Violet Bonham Carter and Mary Stocks remember the struggle for women's suffrage

I thought I had finished blogging for today, but this video is too good not to share with you tonight.

It's a BBC2 discussion from 1968 with Lady Asquith (better known as Violet Bonham Carter) and Lady Stocks. A young Joan Bakewell is in the chair.

They are talking about a television film about how women got the vote, and both take the view that it exaggerated the importance of the militant tactics of the Suffragettes at the expense of the role played by the wider Suffrage movement. 

And Lady Asquith remembers defending her father, the Liberal prime minister, from attack by Suffragettes.

Lady Stocks was the cousin of Tim Brinton, a Conservative MP in the Thatcher era and the father of Sal Brinton, the former president of the Liberal Democrats.

I've also discovered that Lady Stocks's husband, a little-remembered philosopher called John Leofric Stocks, was the son of John Edward Stocks, who was vicar of Market Harborough from 1871 to 1884 and then of the fascinating St Saviour's in Leicester.

Cormorant released after being found wandering around Market Harborough

Imagine my pride when the judges decided to award Headline of the Day to the Harborough Mail.

I took this photo of a cormorant on the Nene in the centre of Northampton a few years ago.

Argent: Hold Your Head Up

I loved this when it came out when I was 11, but it now makes me remember seeing The Zombies at Market Harborough Leisure Centre in 2011.

After he had played his keyboard solo on this, Rod Argent was shaking hands with people in the front row of the audience. I do like small venues.

Also in the band that night was Rod Argent's cousin, the late Jim Rodford. He is also playing on this original recording.

Book Review: Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt by Lon Milo DuQuette and Jim Bratkowsky

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator, which you can download free of charge from the magazine's website.

Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt

Lon Milo DuQuette and Jim Bratkowsky

Weiser Books, 2026, £14.99

The year is 1900 and a young Aleister Crowley – poet, mountaineer and Cambridge chess Blue – is keen to learn the mysteries of London’s leading occultists, but he arrives in this fashionable circle to find it riven by a power struggle. The old guard of MacGregor Mathers and his wife Moina, who were real historical figures, are being challenged by a new generation that includes W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne and Bram Stoker.

Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt began life as a screenplay, which at one time came close to being shot with the late Alan Rickman as the lead. Its frustrating history is set out in a preface and, perhaps because of that history, this novelisation sees an eminent British director describing, to a young American who is also in the movie business, the action of a film about Crowley he has long planned but is now too ill to make. This extended dialogue takes place at a wake held for Crowley after his funeral in 1947 at the Marylebone home of two more real figures, Sir Percy and Lady Frieda Harris.

Percy Harris held Harborough for the Liberals at a wartime by-election in 1916, but was defeated there two years later after his Conservative opponent received Lloyd George’s coupon. He returned to Westminster as MP for Bethnal Green South West in 1922 and represented that seat until 1945, becoming one of Sir Archibald Sinclair’s most important lieutenants. Frieda Harris, his wife, was an artist and follower of Crowley who painted his famous Thoth tarot pack. After Sir Percy’s death in 1952 she moved to a houseboat in Kashmir and made a modest income from writing and artistic projects. When Matthew Taylor (now Baron Taylor of Goss Moor), the former Liberal and Liberal Democrat MP for Truro, who was adopted as a baby, traced his birth mother, he found that Sir Percy and Lady Frieda were among his great grandparents.

But it’s not just the Liberal trivia that makes this book fun. Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt, a work of fantasy that is firmly grounded in fact, paints an intriguing picture of an Edwardian London where men in wing collars and women in enormous hats believe the most extraordinary things. It’s a world not unlike the one G.K. Chesterton created in The Man Who Was Thursday.

East Midlands Railway cancels 20 fast services a day because of problems with its new trains

East Midlands Railways has admitted that its problems with its new trains have not all been caused by the recent hot weather.

BBC News reports:

A number of Intercity services, which run to and from London St Pancras, will be cancelled from Monday, while other services will have fewer carriages.

Will Rogers, managing director of EMR, said the performance of the Class 810 fleet had "fallen below the levels we and our customers expect" and that the timetable change was "necessary".

