"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
The best-known scene from a British film involving children and bombsites is the climax of Hue and Cry (1947), where the office boys and errand boys of London stream across a ruined cityscape to confront the villains. It feels more Roberto Rosselini than Ealing.
Here, you sense, is the exotic London captured by Rose Macaulay in her novel The World My Wilderness (1950). A city where the bombsites are bright with flowers and lush with vegetation. A city of sudden unaccustomed vistas of Italianate churches. A city where the displaced sleep at night among the ruins.
That was me writing on Lion & Unicorn earlier this year. This video looks at the locations used in the filming Hue and Cry and what remains of them today.
Thanks to Lion and Unicorn for publishing a piece from me on British films about children and bombsites, and on the film Innocent Sinners (1958) in particular:
So dangerous did bombsites become for boy actors that Jon Whiteley ventured on to them twice and got caught up with a murderer both times. In Hunted (1952) he comes across Dirk Bogarde dumping the body of his wife’s lover, while in The Weapon (1956) he finds a gun, accidentally shoots a playmate and, thinking he has killed him, goes on the run. In reality, it’s not the police Whiteley needs to worry about but a villainous George Cole, who used the gun to kill some years before and now fears detection.
"Opportunities to object are limited. Roadblocks and checkpoints have been established at either end of the only lane in and out of the village. Cars are searched with sniffer dogs and ID demanded. All footpaths have been closed off, and unless you live here you stand no chance of getting in. Secret Service agents keep a watchful eye on the hordes of police who are doing their bidding. In short, we’ve been completely sealed off from the outside world." An anonymous contributor to The Oxford Clarion describes life in the Cotswold village of Dean during JD Vance's visit.
Shaun Thompson was wrongly identified as a criminal by new police cameras. He explains why, if this technology is rolled out across the country, or is used at this year’s Notting Hill Carnival, as planned, such injustices will disproportionately affect Black people.
"Climate action does not just need good policy, it also needs good psychology. Understanding and addressing how people perceive climate measures is essential to avoid backlash and build lasting public consent." Wouter Poortinga looks at the psychology of winning public support for climate policies.
"The conference circuit, once lively with questioning and dialogue, now contends with a new problem: the 'ghost academic'. These are scholars whose names appear in conference programmes and proceedings, whose abstracts are listed, yet who never turn up to deliver their presentations. They accrue the CV line, but never share the substance." Anne Tierney and Doug Specht say the obsession with metrics in academia is imperilling the tradition open intellectual exchange that was the hallmark of scholarly life.
JacquiWine on Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness. Here is Macaulay's description of a London bombsite: "They climbed out through the window, and made their way about the ruined, jungled waste, walking along broken lines of wall, diving into the cellars and caves of the underground city, where opulent merchants had once stored their wine, where gaily tiled rooms opened into one another and burrowed under great eaves of overhanging earth, where fosses and ditches ran, bright with marigolds and choked with thistles, through one-time halls of commerce, and yellow ragwort waved its gaudy banners over the ruins of defeated businessmen."
Patrick Glen looks back to the Isle of Wight Festival of 1970: "The lineup included the Who, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Sly and the Family Stone and Gilberto Gil; Jimi Hendrix played one of his last performances before his death."
One of the best things about subscribing to the London Review of Books is that it grants you access to the magazine's archives. So it was that I was reading a book review by Jonathan Meades from 2018.
I've not read the book he is discussing – The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain by Lynda Nead – a lot of caveats apply to this post. And I'm pleased to see it has a photograph of St Saviour's Road, Leicester, on its dust wrapper. It's the same photo you see above.
Meades writes:
In The Tiger in the Smoke, fog and smog are ubiquitous. They are past and present, a continuum from the High Victorian age to the New Elizabethan age, which was also, according to Nead, the first neo-Victorian age. They possess a palette that is specific to them.... The 'characteristic colour' she assigns to the period – 1945-60 – is a foggy sort of greyish brown.
He questions whether this is an adequate account of Victorian Britain, suspecting that Nead has been too influenced by Dickens and his fog, when in reality:
He lived in an age of polychromatic brickwork, dazzlingly bright inflammable crinolines, gilded smoking rooms, saturated ottomans, luminous painting, garish advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s 'rank growth'.
