Sammy Going South, Suez and the end of the British Empire

Written for Terence Towles Canote's 13th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon.

We British have a habit of turning military debacles into victories. The retreat from Dunkirk, for instance, has twice been the subject of a film (in 1958 and 2017) and also forms an important part of the action in Atonement from 2007.

But the Suez Crisis of 1956, whether because of the deceit it involved or its abject failure, has proved too shameful a subject for British cinema to tackle. This unsuccessful attempt to overturn Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, made together with France and Israel, and in particular the way we were forced to back down by a threat from the United States to spark a run on the pound, marked the end of British illusions that is could remain an imperial power in the postwar world.

So it’s notable that there is a British film that begins amid the British bombing of Port Said. But, of a piece with the doomed Suez operation as a whole, that bombing kills the parents of a 10-year-old British boy, Sammy Hartland. Finding no help in a suddenly hostile town, the boy sets off, with no concept of the distance involved, to walk to his only relative, an aunt who lives in Durban in South Africa. 

Released in 1963, Sammy Going South was based on a novel of the same name by W.T. Canaway, who had quite a reputation in the Sixties and Seventies, and also had a writing credit for The Ipcress File (1965), but seems forgotten today.

Alexander Mackendrick

It was the first film that its director Alexander Mackendrick had completed for six years. After reeling off some of the best films Ealing Studios was to make – Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy, The Ladykillers – he went to Hollywood to make Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Though it now has a towering critical reputation, it bombed on release and Mackendrick was then taken off two pictures that he had begun to direct – The Devil’s Disciple and The Guns of Navarone.

Mackendrick, who badly needed to complete another film, then went back to work for his old Ealing boss Sir Michael Balcon (the grandfather of Daniel Day-Lewis), who was now the head of Bryanston Films. But there turned out to be a chasm between their views of what their adaptation of Sammy Going South should look like.

As Mark Duguid has written:

Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".

You might say that for Mackendrick, Sammy was another of the lethal innocents in whom he rather specialised – think of the chaos that Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers and Alec Guinness’s manic scientist in The Man in the White Suit provoke around them.

One result of these tensions was that Mackendrick’s original cut, which came in at over three hours, was reduced by Balcon to 128 minutes before release. The version that is shown from time to time on British television, and was released on DVD in 2010, is 10 minutes shorter still – no one seems to know quite when or why this further cut was made. 

A surprising amount of the strangeness and cruelty that Mackendrick found in Canaway’s novel survived into what was marketed as a family film. Within the first 25 minutes, Sammy has lost both his parents, been seized upon by a pedlar who clearly has sexual designs on him, and then found himself handcuffed to the man’s corpse.

As he makes his way south, Sammy is variously helped or hindered by the adults he meets. After a trek across the desert, first with the pedlar and then alone, he is taken up by a rich American woman. He runs away from her when he finds she wants to take him north with her, and then falls in with a group of Sudanese Muslims returning from the haj. 

The pilgrims’ leader, played by a stern Orlando Martins, is the only adult the boy meets in the early part of his journey who cares for him without selfish motives, but the boy abandons him for a Greek journalist who says he will take him to his aunt – and has ambitions to sell his story. The boy comes to distrust him and eventually runs away again.

Then, alone in the bush, Sammy is happened upon by a diamond smuggler played by Edward G. Robinson, whose performance and touching relationship with the boy will be what many viewers remember from the film. 

It looks as though the boy will stay with him permanently, but Robinson’s camp is broken up by the authorities and Sammy makes his way to his aunt alone. Quite how he manages this is skipped over, but in the novel he travels by light plane and train, and still has to fight off a bounty hunter at Durban station.

How Sammy became too happy

The success or failure of the film obviously relied to a great extent upon the casting of Sammy, and Mackendrick thought he had struck gold in Fergus McClelland, the 11-year-old son of Northern Irish actor Alan McClelland who, among many other roles, was in the original cast of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap alongside Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim. 

Mackendrick, quoted in Philip Kerr’s biography of the director, said of him, with alarming objectivity: 

"He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting."

But something happened which explains why McClelland, who is convincingly ragged and itchy in his scenes with Orlando Martins, appears so happy and healthy when he meets Edward G. Robinson after trekking through the bush:

"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."

