Zack Polanski in a Yes to AV campaign video

I remember very little of the Alternative Vote referendum campaign except that it turned out to be a referendum on Nick Clegg instead. The only party that much liked AV was the Labour Party, and it campaigned against it.

So thanks to Josiah Mortimer for posting this video from the Yes side, which turns out to feature a young Zack Polanski in the days before he joined the Liberal Democrats. Presumably he turned up here because he was still working as an actor.

I don't imagine this video converted many people. Though it sets out to show that AV is simple, it risks making it seem rather complicated. Worse than that, I just don't care whether Zack and his friends go for a coffee, go to the pub or fall down an unmarked mine shaft. It's dull.

Perhaps it looks forward to the Bluesky assumption that anyone who does not share our politics must be stupid. But at least it sets out to educate them, rather than blocking them and then boasting that it has done so to its friends.

Another mercy is that it doesn't feature Stephen Fry, which it might well have done. Dan Snow, as fans of Liberal trivia will know, is Lloyd George's great great grandson.

Later. I'm told this video wasn't issued by the official Yes campaign but by an independent group of activists. They made it because they thought the official campaign material was so poor.

For an informed view of the Yes campaign, see this post by James Graham.

Ken Loach was Kenneth Williams' understudy in a West End revue

In 1961 Sheila Hancock was appearing in the West End revue One Over the Eight. In her memoir The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw she writes:

The chief joy of One Over the Eight for me was meeting and becoming friends with the writer of the show, Peter Cook, and Kenneth [Williams], the maverick star.

But she didn't feel London was really swinging yet and neither did Kenneth Williams:

One night after the show, when I gave him a lift back to his chaste flat on the back of my Lambretta, he waved his furled umbrella at Eros as we circled Piccadilly Circus crying "Where is it? Where is it all happening? Where are all these orgies? Why haven't we been asked?"

Peter Cook wasn't the only writer who contributed to One Over the Eight: The Stage lists John Mortimer, Lionel Bart, N.F. Simpson and John Bird among the other contributors.

But the reason for this post is that Sheila Hancock reveals that Kenneth Williams' understudy was Ken Loach and so gives us our Trivial Fact of the Day.

In this era, Loach was also involved with Leicester's The Living Theatre. His first screen credits as a director came on television in 1964.

Lord Harborough's Curve and Oscar Wilde's first biographer

Lord Harborough's Curve: photo by John Sutton

Many railway enthusiasts will know the story of the Battle of Saxby and Lord Harborough's Curve, told here by the Leicestershire Museum Collections site:

In mid-November 1844, railway surveyors were making their way slowly through the Leicestershire countryside. George Stephenson had sketched out his preferred route for the Syston & Peterborough Railway and now they were taking the levels. 

Four miles east of Melton, near the village of Saxby, they reached the estate of Lord Harborough, whose ancestral home of Stapleford Hall stood nearby. His Lordship hated the very idea of railways and had put up signs warning the surveyors to keep off his land. 

The railway men attempted to avoid causing offence by following the towpath of the Oakham Canal, but this added insult to injury, as Lord Harborough was a shareholder in the canal, which faced ruin if the railway was built. His servants and estate workers set about removing the surveyors by force, leading to four days of fighting between the two sides.

Sidetracked adds some colour:

Pistols were allegedly drawn by surveyors, clubs and iron pointed staves carried and bare fists used.  Artillery was even mentioned! The estate Fire Engine was deployed as a primitive water cannon and the railway company was threatened by letter that:

"We have barricaded the towing  path and have in readiness a few cannons from Lord Harborough’s yacht. If you force us to use them, as a last resort, the blood will be upon your hands."

Lord Harborough won his dispute with the railway company, so its engineers were forced to construct a tight curve in order to avoid his land. "Lord Harborough's Curve", as it was known, remained in use until 1892, when a route through Stapleford Park was finally built. You can see the wooded embankment of Lord Harborough's Curve in the photograph above. But the title died with him, as he did not father any legitimate children.

