"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
The Guardian reports that a host of transactions involving Reform UK's most senior figures, and some donations to the party, have led bankers to report potential money-laundering concerns to the National Crime Agency (NCA).
According to the newspaper, finance industry figures have raised at least four suspicious activity reports (SARs) relating to transactions involving senior figures in Reform. It names them as:
One relates to a £1m donation made to Britain Means Business, a fundraising organisation for Reform UK, before the last general election. Half of the £1m was then transferred by Tice, as director of the company, to Reform UK. Renamed from Leave Means Leave, Britain Means Business is a company that is used to help fund Reform. The £1m seemingly came from the aristocrat and Reform UK donor Fiona Cottrell. In this instance, the Guardian understands bank staff were not satisfied that the funds had ultimately come from her. The NCA has sought help from a foreign partner agency to trace the original source of the funds.
Two other SARs relate to a loan from George Cottrell to Tice. The loan was made shortly before Tice finalised a property purchase and made a party donation, and was not repaid until after those two transactions were completed, according to sources. George Cottrell is the son of Fiona Cottrell, and is a convicted fraudster, former deputy treasurer of Ukip and close associate of Farage.
A fourth relates to the £5m gift from the Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne to Farage, which was first revealed by the Guardian in April.the
The Guardian says Richard Tice, Reform's deputy leader, has declined to answer any of the questions put to him and, via lawyers, threatened to injunct the paper prevent the publication of these details.
Earlier this week, the same paper the Guardian revealed that the undisclosed and much-discussed £5m gift to the Reform's leader, Nigel Farage, from a cryptocurrency billionaire shortly before the 2024 general election had been reported to the NCA.
As far as Farage is concerned, this week is resembling the scene late in Shakespeare's King John where messengers arrive from all directions with bad news. And it's only Wednesday.
Later. The Guardian has published a second article with more details of the transactions in question.
This production had had a highly acclaimed run on the RSC stage in 1963 and was directed for BBC Television in 1965 by Robin Midgley and Michael Hayes. It was filmed on the stage at Stratford-On-Avon using a multi-camera set up, resulting in a much more fluid filmic result with a greater variety of shots and even the use of hand-held cameras for the battle scenes.
In this respect the production was a forerunner of today’s recorded theatre productions which are regularly streamed to cinemas and homes throughout the world.
The Wars of the Roses was an abridgement of four Shakespeare plays – the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III – into three plays: Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III.
You can find an extract from the third of these above. McClelland is playing Edward V, the elder of the Princes in the Tower, having played the similarly ill-fated Edmund, Duke of Rutland, earlier in the production.
But the real interest is Ian Holm's Richard III, who here appears not as a monster but very much the younger brother to the charismatic Edward IV that he was.
This recording is of some importance to theatrical history, because Holm was struck down with stage fright in the Seventies and thereafter chose to concentrate on film and television work.
Roz Savage says our electoral system is not just unfair but dangerous: "Manifestos are written for floating voters in constituencies that might change hands – not for the country as a whole. And when governments make spending decisions, the incentive structure pulls them in exactly the same direction. The Towns Fund, which directed 40 of 45 allocations to Conservative-held seats, was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed."
"Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse." Harry Paticas explains why hot spells now turn British schools into heat traps.
Jack Meredith says it's time for Liberals and trade unions to talk again: "The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing/"
Simon Skinner reviews a history of the World Cup: "Argentine reverence for Maradona endured because and not in spite of his anti-Corinthian ethos, up to and beyond the point in 1991 that he failed a drugs test when unable to deploy his habitual expedient of squirting someone else’s urine through a prosthetic penis. The penis was later displayed in a Buenos Aires museum as a quasi-religious relic (before being stolen)."
"Plans to moor a large vessel beside London Bridge have run into an unexpected complication – a disused tube tunnel buried beneath the Thames," reports Ian Mansfield.
Maria J. Pérez Cuervo looks at legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and what may lie behnd it: "The Pied Piper, like the Trickster, is a shape-shifter who wears a number of different masks – the psychopath, the hero, the rebel… even Death himself. Like Shakespeare’s Puck or Barrie’s Peter Pan, he spreads a net of enchantment, leading our children to the Otherworld. Whether this Otherworld was a new land to colonise, an altered state of consciousness or the realm of the dead remains a mystery."
