual home of the Olympics. It also the venue for Festival at the Edge, which I attended a couple of times back in the 1990s.

Although it is chiefly a storytelling festival, my chief memories of it are musical. I heard a young Eliza Carthy play (with Nancy Kerr) and, best of all, I heard the Polly Bolton Band.

That year everything was running hopelessly late, and it was after midnight when the band (Polly Bolton, John Shepherd and Steve Dunachie) took the stage in the marquee. Everyone's breath was steaming in the cold air. The band played traditional folk songs and their own settings of poems by Kipling and A.E. Housman. Above all I remember Polly Bolton's wonderful folk voice.

Now, at last, I have found a recording by the Polly Bolton Band on YouTube. It's a setting, not of Kipling or Housman, but of a poem by their contemporary W.B. Yeats.

US money will drag leading Conservatives further to the right

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Suella Braverman has made £60,000 on the international speaking circuit, says the Guardian. Reading between the lines of its report, this money was made over the last parliamentary year.

Braverman is not taking part in the current Conservative leadership election, but for most of that year she will have been intending to do so. And she will certainly have her eye on the contest after this one.

And if such a lacklustre figure can earn this figure, think how much must be on offer to the few remaining big beasts of her party.

If you're not sure, the Guardian helpfully spells it out:

Boris Johnson in, 2023 declared an income of £4.8m within the first six months of leaving No 10, including an advance payment of £2.5m for an unspecified number of speeches.

Most of this money is American, and a study of Twitter tells us what the American right wants to hear about Britain at the moment. It's that we are ruled by mullahs and all live in fear of arrest for saying the wrong thing.

If you're old and worldly like me, you may say that saying one thing to one audience and the opposite to another is one of the most important political arts. But it has become much harder in the age of the net and social media.

But the temptation to tell American audiences what they want to hear, and to earn the big bucks that this will bring, is will prove hard to resist.

Heard back in Britain, such sentiments will sound extreme, even unpatriotic. to most voters. And so the Tories' shift to the unelectable right will continue.

The Joy of Six 1142

"There’s been a fair bit of discussion about Lib Dem housing policies and our record recently. It’s become obvious to me that many members, especially Young Liberals, don’t appear to know what our national housing policy is, or our track record." Mattthew Pennell sets out some of the housing achievements of local authorities run by the party.

George Llewelyn makes an unexpected discovery: "More interesting perhaps is the change in mood from the Brexit voters I spoke to in 2021. Many of them have graduated from Eurosceptics with a general dissatisfaction at how things turned out to becoming ardent rejoiners themselves."

Our suspicion of anyone who expresses the ambition to be a politician is one of the reasons for the poor quality of our MPs, says Adam Hawksbee.

Emma Fergusson, Shona Reed-Purvis and Lucy Foulkes argue that "some young people’s emotional and behavioural difficulties are now too readily being viewed as problems that require (and require only) medical intervention, typically in the form of assessment and one-to-one treatment from a mental health professional."

"These Spiritual Defenders of the game stood, using the theatrical backdrop and the powerfully echoing acoustics of their private cricketing palace to bray and honk like entitled asses." Emma John on the behaviour of MCC members on Sunday.

John Walsh remembers Martin Amis: "Although he was seen, by some critics of his first three novels, as a sex-obsessed snake in the garden of fiction, he was also the most self-consciously literary of writers. The names (or allusions to the works) of D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Fielding, Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, Gerald Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman and William Shakespeare are all dropped in the first thirty pages of The Rachel Papers. By page 60, Dickens, Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Jane Austen, George Herbert and Franz Kafka had also been press-ganged into the action."

Peter Hitchens has been banged up in Shrewsbury jail

There's a good article by Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail.

Readers (aghast): Peter Hitchens? The Daily Mail?

Liberal England replies: Go on then, if you must.

Where were we?

Peter Hitchens is one of a number of minor celebrities who have been filming a reality television show about life in prison,

He explains:

The programme-makers assembled a large group of genuine ex-prisoners, and also several experienced former prison officers, to recreate as closely as possible the routine and atmosphere of jail. 

This was no stage set. We were literally Banged Up (the working title of the programme) several times a day, as uniformed officers swung shut the heavy blue-grey iron doors and forced us to endure slow hours in the company of cellmates we had absolutely not chosen.

