Restoration of Gone to Earth to be shown in London Film Festival

From the London Film Festival website:

Long overshadowed within Powell and Pressburger's canon, this major new restoration reveals the visual splendour and dramatic intensity of one of their most misunderstood films.

Powell and Pressburger’s passionate Technicolor melodrama stars Jennifer Jones as the free-spirited Hazel, who refuses to be bound either by her clergyman husband or the predatory squire who pursues her. 

The untamed Shropshire landscape is at one with Hazel’s primal spirit, making this one of the filmmakers' most rhapsodic odes to the English countryside and among their most intoxicatingly sensual achievements.

The showing of Gone to Earth is on Wednesday 7 October (6pm) at the National Film Theatre.

The view west from the Stiperstones ridge today

I was up on the Stiperstones ridge today, placating the Devil and admiring the view into Wales.

Mind you, the border does funny things around there. So the large hill in the background and to the right, Corndon Hill, is in Wales, while the high ground to the left and behind it is Clun Forest and so in Shropshire.

Those tortured rocks in the foreground are, of course, the Stiperstones' very own.

A Liberal England guest blogger shows us around Snailbeach Mine

Ginger Beard Mark and the musician Eric Loveland Heath visit the old lead mine at Snailbeach in Shropshire. In its heyday in the second half of the 19th century, it was the most productive lead mine in the country.

Eric Loveland once wrote a guest post for Liberal England about growing up in Snailbeach and his reaction to it today. 

And you can download his digital album Snailbeach Mines Trust.

See? It's not just me who's taken with the place.

In which D.H. Lawrence visits Snailbeach

On Friday we saw D.H. Lawrence getting all Lawrentian about the Stiperstones: "It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers."

But when did he visit the area? The answer's in the video clip above: January 1924.

A paper by Lawrence Jones and Paul Simpson-Housley tells us something about Lawrence and Frederick Carter got up too:

They enjoyed a winter's walk together, which they began by climbing Cad's Hill. Later they crossed a narrow gauge railway and ascended the Stiperstones. The tiny Lord's Hill Chapel, located at the edge of the moors, and the works and smoke of Snailbeach came within their view. They then climbed Cranberry to the crest of the Stiperstones, at the southern end of which is located the Devil's Chair, an area of scattered rock.

Lead mining had ceased at Snailbeach by 1924, but the upper levels of the mine and the spoil heaps were being worked for barytes. Colonel Stephens had recently bought Snailbeach District Railways. Most of the line's traffic came from a quarry halfway along the line, but it was still open all the way to Snailbeach mine because that's where its locomotive shed was.

I've not read St Mawr, but Jones and Simpson-Housley say Lawrence combined the Stiperstones and the Wrekin to produce a symbolic landscape with a Devil's Chair and an Angel's Chair, the latter based on Heaven's Gate on the Wrekin.

So D.H. Lawrence visited Snailbeach. I'm sure Mary Webb did too, but did any other notable writers?

"The old savage England": D.H. Lawrence visits the Stiperstones

From St Mawr by D.H. Lawrence, published in 1925:

They came at last, trotting in file along a narrow track between heather, along the saddle of the hill, to where the knot of pale granite suddenly cropped out. It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England, whose last blood still flows in a few Englishmen, Welshmen, Cornishmen. The rocks, whitish with weather of all the ages, jutted against the blue August sky, heavy with age-moulded roundnesses.

Lewis stayed below with the horses, the party scrambled rather awkwardly, in their riding boots, up the foot-worn boulders. At length they stood in the place called the Chair, looking west, west towards Wales, that rolled in golden folds upwards. It was neither impressive nor a very picturesque landscape: the hollow valley with farms, and the rather bare upheaval of hills, slopes with corn and moor and pasture, rising like a barricade, seemingly high, slantingly. Yet it had a strange effect on the imagination.

A review of Terry O'Neill's life story in a social work journal

Twenty years ago, every branch of Waterstones had a section called "Painful Lives" that carried memoirs of abuse in childhood. The success of Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It in 1995 had awakened a public appetite for such literature, and publishers were happy to satisfy it.

It was in this climate that Terry O'Neill, the younger brother of Dennis O'Neill, whose death I have often written about, posted his life story on the website Authonomy under the title Never Again in 2009. This was a site where authors could post their manuscripts in the hope that its owner Harper Collins or another publisher would see it and be interested.