The Intercity services run between London and destinations including Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby and Sheffield.

EMR did not say how long the timetable changes would be in place for, but said in a statement they would remain in place while "EMR works with the manufacturer, Hitachi Rail, to resolve disruption for customers as soon as possible".

And the Guardian adds more detail:

EMR is cancelling about 20 fast trains a day between London, Sheffield and Nottingham, while others will also be short-formed and are likely to be crowded. Its new class 810 fleet, previously labelled Auroras when their launch was heralded less than a year ago, have suffered from what EMR has called “performance and reliability issues”.

The operator also criticised Hitachi’s maintenance of the existing fleet that the Auroras were due to replace, the class 222 trains, which it said had “significantly impacted upon EMR’s ability to run a consistent intercity service”.

Interestingly, BBC News ran a story only yesterday under the headline:

East Midlands Railway cancellations – is it really just the hot weather?

In it, my best friend from school, now secretary of the East Midlands branch of the passenger advocacy group Railfuture, said:

"a bit more transparency" around a recovery plan and the issues the operator was facing would be helpful for passengers.

We are not without influence.

The 810 trains are bi-modal – they're able to take power from overhead wires but also have their own diesel engines. They were ordered on Chris Grayling's watch after the Conservative government cancelled its plans to electrify the whole of the St Pancras main line. The wires run out at Wigston, a few miles south of Leicester.

But it's not all bad news. We're getting new taller ticket barriers at Market Harborough station to stop people without tickets boarding the trains that aren't running.

What would have happened if St Pancras station had been closed?

In 1980 the were serious proposals, and not for the first time, to close both Marylebone and St Pancras stations in London.

Jago Hazzard takes us through the plans and why they came to nothing. Before I go any further, let my suggest you like this video, follow him on YouTube and have a look at his Patreon page.

One thing he does not explain is how trains from the Midland Main Line would have reached Euston. There was no existing connection they could have used nor any obvious new one that could have been built.

I don't know what the London Amenity & Transport Association had in mind in 1980, but a post on RailUKforums tells us what British Rail had in mind when there were serious plans to close St Pancras in the 1960s:

The broad outline plan was that the Bedford Suburban services would be diverted from St. Pancras into Moorgate, much as it happened later with Thameslink. Main Line services were proposed to be diverted from Market Harborough over the now closed line to Northampton, and into Euston, with the lines involved electrified. It was also proposed at one point that the line between Market Harborough and Bedford would close, with Wellingborough and Kettering losing their rail services. 

For about four years the St. Pancras to Nottingham Newspaper traffic, and the remaining St. Pancras to Glasgow overnight service were diverted to run out of Euston over the Northampton to Market Harborough route, before reverting to St. Pancras around 1970 after the station at St. Pancras had been reprieved.

Several floors of the old station Hotel at St. Pancras, which had been in use as offices, were relocated elsewhere during the period when closure seemed certain. Even after it was reprieved there was a lot of vacant office space left empty, and walking about up there could be very spooky at times.

It's worth reading the whole thread there. Other contributors say Bedford to Market Harborough would have remained open or that only the line between Kettering (Glendon North Junction be be precise) and Market Harborough would have closed.

I like the idea, possible if the latter closure had taken place, of a regular semi-fast service from St Pancras to Leicester via Corby and Melton Mowbray.

HMO plan for Market Harborough's Bottom Club

Stop sniggering at this story from HFM News there. I shall explain.

 

Market Harborough used to have two working men's clubs in the town centre. The one that stood towards the top of the High Street was known as "Top Club" and the one on The Square was "Bottom Club".

Top Club is now a branch of Zizzi, while Bottom Club now houses a Waterstones and a Pret a Manger. They don't call Harborough "the Notswolds" for nothing.

The white building in the photo above was also part of Bottom Club. Its ground floor was where the club's snooker tables were to be found and where Market Harborough's British heavyweight boxing champion Jack Gardener once trained. This is the building for which a planning application for conversion to an HMO has been made.

When I was a lad, I sometimes played snooker there because one of our gang's dad was a member, so they let us use the tables if it was quiet and we behaved ourselves. In those days it was possible to enter the club on the Square and walk through it all the way to that white building, so there must have been some demolition when the front of the club was converted into the two shop units.

