"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
Showing posts with label Richmond upon Thames. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richmond upon Thames. Show all posts
"Every week I read of people seeking planning permission for children’s homes whose backgrounds are in real estate, building, motor dealerships, pubs, caravan parks and light engineering. The one thing they don’t have is experience in the care of children and young people." Illegal children’s homes are thriving because profit has broken the care system. argues Martin Barrow.
Russell Brandom says Mark Zuckerberg’s AI manifesto shows exactly why people don’t like AI: "Even as Zuckerberg tries to paint a picture of the wonderful future abundant superintelligence will bring, he keeps reminding us of all the ways it’s likely to go wrong."
Erin Clabough on the reasons for student anxiety: "Grades aren’t the only source of pressure that students experience. Social comparison plays a role, too, along with the pressure to only answer questions when they’re already sure, to never seem confused and to stay constantly productive. Based on my experience and research, kids pick up on the message that they should keep their curiosity at a 5 out of 10 scale, instead of a 10 out of 10, especially if it strays outside the curriculum."
"The web had not yet become a pure retrieval machine. It still had a culture of exploration, and many services were designed to help users browse topical categories rather than fire a query into a universal index. In that world, a webring or directory was not a compromise. It was often the main event." Alan Bradley remembers life before Google.
"The suits don’t own cricket. The suits just manage the top floor. The soul of the game lives right here on the grass, kept alive by the people who simply care too much to let it go. And as long as there’s a Saturday afternoon, a cold drink, and a game to watch at Barnes, my heart isn’t going anywhere else." Elizabeth Ammon loves club cricket.
Nathen Amin travels to Lisbon on the trail of Perkin Warbeck.
Chris Dillow on Labour's mistaken strategy: "All good businesspeople know that it’s easier to keep a customer than to win a new one; that you can’t always choose your customers; and that one must never 'do a Ratner' and insult your customers. In ignoring all this Labour has been simply grossly amateurish.
Keyvan Hosseini and Dawn-Marie Walker say their research shows that the electric SUV boom is a problem for climate, health and equity: "Larger vehicles can also make streets more dangerous, especially for children. A study using Great Britain crash data found that children aged 0-18 hit by SUVs, rather than passenger cars, had 77 per cent higher odds of fatal injury. For children under nine, the odds were more than three times higher."
"Too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning." David Didau argues that systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better.
"Boudicca and co surprised the Reserve staff by digging canals. Because there are plenty of trees on the edge of the lake, the presumption had been that they would not require canals. The beavers knew otherwise, and the ditches are altering the way water flows around the site. They’ve built two lodges and, as well as stripping bark and eating foliage, have begun to fell some larger trees. In one area, they have cut down most of the young saplings." Isabella Clarke reports on the remarkable success of the Nene Valley beavers.
Discontinued Notes has been to Somerset House to see the the M.C. Escher exhibition.
"The Station Hotel, the original home of the Crawdaddy Club where the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds played some of their earliest gigs, is now a gastro-pub. L'Auberge, the coffee bar at the bottom of Richmond Hill where beatniks and then hippies gathered to trade gossip and other substances, has become a branch of Nando’s. A little further up the hill, there is no trace of Sandover Hall (another early venue for the Stones), Potter’s Music Shop, or the Hanging Lamp, one of the key sixties folk clubs." David Buckingham goes in search of the South West London venues that fostered British rhythm and blues.
It's easy for a Liberal Democrat with a good memory to find Zack Polanski irritating. His story that he stood for his local council as Lib Dem because he cared about proportional representation, but then joined the Greens because he found he agreed with them more, doesn't square with what we recall of him.
He didn't just stand for his borough council, he also stood for the London Assembly and was dead keen to be our candidate in the 2016 Richmond Park by-election. His complaints when he wasn't selected filled Lib Dem social media for ages afterwards.
In fairness to him, my best researches have found no trace of any democratic process behind that selection: Sarah Olney seems to have been simply announced as the candidate. If this was the case, it was understandable, as the party had found itself without a single woman MP after the carnage of the previous year's general election.