And I am going to question the book's account of the post-war era, at least as it is seen in this snippet on audience reaction to David Lean's Great Expectations that Meades quotes:
'What,' she wonders, 'did this fabulous cinematography mean to postwar audiences and how did it relate to the greyscale aesthetics of the fog and the bombsites?'
But bombsites weren't grey. Here's J.K. Adams writing the Guardian's Country Diary for 1 September 1948:
A gentle breeze was blowing as I walked through the badly bombed Cripplegate area of London the other day, and the feathery seeds of the rosebay willowherb were drifting before it like snowflakes. In the basements of what seven or eight years ago were shops, warehouses, and dwellings a waist-high tangle of willowherb, spear-plume thistle, and Oxford ragwort bore witness to the thoroughness with which nature reclaims the land as soon as man’s back is turned. More than that, here and there were birches and elders and various sorts of willow that had grown to a height that fully entitled them to be called trees.
It may have been a far cry to the complete return to nature envisaged by Richard Jefferies in After London, but the germ of that great reversion, one felt, was there. Even the birds have begun to return to this as to other parts of London that have gone wild. Within the past two years a linnet and both pied and grey wagtails have been seen there, and at migration time in 1946 three birds on passage looked in – a whitethroat, a wheatear, and a whinchat. Even more remarkable was the visit paid by a little owl during the autumn of that year.
Or to make it sound more exotic, here is Lucy Scholes writing about Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness:
Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."
I suspect London bombsites became less exotic as they were gradually cleared for redevelopment, but I still think of them as a home to lush vegetation and providing unexpected new vistas of Italianate churches.
Let's finish by going back to Victorian polychromatic brickwork. Here's something else I've found recently - a charity-shop copy of Nairn's London. In it, Ian Nairn writes of All Saints, Margaret Street:
To describe a church as an orgasm is bound to offend someone; yet this building can only be understood in terms of compelling, overwhelming passion.
I'm not sure that it advances my argument, but I really want to quote it.
I'm reading An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden - it's for a thing - and have come across another early celebration of multiracial London. The previous one, by Marjorie Allingham, dated from 1965: this one from Rumer Godden dates from 1956:
The ugly accents of the Street children were unmistakably English, but the older people could have belonged anywhere; a great many had come from somewhere else, all tongues were spoken in Catford Street, faces were all colours, but even the people who had been born there and lived and died in it were like any people anywhere.
It was all perfectly ordinary; seen from above, from the back windows high up in some of the Square houses, No 11 for instance, from the old schoolroom at the top of the house, Catford Street. with Motcombe Terrace and Garden Row - which had no gardens - running to left and right of it, made the shape of a big cross.
The observer is Olivia, the most sympathetic of the novel's adult characters, but even her worldly younger sister Angela is worried by the social class of the Catford Street children who sometimes spill into the more genteel Mortimer Square, not their race.
And note that Godden doesn't see the assimilation of people from other cultures into English society as a problem. Instead, she wonders at how quickly it takes place.
An Episode of Sparrows is the book on which perhaps the most interesting of my children-and-bombsites films, Innocent Sinners, is based.
Reader's voice: Have you left in that last bit of the quotation because it contains a whopping great Christian symbol?
An impressed Liberal England replies: Not much gets past you, does it?
So said Jack Kerouac in his Lonesome Traveler. We join John Rogers as he retraces a walk the Beat Generation novelist once took through London.
As the blurb on YouTube says:
American Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac, visited London in April 1957 while on a big trip just before the publication of his most celebrated book, On the Road. He recorded his trip in his book, Lonesome Traveler.
This video follows the walk he took when he arrived by train at Victoria Station and walked past Buckingham Palace, up the Strand to Fleet Street to St Paul’s Cathedral. He then went to the King Lud pub for a ‘sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout’, before taking the bus back to Buckingham Gate.
In Lonesome Traveler Kerouac wrote, ‘Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub’.
I've been reminded of another children-and-bombsites film to fit into my schema of these postwar British productions. And it suggests that by 1954 these unofficial open spaces were just as dangerous to adults as they were to children.
