The poor Lambeth church providing choristers for cathedrals

So many areas of our national life are now dominated by the products of private schools, from journalism via county cricket to film and theatre acting, that it's heart-warming to read this in the Guardian.

St Paul’s Cathedral school, one of the UK’s most prestigious private schools, has long been associated with the musical elite. So was seven-year-old N'raeah, from south London, nervous about auditioning for its internationally renowned choir?

"No," she said, beaming. "Everybody’s counting on me to sing beautifully."

And sing beautifully, she did. N'raeah is the fourth chorister from St John the Divine, Kennington (SJDK) to win a fully funded scholarship to one of the UK’s most prestigious musical institutions in recent years.

Other choristers from the church have secured scholarships at Westminster Abbey, King’s College, Cambridge and St John’s College, Cambridge, with some going on to perform at national events including the coronation of King Charles III.

What makes SJDK even more remarkable is serves an area of Lambeth marked by high levels of deprivation. Yet its success is taking place against a general picture of a decline in music teaching in primary schools – a decline that is doing nothing to widen the talent pool on which cathedral choirs draw,

I remember watching a documentary about York Minster years ago and being struck by how middle-class it all was. Couldn't they find even one working-class kid in the city with a good singing voice?

But there are now three cathedrals in England – Peterborough, Southwell, Bristol – where the choir is not attached to a fee-paying school, so other models are possible.

"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.

Medbourne station and the emptiness of the countryside between Leicester and Peterborough

I went to look for Medbourne station, which closed as long ago as 1916. You may remember that I blogged about a 1922 campaign to reopen it.

The station master's house survives, but you can't get a good photo of it from the public road. You can see a picture of it on the Medbourne village website.

So all I can show you is the pillars at the entrance to the station, which are quite a way from where the platforms would have been. The second pillar is next to the litter bin, if you're struggling to locate it.

And below is a heavily altered (Notswoldised?) terrace of railwaymen's cottages, which stands close to the station entrance.

In 1910 the Great Northern Railway ran a service from Leicester Belgrave Road to Peterborough North (the present-day Peterborough station), which called at Medbourne. It probably took a more direct route than the Leicester to Peterborough trains via Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Stamford do today.

What brings home the emptiness of this part of the world is the list of stations the GNR trains called at between Leicester and Peterborough. After the Leicester suburb of Humberstone, there was not a place of even middling size among them.

The list ran: Humberstone, Thurnby & Scraptoft, Ingarsby, Lowesby, Tilton, East Norton, Hallaton, Medbourne, Rockingham, Seaton, Wakerley & Barrowden, King's Cliffe, Nassington, Wansford, Castor.

A 1922 campaign to reopen Medbourne railway station

From the Grantham Journal, Saturday 16 December 1922.

Medbourne

Re-Opening Railway Station Wanted. - At a meeting of the Parish Council, steps were decided upon with a view to inducing the G.N.R. Company to re-open Medbourne Station, which was closed during the war,, and the train service from Leicester to Peterborough, via Seaton Junction, suspended.

Medbourne station was open for only 33 years. It and the short line through it opened in 1883, the line was singled in 1905 and the station was closed as a wartime economy measure in 1916.

After that the line was used chiefly for storing wagons, but wasn't lifted until the 1960s.

One problem with the station was that the GNR's Leicester Belgrave Road to Peterborough service, which called there, took a circuitous route - though probably no more so than the Leicester to Peterborough service that runs today via Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Stamford.

The Medbourne Village site suggests that people there would rather have had a train to Market Harborough.

One irony is that the village sat inside a triangle of lines, so whichever way you left Medbourne, you crossed a railway. No wonder there was a campaign in 1922 to get their station back.

Peterborough Cathedral launches £300,000 appeal to allow it to stay open daily

Peterborough Cathedral has launched an emergency appeal to raise £300,000 by the end of March to avoid running out of money.

It costs over £2m a year - almost £6,000 a day - to run. About 15 per cent of that, says the Guardian, comes from the Church of England , and the remainder must be raised by the cathedral through events, rent, grants and donations. Nothing comes from the government.

The cathedral's dean. the Very Rev. Chris Dalliston, tells the newspaper:

"There have been three or four years of erosion of our reserves. Post-Covid, visitor numbers were low and events were slow to pick up. There has been a huge rise in the cost of utilities - our bill has gone up by more than £100,000 a year across the estate, a huge additional expense.

