The Joy of Six 1580

"Later he announced that the party are now in favour of cutting fuel duty by 10p, a policy that has not been agreed by conference and one that flies in the face of our commitment to tackling climate change. The Deputy Leader, Daisy Cooper also launched a new economic policy in her speech, which, once I had got hold of it, appears to be largely sensible, however, that too has not been approved by conference and it also talks about tax cuts." Peter Black reports from the Liberal Democrats' autumn conference in Brighton.

George Monbiot asks why lawbreaking on our roads isn't just visible, but designed to be seen.

"It had been intended that Lloyd George would go with Lord Kitchener to Russia in order to 'see in what way the Ministry of Munitions could best help' to remedy Russia's shortages. Had he done so, then he would have been aboard the armoured cruiser Hampshire, which on 5 June 1916 struck a recently-laid mine off the Orkney Islands. The weather was foul, and she went down in twenty minutes, taking 749 men with her." Charles Stephenson writes on Ireland, Churchill and Lloyd George.

"For more than seventy years after the war ended, the town elected only left-wing mayors. And yet, ever since 1957, when Rachele reclaimed her husband’s corpse, Predappio has relied on Mussolini for its living." Dani Garavelli visits the village where the Italian fascist dictator was born.

"I wanted to understand why so many people read her, and why they stopped. But I also knew that her life story was like a bonkers telenovela – with suicides, plane-crashes, wartime heroism and royal intrigue – and that during her lifetime she had presented it in a carefully curated way, which could now be interrogated." Matthew Sweet is interviewed about his biography of Barbara Cartland – and an ill-advised attempt to watch 700 episodes of Crossroads.

Rebecca Hutcheon discusses why the places we love in books – the Brontës’ Haworth, Jane Austen’s Bath, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex – can never quite be found in real life. 

After reading this column you will never think of Barbara Cartland in the same way again

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Another of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Barbara Cartland has her own label on this column, and I think all this material had appeared on Liberal England before, but I suspect it is not common knowledge among radical mental health professionals.

Barbara Cartland as a political activist

The writer Damian Le Bas once interviewed a man whose mother, a Conservative county councillor, had fought for travelling families to have somewhere to live and for their children to be educated. 

"People offer all sorts of reasons why they don’t want a Gypsy site near them,” said Le Bas. "You’ve referred to it as old-fashioned racism, and your mother compared it with the situation in the South of the United States of America."

The man replied: “It was definitely prejudice. It was really, really nasty. My mother had a lot of hate mail and people were rude to her, but she persevered. She was not one to be deterred, my mother, in any way. She stuck to her guns."

Her name? Barbara Cartland.

When I told someone who I was writing this column about, they dredged up Clive James’s description of her on television in old age:

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

But then if Barbara Cartland is remembered at all today, it is for this late eccentricity of appearance. 

Matthew Sweet, who is writing her biography, has observed that, though you would expect her romantic novels, of which there were hundreds, dictated from a chaise-longue to relays of secretaries, to be a staple of charity shops, but they have not lasted. Not lasted physically, that is: they were cheaply produced and fell apart in the hands of a vigorous reader.

So, though Barbaraville Camp, a permanent site for Gypsies on the outskirts of Hatfield named in her honour, is still open, we have to look further back to pay Barbara Cartland her due.

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The hero of The Glamour Boys, Chris Bryant’s study of the group of gay – if that’s not an anachronism – MPs who opposed appeasement in the run up to World War II, was meant to be Major Ronald Cartland, who died at Dunkirk aged 33. But doesn’t his sister keep breaking into the story?

Their father’s death had left Barbara and her two brothers in straitened circumstances, but they weren’t for long once she started writing. First there was a racy High Society novel with a fair amount of sexual innuendo, Jig-saw (1923), then a column for the Daily Express and risqué plays, one of which was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain.

Bryant writes:

Barbara was no prude. She wrote wry and naughty copy for Bystander under the pseudonyms Miss Hamilton or Caviare, she turned out gossipy pieces for Tatler as Miss Scott and passed on titbits of society news as Miss Tudor in the Daily Mail. The copy she filed was invariably bubbly and enthusiastic, with no hint of the prim coyness that was so common at the time. Her advice to young women in her book of modern morals, Touch the Stars: A clue to happiness, was remarkable: 

Remember that you are not a miserable sinner… nor were you born in original sin; the sex instinct is one of the most beautiful things in the world. It is sent to inspire us, and help us understand Nature and the workings of the Divine. It is the nearest approach we get to the beauty, the intensity and the power of Life.

And in between all this writing, she found time to be the darling of the fast set at Brooklands motor racing circuit and a pioneer of gliding.

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What first made me take Barbara Cartland seriously were her wartime memoirs, The Years of Opportunity, as they showed her to be a notably sensible voice in welfare work.

She defended servicewomen, saying the remarkable thing was how few unwanted babies there had been, given wartime conditions. And when women did become pregnant:

It was nearly always a case of being brought up in ignorance, of being given a new and exciting freedom in the Services, and often of being “stood a drink” for the first time in their lives! Many of them didn't know what was wrong with them, and when the Medical Officer told them they were going to have a baby they were stunned and astonished.