Mackendrick’s treatment of the boy during filming was as hard-hearted as his approach to casting. Appearing on BBC Radio Four’s The Film Programme in 2010, McClelland recalled the unit doctor telling the director at one point that he had to decide whether he wanted “a dead star or a live little boy”.

Some critics complained that McClelland’s acting was wooden until he met Edward G. Robinson, but this is not the first time a child actor had been blamed for following their director’s instructions. Preparing to shoot the film, Mackendrick had been to institutions to study traumatised and orphaned children, and this woodenness was what he saw in in them. McClelland was to go on acting for some years, appearing in both television plays and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so other directors appreciated his talents too.

Edward G. Robinson and Harry H. Corbett

Mackendrick faced greater problems than his young lead becoming too happy and well fed: Edward G. Robinson suffered a serious heart attack early in the filming of his role. The result was that many of his scenes with the boy were shot with the participants being on different continents. 

Fergus McClelland was filmed in Africa, with Mackendrick reading the other part, and Edward G. Robinson in a studio in London, with Mackendrick this time reading the boy’s lines. It’s a mark of the director’s skill that these scenes are still so convincing and moving.

Another actor who deserves a mention is Harry H. Corbett, who plays Edward G. Robinson’s associate in the diamond smuggling game. Corbett had already made one series of Steptoe and Son, the classic BBC sitcom that was to make him a household name – soon every impersonator on television had to be able to take him off – but arguably blight his career. 

Before Steptoe, Corbett was called “the British Brando” by some, because he was a Method actor, and was the star Shakespearian in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East.

Fergus McClelland later became a voiceover artist and a trainer in business presentation, so there are plenty of his videos to be found online. In one of them, he recalls that Corbett did not talk to the other cast members much, but was friendly to him – the boy was allowed to call him “H.” 

Corbett told him that he didn’t plan on doing a second series of the comedy, but perhaps even one had fixed him in the public mind as Harold Steptoe and Harold Steptoe alone. One review of Sammy Going South referred to his “Steptoe accent”, as though it already counted against him as a serious actor.

Racial politics

The racial politics of Sammy Going South are muted: there is, for instance, no suggestion that by 1963 South Africa was a tainted haven for the boy to seek. Orlando Martins is allowed great dignity and Sammy is shown to need and appreciate his paternal authority. And, as a returning haji he appreciates that the boy is on a pilgrimage of his own. 

Beyond Martins, however, there is no other substantial Black character in a film set in entirely in Africa. The men who work for Edward G. Robinson are at least shown as a benign presence, singing a lullaby when the boy wakes suddenly in the back of their jeep.

It is the Greek journalist who suffers the worst stereotyping, particularly from the British officials, who still administrate Robinson’s part of East Africa. Those officials are verging on the comic themselves, and this is certainly no celebration of British Africa. 

The fact that Robinson has drawn for years on fuel dumps the Germans abandoned in 1918 suggests that the European presence in Africa is drawing to a close, something his character explicitly says. That wasn’t to stop Britain’s private schools turning out ideal types to run the Empire for two or three decades after it ceased to exist.

Sammy goes west

I can’t argue that Sammy Going South is a forgotten masterpiece, but it is better than its reputation and is interesting in so many ways. As a study of childhood trauma and recovery; as a document of the last days of the British Empire; and as a film by one of Britain’s best directors, who was soon to give up making films and devote himself to teaching instead.

The film was trimmed yet again for the US market, given a new title (the ludicrous, to my eyes, A Boy Ten Feet Tall) and a new soundtrack. Joe Dante even claims that this version is better than the original: I’ve not seen it, but the omission of most of Orlando Martins’s scenes makes that sound unlikely. 

But I can at least show you the trailer for this version. I wonder if Steven Spielberg saw A Boy Ten Feet Tall: am I alone in being reminded of Empire of the Sun by the scene of the boy amid the bombing of Port Said?

I suspect this American version is closer to what Michael Balcon had hoped for from the shoot. Me? I mourn Mackendrick’s lost, darker three-hour version.

