"I'll miss the fucking horse"

Another short extract from David Storey's A Stinging Delight. This one contains a thumping dangling participle, but the book was published posthumously, so he probably never got to revise it as he would have wished.

I returned to Andrassay's, but soon afterwards I discovered that I could earn more as a bus conductor and applied to the West Riding Bus Company at the Belle Isle depot in Wakefield for their one-day training course. 

Held in a mock-up of a bus interior sets out as rows of chairs in an otherwise cheerless office, I was the only student in a room of men and women that included the driver of a horse-drawn shop, which had plied its trade on the estate throughout my childhood. 

"Times have changed." the ageing driver remarked as I sat beside him. "Though I'll miss the fucking horse."

Thief inadvertently called 999 during robbery

I was led to this amusing Birmingham Mail story of unsuccessful criminals by the latest issue of Fortean Times:

It was during this incident, Mr Harrington told jurors, Everitt had mistakenly called the emergency services as the group attempted to get into the cash machine.

He said Everitt was using a Nokia phone and "importantly here he made a mistake." Mr Harrington said the phone had a feature which meant the owner could accidentally make a call to the emergency services.

"That is precisely what Everitt's phone did during this event and of course calls are recorded. You do not hear any speech on it but what you can hear matches precisely what we can see on CCTV," he said. Mr Harrington said you could hear the sound of gas pumping, sawing and an angle grinder.

He said they were successful in exploding the ATM but again were not rewarded in getting to the money inside. Shortly afterwards the police arrived and the gang made off in the BMW, said Mr Harrington.

GUEST POST Sex, spies and scandal: The John Vassall Affair

Historian Alex Grant explains why an often-overlooked spy scandal of the early 1960s matters – and  how it changed British journalism, and security vetting, for ever.

"He had 'minor public school' printed all over him," an old friend told me during my research into the life of the clerk turned spy, John Vassall. "Because he was not in the same social class as the ambassador and other senior diplomats, he hadn’t the nerve to go to them when he got himself in a spot of bother."

Who was John Vassall, what was this "spot of bother" and why is it important? With typical British understatement, the term a "spot of bother" was a euphemism for some of the worst possible predicaments - rape, entrapment and blackmail. And Vassall was entrapped by his delicate position in Britain's class structure, as well as by his sexuality.

Vassall, the son of a Church of England vicar, was born in 1924. After being forced to leave his minor public school - Monmouth - in 1941 (his impecunious parents could no longer afford its fees) he served briefly in the RAF and then found work as a junior clerical officer at the Admiralty, where he beavered away quietly until he was sensationally exposed as a Soviet spy, prosecuted and imprisoned in 1962. 

Only then was it discovered that Vassall had been photographed in compromising positions while working at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954. Over the next seven years he had been blackmailed into handing hundreds, if not thousands, of British defence secrets over to his Soviet handlers, both in Moscow and in London. 

Vassall’s arrest and trial, and a subsequent judicial enquiry by Lord Cyril Radcliffe, dominated the front pages of newspapers for several months. The press’s salacious reporting was full of homophobic innuendo and half-truths. 

As a gay man being prosecuted for spying, several years before decriminalisation, Vassall was given no quarter. Newspapers, and the judge at his trial, overlooked the ugly truth: that Vassall had not been seduced in Moscow, but had been drugged and gang-raped.

The scandal led to the resignation of a well-regarded government minister - Tam Galbraith, whose private office Vassall had worked at in 1957-9  - amid what was arguably Britain’s first modern tabloid witch-hunt. There were hysterical rumours that Vassall was not a lone operator, but part of a large, and secret, homosexual cabal in Westminster and Whitehall. Macmillan's government almost fell.  

Two reporters were sent to jail for refusing to reveal their sources, which caused lasting fury on Fleet Street, and helped to fan the flames of the Profumo scandal a few months later. A crackdown after Vassall’s conviction led to a tightening of woefully lax security procedure at the Admiralty - and the modern system of 'positive vetting' for certain civil service posts, which still persists today.

Yet the Vassall scandal is barely remembered now. The Profumo one, which followed fast on its coat-tails, seems to have erased memories of Vassall, even though it was just as a big a story at the time. And remarkably, apart from a homophobic account of Vassall’s espionage, published in 1964, no book has ever been written about it – until now.