Fortunately, Harper Collins did recognise what a treasure they had. and published a rewritten version of Terry's book as Someone to Love Us. Despite this very "Painful Lives" title, and a cover that also made it look as though it belonged to that genre, my impression when I read it was that the ghost writer had done a good job. But I do remember things in Terry's original version that didn't make it into the published book, so I hope that manuscript still exists somewhere.

My reason for writing this post is that I've come across a review of Someone to Love Us in a social work journal. It was written by Dave Burnham and appeared in The Bulletin of the Social Work History Network (Vol. 3, No. 1, June 2016).

Here is an extract:

There are recognisable themes:

• Children never being told of decisions about them – not just by officials, but by anybody. 

• The number of placements and the yo-yo emotions associated with moving between caring family homes and rulebound institutions. 

• Although Reginald Gough’s beatings were by far the worst, the punishments meted out later to Terence in homes (beating, deprivation of food) bore a sinister similarity to Bank Farm practices. 

• The rich collection of characters involved in child care: the careful, kind leaders, the charismatic role models, the thoughtless, the demanding bullies. 

• The still silence of the scared children in the face of adult authority.

• The years of guilt Terence felt after Dennis’ death about what he might have done to save him. 

• The official emphasis on attempting to place the boys with a Catholic family, even though, as Terence said until he was in care he'd never been to church in his life. 

• The heartlessness of the press.

Most notably, during the boys’ six month stay there were perhaps ten visits by various officials, a Boarding Out volunteer, two senior Shrewsbury Council [in fact Shropshire County Council] officials, an 18 year old clerk from Newport and social workers dealing with other foster children at the Goughs. Not one of these people went upstairs to the freezing room where the boys slept on a straw pallet with one blanket. Monckton recommended some changes in Boarding Out visiting, but his report is most notable in proposing that people should simply do their jobs properly – seeing where boarded out children slept, for instance. had been expected for fifty years by then.

Burnham ends by saying Someone to Love Us should be read in conjunction with Sir Walter Monckton's report on the affair, but that this is hard to find.

You can find the Monckton Report online, but his statement that "no evidence came to my notice of any exploitation of the boys in the work of the farm" does not accord with the story Terry O'Neill tells.

Terry died in 2023. You can hear him speak in the award-winning BBC Radio Wales documentary The Mousetrap and Me.

A TV mast on the Stiperstones? What horrors would it have broadcast into people's homes?

The transmitting station on top of the Wrekin, which broadcasts television and radio to much of Shropshire and parts of the West Midlands beyond, celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. But if the county's planners had got their way it would have been built on the Stiperstones instead.

An article on BBC News – and they should know – says the BBC had tested transmissions from the Wrekin as far back as 1964. But in 1970, the Wellington Journal reported:

Salop County Council’s planning committee is in favour of putting the proposed BBC TV mast on the Stiperstones. It has rejected the Wrekin as a possible site saying it would have "an adverse effect on the visual amenities of the area." 

An inquiry into the BBC plan to have the Stiperstones as the site was held last year. But the Minister of Housing deferred decision, calling for new plans to be drawn up for the Wrekin. He said he would make a final decision after an inquiry into the Wrekin plans, fixed for March 3.

And the minister came down in favour of the Wrekin, after the proposed site of the mast there was moved further from the Iron Age hill fort.

I am left wondering what horrors a mast on top of the Stiperstones would have broadcast into people's homes.

Good Friday in Shropshire

From The Folklore of Shropshire by Roy Palmer:

Until the 1860s, when the well was drained, it was the custom on Good Friday to dip one's hand in the water, deemed good for weak eyes, of St Margaret's well at Wellington. 

Much more recently, comfortably into the 20th century, the congregation of Lords Hill Baptist Church met at Snailbeach in the afternoon and perambulated the area, pausing to sing hymns to the accompaniment of a brass band. 

Until the 1930s, most places of work closed on Good Friday. People traditionally spent the time in their gardens, and this was considered a good time for planting potatoes. Formerly, bread baked on this day was believed to have curative properties. 

Many Shrewsbury families trekked to Haughmond Hill, following the canal towpath to Uffington. Children played and picnicked on the hill until the Second World War ended the custom.

Powell and Pressburger's most bizarre moments

The British Film Institute's blurb on YouTube says:

In this video essay director Will Webb highlights scenes from Powell and Pressburger films – including The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where I'm Going and Black Narcissus – that tilt us off-balance, shaking what we thought we knew about the world's that one of cinema's greatest filmmaking partnerships created.