"Peterborough is not a wealthy city. It’s not a hotspot on the tourist trail, it’s not seen as glamorous. In recent years, footfall has not been high in the city centre. We’ve lost our big department stores. People have been badly affected by the cost of living crisis.”

"We’re a spiritual hub and a community space in the heart of the city. But we also have to run this as a business. We need people to recognise the urgency of the situation. We’re not crying wolf."

The Joy of Six 1217

"Everything John Barnett said about Boeing’s problems was true. Everything. If the company had been willing to listen to him, 346 airline passengers would still be alive. And maybe Barnett would be too." Joe Nocera on the death of whistleblower.

Tim Eaton and Christopher Phillips look at British foreign policy with David Cameron as foreign secretary. "Cameron’s energy ... does not appear to be part of a broader foreign policy strategy. The UK’s response towards Gaza and MENA [ the Middle East and North Africa] in general remains reactive and Britain is not at the forefront of discussion on what comes next."

Roz Kaveney, a veteran trans activist, talks to Hackney History about the history of the struggle: "I noticed a lot of bleakness creeping into trans social media and thought it my job as a community elder to remind young people that things had been, if not worse, at least as bad in different ways... The important thing about life in an embattled community is to have each others backs."

"There are loud voices, currently holding the microphone, who seem determined to run classical music into the ground. Even Arifa Akbar, The Guardian’s chief theatre critic, recently announced that traditional modes of listening to such music (respectfully and quietly) are elitist. This is only going to get worse. Those of us who really care about classical music, whether listeners, performers, educators, critics or arts administrators, need to be prepared to stand up and speak out." Alexandra Wilson says classical music is under threat from accusations of elitism.

"Train travellers approaching Peterborough from the south can still, for now, see what might once have been the future of train travel. It might have been yet another fruit of what many see as the engineering genius of the UK. What went wrong?" J.J. Jackson finds out.

Andy Walmsley takes us back 50 years to the launch of Radio Caroline.

GUEST POST Sex, spies and scandal: The John Vassall Affair

Historian Alex Grant explains why an often-overlooked spy scandal of the early 1960s matters – and  how it changed British journalism, and security vetting, for ever.

"He had 'minor public school' printed all over him," an old friend told me during my research into the life of the clerk turned spy, John Vassall. "Because he was not in the same social class as the ambassador and other senior diplomats, he hadn’t the nerve to go to them when he got himself in a spot of bother."

Who was John Vassall, what was this "spot of bother" and why is it important? With typical British understatement, the term a "spot of bother" was a euphemism for some of the worst possible predicaments - rape, entrapment and blackmail. And Vassall was entrapped by his delicate position in Britain's class structure, as well as by his sexuality.

Vassall, the son of a Church of England vicar, was born in 1924. After being forced to leave his minor public school - Monmouth - in 1941 (his impecunious parents could no longer afford its fees) he served briefly in the RAF and then found work as a junior clerical officer at the Admiralty, where he beavered away quietly until he was sensationally exposed as a Soviet spy, prosecuted and imprisoned in 1962. 

Only then was it discovered that Vassall had been photographed in compromising positions while working at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954. Over the next seven years he had been blackmailed into handing hundreds, if not thousands, of British defence secrets over to his Soviet handlers, both in Moscow and in London. 

Vassall’s arrest and trial, and a subsequent judicial enquiry by Lord Cyril Radcliffe, dominated the front pages of newspapers for several months. The press’s salacious reporting was full of homophobic innuendo and half-truths. 

As a gay man being prosecuted for spying, several years before decriminalisation, Vassall was given no quarter. Newspapers, and the judge at his trial, overlooked the ugly truth: that Vassall had not been seduced in Moscow, but had been drugged and gang-raped.

The scandal led to the resignation of a well-regarded government minister - Tam Galbraith, whose private office Vassall had worked at in 1957-9  - amid what was arguably Britain’s first modern tabloid witch-hunt. There were hysterical rumours that Vassall was not a lone operator, but part of a large, and secret, homosexual cabal in Westminster and Whitehall. Macmillan's government almost fell.  

Two reporters were sent to jail for refusing to reveal their sources, which caused lasting fury on Fleet Street, and helped to fan the flames of the Profumo scandal a few months later. A crackdown after Vassall’s conviction led to a tightening of woefully lax security procedure at the Admiralty - and the modern system of 'positive vetting' for certain civil service posts, which still persists today.

