Navigating for Change calls for more investment in Fenland rivers

A flotilla of boats will make its way up the Great Ouse from St Ives to Bedford this month to highlight a critical lack of investment in the river and in Britain’s inland waterways generally.

Organised by the Great Ouse Boating Association and Fund Britain’s Waterways, the Navigating for Change campaign cruise will take place from July 13-18, travelling some 25 miles along the Great Ouse.

The flotilla will stop at riverside towns including Huntingdon and St Neots before arriving at the Bedford River Festival on July 17

The cruise is intended to draw attention to the growing funding crisis affecting waterways managed by the Environment Agency, which is responsible for maintaining the River Great Ouse in a safe and navigable condition.

According to the organisers, the Environment Agency has identified an annual funding shortfall of between £6m and £11m across the Anglia region. They say that around 40 of the region’s 60 locks and weirs are approaching the end of their operational lives, with no capital renewal programme in place.

Campaigners argue the consequences are already being felt across the network. Navigation on the River Cam was suspended for more than 18 months during 2024/5 following the structural failure of two lock islands, with repairs estimated to cost £10m. Meanwhile Brandon Lock on the Little Ouse remains closed because of a lack of funding for repairs and channel clearance.

For more information on the flotilla and Navigation for Change, go to Towpath Talk.

The Joy of Six 1528

Tom Williams reports from Southampton: "The demonstration descended into rioting as protesters clashed with police. Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. They marched to Belmont Road, where Nowak was killed. Riot police prevented them reaching Digwa’s family home."

"I had expected to meet a former MP with the usual recollections and political anecdotes. What I encountered instead was something rarer: a political thinker who remained genuinely concerned with ideas, and who was determined to dispel the myths that had accumulated around Liberal history like barnacles on a ship's hull." Andrew Page pays tribute to Michael Meadowcroft.

Matthew Pennell analyses last month's local election results and looks forward to future conquests: "What are the key battlegrounds in England? In 2027 we’ll see if we can build on long term gains in North Yorkshire and East Riding, whether we can retake Bedford and if there’s a chance of completing jigsaw in the far West of England by flipping the status of Herefordshire."

Ellie Davies talks to three Bristol academics about the impact that villages – both literal and metaphorical – have on our health and happiness.

"She wanted to do all that men could do, painting nudes at a time when female art students weren’t allowed to do so. She treated her subjects with seriousness and commitment, but also with enormous sensuous energy and a feel for the pleasures of looking, whether it’s the naked women on Cornish beaches, the garish clowns in her 1930s circus pictures, or even the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force commanders of the 1940s, surrounded by the meticulously rendered paraphernalia of their working lives." Lara Feigel salutes the continuing relevance of Laura Knight.

"There is an unavoidable ethical dimension to all this: though Payne’s deeply-considered and expert work on the sketches was clearly much more than the 'tinkering' Elgar was worried about, we have to acknowledge that the composer’s wish needs to be more-or-less disregarded if we are to perform or listen to the completed work." Jeremy Benson on Elgar's unfinished third symphony.

Book Review... How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler

Peter Pomerantsev

Faber, 2025; £10.99

In September 1941 German civilians began to pick up enticing new radio broadcasts. In the salty language of an army veteran from Berlin, ‘Der Chef’ complained bitterly about food rationing and excoriated leading Nazis as inefficient and sexually corrupt. “It’s a pity we can’t cut our meat from the buttocks of the SS.”

But Der Chef was not a disaffected insider: he was in reality Peter Hans Seckelmann, a German political exile broadcasting from Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire under the control of the British black propagandist Sefton Delmer.  

It is Delmer’s story that Pomerantsev tells – his boyhood in Germany during the First World War; his time as a journalist there during the Thirties when he became close to the Nazi leadership; his difficulties in proving to the British authorities that he was loyal and that his skills should be used.

Though Der Chef was a crude character, he was used in subtle ways. When he complained, for instance, that some German civilians were getting round rationing by buying clothes on the black market, his broadcast was designed to normalise this behaviour, encourage more people to take it up and speed the breakdown of the rationing system.

As the war went on, Delmer invented more characters and radio stations. Father Elmar – a real priest, though Austrian not German as claimed – broadcast religious programmes about the sins of the Nazi regime, emboldening believers with their own doubts about Hitler. And Delmer devised a whole station that combined subtle propaganda with a supply of genuine news about the home front and the welfare of troops that no German station could match. Ian Fleming, for instance, then working in Naval intelligence, fed him the results of the U-boat football league. Another writer, Muriel Spark, was on Delmer’s staff and later drew on this experience for her novel The Hothouse by the East River.

Pomerantsev shares Delmer’s experience of growing up in both liberal and authoritarian cultures. He is the son of political dissidents from Kyiv, was born in Ukraine and grew up in London. Early in this century, he lived in Moscow and worked as a TV producer. He sometimes draws parallels between Putin’s propaganda and that deployed by the Nazis or Delmer. His readers may be left wondering if some of Delmer’s tactics could be adopted by those seeking to counter the far right today.

Jonathan Calder 

Hitchin to Bedford in 1961

Before the Midland Railway built its own London terminus at St Pancras, its trains used this line to reach King's Cross.

Look for the vast airship hangars at Cardington ("the Bedfordshire pyramids" as James Hawes has called them), a crossing on the level with the Oxford to Cambridge line near Bedford and an arrival at an unreconstructed Bedford Midland

The last passenger train on this line ran in December 1961, but goods services lasted until 1964.

Later. You can see what remains of this line today in another video on this blog.