The Joy of Six 1174

"Like a partner in an abusive relationship, the BBC is desperate to be loved by those who despise it and everything it stands for. So, even as this tired and disgraced Government, reeling from a series of catastrophic by-election defeats, is limping timidly towards its reckoning with an increasingly hostile electorate, the BBC’s Director-General felt it necessary to abase himself before its baying backbenchers." Patrick Howse on Tim Davie's self-basement before the 1922 Committee.

Johnny Rich says the government is wrecking its own reforms of technical education.

"Young Deer’s version of the Osage tragedies opened just four months after the January 1926 arrests of William King Hale, Ernest Burkhart and John Ramsey - played by Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tay Mitchell, respectively, in Scorsese’s film - for the horrifying murders of several dozen or more Osage Indians over their oil headrights." Angela Aleiss rediscovers the Native American filmmaker James Young Deer, who first told the story of Killers of the Flower Moon.

Iain Sharpe, who was one of the most interesting Lib Dem voices in the golden age of blogging, has revived his blog Eaten by Missionaries after 11 years. Here he explains why he was away so long.

"One of the things that has always struck me about the Narnia novel is how wildly and recklessly they borrow from other narratives.  Lewis blends together Classical myth with English folklore, adds bits of The Secret Garden and the Gospels, gestures to Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Malory, and sends the reader off to wander through this dazzling landscape." Jem Bloomfield introduces his new book, which untangles the literary roots of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Katy Alston is interviewed about her new map of medieval Ludlow: "I tried to ensure that everything on the map had been researched. For example, I wanted to add boats on the river but didn’t because Ludlow didn’t have a decent boat trade route. It was blocked intermittently and very unreliable. Artists have added trows ( boats) in the past, but this was apparently just artistic licence."

Angus Wilson: Skating on Thin Ice

I have started reading Ma'am Darling, Craig Brown's book about Princess Margaret, and it is every bit as good as the reviews said it was.

The book's genesis, Brown says, lay in the way Margaret cropped up in the index of every biography from her period that he opened. 

Here is a little run he gives from Margaret Drabble's biography of Angus Wilson:

Margaret, Princess

Marie Antoinette

Market Harborough

Given my love of a good index, I found this immediately appealing, and here I am left wondering what Angus Wilson's connection with Market Harborough was.

And it has led me to think about Angus Wilson too. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose work was held in high regard when I read it avidly back in the Seventies, along with his critical studies of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. Yet he has since fallen out of print.

This 1991 BBC film was broadcast in 1991, the year he died, and tells the story of his success and his eclipse late in life.

Two quotations in defence of Baden Powell

Embed from Getty Images

This is an extract from a blog post - The generation gap and reinventing bob-a-job week - that I wrote back in 2011.

I have never bought the idea that Scouting is a sinister, right-wing movement. That view misses the essential strangeness of Scouting.

This is brought out in this passage from Tony Gould's Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes from 1983:

Colin always defended the scouts against leftish accusations of incipient fascism and the like. How could be not be loyal when the "prophetic book" was none other than Cousin Roddy's Kim?

He describes the ideology of the movement as "the weirdest blend of ritual, non-sectarian religiosity, nature and beast worship, and a passion for peoples (Red Indian, Australian aborigines, African tribesmen) whom Christian imperialism had tried for centuries to destroy."

He makes a distinction between militarism - useless to deny, he argues, what it is for which the scout should chiefly "be prepared" - and the para-militarism of the Boys' Brigade. The true military heir to Baden Powell (he writes in 1961) is Dayan. Fascist and Communist countries alike usually end up suppressing the scouts.

MacInnes, the author of Absolute Beginners, is an impeccably left-wing figure, even if (as this passage hints) he was a kinsman of Rudyard Kipling, who gave the Scouting movement its mythology.

And even if you think Baden Powell would have liked, at least in certain moods, to have founded a paramilitary movement, it didn’t turn out like that. 

Here are Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy writing in their Goodnight Campers! The History of the British Holiday Camp in 1986:

When Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was published in serial form groups of boys all over the country set up their own groups before any central organisation had been formed. 

Leslie Paul recalls how “With an astonishing perception they leapt at Scouting as at something for which they had been waiting, divining that this was a movement which took the side of the natural inquisitive, adventuring boy against the repressive schoolmaster, the moralising parson and the coddling parent.

Before the leaders knew what was happening groups were springing up spontaneously and everywhere bands of boys, with bare knees, and armed with broomsticks, began foraging through the countryside.

It seems Baden-Powell was not so much scouting for boys as chasing after them.

Uttoxeter to Macclesfield around 1960

A trip along the old North Staffordshire line from Uttoxeter to Macclesfield.

There is plenty of interesting industry, but it also takes in some lovely countryside.