Another reason why Vassall was treated so unsympathetically was that he was on the cusp of two social classes Curiously, he was both a snob and a victim of snobbery. Although he was presentable, well-spoken and a vicar’s son, he had never risen higher than clerical officer. His social pretensions irritated his colleagues just as much as his campness did. 

There is evidence that being cold-shouldered by more senior diplomats at the British embassy in Moscow may have driven him into the arms of Russian men. Naively, Vassall never suspected that most of them were covert KGB agents.

Although Vassall died in 1996, I managed to track down several people who knew him,  including two women who worked with him in an archive after his release from prison in the 1970s, when he used the alias John Phillips to avoid his past. More importantly, in the autumn of 2022, the National Archives released thousands of documents on MI5’s surveillance of Vassall, and their breathtakingly intrusive investigations of everyone he knew socially. 

MI5’s files confirm for the first time that Vassall had relationships with two Conservative MPs -  Fergus Montgomery and Sir Harmar Nicholls - before his arrest. By a neat coincidence I live in Oundle, in what used to be Nicholl’s Peterborough constituency, where Nicholls is still fondly remembered as a diligent MP, about whom no whisper of a connection to Vassall was ever heard).

While neither MP seems to have known anything about his spying, they managed to keep their names out of the papers and their careers continued until the 1980s and 1990s. Two other MPs – Tam Galbraith and Denzil Freeth – were not so lucky. Galbraith spent the last 18 years if his life on the backbenches, while Freeth was forced to leave parliament entirely in 1964, merely because of rumours he had once attended a party with Vassall. 

Once Vassall was released, he found that many of his old friends and lovers had been persecuted or dismissed from the civil service in Britain, America and Australia.

Then, just as now, Westminster and Whitehall were brutal places, where careers were either brutally cut short, or gilded, depending on luck, and what friends in high places you had. Despite Vassall’s constant name-dropping, he really stood no chance against a British state that wanted to make an example of him, and which ignored the role that its own homophobia had played in his downfall. 

Some aspects of the Vassall scandal – Minox cameras, undeveloped films in cardboard boxes sealed with Scotch tape, Vassall taking ministerial boxes up to Galbraith in Scotland on the night train from Euston – seem very old hat nowadays. But others are all too familiar. 

One would hope that Vassall would be treated more leniently by the courts today, as a victim of sexual violence rather than an ideological traitor. But would the press, and social media? report the story more sensitively than they did in the early 1960s? I am not so sure.   

Alex Grant’s book on the Vassall scandal - Sex, Spies and Scandal - can be ordered from Biteback Publishing. www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/sex-spies-and-scandal. You can read his blog Alex Grant and follow him on Twitter.

Amateur archaeologists find Tudor palace in the Northamptonshire village of Collyweston

Collyweston Palace in Northamptonshire, the home of Henry VII’s mother Lady Margaret Beaufort, was once famous. The pre-wedding celebrations of the marriage of Margaret Tudor and James IV of Scotland in 1503 were held there, and Henry VIII held court on 16 and 17 October 1541. There were meetings of the Privy Council too.

But until a group of amateur archaeologists got going in the village, the location of the palace was lost. 

The Guardian carried the news of its finding at the start of December:

"Many of us were brought up in the village, and you hear about this lost palace, and wonder whether it’s a myth or real. So we just wanted to find it," said Chris Close, the chair of the Collyweston Historical and Preservation Society ... which made the discovery of the Palace of Collyweston in a back garden this year.

"But we’re a bunch of amateurs. We had no money, no expertise, no plans, no artist impressions to go off, and nothing remaining of the palace. It’s naivety and just hard work that has led us to it."

You can all about it on the Collyweston Historical Society website.

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Chris Skidmore tells a Press Association reporter that he has "no regrets" over leaving parliament and warns his former party that it faces its "toughest by-election fight so far" in Kingswood.

"You expect some silence in a library. But not this much. The reading rooms of the British Library near King’s Cross are usually home to busy writers and academics working on their next tomes, but on a visit this week, most of the desks were empty." Robbie Griffiths on the ransomware attack that crippled the British Library.

