Lord Bonkers' Diary: A strange episode

Was Peter the Painter at the Siege of Sydney Street? Did he survive it? Was he still alive in Rutland this summer? It's possible, if he stumped up for the potion the Elves of Rockingham Forest sell.

Anyway, as the old boy says, it was a strange episode.

Friday

When I heard a few months ago that they had an “artist in residence” at Belvoir Castle, I determined at once that no Duke of Rutland was going to outdo the Bonkers. I telephoned Joshua Reynolds and Freddie van Mierlo to see if they were interested in the gig, but both told me they were too busy. Then, or so I thought, fate dealt me an ace. 

I was putting the world to rights in the Bonkers Arms that very evening, when someone introduced me to a foreign fellow by the name of “Peter the Painter”. Naturally, I engaged him on the spot and told him to turn up at the hall with his brushes the next morning. 

When he did, I was disappointed to find that he was a house painter. Nevertheless, he proved useful, tackling various jobs about the Estate. He had Advanced Views, but I’ve always found anarchists to be good company – unlike the average Labour MP – so I was happy to discuss politics with him over dinner. And then one morning he was gone, leaving a barn half painted. A strange episode.

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

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins
• "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"
• A young Marines officer called Ashdown

Anti-Trump tactics in Portland recall the opposition to Poland's Communist regime

The Frogs of Portland challenging Trump's goons and their occupation of the city remind me of the tactics adopted by the opposition of the Communist regime in Poland.

The quotation below comes from the East European supplement included in issue 7/8 of Here and Now, a Situationist magazine published in Glasgow between 1985 and 1984. The article is written by Danny Branchflower and issue 7/8 appears to date from January 1989:

During the referendum on social policy held on November 27th, Orange Alternative demonstrated and called for Wroclaw to be the city with a 200% turnout; "Vote 'yes' twice". 150 people were arrested and detained for a number of hours. 

Again on 7th December the streets were flooded with Santa Claus's: "Bring Christmas decorations, fir branches to decorate the subway. Let's help the administration in this noble task ... Let the new existence shape the new consciousness!!! Only Santa Claus can save you from poverty".

Confusion reigned as the police tried to round up the Santas, arresting many official Santas in the process. A crowd of more than 2000 called for the release of Santa and pressed in on the police, later surrounding the district Police HQ, before being dispersed.

You can read more about Orange Alternative on 99% Invisible.

Charles Masterman and the Siege of Sidney Street

Embed from Getty Images

Talking Pictures TV is showing the 1960 British film The Siege of Sidney Street at 22:05 this evening. Thrill to Peter Wyngarde as Peter the Painter. [Later. It's now on the channel's catch-up service TPTV Encore.]

The siege. a real event from 1911, is famous because the Liberal home secretary Winston Churchill called out the Army to deal with two Latvian revolutionary anarchists and had himself photographed at the scene, apparently directing operations.

This gives me an excuse to repeat this extract from Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband Charles, who at the time was Churchill's deputy:

The "Sidney Street incident" had taken place while we were abroad, and the Home Secretary, Mr. Churchill, had incurred a certain amount of criticism for calling out the troops and for being there himself. As Mr Balfour observed later, "I understand what the photographer was doing but why the Home Secretary?"

The story was told in heightened terms in the foreign press, with illustrations in red and blue; every English person we encountered demanded what was happening, with vocal complaints that they did not expect this sort of action by a British Government. I will not deny that by the time he reached home Masterman's official loyalty was beginning to show signs of wear and tear.

He burst into Mr. Churchill's room at the Home Office with the query "What the hell have you been doing now, Winston?" The reply, in Winston's characteristic lisp, was unanswerable. "Now Charlie. Don't be croth. It was such fun."

The Joy of Six 1258

"The middle-income professionals in the seats we have just won will take a lot of persuading to pay more for better prisons, probation officers and children’s services, even if told that alienated teenagers turn into rioters, and criminals without rehabilitation reoffend. Those saving to send their children to private schools will be reluctant to pay more tax for the state sector. Getting comfortably-off taxpayers in the home counties to contribute to regeneration of the north will be very difficult." William Wallace says the Liberal Democrats need to have a clear position on public spending.