Talking Pictures TV showed The Eight O'Clock Walk the other day. This was a film born out of concern at the death penalty and reliance upon circumstantial evidence.
As you can see in the clip above, Richard Attenborough has an April Fool trick played on him by a little girl who says she's lost her doll on a bombsite. Being in a happy mood, he tries to help her.
Later, she is found murdered on the same bombsite, And when that woman reports seeing Attenborough shaking his fist and chasing the girl, the police become very interested in him.
The original children-and-bombsites film was Ealing's Hue and Cry from 1947, which portrays the bombsites as an unofficial playground for all the boys of London - and the children shown are all boys, except for Joan Dowling.
But within a few years, British films; view of bombsites had changed completely - terrible things happened to small boys who wandered on to them.
The only substantial exception to this pattern I've found is Innocent Sinners from 1958. This film suggested that bombsites provided working-class children with the space and privacy they lacked in their overcrowded homes. It is also the only children-and-bombsites film with a girl at its centre.
What was so threatening about bombsites? The way Rose Macaulay painted them may give us a clue:
This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."
It’s here among the "dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Maya temples, hiding them from prying eyes," that Barbary finds what Macaulay, in a letter about her novel to her friend Hamilton Johnson, calls the girl’s "spiritual home." These "broken alleys and caves of that wrecked waste" offer the traumatized, homesick Barbary a safe haven.
The Eight O'clock Walk is not on Talking Pictures catch-up service TPTV Encore, but you can find it on one of those dodgy Russian sites.
And - don't worry - Attenborough escapes the noose, but it takes an absurd, Perry Mason courtroom coup to save him.
These pieces of originally silent film appear to have been either outtakes, film made for atmosphere or just as a recce of the area.
They were made for two British feature films made in the 1950s.
Most of the clips are connected to the film Hunted which starred Dirk Bogarde, and was released in 1952.
Some are connected with the later film Innocent Sinners starring Flora Robson and David Kossoff, and released in 1958.
Both these films use extensive outside shots in and around the Pimlico area, and for lovers of this unique "village" in the heart of London, they are well worth looking out for.
Both Hunted and Innocent Sinners are among my children-and-bombsites films. The first two clips here are clearly outtakes from Hunted, because you can see young Jon Whiteley in them.
Incidentally, most of the Pimlico scenes in Passport to Pimlico were shot in Lambeth - some on a set built on a bombsite off the Lambeth Road.
The music hall songs the poster has used as a soundtrack, have reminded me that, when I was young, my mother sometimes sang She Was Poor But She Was Honest.
And she included a verse that I cannot find anywhere online:
See 'im riding on an 'orseback With his friends in Rotten Row, While the victim of his passion Slinks away to Pimlico.
I photographed these stones, which you can find off Judd Street to the south of St Pancras International, on the way to a Liberator drink one evening. I looked up their history when I got home.
The open space they grace is called Bramber Green. Until the second world war, says Ian Visits, it was an area of Georgian houses - you can see a photograph of an ornate house that stood there on London Picture Archive.
Then came the German bombers, after which the area lay derelict until the early 1960s, when it was cleared to create the park we see today.
I can't find the sculptor of these stones - the large one seems designed to encourage children to climb it - or when they date from, but the last major renovation of the site was in 2019.
"Biden should have been managed off the stage in time for the party to have proper primaries, introducing a new generation of Democratic party politicians to the American public. Instead, the president clung on to the point where only Kamala Harris could realistically be the nominee. She was left having to campaign as a “change candidate”, trying to define herself as a new face while also defending her government’s record." Alistair Carmichael says the Democrats made one of the worst political mistakes in modern history.
Robert Saunders discusses the supposed role of the monarchy in times of political crisis: "In a democracy, the monarchy can only survive if it stands outside political contention. Yet that makes it a broken reed when it is the constitution itself that is in crisis. The logic of this situation is not that the monarch should be more politically active, but that we cannot rely on a ceremonial monarchy to protect the constitution from attack."