Don't worry. It also includes something from A Canterbury Tale – the first shot of the glue man here is really a boy, to make him look further away on the studio set. We also see Jennifer Jones on the Stiperstones in Gone to Earth.

Pollution from Shropshire lead mines still reaches the Severn

This information from an Environment Agency page will come as no surprise to regular readers:

There is evidence of lead mining in the Minsterley area of the Shropshire Hills since pre-Roman times. The importance of lead mining grew during the medieval period and had become a major part of the economy of Snailbeach and Minsterley by the late 16th and 18th centuries, respectively. 

This continued to grow throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, until the 19th century, when the mining activity was at its peak. During the 1870s the Stiperstones area was one of Britain’s main sources of lead.

But the page goes on to say that these long-abandoned mines still present a significant pollution problem:

Minsterley Brook is polluted in its headwaters by cadmium, however after the input of a mine water discharge known as Wood Adit at Gravels, the watercourse is polluted along its length for cadmium, lead and zinc down to the confluence with Rea Brook. 

Hogstow Brook is polluted along its length by cadmium, lead and zinc from its source at the outflow of the Boat Level mine drainage tunnel. Further metal polluted inputs enter the watercourse from Snailbeach. 

After the confluence of Rea Brook and Minsterley Brook, Rea Brook is still polluted at the sampling point at Hook-a-Gate Bridge near Bayston Hill. However, Rea Brook is not polluted, when assessed as an annual average, approximately 8km downstream of Hook-a-Gate Bridge at Coleham in the centre of Shrewsbury. 

Rea Brook flows for 25 miles from Marton Pool near the Welsh border to the Severn at Shrewsbury, passing Minsterley, Pontesbury, Hanwood, Hook-a-Gate and Bayston Hill on the way. 

It is joined at Minsterley by the Minsterley Brook, which rises on Stapeley Hill and runs through the wooded Hope Valley. The Hogstow Brook is a smaller stream that joins the Minsterley Brook shortly before its confluence with the Rea Brook.

There is another page on the pollution of these rivers on Restoring Europe's Rivers, but it's 10 years old and I don't know its provenance.

But, for what its worth, it says:

The mines were worked for mainly lead ores, but also zinc ore and latterly barites until closure in the 1940s, leaving spoil deposits and drainage adits which discharge to Minsterley Brook at various points. The mines are a significant source of heavy metal pollution in the catchment, and the discharges from them represent one of the longest continuous sources of pollution in the whole Severn River Basin.

Environment Agency routine monitoring found there were high levels of zinc in Minsterley Brook over most of its length, exceeding the Environmental Quality Standards (EQS) for the brook (75ug/l). As a result, the watercourse isn't achieving the 'Good status' for water quality as set out in our Severn River Basin Plan. 

The Boat Level adit discharge is the main source of the zinc (around 3000kg per annum) and other heavy metals, such as cadmium and lead, and discharges these pollutants into the Hogstow Brook. Immediately downstream of the Boat Level adit the zinc concentrations are up to 47x the EQS. 

At Minsterley, the zinc concentrations are 8x the EQS. Downstream of the mines, concentrations exceed the EQS for over 15km, until the Rea Brook reaches Hanwood and dilution from other rivers lowers the concentration to below the EQS.

Ecological surveys of the brooks have found aquatic insects were suffering as a result of these heavy metals, which can settle in river sediments. There is also a lower than expected population of small fish species.

To end on a happier note, the pretty little bridge in the photograph above crosses the Minsterley Brook in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Hope.

Secret Shropshire: Wild Edric and the Seven Whistlers

Is there anywhere spookier in Shropshire than the Stiperstones?

This short programme in the BBC's Secret Shropshire series tells you about the Devil's Chair, the Seven Whistlers and Wild Edric.

For Central Bylines: The forgotten Shropshire tragedy that inspired The Mousetrap

I met the editor of Central Bylines for coffee while I was on holiday in Shrewsbury. "Did you know that The Mousetrap was inspired by a real-life case that took place in Shropshire?" I asked.

So that's what my second article for the site is about.

Too often victims of crime are seen only as victims, so I was pleased to be able to include this from a news report of the trial:

Mrs Connop, who had previously fostered them and their younger brother Freddie in Herefordshire, described them in her evidence as "happy-go-lucky and harum-scarum, but nothing else" and Dennis himself as a "forgiving and sweet boy".