We mopped the floors and peeled potatoes and doled out food to each other in the servery. We worked out in the gym and shared the showers, which switched wildly between freezing cold and searingly hot.

We circled round the exercise yard when the weather allowed and were exposed to various attempts at therapy from yoga (an actual punishment for me) to bricklaying. For days we never saw a tree or a blade of grass. ...

It is a dismal place, oppressive and grubby, haunted by tragedy of one kind or another, and redolent of all kinds of misery. It is especially dismal because the busy sounds of the nearby railway station remind the inmate of the freedom of others, outside the melancholy brick walls.

The experience had not changed his very Daily Mail views on crime, but he does write:

I still think we are all responsible for what we do. I just do not think that physical squalor, dirt and danger help achieve these ends.

And there's some real humanity here:

I must praise the former prisoners, who did their bit without any reward, and who - in many cases - suffered flashbacks to real prison sentences. I will always be grateful to them for the small but vital kindnesses they gave me, a suburban softie with a la-di-da voice, obviously doomed to defeat in any hard physical confrontation.

Reality shows with serious intentions have a habit of not living up to their billing, but this one sounds like an honest attempt at showing us the realities of prison life.

I had intended to use this post as excuse for dropping in a verse of Housman's A Shropshire Lad - there are two that mention 'Shrewsbury jail'. But Hitchens got there before me and quoted both of them.

Still, I shall not be deterred:

There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,

    Or wakes, as may betide,

A better lad, if things went right,

    Than most that sleep outside.

The Joy of Six 1132

Robert Hutton has been to the National Conservatism Conference: "The country is in a terrible mess, and Rees-Mogg is just trying to find the guys who did this. He denounced the Budget and the failure to scrap EU regulations. He even denounced Voter ID, a policy he shepherded through Parliament, as a failed attempt to rig the vote. It wasn’t clear whether he had always been against it because of the rigging, or simply was now because it hadn’t worked."

"Between 1946 and 1950 ... around 35,000 Ukrainians came to the United Kingdom as part of the European Volunteer Workers scheme. This intended to address labour shortages by providing jobs to displaced people." Historic England provides a history of Ukranians in England.

"A great film and a rare example of one that improves on its written source, it also takes its place in the distinguished line of UK dystopias stretching from The War of the Worlds to Day of the Triffids to The Drowned World." Simon Matthews watches Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men.

Isaac Butler says it's long past time to retire the anti-historical search for who 'really' wrote Shakespeare's plays: "Trutherism abuses the liberal public sphere by using the values of liberal discourse - rational hearing of evidence, open-mindedness, fair-minded skepticism about one’s own certainties, etc. - against it. Once the opposition tires of this treatment and refuses to engage in debate any longer, the truther can then declare victory, and paint the opposition as religious fanatics who are closed-minded and scared of facing the truth."

Lisa R. Marshall takes to the wild green hills of Worcestershire with Jonathan Meades and A.E. Housman.

There's been controversy about Sussex giving the Australian captain Steve Smith a short-term contract before this summer's Ashes series. Ben Gardner asks if the decision is hurting Sussex as well as England.

Shrewsbury Prison from above, 1927

As well as the town's prison, this also shows the Severn and Shrewsbury railway station.

The poet Housman adds:

There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, if things went right,
Than most that sleep outside.

So farewell then Ironbridge power station cooling towers

Travelling to Shropshire by road, if you leave the M54 at one junction you join a road that dips sharply so that the hills rise above you.

Just as you are trying to remember some quotations from Housman, you round a bend and see the cooling towers of Ironbridge power station.

Not any more you don't: they were demolished today.

As a 20th-century boy, I still have a regard for industry on the heroic scale. I also admire the way red pigment was added to the concrete so the towers matched the local soil

Lead mines and poetry: A podcast on W.H. Auden

A.E. Housman is not the only poet honoured with a London Review of Books podcast.

Among the others is one on another of my favourite poets, W.H. Auden. It takes a little while to get going, but it is very good when it does.

Like me, Auden had a fondness for ruined lead mines. The photograph above shows the Tankerville Mine in Shropshire, but Auden's favourites were those of the Northern Pennines.