Alex Krasodomski argues that the UK riots have forced Western democracies to confront their reliance on technology giants.

"The Peak District and Exmoor were found to have concentrations of antibiotics at a level that could be of concern for human health as they were beyond the threshold that can contribute to antimicrobial resistance. This could affect anyone entering the water for swimming or water sports, the researchers said." Lucie Heath on new research into pharmaceutical pollution of English rivers.

Charlotte Llewellyn celebrates the very English anarchist Colin Ward, who "put people, especially those most marginalised by society, at the centre of his work. He recognised the creativity, knowledge, and talent of ordinary people and their ability to make change happen, as well as emphasising the importance of working co-operatively towards a better future."

Ingrid Skeels explores the history and benefits of 'playing out', where children enjoy informal sport for free in the community where they live, and She how 'play streets' are revitalising communities across the UK and further afield. And she does it on the England and Wales Cricket Board site too.

"We could ask if Yoda's Theme would be Yoda’s Theme without Yoda. Or, does Jaws' theme need a shark to be frightening? Do we need to see E.T. fly across the moon in order to be moved by the film’s soaring theme? Does the Close Encounter’s five-note motif only work if we see Richard Dreyfus playing with mashed potatoes?" Edwardo Pérez discusses the film music of John Williams.

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Ukrainian victims of Russian war crimes should not be deployed as a human shield to keep a discredited Boris Johnson in Downing Street, says an angry Euan McColm.

Jonathan Meades argues that war and famine offer opportunity to the spivs: "It doesn’t matter how catastrophic, how terrible, how morally squalid, how globally imperilling the circumstances, there is nothing that cannot be shamelessly exploited by the descendants of Stanley Baldwin's 'hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war'."

Josie Giles recalls Orkney's short-lived anarchist newspaper The Free-Winged Eagle.

Arundells, Edward Heaths former home in Salisbury, is open to the public. Richard Smith finds a visit intriguing.

"Blyth might not look much like ancient Sparta, but the locals shared a similar devotion to hard work and athleticism, and there can’t be many football grounds where Plutarch is quoted above the grandstand: 'Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy, but where are they.'" Dan Jackson on how he fell in love with the Northern League.

Richard Williams pays his tribute to Doris Day: "I imagine that back in 1963 I was not the only teenaged boy to be stirred by 'Move Over Darling', a 'girl group' record sung by a 41-year-old woman, co-written and produced by her 21-year-old son." Richard Williams pays his tribute to Doris Day.

Tory leader of Leicestershire: Government has given no money to fund free school meals over Christmas

Conservative leader @LeicsCountyHall @nrushton says for the Govt to say the £63m given to councils can fund free school meals is untrue. He says they can't see children go hungry so 12k on #fsm will get them in the holidays including Easter even though no funds to help.@bbcemt pic.twitter.com/hBonSzTM5X

— Tony Roe 👓 (@tonyroe) October 27, 2020

In the tweet above you can see a clip of Nick Rushton, the Conservative leader of Leicestershire County Council, being interviewed by the political editor for BBC East Midlands, Tony Roe.

Rushton says the council "cannot see children going hungry" and will fund free school meals over the Christmas holidays.

Asked if the government has given the council money to pay for measures like this, as Tory MPs are claiming, he replies:

They gave it us in June or July with the instructions that we had to spend it by the end of September, which we did.

That money, says Rushton, was spent on funding food banks and community groups.

Six of the Best 707

Mark Pack suggests 11 things to do with new Liberal Democrat members.

"Militant has returned. Of course, not quite the same people. Many of the people who have joined the new Militant – Momentum – were not born then. But some are the same people with less hair and even less imagination!" Richard Kemp sees the resurgence of an old opponent in Liverpool.

Carne Ross, diplomat turned philosophical anarchist, is profiled by Andrew Anthony.

Michelle Sowey says teaching philosophy to children is a great idea.

"'How are we Flat Earthers supposed to explain to our friends the solar eclipse in August?' asked one attendee. The room fell silent. 'We'll have to do more research and get back to you on that.'" Graham Ambrose on America's burgeoning Flat Earth movement.