On which note, the photo below, which must be copyright to the O'Neill family, shows (from the left) Terry, Dennis and Freddie O'Neill in their days with Mrs Connop.

I've written before for Lion and Unicorn about the influence of this case on an earlier play: No Room at the Inn. And also about its uncanny parallels with what is now my favourite Malcolm Saville story Seven White Gates.

The death of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill shared front pages with news of the war in early 1945

Back in July, I wrote that the death in 1945 of Dennis O’Neill, a child in public care who’d been fostered with his younger brother at a farm in Shropshire, had caused a national scandal and shared newspaper front pages with the last stages of the war in Europe.

I've not seen a more striking illustration of this than the Daily Mirror's front page for 14 February 1945.

The text of the story runs:

Reginald Gough, farmer, and Esther Gough, his wife, were at Pontesbury, near Shrewsbury, yesterday committed for trial at Salop Assizes on a charge of the manslaughter of thirteen-year-old Dennis O'Neill, placed in their care by Newport Education Committee. 

Both pleaded not guilty and reserved their defence. Bail was refused. 

When Mr. Gough Thomas, defending, asked for bail Mr. Maddocks, prosecuting, said he could not possibly consent. The Justices had to consider the gravity of the case and the evidence that had been given, he said. 

"There is another matter to be taken into consideration. A tremendous amount of indignation has been aroused, and it might be for their own safety if they were not allowed bail," he added.

When Mr. Thomas pointed out that Mrs. Gough would have to go to Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, the chairman said that that point had been considered. 

Mr. Thomas: In the interests of decency and justice, will you give some indication to the ladies and gentlemen, as I will call them, at the back of the court, that in England we have British justice and not German justice? 

The chairman made no comment in reply, and Gough and his wife left the court in complete silence.

And the photograph caption says:

Terence O'Neill was 4½ hours in the witness box, Tuesday and Yesterday, telling about life on the Gough farm, where his brother died.

When the trial took place, it was held in Stafford because feeling was running so high in Shropshire. Reginald Gough was given six years for manslaughter and Esther Gough six months for neglect.

Though all the contemporary press reports say Dennis O'Neill was 13 when he died, he was in fact 12.

The photograph below shows the old police station and court in Pontesbury. For as long as I can remember, the building has been the offices of an insurance company, but when I saw it in the summer it appeared to be empty and was looking rather run down.

I imagine Dennis's brother Terry, who was the chief prosecution witness, is standing in the left-hand doorway of this building in the newspaper photograph.

Why the road through the Hope Valley road was closed to traffic while I was in Shropshire

I went to Bishop's Castle twice while I was on holiday in Shrewsbury. Because the A488 through the Hope Valley was closed, the buses were diverted via the road that runs through the villages of Snailbeach and Stiperstones - hairpin bends and all.

This video shows what was happening in the Hope Valley. The road there was laid out in the 1830s, and heavy lorries have been taking an increasing toll of it in recent years. Heather Kidd, the local councillor who appears in it, is the Liberal Democrat leader of Shropshire Council.

A page from UK Fossils tells you what is so interesting about the geology of the Hope Valley. The woods in the valley are, of course, known for their media-savvy dormice.

Good news for media-savvy dormice in Shropshire's Hope Valley

The new Stiperstones Landscape National Nature Reserve is good news for dormice that live in the woods of Shropshire's Hope Valley.

BBC News quotes Tom Freeland, English Nature's head of nature reserves, as saying that the cooperation between organisations that the new reserve encourages will make it easier to provide more suitable habitat for the creatures.

He says:

"Now listed as vulnerable, the loss of hedgerows and changing woodland management practices has seen hazel dormouse numbers plummet in the last two decades.

"We're carefully managing the woodland at Hope Valley to create and maintain more favourable habitat for dormice.

"By working with our partners we can turn small islands of wildlife-friendly habitat into one unified sanctuary for nature that reaches across the Stiperstones landscape for the benefit of vulnerable species like the hazel dormouse and many more."

The hazel dormouse is a fancy name for what was formerly called the common dormouse. Perhaps the mice have got together and decided on a relaunch?

It's certainly better branding than the name chosen by another kind of dormouse that was introduced to Britain in 1902 and can now be found in and around the Chilterns. That's the edible dormouse.

