Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Leicester Mercury.
I know things can get pretty het up on the city council, but the authority in question here is Witherley Parish Council.
The village of Witherley lies on the Leicestershire-Warwickshire border near Atherstone, and we are able to bring you exclusive video of its most recent attempt to conduct a parish council meeting.
The ferry operates on Saturdays and Sundays from the beginning of April until the end of September. A crossing costs £1 per person, with an additional charge of 50p for bicycles and dogs.
A report on West Bridgford Wire says:
The ferry, which is believed to be the last chain-operated passenger ferry of its kind in the UK, dates back to at least 1770. Estimates suggest a crossing may have operated at the site as early as the 13th century. ...
It was once used by fishermen and people travelling to markets in Loughborough. Newspaper reports from 1977 said the crossing was regularly used during the 1920s, when the fare was one penny.
Some 40 volunteers now operate the ferry during the season. It carries approximately 3,000 passengers each year, with a record of about 140 crossings in one day.
Another video from Bob Trubshaw. He writes on YouTube:
My maternal grandmother – known as a child as Dorothy Durran and in later life as Sarah Dallaston – spent her junior school years living at Bottom Lock Cottage at Foxton Locks. Her family were the lockkeepers at Foxton in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I interviewed Sarah in 1988 and this video mostly uses these recordings. In 1991 I published edited transcripts of the interviews, along with family photographs, as a booklet called Around Foxton. In 2016 that booklet was revised and made available as a free PDF.
For an excellent video about the history of Foxton Locks see @OurHistoryUnderfoot and their video Foxton Locks and the inclined plane by foot, narrow boat and drone.
I may be in Shropshire, but our Headline of the Day comes from the BBC News Leicestershire pages:
Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service said they were called to Aylestone Meadows after Nell "must have decided to cool-off in the canal near the Packhorse Bridge" but suddenly became stuck in the waterway.
A technical rescue team from Southern Station and a crew from Wigston Fire Station were dispatched to the scene on Saturday evening, and working alongside local farmers they lifted the animal out and had her checked over by a vet.
A statement from the service said Nell now "appears to be in a stable condition" at home, adding: "You can lead a horse to water, but it can be a struggle getting it back out again."
The judges did find a Shropshire Star story to commend highly:
"The impact would be huge": Residents rally against plans for three new homes in Shropshire village
Yes, Leicestershire County Council is run by Reform. Why do you ask?
Anyway, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.
"The university’s own financial reports show that 16 members of the University Executive Board are paid an average of £241k – a 27 per cent increase over three years while the institution has been going through financial difficulties. We have also seen the recruitment of highly paid and non-academic 'professors of practice', who are often industry figures without teaching and research experience. New managerial roles with grandiose titles such as 'associate pro-vice chancellor for education and student experience' have been created across the institution." John Heathershaw takes us inside the crisis at the University of Exeter.
"Deaths, misconduct in public office, rat infestations, and a climate of fear." Emma Guy reports on Leicester's privately run HMP Fosse Way.
Gawain Towler explains Rupert Lowe's sudden interest in cooperation with Reform UK: "A man of sixty-eight, a man elected twice on the coattails of Nigel Farage, who has spent eighteen months declaring that his purpose was the destruction of Nigel Farage, has looked at 8.7 per cent in a nationally ignored by-election and concluded that his moment is now or never. It is not unity he wants. It is relevance, and he is in a hurry for it."
"Works such as Robert McFarlane's The Old Ways, Tom Cox's 21st Century Yokel, Benjamin Myers' Under the Rock, and Edward Parnell's seminal Ghostland explore the connection between the self, the landscape, and the stories and histories that permeate and in many ways 'haunt' these landscapes." Lydia Waites considers the role of environmentalism in recent 'folkish' English writing.
Fed Kandi photographs the public art on the campuses of Lougborough University and the University of Leicester.
Michael Savage reports that journalists are self-censoring their reporting on right-wing protests, Donald Trump's administration and trans issues because of growing concerns about their personal safety.
Alistair Jones on the reorganisation of local government in Leicestershire: "Rutland is deemed too small to be a cost-effective council (although, personally, I remain unconvinced). Similarly, although more contentiously, the population argument was likely to see some expansion of the Leicester City Council boundaries. The question was going to be: how far? And now we know. There will be a significantly enlarged city council, and the remainder of the county and Rutland will form a single unitary authority."