David Pountain explains how Bonnie and Clyde brought the French New Wave to Hollywood.

Charlie Hebdo in Presteigne

© Colin Smith

There are reports that several newsagents selling copies of Charlie Hebdo have been approached by police.

One of the places where this has taken place is Presteigne in Powys - not a town noted for its inter-faith tensions.

Fashion may have moved on, but a few years ago it was where the cool kids who had decided to settle on the Welsh border went to live.

According to the Guardian:

Paul Merrett, 57, the owner of a newsagent in Presteigne, Wales, said a detective and a police community support officer from Dyfed-Powys police spent half an hour asking his wife Deborah, 53, about the magazine. 

“They wanted to know about Charlie Hebdo. They came in unannounced and we had customers,” he said. “There were questions asking where we got the Charlie Hebdo copies from, did we know who we sold them to – which we didn’t say. We were a bit bemused because it was out of the blue.” 

“My wife said, ‘Am I in trouble?’ because she thought she was in trouble for selling them. They said, ‘No, you’re not in trouble’ but just continued with their questioning for half an hour.” 

Merrett added: “It was all about Charlie Hebdo. I guess they wanted names and addresses of people we sold them to, which we didn’t tell them anything like that. We sold 30 copies. 

“My wife was a bit worried with the questioning but she certainly wouldn’t have given any names to the police. I’m shocked they asked. They wanted to know where we got the copies from, how did we let the customers know that we had them.”

Dyfed-Powys Police have issued a statement confirming shops in the town were visited but denying that customers' names were requested:

"Dyfed Powys Police can confirm the visits were only made to enhance public safety and to provide community reassurance."

You can be sure that when the last of our liberties is removed it will be done "to enchance public safety". And, while I am not sure exactly what "community reassurance" means, I suspect this intervention failed to provide it.

But why Presteigne of all places?

There may be a clue in a recent story on the Hereford Heckler ("Anarchist news and views from Hereford and beyond"):

A barmy local vicar has compared satirical cartoons in the French anti-racist magazine Charlie Hebdo with the anti-Semitic blasphemy of Nazi Germany. 

Writing in Presteigne’s parish magazine, Revd Steve Hollinghurst called it ironic that the west condemns the murder of Jewish people under Hitler’s rule but defends “to the hilt the right of others (cartoonists in this case) to ridicule and offend people of faith and their beliefs”. 

The vicar goes on to ask readers, “didn’t the holocaust begin with vile anti-Semitic cartoons? Is there that much difference?”

That post goes on to tell the story of the police's trawl of shops in the town and ends by asking:

So which of these two stories more accurately portrays life in Nazi Germany: The one where satirical journalists poke a bit of fun at all religions but ultimately promote a message of love and tolerance; Or the one where the strong arm of the state harasses a newsagent and demands to know details of customers who have bought copies of a legally published magazine?

Thanks to John for introducing me to the Hereford Heckler.

Ten stories from ten years - 24 March

Taking my lead from Caron Lindsay on Liberal Democrat Voice, here are snapshots of 24 March over the years here on Liberal England:

2013 - Marianne Faithfull sang for us while I wrote about her grandfather's libido-liberating Frigidity Machine.

2012 - I visited the Portland Enclave, which lies off the London Road in Leicester. The picture above is taken from this post.

2011 - A guest post by Ruth Kinna offered a beginner's guide to anarchism.

2010 - Rory Stewart had compared Liberal Democrats to the Taliban. I remarked that I would be more outraged at this if I had not once begun a Guardian article as follows: "Fierce, bearded and wedded to an impenetrable ideology. Not a description of the Taliban, but the average commentator's view of the Liberal Democrats."

2009 - On Ada Lovelace day, I paid tribute to the woman herself.

2008 - I congratulated to the pro-Tibet activists who attempted to disrupt the lighting of the Olympic torch in London.

2007 - An amusingly shaped parsnip had made it from the pages of the Shropshire Star to the Guardian.