"If I say something is 'typical Boris Johnson', you have a mental picture. But what is 'typical Keir Starmer'? Worse, what is 'typical Jonathan Reynolds”' (He’s the Business Secretary, but you knew that.)" Robert Hutton on why itanto will take the satirists and sketchwriters time to get to grips with Labour.
Ella Creamer and Lucy Knight report on the glut of children's books written by celebrities and ask if the trend pushes aside genuine writers and makes it harder to find great children’s fiction.
Elizabeth Tingle introduces to Anthony Jenkinson, who was born in Market Harborough: "the records of his travels and his surviving letters comprise the first English descriptions of the lands and peoples of Muscovy and Tartary. With recent historical interest in travel, life writing, and perceptions of ‘other,’ the story of Jenkinson adds a Leicestershire and Rutland dimension to the processes of globalisation and empire that made the modern world."
"Now they’re almost gone, some of us have started to feel nostalgic for those wastelands. They were dangerous, mysterious and wide open. Those that remain, pending development, are invariably locked down tight, with heavy security and surveillance." Ray Newman cpnsiders love and death in the rubblescape.
In my original article on children and bombsites in postwar British films, which really needs to be updated with my later discoveries, I noted how children's command of these spaces was celebrated in the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry, but later films came to see them as freighted with danger.
One reason for this positive early view, I now believe, is the role played by London urchins during the Blitz.
In an article on the History Press site, Ian Parson reveals that many of the children evacuated to places of safety in the countryside soon voted with their feet and came back to London. Just before the Blitz:
evacuees, or to give them their proper title, ‘unattended children’, were returning to Liverpool Street Station at a rate of two and a half thousand every week.
What happened next is remarkable:
The youngsters who only a few months before had been tucked away, in England’s green and pleasant and safe land, were as it turned out, brave way beyond their years, and they had a name. They were the ‘Dead End Kids’ and they were the brain child of 17 year old Patsie Duggan, son of a Poplar bin man.
Soon a gang of scruffy urchins, including Patsie’s 13 year old sister Maureen, and recruits as young as ten, had equipped themselves with an assortment of tools, buckets of sand, rope and axes. Night after night, raid after raid, they were out there. Scouring the area for people in distress, hoping to perform the most daring rescue this time round. With no adults to supervise them, the game very quickly got seriously out of hand.
During the Blitz they were responsible for a series of life saving missions. On one really bad night, as reported in the London Fire Journal, an eye witness describes, ‘They rushed up the stairs, ready it seemed to eat fires!’ The same witness then described them as ‘emerging from the building, some of them with their tatty clothes smouldering.’
They became known as unofficial fire-fighters across the East End. But it was a dangerous game.
During the Blitz children accounted for one in ten deaths, and unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, two of Patsie’s group were killed on duty. Ronnie Ayres and Bert Eden died together on a night when Patsie himself was also badly injured. They were putting out incendiary bombs when without warning three heavy bombs came down the other side of a wall to where they were furiously working away. They died instantly, killed by the falling wall.
This sounds too good to be true - a case of heroes being found at the darkest hour of the war - but there are other sources that tell the same story. One example is Frank Lewey, who had been mayor of Stepney during the Blitz, writing in John Bull magazine (23 October 1943):
We had some bombed-out children billeted at the "People's Palace." One night a cluster of incendiaries fell in the gardens and started to blaze up against some buildings. The resident caretaker, Mr. Crawley, who himself won a reputation as a fire fighter, told me, next morning, how those small boys "went over the wall like a pack of monkeys, and dowsed the bombs as if they were snuffing so many candles." They ought to have been in bed; but their action probably saved the "People's Palace."
The Stepney Scouts deserve a word to themselves. Into one of our shelters a woman came crying, with five tiny children trailing crying after her. Her house had caught fire, and, in the rush to escape, she had left one of her babies behind. Two small Scouts, almost extinguished beneath steel helmets, instantly raced out through shrapnel and bomb-bursts, calmly entered the blazing house, and brought the little girl back. She looked very proud of her escort. And well she may have been! There were over 700 people in the shelter at the time.
No wonder Hue and Cry was a "notable box office attraction" at British cinemas in 1947.