Tom Scott warns that conspiracy theorists are increasingly moving out of their internet echo chamber of medical disinformation and climate science denialism into real-world activism in communities around the UK: "There is no single, central point from which the movement is directed – indeed, one of its strengths is that it has grown organically. It is not overtly party-political, though Richard Tice’s Reform UK party, with which it shares many positions, appears to see it as a fertile recruiting ground. Some of its leading figures are also linked to groups even further to the right, including the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative."

In the wake of the impact of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Mark Lawson chooses 13 television programmes that shook Britain.

Darcy Moore introduces us to George Orwell's militant suffragette Aunt Nellie.

"The wisdom of taking very young boys out of local and school football and placing them in a youth-academy setting is questionable for a number of reasons, not least because the overwhelming majority of them will never secure a future career as professional footballers." Post-Liberal Pete mourns the decline of street football and the rise of club academies.

Mental Hospitals: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

More about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Publishing site. I've slightly lost the thread of which issue which column has appeared in, but this one came out some time last year.

I reviewed The Premonitions Bureau on this blog.

Sighcology

The hospital consumed 865 pints of milk per day. The grounds were infested with feral cats, which were a source of ringworm. There was a single post box, by the front door, for patients, staff and the hospital itself, which was often full to overflowing, meaning that letters often went missing. Nurses smoked constantly, in part to block out Shelton all-pervading smell: of a house locked up for years, in which stray animals had occasionally come to piss. The kitchen had a butcher with an attitude problem and the laundry sometimes went wrong, meaning that patients were forced to wear socks shrunk to half their normal size.

That’s Sam Knight writing about Shelton Hospital, Shrewsbury, in the 1960s in his The Premonitions Bureau. 

And could anyone agree what such county asylums were for? Was it cure? Containment? Elimination?

Around a dozen people died every month at Shelton, mostly from old age. But every few weeks, someone would throw themselves out of a bathroom window, or hang themselves from a tree by the cricket pitch, or escape and throw themselves in front of a car. The primary means of discharge was death.

******

It was Enoch Powell, as a health minister in Harold Macmillan’s government, who brought the questioning of the need for these strange institutions into the political mainstream. In a speech to the National Association for Mental Health in 1961, emboldened by the promise of newly introduced psychiatric medication, Powell talked of his desire to see greater provision of community care for mental health patients.

He estimated that the number of psychiatric beds could fall by 75,000 within 15 years, with the result that many institutions would no longer be needed. He emphasised that their buildings were not fit for purpose and should be closed rather than found other functions.

Powell continued in what one wishes were the words he is best remembered for:

"This is a colossal undertaking, not so much in the new physical provision which it involves, as in the sheer inertia of mind and matter which it required to be overcome. 

"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside – the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault."

******

Why did these hospitals have those gigantic water-towers and chimneys? Dr Claire Hilton, the historian in residence at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, once discussed the question on the college’s website.

One reason was the institutions’ remoteness, whether this was dictated by a Victorian faith in the restorative powers of country air or a more 20th-century desire to hide the unfit away. It meant they often lacked mains water – many villages were not connected until after the second world war – so pumping water up to a storage tank at the top of a tower was the only way to ensure a sufficient and reliable supply. And the size of the asylums, which might have over 2,000 residents, dictated that those tanks would be huge.

Hilton quotes an 1894 book on the management of asylums as recommending the water tower be at least 20 feet higher than the highest part of the rest of the building and the tank capacious enough to hold at least 48 hours' supply. And in those days, the pumping this entailed meant the hospital needed a powerful steam engine – hence the chimneys.

The water supply had another use: fighting the fires to which their conditions made these buildings vulnerable. Many asylums, says Hilton, formed their own fire brigades of staff and patients.

******

If you had an engine in steam every day, then you got through a lot of coal. And that coal had to be brought to the hospital, often over inadequate rural roads. The solution many hospital boards and councils came up with was a railway: sometimes a whole complex of lines.

In 1896 the London County Council purchased the Horton Estate in Surrey with the intention of building a cluster of mental hospitals and other institutions there. A railway system, linked with the main line, was built to carry materials for the construction of the hospitals and then carry the coal and other goods they required for day-to-day operation. The cluster, naturally, had its own power station.

In the 1920s the volume of coal and coke delivered to the power station, and to glasshouses at one of the hospitals, reached a peak of 15,000 tonnes per year.