There was little sign of Polanski the eco-populist in those days. Here he is writing on Lib Dem Voice right after that election:
I want a leader who is proud of our Government record, who doesn't have blinkers about where we failed to communicate effectively with the electorate whilst still being immensely proud of what Nick and our colleagues achieved in office.
Well, we can all change our minds – in fact, politics would be better if more people changed their minds – but maybe the thread of continuity between old Zack and new Zack is that both are very good at judging what his audience wants to hear.
Again courtesy of Lib Dem Voice, you can also watch Polanski's performance at the conference rally from 2015 – his speech starts at 24:55 and then, you've been warned, there's music.
The media's attempted gotchas against Polanski – his council tax, his failure to vote and, most worrying if justified, his claimed professional qualifications – don't seem to have deterred voters, but they do suggest a rather disorganised individual.
What they should spend more time asking Polanski, of course, is where the substantial policies to support his rhetoric are and why he so rarely talks about the environment.
But however irritated we Lib Dems feel, a significant section of the electorate feels sympathy with his views. And they are voters – young, urban and radical, but without ancestral loyalty to Labour – that a Liberal party should be winning over.
Writing in the London Review of Books, James Butler gives a kinder account of Polanski's progress, suggesting that his journey is typical of that also taken by many of his new voters:
Polanski’s political journey – he started out as a Liberal Democrat – is sometimes framed as opportunism but in fact reflects the often radicalising economic experience of millennials now approaching middle age.
Many of the instinctive policy positions of Green supporters are the common sense of a decade ago: opposition to austerity, borrowing for infrastructure, rent control and social housebuilding.
But the environment has changed: borrowing is harder, energy supply unstable, inflation a drag, wages miserable; the world is less stable, chaos and conflict are inevitable. There is an opportunity to frame a coherent Green politics in response to this moment – an egalitarian politics of public affluence and energy sovereignty – but it cannot be a cargo-cult Corbynism.
What do we Lib Dems have to say to people radicalised by their economic experience over the last 10 or 20 years? Providing a good answer to that question will be key if we are again to be able to win seats outside the affluent South of England.
"Am I alone in thinking our response to the local election results is a little too self-congratulatory?" asked David Vigar on Liberal Democrat Voice this morning. We can safely say he is not alone, judging by comment on that blog and further afield.
No one has ever asked me to devise an idea for Ed Davey’s next stunt. But if I was approached from on high, I might suggest having him wade through a river of treacle.
That’s how it feels trying to spread the Liberal Democrat message in the North of England these days.
It’s been an underwhelming set of elections in our part of the country. Despite some notable and very important exceptions such as Stockport, Preston and Sefton, the Liberal Democrats have failed to cut through with what has been a predominantly nationally motivated electorate.
We saw major success stories in Brent and Ealing, with the local parties there making significant gains on Labour. Our ground game all across London was a marvel to watch, and the establishment of a 100 per cent majority in Richmond, as well as maintaining/improving large majorities in Kingston and Sutton is something to champion going forward.
These are emblematic of our strong ground game resonating well, when there was a record of results behind them.
However, it is also important to accept the reality of the situation that we have underperformed in many areas, even just in London. Our major target of Merton has fallen flat with only two councillors gained.
Also, in Lambeth, Southwark, Islington and my home borough of Croydon, expected gains have somehow evaporated and in some areas, paper candidate Greens in areas like Newham, Barking and Enfield have won without ever campaigning!
While Tara Foster detected a malaise than goes beyond disappointing election results:
In my view, from 2024, we've been electorally and politically stagnant, and the Party has forgotten how to be an effective campaigning machine. Many MPs are well-educated, but their expertise is being wasted.
For example, we don’t have the tax experts working on treasury matters, and as a result we had Daisy Cooper come out with the politically-weightless idea of a Trumpian "Department of Growth" with a tagline of "Get Britain Growing Again."
James Graham, a fellow survivor of the golden age of Lib Dem blogging, has also gone deeper on his own Quaequam Blog!:
The party continues to do well in places where it has been doing well in recent years, and continues to decline in areas where it took a knock during the coalition years. The areas it does well tend to be rural, formerly Conservative dominated areas and it continues to decline in areas that historically were dominated by Labour. In the latter areas, the Greens have completely eclipsed the party.