In the latest move to censor US school libraries, one district is considering getting rid of them altogether. Erin Reed reports from Clay County in Florida.
"Both detectives were created or at least popularized by women; both possessed a typically female kind of intelligence that was easy to miss or dismiss. But the women who made them lived entirely different relationships to ownership and credit, and those relationships come through in the characters themselves." As the early Miss Marple and Nancy Drew novels are entering the public domain, Ellen O’Connell Whittet asks what comes next for the characters.
Rob Bagchi recalls the Joe Mercer's short, sunny spell as England's caretaker manager in 1974: "He gave them a blueprint for renovation that was disastrously ignored when the caution and anxiety he had temporarily banished returned with a vengeance."
With the Leicester Mercury reporting a new push to restore passenger services to the railway line from Leicester to Burton upon Trent, it's time to visit it again with Our History Underfoot.
In May we saw the line between Burton and Coalville, which hasn't carried any goods traffic for two years and is already showing signs of decay.
This time we go east from Coalville about half the way to Leicester. Matt sees, or at least hears, more quarry traffic than he expected and comes across relics of the district's early railway history.
A third video will complete his journey to Leicester.
I’m told that when a Labour junior minister discovered that councils are not All The Same Size, he started screaming and had to be sent home in a taxi.
Warning issued as beach closest to Leicestershire shuts amid health fears
Barbara Skedd was in "absolute horror" when she opened a letter addressed to her executors offering them condolences on her death.
The 74-year-old received a letter to her Ibstock home, in Leicestershire, from North West Leicestershire District Council in May to update its council tax records following the family's "recent bereavement".
And that's not all:
Skedd said she was in tears after the initial shock of reading that she had died in the council letter, dated 21 May.
She said anger then followed when she discovered all her benefit money, including her Personal Independence Payment (PIP), Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit (IIDB), pension and pension credit - had been frozen.
"Everything stopped dead," she told the BBC.
"I've not had money to buy food, no money to put petrol in my car. I can't do anything or go anywhere."
There's more:
She contacted the government department several times to correct the issue and was told an officer would visit her to confirm she was alive, she added.
"That horrified me to be honest," she said.
"I said, 'I'm talking to you. What more proof do you need?'"
Skedd said since the visit she has had "no explanation, no apologies, nothing" from the DWP.
"Just tell me why it all happened," she said.
This vote, which took place on Monday, followed a public poll in which 86 per cent of those who voted supported the establishment of a new council. I was one of them.
The BBC report makes great play of the fact that only 24 per cent of those eligible cast a vote, but I wonder if this is such a bad figure for such a poll.
Given the possibility that Market Harborough will be governed from Glenfield in future – it would be Nottingham if Labour had its way – the existence of a forum where the town to debate and decide what it needs is vital.
The passage below is from W.G. Hoskins' Midland England. Published as part of Batsford's The Face of Britain series, that book captures the charm of this part of the world better than any other I know:
There is, for example, the green deserted country around Knaptoft in the south of Leicestershire, where the pastures of central England hardly touch five hundred feet above the sea and yet they are the watershed between Trent and Severn; and streams gather here that end in the Humber, the Wash and the Bristol Channel.
This, more than anywhere, is the very heart of England: Knaptoft, with its ruined church, its font under the trees, its village under the sheep-pastures since Henry VII's time, its medieval manor house marked only by a rectangular island within a drying moat, and the later Elizabethan hall itself falling into slow ruin at the top of the field.
Once full of life, a thriving village of plough-land and meadow in the thirteenth century, the squire within his moat and the parson in the newly built church, now it dreams its life away in the autumn sunshine, deserted by all save occasional blackberry-pickers.
Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound,Rugged and high, of Charnwood’s forest ground,Stand yet, but, Stranger, hidden from thy viewThe ivied ruins of forlorn Grace Dieu,Erst a religious House, which day and nightWith hymns resounded and the chanted rite.
Ever since I was a councillor in the Eighties, the reopening to passengers of the line from Leicester to Coalville, Ashby and Burton upon Trent has been high on the agenda of transport campaigners in the East Midlands.