This railway system was little used during the second world war, when some of the hospitals were given over to wounded and recuperating soldiers, and it was scrapped not long after hostilities ceased. But before it closed, enthusiasts in sports jackets and flannels came to photograph the operations for railway magazines. It is said you can still find traces of the lines among the housing estates, private roads and golf courses that now occupy the Horton Estate.

******

By 1968 Shelton had long relied on the Shropshire Fire Brigade to fight its fires, but whatever fire-prevention measures it had in place that year failed. Soon after midnight on 26 February, a blaze broke out and 21 female patients died.

An investigation found staffing at Shelton to be ‘on the low side’, the night staff had no training in evacuation and locking patients into wards was accepted practice. The Shrewsbury Fire Brigade reported that the 10-minute delay between a night nurse discovering the fire and the alarm being raised contributed to the death toll.

In The Premonitions Bureau Knight says:

The fire alarm system, which had been installed in 1962, was tested every day at noon. Three large bells and a siren, mounted on the hospital roof, sounded across the grounds. But barely anyone knew how it worked.

Jim Dale: Piccadilly Line

Visiting Jim Dale's birthplace in Rothwell led me to this record from 1957, a parody of Lonnie Donegan's popular recording of Rock Island Line.

The songwriting credits on Piccadilly Line are Dale-Robinson-Dale - perhaps a British anticipation of Motown's Holland-Dozier-Holland?

Jim Dale himself is the first Dale and I suspect the second, no relation, is Stanley Dale, a sort of skiffle entrepreneur. Jim Dale compered his his National Skiffle Contest in 1957-8.

Robinson must be the composer and arranger Harry Robinson - a not very imaginative pseudonym for Harry Robertson.

His story was that he once received a cheque made out to Harry Robinson and reasoned that it would be easier to open a bank account in that name than get the cheque reissued. From then on he used the two names interchangeably.

Robertson's most interesting credit in a long career is that he arranged the strings on what is probably Nick Drake's best known song, River Man.

Oh, and the record's producer is George Martin.

Dangerous cladding to be removed from Leicester's Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre

This story had passed me by until today. 

From the Leicester Mercury:

Road closures will be put in place for a major project to remove unsafe cladding from a Leicester building. The Phoenix building will undergo the works amid a safety clampdown in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

The building, which is in Leicester’s Cultural Quarter, encompasses a number of privately-owned apartments, business units and the Phoenix Cinema and Art Centre. 

However, it is surrounded by cladding which has been deemed unsafe following reviews in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire which killed 72 people.

The city council has secured £14m from Homes England’s Building Safety Fund to carry out the necessary works.

Journalists are entitled to quiz Ed Davey about the Horizon scandal and he should apologise for his part in it

I cannot share the outrage among my fellow Liberal Democrats at the questioning of Ed Davey over his actions as the minister responsible for the Post Office

Those actions are bound to be of interest to the media. Ed is a party leader and one of the few ministers to have held that role in the relevant period who is still at the forefront of politics.

If you doubt that, read the names of the others: Ian McCartney, Alan Johnson, Douglas Alexander, Stephen Timms, Gerry Sutcliffe, Jim Fitzpatrick, Pat McFadden, Lord Young, Norman Lamb, Jo Swinson, Jenny Willott, Jo Baroness Nevill-Rolfe, Margot James, Andrew Griffiths, Kelly Tolhurst, Paul Scully, Jane Hunt, Dean Russell, Kevin Holinrake.

I wonder how many of them you would recognise if they sat down next to you on the bus. So Ed is bound to be of interest to journalists reporting the Horizon scandal.

Nor do I understand the determination that Ed should not apologise for his failure to challenge the Post Office's story.

While doing so he could fairly point out he was the first minister to meet campaigners and that until a whistleblower from Fujitsu appeared on Panorama in August 2015, there was no hard evidence with which to challenge the Post Office's account. By then the Coalition was over, so the journalists need to talk to the Conservatives if they want to find out why nothing was done then.

No doubt Ed and the people around him could put it better than that, but I fear his current defensiveness is not serving him well.

Some fear the headline "Ed Davey Apologises", reasoning the media will come back for more. But I suspect the headline "Ed Davey Refuses to Apologise" has been more harmful.