In another part of the forest, I have noticed that whenever I search for pictures of Market Harborough in photo libraries, portraits of a writer called Robert Harborough Sherard come up. He was a friend of Oscar Wilde and his first biographer.

Sherard's father was the Revd Bennet Sherard Calcraft Kennedy, who turns out to have been one of three illegitimate children that our Lord Harborough had with an actress called Emma Love. Through his mother, Sherard was also a great grandson of the poet William Wordsworth.

Sadly, he is not an attractive figure. His books on the poor of England generally lay the blame for their sufferings at the door of Jewish landlords.

Still, we have our Trivial Fact of the Day: Lord Harborough who won the Battle of Saxby was the grandfather of Oscar Wilde's first biographer.

Something amazing: A Shropshire businessman falling out of the sky and Mystery at Witchend

The latest Secret Shropshire programme on BBC Sounds is intriguing:

In 1937 Max Wenner fell to his death from a plane in one of aviation's greatest mysteries. Wenner was a wealthy landowner and pilot living at Batchcott Hall outside Picklescott in the foothills of the Long Mynd.

Wenner's frequent flights to Germany in the 1930s and visits from high profile Nazis like Joachim von Ribbentrop led to speculation that Wenner may be leading a double life. In January 1937 his body was found in woodland near Genk, in Belgium.

He had fallen out of a passenger plane but no could explain why. Almost ninety years later, the mystery continues to intrgue journalists in the UK, and on the continent.

Johnty O'Donnell visited Batchcott Hall to investigate the mysterious Max Wenner, the man who fell from the sky.

So there were rumours of a nest of Nazi spies in a big house in the shadow of the Long Mynd? Could this story have been an inspiration for Malcolm Saville's first Lone Pine book Mystery at Witchend? 

Wenner's death must still have been the talk of the district when Saville visited Shropshire during the war. Even the name Batchcott echoes the Hatchholt of his book, and I once drew parallels between Mystery at Witchend and the wartime propaganda film Went the Day Well?

While I was writing this the Trivia Desk phoned to point out that Max Wenner was the great uncle of the Blue Peter presenter Christopher Wenner, who later became a crusading documentary maker under the name Max Stahl.

From our Trivia Desk: Aleister Crowley, Harold Davidson and chess

Our Trivial Facts of the Day both come from a post by Richard James, who was my captain when I played chess for Richmond & Twickenham long ago. He is writing about the annual Varsity chess match:

Aleister Crowley, "the wickedest man in the world", ... played for Cambridge in 1896 and 1897, while Harold Davidson, "the rector who was eaten by a lion" (he was actually mauled rather than eaten, but that’s jumping ahead), represented Oxford between 1901 and 1903.

As I've said before, it's great fun on my Trivia Desk, but you have to work weekends. Both Aleister Crowley and Harold Davidson (AKA the Rector of Stiffkey) have good Wikipedia entries.

Barlow and Watt investigate Jack the Ripper

Last night I watched the film Murder by Decree on Talking Pictures TV. I've watched it several times because the cast and premise (Sherlock Holmes tracking down Jack the Ripper) are so appealing, and because I always forget how disappointing it is.

But Holmes was the not first fictional detective to investigate the Ripper murders. In 1973 the BBC screened a series in which the nation's most celebrated television detectives Charlie Barlow and John Watt, played by Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor.

It was this series that introduced the public to the theory that the Ripper had been the eldest son of the future Edward VII, Prince Albert Victor. Stephen Knight did not publish his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution until 1976.

The 1973 television series avoided turning these terrible murders into a parlour game – Martin Crookall describes its approach well:

The format is simple, level-headed and unmelodramatic. On one level, Barlow and Watt move around a contemporary investigation room, surrounded by books, copies of newspapers, such documentary evidence as there is, and reconstruct the five canonical murders in chronological order. 

They don’t dramatise things, they talk like senior Detectives sifting evidence, looking for similarities and anomalies, testing the weight of the evidence against their professional experience, building up a picture of the time, the place, the people and the events, as fairly and neutrally as they can. Naturally, they talk as the characters they are playing, indulging in a never belaboured degree of the banter and cynicism of the veterans they are. 