I wrote about the actress Freda Jackson's background on Central Bylines:
Jackson was born in Nottingham in 1907, the daughter of a railway porter. She was educated at High Pavement School and the city’s University College. In 1933 she was teaching English and Drama at Haywood School, Sherwood, and spending her evenings acting with a local theatre group, when a letter to the director of its repertory company won her an audition at Northampton’s Theatre Royal.
Yesterday's purchase Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92 tells us what happened after that successful audition:
Miss Jackson's status for her first five months in Northampton was that of pupil, which meant that she received no salary. She had originally applied to Herbert Prentice, by then at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, but, since the pupil system did not operate there, he advised her to try Northampton. The pupil arrangement was confined to actresses, young actors being in such short supply that they could command a salary from the outset.
The dedication of the pupil actress extended not only to support herself without salary, but also to providing an adequate personal wardrobe for modern plays, a much more onerous requirement than for her male colleagues.
Were young male actors really in such short supply, or was it simple sexism that saw them paid from the outset when young actresses weren't.
Whatever the reason, this arrangement made it next to impossible for a young working-class woman to embark on a theatrical career. It explains why maids in Thirties films, of which there were many, were usually played by upper-class girls with unconvincing cockney accents.
We are seeing a return to such an arrangement in Britain today: every well-endowed private school has its own theatre, but the public facilities open to youngsters from poorer homes are under increasing financial pressure.It's no wonder we see the same limited group of privately educated actors snaffling the star roles in British films. And narrowing the pipeline of talent entering the acting profession can only result in a reduction in quality.
Anyway, you can see Freda Jackson above as Mistress Quickly in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Henry V.
The other actors in the scene are Robert Newton as Pistol and two who were to be dead within months of shooting it: Frederick Cooper (with the nose) as Nym and Roy Emerton as Bardolph. The boy is unmistakably a young George Cole.
Julia Lurie collates accounts of conditions inside ICE's only family detention centre: "My younger son does not eat the food here; he is hungry all the time. He will only accept breast milk and it is not enough for him. He is growing. He is 2 and a half, and he needs to eat. I often worry that I will stop being able to produce breast milk for him. I hardly sleep and I am anxious all the time; I don’t know what we would do. My toddler is losing weight very quickly."
Hannah Aldridge explains why having a decent salary isn't always enough to get a mortgage, and what we can do about it: "Almost half of potential buyers have enough income to qualify, but they simply don’t have enough saved. Only 15 per cent have enough piled up in the bank to lay down even a 5 per cent deposit."
Now that the Lowry Academy has been publicly named, Katie Dancey-Downs has written a follow-up to last week's book banning story for Index on Censorship.
Gareth Dennis reminds us of the powerful case for railway electrification.
"What just about works on the page doesn’t, I think, work in the film, despite Jessie Buckley’s fine – and award-winning – embodiment of Agnes. It doesn’t help that for no apparent reason Shakespeare (the miscast Paul Mescal) has to recite the opening of the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy on the banks of the Thames – not an incident that can be found in the novel." John Davies rereads and watches Hamnet.
"The American singer Harry Nilsson owned one of the flats on the top floor, and it was in this flat that firstly Mama Cass Elliot of the band the Mamas and Papas died in 1974 of a heart attack. This was followed in 1978 by the death in the same flat of Keith Moon, the drummer with The Who, who died of an overdose of Heminevrin which he was taking to help with the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal." A London Inheritance takes us to Curzon Square, Curzon Place and Seamore Place.
It's almost four years since my mother died. A strong memory from her last days is the magnolia at the end of the street. I saw it every time I went out on an errand.
As it was so sunny today, I went to see if the tree is still thriving. And it is.
Here's an interesting passage from Chris Given-Wilson in a recent London Review of Books:
There are several earlier references, dating back at least to the early 14th century, to red and white roses being used occasionally as insignia by the families later associated with the Lancastrian and Yorkist causes, but it was not until Shakespeare picked up on the idea in Henry VI Part I... that it entered the popular imagination. ...