"The UK and EU cannot help but matter to each other. Regardless of the formal terms of the relationship, developments on one side of the Channel do affect what happens on the other." Brexit boredom is one thing, but there’s a real problem when Britain’s leaders won’t even talk about Europe any more, says Simon Usherwood.
Anusha Singh profiles Hina Bokhari, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats in the London Assembly. Hina is the first ethnic minority woman to lead a group at City Hall since its establishment in 2000, and also the first ethnic minority woman to lead a group in any of the UK’s devolved institutions.
"The idea that Labour’s electoral success depends on its ability to win back imagined hordes of socially conservative voters in the distant north and Midlands remains central to the party’s self-image." Alex Niven on the myth of the 'red wall'.
Hannah White argues that whether a government’s majority is enormous or merely substantial the more significant factor for democracy is the attitude a government takes to the role of parliament and the value of scrutiny.
Ben Highmore discusses the postwar adventure playground movement: "What if you gave children and young people their own space? A third space that wasn’t school and wasn’t home. Somewhere not orchestrated by obedience ... . A place where young people might have a great deal of autonomy in how they occupied the space and what they did with their time."
"Bringing psychoanalysis into the conversation explains so much, not only about Mitchell’s 1970s preoccupations, but about the looping, overflowing structure of her songs as the decade progressed. I wasn’t surprised to discover that Mitchell's own experiences with therapy were at best mixed." Ann Powers finds that the preoccupations of Joni Mitchell's work mirror those of American society throughout her career.
Andrew Pulver has ranked all 19 Ealing Comedies for the Guardian. In the process, he notices some films that even I have not seen. But I've seen most of them, so here are a few thoughts on his reviews and rankings.
Following his counting up the list up from 19th and last place, my first comment is that Hue and Cry is ranked far too low at 16th place. The film a celebration of the way boys ruled London and its bombsites - this would never be seen in such a positive light in a British film again - and there are fine performances by Jack Warner and Alastair Sim.
I can't make much of a case for The Magnet, which stars an 11-year-old James Fox, being placed much higher than the 14th place where Pulver has it, but he gets some things about the film wrong. Fox did not go near a drama school until he was 16: the accent he has in the film is that of a prep school boy of the day, and this is just what he is playing here. Parts of The Wirral were very posh in 1950.
Barnacle Bill is at 13. Pulver, quite fairly, says Alec Guinness never gets out of third gear in this film, but then Guinness in third is better than most actors in fifth. When you see his walk at the start of the film you believe absolutely that he is a former Naval officer. The film also sees Ealing take the side of teenagers against the stuffy establishment of the seaside resort where it is set. And where else will you see Guinness boogying with Jackie Collins?
Harry Secombe's star vehicle Davy is too high at 10. As Pulver admits, he isn't much of an actor and the film's approval of his character's surrender of his operatic ambitions for the sake of the family variety act is a bit Ealing-by-numbers.
I'm pleased to see the The Maggie (which is rather like a harder-edged Local Hero) in seventh place, which is one above the more celebrated The Titfield Thunderbolt. For me, the latter film's awareness of its own quirkiness is a sign of the studio's decline. The train must be saved because its quaint, not because it helps anyone get to where they want to go.
From now 6 down to 1, Pulver gets it pretty much right:
6. Passport to Pimlico
5. Whisky Galore!
4. The Man in the White Suit
3. The Lavender Hill Mob
2. The Ladykillers
1. Kind Hearts and Coronets
They are all celebrated films, though maybe The Man in the White Suit deserves to be even better known. Its satire hits the spot more accurately than the Boulting Brothers ever managed, perhaps because it doesn't star Ian Carmichael.
It's also worth noting that Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its period setting, is far from being a typical Ealing film. And Pulver gets it right in saying that Dennis Price is its real star.
This is not a proto version of Royston Vesey, but another film about how soldiers fared after the second world war in which Jack Hawkins plays the Colonel.
But, unlike in The League of Gentlemen, its not Hawkins who has turned to crime at the start of the film but one of his wartime NCOs, played by Michael Medwin. Hawkins comes home from an afternoon of golf to find that Medwin has broken into his house with burglary on his mind.