Interspersed with this is the reconstruction. Intelligently, and in keeping with the series’ aim to be as factual and complete as possible, these eschew any reconstruction of the killings themselves and lapse into drama only once, showing fourth victim Catherine Eddowes being released from police cells after sobering up, only to be murdered within thirty minutes. She’s the only one of the five victims to actually be depicted in persona.

I'm writing this post because the whole series has reappeared on YouTube – it has a history of coming and going there.

The clip I have chosen above comes from the sixth and final episode. In it Joseph Gorman sets out the meat of the theory and claims that he is the illegitimate son of Walter Sickert. I don't believe a word of it, and Wikipedia says he later admitted to the Sunday Times that his story was a fiction. Elwyn Jones, one of the writers of this series, was introduced to him when he told one of his police contacts that he was working on a series about Jack the Ripper.

Finally, a moan and then my Trivial Fact of the Day.

The moan is that when the Rest is History tackled the Ripper story, it said that Barlow and Watt were still in Z-Cars in 1973. In fact, they had left the show as long ago as 1965 to appear in Softly, Softly and then Softly, Softly: Task Force. By 1973 Barlow had a series of his own, Barlow at Large.

And my Trivial Fact of the Day? It's that Jack Warner's daughter in the often misremembered Dixon of Dock Green was first played by Billie Whitelaw.

Britain's two most famous TV policemen on screen together in 1964

Between 1962, when he first appeared as Charlie Barlow in Z-Cars, and 1976, when he played the character for the last time in Second Verdict, Britain's most famous television policeman was Stratford Johns.

That baton was then taken on by John Thaw, who had begun playing Jack Regan in The Sweeney in 1975. He continued in that role until 1978 and then played Inspector Morse between 1987 and 2000. (I don't remember their being any clear holder of the crown during that interregnum.)

And here they are together in a Z-Cars episode from 1964.

Trivia fans will be pleased that Sheila Hancock, who was married to John Thaw, played Miss Hannigan opposite Stratford Johns' Daddy Warbucks in the original London production of Annie.

No, Pope Leo XIV did not mail dead rats to American radio stations to promote The Boomtown Rats

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This claim was made in a recent Word in Your Ear podcast, but sadly it appears not to be true.

In fact, the young Bobby Prevost, as the Holy Father was then known, was a temporary replacement for the man who did mail the rats.

So close, but no cigar. You can read the full details on Facebook. And Mike Bone tells the same story on Best Classic Bands, but doesn't mention the young temp there.

Trivia dump: Woman wakes to find she's bought an emu egg

A BBC News story was shortlisted for Headline of the Day – Woman fulfils childhood dream of rearing an emu – but lost out to a demonic jumper.

The story beneath it does deserve some sort of award though:

A late night shopping spree turned into a dream come true for one animal lover after she successfully hatched an emu egg. 

Rhi Evans, from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, has no memory of buying the egg but woke one morning in 2022 to an email confirmation from eBay saying it was on its way.

We've all been there.

This item gives me an excuse to repost my favourite clip of Rod Hull and Emu. As someone said, "I've watched it dozens of times, but still all I can see is an emu throwing a man into a chest freezer."

Rod Hull began his career on a children's television show in Australia. As it the way with such shows, the presenters sat in front of some shelves with interesting things on them. And among them was an emu's egg.

Someone wrote in to ask if it was ever going to hatch, and shortly after that Hull saw an emu puppet in a shop. The rest is history.

Like the Bee Gees, Rod Hull was given his break into television by an executive called Desmond Tester. Tester had begun his career as a child actor in Britain before the war – he is the boy with the bomb on the bus in Hitchock's Sabotage.

I'm also reminded of a story about someone at Liberal Democrat News finding they needed an illustration for an article on European Monetary Union. Without much hope, they turned to the paper's artwork files, only to find an envelope labelled 'EMU'.

They opened it and found a photograph of an emu. And that complete's today's trivia dump.

V.S. Pritchett reviews the Sword in the Stone in 1938

V.S. Pritchett (1900-97) was still reviewing for the New Statesman in his late seventies when I started buying it in the sixth form.

