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Leicester New Walk Museum and Art Gallery: A Journey out of Darkness

From the museum's website:

"A Journey Out of Darkness" is a stunning exhibition of over 100 artworks, which explores the development of Leicester’s German Expressionist Art Collection.

The collection, which began in 1944 amidst the darkness of war with paintings saved from destruction in Nazi Germany, now numbers over 350 artworks, the first and largest of its kind in the UK.

The exhibition will now run until 3 May 2010. This etching, the extraordinary "Death and Woman" by Kathe Kollwitz, forms part of it.

Health and safety and the Daily Mail

A couple of days ago I pointed you to a posting where David Boyle wrote about the concern with health and safety. He suggested that it had the effect of making us less safe and was a good example of how big government can be self-defeating.

In a comment on that post "James" pointed us to a link that showed that what the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph had described as Institution of Occupational Safety and Health guidance was in fact the opinion of an individual contributor to the Institute's magazine.

James concluded: "David may have a point but he needs to back it up with some real examples", which is fair comment.

The trouble is that too many Liberal Democrats regard showing that the Daily Mail is wrong as the end of the debate.

Take a posting on the same subject by Mark Pack on Lib Dem Voice. (I am sorry to pick on Mark- there have been many similar posts over recent months.)

Mark wrote about the same story, but to him the only point of interest was that the two newspapers had misrepresented the Institute's advice. But surely there is more to it than that?

Because when you read the Institute's guidance (which Mark helpfully reproduces) it turns out to be something less than the call for neighbourliness which the Institute's website represents it as:

Deciding whether to grit beyond the boundaries of their property needs to be carefully considered by companies. If access to the premises is covered in ice, companies may choose to grit the access to help their staff and visitors arrive and leave safely, even though it’s not their property. However, in this instance, if they failed to grit the surface properly and someone had an accident as a result, then they could incur some liability.

As a general rule, though, it’s sensible for firms to consider the risks and take reasonable steps to prevent accidents from happening. If this means gritting outside the boundaries of your workplace, then it’s better to do that than to have people slipping over or involved in car crashes on your doorstep.

Mark has nothing to say about this. All he wants to do is complain about the Mail.

Let us take is as read that the Daily Mail is awful. There still remains a much more important and interesting question to debate.

What is the Liberal Democrat attitude to health and safety? Do we think that the government (though it is not the only influence here) has got things about right? Or do we (like me) hold a view more like David Boyle's, which suggests that the Labour attempt to regulate everything is bound to be counterproductive?

This constant complaining about the Mail is a form of political group grooming. Look how ridiculous the people who disagree with us are! How sensible we are in comparison! Why, they even supported Oswald Mosley!

I suspect that, like the constant bien-pensant complaints about the Sun in the 1980s, the modern hatred of the Daily Mail disguised more than a drop of hidden snobbery.

So let's stop talking about the Mail all the time and start worrying about what we think. It may be harder work, but it will a lot more rewarding.

Comedian's son is the deputy leader of Rochdale Council

The Manchester Evening News carries the important news that Liberal Democrat councillor Dale Mulgrew, who has just become the deputy leader of Rochdale Council, is the son of the comedian Jimmy Cricket.

"And there's more!"

Please yourself. That used to crack us up in the 1980s.

Peter Bartram

Someone called Peter Bartram arrived at work today to give us some training.

The name seemed familiar. "Did you once publish a biography of David Steel?" I asked.

He did. We got talking.

"Don't you write Lord Bonkers?" he asked. I do.

We got on famously after that.

Peter has his own website.

Windy Ridge, Little Bowden

Walking home from the station tonight someone asked if I would show a poster protesting against the development of Windy Ridge on the edge of Little Bowden. I agreed to do so.

The Harborough Mail will tell you about the issues at stake:

An inquiry into the so-called Battle of Windy Ridge is due to start tomorrow (Wednesday, January 13).

A Government-appointed planning inspector will preside over a three-day public inquiry in Harborough over the latest homes row at the so-called Windy Ridge site, off Glebe Road in Little Bowden.

Developers Mosaic Ventures and Fletcher Homes want to build 141 houses on the 17-acre plot of land but residents living nearby are against the move.