Yet the Vassall scandal is barely remembered now. The Profumo one, which followed fast on its coat-tails, seems to have erased memories of Vassall, even though it was just as a big a story at the time. And remarkably, apart from a homophobic account of Vassall’s espionage, published in 1964, no book has ever been written about it – until now.

Another reason why Vassall was treated so unsympathetically was that he was on the cusp of two social classes Curiously, he was both a snob and a victim of snobbery. Although he was presentable, well-spoken and a vicar’s son, he had never risen higher than clerical officer. His social pretensions irritated his colleagues just as much as his campness did. 

There is evidence that being cold-shouldered by more senior diplomats at the British embassy in Moscow may have driven him into the arms of Russian men. Naively, Vassall never suspected that most of them were covert KGB agents.

Although Vassall died in 1996, I managed to track down several people who knew him,  including two women who worked with him in an archive after his release from prison in the 1970s, when he used the alias John Phillips to avoid his past. More importantly, in the autumn of 2022, the National Archives released thousands of documents on MI5’s surveillance of Vassall, and their breathtakingly intrusive investigations of everyone he knew socially. 

MI5’s files confirm for the first time that Vassall had relationships with two Conservative MPs -  Fergus Montgomery and Sir Harmar Nicholls - before his arrest. By a neat coincidence I live in Oundle, in what used to be Nicholl’s Peterborough constituency, where Nicholls is still fondly remembered as a diligent MP, about whom no whisper of a connection to Vassall was ever heard).

While neither MP seems to have known anything about his spying, they managed to keep their names out of the papers and their careers continued until the 1980s and 1990s. Two other MPs – Tam Galbraith and Denzil Freeth – were not so lucky. Galbraith spent the last 18 years if his life on the backbenches, while Freeth was forced to leave parliament entirely in 1964, merely because of rumours he had once attended a party with Vassall. 

Once Vassall was released, he found that many of his old friends and lovers had been persecuted or dismissed from the civil service in Britain, America and Australia.

Then, just as now, Westminster and Whitehall were brutal places, where careers were either brutally cut short, or gilded, depending on luck, and what friends in high places you had. Despite Vassall’s constant name-dropping, he really stood no chance against a British state that wanted to make an example of him, and which ignored the role that its own homophobia had played in his downfall. 

Some aspects of the Vassall scandal – Minox cameras, undeveloped films in cardboard boxes sealed with Scotch tape, Vassall taking ministerial boxes up to Galbraith in Scotland on the night train from Euston – seem very old hat nowadays. But others are all too familiar. 

One would hope that Vassall would be treated more leniently by the courts today, as a victim of sexual violence rather than an ideological traitor. But would the press, and social media? report the story more sensitively than they did in the early 1960s? I am not so sure.   

Alex Grant’s book on the Vassall scandal - Sex, Spies and Scandal - can be ordered from Biteback Publishing. www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/sex-spies-and-scandal. You can read his blog Alex Grant and follow him on Twitter.

Photo-identity for voters, racism and the Electoral Commission

Forcing people to show photographic identity before they could vote in May's local elections led to racial and disability discrimination. That's the conclusion of a report published today by the all-party parliamentary group on democracy and the constitution.

I can't find the report online, but the Guardian says:

The report, which has been seen by the Guardian, says: “The current voter-ID system is, as it stands, a ‘poisoned cure’ in that it disenfranchises more electors than it protects.”

The authors found that “polling clerks are more likely to fail to compare a photo ID to the person presenting that document if the person is of a different ethnicity”.

They highlighted the case of Andrea Barrett, who is immunocompromised and was blocked from entering a polling station after refusing to remove her mask for an identification check.

The report says: “Their decision in that instance was … clearly discriminatory (and potentially unlawful) because they denied Andrea Barrett the right to cast a ballot purely on the basis of circumstances which arose as a direct result of a disability.”

The point that demanding photo ID from voters disenfranchises more electors than it protects will not be a surprise to anyone who has followed the debate on the issue.

James Meek wrote in the London Review of Books at the time of the local elections:

A 2014 report by the Electoral Commission arguing in favour of voter ID – which the organisation continues to back – conceded that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that there have been widespread, systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with recent elections through electoral fraud.’

But he said much more about what turns out to have been a worrying document:

The 2014 Electoral Commission report, signed off on by its then chair, Jenny Watson, is written in an odd key. Rather than enumerating, in bureaucratic, quantitative terms, the scale of the danger that voter ID is supposed to head off, it deals in hearsay and rumour. 

