Encouraging news on encouraging chess in schools

In February I had an article on Comment is Free looking at the works of the charity Chess in Schools and Communities to restore the game in British state schools.

On Friday the Independent had an article detailing the progress that has been made more recently:

At Sacred Heart, a 180-pupil school in one of Liverpool's most deprived areas, all children have either an hour or 45 minutes timetabled chess a week except for the very youngest in their first year of compulsory schooling. There is also a chess club after school every Wednesday. 

The school won a Liverpool-wide schools’ chess competition - something which headteacher Charles Daniels, a keen chess player himself, is very proud of. “We're only a small one-form entry school - we don't win things like football and cricket competitions,” he said. “It's something the children will remember.”

And next month a contingent from the school will travel down to London's Olympia to watch the London Chess Classic.

The article goes on to quote Malcolm Pein, who runs the charity:

Meanwhile, Malcolm Pein is busy exorcising the myth that chess is a middle-class game. He has encouraged several pupil referral units (“sin bins”) and one young offenders' institution to take it up. “It has been popular in the pru's,” he said – possibly as a result of the calming influence it has on its players. In the United States, it is also widely encouraged in prisons.

You may also be interested in the piece on Judit Polgar, the world's strongest women's player by Stephen Moss in the Guardian. Judit will be playing at the London Chess Classic.

When I interviewed Malcolm Pein he mentioned that Polgar's father, who home-schooled his daughters and turned all three into strong players, would never allow her to play in single-sex tournaments. She always played with the boys. Ending single-sex tournaments, he suggested, was the way to produce more strong female players.

Just Cyril being Cyril?

I first heard of the allegations against Cyril Smith when I read them in Private Eye in 1979. The Eye had picked them up from the Rochdale Alternative Press (RAP - those were the days when any self-respecting town had an 'alternative' newspaper). Northern Voices reprinted the original RAP story in 2010.

My instinct has always been to assume that they were true, if only because I could not see why anyone would trouble to invent anything so tawdry - he "'told me to take my trousers down and hit me four or five times on my bare buttocks" - about someone who was then only a local politician.

Today Paul Waugh, who grew up in Rochdale himself, revived this story with further allegations, as did Simon Danczuk, the current MP for the town, in the Commons. In the current climate it was inevitable that someone would do so.

And when the alleagations did become public, the old Liberal Party's reaction was not exactly to deny them.

A quotation from 1979 - "It's not a very friendly gesture, publishing that. All he seems to have done is spank a few bare bottoms" - was attributed by Private Eye (at least in a piece following Smith's death in 2010) to David Steel. But it originates from the original RAP story, where it is attributed (one suspects more accurately) to Steel's press office.

Perhaps the Liberals and Cyril Smith are a bit like the BBC and Jimmy Savile. We had all heard the rumours, were not sure if they were true or what to do about them if they were. It was easier to believe the legend of Big Cyril and do nothing.

When Cyril Smith died I did my best to write an even-handed assessment of him. But these stories - if they are true, of course - do reinforce my view that local politicians who present themselves as Mr Rochdale (or anywhere else) and bigger than their party tend to be bullies and braggarts and are not to be trusted.

I also raise my eyebrows at David Steel's statement on Any Questions? last Friday: "I have never come across it [child sexual abuse] in all my years as an MP."

I'm a civilised person get me out of here

While I have been out this evening I gather that the Conservative member for Mid Bedfordshire has been eating ostrich anus on national television.

I don't like Nadine Dorries. I don't like I'm a Celebrity... And she is a fool for going on the show.

But I shall not be voting got her to eat any more anuses. Because I don't like the bullying inherent in the campaign to have her undertake every Bushtucker Trial.

And I have reached an age where I have sympathy for the words of the psychologist Professor Paul Gilbert, as reported in this morning's Independent:

"Reality shows are designed to hold your interest in people when they lose, and see them despair. The focus is on the emotional meltdown of losers. 

"We need to be studying in detail the effect of this kind of competitive culture in the media on the young people who are growing up on it. 

"Supposing all the young people watching The Apprentice thought this was the way people did business, with all the back-stabbing and attacking each other. Would you really want to live in a world where everyone did that?