The rest of the film uncovers what has happened to Medwin to place him on the wrong side of the law.
It's a sad story, but there is humour along the way too. I can't think of a single film with Dora Bryan in the cast that isn't much the better for her presence.
The reason I am writing about The Intruder is that it is another children-and-bombsites film. Medwin comes home from the war to marry Susan Shaw (who turns out to have found another man) and take care of his young brother, who has been living with an aunt and uncle of theirs.
We first see the boy playing with a gang of others on a bomb site, happy and dirty. But when he returns home he is told off for playing with common boys and Medwin has to intervene to save him from a beating. It's clear this has been the uncle's way of dealing with the boy.
The bombsite scene is a short one, but the boys' play there is seen in a wholly positive light, perhaps for the first time since Hue and Cry in 1947. Medwin's uncle, who disapproves of children who play on bombsites, is a prig and a bully.
Thanks to Reelstreets, I know that this scene was filmed on a London E1 bombsite between Pennington Street and St George's in the East. Remarkably, the site remains undeveloped to this day.
The Intruder was on Talking Pictures TV the other night, but does not appear to be on its online catch up service TPTV Encore. It's certainly worth watching if you get the chance.
I wrote a long post on children and bombsites in September 2022, and my major discovery since then has been the 1958 film Innocent Sinners. One day I will rewrite that long post, incorporating my later finds.
Back to the bombsites. Thanks to Talking Pictures TV, who showed this film the other day, I have discovered a sport that was invented on them in the years after the war. It's cycle speedway.
The sport of Motor Cycle Speedway was allegedly introduced to this Country in 1928, and it is from these humble beginnings that the sport of Cycle Speedway emerged, with a form of racing taking place before the second World War. However, it was not until the end of this war that the sport emerged in a controlled and recorded manner, and the "Skid Kids" were truly born.
In 1946 Control Boards and Local Leagues were formed throughout the Country, these being run by interested adults, many of whom had their own sons and daughters in the teams. The tracks themselves were built on cleared bomb sites, where previous devastation and despair were replaced by the sounds of enjoyment and laughter. Bricks and timber from the bombed houses were used to mark the inner and outer perimeter of the tracks, whilst mother's knicker elastic was used as the starting tape, this being pulled across the start line to the outside of the track, so as not to give the inner gates that extra advantage.
Once the sport got on it's feet, a number of go-ahead Councils began to donate corners of recreation grounds on which tracks could be built, some even financing this venture, from the building of the track, to the supply of all the equipment required.
One of the early Cycle Speedway Control Boards was that of London, and when the National Association of Boys Clubs joined forces, their numbers topped the three thousand mark.
A very early magazine for the sport was called "Cycle Speedway Monthly", which covered the whole Country, and sold well over 4,000 copies per edition.
In 1950 a national association was established for the sport, and by 1958 there was a British Cycle Speedway Federation. The two bodies proved to be rivals until they merged to form the Cycle Speedway Council in 1971.
I can't recall coming across the sport before, but the British Cycling site assures us that:
Cycle speedway is accessible, affordable, family-oriented and taking place in clubs throughout the country.
Here are some notes on 10 British films that are not as well known as I think they ought to be. It's not a top 10 - they are in chronological order - and I'm sure there are plenty more, particularly from recent years decades, that could fairly be included in such a list.
With those caveats entered, let's go.
No Room at the Inn (1948)
Inspired by the death in Shropshire of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, the same scandal that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap, this had already been a huge success as a stage play. The star of the play was Freda Jackson as the voracious Mrs Voray, who took in war orphans for the money and abused and corrupted them. So hated was she by audiences, the story goes, that she needed a police guard.
Jackson repeats the role in the film, and her skill at playing monsters was so great that she became rather stuck with them later in her career. Before No Room at the Inn, she had played Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V and Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations.
The tragic Joan Dowling, who was to take her own life at the age of 26, is notable among the children. A word too for Dora Bryan who, in her first film appearance, steals both Freda Jackson's date and the scene.
This dark film ticks so many of this blog's boxes that it has its own label.