2006 - As so often in those days, my House Points column dealt with Labour's attempt to give the government more powers against terrorism: "Never mind traditions of local accountability and mistrust of an overmighty state: whisper the word “terrorism” and we are supposed to throwaway everything we believe in. The problem with today’s world is not that terrorists believe in their cause so strongly: it’s that the democracies’ belief in theirs is so weak."

2005 - Responding to reports that Mark Thompson had bit a colleague when working as editor of the Nine O'Clock News, Lord Bonkers said: "I knew Lord Reith well and never saw him bite anybody, but there were persistent reports in the 1960s that Hugh Carleton Greene had eaten a junior researcher."

2004 - "Twitchy local authorities, obsessed with safety and frightened of compensation claims, are turning urban areas into 'fun-free, soulless' spaces," said a campaign launched on this day.

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"It's a bizarre circumstance that the Conservatives ... have chosen a candidate who appears opposed to it and its leader. As well as declaring against Gay Marriage, Lords Reform and Abortion rights - all key elements of the Cameroon modernisation agenda and part of the Tory General Election Manifesto she fought the last election in support of - she's effectively pre-rebelled against the housing and infrastructure policies of the Government she's campaigning to be a part of." Leading Lines on the ironies of the Eastleigh by-election.

Spitalfields Life photographs the fight back after fascists firebombed the anarchist Freedom Press bookshop in Whitechapel. I have stolen the photo you see here - property is theft and all that.

"It is a strange reversal of fate that makes you worry a little about your son, at the hands of an educational system that is more geared up to deal with girls.  Until 1990, it used to be the other way around," says The Real Blog.

The Atlantic Cities on the evidence that children who walk or cycle to school can concentrate better.

"Leicester’s experience with the Richard III discovery underlines that universities have powerful stories to tell about research and education that is useful, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, making the world a better place, or just plain fascinating. They should come down from the ivory tower and talk." Paul Woodgates writes in the Daily Telegraph on the lessons of the discovery of the king.

Past in the Present asks if Pimlico is still 'the poor man's Belgravia'.

Liberal Democrats insist on police accreditation for Conference representatives

If I go Liberal Democrat Conference these days it is to help out with the party newspaper rather than as a voting representative. So in a way the announcement that the Lib Dems are to continue to insist on police accreditation of representatives does not affect me. But it has still saddened me.

It appears we now live in a country where you need police permission to attend political conferences. I grew up in a country where we congratulated ourselves precisely because we did not live like that. This was seen both as a way of showing we were not like the Soviet Union and as our reward for having defeated Hitler.

If you can hear ghostly laughter, it is probably Osama Bin Laden.

Proudhon said that to be governed

is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.

More and more that describes the experience of being a political activist in modern Britain.

And if you do use the party's democratic structures to challenge something, as Lib Dem members did with police accreditation last year, then you will ignored.

In fact it is worse than that. The strongest argument against accreditation as far as many of us were concerned was that it would not make us any safer. Yet the signatories of the announcement write:

However, whilst some of us are willing to risk the possibility of serious harm to ourselves by not following police recommendations to accept accreditation for all conference goers, we accept that we do not have the right to impose this on others who have no choice about attending Conference. This includes the many staff that will be working for the venue, the Conference hotel or for the Party.

So not only are our arguments ignored: we have to suffer the clear implication that we hold our view only because we do not care about the workers.

As I wrote on the Guardian website at the time of last year's Lib Dem Conference:

If activists are treated like this, and also face security precautions that make attending conference the equivalent of taking a transatlantic flight, many will drift away from the political process.

It is no wonder that so many people are choosing to be active in charities and single-issue pressure groups rather than political parties. If nothing else, you are more likely to be treated with respect.

Living the town and country life

"We live the town and country life," went the song in an old television commercial for the Town and Country Building Society. That society has long since merged with the Woolwich (and thus Barclays Bank), but maybe it was on to something.

I have been reading the opening chapter of The Child in the Country by my favourite modern anarchist Colin Ward. In it, Ward looks at the consensus among so many theorists that city life was unhealthy for children and that the country was the place for them to grow up:

Not only public schools and preparatory schools but borstals, reformatories and approved schools were deliberately situated in the country, far from the temptations and stimulations of the city, for rural childhood was especially valued. 