Which makes this video following the line between Coalville and Burton concerning. No train has run west of Coalville for a couple of years and, as a result, that section of the line is rapidly being reclaimed by nature.
This is doubly worrying because, though what people in Coalville want is a train to Leicester, it is this section between Coalville and Burton that the authorities now talk about reopening.
Anyway, thanks to Our History Underfoot. Like and subscribe. my children. Like and subscribe.
James Meek looked at housing in Andy Burnham's Manchester om the eve of the last general election: "Burnham presides over a scale model of a future Starmer Britain, one where a social democratic leader full of genuine desire to mend the broken, over-marketised public realm is hamstrung by lack of resources and constrained by fear of frightening away the wealth-holders. Like England, Greater Manchester has its richer south, the Cheshire fringes where the golfing set and superstar footballers live, its great main city of hedonism and cranes and sky-high rents, and its decapitalised, struggling northern towns."
Rachel Dixon on the revival of the River Mease (rises in Leicestershire, flows through Derbyshire and joins the Trent in Staffordshire) by the communities on its banks.
"Old buildings give places a uniqueness that cannot be imported, exported, or copied. They contain distinctive details and period-specific materials that carry forward long-standing building traditions and preserve something intangible at first glance – the touch of time." Anita Straub makes the case for conserving historic buildings.
Daniel A. Kaufman distinguishes the 13 different social media personalities.
"The falling-off of the last few chapters is due to the need to fill the three-decker’s third volume, but that must surely be forgiven when Bevis and Mark and Frances make their winter ride through the ice-floes of The New Sea in the final stunning paragraphs." Brian Alderson pays tribute to Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies.
The former England cricket captain M.J.K. "Mike" Smith died yesterday at the age of 92. He was a middle-order batsman with Leicestershire and then Warwickshire, and also a rugby union player. He won a single England cap was at fly half against Wales in 1956, making him the last man to play both sports for England.
His Guardian obituary says:
His even-tempered approach was one of the keys to his success as a skipper not just with England, whom he led between 1964 and 1966, but with his county, which he captained from 1957 to 1967.
Although the product of a traditional public school and Oxbridge background, he was unusual for the time in having a classless accent, an egalitarian outlook and a relaxed attitude to convention. Rank and file players loved him for it, and would do anything to support his cause.
The Guardian also reveals that Smith was the son of a Leicestershire hosiery manufacturer and grew up in Broughton Astley, a village in the Harborough District.
I would say that Smith's test career was before my time, but when I was a boy the England selectors loved their recalls. So, six years after his last cap, Smith was picked to play in the first three tests of the 1972 home Ashes series.
His batting made no impression on me, but I do remember a catch he took on the boundary. It was on the second day of the series and dismissed the Australian captain Ian Chappell first ball off a bouncer from Tony Greig. You can see the catch in the video above.
Later. There are some nice tributes in Smith's Cricinfo obituary – he was the England manager on Atherton's 1994-5 Ashes tour:
Mike Atherton, who captained that tour, paid tribute to Smith in The Times. "MJK's good humour and easygoing demeanour was a wonderful antidote to the occasional stress and pressure I felt as captain," he wrote. "He was utterly unpretentious and saw cricket for what it was – which is to say not a matter of life and death."
Geoffrey Boycott, England's former opener who played alongside Smith in 18 Tests between 1964 and 1972, wrote in the Telegraph that he had "a great sense of humour, no edge and was never officious. He was just a good man, a good gentle guy and you wanted him to do well. He gave you freedom to play and was not a martinet."
Bob Trubshaw is our guide. He says in his YouTube blurb:
As with all areas of Britain there are certain wells in Leicestershire and Rutland known as "holy wells" and several dedicated to saints. Almost invariably such holy wells have reputations for clean water and for never running dry.
Leicestershire and Rutland once had over thirty documented wells called "holy well" or dedicated to saints. But few survive. In addition there are some wells that were probably once thought of as holy but aren't reliably documented as such.
Here is my own photo of the well at Beeby.
I'm glad I did, because there were several exceptional buildings to see and a lot of interesting history to hear. Visit the Desford Heritage website to learn more.