Gone to Earth (1950)
The Shropshire hills filmed in Technicolor by Powell and Pressburger? There's no way I was going to dislike this one. Gone to Earth was a novel by Mary Webb, who had the misfortune to be deeply obscure in her lifetime and become hugely popular soon after her death. In the 1930s you would see coaches in these hills with 'Mary Webb Country' on the front.
Gone to Earth is melodrama whose plot has similarities with Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Jennifer Jones brings Hollywood glamour to the role of the tragic heroine and makes a brave attempt at a Shropshire accent, while David Farrar makes a splendid wicked squire. Look out for George Cole in his first adult role.
The 'Maggie' (1954)
The greatest Ealing comedies are still widely known, but there are some that have been all but forgotten. The Maggie is the best of this second group, and in its dramatisation of an encounter between wily Scots and American big business it looks forward to Bill Forsyth's Local Hero.
An American millionaire makes the mistake of hiring a decrepit Clyde puffer to carry furniture to his holiday home in the Hebrides. He ends less happily than Burt Lancaster in Local Hero.
Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)
The disorganised Yvonne Mitchell considers herself happily married to Anthony Quayle, but discovers that he is having an affair with the stylish Sylvia Syms.
Because this is a British film from the Fifties, the family has to defeat all threats to it. But the scene in Mitchell tries to change her image to compete with Syms, only to find that everything goes wrong, is horribly painful to watch.
Innocent Sinners (1958)
Ignore the title, which makes it sound like a particularly tacky porn film, this is the most interesting of the children and bombsites films I have yet found. Unlike the others, it has a girl at its centre, and the enemies the children encounter are not the murderers they encounter in those other films but snobbish residents and unsympathetic officialdom.
Here, bombsites are not a place of danger but somewhere working-class children can express themselves and find the privacy they lack in their overcrowded homes.
Tunes of Glory (1960)
Alec Guinness playing a red-haired Scottish officer who has been promoted from the ranks in wartime may sound ridiculous, but he is wholly believable here. Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.
The film is about the lethal clash between Guinness and John Mills, who plays the upper-class officer who is appointed over his head now that the war is over. Both are flawed but appealing characters, and their tragic battle takes place in front a remarkable supporting cast: Susannah York, Gordon Jackson Dennis Price, Duncan MacRae, Allan Cuthbertson.
You'll recognised the last-named from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.
West 11 (1963)
Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.
Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?
Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.
Our Mother's House (1967)
A fatherless family of children hide the death of their mother from the authorities by burying her in the garden because they fear being sent to an orphanage.
Among the children are Pamela Franklin, Mark Lester, Phoebe Nicholls (immediately recognisable as Cordelia in the famous television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited) and Louis Sheldon Williams, whose mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the Sixties, as I did for Liberal Democrat News 40 years later.
If all this sounds tacky or exploitative, the wonderful score by George Delerue - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts the film to a wholly different level. Add in Dirk Bogarde in a very atypical role, Yootha Joyce and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and there's lots to enjoy.
Comfort and Joy (1984)
This is the film Bill Forsyth made after Local Hero and for some reason it appears to have been forgotten. Bill Paterson, who play a local radio DJ, is left by his girlfriend just before Christmas and then finds himself sucked into the Glasgow ice cream wars after witnessing an attack on a van.
I saw this in a cinema when it came out (which is a worryingly long time ago) and have never seen it again, yet I still remember it.
The Last Resort (2000)
Another one I saw in the cinema - the Renoir at Brunswick Square near St Pancras, since you ask. It taught me that Russian is the sexiest accent in the world and that Paddy Considine is a brilliant actor.
There they meet a bingo caller, played by Paddy Considine, who goes out of his way to help them. He is surely a good man, yet somehow we don't know whether we should wholly trust him. According to the reviews, he and Kozun improvised much of their dialogue.
Eventually Kozun decides she must grow up and return to Russia, a task in which Considine regretfully helps her.
Thames Water has outlined a scheme that would involve digging a tunnel to convey treated sewage from Mogden Sewage Works, via Twickenham, in a line that will lie under Ham Lands to the discharge location on the Surrey side of the River in the North Kingston/Ham part of Ham Lands and associated local nature conservation area.