Community Land Trust launches appeal to buy White Grit Meadows

Two sites owned by the Middle Marches Community Land Trust are included in the new Stiperstones Landscape NNR. Now the trust is appealing for funds to help it buy a third:

Help us acquire five acres of botanically rich meadow at the foot of Corndon Hill, where plants such as Heath Spotted Orchid, Dyers Greenweed and Devil’s Bit Scabious abound.

The area we wish to buy consists of 4 small fields totalling 5 acres, bounded by tall, thick hedgerows, with some small stands of Alder and Goat Willow trees.

The site is situated at the foot of Corndon Hill just inside Wales at an altitude of 1000 feet (300 metres) in the hamlet of White Grit.

White Grit is a small, quiet, scattered village directly on the border with Shropshire. The nearby village of Priest Weston, despite being in England, actually lies to the west of White Grit. To the east is the A488 road, and the nearest town is Bishop’s Castle.

The mining community which thrived here in the 19th century gave rise to this area of smallholdings and a series of species-rich meadows, some of which remain today. 

Read more on the Middle Marches Community Land Trust site, where this photo comes from.

More than 1,000 hectares of Shropshire uplands to be protected as part of expanded Stiperstones nature reserve

Natural England has announced the creation of a new Stiperstones Landscape National Nature Reserve. 

The expanded reserve is more than three times the area of the original Stiperstones reserve. It brings together six partner organisations to safeguard precious heathland, ancient woodland, bogs and acidic grasslands on the border of England and Wales.

One of the six organisations is the Middle Marches Community Land Trust. Its chair, Dr Richard Keymer,  says:

"Middle Marches Community Land Trust is delighted that the Stiperstones National Nature Reserve is to be extended and will include 2 areas of land that we own, Minsterley Meadows and Norbury Hill. Larger areas of land managed for nature will make them more resilient in the face of a changing climate."

I took the photograph above, which looks across to the Stiperstones from the west, a couple of weeks ago.

The expanded Pevsner Shropshire visits Snailbeach

In Church Stretton this morning, I treated myself to the Buildings of England volume on Shropshire by John Newman and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Ludlow? Schmudlow. I knew where to turn first:

Snailbeach is less lunar than it was before the great glistening white hills of mine waste were cleared away in 1994 but it is still an odd place. It has no obvious centre, no coherent street pattern and little in the way of public amenities. 

The double-glazing and conservatory industries cannot disguise the origins of virtually every dwelling in a C19 worker's cottage of the most cramped and basic sort. The houses cling to ledges of extraordinarily steep N- and NW-facing hillsides or hide in the lush vegetation of a narrow valley and are reached along a maze of tracks which, more often than not, allow no through passage. This heartless development is the product of the Snailbeach lead mine, locally claimed to have been the richest in Europe.

Now do you see why I'm obsessed with the place?

And then there is the mine itself:

The remains comprise the country's most complete and atmospheric record of a nationally important industry. Between 1845 and 1913, British mines produced a total of 241,000 tonnes of lead of which more than half came from a Snailbeach.

You can see the great glistening white hills of mine waste, which were still there when I first visited Snailbeach, in the photo below.

Embed from Getty Images

Stiperstones village and the Stiperstones today

The Stiperstones area didn't really go in for villages. It was a landscape of scattered smallholdings where the lead miners and their families lived.

Although the school and pub have long been there, the village of Stiperstones seems to be a modern notion. Since the war at least, it's been policy to concentrate new development there and at Snailbeach. The Bog, another mining village in the area, was largely demolished in the Sixties.

Today I went to Stiperstones, notably the Stiperstones Inn. I also went for a walk and took some photographs of the Stiperstones ridge lowering over the village to which it lent its name.

The four coalfields of Shropshire (with help from a cat)

 As the blurb on YouTube explains, there are four coalfields in Shropshire:

• The Denbighshire field, which stretched from Chirk to below Oswestry.
• The Shrewsbury field, which included the town of Shrewsbury, Hanwood, Cruckmeal, Condover, Leebotwood, Pontesbury and Westbury.
• The Coalbrookdale field, which focused on Arleston, Dawley and Madeley but ran to Oakengates.
• The South Shropshire field around Highley and the Clee Hill, but running into the Wyre Forest.

The Shrewsbury field provided the coal that powered the lead mines of South Shropshire and, while I knew that coal had been mined on Clee Hill during the second world war, I didn't realise there had been opencast working there so recently.

The commentary sounds authoritative, but at various points a cat takes strong exception to it. It's worth a listen just for him.