It names sixteen English electoral fraud hotspots, but doesn’t say, as at least one newspaper (the Times) reported it did, that these are places where electoral fraud has been shown to take place. It says they’re places where people are more likely to say they think it’s happening – where, in the report’s words, there appears to be ‘a greater risk of cases of alleged fraud being reported’.

Who are the people who suspect foul play, and whom do they suspect, and why? The commission hasn’t made public the identities or comments of its respondents in these sixteen areas – Birmingham, Bradford, Calderdale, Derby, Kirklees, Pendle, Slough, Walsall, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Coventry, Hyndburn, Oldham, Peterborough, Tower Hamlets and Woking – but the report candidly summarises their presumptions. 

‘We have heard some strongly held views,’ the report states, ‘based in particular on reported first-hand experience by some campaigners and elected representatives, that electoral fraud is more likely to be committed by or in support of candidates standing for election in areas which are largely or predominately populated by some South Asian communities, specifically those with roots in parts of Pakistan or Bangladesh.’

The Electoral Commission isn't racist, you understand, but it believes we have to humour voters who are by changing the law to put a burden on all of us and deny some people their votes.

I tried to download the report from the commission website, but was met with notices saying 'The requested page could not be found' and 'We have been the subject of a complex cyber-attack. Find out about the data affected, the potential impact, and the measures we’ve taken.'

In view of the sensitivity of some of the date the commission holds, it's worrying to come across this story on BBC News:

The Electoral Commission has confirmed it failed a basic cyber-security test around the same time hackers gained entry to the organisation.

A whistleblower told the BBC that the Commission was given an automatic fail during a Cyber Essentials audit.

Last month the Commission revealed that "hostile actors" accessed its emails and potentially the data of 40 million voters.

A spokeswoman said the Commission had still not passed the basic test.

This makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be safer to allow councils to look after their own electoral data.

And, though the idea of a body independent of government to supervise elections is appealing, the Electoral Commission does not come across as being that body.

A tribute to Neal Ascherson on his 90th birthday

Last October one of my favourite journalists, Neal Ascherson, turned 90. To mark the occasion, he was interviewed by Tim Adams in the Observer:

There are certain writers who seem singled out to bear witness to their times. Neal Ascherson first had a graphic inkling of that fate when he was a small boy in Peterborough, where his father, a naval officer, was stationed at a factory making torpedoes. 

"It would have been the summer of 1940," Ascherson says, "and I was coming back to the village where we lived, from school, on the bus. I must have been seven. This aircraft appeared as I was walking back to our house. Like all small boys I knew my bomber planes and I recognised it as a German Dornier, flying low. I didn’t hear it firing, but my mother did. She was watching for me from a window and almost died of horror. 

"Some fucker in the belly turret of the plane let off some machine gun rounds at me. I was the only person in the whole landscape, a little boy with a school bag. The noise of the engine was so loud I didn’t hear anything, and obviously he missed, but afterwards the trees all along the road had these white scars where the bullets had gone in."

Ascherson is telling me this story, with a characteristic twinkling smile, from his sofa in the tall terrace house near Highbury Fields in north London where he has lived for 40 years with his second wife and fellow journalist, Isabel Hilton. 

The previous night he had celebrated his 90th birthday at the Polish Hearth Club in Kensington where his old friend, the playwright Michael Frayn, a youthful 89, had toasted him as a man of “rare charisma, like a 19th-century romantic hero, with a kind of nobility that has always seemed a kind of human gold standard”. 

Ascherson wears those traits lightly, but you glimpse them all the same. In some ways, that near-miss from the Luftwaffe established the pattern of his life: if European history was happening, he was never far away.

And my graphic? Yes, it was Neal Ascherson who said that and not Tony Benn.

Welland Valley Rail Partnership calls for Rutland reopening

A short stretch of reopened railway line in Rutland could reconnect the communities of Kettering, Corby, Stamford, Peterborough together with Luffenham, Whittlesey, March and Wisbech.

That's the claim of the Welland Valley Rail Partnership, which describes its plans like this:

The largest piece of infrastructure is a 3.5 mile section of track between Seaton and South Luffenham. This section is a small part of the Rugby & Stamford railway, opened in the 1800s, closed by Beeching in the 1960s.

This track is required because trains coming from Corby in the south can’t turn right at Manton junction to head towards Peterborough ...