If we want something to say on Horizon beyond a defence of our leader's actions, I suggest we think about what Andy Burnham has been saying about the "unelected state" and read the Andrew Rawnsley article in the Observer tomorrow: 'The abuse of unaccountable power is at the wicked heart of the Post Office scandal.'

The Cumbrian pit disaster that made a Leicester man the Daddy of Tin Pan Alley

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Denmark Street, Britain’s Tin Pan Alley, played a pivotal role in the music industry. Peter Watts takes us from through the street’s history including its 1960s heyday; with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elton John and David Bowie frequenting it for guitars, meetings and recording. Despite its decline, it became the rehearsal space for the Sex Pistols and today remains a hub for music.

Denmark Street is the subject of the latest edition of The Strange Brew. This podcast, in its course, reveals that the street gained its role thanks to a Leicester man and a pit disaster in Cumberland.

Let's begin with the Wikipedia entry for Lawrence Wright:

Lawrence Wright was born in Leicester, where his father, Charles Wright, taught violin and ran a market stall selling instruments and sheet music. After leaving school aged 12, he worked for a printing company before joining a concert party in Eastbourne as a violinist and singer. 

He returned to Leicester and in 1906 set up his own market stall to sell music, including his own composition, "Down by the Stream", which became successful. In 1910, he heard a street singer perform "Don't Go Down the Mine, Daddy". 

He bought the rights to the song, which he published some weeks later following the Whitehaven mining disaster, in which 136 men were killed; the song reportedly sold a million copies.

The mining disaster was the Wellington Pit Explosion, which claimed the lives of 147 men and boys. That link will take you to a full account of it by the Northern Mine Research Society.

Folk Song and Music Hall tells the story of the song, beginning with this intriguing paragraph:

Don’t Go Down the Mine Dad was originally popularised by JH Greener, aka The Singing Pit Lad, who was performing it in the Halls between 1910 and 14 and then disappears…. I am investigating this person – at the moment all I know is that he sang this song in the Halls of Birmingham, London and Wales: perhaps a one-hit wonder, lost in the War? (speculation at present).

The song crossed the Atlantic. In the US it was known as The Dream of the Miner's Child, and it formed part of the early repertoire of Woody Guthrie.

Back to Lawrence Wright:

In 1911 Wright moved to London, hired a basement in Denmark Street from which to sell his music, and set up the Lawrence Wright Music Co.. He was one of the first music publishers to set up business in the street, which in time became known as London's Tin Pan Alley.

And in 1926 he founded the Melody Maker. 

Wright sometimes billed himself as The Daddy of Tin Pan Alley or The King of British Songwriters. When he died in 1964, his music publishing company was bought by Northern Songs, which had been set up the previous year to publish John Lennon and Paul McCartney's songs.

Zac Goldsmith gets a ban after speeding four times, but at least he keeps his trousers

 LBC reports:

Former environment minister Zac Goldsmith has been banned from driving after being caught speeding four times in London in less than four months.

Lord Goldsmith pleaded guilty the four incidents at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Thursday. The driving offences took place between late April and early August last year. He was banned until mid-March.

Zac Goldsmith and cars? That rings a bell.

Sure enough, I can bring you this story from 2016:

Zac Goldsmith limped into the last hustings of the Richmond Park by-election an hour late after being struck by his own car. 

The former London mayoral candidate was not badly hurt but his trousers were "shredded" when a volunteer driving his car clipped him while they were out canvassing. 

The collision in New Malden happened as he was due on stage at the Richmond Society’s hustings - his last chance to debate publicly with his by-election rival, Liberal Democrat Sarah Olney. 

Arriving an hour late after going home to change, he said he was "so sorry" for missing the start of such an "extraordinarily important event".

What it is to have been blogging a long and have a good memory for political trivia!

Post Office claimed North Kilworth woman stole nearly £2000 after her branch closed

If you thought you'd heard it all about the Post Office Horizon scandal, here's a news story from Harborough FM:

A former Harborough sub-postmaster was accused of stealing nearly £2,000 after the Horizon computer system reported a shortfall despite her Post Office being closed for a year.

The small branch in North Kilworth shut at the start of the pandemic in 2020, because it could not be adapted for social distancing.

Julie Beisner checked her accounts on the computer before closing the doors, which showed they were balanced.

After deciding to retire and close the office a year later before it re-opened, Post Office officials attended to complete a final audit on the system, which indicated a shortfall of £1,970.