Even in places where the party was doing well in recent history, such as Hornsey and Friern Barnet (most of which represented by Lynne Featherstone until 2015) and Manchester Withington (most of which was represented by John Leech), the Greens have replaced the Lib Dems as the main challengers to Labour. Wales, with the exception of a single MS in the form of Jane Dodds and a smattering of councillors, is now a no-go area for the party. ...
As some have pointed out, the extent to which the Lib Dems now represent the richest parts of the UK is quite striking; at the top end, Lib Dem MPs represent even wealthier areas than the Conservatives. No wonder Ed Davey has been quite as hostile to any suggestion of redistributing wealth as he has been over the last couple of years.
And this is my worry too. If we are increasingly drawn to campaigning on the grievances of these comfortably off constituents, then our policies are going to seem at best irrelevant to much of the country.
Let me end with an observation on Keir Starmer and Ed Davey from the Commentary in the current issue of Liberator:
There are worrying similarities in the predicaments of the leaders of what are traditionally the two main centre-left parties as they try to contend with both the Greens and Reform.
Both became leader by replacing an extremely unsuccessful predecessor, both conveyed an “adults are back in charge” air of calm competence and both won bigger than they can have dared hope in 2024.
Since then they have both shown little sign of knowing what to do with that success, both have struggled to manage a larger than expected parliamentary party and both have been unable to clearly articulate in public any narrative about what their party is for and what it wants to do.
While Starmer has made a series of u-turns Davey has made a series of diversion side turnings while not really getting anywhere. British missiles? A new Magna Carta? Splitting the Treasury? Defence bonds? Some of these ideas may have merits but nothing links them and they get the public no nearer to knowing what sort of country they would be living in were the Lib Dems in power.
Our Trivial Facts of the Day both come from a post by Richard James, who was my captain when I played chess for Richmond & Twickenham long ago. He is writing about the annual Varsity chess match:
Aleister Crowley, "the wickedest man in the world", ... played for Cambridge in 1896 and 1897, while Harold Davidson, "the rector who was eaten by a lion" (he was actually mauled rather than eaten, but that’s jumping ahead), represented Oxford between 1901 and 1903.
As I've said before, it's great fun on my Trivia Desk, but you have to work weekends. Both Aleister Crowley and Harold Davidson (AKA the Rector of Stiffkey) have good Wikipedia entries.
William Lane has discovered a new political category: the Oxford Liberal Democrat. Who is she and what does she want from us?
It was with great interest that I read the latest piece from Rose Runswick over at the New Model Liberal blog, as it made an excellent case that the Lib Dems have exhausted their potential pool of Tory–Lib crossover voters. This is a point I have also made in the past, but I refrained then from recommending a subsequent shift in the party’s approach as I am not a Lib Dem member.
Things have changed, however, and it’s clear from rumblings online that many Lib Dem members are not happy with being stuck on 15 per cent of the vote, and are looking with slightly jealous eyes at the Greens' current poll surge. There seems to be an appetite among Britain’s liberals for a change in direction.
So how do I suggest the Lib Dems expand their appeal? Well, to be clear I don;t think that lies in a populist turn à la Polanski. For one thing the existing Lib Dem voter base would hate it, and for another I’m unconvinced this new populist direction will actually benefit the Greens in the long term.
Personally, I think the answer to that question lies in analysing their existing voter base. It was @Amrk on Bluesky who introduced me the concepts of "Devon Lib Dems" and "Twickenham Lib Dems", terms which immediately gelled with me as someone who grew up in the liberalising South East from 1996–2014, and has met liberal voters in both camps. For those unfamiliar with these terms, I will loosely define them now:
Devon Lib Dems: Independently minded small l liberal voters, of the type that used to be called "nonconformist". They usually live in villages or rural towns, and work in small, domestic-facing businesses or agriculture. These liberals tend towards localism, often take an interest in local history and folklore, and tend to identify heavily with their region.
These voters were the backbone of the 20th-century Liberal Party. They are often found in rural areas of the UK, including the South West of England, the Scottish Highlands and the Welsh countryside (although there they tend to vote for Plaid Cymru).