Harborough District Council's planning department threw out the application in August, saying the plan lies outside the limits of its Local Plan and would adversely affect the appearance of the countryside.

The System: When Michael was a Winner

As soon as I realised how many obscure old British films LoveFilm has I signed up to it. One of the best I have seen so far is The System. It was shot in 1964 when Michael Winner was justifiably one of the great hopes of British cinema.

The System tells the story of a group of young men in a seaside town who play and prey upon the girls who visit it. They are led by Oliver Reed in one of his early starring roles and the rest of the group contains several faces that were about to become famous too, including David Hemmings and John Alderton.

Interestingly, the actor amongst them with the greatest screen presence is Andrew Ray. He had enjoyed fame as a child star in the fifties in The Mudlark and The Yellow Balloon (more on the latter film one day) and like his friend Hemmings was beginning to ride the wave of the sixties, but his career was soon to go into decline.

The film is notable for its photography and locations, including near documentary footage of holidaymakers on the beach and shots of Brixham station (which had already closed when the film was made there) and the abandoned village of Hallsands.

Like other sixties' heroes (think Blowup and Alfie) Oliver Reed turns out not to be as in control of events as he likes to imagine. He falls in love with the classy Jane Merrow, but it is she who drops him and you suddenly realise how cheerless his life will be in the out of season resort.

Libertarian Party: Nationalise home schooling

Bizarre Posting of the Day goes to the Libertarian Party's Members' Blog. It seems the party wants the state to fund and regulate home schooling.

The posting begins by saying:

the Party will be implementing a Voucher System roughly along the lines implemented in Sweden, this will not mirror any clamp-down or coercive programme directed towards Home Educators that exists there.

Fine, but what would a Libertarian government do about home educators under its new system? Clearly, home educators have as much right as any school to receive payments through the voucher system:

should the Educator request that the taxpayer fund such education – take the State’s Shilling as it were - there would need to be evidence that the funding was in fact delivering an education. It is unreasonable for anyone to demand no strings funding from the Taxpayer and we feel that genuine Home Educators will understand this point completely.

And what would these strings consist in?

In exchange for Taxpayer funding we would expect, in almost all cases, improvements in literacy and numeracy over time, where literacy is one of reading, writing, comprehension and critical reasoning.

Which would presumably entail state testing of any home schooled child whose parents decided to take the government shilling.

The writer does envisage allowing homed educating parents to opt out of the voucher scheme, and thus the testing, altogether. But it is still bizarre, at a time when home educators are trying to fight off greater government involvement in their children's education, for a "Libertarian" party to be proposing such a scheme of testing.

This confirms my suspicion that Libertarians are more interested in demanding that the world should conform to their principles than in devising solutions to the problems we face that expand our freedom.

For more on home education and the current debate read Dare to Know (though I note it is keener on this Libertarian Party posting than I am).

Nevill Holt prep school - stranger than Bonkers Hall

Because it is the most important model for Bonkers Hall, I have long taken an interest in Nevill Holt Hall. It has latterly been the home of David Ross, founder of the Carphone Warehouse and prominent supporter of David Cameron, but it has had a long and colourful history.

It was for centuries the home of the prominent Catholic Nevill family and belonged to the Cunard family between 1876 and 1912. Sir Bache Cunard, who devoted his time to hunting and metalwork rather than the family shipping line, is one of the models for Lord Bonkers whom I discovered long after I started writing his diaries, while his daughter Nancy Cunard was quite a girl.

But for most of the 20th century Nevill Holt was known as a boys' prep school which had strong connections with the public school at Uppingham. Wikipedia will tell you that the school closed in 1998 "because of falling rolls", but it doesn't tell you why those rolls were falling.

Because Nevill Holt school was the scene of a child abuse scandal. An article from the Birmingham Post dated 23 June 1998 tells the story:

A former preparatory school teacher who subjected six schoolboys in his care to a catalogue of "degrading and perverted" sexual abuse was yesterday jailed for 10 years.

Edmund Clements (59) abused the boys, then aged between eight and 12, from 1974 to 1984, Leicester Crown Court was told.

The abuse took place while he was a geography master at the Nevill Holt Prep School, near Market Harborough, Leicestershire.