Up to six construction sites each requiring an area of size of half a football pitch will be required for tunnel shafts. A total area of 3 to 4 acres.
And here is Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond and North Kingston, taking up the cause in Westminster Hall this week:
I congratulate my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for securing this extremely important debate. She mentioned Ham Lands, which is in my constituency of Richmond Park.
It is a local nature reserve that the local community has spent decades trying to protect. It has a unique ecology; it is home to many rare plants, lichen and fungi.
Yet incredibly Thames Water proposes to build up to six major construction sites on Ham Lands, each one half the size of a football pitch. The plans include the permanent - I emphasise permanent - destruction of five acres of vital wildlife habitat. In total, 24,000 people have signed a petition against the scheme.
Does she agree that the community has made its views very clear and that the Government must now listen?
And Munira Wilson, who had called the debate on water resources proposals for Teddington, did agree.
Ham Lands is a nature reserve in Richmond upon Thames, between the river and the villages of Ham and Petersham.
Early in the 20th century there were gravel pits there. These were worked out by the time of the second world war and they were later used as a dump for rubble from London's bombsites.
This is a reminder that what are dismissed as brownfield sites can often be more valuable for conservation and recreation than your average piece of farmland. The rubble that came to the Ham Lands, for instance, brought with it soils and seeds from across London, leading to a particularly rich local flora.
I know a bit about the Ham Lands because I lived in Richmond for a while in the early 1980s, by which time they had become a political issue in the borough.
At some point the council had bought land there with the intention of using it for housing. Later, as the Ham Lands came to be valued as a local amenity, parts were sold off to private developers.
By 1983 there was a vocal campaign to protect the Ham Lands from further development. This was achieved when the Liberal-SDP Alliance took control of the council in the autumn of 1983.
I remember Alan Watson, the Liberal PPC for Richmond and a man not without a sense of his own importance, arriving at a meeting of the constituency party to find the new council leader, David Williams, passing round photographs of Ham Lands wildlife so we could all see what had been saved.
Watson had to wait until we'd all finished admiring them before he could tell us how he was going to be in the Alliance cabinet after the next general election.
A sweet little film that shows the bombsites of Canterbury in 1945. Like Sheila Sim in my favourite film, young John struggles to recognise the city's old street pattern among the ruins.
But We've Come Back shows you the real thing. Study the bombsites in A Canterbury Tale closely and you realise that a lot of matte painting and model-making has gone into producing them.
"Basic Income was proposed by Paddy Ashdown as a fundamental component of his Radical Agenda for the 1990s, a book published in the late 1980s. It is liberal because it recognises the agency of the individual and their contribution to society. A Basic Income, he said, 'gives security to each individual', and will also 'liberate power in the hands of the citizen'." Jane Dodds is encouraged by the success of a Basic Income in Wales and dismayed by Liberal Democrat backsliding on the policy.
Richard Sanders on the way the 2017 general election has been written out of Labour Party history because it does not fit into the narrative promoted by the party's current leadership.
"A very senior insider told me that there ‘has never been any proper management and accountability of the project. There have been constant changes to the specification with no understanding of the cost implications’. Remarkably, there is no overall budget, the business case has not been reviewed despite the changes in specification and rises in costs and the accounting is carried out, bizarrely, in '2019 prices’ - a subterfuge to disguise the soaring expenditure." Christian Wolmar explains why HS2 is costing so much.
"Last year, I joined a group of intrepid plant hunters descending into the depths of the last remaining bomb site in the City of London. We climbed all the way down into the hole until we reached the level of the platforms of what was formerly part of Aldgate East Station, until a V2 bomb dropped nearby in the Second World War." That was The Gentle Author blogging in 2018.
"Typically set in a sprawling country house and populated by a cast drawn from the landed gentry and the well-to-do, 'Golden Age' detective fiction is not the most obvious genre in which to find two of the country’s leading socialist intellectuals." The Society for the Study of Labour History recalls G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, whose 28 detective fiction novels and four collections of short stories helped the publisher Collins achieve great success with its Crime Club imprint.