We follow the Churnet valley which, for a stretch, contains s river, a canal and a railway, but no road. That stretch now forms part of a modern heritage line - the Churnet Valley Railway.

We also pass Rudyard Lake reservoir, after which Kipling was named. There is now a narrow gauge steam railway there in the form of the Rudyard Lake Steam Railway.

Six of the Best 497

Colin Talbot gets it right on the imposition of a new mayor on Greater Manchester: "The proposed changes ... have all the hall marks of a policy being made on-the-hoof, behind closed doors, by small groups of like-minded people – just the sort of ingredients identified by King and Crewe which lead to monumental blunders."

Wages are decided by the market? Nonsense, says Stumbling and Mumbling: they are social constructs.

" One of the problems about getting economic policy-makers in a room together is that you sink immediately into acronym hell." David Boyle reports on a seminar he organised at the Treasury.

"The Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian epochs are awash with visionaries who have helped sculpture landscape sensibilities ever since. Titans for whom a surname is all that is required: Blake, Dickens and Darwin; Turner and Constable; Tennyson, Wordsworth and Keats; the Bronte's and Hardy; Kipling, Conan-Doyle and Buchan; Ruskin and Morris; Emerson, Muir and Thoreau." Eddie Procter looks towards a new landscape aesthetic.

The East End on Britain's worst civilian disaster of World War II. A total of 173 men, women and children lost their lives in a crush on the stairs at Bethnal Green tube station.

The Sound of Music premiered to horrific reviews in 1965. Now it’s the most beloved and popular movie musical ever. Kevin Fallon looks at how it climbed a mountain.

From Richard III to Rudyard Kipling

#90734607 / gettyimages.com

Longstanding readers will remember that Rudyard Kipling was named after Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire.

But where did the lake, in reality a canal reservoir, get its name?

It was named after - and this is our Trivial Fact of the Day - Ralph Rudyard, who is reputed to have slain Richard III at Bosworth.

In which I fail to get a cup of tea at a Buddhist cafe

I have long felt warm towards Buddhism. That may at first have been the result of coming across the lama in Kim, but there are other reasons. Even if recent events do not wholly bear this out, I suspect that religions with no god or many gods are inherently less aggressive than monotheistic ones.

So the sign in Kelmarsh, a few miles south of Market Harborough, pointing to a Buddhist centre only a quarter of a mile away and promising refreshments intrigues me every time I pass it.

Today I tried to visit the Nagarjuna Kadampa Meditation Centre, but found its cafe closed. 

I was ready to reconsider my view of the Buddhist faith - at least you get a cup of tea from time to time with the Church of England - until I got home and found that the closure was clearly mentioned on the centre's website (even if a different reason is given).

Besides, I found plenty of points of interest in Kelmarsh even though the Hall was closed to the public for a wedding. No doubt I shall share them with you in coming days.

I shall go back to the Buddhist cafe one day when it is open. It is housed in a modern outbuilding close to the village's rather elephantine old rectory, which is now home to the centre.

Misprint of the Day

"Ye have acquired merit. Merit greater
than your knowing."

Who else can be our winner but the Guardian?

Here is Charlie Fletcher choosing his favourite adventure books:

It's an exciting story of espionage and skullduggery, but more than that it's a story about identity and choice. Kim's liking for intrigue and adventure is tempered by his love for the Llama he serves.

The generation gap and reinventing bob-a-job week

I have long worried that older people find children and adolescents threatening. Given that a recent survey found 44 per cent of adults agreeing with the proposition that young people are becoming feral, it seems I have good cause.

In part this fear arises from a more general decline in community, but I suspect it also a result of our enthusiasm for segregating the generations. And advanced opinion generally wants to increase that segregation by further raising the school leaving age and sending more teenagers to university.

If this analysis is right then most of the remedies suggested, whether liberal (more youth clubs) or punitive (youth curfews), may make things worse because they are based on the idea that it is a good thing to keep the generations apart.

But if the old fear the young because they do not meet them in normal social interactions, then increasing segregation will make them more fearful not less.

So I got to thinking about how we might get the old and young to meet again.

It would be a great if we could bring together youthful energy with older people’s need for help. This would enable the old to experience the young being helpful and do much to repair relations across the generation gap.

Of course, the scheme would have to be run by a respected organisation so that older people knew who they were letting into their homes and the youngsters had somewhere to turn if they were being exploited or were worried...

And before I knew it I had reinvented 'bob-a-job' week.

So I was pleased when I saw this story on BBC News last month:

Scouts are to volunteer their services in a dedicated UK week of action for the first time almost 20 years after "bob-a-job week" ended. 

The Scout Association is to launch Scout Community Week from 14-20 May next year, encouraging its members to do work to help their local community.