Passing sentence, Judge Peter De Mille told Clements, a married man, of Hove, Sussex, that he had committed a "gross breach of trust" and selected at least two of his victims because they were particularly vulnerable.

The judge added that Clements, who admitted 33 sex offences against the six boys, had subjected his victims to "what any right-minded person would regard as degrading and perverted behaviour".

A second master who faced charges took his own life, but that story seems to have disappeared from the net. (Later. I have now found the story. Note that coroner was a Symington - presumbaly one of the local soup and corset dynasty.)

There is, however, a posting (#115) on a Facebook group devoted to "Your Boarding School's Best Scandal" which describes events at Nevill Holt (perhaps a little colourfully):

1. Police storm the school one morning with cars, vans and even helicopters.
2. Teacher jumps out the window of breakfast when he's told they have arrived.
3. Hangs himself in the school grounds.
4. School shuts down the following and the manager of the Carphone Warehouse buys it.
5. Coffins found behind the panelling in the girls' dormitories.

This was obviously the biggest scandal, but there were hundreds of others.

All very remarkable, but my real reason for writing this post is another recent discovery. Because for most of its history the school was owned and run by the Phillips family.

Which makes this 2003 article from the Times Educational Supplement intriguing:

A headteacher who faked his name, age and qualifications to run a boarding school in Leicestershire for 40 years has been exposed as a fraud by his son.

Frederick Phillips cheated parents, pupils and his bank manager into believing he was a qualified French teacher and aristocrat with military honours in order to buy and run Nevill Holt preparatory school in Market Harborough. He died in 1982 ...

Swansea-born Frederick Phillips changed his accent and pretended he was a graduate from the Sorbonne to get a job teaching French at Nevill Holt.

He had, in fact, only attended summer school at Besancon university, France.

In 1927 he adopted the double-barrelled name Serille-Phillips and claimed he was the son of a gentleman (his father was a wheelwright) to secure a bank loan of £12,000 to buy the Grade I listed 13th century school building.

He said he was 30, to substantiate a lie that he was a former squadron leader, secret service agent and medal-winner in the First World War. In fact, he had only just completed his military training at Uxbridge.

And Phillips' daughter

recalls her father giving her the answers in advance of a scholarship entrance exam for a girls' school in Oxford.

She said: "I have no proof but I wonder if he did this for other pupils.

Bonkers Hall has enjoyed a colourful history, but it is not a patch on the real thing.

Nick Clegg's "Four Steps to a Fairer Britain"

This should hold all you party loyalists for a while...

David Boyle on health and safety

When faced with a story about some inanity attributed to health and safety, the reaction of many Liberal Democrats is to argue that the whole thing has been made up by the Daily Mail and conclude that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Characteristically, David Boyle looks into things more deeply:

The ruling about not clearing ice is a good example, set out by the professional body of health and safety officials. The actual effect of this kind of regulation is to make us less safe. The actual effect of much of the safe-guarding regime is to corrode the informal ways that neighbourhoods actually watch over children.

And he concludes:

So this isn’t just a story of how successive governments corrode social capital. It is the core story of why Blair and Brown invested such huge sums in public services, and yet rendered them so intractable, so elephantine, so narrowly focussed on symptoms rather than causes, and – over the long-term, therefore – so hugely ineffective and wasteful.

Thin Lizzy: Whiskey in the Jar

1973 wasn't all Garry Glitter and Mud. There were some good records in the charts.

It's just that you had to look hard to find them.

Britblog Roundup 255: This week with added video

Welcome to this week's selection of the best in British blogging.

Politics

As you see, we start with something new: a video. It comes from Paul Staines' Guido Fawkes blog.
I have sometimes been puzzled by Guido's pre-eminence in British blogging - why is there such a readership for stories about Gordon Brown picking his nose? - but this film on "The Hubris of Nick Robinson" is a classy production and explains what the blog does with all those interns. Guido is promising more good things in the run up to the general election.
Writing on Liberal Democrat Voice Mark Pack looks forward to the debates between the main party leaders at that election, making 10 predictions. One of them is that "there will be a battle over worms".
The New Adventures of Juliette probably will not enjoy watching David Cameron in those debates: she objects to seeing a:

giant poster of David Cameron's weirdly smooth, wholesome, lineless, boneless-looking pinky-beige face gazing earnestly down at me from a great big fuck-off billboard".