"So much is going on that is making people angry. I think people feel a bit hopeless."

I will make one exception. If AntnDec ever fall on hard times and are obliged to go into the jungle themselves, I shall happily pay to vote for them to eat ostrich anus all evening.

The Ripon Canal meets the River Ure

The Ripon Canal runs for a little over two miles from its basin near the centre of the city, past the racecourse to the River Ure.

I walked the towpath and when I arrived at the far end of canal I found the Ure was very high - this was the summer of 2012, after all. The Ure has come from Wensleydale and flows down to York, by which time it has changed its name to become the Ouse.

Then a boat obligingly appeared. The photograph above shows it coming off the Ure and entering the canal. I helped with the first lock (named Oxclose Lock) and then walked back to Ripon.

Jersey child abuse: new readers start here

When the Haute de la Garenne children's home failed to yield up any bodies, the newspapers lost interest. Even though, as Nick Davies has showed, the more lurid stories about the home were largely generated by those newspapers themselves. And even though there clearly was a serious problem with child abuse on Jersey.

(Incidentally, a great deal of forensic evidence was retrieved and no one seems sure what became of it or whether it was even tested. Perhaps the papers should be asking about that?)

The newspapers may have lost interest, but what has happened there since is simply extraordinary. A post on photopol gives a good guide to the island's politics, the child abuse scandal and these subsequent events:

Jersey probably has more in common with a feudal state than with a modern democratic one. Particular families have long wielded effective power. There is no formal separation of powers such as one might expect in a modern democratic state. The executive, parliament, judicial system, and public prosecutor are all part of the same amorphous mass.

This makes for a highly politicised justice system, and it explains much of the tension between the police and the prosecution service during the tenure of [Graham] Power and [Lenny] Harper, officers who were attuned to the UK system and who were taken aback at the extent of political interference in the judicial and policing areas in Jersey. 

It is against this background that Stuart Syvret is attempting to involve Europe in the Jersey scene and that Power and Harper had to resort to stratagems to secure the prosecution of sex abuse offenders.

One of the things that happened after British newspapers lost interest was the summary dismissal of the island's police chief Graham Power - he was the superior of Lenny Harper, who was the officer who spoke to the media at the time that Haute de la Garenne was in the news.

Power has offered some thoughts to the Jersey blog voiceforchildren on the fourth anniversary of this sacking:

I have been reminded that it is now the fourth anniversary of my suspension from duty and subsequent "dismissal by stealth" from my position as Chief Officer of the States of Jersey Police.

Much has happened since that time. Nevertheless it is encouraging that a wide number of interested parties have continued the fight to obtain justice for the victims of the persistent abuse of vulnerable children which occurred in establishments operated by the Jersey Government. 

In spite of Establishment efforts to bury the issue it has remained firmly on the political agenda, largely due to the tireless work of a number of individuals committed to searching for the truth and giving the protection of vulnerable children the highest priority. These include the Jersey Citizens Media, a small number of Local Politicians, Investigative Journalists from outside the Island, and the many supporters wordwide who have nothing to gain from their endevours other than the knowledge that they are supporting a just cause. 

I am aware that much is happening at present and I do not want to distract anyone from their current efforts by re-opening the issues relating to my suspension in any great detail. I would however simply for the record, remind readers what has been established from a number of credible and independent sources and disclosures. Namely, that my suspension was based on falsified documents, fabricated evidence, misleading information provided to States Members and the public by Jersey Ministers, and the testimony of a number of senior individuals who have since been publically discredited. 

The events relating to Jimmy Savile and other revelations have heightened the general awareness of the issue of Historic Child Abuse, and the substantial difficulties which stand in the way of those who attempt to bring abusers to justice.They may also provide a further opportunity to return to the question of whether persons responsible for abuse or for failing to prevent that abuse, remain in positions of authority where they may still constitute a risk to children or the search for justice. 

The "shock and awe" of the suspension was intended to knock the fight out of me and lead to my quiet departure and subsequent silence. Among the many proven failings of those responsible for imposing and maintaining the suspension I think that we can now confidently add a decidedly poor judgement of character and a serious failure to anticipate the likely consequences of their actions. Not exactly the best characteristics for people who claim to be capable of running a government.