Here he is back in 1938, welcoming the publication of T.H. White's The Sword of the Stone in his review for The Bystander:

The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White (Collins 8s. 6 d.), is mixed, but, on the whole successful, fantasy about anachronisms and it contains two chapters at least which are the funniest things I have read for a long time. Mr. White's game is to tell the adventures of a boy called the Wart, at his father's mediaeval castle, in terms which lie somewhere between the language of Grimm, Wodehouse, and the College of Heralds. 

This kind of thing may produce the vulgar comedy of the schoolboy howler or passages of wicked genius Mr. White has both here is an example of the latter. A possible origin of fox-hunting is suggested—

Sir Ector said: "Had a good quest to-day?"

Sir Grummore said: "Oh, not so bad. Rattlin' good day in fact. Found a chap called Sir Bruce Saunce Pite choppin' off a maiden's head in Weedon Bushes, ran him to Mixbury Plantation in the Bicester and lost him in Wicken Wood. Must have been a good 25 miles as he ran." 

The two high spots are the witches' duel—run strictly on what I take to be Camelot rules—with Merlyn; and a wonderful joust between two knights who lumber along towards each other at a mild drayhorse canter and meet with stupefaction in a dull crash of ironmongery. These are both Disney scenes. 

Mr. White has a pleasant learning which gives the whole a comically critical and instructive air. I never recommend humour, because it makes enemies, and many awful people will read this book aloud; but I suggest a prolonged and surreptitious glance at it.

And Disney did buy the rights to the book in the following year, though his film of it did not appear until 1963.

Trivia fans will be interested to know that Pritchett is the grandfather of the cartoonist Matt, who is famous for nailing it.

Labour councillor defects to Tories after seeking to fight particular seat for Lib Dems, but there's something more interesting here

There's a story on MyLondon about a deselected Labour councillor in Brent who has joined the Tories after first demanding to be allowed to fight a particular seat for the Liberal Democrats.

I am reminded of the days when David Icke wanted to be the Liberal candidate for the Isle of Wight, but wasn't interested in any other seat.

The MyLondon report says:

A text message sent to the LDRS from a source at the Brent Liberal Democrat Group appears to show him expressing disappointment at the Party for not offering him the seat he demanded in Alperton. Instead, he was told "seats are not given away like sweets".

Brent Liberal Democrats Chair, Virginia Bonham-Carter, told the LDRS, whilst the party did have conversations with Cllr Rajan-Seelan about joining the party, they "decided quickly that he wasn’t acceptable to us, as he could not meet our expectations."

She added: "Labour’s decline in Brent has been clear for some time, and this latest episode involving a deselected Labour Councillor underlines how deep their problems run. Local people deserve councillors who focus on residents’ needs, not on party infighting and personal ambition."

A little research shows that Virginia Bonham Carter (no hyphen) is the daughter of Mark Bonham Carter and the granddaughter of Violet Bonham Carter.

Writing this reminded me that I knew a Tim Bonham-Carter when I lived in Kew (well, North Sheen) back in the early Eighties. I saw sad to find that he died a few years ago.

To the best of my knowledge neither he nor Virginia is related to Lord Bonkers' old friend, the London gang boss Violent Bonham Carter.

Trivial Fact of the Day features Prunella Scales and Vera Menchik

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I'm listening to an edition of Gyles Brandreth's Rosebud podcast in which he talks to the actor Samuel West. It was recorded a couple of weeks before the death of West's mother Prunella Scales and so far he has talked mostly about her and his late father, Timothy West.

But there is one story he has not told about his mother...

Vera Menchik was born in Moscow, to an English mother and Czech father, in 1906. She began playing chess competitively just before the family came to live in London in 1921.

She was to become the strongest woman chess player in the world, holding the women's world title between 1927 and 1944. She regularly competed, and with some success, against the top men players of her day. There was not another woman player who did that regularly until Judit Polgár in the 1990s.

Vera Menchik died in 1945 when her house in Clapham was hit by a German V1 flying bomb.

And what does all this have to do with Prunella Scales?