And Gordon Brown had better not try arguing that liberal voters support his policies: Mark Reckons isn't having any of it.
Around the world
If you really can't face the prospect of those debates, you could try moving abroad.
Where to choose?
Odessablog helpfully points out that Ukraine is the 68th best place to live.
There may be a lot wrong with Spain too, but Thoughts from Galicia has discovered a journalist who believes you are not entitled to mention them unless you are Spanish yourself.
Or you could go to Africa, though Charles Crawford explains that you may find yourself officially the only gay in the continent.
Maybe you would do better in Paris, which On An Overgrown Path has visited.
Around Britain
Go Litel Blog, Go has found a poem by John Clare that is relevant to our current weather:

And in the morning, when the tempest drops,
At every cottage door mountainous heaps
Of snow lie drifted, that all entrance stops
Until the besom and the shovel gain
The path, and leave a wall on either side.

Earthpal describes a current-day struggle with the white stuff. And Musings from a Muddy Island allows us to enjoy scenes of Mersea Island in the snow.
Unmitigated England describes a visit to the landscaped gardens and follies of Stowe which may just have passed on his enthusiasm for such things to his sons.
And English Buildings explains his ambition of "slowing down the buildings".


Communication
Just because the people who run internet companies like jellybeans and snowboarding, it doesn't mean they can always be trusted to do the right thing.
The Bristol Blogger reports that earlier this week Wordpress took his blog and a couple of other blogs down without warning or explanation. It turned out that this was because each carried posts about the former vice chancellor of the University of the West of England, Sir Howard Newby.
It transpired that the pressure on Wordpress came not from shit-hot international libel lawyers but the rather less minatory figure of the director of legal services at the University of Liverpool, which is Sir Howard's new employer.
EcoLogics was another of the blogs caught up in this row and provides its own account of the affair. And Bristle’s Blog from the BunKRS asks why Liverpool is so reticent about Sir Howard's appointment.
Communication takes many forms. Geoff Jones, for instance, is having trouble unlocking his iPhone.
And The Misssy M Misssives celebrates the demise of thank you letters. Me, though I was never that good at them, I cannot note the passing of old-fashioned civility without a little sadness. Besides, the more is see "the 1950s" used as shorthand for all that the writer things is wrong with Britain, the more I want to defend that much traduced decade.
My advice is to search out the Molesworth Self Adjusting Thank You Letter.
The blog 1930 to 1960, which is probably rather keener on the fifties, has found a precursor to the popular modern children's novel Goodnight Mr Tom that was published in 1943.
Next week
The Roundup will be found on The Wardman Wire.
Please send your nominations to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com as usual.

Market Harborough still in the snow

Taken yesterday, this photo shows the Old Grammar School with Symington's corset factory (now the offices of Harborough District Council) behind it.

Peter Watt on Gordon Brown

Tomorrow's Mail on Sunday has an article based on the memoirs of Peter Watt, a former Labour Party general secretary.

Various claims are made:

• Mr Brown’s Cabinet ally Douglas Alexander said the PM’s inner circle wanted an early Election partly because even they didn’t like him – and they feared the British public would soon form the same view.
• The day Mr Brown called off the 2007 Election, denying he had ever intended to hold one, Labour chiefs had a fleet of limousines circling Parliament Square ready to take Ministers on the campaign trail, and had 1.5million leaflets ready to be posted.
• No10 is ‘completely dysfunctional’ under Mr Brown, who runs the country ‘by making it up as he goes along’.
• Sulking Mr Brown walked out of a Downing Street dinner party with US politicians because they sat down without his permission.

The article also claims that:

Mr Watt also reveals for the first time the inside story of the ‘Donorgate’ scandal which led to his resignation when The Mail on Sunday exposed how tycoon David Abrahams had secretly given £600,000 to Labour in other people’s names, in breach of electoral laws.

Mr Watt claims the scandal was not his fault and alleges Mr Brown ‘stabbed him in the back’ by pledging to stand by him, hours before branding him a criminal in public.

That at least explains why Watt has written this book and sold the serialisation rights to the Mail.

Iain Dale has more on the background to this book and the Mail story.