Market Harborough chess club met for a while in what is now the first floor of Waterstones. This was at a time when what had been the town's roughest pub, The Talbot, had just closed and some of its ne'er-do-well customers had taken to using the Bottom Club instead. The result was that the club lost its alcohol licence for a while over concerns about drug use.

So it was that, having won a county league game with a particularly outrageous swindle, I lent over the board after my opponent had resigned and asked: "Would you like a glass of orange juice?"

And The Talbot?  As this is the Notswolds, it's now a Hotel Chocolat.

Three Lions but no St George's flags

I went for a walk across the town after lunch today and saw this Three Lions flag. What I didn't see was any St George's flags.

Twenty years ago, I was in Shropshire during the 2006 World Cup and I can remember St George's flags in the upstairs windows of houses in some very leafy streets in Shrewbury. I expect the children of the house demanded them for their bedroom windows. This year in Market Harborough, there's nothing.

It looks as though the far right has put us off our national flag by making it a symbol their thuggish politics. They couldn't be more unpatriotic if they tried.

District council backs a parish council for Market Harborough

An extraordinary meeting of Harborough District Council has voted unanimously in favour of a parish council for Market Harborough, reports BBC News.

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 Walker Brothers: No Regrets

By 1975 the Walker Brothers had got over the evening when they had their shirts ripped off in Market Harborough.

You can tell this single is from that era because of the gratuitous guitar solo. 

More improvements planned for the River Welland through Welland Park, Market Harborough

The East Mercia Rivers Trust (EMRT) is to carry out improvement work on the River Welland where it flows through Welland Park in Market Harborough.

HFM News reports that the EMRT will increase water flow during the summer by clearing weeds and adding gravel and small structures to the river. It will also create better access points for education and community use and install new interpretation boards.

The report quotes the EMRT as describing the Welland through the park as "a heavily modified urban watercourse, with weed growth restricting flow and causing both visual and ecological concerns".

So I went to the park today to take some pictures of the unimproved river in the sun. Rewilding work on the Welland through Market Harborough previously took place in 2014.

There's more than one Reform politician who believes in UFOs

This video has received a lot of attention today, but don't mock Councillor Kieran Lay too hard. Because he's not the only Reform politician to believe in aliens and their UFOs.

Regular readers will be familiar with Rupert Matthews, the police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire. He was elected as a Conservative but later joined Reform UK.

And Matthews once told an American interviewer:

"The evidence for UFOs and for the humanoid creatures linked to them is pretty compelling."

Less amusing are Matthews' current plans for Market Harborough town centre. Rather than spend the money on more properly trained police offices or PCSOs, he's giving £2m to private security firms to provide street wardens.

This approach reminds me of an earlier post of mine about Matthews:

Rupert Matthews, the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland, has paid £250 to put up a Victorian-style police station blue lamp in Uppingham.

"The blue lamp is an iconic piece of British policing history and symbolises not only law, order and justice, but safety and sanctuary," he told BBC News.

Trouble is, there is no police station in Uppingham, and the inhabitants of Rutland's second city are far from impressed.

I'm afraid I couldn't resist the headline... Rupert Matthews: The lights are on but no one's at home.

"An ingenious inventor is keeping his secret in some remote farm building between Market Harborough and Peterborough"

I've blogged before about the C.W. Allen and the phantom airships of 1909. It turns out that excitement was running so high that the Daily Express sent a special correspondent to Market Harborough. Here is part of his report.

THREE EYE-WITNESSES

“Express” Special Correspondent

MARKET HARBOROUGH, Tuesday Night

The mysterious airship with blazing headlights, which is reported to have been seen flying by night round Peterborough and across East Anglia, is being eagerly watched for again to-night. 

This strange aerocraft, with its suggestion of Mr. H. G. Wells' "War in the Air," has fired the imagination of the countryside, and the villagers everywhere are watching the sky for its reappearance. It has been seen driving through the night by several credible witnesses in districts wide apart, and many people believe that an ingenious inventor is keeping his secret in some remote farm building between Market Harborough and Peterborough.