Except that it turned out that the Scout Association is not quite reinventing bob-a-job week. Instead, the report says:

Matt Rooney, head of Nottinghamshire Scouts, told BBC Breakfast that the new week of action would be different from the previous one, in that scouts would no longer go door-to-door offering to do work in return for a small donation. 

"It's not about rattling tins and brushing leaves off the neighbours driveway. It is about local communities working with the Scouts to decide on projects that they can do to make things better locally.

While having Scouts help in this way is an excellent thing, I doubt it will bring the generations together in the way that I would like to see.

So how do we do that?

Incidentally, I have never bought the idea that Scouting is a sinister, right-wing movement. That views misses the essential strangeness of Scouting. This is brought out in this passage from Tony Gould Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes from 1983:

Colin always defended the scouts against leftish accusations of incipient fascism and the like. How could be not be loyal when the "prophetic book" was none other than Cousin Roddy's Kim? 

He describes the ideology of the movement as "the weirdest blend of ritual, non-sectarian religiosity, nature and beast worship, and a passion for peoples (Red Indian, Australian aborigines, African tribesmen) whom Christian imperialism had tried for centuries to destroy." 

He makes a distinction between militarism - useless to deny, he argues, what it is for which the scout should chiefly "be prepared" - and the para-militarism of the Boys' Brigade. The true military heir to Baden Powell (he writes in 1961) is Dayan. Fascist and Communist countries alike usually end up suppressing the scouts.

MacInnes, the author of Absolute Beginners, is an impeccably left-wing figure, even if (as this passage hints) he was a kinsman of Rudyard Kipling, who gave the Scouting movement its mythology.

And even if you think Baden Powell would have liked, at least in certain moods, to have founded a paramilitary movement, it didn’t turn out like that. Here are Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy writing in their Goodnight Campers! The History of the British Holiday Camp in 1986:

When Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was published in serial form groups of boys all over the country set up their own groups before any central organisation had been formed. 

Leslie Paul recalls how “With an astonishing perception they leapt at Scouting as at something for which they had been waiting, divining that this was a movement which took the side of the natural inquisitive, adventuring boy against the repressive schoolmaster, the moralising parson and the coddling parent. Before the leaders knew what was happening groups were springing up spontaneously and everywhere bands of boys, with bare knees, and armed with broomsticks, began foraging through the countryside.

It seems Baden-Powell was not so much scouting for boys as chasing after them.

But I repeat my question. If bob-a-job week does not bring the generations together, what will?

Rudyard Kipling on Tony Blair

Mentioning Kipling yesterday reminded me of two of his Epitaphs of the War.

Common Form

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

House Points: What is Kim Howells?

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Perhaps the truth is that, like John Reid, Howells has just been a consistent authoritarian all his life. Hornsey College of Art at the sit-in point at something more libertarian, or am I just being seduced by the glamour of the sixties?

Incidentally, do people still read Kim. They certainly should do. When someone told Evan Davis on the Today programme this morning that India was Kipling's home, he scoffed at the idea. He would not have done that if he had read his best book.

Kim what?

“I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?” Kipling’s young hero asks himself repeatedly. These days there is an even harder question: What is Kim Howells?

Because today this former student radical and former Communist union official finds himself defending Britain’s intelligence services unreservedly when even many Conservatives fear they have been complicit in the torture of suspects overseas. It’s worse than that: the head of MI5 sounded more reasonable than Howells when when he raised his head the other day.

Last week Howells, who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), said any such suggestion was “a calumny and a slur and it should not be made”. For good measure he added “I don’t know what the Master of the Rolls is ... playing at.” (In my experience senior judges don’t play much. They tend to be rather serious about things.)

When it was set up, the ISC was loaded with senior parliamentarians so that it would have the clout to hold the security services to account, yet its chairman prefers to act as their cheerleader. (Perhaps they won him over by letting him play with their invisible ink?)

It has been a long journey to reach this lonely position. Howells first came to public notice in 1968 as the student organiser of a sit-in at Hornsey College of Art in North London. He reappeared in the eighties as a Communist research officer with the National Union of Mineworkers in South Wales during the strike of 1984-5 .

He became a Labour MP in 1989 and soon found himself a member of Neil Kinnock’s inner circle. One theory is that he received this rapid promotion because he was the only person who made Kinnock’s sound laconic and crisp in comparison. When Labour came back into government he filled a succession of ministerial positions, and now finds himself, in effect, the spokesman for the intelligence services.

You could say this is a common story: a young firebrand turns into a reactionary. But what story do people like Howells tell themselves. Do they detect a golden thread of principle that has run through their careers or do they prefer not to think about the past?

So the question remains: “What is Kim?”