Nick Clegg falls out with Gina Ford

Tomorrow's Sunday Times reports that Nick Clegg has fallen out with the child-rearing guru Gina Ford. The paper quotes the Lib Dem leader describing his and his wife's attempts to follow her suggested rules:

“It was like following a sort of Ikea assembly instruction manual. It made us feel strangely passive as parents.”

It goes on to quote him as saying:

“With our first one ... like all new parents, we religiously followed Gina Ford. Instructions like, stick him in a broom cupboard at 7.46am. At 7.48am, take him out, do not look at him ... Absolute nonsense.”

As an admirer of Frank Furedi's views on the tyranny of parenting experts I am pleased to see Nick making a public stand on the subject. (I did try to contact the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans to elicit his views on the subject of sticking babies in broom cupboards, but I was told he was not available.)

Besides, the article does not suggest that Gina Ford is an immediately appealing character. It quotes her as saying:

“What is sad about this statement is that it comes from a supposedly intelligent man who would have us believe that he is capable of running Great Britain. Clegg may think his comments are funny — and indeed in one way they are, as he has just insulted the parenting choice of more than 2m British voters.”

To which one can only reply: Calm down, dear, it's only a light-hearted newspaper article.

But then it seems Miss Ford has a thin skin when it comes to criticism. In 2006 the Mumsnet website, which has recently come to prominence through interviewing the three main party leaders, was faced with the prospect of having to close when she threatened it with legal action over postings made on its message boards.

One of those the postings, it seems, suggested that she "straps babies to rockets and fires them into south Lebanon".

Somehow I doubt this was meant seriously and Wikipedia says the dispute was resolved with Mumsnet paying some of Ford's legal costs but remaining open.

Still, I did again try to contact the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans for an opinion on this latter idea.

This time I was given a written statement:

These allegations against us were looked into at the time and found to be a gross exaggeration. I don't know why you are dredging them up now.

A North West Leicestershire by-election?

Ashby Castle

When Gwyneth Dunwoody died in April 2008 Labour whips moved the writ for a by-election before she had been buried. They have not shown the same alacrity following the death of David Taylor, the MP for North West Leicestershire, whose funeral took place earlier today in the village of Heather.

I imagine Labour, afraid of defeat at the hands of the Conservatives, will do all they can to avoid having a by-election in North West Leicestershire before the general election. Certainly, I sense no enthusiasm for one amongst Labour activists in the county.

The North West Leicestershire constituency was created out of parts of the old Loughborough and Bosworth seats. It was first fought at the 1983 general election when David Ashby won it for the Conservatives. Ashby, whose antics did so much to enliven the the final years of John Major's premiership, held the seat until 1997. It was then gained for Labour by David Taylor, who had narrowly failed to capture it in 1992. (Ian Ridley has the results up to 1997.)

The constituency is quite rural, with two main towns: Ashby de la Zouch (just Ashby if you live in the county), which is thoroughly Tory, and Coalville, traditionally an area of Labour strength.

But things are more complicated than that. North West Leicestershire covers the former Leicestershire coalfield (the last mine closed in 1991), which means that many of the villages have a strong Labour tradition. And Coalville was won by the BNP in last year's county council elections.

The Liberal Democrats do not have much history of success in the constituency, but Michael Wyatt did have a good win in the rural Warren Hills ward in those same county elections.

To end on a literary note, fans of the Adrian Mole books may recall that his beloved Pandora Braithwaite is now New Labour MP for Ashby de la Zouch.

Keepin warm: Ur doin it right

Latest picture from Huntly...

Britblog Roundup: A reminder

A reminder that I shall be hosting the Britblog Roundup tomorrow.

If you have seen a posting on a British blog over the past week that you think particularly fine, please send the URL to britblog [AT] gmail [DOT] com and I shall include it.

Nominating a posting for the Britblog Roundup is a good way of promoting a blog that you think deserves more readers. And you are welcome to nominate a posting on your own blog too.

All nominations by tomorrow lunchtime please.

Grinkle ironstone mine

Phill Davison has some amazing photographs from his exploration of the old mine at Grinkle, a mile inland from Staithes on the Yorkshire coast.

Thanks to BLDGBLOG.