There are 8 houses on the historic trackbed, but we have identified two alternative routes that would avoid any houses. 

The next stage of the project would be a feasibility study to evaluate these alternatives running past South Luffenham, along with the viability of the entire project.

Looking back at Change UK a year on

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As Tim Adams reminds us in the Observe, a year ago Britain boasted a new centre party.

It kept changing its name, but it will probably go down in history as Change UK - if history bothers to remember it at all.

The group was launched in February 2019, when seven MPs left the Labour Party and I wrote:

It is hard to see much hope in the statement of values their Independent Group has published. It is hard to imagine anyone reading it and thinking: "At last someone has put into words what I have been feeling all these years." 

Rather than the launch of a new movement, I see seven individuals who have succumbed to the hard left's perennial tactic of making life so unpleasant for those who oppose them that they eventually walk away from the fight.

The Tories who joined shortly afterwards seemed to be having more fun, but I think I was right.

Perhaps because they had made their careers in the Labour Party, which had plenty of safe seats, the seven did not appear to have the stomach for a fight.

If you doubt me, read Gavin Shuker's explanation of why the new party declined to join others in endorsing a single Remain candidate in the June 2019 Peterborough by-election:

"We all agreed to stand down any candidates we might field in favour of a genuinely independent, pro-People’s Vote and pro-Remain candidate who had expressed an interest and intention to stand. 

"However, senior Labour figures, including senior figures campaigning for a People’s Vote, made it clear that they would strenuously disrupt the campaign and obstruct an independent Candidate, driven by fears that it would harm their party in Peterborough." 

But there was one thing the new party could have done to make an impact.

Its statement of values, as far as I can recall (the link in my original post no longer works), assumed that Brexit was bound to take place and made vague statements about what the world should look like afterwards.

But what Change UK should have done was call itself Remain or The Remain Party.

That would have given them a clear identity and quite possibly put them ahead of the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls.

I don't think it would have brought them any seats in the December 2019 general election, but it would have caused us huge problems.

The moral is that a new centre party needs a clear appeal to the voters and to offer something the Lib Dems don't. Change UK failed to do either.

On becoming exasperated with Heidi Allen

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So the Tiggers have changed their name again - they are now The Independents - and will be less of a party in future.

But there was another, less amusing, development involving Heidi Allen yesterday. She also announced the launch of Unite to Remain.

According to The New European:

The independent MP for South Cambridgeshire, who will lead the initiative, said the group will follow the blueprint of what is happening in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election, where both Plaid Cymru and the Greens have agreed to stand aside in order to support the Liberal Democrat candidate, who is seen as having the best chance of defeating the Conservatives and bringing a seat to the Remain cause.

But the parties listed here are getting on very well with no help from Heidi Allen.

And when the Tiggers did involve themselves involved in a by-election - in Peterborough - it all turned shambolic.

Who can forget Gavin Shuker's explanation of why there was not a single Remain candidate?

He said:

"We all agreed to stand down any candidates we might field in favour of a genuinely independent, pro-'people's vote' and pro-remain candidate who had expressed an interest and intention to stand. 

"However, senior Labour figures, including senior figures campaigning for a people’s vote, made it clear they would strenuously disrupt the campaign and obstruct an independent candidate, driven by fears that it would harm their party in Peterborough."

If there is a vacancy for a group like Unite to Remain it is for one that can bring in the SNP and parts of the Labour Party. And for that task you do not want a recent Conservative MP.

Even then there are problems. The Scottish Liberal Democrats have clearly concluded that there way back to significance is to unite the Unionist vote in the seats we held until 2015. Working with the SNP will not be easy for them.

I agree with Nick Tyrone: the Tiggers should accept the way the tide is running and join the Lib Dems.

Heidi Allen should be aware that if she continues down her present path, she may well find South Cambridgeshire Lib Dems putting up against her at the next general election out of sheer exasperation.

Peterborough East station from above in 1934

With political eyes turning to Peterborough, here is an aerial photograph of the vanished Peterborough East station. You will find it in the bottom right-hand corner.

Read all about Peterborough East on Disused Stations.

The surviving Peterborough station, then called Peterborough North, is right at the top of the photo.

The Tiggers' week from hell arrives in Peterborough

Whatever did for the idea of a single Remain candidate in the Peterborough by-election - Patrick Maguire of the New Statesman thinks he knows - we can agree that this statement from the Tiggers' Gavin Shuker is remarkable:

"Change UK, the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats and Renew have been working hard these last few days on a joint approach to the Peterborough by-election, recognising that we need to put the country’s interests first, securing a People’s Vote and remaining in the European Union. 