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Not that the men were much better informed:

I know one RAF padre who had a straight talk with every man on his station who came to him wanting to get married or in domestic trouble. He said the abysmal ignorance of the average man about women and love was appalling.

She also wrote with understanding and compassion about the needs of children, particularly those in public care. In 1945, the death of Dennis O’Neill, a 12-year-old foster child, on a farm in Shropshire had scandalised the nation:

How many Dennis O’Neills who don’t actually die are living a life of cruelty and torture, of privation and utter hopeless misery? How many little boys and girls are existing in filth and degradation in Public Institutions without any knowledge that there is love and kindness in a world which to them is only harsh and horrible?

She remembered a little boy who had come from a public institution to live in the cottage next to hers:

He was three years old, but he had never seen a toy of any sort, and when my boys gave him some of theirs, he didn’t know what to do with them. 

One of those boys was Ian McCorquodale, who was interviewed by Damian Le Bas.

And Cartland writes of her friend Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who deserves a column of her own: 

As chairman of the Nursing School Association she visited homes and institutions and what she found was appalling.

It wasn’t all words either. In this volume of memoirs Cartland describes bursting into a stranger's hotel room to stop a little girl being beaten.

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The moral of this story is that someone who ends their days on television in a pink chiffon ballgown and caked with make-up – as I fully intend to do – can still be worthy of your respect.

A post for Lion & Unicorn: No Room at the Inn (1948) and the death of Dennis O'Neill

I've written a post for Lion & Unicorn about the 1948 film No Room at the Inn, which starred this blog's hero Freda Jackson. The poet Dylan Thomas was partly responsible for the screenplay.

No Room at the Inn was based on a 1945 play of the same name by Joan Temple. Like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, that play was inspired by the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire.

And Dennis O'Neill died 80 years ago today.

Read the post on Lion & Unicorn.

Barbara Cartland on the needs of children

It's time for a final post on Barbara Cartland the social critic and reformer. We have seen her views on women in wartime and seen her helping Gypsies and travellers, so let's see more or her views on children.

Here expression of horror at the death of Dennis O'Neill is followed in The Years of Opportunity 1939-1945 is followed by wider foreboding about the lives of children in public care:

How many Dennis O’Neills who don’t actually die are living a life of cruelty and torture, of privation and utter hopeless misery? How many little boys and girls are existing in filth and degradation in Public Institutions without any knowledge that there is love and kindness in a world which to them is only harsh and horrible?

I remember a little boy who came from a public institution to live in the cottage next ours at Great Barford. He was three years old, but he had never seen a toy of any sort, and when my boys gave him some of theirs he didn’t know what to do with them.

Lady Allen of Hurtwood was one of the first people to champion the cause of ‘nobody’s children’. She was laughed at when she first stated that she thought something was wrong. As chairman of the Nursing School Association she visited homes and institutions and what she found was appalling.

I have written about Marjory Allen and her agitation on behalf of children in care during the second world war before - 20 years later she was prominent in the adventure playground movement.

Respectable society tends to treat children in care as though they were dangerous or criminal, so it's striking when Cartland writes:

No child can thrive without love, attention and understanding. Crime records show that the majority of child delinquents come from homes and institutions. Can one be surprised? 

There are in the country at the moment 125,000 children deprived of a normal home life, and 60,000 illegitimate babies are born every year. These forgotten, unwanted, ill-treated, unloved children are another of Britain’s ‘distressed areas’ for which she must - and immediately - make reparation.

And Cartland shares the indulgent view of boyish mischief that you sometimes find in female Tory writers - think Angela Thirkell or Richmal Crompton. Here she says:

In the past there have been too many old magistrates ready to send a high-spirited boy who tried commando tactics on an apple tree to an approved school. Laws and controls have never made good citizens, and they never will - it is love and understanding, justice and freedom, which build a nation of strong and honourable men.

Nor is she all theory: in The Years of Opportunity she described herself bursting into a stranger's hotel room to stop a little girl being beaten.

There is much too on the problems caused to children by their mother's remarrying after the death of their husband and by her absence from home because of war work, but modern liberals tend to dismiss the possibility of such problems.

So there you have Barbara Cartland. Her wartime memoirs have shown me you should be wary of judging someone from their media image late in life.

Dame Barbara Cartland was a friend to the Gypsies

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Time for another post about Barbara Cartland, the liberal Conservative and social reformer.

Four years ago the BBC screened a documentary by Damian Le Bas about the experience of Romany Gypsies in its series A Very British History. (There's a page for the programme on iPlayer, but you can't view it at present.)

The Welwyn Hatfield Times published an article about it at the time, and Dame Barbara featured prominently:

Going into the 1960s, the travelling way of life was still there but by the end more and more gypsies were becoming 'settled'. 

Large numbers were forced to abandon their nomadic lifestyles for a more settled existence - a painful transition for many. 

Focusing on the Home Counties, Damian draws on his own Romany family background, and a rich film archive, to show how Romany Gypsy people faced becoming outlaws in their own land.