Julie Beisner told the radio station that she suffered numerous problems with the system and estimates she paid £3,000 to Post Office to cover alleged shortfalls over the years. She described the experience as "traumatic" and said it showed there were still issues with Horizon even in 2021.

It makes you wonder just how many people have been robbed by the Post Office.

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Josh Self on why Reform UK remains a mystery.

The government is blocking the release of all information about Prince Andrew’s decade as a taxpayer-funded trade envoy. This is the mark of a banana republic and not a mature democracy. argues Andrew Lownie.

"We tend to either blame them (parents need to use Tough Love, children should try harder) or say that there’s something wrong with their brain using the medical model (they have a 'mental disorder' or 'special educational needs'). After 'Blame', the medical model comes as a huge relief. It effectively says, 'It’s not your fault. There’s something wrong with your brain. You can’t help it'." Naomi Fisher argues that we need to think far beyond diagnosis when seeking to understand neurodiversity. 

Michael Hindley pays tribute to Jacques Delors, the architect of European unity. The British government, by contrast declined to send anyone to his funeral.

"It was during the anti-Poor Law campaigns of 1836-38 that we see the return of George Hort the class warrior. He now appears regularly in the local press attacking Liberals at meetings for their betrayals of the 1832 Great Reform Act and the pernicious treatment of the poor as a result of the 1834 New Poor Law or representing individuals at Board of Guardians tribunals and in the magistrates’ courts." Steve Marquis celebrates Leicester's forgotten working-class hero George Hort.

Retired Martin recommends half a dozen Derbyshire pubs.

The CofE asked Paula Vennells to review its governance even after her role in the Horizon scandal became known

The Church of England was even more starstruck by Paula Vennells that I realised. A thread from Marcus Walker on Twitter reveals that she was appointed by the CofE to conduct a review of its own governance.

If I understand rightly, this was after she was first asked to conduct a review of a failed attempt by the Church to reach agreement on the need for church closures. Walker suggests that Lambeth Palace wanted more than a thousand of them.

Her review criticised the Church's existing governance arrangements, in essence because they were too collegiate and too democratic.

This, I suspect, was music to the ears of the former oil industry executive Justin Welby, who appointed her to head the governance review on the strength of it.

I hope I have understood all this correctly, but there is no doubt about the most startling fact here. Vennells was appointed to this role in after her report on the failed church closure attempt was presented to the church authorities in 2020.

As Walker writes in his Twitter thread:

So there we are. Even after the Post Office scandal was known and even after it was clear that Paula Vennells’ leadership had led to catastrophic abuse of her employees and gross miscarriages of justice she was hired to start the transformation of the CofE.

We must avoid making Vennells the sole villain in this story, just because she was the only Post Office chief executive to be portrayed in the television play. Adam Crozier held the role for longer and also appears to have been in charge when the organisation committed its worse abuses.

But I still find the Church's decision to appoint her extraordinary.

Desborough and the Railway

If I'm feeling too lazy to walk into town for a coffee and a trip round the supermarket, I can catch a bus to Desborough in my road. This little town now has a Costa by the bus stop and a Co-op store in what was once the yard of its railway station.

This video is full of appealing photographs of that station, which was known as Desborough and Rothwell from 1899 until it closed in 1968.

Desborough also had narrow and standard gauge lines to the north and south that served ironstone quarries and brought their product to the main line. An article in The Industrial Railway Record describes one of the lines in its later days:

The outstanding feature of this short railway is the track. The rail is of light section and flat bottomed, with earth, mud or leaf mould ballast; a stream flows over the sleepers between the engine shed and the first bridge. In several places old sleepers have been wedged between the rail and cutting side to stop the track moving. 

The cutting sides are covered with bushes and trees which overhang the track so that branches brush continuously against the train. The curves are so sharp that even when wagons are being pushed and the inside buffers are in contact the coupling is taut. 

Even a short railway like this is not immune from vandals, who recently dislodged the capping stones on a bridge parapet and pushed them off on to the track.

Ed Davey should go easy on calling for people to resign

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Sir Ed Davey, leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats, has faced harsh criticism this week for his role in the Horizon IT scandal, after it was revealed that he failed to act on claims that sub-postmasters were being wrongly accused of theft and false accounting by the Post Office. 

note Anna Gross and Rafe Uddin on the Financial Times website. They go on to say that the blame should be shared far more widely,

But experts and campaigners say that members of all three main political parties could have done more to address claims over the nearly two-decade scandal that has ruined hundreds of lives.