Twickenham Lib Dems: Successful, liberally minded voters who 40 years ago would have been liberal Tories. Instinctively liberal and internationalist, but focused on economic issues, these voters are often current or former business owners or well-paid private sector workers. They tend towards being well-off homeowners, although this category is increasingly including middle-income, frustrated private renters.
These voters are the spiritual successors to the prosperous middle class that made the 19th century Liberal Party such a dominant force, and whose move to the Tories in the 1920s sealed its fate as a major party. Their move back towards liberalism has been a major (and underdiscussed) feature of British politics since the early 1990s.
So, if these are the two main types of existing Lib Dem voter, how can the party move beyond them? The clue is in the increasing numbers of frustrated middle-income voters turning to the Lib Dems.
Here I will introduce my own concept, the "Oxford Lib Dem".
The Oxford Lib Dem is a white-collar private sector worker, living in a prosperous area of the country but struggling with stagnant wages and high rent. She may have a background in the upper working/lower middle class, but through education has gained a place in the solidly middle classes, either through traditional service industries (law, consulting) or Britain’s new growth industries (biosciences, tech).
Probably somewhere between 27 and 45, she is staunchly anti-Conservative but either suspicious of or despondent with Labour, while being too business-minded to be tempted by the Greens. She shares the internationalist focus of the Twickenham Lib Dem, but lacks their wealth and background. Similarly, she agrees with the Devon Lib Dem on the importance of place and local area, but values her life in a prosperous urban town or small city.
As you may have guessed reading this, this voter is an amalgamation of people I know personally from my experiences living and travelling in prosperous parts of the country like York, Surrey, Clapham and Oxford. Although lovely places to live in, these areas combine a high cost of living with often stagnant wages for early-to-middle white-collar workers, leading to a constant drumbeat of anxiety around inflation and the prospect of job loss.
This quite possibly led our voter to opt for Labour in 2024, but she will have been disappointed since then. Given that she will never vote Conservative or Reform, and will be put off by the overtly left politics of Polanski, she is a prime target for Lib Dem strategists. Winning her over could be the key to finally breaking out of the 15 per cent vote ceiling the Lib Dems seem stuck under, and finally getting up to 20 per cent of the vote.
However, I must inject a note of caution here. One of the greatest desires of our Oxford Lib Dem is to get out of the hated private renting market, and into her own home. This sets her apart from our other two kinds of Lib Dem, for whom housing is less of a concern. While our Oxford Lib Dem is probably not a YIMBY in the political sense, she does support housebuilding, bringing down house prices and greater infrastructure development.
Appealing to this voter would mean taking the Young Liberal approach to development, which could anger some existing Lib Dem voters. To be clear, this wouldn’t mean totally abandoning existing Lib Dem policy or outsourcing it to housing developers, but it would require a rethink of the national Lib Dem approach to development.
William Lane is an independent political analyst, who writes at the Party Animal Substack. You can also find him on Bluesky.
There's a story on MyLondon about a deselected Labour councillor in Brent who has joined the Tories after first demanding to be allowed to fight a particular seat for the Liberal Democrats.
I am reminded of the days when David Icke wanted to be the Liberal candidate for the Isle of Wight, but wasn't interested in any other seat.
The MyLondon report says:
A text message sent to the LDRS from a source at the Brent Liberal Democrat Group appears to show him expressing disappointment at the Party for not offering him the seat he demanded in Alperton. Instead, he was told "seats are not given away like sweets".
Brent Liberal Democrats Chair, Virginia Bonham-Carter, told the LDRS, whilst the party did have conversations with Cllr Rajan-Seelan about joining the party, they "decided quickly that he wasn’t acceptable to us, as he could not meet our expectations."
She added: "Labour’s decline in Brent has been clear for some time, and this latest episode involving a deselected Labour Councillor underlines how deep their problems run. Local people deserve councillors who focus on residents’ needs, not on party infighting and personal ambition."
A little research shows that Virginia Bonham Carter (no hyphen) is the daughter of Mark Bonham Carter and the granddaughter of Violet Bonham Carter.
Writing this reminded me that I knew a Tim Bonham-Carter when I lived in Kew (well, North Sheen) back in the early Eighties. I saw sad to find that he died a few years ago.