"His glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice": On being the monarch's second son

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Being the second son of a monarch is a difficult career, because you cease to be of use to the family firm – assuming your older brother has healthy children – when you are still young.

Here's Jonathan Parry writing about Victoria's second son in the London Review of Books in 2020:

The monarch’s younger sons in each generation are fated to follow the same trajectory. Few now remember Prince Alfred – except tourists visiting the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town who assume that its name is a misprint for ‘Albert’. 

In the 1860s Alfred, Victoria’s second son, named after the founder of the English monarchy and, as a naval cadet, the first official imperial tourist, became a global superstar. Aged 14 he visited the Holy Land, a year later he conquered South Africa, and before he was 20 he was seriously proposed as king of Greece. Polkas were written for him. At 23 he toured Australia and survived an Irish assassination attempt; soon afterwards he was fêted in New Zealand, Hong Kong and India. 

But his glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice, he married a haughty Russian princess, and he ended in forced exile presiding over his father’s German duchy.

Discuss with relation to the careers of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Prince Harry (as indeed Parry does).

Centenary of Emily Hobhouse's death marked in Cornwall

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This is a letter published by the Cornish Times:

On June 13, a special gathering was held at The Story of Emily to mark the centenary of the death of Emily Hobhouse, the British humanitarian and peace campaigner whose work exposed the suffering of women and children in the concentration camps of the South African War.

It was a privilege to attend this commemorative event and to join others in remembering one of Cornwall’s most remarkable daughters. Born in the hamlet of St Ive, near Liskeard, Emily Hobhouse dedicated her life to humanitarian causes and the pursuit of justice.

The event offered visitors a deeper understanding of Emily’s life, struggles, determination and enduring legacy. During the South African War, her investigations into conditions within the concentration camps helped transform public understanding of the conflict and contributed to improvements in camp conditions.

She was a woman ahead of her time who sacrificed much in her efforts to alleviate suffering and improve the lives of those affected by war.

In a speech written for the unveiling of the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein on 16 December 1913, Emily Hobhouse wrote:

Liberty is the equal right and heritage of every child of man, without distinction of race, colour or sex.

These powerful words reflected the values that guided her throughout her life. They expressed her belief in equality, justice and human dignity at a time when such principles were far from universally accepted.

Today, societies across the world continue to confront issues of discrimination, inequality and human rights. Emily's belief that liberty belongs to every person, regardless of race, colour or sex, remains a principle worth defending.

As we mark one hundred years since her death, Emily Hobhouse's legacy is not confined to history. Her courage, compassion and commitment to humanity continue to inspire new generations. For Cornwall, she remains a source of particular pride.

Barry West, Cornish Historian

The Story of Emily is a museum devoted to Emily Hobhouse's life and humanitarian work, housed in her childhood home near Liskeard. She was the sister of Liberal philosopher L.T. Hobhouse.

Taking up the cause of the Boer women and children took physical courage – see my post on Kenneth Griffith's film Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman.

Patrick Duff: Foolish People

Stranglelove were my favourite slightly obscure Nineties band, so they have featured here three times: Time For the Rest of Your Life, Elin's Photograph and Beautiful Alone.

Patrick Duff was the band's lead singer. Wikipedia records that after they split:

Between 2000 and 2004 Duff went on to travel the world as a solo artist with WOMAD Festival, collaborating with a number of artists, most notably the then 81-year-old veteran African master storyteller and musician Madosini, with whom he lived and worked in the township of Langa, in Cape Town.

Then:

The following year [2006] Duff was commissioned by Bristol City Council to write a Christmas choral symphony intended for a one-off exclusive performance at Bristol Cathedral, which he subsequently recorded over six weeks in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

The 90-minute piece, entitled "Seven Sermons to the Dead", was considered inappropriate by the council and was never staged, but instead released as an album in December 2013.

He's still making music. Foolish People is an acoustic version of a track from an album, Another Word for Rose, that he released last year. The other musician is Woody Taylor.

Duff doesn't sound any less angst-ridden than he did with Strangelove 30 years ago, but this is a pleasant listen until the feds turn up at the end.

Cornish museum devoted to the life of Emily Hobhouse wins architectural award

The Story of Emily, a museum celebrating the life of the humanitarian Emily Hobhouse, has been named the Royal Institute of British Architects' South West and Wessex Building of the Year.