Liberal England book quiz: Twenty opening sentences

A little fun for the Christmas season. Below are the opening sentences of 20 works of fiction (a handful of them written for children). Please leave the title and author in the comments below. I shall fill the answers in as they are guessed.

The winner gets tea at Bonkers Hall (terms and conditions apply).

The opening sentences

1. Marley was dead: to begin with.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

2. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.
The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White
3. To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
5. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Middlemarch by George Eliot

6. They changed trains at Shrewsbury.
Mystery at Witchend by Malcolm Saville
7. Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

8. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
9. A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
10. As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place.
Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
11. There were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency.
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

12. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking Thirteen.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
13. The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
14. When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

15. One morning a large wooden case was brought to the farmhouse, and Bevis, impatient to see what was in it, ran for the hard chisel and the hammer, and would not consent to put off the work of undoing it for a moment.
Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies
16. Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
17. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
18. The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.
The Man who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

19. He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling

20. The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged: and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Polly Bolton: Call of the Siren

Much Wenlock is not just the spiritual home of the Olympics. It also the venue for Festival at the Edge, which I attended a couple of times back in the 1990s.

Although it is chiefly a storytelling festival, my chief memories of it are musical. I heard a young Eliza Carthy play (with Nancy Kerr) and, best of all, I heard the Polly Bolton Band.

That year everything was running hopelessly late, and it was after midnight when the band (Polly Bolton, John Shepherd and Steve Dunachie) took the stage in the marquee. Everyone's breath was steaming in the cold air. The band played traditional folk songs and their own settings of poems by Kipling and A. E. Housman. Above all I remember Polly Bolton's wonderful folk voice.

I later found that she had recorded with a lot of people, including Ashley Hutchings. You can read more about Polly Bolton's career on her own website. As well as performing and running singing workshops, she runs a garden centre in the shadow of Brown Clee.

This video features Polly singing with Jennifer Cutting's Ocean Orchestra and is accompanied by footage from the film Ithaca.

Incidentally, the Festival at the Edge was founded by the late Richard Walker, known as "Mogsy" in storytelling circles. He was also the founder of the Malcolm Saville Society, but when I first met him at a storytelling evening at a pub in Leicester, I did not know of this shared enthusiasm.

Top author named after reservoir shock

Talking of Kipling, it is not widely known that the great man was named after Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire.

The "lake" is really an artificial reservoir built in 1797 to supply water to the Caldon Canal.

Rudyard Kipling answers Gordon Brown

Britain should have a day to celebrate its national identity, says Gordon Brown. He has urged Labour supporters to "embrace the Union flag".

The BBC report adds:

"What is our equivalent for a national celebration of who we are and what we stand for?" Mr Brown said.

"And what is our equivalent of the national symbolism of a flag in the United States in every garden?"

Isn't there something very unBritish about these sorts of display? Isn't our reticence, our lack of swagger, one of the most appealing things about us Britons? At the very least, isn't that how we like to think of ourselves?

The whole point of out national myth - the Arthurian legends - is that is something indistinct and only half remembered.

Rudyard Kipling understood this. One of his Stalky & Co school stories deals with the boys' outrage when a visiting speaker browbeats them about mysteries that an upright fellow just does not talk about:

And so he worked towards his peroration - which, by the way, he used later with overwhelming success at a meeting of electors - while they sat, flushed and uneasy, in sour disgust. After many many words, he reached for the cloth-wrapped stick and thrust one hand in his bosom. This - this was the concrete symbol of their land - worthy of all honour and reverence! Let no boy look on this flag who did not purpose to worthily add to its imperishable lustre. He shook it before them - a large calico Union Jack, staring in all three colours, and waited for the thunder of applause that should crown his effort.

They looked in silence. They had certainly seen the thing before - down at the coastguard station, or through a telescope, half-mast high when a brig went ashore on Braunton sands; above the roof of the Golf Club, and in Keyte's window, where a certain kind of striped sweetmeat bore it in paper on each box. But the College never displayed it; it was no part of the scheme of their lives; the Head had never alluded to it; their fathers had not declared it unto them. It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eyes? Happy thought! Perhaps he was drunk...

They discussed the speech in the dormitories. There was not one dissentient voice. Mr. Raymond Martin, beyond question, was born in a gutter, and bred in a Board-school, where they played marbles. He was further (I give the barest handful from great store) a Flopshus Cad, an Outrageous Stinker, a Jelly-bellied Flag-flapper (this was Stalky's contribution), and several other things which it is not seemly to put down.

The snobbery is hateful, but you can see that Kipling - the poet of Empire would have no sympathy for Gordon Brown's idea. It would make Brown, in Stalky's language, "a Jelly-bellied Flag-flapper".

That idea stems from Brown's love of all things American, from New Labour's anxiety about the multiracial society it professes to celebrate and from their socialist desire to police our emotions.