A podcast on A.E. Housman

Clun: Very quiet

With it being National Poetry Day, it is opportune that the London Review of Books has just posted a new podcast:

In the latest instalment of their regular series, in which they consider major poets of the 20th century – or in this case the long 20th century – through a lens of the pieces written about them in the LRB archive, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to Worcestershire lad and old-type natural fouled-up guy, A.E. Housman.

Gerald Finzi: Fear No More the Heat of the Sun

Time for some English art song, alebit with a Welsh singer, and a title appropriate for this heatwave.

Fear No More the Heat of the Sun comes from Shakespeare's Cymbeline and, like a lot of good poems, is about death.

The couplet:

Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Encapsulates the whole of Housman's verse centuries before he was born.

I sometimes suspect Bryn Terfel of overacting in this sort of work, but his voice is simply magnificent.

The River Severn through Shrewsbury

Much of the Severn through Shrewsbury is surprisingly rural. Meanwhile, the large institutional building of Shrewsbury School looks like the former foundling hospital and workhouse that it is.

Me? I finished Peter Parker's Housman Country in a pub by the river and then caught the train home.

The Ghost of Jimi Hendrix at Stokesay Castle

Jimi Hendrix, aged only 27, died on this day in 1970.

Eighteen years later John James published a slim pamphlet of poems with the irresistible title The Ghost of Jimi Hendrix at Stokesay Castle.

Irresistible to me at least. I bought his Collected Poems just to get hold of the poems that pamphlet contained:

you can't believe everything you see & hear can you
the old heroes of desire sleeping where Handel slept
it's a long way from the surf
& the sign for victory equals peace
the River Onny & its mood of total calm 

when you're dead you're made for life

James may be the first poet since A,E. Housman to mention the River Onny. Unlike Housman, he spells it correctly.

Lizard that leapt out of Christmas dinner is now prized pet for Knighton boy

Well done to the County Times for winning our Headline of the Day Award.

The poet A.E. Housman adds:

And lads knew lizards at Knighton
When I was a Knighton lad.

The Springs of Rivers project on the Teme

At this point on its journey to the sea, the Teme changed its character and appearance. The Lone Piners had many times seen it splashing over the weir at Ludlow and sparkling in the sunshine as it ran under the battlements of that ancient town. Nearer to its source, and before it reached the gorge, it meandered through pleasant water meadows, and even when there was very little water in its shallow bed it ran fast. 

But here it changed. Now it was sullen and deep in the limestone gorge where it had been cutting through the soft rock for hundreds of years, and the Lone Piners, standing on the bank, wondered what it would look like when the rain on the Welsh border brought the storm waters rushing downstream, tearing at the banks and roaring into the gorge. 

Malcolm Saville The Secret of the Gorge (1958)

Good news from Shropshire courtesy of the Heritage Lottery Fund:

The beauty of the River Teme was immortalised in A.E. Housman’s collection of poems A Shropshire Lad, but in the 118 years since it was published the river has suffered a drastic change. 

Despite its high conservation status, species such as salmon and eel are in serious decline, and wildflower meadows and woodlands that once characterised the river valley are being lost. 

The Springs of Rivers project, which will be managed by SRT, aims to reconnect and improve more than 200km of river through a number of linked initiatives. These will include practical conservation; a range of community events; improving access to the river; and creating volunteering opportunities and apprenticeships. 

A new visitor centre will form a hub for the community across the river. An educational programme is also planned that will aim to work with schools and their local rivers and streams across the region.

The name of the project comes from this Housman verse:

In valleys of springs of rivers,
By Ony and Teme and Clun,
The country for easy livers,
The quietest under the sun,

My photo shows the Teme just over the Herefordshire border in Leintwardine. The Downton Gorge, which inspired Malcolm Saville, lies between there and Ludlow.

The Teme, despite what the great man wrote, does not reach the sea. It flows into the Severn south of Worcester.

Thanks to the excellent @andybodders on Twitter for the lead.

Clunton not so quiet after all

A.E. Housman once wrote:

Clunton and Clunbury,
Clungunford and Clun,
Are the quietest places
Under the sun.

But he clearly hadn't seen this video from the Shropshire Star.