Vera Menchik's great grandfather was a man called George Illingworth. And his brother John Thomas Illingworth was the great grandfather of Prunella Scales. Which makes the two women third cousins.

Thanks to Richard James for putting me on to a thread on the English Chess Forum.

Joanna Newsom: Baby Birch

When I first posted this back in 2010 I described it as "a lament for a child who is lost or never was".

Today, I know that Joanna Newsom is the second cousin, twice removed, of Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.

Roger Hollis: The spy who never was?

My memory of the Eighties is that Peter Wright was seen as being obsessive about Soviet infiltration of British intelligence. But didn't Karla arrange things to make Control look like that?

And in this programme from 1984 Wright cuts an impressive figure. No Percy Alleline he.

Let's end with a couple of pieces of trivia. 

Malcolm Turnbull, the future Australian prime minister, who embarrassed the British government in court while fighting to allow Wright to publish his memoirs, is related to both Angela Lansbury and Oliver Postgate.

And Roger Hollis, whether he was a spy or not, was the father of Adrian Hollis, who was a correspondence chess grandmaster.

"And Wilson plays a pass of geometric precision"

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We have our Trivial Fact of the Day and our Name of the Day.

Clive Wilson, who played on the left side of midfield in the late Eighties, was christened Euclid Aklana Wilson.

Thanks to A.V. Deggar.

Bryan Ferry and Howard Kendall played together in the same school football team

I was convinced I had made this my Trivial Fact of the Day years ago, but I hadn't. So now I have.

Ferry and Kendall both attended Washington Grammar School in County Durham. The photo above, borrowed off of the internet, shows them together in the school's under-13 side in 1957/8. Ferry is under the left-hand arrow.

Howard Kendall, a midfielder, played for Preston North End in an FA Cup final when he was 17 and then joined Everton, where he won a Championship medal. He later returned to the club as manager, winning two league titles, an FA Cup and the European Cup-Winners' Cup. He died in 2015.

Fulham Broadway station and some Stamford Bridge trivia

I liked John Rogers' video on Fulham so much that I've gone back there with Jago Hazzard.

He sets out the history of Fulham Broadway station on the London Underground. And, in passing, he gives us our Trivial Fact of the Day: the terraces at Stamford Bridge were built using spoil from the excavation of the Piccadilly Line.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page. And why not follow his YouTube channel? I know I do.

Richard Dawkins and T.H. White are distant cousins

This, just in from out Trivia Desk, wins Trivial Fact of the Day.

The Wikipedia entry for this blog's hero T.H. White tells you that that one of his great great grandfathers was a clergyman and author from Cape Colony, part of what later became South Africa, called Abraham Faure.

Go to the Wikipedia entry for Abraham Faure and you find that he is also a great great great grandfather of the scientist Richard Dawkins.

The Towers of Trebizond was partly written at Butlin’s in Skegness

I'm an admirer of Rose Macaulay's writing, and wouldn't share the critical judgement in this old London Review of Books article by Claire Harman. Still it does contain an irresistible trivial fact and a good joke at her expense:

Perhaps The Towers of Trebizond is the only one of Macaulay’s 23 novels in which a satisfactory balance between style and content is achieved. A charming detail is that this cosmopolitan story was partly written at Butlin’s in Skegness, where she had taken Gerald O’Donovan’s granddaughters for a holiday. 

Macaulay was not a snob, though she was taken up by snobs all her life, and relished a very active social life. Macaulay’s greatest claim to fame was the most perishable: she was a ‘golden talker’, valued by literary hostesses from her first appearance in print onward, and described by Naomi Royde-Smith in terms equally applicable to a patent corkscrew, ‘welcome at any dinner table, invaluable at weekends’.

So irresistible that it's our Trivial Fact of the Day.

Noel Harrison: The Windmills of Your Mind

In 1968 this song, which Noel Harrison performed on the soundtrack of The Thomas Crown Affair, won the Oscar for Best Original Song.

The previous year's winner of the same award was Talk to the Animals from Doctor Dolittle, which was sung - using the term in its widest sense - by Noel's father Rex Harrison.