These, remember, are the words, not of a political activist, but of an experienced British police officer. Jersey is indeed a strange place.

Welcome to Liberator's blog

Many readers of this blog will be familiar with Liberator, the magazine where Lord Bonkers' Diary appears.

Now the magazine has its own blog. You can find it at Liberator's blog.

I may post there myself from time to time - and Lord Bonkers thinks it would be a Terribly Good Idea if he did too.

Leicester Labour helps Robert Wann avoid disqualification

On Friday I reported that Robert Wann, the former Lord Mayor of Leicester, faced disqualification from the city council for not attending a meeting in six months if he failed to find one to attend before 17 November.

Guess what happened next?

This evening the Leicester Mercury website tells us:

The Labour group's whip Councillor Barbara Potter arranged for him to sit in on tonight's Economic Development, Culture and Tourism Scrutiny Commission. Coun Wann is not a regular member of that committee but stood in for another member who was unwell.

Six of the Best 294

"Fortunately the Scottish Lib Dems have done their homework and produced an admirable document spelling out how it would work, including its possible and wholly positive implications for the rest of the UK.   It’s a huge pity that this blueprint for devo max, the completion of devolution, was not produced first by the Labour Party; but its Lib Dem parentage offers an excellent opportunity for Labour and the Lib Dems to join forces in defence of the survival of the United Kingdom." BrianBarder on LabourList is impressed by our contribution to the debate on Scottish independence and devolution.

Hoping for More than Slogans has had enough of Jeremy Paxman.

John Dickerson on Slate explains why Mitt Romney did not see his defeat coming: "Even on the morning of the election, Romney’s senior advisers weren't close to hedging. They said he was going to win “decisively.” It seemed like spin, but the Boston Globe reports that a fireworks display was already ordered for the victory. Romney and Ryan thought they were going to win, say aides. “We were optimistic. More than just cautiously optimistic,” says one campaign staffer. When Romney lost, “it was like a death in the family."

The New Yorker has a gallery of photographs showing "a divided country coming together to perform the single unifying act of going to the polls".

Did The Smiths warn us about Jimmy Savile? Cowan & The Stupid Dream investigates.

mikeyashworth on Flickr shows us some vintage advertising posters discovered in a disused passageway at Notting Hill Gate tube station.

Sam Carter: Jack Hall

A week ago I turned on Jools Holland's Later to hear a song about a highwayman being hanged. That's real folk music. And this performance is reminiscent of a young Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick.

[Later. That performance had disappeared from Youtube, so here is another - with no violinist]

Contemplations from the Marianas Trench tells the story of the song:

In 1701 a chimney named Jack Hall was hanged for burglary. When a child Jack Hall had been sold to a chimney sweep for a guinea. 

According to Sharp the song was written before 1719 because there is reference to a tune "Chimney Sweep" which has the same metre as Jack Hall in a publication that year ... 

The song was made popular in the 1850s with the adaptation Sam Hall by English comic minstrel, C.W. Ross, in the 1850's.

Sam Carter, who won the Horizon Award for Best Newcomer at the 2010 BBC Folk Awards, also sings more contemporary songs such as Dreams Are Made of Money.

For Remembrance Sunday

Ripon canal basin

For many years Ripon was the most northerly point on Britain's inland waterway system. The Ripon Canal takes you to the River Ure, and from there you can navigate via the South Yorkshire waterways to the Trent and the Midland canals.

In truth, this status was purely theoretical for much of the canal's history. According to Wikipedia, the Ripon Canal was impassable by 1906, officially abandoned in 1956 and not fully restored until 1996.

In 2002 Ripon lost its status, as the Lancaster Canal was connected with the main system by the construction of the Ribble Link.

So now the most northerly point on the system is Tewitfield, the current northern limit to navigation on the Lancaster Canal. However, there are plans to restore this waterway all the way to its original terminus at Kendal, even though this will involve some new lengths of canal to undo the damage caused by the construction of the M6.

Anyway, this is Ripon canal basin, which I found close to the centre of the city on a lovely sunny afternoon.