It was another two hundred years before Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein, published in 1829, brought the idea of the ‘wars of the White and Red Roses’ into common usage. Since then it has become synonymous with the political turmoil which, between 1455 and 1485, saw four English kings deposed (one of them twice) and fifteen internecine ‘battles’ – some of them in reality just skirmishes – fought on English soil, from Dartford in Kent to Hexham in Northumberland to Mortimer’s Cross on the Welsh border.
There are those, of course, who would like to bin the label, but that is a vain hope. During the last quarter of the 20th century at least seven British historians published monographs entitled The Wars of the Roses, and scholars in the 21st century appear to be trying to keep pace.
Obliging reader's voice: I gather the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth is accepted as having marked the end of these wars. Have you by any chance contributed an article that touches upon it to Central Bylines recently?
Put your titters away, because I'm talking about Shakespeare. In 1957 Frankie Howerd was invited to appear as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic.
And very good he was to, at least according to Francis Wyndham in The Queen (7 January 1958):
Some members of the audience may have feared that his gift for gagging might interfere with the sacred text; others, that his comic genius might be constrained within the limitations of a classic.
On the first night he struck a happy medium, under-acting in the rehearsal and Titania scenes but bursting out with hilarious bravado when performing Pyramus before the Duke. This play scene can have seldom been made so funny.
You can see Howerd's Bottom ("Shut your face.") in the video above.
Far down the cast as First Fairy ("And that's an achievement when you're with this lot, I can tell you.") was a young Judi Dench. You can see and hear her below.
Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the power struggle at the top of Your Party: "There is talk that the leadership race could feature at least one other candidate; a non-MP perhaps with a 'plague on all your houses' campaign aimed at highlighting the chaos that has emerged under those running the show so far."
"The whole estate shares the same creaking water, electric, sewage and gas systems, most of which are interconnected across the buildings – meaning shutdowns for repair affect the whole estate. According to the official Restoration and Renewal unit, there are 'also hundreds of miles of rusting pipework, obsolete electrical cables and gas pipes, and the giant, inefficient Victorian steam heating, all of which need replacing'." The Palace of Westminster is falling down, reports Simon Wilson.
Tom Chidwick pays tribute to Lord Taverne - Dick Taverne - whose victory in Lincoln in 1973 was, along with the Liberal Party by-elections triumphs of that era, one of the things that got me interested in politics.
"The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything." William Day seeks to explain Ludwig Wittgenstein's dislike of Shakespeare.
Georgia Poplett emphasises the Leicester roots of Adrian Mole and his creator Sue Townsend: "As a teenager and young adult, the aspirant Leicester Tolstoy moved between jobs, working in retail and at a garage where she spent most of her time reading books on the forecourt. She was sacked from a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms."
"Bitterns are elusive and well camouflaged. They hide in the dense reed beds, popping out to catch eels, fish and amphibians, and quickly darting back under cover. This makes them a secretive bird and extremely hard to spot in their environment with their unique plumage. Typically, it’s their call, the Bittern boom, that announces their hidden presence." Leslie Cater remembers his encounters with Britain's loudest bird.
Manuela Perteghella believes Britain will one day rejoin the European Union.
Asked in an interview with the Europe Street news agency if she thinks such a move will ever take place, the Liberal Democrat MP for Stratford upon Avon replies:
"In my opinion yes, because it is important for the UK to have partners who care about the future of Europe. ... When I speak in schools, it is clear that young people want closer ties with Europe. They know the rights they have lost with Brexit and they want to experience Europe without hurdles, so I hope the new generation will take us back into the EU, where our place is."
She is also critical of Labour's and others' rhetoric on immigration:
"The language that we have heard recently reopened old wounds and reignited the toxic debate of the Brexit campaign, while immigrants have over the centuries enriched massively British society. We need to have an honest debate and my mission will be even more to highlight this."
And, as an expert in the translation of British drama, including Shakespeare’s work, Manuela speaks of the "huge honour" of representing his birthplace in parliament.
"We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s." Garry Kasparov on the Putinisation of America.