"Rousseau's 'Emile,' wrote Herbert Read, "seems to have been taught in a well-furnished country house, surrounded by a well-cultivated garden with all variety of natural phenomena within easy reach. That may be the ideal environment for the unfolding sensibility of the child - personally I believe that it is.

That may be what thinkers of the right and left have said about childhood - particularly in the early twentieth century with its eugenicist concern for national efficiency - but it is not how they have generally behaved.

As Ward points out:

The rich, in bringing up their children, have always been able to mingle urban and rural experiences. The possession of a town house as well as a rural estate, whether we are thinking of Imperial Rome, eighteenth-century England or nineteenth-century Russia, ensured that the children of the family gained experience of both, as well as of the drama of the transition between the two. 

It was expedient for the patricians that their children, or at least their sons, should gain the experience of negotiating with gamekeeper and bailiff as well as with gaming-house keeper and tailor. It was expedient that their daughters should achieve marriageability and the avoid the attributes of hoydens or tomboys by being 'finished' in town before 'coming out'.

I remember falling into conversation with a retired architect in a pub in Rye. (Rye is the kind of town where you find yourself falling into conversation with retired architects.) He pointed out that the terraces of Bath, which we so admire today, were inhabitable in part because the owners had a place in the country to go to as well. So we should not draw easy conclusions from them about the degree of urban density that is compatible with pleasant living.

We cannot all live like eighteenth-century gentlemen, but we can avoid adopting an unthinking polarity between town life and country life.

Malcolm Saville provides a good reason for writing

From chapter 6 of Rye Royal (1969):

But when they reached the castle they saw that it was now surrounded by a high wire fence bearing a notice "Entrance to the Public prohibited" and Dickie said he would like to write a protest article about this sort of thing happening. 

"Anyway," he added. "Things and places are hardly ever what they were. I suppose that's another important thing about being a writer. You can help people to remember.

There is more about my favourite writer as a child on the Malcolm Saville Society website. The castle mentioned here is Camber Castle.

Anarchism: Should I report myself to the police?

This morning's Guardian revealed  that a remarkable official counter-terrorism notice was circulated in London last week:

There was no warning about other political groups, but next to an image of the anarchist emblem, the City of Westminster police's "counter terrorist focus desk" called for anti-anarchist whistleblowers stating: "Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police."

That is a bit worrying, because I have an interest in anarchism myself. Having heard Ruth Kinna talk about her book A Beginner's Guide to Anarchism at a small publishers' event in Leicester, I asked her to write a guest post for this blog. Instead, it seems, I should have shopped her to the Old Bill.

This evening comes the welcome news that the police notice has been withdrawn. Another Guardian report says:

After 24 hours trying to discover why the counter-terrorism desk at Belgravia police station had issued the injunction under the banner of Project Griffin, an initiative raising awareness of counter-terrorism and security issues among business, public sector and security personnel, Scotland Yard said: "The Metropolitan police service does not seek to stigmatise those people with legitimate political views."

It seems the rozzers were worried about self-styled anarchists who go around smashing things up during demonstrations. But those are the sort of anarchists who go on the marches to demand a bigger state, so I don't think they have quite got the hang of anarchism.

GUEST POST A beginner's guide to anarchism

Ruth Kinna is the author of A Beginner's Guide to Anarchism (Oneworld Publications, 2009).

Anarchism is often said to have a sporadic history: defeat in Spain in 1939 marks the end of the international movement which had its origins in the First International; 1968 was a year of resurgence, sparked by student protest and the rise of the new left; and the Battle for Seattle in 1999, the global justice movement’s coming out party, was anarchism’s most recent manifestation.

Though each wave generates a good deal of enthusiasm and some affection, a negative image of the anarchist still prevails. The alter-globalisation movement and organisations like Reclaim the Streets encouraged an association with party-going carnival "fluffies," but the bearded, bomb-throwing terrorist remains a powerful trope (witness the character "V" in V for Vendetta), and the balaclava of urban youth, the punk and the eco-warrior are modern takes on it - search for ‘anarchist’ on Google image search and see what appears.