Danny Alexander launches Ginger Rodent beer

From BBC News:

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has helped to launch a new beer called Ginger Rodent, a nickname he was given by a political rival. UK Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman made the comment at the Scottish Labour conference in 2010. She later apologised.

The beer is made by Cairngorm Brewery in Mr Alexander's Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey constituency.

Paper Sun by Traffic - a mystery solved

Paper Sun by Traffic is one of the great psychedelic hits of the 1960s. But where was its distinctive video (as we would call it now) filmed?

At first I though it might have been the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, South London. A couple of years ago I asked them via Twitter if they had been the venue, but they said no. They suggested it might have been filmed at the Powell-Cotton Museum at Quex Park in Kent.

So I asked the Powell-Cotton Museum, but they said they had not been the venue for filming either.

Then, a couple of days ago Slugabed left a comment on my post about this quest suggesting that the video had been filmed at the Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in Brussels.

So I emailed them. And today Kristien Opstaele replied:

Yes indeed, it was filmed in our museum Some of the galleries are still the same, but not for long anymore. The museum will close mid 2013 for renovation.

So, thanks to Slugabed and Kristien, the mystery is solved. Take it away boys...

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Writing in the Guardian, Clare Allan draws an important moral from the Savile affair: "The various inquiries into how he was able to continue his behaviour unchecked are likely to take some time. We don't need to wait for an inquiry, however, to tell us the most immediate and obvious truth: it is crucial to listen to people whose word it is easy to dismiss."

On the Wired Danger room site Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan examine the Kremlin's increasing surveillance of the internet.

The writer of Feeding My Intolerant Child feels the NHS has let her down. So she wrote to her MP. Trouble is, her MP is currently in Australia appearing in a reality television show.

Five Chinese Crackers unpicks an article by James Delingpole to demonstrate a number of common logical fallacies.

"The Normans called the guerrilla movement that resisted them after 1066 the ‘silvatici’ — the men of the woods. The English, it is said, called them the same thing in their own language: green men ... How would you show your loathing of them without attracting a penalty? Perhaps you would carve the face of a green man inside the church: perhaps you would bring the spirit of the silvatici into the temple of the enemy." Writing on Aeon Paul Kingsnorth, fancifully but intriguingly, suggests that the Green Men you find carved in Medieval churches were a symbol of Saxon resistance to the Norman yoke.

Spitalfields Life presents some vintage photographs celebrating the high days and holidays of old London.

Former Leicester Lord Mayor faces disqualification

From the Leicester Mercury:

Former Lord Mayor of Leicester Robert Wann faces being kicked off the city council for not attending a meeting in nearly six months. 

The veteran Labour politician has not been present at any meetings since May 17, when he handed over the mayoral chains to Adbul Osman.

Under council rules, any elected member who does not attend a meeting for six months is disqualified from being a councillor. 

Yesterday's cancelled audit and risk committee meeting was the last he could have attended before the six-month deadline, November 17, passes. 

Coun Wann could yet attend the rescheduled meeting – for which a date has not yet been set – to avoid disqualification. 

However, his no-shows have already frustrated a number of party colleagues, who say his absence has been noted by residents of Thurncourt ward, which he represents.

Hawksmoor's obelisk in Ripon and the South Sea Bubble

The bus for Ripon leaves from opposite York railway station, takes you through Little Ouseburn and Boroughbridge and makes a stylish entry to the city by sweeping around the market square before dropping you at the bus station.

Ripon's market square is dominated by a stone pillar. Ripon Civic Society will tell you its history:

Pride in the city was behind the efforts of the city council, led by the MP John Aislabie, at the beginning of the 17th century, when they transformed the rough medieval Market Square into its concept of a Roman forum – the forum populi. They were led in their vision by one of England’s greatest architects, Nicholas Hawksmoor 

Hawksmoor was steeped in the architecture of classical times, so his plan to pave the Square was based on ancient and Renaissance precedents – among them public spaces like Rome’s Piazza Navona. And as they often – like Navona and St Peter’s Square – had obelisks at the centre, Hawksmoor was determined that Ripon should have the same feature. 