To the best of my knowledge neither he nor Virginia is related to Lord Bonkers' old friend, the London gang boss Violent Bonham Carter.
I'm late to the party on last week's Guardian interview with Zach Polanski, but I've still decided to come.
Reading it today, I find it's not the first time the Guardian has allowed the politician to present a carefully edited version of his past without challenge.
Zoe Williams1 tells us that Polanksi:
started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016. “That was for one very clear reason,” he says. “Proportional representation – it’s always been really important to me.” He joined the Greens the following year...
But Polanski didn't stand in a London borough election: he stood for the Greater London Assembly. And, a prominent figure on social media, he clearly had higher ambitions with the Liberal Democrats.
Some say he had his eye on the by-election in Richmond Park, and made up his mind to leave the Lib Dems once the local party decided to stick with Sarah Olney as their candidate.
And then there was that notorious article where he told a Sun journalist he could make her breasts bigger by using hypnosis.2
Reading it now, it looks like a puff piece for his business rather than a hatchet job. Yet Williams defends it on the grounds that "he was only just 30".
But this is not the first such interview I've seen in the Guardian. Here's Decca Aitkenhead profiling the late Alistair Darling back in 2008:
Studying law at Aberdeen, he stood for election in the student union, but not for a party. "I was just quite interested in getting things done." His manifesto favoured "strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory". When he joined the Labour party in 1977, he never expected to be more than a member.
The truth was rather different and will surprise anyone who remembers Darling in days as Gordon Brown's chancellor.
Here's George Galloway remembering a meeting with Darling in 1973:
When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf.
And joining Labour didn't curb his militant tendencies:
Later ... he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze.
The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy.
Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left.
The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time.
The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been.
Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.
A reader asks: So what's the moral of all this?
Liberal England replies: I suppose it's that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the Guardian.
The reader persists: That a bit obvious, isn't it?
Liberal England admits: I suppose it is. To be honest, I just wanted to repeat that George Galloway story one last time. Oh, and to show that I've found how to do the numbers for footnotes in superscript.3
Notes
Nevertheless, I won't hear a word against Zoe Williams: in my press officer days she was always a pleasure to deal with. Polly Toynbee, by contrast, once made me miss my train.
I'm not scandalised by that Sun article, it's just that it reminds me of when P.G. Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts, turns out to be a designer of ladies' underwear. And Polanski's suggested strategy of concentrating on winning an urban, Corbynite vote will appeal to many Green members.
Mourning the death of Adrian Slade the other day, I initially wrote that he was the Liberal Party's first councillor on the Greater London Council.
I should have known that Stanley Rundle had been the member for Richmond upon Thames before him, because I heard many tales of the contribution he made to local politics when I lived there in the early Eighties.
But I had not heard of Ruth Shaw, who represented Sutton and Cheam between 1973 and 1977.
Ruth died in 2024, and Sutton Liberal Democrats have a page celebrating her life - I have borrowed the photo here from it.
The page lists her lifetime of work for the Liberals and then Liberal Democrats:
Ruth was one of a small group of people who kept the Liberal Party alive in Sutton & Cheam through the lean years of the 1950s. She:
was a founder member of Sutton & Cheam Young Liberals in 1950;
was the first ever Liberal councillor on Sutton & Cheam Borough Council in 1961 (finally winning a seat on her seventh attempt);
was elected to the GLC in 1973 to represent Sutton and Cheam, one of only two Liberals on the council. She put her victory down to "community politics" and the party's opposition to the Ringway 3 project. She was given a place on the GLC's transport committee;
was the first (and last!) Liberal Greater London Councillor for Sutton & Cheam 1973-77;
was Sutton councillor for Worcester Park North 1986 to 1990 and North Cheam 1990 to 2002;
was named an Honorary Alderman by Sutton Council in 2011;
held most Local Party offices, including Chair and President.
The page also records what Ruth said to the Sutton Guardian when she was awarded and OBE for her services to politics:
"I didn't see this coming at all.I was absolutely astonished and obviously very pleased. To get this recognition is wonderful although I don't even feel like I've done all that much - although I must have been doing something right.