In different ways, each speaks to the suspicion and unease that the idea of "anarchy" stirs. Anarchism might be interesting and, compared to other currents of radical and socialist thought, an attractive "libertarian" alternative, but anarchism is still linked with violence, utopianism and rebellion in equal measure. Do either graffiti artists or their audiences realise that the circle scrawled around the A is actually an O and that the symbol stands for "anarchy is order"?

The answer is probably very few and too many still confuse ‘anarchy’ with the Hobbesian mess that anarchists associate with the state. How, then, should anarchism be understood and what do its recent manifestations have to do with the politics of Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin or P.-J. Proudhon, to name three of the anarchist movements leading thinkers?

The Beginner’s Guide was written with a number of aims in mind: to provide an accessible account of anarchist politics; to highlight the diversity of the movement and unpack some of the myths attached to it. As importantly, it has been designed to introduce anarchist ideas without adopting prescriptive definitions. In keeping with the diversity at the heart of anarchist politics, it neither presents a check-list of core beliefs nor a supposed set of essential theoretical assumptions (for example, an "anarchist conception of human nature").

Anarchism is linked to anti-statism, but this can be and is understood in myriad ways: in relation to capitalism, as a form of anti-authoritarianism, as a rejection of institutionalised power, as a set of social relations, a combination of any of these, and so on.

The first chapter of the book discusses three different approaches to anarchism: the canonical, which identifies the founding fathers and key thinkers; the categorical - an approach which groups anarchists into schools (for example "philosophical", "communist", "individualist") - and which spawned a movement that demands ‘anarchism without adjectives’; and the historical, which traces the emergence of the political and labour movements which sprang up across the world in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries.

Each has something to tell us about anarchism, but it is through an appreciation of their interrelationship that we learn the most about the perennial concerns of self-identifying anarchists and the ways in which these concerns translate into theory, into ideas about political practice and organisational ideals. This is a rich tradition of political thought and action, innovative, passionate and creative, and it embraces late, great revolutionaries like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the Christian anarchism of Leo Tolstoy and contemporary activists like Bob Black and John Zerzan. Class struggle anarchists, anarcha-feminists, anti-civilisation anarchists are all part of the mix.

Subsequent chapters focus on particular themes: conceptions of the state; ideas of anarchy and approaches to action. The rejection of centralised power is a strong theme in anarchist writing, but so too is the state’s hypnotic authority which leads us to adopt roles that militate against individual reflection and conscience. In the state, Fredy Perlman argued, we wear masks; and even if we agree with the decisions that we are charged to take, we are infantalised by Leviathan and the processes which structure daily life.

The book explores a number of ideas of anarchy. Amongst these is the practical utopianism of Colin Ward and Paul Goodman, two inventive, creative subversives whose reflections on education, squatting, urban design, gardening and a whole host of other issues continues to inspire community-action groups. Ward, in particular, took his lead from Kropotkin, whose critique of the state (in The State its Historic Role and Mutual Aid) pointed to the possibilities of co-operation, local initiative and the development of non-hierarchical organisations. Not quite the big society. Practical anarchy not only by-passes government, it also develops its own moral rules and it challenges market-capitalism.

The anarchists’ understanding of the intimate relationship between ends and means is one of the themes of the final chapter. This has led both to a principled rejection of parliamentary politics and the aspiration to take power in the state – for benevolent or other purposes.

Anarchists stand against vanguardism. They are advocates of direct action, though they understand this in a variety of ways and adopt very different attitudes to questions of violence, disobedience and protest. Because they reject institutional politics, anarchists are often dismissed as hopeless idealists. Anyone prepared to engage with the order that anarchists see at the heart of anarchy will find this a strange reversal.

If you want to find out more, the book is available at Housemans online shop.

Colin Ward on the state

Writing on Crooked Timber, Maria cites a favorite quotation of Colin Ward. It comes from the German anarchist Gustav Landauer:

The State is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

Colin Ward 1924-2010

I was sad to hear of the death of the anarchist thinker Colin Ward. As I said last year, he managed to "make anarchism sound a) common sense and b) thoroughly British".