Emily Hobhouse campaigned against Britain's use of concentration camps in the Boer War. The Story of Emily is located partly in her childhood home, the rectory in St Ive, near Liskeard.

It is the new buildings on the site, which house the immersive displays about her work in South Africa and a restaurant for visitors, that have won the RIBA award. You can see something of them in the video above and read about them in depth on the RIBA site.

Emily Hobhouse was the sister of the Liberal philosopher L.T. (Leonard Trelawney) Hobhouse. Her campaigning against the camps in South Africa was hugely controversial in Britain - watch Kenneth Griffith's Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman to learn more about the way it was received.

Unsecured penguin caused helicopter crash in South Africa

BBC News wins out Headline of the Day Award.

The judges were relieved to read:

The South African Civil Aviation Authority said the impact sent the helicopter crashing to the ground. No-one on board, including the penguin, was hurt.

The life of the Boer War whistleblower Emily Hobhouse is now celebrated at her Cornish home

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Emily Hobhouse, who exposed the suffering of women and children held in British concentration camps during the Boer War, is now honoured at her childhood home in Cornwall. A new historical attraction called The Story of Emily at the rectory in St Ive, near Liskeard, where she grew up.

The Guardian reports:

From 12 April a series of events are being held at the Cornish home where the pacifist, whistleblower and activist Emily Hobhouse grew up, around the 165th anniversary of her birth, part of efforts to shine a new light on her fight for justice.

Hobhouse travelled from Cornwall to South Africa at the turn of the 20th century and reported back on the awful conditions endured in the British bell tent camps set up during the Anglo-Boer war, but was dismissed as a “hysterical woman” and a traitor.

On Saturday 12 April a talk will be given there by Elsabé Brits, who told the Guardian:

“Emily Hobhouse was an eyewitness of the British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer war. Not only did she provide relief, such as food, clothing, and other necessities, but she also compiled a 40-page report, published in June 1901, detailing all her observations and findings.

“This report was discussed in both [British] Houses of Parliament. It generated a significant amount of negative press and denialism. She was called a traitor and a hysterical woman.”

You may enjoy my post on Kenneth Griffith's film Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman.

Emily Hobhouse was the sister of the Liberal philosopher Leonard Trelawney (L.T.) Hobhouse.

The Joy of Six 1284

Ben Quinn explains how the National Trust fought back against the culture warriors: "When it comes to disinformation, [Celia] Richardson speaks of taking 'a broken windows approach' - borrowing from the criminology theory that addressing low-level problems creates an atmosphere that discourages larger ones."

"From the 19th to 20th century, children were physically removed from their homes and separated from their families and communities, often without the consent of their parents. The purpose of these schools was to strip Native American children of their Indigenous names, languages, religions and cultural practices." Rosalyn R. LaPier says Joe Biden's apology for the horrors of Native American boarding schools doesn’t go far enough.

Dominic Grieve has some good advice, which the Conservative Party will ignore, concerning the severe problems that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights would cause.

It is all too clear that unelected bureaucrats now control what happens on the West Yorkshire Rail network on the grounds that declining passenger numbers, a result of their own failures, justify further cuts. Curtailments to Sunday and evening services could soon follow. In a reversal of decades of local progress, argues Colin Speakman, West Yorkshire’s once-thriving commuter rail now struggles under bureaucracy and neglect.

"Arlott was a superlative cricket commentator, a failed Liberal politician (was there any other kind in the post-war era?), and a major catalyst in the D'Oliveira Affair. Were it not for John Arlott we may never have heard of Basil D’Oliveira and the controversy sparked by D'Oliveira’s selection for England’s tour to South Africa, turning South Africa into even more of a pariah state may never have happened." Matthew Pennell wrote a post for Black History Month on British Liberals and the D'Oliveira Affair.

Andy Lear searches for the ghost woods of Rutland's Leighfield Forest.

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Richard Kemp says the Liberal Democrats must be a party of the major cities as well of the shires and suburbs: "We will only be a truly national party when we represent people in all areas and from all walks of life. We will now have a greater resource than at any time in my political career to begin to achieve this."