Noah Berlatsky and Ilana Gershon argue that undemocratic workplaces sowed the seeds of Trumpism: "Many American workplaces are hierarchical. Decision-making is opaque. Mechanisms of accountability are either nonexistent or weak and deceptive. Yet, at the same time, many workers are enthusiastically told how democratic their workplaces are, much to their frustration. Workplace culture in the US teaches employees that arbitrary rule is normal and that democracy is a deception and a lie."
John Elsom reminds us that, before Volodymr Zelenskyy became president of Ukraine, he played the president of Ukraine in a television comedy: "Vasyl is played by the comic actor, Volodymr Zelenskyy, with a gift for deadpan humour. As president, he cycles to work every morning to avoid the official car, but shyly takes off his cycle clip before entering the government building. He is instructed on how to behave by an apparatchik ... in the pay of the global oligarchs. Vasyl is taught how to take photo-calls, answer press conferences, wear suits and greet ambassadors."
"I have been a doctor for more than 30 years and a neurologist for 25 of those. I have recently grown particularly worried about the large number of young people referred to me with four or five pre-existing diagnoses of chronic conditions, only some of which can be cured." Suzanne O'Sullivan questions the trend of detecting health issues in milder and earlier forms, and the assumption that is always the right thing to do.
Peter Conrad believes Dickens is a greater writer than Shakespeare.
"Hall needs to know more about what Sharpey and the other chaps were up to. In the lecture theatre we see a student played by Edward Fox, before getting in to the original footage of the French scientist played by Roger Delgado who did pioneering experiments on isolation and sensory deprivation." Discontinued Notes watches Basil Dearden's 1963 film The Mind Benders.
"The experience of that Royal Commission - on long-term care for older people - is instructive. It made four major recommendations relating to: free personal care, a cap on care costs for accommodation, the establishment of national care standards, and integration of services. We are still awaiting effective action on all of these." Bob Hudson asks why social care is never fixed.
Annie Hickox on the 'toxic positivity' - the dark side of all those simple recipes for dealing with unhappiness and depression that spread so frictionlessly across social media.
Privacy International says the use of social media monitoring by government and commerce is increasingly prevalent and largely unregulated.
Thomas Horabin held North Cornwall for the Liberal Party at a 1939 by-election, defended it in 1945 to become the only parliamentary representative of West Country Liberalism, but crossed the floor to join Labour two years later. Jaime Reynolds and Ian Hunter weigh up his maverick career.
"There was something else in the house, unmentioned and unlabelled. A sort of shadowy presence that hovered by the back door. No one referred to it, so I kept quiet, but without ever really actually seeing anything I knew it was a boy. A boy of about 10 or 12, in short trousers and a cap. I acknowledged him as I walked by, much as I would acknowledge a single magpie, with a dip of the head and a murmured incantation." Esther Freud discusses Walberswick, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and ghosts.
Tom Moran shows that our false belief that Shakespeare had little knowledge of Latin and Greek - the basis of many a nutty theory about the authorship of his plays - rests on a misunderstanding of the meaning of "though" in a poem by Ben Jonson. Fascinating stuff.
I saw a tweet by Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, in support of the End Sexism in Schools campaign. It said that, "shockingly", only two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors.
It is a shocking statistic, and it made me think back to my own schooldays. Sure enough, I didn't study a single woman writer for O level or A level English literature.
Since you ask, here are the books I studied:
O level
The Merchant of Venice
An anthology of 20th-century British poets
Lord of the Flies
You had to study Lord of the Flies for O level in those days - I think there was a law. And there wasn't a single woman poet in that anthology: the poets I liked most in it were Edward Thomas and Edwin Muir. There was no Auden, who is now my favourite British poet of this era, and I don't think there was anyone later than the early Betjeman.
A level
Hamlet
The Tempest
Dr Faustus
Wordsworth's Prelude (Book 1)
John Donne
T.S. Eliot (Selected Poems)
The Rainbow
The Grapes of Wrath
I think we studied more texts than we needed to because use we had a good teacher and we were a bright class, but there was still no room for a woman writer.