Seventeen ministers have been responsible for the postal service brief since the flawed Horizon system was rolled out to Post Office branches under a Labour administration in 2000.

It was only following a landmark 2019 Court of Appeal case that the Post Office’s leadership was forced to concede that there were systemic issues with the Horizon system. It took several months before then prime minister Boris Johnson committed to an independent public inquiry into what has become one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice.

As a party leader, Davey is bound to attract more interest than the other 16 ministers who once had responsibility for the Post Office. How many of them are still public names?

But one telling point has been brought to light by this criticism of Ed. He is remarkably keen on calling for other people to resign. By one journalist's calculation, he has used Twitter to demand someone else walk the plank 32 times.

You can say that a lot more Tories should have resigned in recent years and that leaders of smaller parties can't be too squeamish about what they have to do to catch the interest of the media.

But I wonder if this enthusiasm for demanding resignations is a consequence of Liberal Democrat determination to fight the next general election as a series of by-elections.

Many of the problems Britain faces are deep and systemic, but it's hard to convey that - and the Lib Dem solutions to them - in a set of three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can't win here. Calls for a minister to resign, however, fit neatly into that format.

But we must be careful  those bullet points don't become the sum total of our thinking.

I suspect one result of this week's surge of interest in the Post Office Horizon scandal will be that Ed makes fewer calls for others' resignations, if only because of the response they will now meet with.

And, after the general election, we must rediscover the idea of building up a core Lib Dem vote. This will have to involve talking about our ideas, rather than just exclaiming at the awfulness of the Tories.

David Storey, the Booker-winning novelist who played rugby league for Leeds

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I first came across David Storey when his novel Saville won the Booker Prize. It was one of those books about the progress of a working-class grammar school and his alienation from his background that used to be everywhere.

The grandfather of this school of literature was D.H. Lawrence, and I was studying his novel The Rainbow for A level at the time. Our teacher talked about Storey's debt to Lawrence and suggested we might want to read Saville.

Storey's own life story was like one of his novels on speed. At one time he was studying fine art at the Slade in the week and catching the train back north to play rugby league for Leeds at the weekend.

He wrote of rugby league in his posthumous memoir A Stinging Delight:

An odd game, rugby league was confined principally to the two northern counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire and was almost exclusively working class. It seemed to me that it had about it something of the graft of underground labour (several of the more notable players were miners), something of the confederacy induced by enclosed spaces; something of the magnanimity of the elements: dourness, strength, tenacity, graft.

Grafting was what the forward game was all about: five-tank like players formed the scrum, with me shifting between the second row (the two players welded between the three in front) and the loose-forward at the back .The first ten minutes of the game were taken up with seeking what might be described as a psychological advantage: a stag-like confrontation whether forwards trying to suppress and finally demoralise their opposite numbers. There ferocity with which a player ran with the ball was matched by the ferocity with which he was tackled, the subsequent course of the game determined by the conclusions reached in these introductory encounters.

A winter sport, austere and remorselessly physical, we played in rain, mist, fog or occasional snow; on darkening afternoons, in encroaching dusk; on grounds enclosed by industrial workings, or by the debilitating and depressing environs of a smoke-ridden town. Journeys took us around the industrialised valleys of the Pennines. Occasionally the sky would be illuminated by the descending sun, the valleys suffused with a purplish glow. Occasionally the Pennine hills would rear in the distance but, invariably, the terraces were silhouetted against chimneyed roofs, mills, factories, the cooling towers of a power station: slopes of ashy, industrial dereliction.

I'm remined of how Eddie Waring used to refer to the "Satanic Mills End" at Leigh's Hilton Park ground.

Fashions change in literature. Not so long ago I saw Andy Miller from the Backlisted podcast exclaiming online that Saville had won the Booker Prize yet he could find no one who had read it.