Jason Beer KC discusses being crowned Barrister of the Year, the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and what it has done for public understanding of the role of barristers.

"If you don’t already have generational wealth, your kid will feel it sooner or later. The average fee for an independent school is £16,650. If the schools pass on the VAT increase, that will mean an extra £2,500 a year. If that is too much for your family, then you are better off not sending your kid to a substandard private school." Stella Tsantekidou has some advice for parents.

"There is ... only one sustainable future for the series and the now completed volumes for England, Scotland and Wales, and that future is digital. A small group of supporters are actively pursuing this prospect. Should the project succeed, subscribers will benefit from corrections and updates and a GPS locator." Gillian Darley looks to the future of Niklaus Pevsner's Buildings of England series.

"From writer-director Cy Enfield’s desire to capture native customs on film to the acknowledgement of Cetewayo’s tactical expertise, the picture depicts the Zulus in a manner far removed from the way Africans had been previously depicted on film." Richard Luck defends the politics of Enfield's 1964 film Zulu.

John Lewis-Stempel makes a plea on behalf of eels and for a change in human thinking about nature: "Like everything about the eel, the reasons for its calamitous decline - 95% globally since the 1970s - are mysterious, although shifts in the oceanic currents which bring the elvers to Europe and the pollution of waterways are causal contenders. And it is the eel’s bad luck to be enigmatic rather than charismatic."

England beat the All Blacks away from home in 1973

I'm fond of quoting the Irish hooker Ken Kennedy on English rugby in the amateur era: 

"England have the players. What they've got to do is find the selectors who will pick them."

Some evidence he was right comes in the shape of this victory against the All Blacks in New Zealand. Such wins are rare today: they were almost unthinkable in 1973.

England chopped and changed their team throughout the Seventies, yet three of the pack playing here - Fran Cotton, Roger Uttley, Tony Neary - were in the Bill Beaumont's grand slam XV almost seven years later. What might they have achieved if they had been selected consistently?

Similarly, Jan Webster and Alan Old had been the England half backs when, almost as unexpectedly, they had won in South Africa the year before. It's quite possible that they never played together again.

As you can see, 50 years ago rugby union was almost a different game. Not every player was a giant, there was no resetting of scrums, there was no lifting in the line out (or if there was it couldn't be too obvious) and it was the wingers who threw the ball in.

I wish England well tomorrow and shall watch the game, But I don't enjoy rugby union on television as much as t used to.

How much of that is down to the style of rugby Eddie Jones's teams came to produce, I may find out.

Kenneth Griffith's film Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman

I'm not bringing you a contemporary newspaper account of the 1899 meeting to oppose the Boer War that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch chaired in Liskeard: I'm bringing you a dramatic reconstruction of it.

Kenneth Griffith was an actor and maker of documentaries whose strongly held political views regularly brought him into conflict with television bosses and the broadcasting authorities.

His Independent obituary from 2006 was candid:

He could exasperate colleagues by his cantankerous manner and stout refusal to compromise his artistic and professional integrity, especially when offered work by those whom he called the "priggish cuckoos" of the BBC's middle management. Even those who were kind to him found he would insist on marching to a different drum.

For someone normally seen as on the left, Griffith had a surprising sympathy for the Afrikaners. From it flowed his 1984 documentary Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman, which dealt with her humanitarian and political efforts to help the inmates of the concentration camps the British had established in the Boer republics.

This tactic of removing the civil population from areas of conflict so guerrilla forces cannot use it as cover had already been used by Spain in Cuba and was recently used by the Sri Lankan government in Tamil areas of the island.

In Cuba and South Africa at least, the conditions in which these civilians were held were appalling and resulted in many deaths. 

I have chosen the section of Griffiths's film that deals with the Liskeard meeting, but the whole of it is worth watching if you do not know the story. All the parts are played by Griffith or the South African actress Hermien Dommisse.

Six years later, a film called That Englishwoman: An Account of the Life of Emily Hobhouse was made in South Africa, with Veronica Lang in the title role. Lang enjoyed a long but not stellar career in British television.