When it came to my MA in Victorian Studies, male writers were in the majority, but we did at least study Felix Holt by George Eliot and Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell.
And it's interesting that, when I was preparing to start the MA course, I read the two Victorian novels I was most ashamed of not having read: Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights.
So all power to End Sexism in Schools. Not because the male writers I studied were bad, though Lord of the Flies was surely overrated in those days, but because one point of studying good literature is to widen your imagination and your sympathies. And you are less likely to do that if you study only writers of one sex.
Closing the educational achievement gap should be a priority for the next government, argues Kevin Latham: "This includes ... making a long-term commitment to funding a national in-school tutoring programme, like that set up during the pandemic. It includes reversing real terms cuts to key educational budgets targeting disadvantaged pupils in schools through the Pupil Premium, and reversing changes made to school funding in 2018 that disproportionately benefited schools in less deprived areas."
Caspar Hughes became a human bollard to enforce a bus gate when the authorities wouldn't: "We don’t need one LTN in Exeter, we need every residential neighbourhood turned into an LTN, protected cycle lanes on all main roads, and regular, cheap, and reliable public transport. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that people have become so accustomed to the privilege of driving, it feels like it is a right. For them, equality must feel like oppression."
Joshi Herriman took his worries about the declining quality of local newspapers to a House of Lords select committee.
Claire Meadows celebrates Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971): "I’m glad that the film has enjoyed a critical appraisal. Because I think it is a minor masterpiece. The casting - with Jon Finch and Francesca Annis playing against the historical norm as a younger and beautiful couple - is inspired. It feels new, yet acutely traditional.
"In typical Pym fashion, a series of amusing encounters ensues, comprising dinner parties, church bazaars and chance meetings, all of which show Rupert to be a slightly pompous, tactless man lacking in self-awareness. For an academic who studies human behaviour for a living, Rupert seems to have precious little understanding of how to apply this knowledge to his relationships with women!" JacquiWine enjoys Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment.
At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester, Lodged in the abbey, where the reverend abbot With all his convent honorably received him; To whom he gave these words: "O Father Abbot, An old man, broken with the storms of state, Is come to lay his weary bones among you. Give him a little earth, for charity."
If the furore over the finding of Richard III ever dies down - at present there is another court case in prospect - the Leicester people could turn their attention to another historical figure who was buried in the city but whose grave is now lost.
The lines above come from Shakespeare's little-performed Henry VIII and describe the last days of Cardinal Wolsey. He had been summoned to London from York to face a charge of treason, but was taken ill on the journey. He died and was buried at Leicester Abbey.
The remains of the abbey were excavated in the 1930s and what was imagined to be its ground plan was marked out with low stone walls. They even put in a tomb for Wolsey.
I should report, though, that when the idea of searching for Wolsey was put to a leading member of the team that found Richard III, his response was: "If we did find him, Ipswich would only try to claim him."
You can search the Internet Movie Database - IMDb - for actors who were born or died in a particular place. Look for deaths in Market Harborough and you will find a member of Showaddywaddy, a lady who filmed an exotic dance before marrying a Conservative MP, and Susan Shentall.
Shentall made only one film, but in it she played Juliet to Laurence Harvey's Romeo. This was in a 1954 adaptation of Shakespeare's play directed by the Italian Renato Castellani. You can see the trailer above, and the whole film is on YouTube.
Most of the publicity about Shentall at the time the film was made and released centred on the circumstances of her casting. Here's the Daily News for 17 March 1953:
Susan Shentall held her first Press conference. yesterday. And it is likely to be the first of many, because this girl, who has never played a more important role than the Angel in a Nativity play at school, has been chosen by the Rank Organisation to play Juliet.
This week she travels to Verona where Renato Castellani will direct a colour film of Romeo and Juliet. ...
A fortnight ago, she had never even given a thought to a film or stage career. Although as pretty as a picture, she had never had the schoolgirl's dream of being a star.
Then how was she chosen? For months Castellani searched for his Juliet - in Ireland, Italy, France.
Then Mario, restaurateur in London, saw Susan dining quietly with her parents. Mario told Mrs. Janni, wife of the film's producer.