New legislation led to tighter planning laws and a further erosion of traditional stopping places, but some councils did provide a handful of official caravan sites.

Barbara Cartland, who was a county councillor at the time, led the fight to secure a permanent site for Gypsies on the outskirts of Hatfield. That fight was won after a public inquiry and the site became known as Barbaraville Camp in her honour. 

In the programme, Damian Le Bas spoke with Ian McCorquodale, one of Cartland's sons:

Damian says to Mr McCorquodale: "People offer all sort of reasons why they don’t want a gypsy site near them.

"You’ve referred to it as old-fashioned racism, and your mother compared it with the situation in the south of the United States of America."

Mr McCorquodale replies: "It was definitely prejudice. It was really, really nasty."

He adds: "My mother had a lot of hate mail and people were rude to her, but she persevered.

"She was not one to be deterred my mother in any way. She stuck to her guns."

Breakthrough legislation in 1968 finally compelled councils to provide permanent sites that gave hope to many - but at the cost of losing a freedom, which was closely tied to their identity.

Now freedom to roam is even more tightly controlled and councils do not overexert themselves to provide sites.

It makes you nostalgic for the variety of Conservatism espoused by Barbara Cartland, who was also a champion of education for Gypsy children.

Barbara Cartland on women (and men) during the war

First some exciting news: I've just realised that my copy of The Years of Opportunity 1939-1945 is signed by the author.

But I promised you some of the surprising  wisdom of Barbara Cartland on women, children and the war years.

The creator of hundreds of virgin heroines was no naïf herself. She writes of young women who were serving in the forces:

Pregnancies were always a problem. But I want to say this and to say it after six years’ experience of Welfare work: there has been a lot of nonsense talked about the immorality of Service women and the number of illegitimate children born to them. I think it was absolutely amazing how few unwanted babies there were – only an infinitesimal percentage of the women serving.

After all, if you put men and women together in close proximity in a danger shared, mutual attraction … is what we should expect.

And when women did become pregnant:

It was nearly always a case of being brought up in ignorance, of being given a new and exciting freedom in the Services, and often of being 'stood a drink' for the first time in their lives! Many of them didn't know what was wrong with them, and when the M.O. told them they were going to have a baby they were stunned and astonished.

Not that the men were much better informed:

I know one R.A.F. padre who had a straight talk with every man on his Station who came to him wanting to get married or in domestic trouble. He said the abysmal ignorance of the average man about women and love was appalling.

And here is Cartland on civilian women who became pregnant:

Those who never have been tempted and had the opportunity to find out what their reactions would be have always the most to say; but, I repeat, I was often sorry for the ‘bad’ women. They were young, their husbands were not fluent letter-writers – they started by not meaning any harm, just desiring a little change from the monotony of looking after their children, queueing for food and cleaning the house with no man to appreciate them or their cooking.

Another man would come along – perhaps an American or an R.A.F. pilot. Girls were very scarce in some parts of the country and who should blame a man who is cooped up to camp all day or risking his life over Germany for smiling at a pretty girl when’s he’s off duty? He is lonely, she is lonely, he smiles at her, she smiles back, and it’s an introduction. It is bad luck that she is married, but he means no harm nor does it cross her mind at first that she could ever be unfaithful to Bill overseas.

I am reminded of the comment of an older woman my mother used to work with at the doctors' surgery: “If only we’d had the pill during the war.”

Enough Barbara for tonight. More wit and wisdom from her another time.

Barbara Cartland on the impact of the death of Dennis O'Neill

I have in front of me an extraordinary book - The Years of Opportunity: 1939 -1945 by Barbara Cartland.

To someone who remembers Cartland only as a figure of fun, it's a revelation. Informed by Cartland's wartime voluntary service, it's full of interesting observations on the role of women and the needs of children.

Perhaps Cartland's liberal Conservatism should not be such a surprise. One of her brothers was the Conservative MP Ronald Cartland. (Like her other brother, he died in France in 1940.)

Barbara Cartland was to become a councillor in Bedfordshire and was notable for her support of Romany and travelling people.

Ronald Cartland was an opponent of Appeasement and pressed for the government to do more to tackle poverty. I've not read the book, but he is one of the gay MPs celebrated in Chris Bryant's The Glamour Boys.

One day I will put together a post of Barbara Cartland's observations from The Years of Opportunity. But here are three points on wartime concern about the treatment of children from a reading of the book.

First, Cartland bears out what historians say about the impact of the evacuation of children to the countryside. Because many wealthy people had children billeted on them, they encountered the effects of poverty and poor education for the first time.

Second, she pays tribute to the work of my heroine Marjory Allen - Lady Allen of Hurtwood - to bring the plight of children living in institutions to public attention.

And third, she confirms the extraordinary effect that the death of Dennis O'Neill had on public opinion:

I shall never, in all my life, forget the horror I felt on reading of how that little boy had suffered before he died - his hunger, his terror, his maltreatment haunted me, and like thousands of other women in Great Britain I could not sleep for thinking of him.