The result is Britain’s earliest surviving free-standing obelisk, erected in 1702 at a cost of £564 11s 9d – of which £334.3s 9d was paid by Aislabie. He was probably motivated by his political ambition; he later became Chancellor of the Exchequer, but resigned in disgrace.

John Aislabie was disgraced because - everything I know about history I learnt from Wikipedia - of the South Sea Bubble:

When in 1719 the South Sea Company proposed a deal whereby it would take over the national debt in exchange for government bonds, Aislabie was a very strong supporter of the scheme and negotiated the contract; he piloted the Bill through the House of Commons. 

The South Sea Company had been built on high expectations which it could never fulfil, and it collapsed in August 1720. An investigation by Parliament found that Aislabie had been given £20,000 of company stock in exchange for his promotion of the scheme. 

He resigned the Exchequer in January 1721, and in March was found guilty by the Commons of the "most notorious, dangerous and infamous corruption". He was expelled from the House, removed from the Privy Council, and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

His son William Aislabie had the obelisk restored in 1781, but the plaque he had erected at the time misleadingly implies that he was responsible for erecting it in the first place. Perhaps his father was still too controversial a figure to celebrate so publicly?

Sexual abuse in children's homes is not a new discovery

Channel 4 News this evening was a curious mix. It reported that:

From the initial investigation into north Wales child abuse in 1991 to the Waterhouse inquiry in 2000, Sian Griffiths has collated details of every allegation and document surrounding the scandal.

More than that, Sian Griffiths revealed something important about Sir Ronald Waterhouse's method of conducting his inquiry. Some insignificant local was accused of abuse, he was summoned to the inquiry to give evidence himself. But if a more prominent or influential figure was mentioned Waterhouse stopped the proceedings and refused to allow any further evidence on that point.

Perhaps that is what comes of putting a judge in charge of things?

But these revelations were framed by the device of "the past on trial", which sounded dangerously like something out of Brass Eye.

In particular, the talking heads interviewed took it for granted that, 20 or 30 years ago, no one had heard of the sexual abuse of children - in care homes or anywhere else.

I am old enough to remember Britain 20 or 30 years ago, and my recollection is that people were no more naive or stupid than they are today.

My impression, rather, is that there is a repeated process of discovery and forgetting about child abuse, or that it is known about by different groups and professions at different times - I have written a book chapter on this theme.

Certainly, the possibility of sexual abuse in children's homes was well understood in the 1950s.

Chris Arnot and David Brindle, writing in the Guardian in 2009, remembered John Stroud:

John Stroud's The Shorn Lamb is a novel that encapsulates the zeal and idealism of a generation of students training as social workers in the years after the second world war ...

Stroud had returned to the UK after service with the RAF in India, determined to make a difference. His book was first published in 1960. Two years later, it came out as a Penguin paperback, sold extensively and was eventually serialised on the radio by the BBC. Social workers had probably never been so widely popular before with the public at large. And certainly not since.

And what should we find in The Shorn Lamb but this passage?:

"Oh God, Charles, more trouble!" she said, beating her hands to and fro in her hair. 

"What?" 

"That hostel warden." 

"What, old Christmas?" I said. "What's the matter with him?" 

"The usual," she said. 

"Oh, no! Little boys or little girls?" 

"Little boys. Well, big boys - boys in the hostel. It's been going on for months." 

"Oh, hell!" I felt sickened, as I always did, though none of us was unused to this sort of revelation. You never saw it coming, and in someone you knew quite well it was always revolting.

No further questions, m'lud.

Headline of the Day involves Nottingham ferret

A win this time for This is Nottingham (aka the Nottingham Evening Post):

Disabled granny attacked by ferret as she rode mobility scooter in Bingham

Well, what do you expect in Nottingham?

The early days of The Spencer Davis Group and The Move

Untold Stories is a documentary produced by Birmingham Music Heritage that deals with the city and popular music since the 1960s. This is part one, which deals with the early career of the Spencer Davis Group and the Move. There are six more parts to enjoy on Youtube.

An earlier post of mine has a live performance of I'm a Man and a glimpse of the even earlier career of the Winwood brothers.

Headline of the Day features the BBC and alien life

A win for the Daily Telegraph with:

Brian Cox: BBC bosses feared alien discovery could breach editorial guidelines