Within a few days Susan was at Pinewood, having colour tests, reciting the balcony scene. And Castellani was presented with a Juliet.
The reception for the film was at first positive, with Castellani winning the Grand Prix at the 1954 Venice Film Festival, But, according to Wikipedia, there was widespread criticism of the liberties he had taken with the text and the plot of the play, and the consensus was that the film was chiefly notable as a spectacle.
Nor did it prove popular with audiences - one Australian observer of the British film scene described it as the 'unchallenged flop of the year'. I will admit I had not heard of this version of Romeo and Juliet before I came across the IMDb reference to Shentall's death in Market Harborough.
Reading the reviews of Shentall's performance in the British regional press, they are at worst respectful and at best enthusiastic. There is talk of interest in her from Hollywood.
But this was the only film she was to make. Shentall had returned to England and married a Philip Worthington as soon as filming ended. Perhaps she wanted to be a dutiful Fifties wife or perhaps she did not much enjoy making the film.
Philip Worthington was from Leicester and his father was the owner of the Worthington's grocery chain, which I have blogged about before.
So that is how a film star came to live and die in Market Harborough.
[Later. In fact Brian has been appointed as a non-executive director of the Met. The official press release is online.]
Lib Dem Voice reports that the Liberal Democrat peer Brian Paddick is to become a non-executive adviser to the Metropolitan Police and will sit as a crossbencher in the House of Lords for the duration of this appointment.
Congratulations to him - I'm sure he will give good advice.
This story gives me an excuse to revisit a favourite piece of trivia: Brian Paddick is a relation of the actor Hugh Paddick, who is best remembered today as a member of the cast of the radio comedy Round the Horne.
As the graphic below, which I salvaged from a defunct family history site via the Wayback Machine, shows, Brian and Hugh Paddick are second cousins once removed.
You can hear Hugh playing Julian to Kenneth Williams' Sandy above.
This post was written for Terence Towles Canote's 10th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon, where you will find plenty more articles on British cinema.
What is the most successful piece of casting against type in a British film?
There’s Richard Attenborough’s turn as a bull of a Sergeant Major in Guns at Batasi. There’s James Fox as Chas in Performance, whose hooded eyes and half-smile haunt British gangster films to this day.
And there’s another candidate. How about Alec Guinness playing a hard-drinking officer in a Scottish regiment - red hair and all - who has been promoted from the ranks?
It may sound ridiculous, but you need only watch the trailer above to see that it’s not. In fact, Guinness’s performance as Major Jock Sinclair in Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.
This post contains spoilers, but there's good news. You can watch the film on YouTube first if you wish (just don’t tell them I sent you).
Directed by Ronald Neame, Tunes of Glory is set in the barracks of a Scottish regiment just after the end of the second world war.
Though Jock Sinclair, in his own words, has led the regiment "from Dover to Berlin", he is still just a Major. He holds a brevet rank as Lieutenant Colonel, but as Wikipedia explains, brevet ranks are given as a reward but do not necessarily confer the authority and privileges of that higher rank.
We first see Sinclair holding court at the end of a regimental dinner - there are pipers and oceans of whisky. He has news: the regiment is getting a new colonel and it’s not him. It is to be Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow, who is played by John Mills.
The Wikipedia entry on Tunes of Glory has an admirable plot summary, so I’ll let it take up the tale for a little:
Colonel Barrow arrives a day early and finds the officers dancing rowdily. He declines sharing a whisky with Sinclair, taking a soft drink instead. They exchange histories. Sinclair enlisted as bandsman in Glasgow and rose through the ranks, Barrow came from Oxford University. He served with the battalion in 1933. Assigned to "special duties", he has lectured at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Sinclair humorously notes that he was in Barlinnie Prison's cooler for being drunk and disorderly one night in 1933.
When Sinclair presses Barrow about his war years, he replies that he, too, was "in jail". Sinclair recalls that Barrow was a prisoner of the Japanese and belittles the experience - "officers' privileges and amateur dramatics". Barrow simply replies that Barlinnie would have been preferable.
At 3 am Sinclair is drinking with Major Scott, played by Dennis Price, and we hear his outburst to him: "I've acted Colonel, I should be Colonel, and by God... I bloody well will be Colonel!"