Emily's father, the Rev. Reginald Hobhouse, was played by Terence Alexander, in the era when he was Charlie Hungerford in Bergcrac. 

You can see a fragment of the film below. 

Emily Hobhouse: A Cornish humanitarian

Looking for an account of the meeting against the Boer War that Arthur Quiller-Couch chaired at Liskeard in 1899, I came across this tribute to one of the speakers, Emily Hobhouse.

It comes from the Western Morning News for Friday 11 June 1926, when she had just died at the age of 66. It's more about her male relatives than Emily, but it's a start as an introduction to someone I want to know much more about. (John Hall's book, whose cover I've used as an illustration here, looks the place to go for that.)

A Cornish Humanitarian

Opinions differ still as to whether the humanitarian zeal of Miss Emily Hobhouse always found the wisest outlet, but the noble motives this distinguished Cornish woman there are, so tar as I know, no two opinions. A great many people in London and elsewhere think of her as the Florence Nightingale of South Africa, and they will probably be present at Kensington Cemetery to-morrow when Miss Hobhouse's remains are laid to rest. 

Among them I should not be surprised to see Mr. Lloyd George, with whom many Cornishmen may remember Miss Houhouse spoke from the same platform at Liskeard in the 'nineties in connection with the South African War. The district was familiar to her, for it was at St. Ive near Liskeard that Miss Hobhouse was born. Her father, the Venerable Reginald Hobhouse, was then rector. He became afterwards Archdeacon of Bodmin. 

As the niece of Lord Hobhouse on her father's side and of Sir William Trelawney, for some time Radical member for East Cornwall, on her mother's, Miss Hobhouse was related to two Lord Byron's most intimate friends. Her work in the concentration camps South Africa was followed with sympathetic attention nobody more than her famous fellow-Cornishman, Leonard Courtney, then a commoner. 

Cornish settlers in Minnesota still remember gratefully, no doubt, the two years Miss Hobhouse spent in their settlement after the loss of her venerable father. Her brother, Professor Leonard Hobhocse, is probably Cornwall's most distinguished son the sphere of philosophical and sociological research. He is, of course, the author of the little book "Liberalism" the Home University Library.

Leonard Courtney, incidentally, became the 1st Baron Courtney of Penwith. He is described by Wikipedia as "an advocate of proportional representation in Parliament and acting as an opponent of imperialism and militarism".

He was MP for Liskeard between 1876 and 1885 as a Liberal, and then for Bodmin between 1885 and 1900. There, from 1886, he sat as a Liberal Unionist, but his radical views became an increasingly uncomfortable fit with that party.

He did not stand in Bodmin in 1900, and when he did stand for again in 1906 it was as a Liberal.in Edinburgh West. There he was defeated by a Liberal Unionist.

I'll look out for an account of that Liskeard meeting and for more on Emily Hobhouse. The more you know, the more there is to find out.

Later. A bit of googling has turned up a dramatic reconstruction of the Liskeard meeting and a South African film biography of Emily.

Later again. Despite what the contemporary report here says, Emily Hobhouse was cremated and her ashes were ensconced in a niche in the National Women's Monument at Bloemfontein.

Church bans Desmond Tutu's daughter from taking Shropshire funeral due to same-sex marriage

Yes, the Shropshire Star wins my Headline of the Day Award, but the judges felt it necessary to add a rider condemning the Church of England.

As the story below that headline explains:

The daughter of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been banned from officiating at a church funeral in Shropshire, because she is married to a woman.

Instead the family of Martin Kenyon will be holding the 'service' in the back garden of his country home in the south of the county.

The former army officer split his life between London and the county and his family had been hoping to hold his funeral in St Michael and All Angels at Lydbury North.

But his wish to see priest Mpho Tutu - daughter of his close friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his own god-daughter - conduct it in the church has been denied by the Church of England because she is in a same-sex marriage. ...

Mr Kenyon was friends with Desmond Tutu for 60 years after he looked after the South African archbishop when he arrived in London in the early 1960s to study.

Mpho Tutu told the Star of her reaction to the decision:

"I couldn't believe my ears. Our same-sex marriage is again a reason to hurt people for no reason.