Archbishop of Canterbury said to have supported Paula Vennells's candidacy for Bishop of London

Scan the Wikipedia entry for Paula Vennells and you find a paragraph on her involvement with the Church of England:

From 2002 to 2005, Vennells trained for Holy Orders on the St Albans and Oxford Ministry Course. She was ordained in the Church of England as a deacon in 2005 and as a priest in 2006. She has served as a non-stipendiary minister at the Church of St Owen, Bromham, in the Diocese of St Albans. She was reported to have 'stepped back' from duties in 2021. Her membership of the Church of England Ethical Investment Advisory Group was also terminated.

But it's become clear today that her involvement has been far deeper than that.

This afternoon BBC News revealed that in 2017 Vennells was on a shortlist of only three names to be the next Bishop of London. The authors of its report, Henry Zeffman and Harry Farley, say two sources told them that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, pushed her application and was seen as a supporter of hers.

On Twitter, Communard turned Northamptonshire parish priest turned cosy-crime novelist Richard Coles asked:

Why did the Crown Nominations Commission shortlist Paula Vennells, a priest with no experience of running a parish and not even on the payroll, for the CofE’s third most senior position?

A possible clue is to be found in a quote from Welby's book Reimagining Britain flagged up by Gilo, again on Twitter. There Welby writes:

Conversations with Sam Wells, Paula Vennells, Tim Cross, former colleagues in the oil industry and Sir Graham Hearne and many others have shaped my thinking over the years.

It's not clear whether he  is talking about his thinking on a particular topic or his thinking in general, but this does support the idea that the Archbishop held Vennells in high regard. The Church of England, incidentally, declined to comment on the BBC's story about the appointment of the Bishop of London.

As to Vennells herself, Andrew Graystone (on Twitter) quotes from a talk of hers to the London Diocese in October 2017:

"My faith has been absolutely central to transforming the Post Office. We have developed three values: Care, Challenge, Commit. They are based on the Second Commandment: Love your neighbour as yourself."

Later. Another nugget from Twitter: Marcus Walker reveals that Vennells has been a tutor on the Church of England's leadership development programme for bishops.

The Joy of Six 1193

Matthew Pennell uncovers the roots of the Post Office Horizon scandal: "The political origins for Horizon date back to 1994, with the idea of computerising payments and moving away from Girocheques being proposed by Social Security Minister Peter Lilley. It needs to be understood, however, that a brand new IT system for the Post Office and DSS fitted in perfectly with the New Labour ethos of using tech to transform anything and everything."

"The thing is ... this is not a new story. It’s a fairly old one, and in 2019, [Epstein victim Sarah] Ransome told New Yorker writer Connie Bruck that not only did she not have the tapes, but that she invented their existence." Robyn Pennacchia refuses to be excited by the dump of Epstein files.

"It is unclear whether pints were ever available on the shelves of British shops, as opposed to direct supply, and, however supplied, it seems as if they had disappeared well before Britain joined the EU." Those near-mythical pint bottles of champagne are a good symbol of the wholly nonsensical and imaginary idea of sovereignty, itself predicated on a nineteenth century view of Britain and the world, that is shared by Brexit supporters, argues Chris Grey.

Vince Cable warns us not to underestimate the threat posed by Nigel Farage.

A report from Foundation for Common Land describes the results of heritage work carried out with volunteers on the Stiperstones during Autumn 2023. It focussed on Bronze Age cairns in the south of the site and the remains of post-Medieval smallholdings in the north.

Sarah Bertram presents a video obituary of the great JPR Williams.

Jago Hazzard finds the remains of Spencer Road Halt in Croydon

Yer man travels to Croydon to find the remains of a railway station that closed in 1983 - you can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.

The page for Spencer Road Halt on the Disused Stations site gives its history:

On 1July 1906 a new halt was opened between Coombe Lane and Selsdon in an attempt to attract more passengers to the Selsdon Line. Spencer Road Halt had two 100 foot timber platforms made our old sleepers but no buildings, just a wooden name board and a row of posts for holding oil lamps in winter. A lattice footbridge linked the platforms and also formed part of a footpath between Spencer Road and Birdhurst Rise.

The railway company hoped that this halt would enable passengers to change to the Brighton Line by taking the ten-minute walk to South Croydon station - very few did. Although the halt was surrounded by substantial late Victorian villas it could only be reached by footpaths and was short lived, closing on 15 March 1915 as an economy measure during WW1 and it did not reopen after the war. The halt remained intact for 20 years but was demolished in 1935 when the line was electrified.