Next Left has a good appreciation of him by Stuart White:

Colin really stood at the confluence of two traditions (as did the post-war Freedom group more generally). On the one hand, he was of course shaped profoundly by the theoretical tradition of anarchism. He knew his anarchist classics - especially Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops - and he drew on them. 

On the other, Colin was also animated by the diffuse traditions of working-class and popular self-help - resolutely practical traditions concerned to get things done, to make the world better in some simple but important and measurable way, and which have little time for theoretical niceties. He sought to bring the traditions into dialogue, for their mutual benefit.

National Allotment Week and Prince Kropotkin

Birkdale Focus has a superb post by Iain Brodie Brown that starts by noting that this is National Allotment Week, goes on to quote Peter Kropotkin and ends by reminiscing about the glory days of the Young Liberals:

For our generation it was not only Kropotkin's ideas around "Mutual Aid" that we found attractive but his 'green' ideas especially in his book "Factory Fields and Workshops". This publication did impact on Liberals at the times especially those like Howard developing the idea of 'garden suburbs'.

The book was republished in 1974 with a commentary by Colin Ward. In the book-and this is where we get back to allotments-Kropotkin argued that if food production was small scale "allotment-like" then the level of production would dramatically expand. His ideas influenced Gandhi and Tolstoy as well as the Dig for Victory campaign.

Colin Ward is a favourite of mine. He manages to make anarchism sound a) common sense and b) thoroughly British. There was a good article on him in the Guardian a few years ago.

John Ryan and Captain Pugwash

Ten years ago I was down in Rye - no doubt it was something to do with Malcolm Saville - and went into a bookshop there. I saw a display of Captain Pugwash books and told the owner how much I admired John Ryan's work. "He was in here five minutes ago," he replied, "you could have met him."

John Ryan died today aged 88. I am too young to recall Captain Pugwash's heyday: I discovered him as an adult through Ryan's picture books. But I do have fond memories of Sir Prancelot from the early 1970s.

Pugwash war revived in the 1990s. This was in the days when I did not have a television, but I did see an episode at someone else's house. The animation had been jazzed up and modern sensibilities had dictated that the Captain should have a Black crewman. But he was as stupid as the other pirates, so that was fine.

What did matter was that Tom the cabin boy had been given a voice. In the books (and, I believe the original television series, Tom was always the hero and always "said nothing"). Presumably in order to signal to the hoped-for American audience that Tom was a good character, he had an Irish accent.

One other thing has to be mentioned in connection with Captain Pugwash: the myth that the stories contained all sorts of obscenities. Seaman Stains, Master Bates, Roger the Cabin Boy... You know the sort of thing.

Snopes.com confirms that these stories are nonsense, suggesting that the jokes are far older than Pugwash. ("Pugwash" isn't rude either, incidentally.) It also quotes a Guardian apology from 1991:

In the Young Guardian of September 13 we stated that the Captain Pugwash cartoon series featured characters called Seaman Staines and Master Bates, and for that reason the series had never been repeated by the BBC. We accept that it is untrue that there ever were any such characters. Furthermore, the series continues to be shown on television and on video. We apologize to Mr. Ryan, the creator, writer and artist of the Captain Pugwash films and books. We have agreed to pay him damages and his legal costs.

"Young" Guardian? "In the Young Guardian"? No wonder the country is in the state it is. Give our young the original Pugwash, not sniggering like this.

The Chagall windows at All Saints, Tudeley

On Sunday I was looking through Simon Jenkins' England's Thousand Best Churches and came across a photograph of a stained glass window at All Saints, Tudeley in Kent. It is one of 12 at the church by the Russian emigré artist Marc Chagall.

The photograph showed one of those windows, which is a memorial to Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, who died in 1963 in a sailing accident off Rye, aged 21. She was the daughter of the Tory MP Sir Henry d'Avigdor-Goldsmid.

In my lunch hour today I was reading Cold Cream by Ferdinand Mount. By one of those odd coincidences, it contains an account of Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid's death.