"I just believed liberalism was the right way to go. In the '50s people on the doorstep told me it had no future but I couldn't see it that way. Now the Liberal Democrats have been in power here for more than 25 years."
It's obvious that Ruth's early work in Sutton and Cheam did much to make Graham Tope's victory in the 1973 Westminster by-election there possible.
Alistair Carmichael is the latest guest on Iain Dale's All Talk podcast, talking about his own career and about the former Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond.
The Liberals and then Liberal Democrats have held the Orkney and Shetlands seat ever since Grimond won it at the 1950 election.
Thanks to Caron Lindsay for flagging this up on Lib Dem Voice - follow that link to see a photograph of a very young Alistair. He is his usual engaging self in the podcast.
I never met Jo Grimond. The nearest I came to it was in the 1983 general election, when he did a public meeting for us in Kew. Being a good activist, I went canvassing instead - and there were no certificates and medals from Mark Pack in those days.
He gave his speech, I was told later, and then said, looking at the timetable he'd been given:
"It says 'Questions' here, but as I'm stone deaf these days, that's no use. I'll just come round the hall and meet you all."
And so he did, charming everybody.
But I did meet Laura Grimond, a significant figure in the party in her own right in her day, and also the wife of Jo, daughter of Violent Bonham Carter, the gender-fluid gangster even the Krays feared Violet Bonham Carter and granddaughter of Mr Asquith.
She came to Market Harborough a couple of times in the Eighties, and I've found a photo from those days in the British Newspaper Archive. It shows Laura Grimond, Phil Knowles (the current leader of Harborough District Council) and me. One day I'll share it with you.
I knew that Adrian Slade had died because I saw we were discussing commissioning an obituary of him for the next Liberator. But I had not found any announcement of the sad news until this morning, when I saw this notice in The Times:
ADRIAN SLADE Adrian died peacefully on 24th January 2025, aged 88. CBE, cabaret performer,adman and Liberal politician. Husband of Sue. Father of Nicola and Rupert. Much loved by friends and family.
Discussing comedy with Adrian was one of the perks of helping out with production of Liberal Democrat News at party conference - I have mentioned his memories of Peter Cook, whom he auditioned for the Cambridge Footlights, here more than once.
But Adrian was also a politician. He won Richmond at the GLC elections of 1981, defeating Edward Leigh in the process. to become its only Liberal member.
What was impressive was how well known he was. When we went down to the bar after a Liberal meeting, there were always people who came up to him to sat hello or ask for advice. If Adrian had been the parliamentary candidate, we might well have won Richmond earlier than 1997.
That GLC victory was not without cost for Adrian, as the Conservatives contested the election lodged an election petition, contesting the result because of technical errors in Slade's return of expenses. The election result stood, but he was left with potentially ruinous legal expenses. His showbiz friends organised a comedy evening to help pay the bills - sadly the link in my post that told you who was there no longer works.
His experiences of Ken Livingstone were more pleasant. When he went to see Ken, the GLC leader as a new councillor, and was asked which committees he would like to be on. They then fell to discussing where Adrian should sit so as to upset the Tories most.
So farewell to Adrian Slade. We shan't see his like again.
Jago Hazzard gives a thorough and entertaining history of this long-neglected, but now thriving, London station. I too have stood beside the Famous Cock and found that fragment of the original grand Victorian building.
The North London Railway's City terminus at Broad Street has disappeared into history, but in the early Eighties I was a regular user.
The London Chess League matches, in which I played for the Richmond and Twickenham club, all took place at the nearby Bishopsgate Institute. When my game was over, I would catch a late train from Broad Street all the way home to Kew Gardens.
In case you don't believe me, here's the indicator board at Richmond in those days.
Anyway, you can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.
Jan Dehn outlines the many questions being considered by the government inquiry into what happened on Alderney under Nazi occupation: "It is known that the camp held Russian and Ukrainian prisoners as well as Spanish Republicans, captured French resistance fighters, and jews, but precisely how many people were there, who they were, and where exactly they came from remains clouded in mystery. There are also suggestions in some quarters that there are mass graves on Alderney, but where they are located and who is buried in the pits is unknown."
Carlos Moreno, the father of the '15-minute city' has a new book out, reports Feargus O'Sullivan.