Jonathan Meades has a new LP out next week

The Test Centre explains:

Pedigree Mongrel is an album by Jonathan Meades composed of specially-recorded readings from his books Pompey, Museum Without Walls and An Encyclopaedia of Myself. 

Combined with the distinctive soundscapes of Mordant Music, it is both a unique retrospective of Meades’ fictional and essayistic writings, and a new and significant standalone work.

You can read more about the project in an interview the great man gave to The White Review:

"Even though he lived well into the period of sound recording, one of the great regrets is that there’s nothing by A. E. Housman. Housman reading Shropshire Lad would have been wonderfully interesting. I find Housman absolutely fascinating, and writers reading their own stuff provided the writer isn't T. S. bloody Eliot…"

Jonathan Meades on how writers invent places not describe them

Jonathan Meades reviews Nairn's London for the Literary Review and in the course of doing so says something profound about topographical writing:

Do not feel tempted to go and see for yourself. He did his work at a desk, not when he was shuffling about, all eyes and raw antennae, in his slept-in suit. The description - a distillation of a specific perception - is invariably superior to the place which it evokes, which it invents. 

The compact is, or ought to be, between writer and reader, not between place and tourist. Only if we suffer a profoundly defective misunderstanding of places as subject or as catalysts of mood or as topographical correlatives do we hurry to the Teme Valley when we read Housman or to the Marshwood Vale when we read Household.

My own Shropshire is made up from scraps of Malcolm Saville and other writers, my own visits over 25 years, friendships and much else.

And I once heard one of Saville's sons way that when he wrote Seven White Gates, in some ways the most Shropshire of all his books, he had not visited the Stiperstones. He took all that books remarkable atmosphere from Mary Webb.

So, though I have dragged a surprising number of people up from Snailbeach to see Lords Hill Chapel, you cannot visit my Shropshire.

It is true that I photograph it for you, but the ones I use here are carefully selected. The one above shows the old engine house at White Grit with the unmistakable crest of Bromlow Callow behind it.

George Butterworth: The lads in their hundreds

A.E. Housman published his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad in 1896 at his own expense after it was turned down by several publishers.

As Wikipedia says:

At first the book sold slowly, but during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Housman's nostalgic depiction of rural life and young men's early deaths struck a chord with English readers and the book became a best-seller.

Reading them today, you get an eerie feeling that Housman foresaw the First World War.

And the modern reader, you suspect, is more likely to detect the homoerotic undertones than were Housman's contemporaries.

The poems were set by many 20th-century British composers, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, but those by George Butterworth are my favourites.

Ashley Hutchings All Stars: My Bonny Boy

To celebrate my latest visit to Shropshire I looked for something from The Polly Bolton Band's Loveliest of Trees, but none of those Housman settings is to be be found on Youtube.

So instead, here is Polly Bolton singing with the Ashley Hutchings All Stars on their 1988 album As You Like It.

This song is known under several titles, with "The Trees They Grow So High" being perhaps the best known. Another of them is "The Bonny Boy" and that may be what the song should be called here, as "My Bonny Boy" is the title of another song entirely.

Anyway, I have blogged before about my admiration for Polly Bolton.

How Jonathan Meades' uncle trashed Burton-on-Trent

Jonathan Meades has talked about his tweedy, Housman- and Elgar-loving bachelor uncles before, but in his new book An Encyclopaeida of Myself he is particularly damning about one of them who became town clerk of Burton-on-Trent.

Speaking of his uncle's "parodic monologues", Meades says:

City dwellers were targets; townies were targets (he excluded himself); towns themselves were targets, especially towns that had been built after the advent of canals and railways and which were not thus reliant on local materials for their buildings, e.g., Burton-on-Trent. 

Under his stewardship Burton destroyed itself. The mega-brewers, whom Uncle Hank sucked up to and who plied him with cases of limited-edition beers each Christmas, were men whose all too English mores he admired. They were given carte blance to demolish the great brick warehouses that defined Burton, the brewery of the Empire. The oast houses, the maltings, the cooperages  they all went. 

They were expendable (and Victorian). Cities are temporary things. Only the country, the specially sanctioned parts of the country, are eternal.

His uncle's views are reminiscent of a host of writers from the early decades of the 20th century. Perhaps we should blame them for the spoliation of our townscapes and cityscapes that was to come?