I have motored this evening across part of ' the district in which the airship—judging from its line of flight—is understood to be concealed. The fenland of the country round is as flat as a billiard-table, and remote from the main lines of railway and high roads, and is thus admirably suitable {for an aeronaut who desired to keep his trial flights secret. 

Among the first to see the airship that flies by night was Mr, C. W. Allen, the pedestrian holder of the 2,000 miles road record, who lives in Northampton Road, Market Harborough. 1 have today seen Mr. Allen, who has given me an account of what he saw.

You can read Allen's account in an earlier post on this blog – he lived at 43 Nithsdale Avenue, not on Northampton Road. It seems there was a second panic over these mysterious airships in 1913.

The Market Harborough woman who gave birth to a cat

Agnes Bowker, the Market Harborough woman who claimed on 16 January 1569 that she had given birth to a cat, is the subject of the latest short podcast in the BBC's Secret Leicestershire series.

The photograph shows the ruined church of St Mary in Arden by Market Harborough railway station, where the story begins.

There's magnolia, that's for remembrance

It's almost four years since my mother died. A strong memory from her last days is the magnolia at the end of the street. I saw it every time I went out on an errand.

As it was so sunny today, I went to see if the tree is still thriving. And it is.

The political effect of our "silent epidemic of loneliness"

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a network of "Hobby Hubs" to combat what they call a "silent epidemic of loneliness", as a lack of community spaces is forcing people to find human interaction online.

These hubs could libraries, community centres and pubs where groups could meet for activities. The network would be integrated the into NHS social prescribing programmes, giving GPs additional options when recommending activities for their patients.

The BBC News report on this plan says the party estimates that £42m of funding per year could help hobby hubs in England stay open for an additional 300,000 hours.

It also quotes Ed Davey

"The Liberal Democrats want to breathe new life into British high streets and community centres to give everyone a place to do what they love, with other people who love it too. 

"It is so important that we do not allow isolation to become the new normal."

This is an important issue, and one that has political implications. Diane Bolet has written about her own research into the decline of community centres for The Conversation:

The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift.

A couple of other links seem relevant too. Here's Andrew Saint reviewing The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950. in the London Review of Books:

Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads’ brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling 'society', clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.

And here is Simon Titley, writing in Liberator 331, on the world that the concept of "cool" is producing:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: "sad", "trainspotter", "anorak", "anal" or "get a life".

When Peter Lee took 8-13 for Great Bowden

Embed from Getty Images

Peter Lee, the former Northamptonshire and Lancashire seam bowler, has died at the age of 80.

He grew up near Market Harborough in the Northamptonshire village of Sibbertoft and made his debut for that county in 1967. 

But it was when he moved to Lancashire in 1972 that his career really took off. He twice took 100 wickets in a season for them in an era when the feat was already becoming vanishingly rare, but never won test selection.

A trawl of the British Newspaper Archive reveals this story from the Leicester Daily Mercury, 6 August 1980. Great Bowden is nearly, but not quite, part of Market Harborough:

Bowden's Secret Weapon Shocks Wigston

Wigston Town cricketers had a nasty shock in their match against Great Bowden for they found themselves facing Lancashire pace bowler Peter Lee.

After Great Bowden had made 131. Wigston were blasted out for 88 with Lee taking 8-13.

Lee hails from a village called Sibbertoft which is just over the border in Northamptonshire and has two brothers in the Bowden team.

He has been injured recently and his guest appearance was part of his build-up to regain full fitness.

Wigston were on the receiving end another top-line bowler some years ago when Harold Rhodes took all 10 wickets against them for just 11 runs in a match at Matlock.

When Bonkers Hall was a fashionable spa

Nevill Holt Hall has been many things: the family home of the Cunards, a notoriously abusive prep school, the chief model for Bonkers Hall. But in the 18th century it was a fashionable spa.

This feature from the Leicester Daily Mercury (Friday 21 September 1934) tells the story

When Society Descended on a Leicestershire Spa 

The Doctor Bottled its Waters and Let His Imagination Go

In a wood in one of the highest parts of Leicestershire, where wild pigeons seek the topmost branches of fir trees, rabbits scamper unheeding of alien eyes through an autumn carpet of leaves, and an earthy tang brings a curious peace to traffic-jangled nerves.