"Martin’s daughters, grandchildren, friends, the Tutu family, and also my wife, Mpho, who are all mourning because of the death of their beloved Martin are being punished because she fell in love with me and dared to marry me

"I feel it is my time to speak up for my wife."

And the Star claims the Diocese of Hereford told it:

“We acknowledge this is a difficult situation. Advice was given in line with the House of Bishops current guidance osame-sexex marriage.”

Yes, I think it probably did.

Six of the Best 1005

Anne Applebaum says Alexei Navalny is showing the world what courage means: "Nothing is secret about the poisoning, false trial, or harsh imprisonment of Navalny. Like the multiple attempts to murder him, these things are playing out in public, in the open, for everyone to see."

"For 48 hours, soccer stood on the brink. Fans took to the streets. Players broke into open revolt. Chaos stalked the game’s corridors of power, unleashing a shock wave that resonated around the world, from Manchester to Manila, Barcelona to Beijing, and Liverpool to Los Angeles." Tariq Panja and Rory Smith on how the Super League fell apart.

T.J. Coati explains what's wrong with Secure Schools.

In 1982 the South African government bombed Islington. James Morris has the story.

"A fascinating essay by Tom Holland describes a mysterious artefact which may show a West Indian slave playing cricket and then follows C L R James in analysing cricket as a pathway to equality." Richard Heller and Peter Oborne argue that the new Wisden is a global record of war, plague, racism and environmental change.

Jessica Pickens looks back at juvenile Oscars - 12 were awarded between 1935 and 1961.

Six of the Best 851

"First, some figures. From 1899 to 1902, roughly 48,000 people died in British concentration camps in South Africa. Of the 28,000 white deaths, 22,000 were children under the age of 16. More than 4,000 were women. The 20,000 Black deaths were less clearly recorded - a mark of official indifference - but most estimates suggest that about 80% were children." Robert Saunders puts Jacob Rees-Mogg right on British concentration camps in the Boer War.

"Being Asian and a curry lover you would think that I would feel sorry for him but I don’t. Those from immigrant communities who vote or advocate for narrow interests always draw my ire." Jane Chelliah is not moved by the secretary general of the Bangladesh Caterers Association's regret at influencing his members to vote Leave.

Paul Russell reconsiders the moral philosophy of Bernard Williams, whom I heard speak at York as a student.

John Boughton examines the history and architecture of the Church of England's engagement with council estates.

"We have one of the most complete town walls in Europe. But neglect and overdue repairs have led Historic England to add Ludlow town walls to its Heritage in Danger list. The town council should be ashamed of this." Andy Boddington on the failure to repair Ludlow's fallen town walls.

Tim Holyoake watches Shoestring again after 40 years and is not disappointed.

Six of the Best 845

Why do nations sometimes commit spectacular acts of self-destruction? Tom Scott argues that  strange fervour that seized the Xhosa people of South Africa in the 1850s may shed light on Brexit.

"When Jean Phillipson's family returned to Fairfax, Virginia, after living in Bolivia, the main thing her 10-year-old son complained about was the bus ride home from school. 'He wasn't allowed to have a pencil out,' says the mom of three, 'because it was considered unsafe.' Lenore Skenazy on American overparenting.

Boak & Bailey are frankly gutted about Asahi's takeover of the brewing wing of Fuller’s.

Adam Scovell revisits the 2019 television adaptation of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.

Birds can see a colour that human can't, explains Tessa Koumoundouros: "In our eyes, we have three types of colour receptors, or cones - they are sensitive to red, blue and green frequencies of light. Birds have a fourth receptor that varies across species in the type of frequency it can detect."

The archaeologist Francis Pryor recalls the day his mother met Viv Stanshall.

Leicestershire vs South Africa, 1924

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Leicestershire take the field against the touring South Africans on 3 May 1924.

The ground is not Grace Road, where Leicestershire play their games today, but the old Aylestone Road ground.

As I wrote when I visited it three summers ago:

This is the ground where, between 1901 and 1939, Leicestershire played their county games. According to the club's website, the great names who played hear include Grace, Bradman, Hammond and Hutton. ... 

The county played a couple of further championship games at Aylestone Road after the war and the final first-class match here was between Leicestershire and Cambridge University in 1962. Mike Brearley was a member of the visiting team.