"We all agreed to stand down any candidates we might field in favour of a genuinely independent, pro-People’s Vote and pro-Remain candidate who had expressed an interest and intention to stand. 

"However, senior Labour figures, including senior figures campaigning for a People’s Vote, made it clear that they would strenuously disrupt the campaign and obstruct an independent Candidate, driven by fears that it would harm their party in Peterborough." 

Did the Tiggers really think the Labour Party would accede to the loss of one of its seats without a battle?

At least the Liberal Democrats and Greens got their nomination papers in after the breakdown of negotiations and will each have a candidate in the by-election. The Tiggers will not.

Perhaps they were afraid that would upset Labour too?

GUEST POST Forgotten Victorian folklore collectors: An undiscovered treasure trove

Francis Young on the rediscovery of forgotten riches.

Collecting folklore was all the rage in Victorian England. Although there were occasional collectors of ‘popular antiquities’ in the 17th and 18th centuries (John Aubrey is perhaps the most famous example), it was not until after William Thoms coined the word ‘folklore’ in 1846 that books dedicated to folk beliefs, stories and customs became popular.

 The foundation of the Folklore Society in 1878 inaugurated the golden age of English folklore collection, which lasted up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. As the progress of technological innovation and social change intensified, so too did fascination with England’s vanishing rural lore. Folklore collection was an activist form of nostalgia which engaged the interest of everyone from learned scholars and dilettantish amateurs to hack journalists and the proprietors of local newspapers.

The Victorian folklore collectors were a strikingly diverse group, compared with authors of other kinds of literature. The Folklore Society struggled hard to turn folklore into an academic discipline, even a ‘science’, but this effort has never really succeeded.

Folklore remained (and, to a large extent, remains to this day) the domain of enthusiastic amateurs of all social classes. Some folklorists were aristocrats or members of the landed gentry, who sought to gather up the folklore of their tenants from a great height. But one of the earliest serious collectors of local folklore was the poet John Clare, who began life as a rural labourer in Northamptonshire like the people whose songs and stories he collected.

Furthermore, many of the early folklore collectors were women, since the recording of traditional lore was a form of writing considered acceptable for female authors. These folklore collectors gathered stories from other women, producing a form of literature that almost uniquely gave voices to rural working class women.

The work of many Victorian folklore collectors, especially those who were working class or female, remains obscure. Less well-off or well-connected folklorists struggled to get their writing into print, or were only published in local newspapers. Others fell victim to publishers who did not understand how to market or promote books about folklore, or to journalistic plagiarists who appropriated the hard work of folklore collectors as their own.

The first obscure Victorian folklorist whom I had the privilege of bringing to light was Charles Dack (1847–c. 1920), a self-taught railway clerk who became volunteer curator of Peterborough Museum. Dack was able to get a few articles and short pamphlets published, but he simply did not have the financial resources to publish a larger work on the folklore of the Soke of Peterborough.

Some of Dack’s papers were later acquired by Cambridge University Library, and I relied heavily on these to produce my book Peterborough Folklore (shortlisted for the 2018 Katharine Briggs Folklore Award), which is largely a tribute to Dack’s fieldwork.

My book Suffolk Fairylore, published in 2018, similarly sought to excavate the work of some forgotten folklorists, notably the sisters Anna and Lois Fison, who were responsible for recording three folktales they heard from their old nurse in Barningham, Suffolk growing up in the 1830s: ‘Brother Mike’, ‘Cap o’Rushes’ and ‘Tom Tit Tot’.

A leading member of the Folklore Society, Edward Clodd, soon muscled in and reported ‘Tom Tit Tot’ without attribution to the Fisons; Clodd brought the tale to the attention of European folklorists, and although he later apologised to the Fison sisters, their role as the original collectors of the tales was often erased in subsequent folklore studies.

Another woman folklorist who suffered plagiarism was Margaret Helen James (1859–1938), a figure so obscure that her identity was not known until 2017. James was a cousin of the famous writer of ghost stories M.R. James. She published only one book, Bogie Tales of East Anglia (1891), a folklore collection that rapidly became very scarce but was extensively plagiarised by a journalist, Morley Adams, in 1914.