Barrow proves to be a martinet and is not prepared to cut the battle-weary regiment any slack. He takes particular exception to the rowdy style of Highland dancing they favour, and orders all the officers to take lessons so they dance they way he wants them to when he holds a cocktail party for the local gentry.
This reminds me that, in a recent episode of The Rest of Politics, Alastair Campbell was surprised to learn that Rory Stewart had dancing lessons when he held a gap-year commission in the Black Watch at the start of the 1990s.
Anyway, the dancing after the party gets rowdy despite Barrow’s efforts and, red faced and furious, he breaks up proceedings before fleeing in shame at his own behaviour. He knows that the bulk of his officers feel a loyalty to Sinclair that they do not feel to him, and the evening can only have made things worse. To the modern viewer, it seems obvious from this and from the collection of tics and twitches Mills deploys, that he is suffering post-traumatic stress from his wartime experiences.
I sometimes struggle to understand the esteem in which John Mills was held as an actor in Britain - he had an unfortunate habit of being cast in roles for which he was visibly too old - but he is good in Tunes of Glory. Particularly so, as his character is less immediately appealing than Alec Guinness’s and does not allow for the same bravura acting.
The clash between these two flawed characters has an almost Shakespearian heft. As the retired US Marine Corps infantry officer and historian Reed Bonadonna observes, it’s tempting to say that each has the qualities the other lacks – “Sinclair is a warrior and leader of men, but he’s hopeless as an organiser and disciplinarian.”
He goes on:
Despite their obvious differences, the two leads are similar in the sense that both are essentially lonely and unfulfilled. Both have been married but are now on their own. Sinclair has a grown daughter with whom he has a loving but somewhat distant relationship. Both are burdened by their memories of the war.
Barrow spent years in harsh and unproductive captivity. Sinclair suspects that his best days are over, and even that his wartime success was a fluke. They also share a keen sense of the burden and isolation of command. There is the hint of Othello in Tunes of Glory, with Barrow as the Moor and Sinclair as his Iago.
And it is Sinclair’s relationship with his daughter that brings things to a head. Unknown to Sinclair, but known to many others in the barracks, she has been going out with one of the regiment’s pipers. When he finally comes across them together, he strikes the corporal.
This is a clear court-martial offence and Barrow is first minded to bring charges against him. But he is put under pressure by almost everyone to deal with the matter himself. He goes to see Sinclair, who promises that he will be supportive in future if Barrow shows him leniency.
Against his better judgement, he decides against a court martial, only to find that Sinclair does not change at all. He still gives him no support and continues to drink with his 'babies', as he calls the officers loyal to him. Humiliated, Barrow leaves them, goes upstairs and shoots himself.
Ironically, it is in his reaction to Barrow’s suicide that we see the best of Sinclair. His command of the situation and concern for the young soldier who found the body make us see why he was a good leader in battle and inspired respect and even affection in the men under him.
To assuage his guilt - "it’s not his body I fear, it’s his ghost," he says to himself at one point - he plans a grandiose funeral for Barrow. As he describes it to the other officers we hear the pipe band playing the 'tunes of glory', but it becomes clear to them that he has lost his reason and the room empties.
"Oh my babies, take me home," Sinclair pleads to Scott and another officer, and as he is driven away, the film ends. With one protagonist dead and the other driven mad, Tunes of Glory, it occurs to me, has unexpected parallels with Performance.
The supporting cast here is uniformly excellent. Dennis Price’s Major Scott is a typically disengaged Price character. We wonder if he is just a sardonic observer of the tragedy, or if he is the real Iago, encouraging Sinclair and Barrow to destroy one another so he can become Colonel amid the wreckage?
Gordon Jackson plays Captain Jimmy Cairns, the other officer who is there with Sinclair at the end. Yet he has also been Barrow’s right-hand man as he struggles to reform the regiment. Jackson always did have the knack of playing good men who were not dull, which is a rare gift. Certainly, the villains in British films of the Fifties are often surprising dark and alluring, whereas the heroes are just wet - compare Dirk Bogarde and Jimmy Hanley in The Blue Lamp.