"'It’s become increasingly mundane to see intrusive and inappropriate surveillance technologies, once reserved for the police and prison estate, deployed in our schools,' says Caitlin Bishop, senior campaigns officer at Privacy International." Adele Walton on the dangerous rise of surveillance in UK classrooms.
Paul Powlesland tells the tragic story of Hoad’s Wood, used as a landfill and ignored by authorities, and suggests it shows we need Rights of Nature and guardianship.
"A parade in Rogation Week around the old borders of one parish ended in 1751 with an incursion into Richmond Park, which had been built a century before by king Charles I by buying, acquiring and enclosing land from several parishes - an act that had caused decades of anger and friction, as people not only lost access to common land for subsistence, collecting firewood, grazing livestock etc, but were also denied access along traditional footpaths." London Radical Histories unpacks the many meanings of the ceremony of Beating the Bounds.
Former environment minister Zac Goldsmith has been banned from driving after being caught speeding four times in London in less than four months.
Lord Goldsmith pleaded guilty the four incidents at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Thursday. The driving offences took place between late April and early August last year. He was banned until mid-March.
Zac Goldsmith limped into the last hustings of the Richmond Park by-election an hour late after being struck by his own car.
The former London mayoral candidate was not badly hurt but his trousers were "shredded" when a volunteer driving his car clipped him while they were out canvassing.
The collision in New Malden happened as he was due on stage at the Richmond Society’s hustings - his last chance to debate publicly with his by-election rival, Liberal Democrat Sarah Olney.
Arriving an hour late after going home to change, he said he was "so sorry" for missing the start of such an "extraordinarily important event".
What it is to have been blogging a long and have a good memory for political trivia!
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.
Richmond, Twickenham and Kingston aren't just a cradle of Liberal Democrat ambitions.They also played an important part in the British popular music of the 1960s.
You can here the story in Raving Upon Thames, the latest edition of The Strange Brew podcast:
Discover how Richmond upon Thames changed the face of rock music. Richmond’s Crawdaddy Club launched the careers of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds while at Eel Pie Island, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page found inspiration.
From 1956 to 1971, the riverside suburbs of Richmond, Twickenham, and Kingston were the breeding ground for a music scene that rocked the era. Join us as Andrew Humphreys describes a lost chapter in the story of the Swinging Sixties.
This is not what you expect to find when you do a little gentle research into the BBC Children’s Hour dramatisations of Malcolm Saville’s early Lone Pine books:
Leicester Evening Mail, Monday 2 February 1959
Actor accused of murder
TV MAN'S ALLEGED ADMISSION
WHEN CAVAN JOHN MALONE (22), actor, of TT Beverley Court, Wellesby-road, Chiswick, London, appeared at Acton today, accused of murdering a South African, Det.-Supt. John Manning said that Malone told him, "Yes, I did it."
After a three-minute appearance Malone was remanded in custody for a week, charged with the murder of Jan Momberg, who was found dead in a sixth-floor flat at Beverley Court.
22-YEAR-OLD actor was said by the prosecution at Acton, London, today to have fetched a knife and cut the throat of another man during a “free- for-all in a flat. He then followed it up with three blows with the knife in the man’s back, it was stated.
The proceedings in Acton were the committal hearing, and Malone was sent by it for trial at the Old Bailey. Hanging was still the mandatory sentence for murder.
The Gay Dolphin Adventure on the radio
The Gay Dolphin Adventure, the third of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine books, was the second to be dramatised by BBC Children's Hour. It went out on the Home Service in six parts in January and February 1946.
A new dramatisation of the book, with a different cast, was broadcast in October and November 1949. It was again in six parts, but David Schutte says this was a shortened version of the 1946 production.
The first episode of this new dramatisation was billed thus in the Radio Times:
Ever since October 1946 when 'The Gay Dolphin Adventure' was first broadcast children have clamoured to hear it again. It is one of the best of Malcolm Saville's books containing all the ingredients calculated to tickle the palate of children from seven to seventy.
Here is a tale of hidden treasure set against the picturesque background of Rye with its ancient smuggler's inn. Jon and Penny arriving for a fortnight's holiday have no inkling of the excitements in store for them at 'The Gay Dolphin.'