That is the sylvan setting of an ancient spa where once Society leaders used to flock to sip the health-giving waters.

You will find it Neville Holt, a few miles from Market Harborough, but its fame died with the crinoline. 

To-day it is a mere trickle as a result of a dry summer, and its crumbling brickwork is a danger adventurous boys of the neighbouring Neville Holt School.

How the spa became nationally famous is a curious story. In 1728 a tenant farmer of the owner of the estate of Neville Holt Italian Count Migliorucci, dug a pond in Holt Wood where his cattle could slake their thirst.

Much to his dismay, however, after all his hard work, the cattle would not drink the water. 

Curious as to the reason, he had the water analysed and it was found to contain a medicinal mineral known as nitro-alluminous.

He imparted this information to Count Migliorucci, who caused an arch to be built over the spring, making it a grotto of two compartments.

A Doctor Short of Sheffield came to hear of this wonderful spa, which was found to cure all inflammatory diseases, and as result of energetic advertising in London and elsewhere it soon became famous. 

Society and fashion hurried to the spot in search of a cure for their ailments, either real or imaginary and a road was constructed from Neville Holt to the wood for them to ride in their carriages to the spa. A search is now necessary to find the road, which is moss and weed covered through long disuse.

The water was bottled and sent to London for sale. Dr Short, who was actually something of a knave, advertised on a pamphlet that the spa waters could cure among other things "enlarged liver through excess of drinking anaemia and even corns."

His illustration of some of the cures effected could scarcely be credited by even the most gullible modern people.

The popularity of the slow-flowing health-spring waned after a few years. Perhaps the doctor’s patients found him out! 

The pamphlets are in the possession of Mr. F.S. Phillips, headmaster of Neville Holt School, and form a curious link with yesteryear.

F.S. Phillips, it turned out, was no more to be believed than was Dr Short of Sheffield. (There's a heavy content warning - child abuse - for that link, particularly the comments below the story.)

The Grassy Shires: Farming in Leicestershire during WWII

Thrill to footage of Nevill Holt Hall (now widely accepted to be the chief model for Bonkers Hall) from 1:13 and of Market Harborough cattle market from 9:57.

This film brings home just how powerful the British state became during the Second World War. Thanks to Mark Howson for posting it on Bluesky – he says the Clarkes are still farming near Medbourne.

The Guardian discovers the Welland Valley: "An unsung alternative to the Cotswolds"

We've all heard of The Notswolds, and an article in the Guardian today adopts my definition of Les Notswolds profonds: the Welland Valley between Market Harborough and the Welland Viaduct.

Ben Lerwill visits Market Harborough:

The town itself has ancient Saxon roots and is easy to like, with a head-turning mix of Jacobean, Georgian and Victorian architecture. I stumble on Quinns, a cracking independent bookshop tucked down an alleyway, then devour a curry bowl at a lively cafe called Two Old Goats. 

A board on the street lists notable town residents through the ages, the most recent being rugby giant Martin Johnson. I read this, then turn and immediately see him on the pavement 10 metres away. It’s unclear if this clever routine is something he does for all visitors, but he’s hard to miss in any case.

He visits Foxton Locks:

The real pull of the Welland valley is the countryside, a slow-moving world of hushed green dales and drifting red kites. On local advice, I head to rural Foxton Locks – Britain’s highest combination of staircase canal locks, where 10 adjacent early 19th-century locks transport boats up and down a 23-metre hillside – for a gawp and a wander. “It takes 50 minutes for boats to get from one end to the other,” says volunteer Malcolm, who seems delighted to have a visitor to talk to. The neatly painted locks rise up handsomely beside us.

And he visits Medbourne to stay at one of the models for the Bonkers Arms:

My base is nearby Medbourne, one of numerous placid, calendar-pretty villages that stud the Welland valley. Medbourne has a clear stream, a lovely pub – the Nevill Arms, where I spend the night in a four-poster and enjoy exactly the kind of warming, candle-lit dinner you’d want from a country inn in winter – and cottages built of tough, reddish Leicestershire ironstone.

Best of all, be mentions a cafe in Great Easton I didn't know about.