Margaret James’s Bogie Tales was the earliest book dedicated to the folklore of East Anglia, but her contribution has been entirely overlooked until now because her identity was unknown and much of the folklore she collected has been attributed to Morley Adams. I have recently edited Margaret James’s book, with a critical introduction and notes, so that it can finally be made widely available.

The 19th century’s regional folklorists were remarkable individuals – dedicated, eclectic in their interests, often eccentric and sometimes self-taught. Their writings, both published and unpublished, often remain a treasure-trove still to be uncovered.

The digitisation of local newspapers and Victorian pamphlets, making them searchable, is bringing much lost folklore recording to light, and we are currently living through a golden age of folklore research – not because there is still traditional folklore to be collected (in most cases there is not), but because folklore collected over a hundred years ago is finally emerging from the shadows.

Read more from Francis Young on his website.

Medbourne station was lost 50 years before the Beeching closures

David Southwell once gave my name to the chairman of the Blaxwich Chamber of Commerce who tired to assassinate Dr Beeching in 1965, but the first railway closures took place 50 years before that.

Here is P. Howard Anderson writing of the Great Northern lines in High Leicestershire in his Forgotten Railways of the East Midlands:

The GNR based its passenger operations on Leicester Belgrave Road station where for some years there were daily departures for Grantham, Newark and Peterborough. 

The last of these three services was short lived however. It had commenced on 2 July 1883 with four trains in each direction, but the 50-mile route via Tilton, Medbourne, Seaton and Wansford somehow managed to avoid all settlements other than small villages and in 1916 the two surviving Peterborough trains were withdrawn as a wartime economy measure. 

This brought about the closure of Medbourne station, which later burnt down.

You cross the railway on the way to Bonkers Hall Nevill Holt, though the station was a little way to the north where the Uppingham road crosses it.

Today pigs forage on the trackbed, but perhaps they remember that the line remained open for goods until 1964 or have seen the vintage photographs on the Medbourne Village site.

The Brixworth Eagle

I escaped the men in black by going to church.

All Saints Brixworth is the largest Anglo-Saxon church in Britain and it used to be larger still. A monastery standing on a hill.

There is much Roman tile incorporated into it. Though there is talk of it coming from a local villa, tests suggest much was carted in from the Roman buildings of Towcester and Leicester.

The picture above shows an ancient sculpture of an eagle, known as the Brixworth Eagle. Pevsner says this is the Eagle of St. John, dating from the 9th century; others, says Sacred Destinations, think it could be a mason's mark or a reused symbol of a Roman legion.

Whatever the truth, I have turned the photo as the eagle currently lies on its right side just inside the church's porch.

While I was at All Saints a small coach party arrived. They turned out to be from Peterborough Civic Society and I was invited to attach myself to them and get a free cup of tea in The Heritage Centre.

Two prominent Lib Dems join the Labour Party (and a third is rejected)

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In the past few days I have seen reports of two prominent Liberal Democrats leaving us for the Labour Party.

• Stephen Knight, a long-serving councillor in Richmond upon Thames who has also been a member of the London Authority in his time.
• Chris Foote Wood, a veteran councillor and parliamentary and Euro candidate perhaps best known for being Victoria Wood's brother.

Like local by-elections, these defections are close to meaningless individually but can form a significant pattern over time.

And if good people are giving up on the Liberal Democrats then we should be worried at the pattern we currently see.

Mind you, changing parties is not as easy as it sounds.

Darren Fower, a Lib Dem councillor in Peterborough who thought he had joined Labour, has been told by its constituency party that he is not welcome.

Watch the amazing dancing straw bear

I saw the straw bear dance and caper, led by his keeper and followed by musicians playing his own loping tune.

So I wrote on Saturday night after attending Whittlesey's straw bear festival. In this short clip from the 2015 festival you can hear the turn for yourself.

What I have not worked out is why the bear sometimes has two little bears with him and sometimes only one.

I suppose with all that dancing he must get peckish.

Whittlesea station: Alight for the straw bear

Whittlesey does not just have the straw bear: it also has a rather desolate railway station with staggered platforms, a signal box and a level crossing. It also favours the older spelling of the town's name.

As Wikipedia says:

All the original station buildings are long demolished, and only the two platforms remain. Unlike many railway crossings, the gates are not automatic and are still opened and closed by hand by a person who sits in a small hut-like building by the crossing.

You can see the station in more prosperous days in the Peterborough Images Archive.

At least it did a good trade on Saturday.