You can see it's the same ground if you compare the photograph below, which I took that day, with the one above.

Moonraker, Dolly's braces and the Mandela Effect

Do you remember the scene in Moonraker?

Dolly helps Jaws out from wreckage of the ski-lift. He looks at her showing his metal teeth. She smiles back, showing the braces on her teeth.

His heart is softened and he is eventually redeemed by his love for her.

Except... that scene never happened. When Dolly smiles she shows nothing more than her teeth.

I thought I remembered seeing braces, but I was wrong.

Equally, I thought that Brian Dennehy, the American actor who starred in Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect in the 1980s was dead. But he is still with us.

Both these are favourite examples of the Mandela Effect. This is the idea that our memories do not always fit the public record, not because they are faulty, but because that record is somehow falsified.

The Mandela Effect gets its name from the fact that many people were convinced that the death of Nelson Mandela had been announced many years before he was released from prison.

It seems pretty clear that this is because people's memories of the death of Steve Biko have somehow become muddled up with their memories of Mandela.

I suspect this is an American phenomenon. Opposition to Apartheid was central to the British left when I was young - I even heard Biko's friend Donald Woods speak when I was at university - and Britain has many historic links with South Africa.

Dolly's nonexistent braces seem to have lodged themselves in our minds because the scene would have been wittier if she had worn them.

And there was a false report of Dennehy's death in the US, though I have no idea how I came across it.

I have seen it suggested that the Mandela Effect is a creation of the internet. Once, if we looked something up and found our memory was wrong, we would probably have accepted it.

Today, we can go online and find a community of people who have just the same memory as us.

And that must prove something really weird is gong on, right?

Lord Bonkers' Diary: “Free-ee Me-ee-ee-ee-ee”

Thursday

When Nelson Mandela was banged up I sent him a cake with a file in it, but I had not great confidence that the South African authorities would be sportsmen enough to give it him. So I decided to raise public awareness of his plight here in Britain by writing a song. I called it “Free Me”, but as fitting the words and music together proved harder than I had expected, it came out more like “Free-ee Me-ee-ee-ee-ee”.

The idea, you see, was that someone should sing the song while in the character of Mandela himself, and I wrote to both Harry Belafonte and Nat King Cole proposing the idea. When they failed to reply I had hopes of persuading a popular actor or entertainer of the day – say Bryan Forbes, Tommy Trinder or Dickie Henderson – to black up and sing it, but their people never rang my people back.

The good news is that the song was eventually taken up by some jolly young fellows from Coventry who made the bold decision to recast the lyrics so they referred to Nelson Mandela in the third person. I questioned the wisdom of this, but It turned out that they fitted the tune much better after this and the record became something of a hit. Perhaps you have heard it?

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• I am the Lib Dems' new pastoral care office
• David Grace vs the drones
• Oh, those Russians!

Six of the Best 405

The Liberal Democrats are unpopular, but things can change argues Neil Monnery: "Labour now lead the polls just ten years after going into a very unpopular war and five odd years after overseeing the tanking of the economy. They are doing that with a leader who has zero personality or political nous and a shadow Chancellor who is, to be frank, vastly out of his depth. That says a great deal about how politics can ebb and flow...."

Ian Smart on the wide appeal of the Anti-Apartheid movement and how he didn't meet Nelson Mandela.

"When Mandela donned a Springbok jersey and walked onto the field to congratulate the captain, Francois Pienaar, not only was he making a sporting gesture, but reaching deep into the heart of white South Africa. Implicit in his gesture was a reassurance that he would value the things that whites held dear and seek to accommodate their interests, alongside others." Angela Gilchrist writes for Discursive of Tunbridge Wells on her time as a young journalist in South Africa and the process of national reconciliation.

Information Right and Wrongs reminds us that children can refuse to have their fingerprints taken for internal school systems.

Landscapism visits the Uffington White Horse and Wayland's Smithy.

"From here we conducted a quick march down Oxford Street, dodging the throng of Christmas shoppers, and into Soho Square for another reading from Jerusalem." Richly Evocative joins a walk taking in a variety of sites associated with the artist and visionary poet William Blake.