Many of the other officers are played - and well played - by familiar faces: Gerald Harper, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Allan Cuthbertson (who you will recognise him from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers, if nowhere else). The Pipe Major is Duncan Macrae, who appeared in every film about Scotland made after the war and was always a welcome presence.
Sinclair’s daughter Morag is played by Susannah York in her first film role. Liberal Democrat readers may be interested to know that York was at RADA with our own Flick Rea. Trivia fans will be interested that Flick told me that a young man from Liverpool shared their classes for two terms but did not make the grade. So he returned North to the family business, to re-emerge a few years later as the manager of the Beatles.
Tunes of Glory is an exceptionally good film. As another American military writer, Jim Shufelt, says:
This is not a 'war movie', but Tunes of Glory features an intense portrayal of leadership, discipline and reintegration issues common to soldiers and units of any conflict, army, or time period.
He goes on to suggest that watching it could form part of current-day officers’ professional development.
This is not a surprise: the screenplay is by James Kennaway, adapted from his own novel of the same name. Kennaway himself held a commission in a Scottish regiment while doing his National Service. He was invited by the Colonel to apply for a permanent commission, but declined, in part because of the tensions between his fellow officers.
Robert Buckland, the Conservative MP and former justice minister, makes the case against withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights: "This is a profoundly mistaken view, which misunderstands the true nature of our membership of the Convention and the wider political and legal context, not to mention the UK’s international reputation. In a nutshell, this is not serious politics."
Something must be done about the problem of convicted criminals refusing to attend court for their sentencing hearings, or so everyone suddenly seems agreed. The Secret Barrister sees problems with the idea.
David Edgerton reviews a new global history of sugar: "We could always have done without sugar and today could have all the sweetness we want without it. Yet many of the poorest people in the world depend on it to make a meagre living and to make more bearable the sour realities of everyday life."
A group of teenage Indian chess players has the potential to dominate the game. Indraneel Das looks at the sacrifices required to become that good that young.
"A taboo-lacerating work, Performance was made more beguiling still by its back-story. A film that so disturbed leading man James Fox that he quit the industry for a decade, Roeg and Cammell’s film also sowed the seeds of discontent between the Rolling Stones. The on-set presence of real-life 'chaps' such as John Bindon and David Litvinoff also lent the picture an authenticity completely at odds with the cockernee swagger of The Italian Job." Richard Luck on the allure of Performance.
Iain Burnside explores how Shakespeare's words have inspired countless musicians and pieces of music.
Amy Taylor reminds us that banks have been denying people accounts for years: "For my client, there was no accusation of fraud, no prosecution, and no knowledge of any fraud, just a registered possibility of risk, which left her without banking facilities at an extremely vulnerable point in her life. No amount of pleading or explaining her situation worked. The banks turned her away."
Sarah Dyke the 35th woman elected to Westminster under the Liberal or Liberal Democrat banner. Stephen Williams lists them all, and adds the women who have been elected to national parliaments and the European Parliament.
Danny Finkelstein on the rise of RFK Jr: "His presidential campaign is highly unlikely to be successful, and he won’t be the Democratic nominee, but he is doing better than many thought he would, because conspiracy theorists can be found on the left as well as the right. And everywhere they are found, they are a danger to Jews."
"For reasons that have never been clear to me, my mother’s money ran out after one year and, at age 4½, I set off on my own. I headed south, sometimes living in the streets, sometimes joining gangs of other homeless children, sometimes living in orphanages, and most of the time being hungry. My recollections of those four years are vivid but not continuous, rather like a series of snapshots. Some of them are brutal beyond description, others more palatable." Mario Capecchi, a Nobel Prize winner in the physiology of medicine, recalls his extraordinary wartime childhood.
Ian Mansfield shows that Belsize Park was home to many important figures in the Modernist movement in British art.
"Jonson’s statement concerning Shakespeare’s alleged ignorance of Greek and Latin might be the single most misunderstood and misinterpreted line of English poetry ever written: it means the opposite of what most people think it means." Tom Moran argues that William Shakespeare knew Classsical languages far better than we imagine.