It's traditional for adult readers of the Lone Pine books to complain about ‘those awful twins,’ but as I started reading them at such a young age the twins were naturally the characters I most identified with – Dickie in particular.
With the possible exception of Pat the dog in the Ladybird Key Words reading scheme, he was my first literary hero. And in the 1949 production of The Gay Dolphin Adventure Dickie was played by a boy called Cavan Malone.
Cavan Malone
Born on 25 November 1936, Cavan Malone was the son of Danny Malone, a popular Irish tenor and his wife Hazel, who ran the Corona Stage School in London and was later to run a highly successful talent agency. Not altogether surprisingly with that background, he became a child actor.
His most prominent film role was in the 1947 weepy When the Bough Breaks, where he played a boy who had been adopted as a baby, only to be returned by the courts to his birth mother. As you can see from the clip below, he finds it hard to settle in his new home. (And, yes, that is Bill Owen playing his birth mother's husband.)
Kinematograph Weekly said he gave 'easily the best performance' in what sounds an indifferent film: 'He shows his elders how to deal with "ham".' Other reviews were less complimentary.
Malone also had a small part in Kind Hearts and Coronets as Graham, Sibella's brother, in the scenes from Louis Mazzini's childhood.
He continued to find work as a teenager on both radio and television for the BBC and also on the stage. There are news stories about him appearing at the Old Vic and in Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, as well as in a provincial production of Look Back in Anger with Vanessa Redgrave.
At his trial, the Daily Mirror described him as:
a veteran of hundreds of stage, film and TV appearances though he is only twenty-two, had his first film role at the age of nine. More recently he had a part in the ITV 'William Tell' series.
That sounds an exaggeration, but there was no doubt he, unlike most child stars, had made a successful transition to an adult acting career.
The trial
Malone was accused of murdering a South African salesman, Jan Momberg. The Daily Herald takes up the story:
Momberg forced his way into Mrs Malone's luxury flat in Beverley Court. Wellesley-road. Chiswick. Visiting Mrs. Malone was her friend, Mrs. Bessie Momberg, who had been living apart from her husband.
Momberg attacked Mrs. Malone. Mrs. Momberg shouted to Cavan: "You've got to help your mother. He will probably kill her."
An eight-inch-long kitchen knife was handed to Cavan, who took it with trembling fingers. He showed the jury how he used it after parrying a blow from Momberg.
Cavan said: "Momberg drew back and I noticed blood on his throat. I was horrified. I ran towards the lounge, and Momberg came after me.
"He looked terrifying, and gripped me on the shoulder.
"I hit him with my right arm to make him let go. but I forgot entirely about the knife and was horrified when I discovered I had then stabbed him."
And that, together with some strategic blackening of Momberg's character, was enough. The jury took just 13 minutes to find Malone not guilty of both murder and manslaughter.
After acquittal
Cavan Malone went back to acting for a few more years after the trial. He had the distinction of figuring in the first Coronation Street wedding as his character, Gordon Davies, married Joan Walker, the daughter of the formidable landlady of the Rover's Return, Annie Walker.
He did not enjoy a long run in Corrie, as Gordon and Joan settled in Derby after their wedding. If Doris Speed, who played Annie Walker well into her nineties, needed a break. viewers would be told she had gone to stay with her daughter.
In real life Malone married twice, and a post on an old BBC page suggests he had a son called Stephen.
He seems to have given up acting early in the 1960s - his penultimate entry on IMDb is for an uncredited role in 633 Squadron, which was released in 1964.
He became a drummer, playing in jazz bands and with his friend Chris Sandford, who was a fellow Coronation Street actor and briefly a pop star.
The last news story I can find about Malone is from the Western Daily Press of 1 May 1975. He was working for his mother's talent agency and defending a hostess on the wholesome television quiz Mr. and Mrs. after photographs from a nude modelling session she had done a few years before had come to light.
Cavan Malone died of heart failure in 1982 at Richmond upon Thames, aged only 45. I can find no obituary for him nor even where his grave is.
This is not the story I expected to be blogging when I looked up those Children's Hour dramatisations of Malcolm Saville's books. But one thing should be emphasised:
