Ossington Buildings: Early social housing in Marylebone

I was down in London to see some Liberator friends yesterday, and took the chance to visit Chess and Bridge in Baker Street. (Yes, I'm getting hooked on chess again.)

After that I explored Marylebone and, because I've never thought of it as a poor area, was surprised to come across nine blocks of 19th-century "improved dwellings". These were early essays in social housing, provided in slum areas of London.

And West of Marylebone High Street, a draft chapter of University College London's survey of South East Marylebone, tells me all about them:

Most of the Grotto Passage area was redeveloped with blocks of improved dwellings from the late nineteenth century, leaving the old essentially pedestrian street layout. The process began with what is now 8 Garbutt Place, built privately in 1881 in the normal course of lease renewal. 

But the major campaign was over a 15-month period in 1888–9, when some 100 workmen were engaged by Wall Brothers of Kentish Town in building the first seven blocks of Ossington Buildings, on the sites of Conway and Grafton Courts, together with a communal steam laundry in a separate building. Initially called the Portland Industrial Dwellings, these were swiftly renamed in honour of the aged Lady Ossington, co-owner of the Portland estate, though strictly speaking the new name applied only to the north–south street formerly called Grafton Court. 

Two further blocks, on the east side of Grotto Passage, replacing Harrison’s Place, followed shortly after; they were tendered for by Walls, who lost out to Staines & Son. 

The nine blocks, of four storeys plus basements, were the joint work of the architects Alfred Robert Pite and Charles Fowler, the estate surveyor. Although wellbuilt, with fireproof floors and artificial stone staircases, they provided only the most basic accommodation and were at first let by the room, almost all the rooms being fitted with stoves or small ranges. Water and two WC’s were provided on each landing.

The blocks of Ossington Buildings were modernised long ago, but it doesn't surprise me to learn that the facilities here were originally very basic.

In The Yellow Balloon, one of my children-and-bombites-in-postwar-London films, Andrew Ray and his parents live in similar accommodation - one of the blocks on Chelsea's Sutton Estate.

Looking for something good to do before he asks his mother for sixpence, the young Ray lugs a pail of water up the stairs from the half-landing below.

Anyway, here are some photographs from yesterday. If you want to know more about this quarter of Marylebone, The Gentle Author was there long before me.

Oh, and the monogram over the door is PIDC, standing for Portland Industrial Dwellings Company.

Alan Bennett once delivered chops to T.S. Eliot's mother-in-law

The video of a recent British Film Institute event with Alan Bennett has appeared on YouTube.

So far I've watched just the first few minutes, but it was enough to give me my Trivial Fact of the Day. Play the clip above to hear it.

Ed Davey, Zoe Williams and our Letter of the Day

Ed Davey's Guardian interview with Zoe Williams created quite a stir. If you've not read it yet, it will repay your time.

It also features in our Letter of the Day, which comes from today's edition of that paper:

Zoe Williams’ interview with Ed Davey had a most unusual impact on me: I finished reading it and joined the Lib Dems.

Dr Elena Liquete, Corsham, Wiltshire

Cadbury's Dairy Milk and the supersonic Seventies

As I remember it, this is where the Seventies began. There were no more flower children or village green preservation societies: we had landed in a new decade of supersonic air travel, traffic and pollution. (I seem to recall another Cadbury's commercial, using the same tune, that mentioned "the supersonic Seventies", but I can't find it online.)

"Like it always will be?" Cadbury's was sold to the US firm Kraft Foods after the Gordon Brown's government declined to intervene.

And supersonic travel is no more. As Jonathan Meades has pointed out, the future happened briefly in 1969. It seems Cadbury's was already too late.

GUEST POST Will compulsory ID at polling stations break our model of canvassing and knocking up?

Will requiring voters to produce photographic ID at the polling station spell the end for political parties' current polling-day methods? Augustus Carp reports on his experience of telling in this month's local elections.

We all know the game, and a lot of us rather enjoy it. We spend hours canvassing the electorate, and make detailed notes on the register, some of which are accurate. Then, on polling day, we sit outside the polling station and collect the voters’ numbers, send them back to the Committee Room, where someone crosses them off the marked register. Anyone whose name is not crossed off gets a friendly reminder through the process known as 'knocking up'.

As a technique for winning closely-fought elections it’s tried and tested. The Labour Party believe that Ian Mikardo MP first used the 'Reading System' in the 1945 General Election, and no Liberal Party Committee Room would have been complete without a badly written set of Shuttleworth pads. 

These were strangely coloured sets of no-carbon-required paper, on to which the marked ledger had been (badly) transcribed, which enabled activists to cross off names as the numbers came back from the polling station, with the agents able to send out knockers-up three or four times, depending on how brutal they chose to be.

Some of these quaint old traditions have been modernised. The numbers are still written on to slips of paper with 44 boxes, but are now photographed and transmitted by WhatsApp. (Why 44 boxes per sheet? No one knows. It’s tradition.) Some people even enter their numbers electronically from their devices. Knocking up is done from lists sent to mobile phones, so there’s no longer a chance for the knockers up to pop back to the Committee Room for a rest and a cup of tea.

But is it all becoming pointless? I ask because of my experience earlier this month collecting numbers outside a polling station in a neighbouring borough.

The first thing I noted was that everyone (bar two voters) turned up proudly waving their photo ID but without their polling cards. In the past, most people carried these - admittedly rather pointless - talismans with them on their way to vote, which made collecting the numbers very easy. 

No card means no number, but photo ID seems to have replaced the polling card in the popular imagination as the thing to be seen with on polling day.

The second thing I noticed was rather more worrying - the outright hostility from some voters to the tellers. There were three of us, working in tolerable unity and harmony as tradition requires, and we all faced abuse and contempt from the voters. 

Two complaints were made to the Polling Officials about us being 'aggressive' in our number-collecting endeavours. I cannot speak for myself, but I can assure you that my two colleagues were the epitome of good manners throughout. Any aggression was coming from the voters: it was 'a plague on both your houses' made manifest through acts of spite.

On one of my telling pad sheets I recorded only 16 out of a possible 44 numbers. The rest either didn’t have numbers or refused to disclose them. The advice from the committee room was, of course, 'Just ask them for their name and address' or 'Just ask them to get the clerk to give them the number and tell you on the way out.' Believe me, in the circumstances, that was not good advice.

Add in the increasing number of postal votes, and I wonder if there’s any point in a polling day operation any more. Certainly, for local elections, the combination of postal votes, numberless hordes, refuseniks and the low turnout make the exercise seem futile. 

In this case I was told we were testing systems prior to the general election, so perhaps some good came of it, but I wonder if I would have done as good a job by just sitting outside the polling station, wearing a rosette and smiling a lot.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats since 1976. He claims to have worked on more than 50 polling day operations in that time, "some of which were successful".

The Joy of Six 1132

Robert Hutton has been to the National Conservatism Conference: "The country is in a terrible mess, and Rees-Mogg is just trying to find the guys who did this. He denounced the Budget and the failure to scrap EU regulations. He even denounced Voter ID, a policy he shepherded through Parliament, as a failed attempt to rig the vote. It wasn’t clear whether he had always been against it because of the rigging, or simply was now because it hadn’t worked."

"Between 1946 and 1950 ... around 35,000 Ukrainians came to the United Kingdom as part of the European Volunteer Workers scheme. This intended to address labour shortages by providing jobs to displaced people." Historic England provides a history of Ukranians in England.

"A great film and a rare example of one that improves on its written source, it also takes its place in the distinguished line of UK dystopias stretching from The War of the Worlds to Day of the Triffids to The Drowned World." Simon Matthews watches Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men.

Isaac Butler says it's long past time to retire the anti-historical search for who 'really' wrote Shakespeare's plays: "Trutherism abuses the liberal public sphere by using the values of liberal discourse - rational hearing of evidence, open-mindedness, fair-minded skepticism about one’s own certainties, etc. - against it. Once the opposition tires of this treatment and refuses to engage in debate any longer, the truther can then declare victory, and paint the opposition as religious fanatics who are closed-minded and scared of facing the truth."

Lisa R. Marshall takes to the wild green hills of Worcestershire with Jonathan Meades and A.E. Housman.

There's been controversy about Sussex giving the Australian captain Steve Smith a short-term contract before this summer's Ashes series. Ben Gardner asks if the decision is hurting Sussex as well as England.

The railway line across Anglesey that's waiting to be restored

Wikipedia explains:

The Anglesey Central Railway (Welsh: Lein Amlwch, Amlwch Line) was a 17.5-mile (28.2 km) standard-gauge railway in Anglesey, Wales, connecting the port of Amlwch and the county town of Llangefni with the North Wales Coast Line at Gaerwen. Built as an independent railway, the railway opened in portions from 1864 to 1867. 

Due to financial troubles the railway was sold to the London and North Western Railway in 1876, which invested significantly in the infrastructure. Operation continued under various companies during the 20th century, but passenger services were withdrawn in 1964 as part of the Beeching Axe. Industrial freight services continued until 1993. 

The railway's tracks remain and local groups have demonstrated an interest in restoring services as a heritage railway.

This video explores the substantial and surprising remains of the line and the industry it served, and discusses the possibility of reopening it as a commercial or a heritage line.

I've found another fan of No Room at the Inn

It can be difficult to keep all your rabbit holes in the air, and it's high time we went back to No Room at the Inn.

This is the film that introduced me to the wonderful actress Freda Jackson. The play on which it is based was in part inspired the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill in Shropshire in 1945, which was the case that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap. (Those first three links are to labels on this blog, so scroll down for plenty of posts each time.)

I recently came across an article on No Room at the Inn by Meredith Taylor, whose chief interests here are Daniel Birt, the film's director, and Dylan Thomas, who co-wrote the screenplay.

After writing about Birt's previous film, The Three Weird Sisters, he turns to No Room:

A sense of the Gothic also infiltrates No Room at the Inn set in the early months of 1940. We witness atmospheric blitzed streets by the railway bridge next to a rundown house that’s definitely on the wrong side of the tracks: all lorded over by Mrs Agatha Voray (Freda Jackson) doing her damn best not to properly look after three young girl evacuees. 

The children live in squalor and suffer mental and physical abuse under the care of this coarse woman who invites men (local councillors and shopkeepers) for casual sex and bit of cash to bolster her shopping allowance of ration coupons. 

This is good, though Voray is looking after a boy as well as the three girls, and the film is set in motion by her taking in a fourth girl. Indeed, it's Voray's punishment of the boy the precipitates the film's climax.

Taylor continues:

The character of the schoolteacher Judith Drave (Joy Shelton) is remarkable, for we have ... a force for truth-seeking that refuses to be silenced. 

A powerfully written and acted moment occurs when Miss Drave, who has complained about Mrs Voray's behaviour, is asked to give evidence at a town councillors’ meeting. They dislike Ms Drave’s assertive manner. When Mrs.Voray has her right to reply she adopts the manner of a humble woman struggling to do her best during wartime restrictions. 

The schoolteacher sees right through her performance. But the council members (half of whom have flirted with Voray) believe her account of things over the teacher’s. I love Dylan Thomas’s writing here. His social concern is angrily targeted at bureaucratic corruption and ineptitude.

I don't have a copy of the film - it's easy to buy a copy online, but these are significantly shorter than the version Talking Pictures TV has shown more than once. And that is the copy I would want.

It would be interesting if I had that copy to see how much of Joan Temple's original play survived into the screenplay. Often the original source of a film goes unrecognised - the extraordinary atmosphere of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter is all there in the original novel by Davis Grubb.

Taylor rightly identifies a Dickensian bringing together of different moods as one of the roots of the film's strange power:

Like The Three Weird Sisters there are fascinating if disconcerting alterations of tone – such as the beautifully written bedtime story scene in the room of the young girl evacuees. 

Norma Bates (yes, not Norman, though the film has its moments of Hitchcockian darkness) who is played by Joan Dowling, re-interprets the Cinderella story in a ripe, savagely Cockney manner. She comforts the children who are desperate to escape the mean house and its mean housekeeper. 

It’s a spellbinding moment of Dylan Thomas poetics: a joyful spin on Cinderella, beautifully shot and executed. And its lyricism is made more poignant by intercutting with Mrs Voray in the pub getting drunk with the sailor father of one of the evacuees. 

You can see that bedtime story scene in the video above.

Taylor is critical of the ending of No Room at the Inn, and I would add that the film's prologue, which involves one of the children being caught shoplifting some years later, just isn't strong enough to sit with the darkness of the rest of the film.

This structure of a present-day prologue followed by the rest of the action taking place as a flashback is taken from the play, but that began with the police arriving to find Mrs Voray dead and the play then showing us what had led up to this.

The censors meant that her death in the film had to have been caused by falling downstairs, but in the play she is smothered, more or less accidentally, in a drunken sleep by one of the children. The girls are trying to get her keys off her so they can rescue the boy, who has been locked in the coal store on a freezing night.

I should add that Taylor avoids this big spoiler, but I am not so considerate when a film is 75 years old.

But we can end in agreement as he praises the two best performances in the film:

Freda Jackson brings a full-blooded intensity to the role of the selfish and uncaring Aggie Voray. She was a sensation in the play and that’s why they made a film version which launched her considerable career on stage and in the cinema. 

Jackson probably became a role model for actors portraying more authentic working class women. I wonder if Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner) of Coronation Street was influenced by her?

As for all of the child actors in No Room at the Inn well they’re brilliant -especially Joan Dowling who’s street-wise confidence cannot hide her emotional damage. She deserved a prize but unfortunately the BAFTAs didn’t begin until 1954.

Later. It's worth adding that it easy to find a DVD of the film for sale online - it was even on YouTube for a while. That version runs for about 60 minutes, but the one that has been shown more than once by Talking Pictures TV is significantly longer.

Work begins to save the last working bell foundry in Britain

Campaigners have not given up on reopening Whitechapel Bell Foundry, but its closure in 2017 left John Taylor's of Loughborough as the only working bell foundry in Britain.

Taylor's buildings are not in good condition, and there have been efforts for some years to put together a package of funding to secure the enterprise's future and make it more attractive to visitors.

So it's good to read in the Leicester Mercury that:

Work to save Loughborough's historic Taylor's Bellfoundry - the last of its kind in the UK - has begun. The work aims to protect and enhance the Grade II*-listed bellfoundry buildings and on-site museum.

The project is being led by the Loughborough Bellfoundry Trust, which is working in partnership with John Taylor and Company, which has made bells in the town since 1859. The Trust was set up in 2016 to begin the work of restoring the bellfoundry’s buildings to protect the ancient craft of bellmaking for generations to come, and redevelop the site’s museum.

Dr Chrissie Van Mierlo, director of the foundry museum told the paper:

"We are thrilled to see work getting underway. This project has been years in the making and will help preserve and protect our historic buildings for generations to come. Our vision has always been to create a place where people of all ages can visit and learn about the craftmanship and art of bell making, as well as the history of the Loughborough site. 

Thanks to generous funders, and National Lottery players, we can now address the most urgent repair and conservation works to bring our vision to life."

Britain needs the Lib Dems, says the Washington Post

Here's an encouraging article from an unexpected source:

The Lib Dems count for more than their current low representation suggests. Next year, the centre party will become political kingmaker if, as seems highly likely, neither Labour nor the Conservatives win a majority in the general election. It’s a role it has played for more than a hundred years. 

The centrists also matter in other ways beyond raw electoral calculation. At Westminster, the party stands for important but unfashionable causes - the defence of civil liberties and constitutional change - that don’t find a natural home with either of the two bigger parties.

Lib Dem influence may have already ensured that the Tories will be ejected from office. In last week’s local elections, tactical voting for opposition candidates brought about the Conservatives’ huge loss of more than 1000 council seats. 

According to modelling for the Times newspaper by Ben Ansell, an Oxford University professor of politics, tactical voting now makes it "very, very, very hard  for the Conservatives to win an outright majority."

That source is the Washington Post.

And there's more:

There is a traditional place for a Liberal voice in UK politics. The party was the first to champion British membership of the European Community and the last to accept Brexit. It is resolutely internationalist in outlook. It consistently advocates decentralization of the overmighty UK state, too, and challenges knee-jerk law-and-order legislation passed in the wake of populist outrage.

Personally, I have little time for environmental extremists who block the roads and make it impossible for commuters to go about their daily business. Nor did the republicans who attempted to disrupt King Charles III’s coronation elicit my sympathy. 

But it is hard not to feel a twinge of anxiety at the battery of legislation passed to limit the rights of demonstrators. As one of those arrested last weekend complained, "the police have dreamt up a new offence  - 'being in the vicinity of protesters'." The Lib Dems give voice to our doubts.

Lib Dems, Labour and Greens reach agreement on running Harborough District Council

From Harborough FM:

A deal has been struck between political parties to run Harborough District Council.

The Greens, Liberal Democrats and Labour have reached an agreement to work together, after the authority was left in no overall control following the local elections.

Liberal Democrat councillor Phil Knowles will be put forward to become leader of the council at tonight’s annual council meeting.

Well done to everyone who has brought this agreement about, and congratulations to Phil, whom I first met almost 40 years ago.

Later.

In a statement to the Harborough Mail the three groups said: 

We have been working hard since the election to seek a solution in the best interests of the residents of Harborough District.

Voters sent a message loud and clear that they were dissatisfied with the Conservatives. With no single party having an outright majority, we can confirm that the Labour Party, Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party have an agreement to work together.

Angus Wilson: Skating on Thin Ice

I have started reading Ma'am Darling, Craig Brown's book about Princess Margaret, and it is every bit as good as the reviews said it was.

The book's genesis, Brown says, lay in the way Margaret cropped up in the index of every biography from her period that he opened. 

Here is a little run he gives from Margaret Drabble's biography of Angus Wilson:

Margaret, Princess

Marie Antoinette

Market Harborough

Given my love of a good index, I found this immediately appealing, and here I am left wondering what Angus Wilson's connection with Market Harborough was.

And it has led me to think about Angus Wilson too. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose work was held in high regard when I read it avidly back in the Seventies, along with his critical studies of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. Yet he has since fallen out of print.

This 1991 BBC film was broadcast in 1991, the year he died, and tells the story of his success and his eclipse late in life.

Shelagh McDonald: Mirage

Shelagh McDonald wrote a piece in the Guardian under the title 'I disappeared for 30 years'.

It wasn't my intention to walk out of my own life and vanish, especially when things were going so well. I was an ambitious 24-year-old folk singer and had just started work on my third album. The second had been a critical success and had really started to get me noticed.

A bad trip was the catalyst for unexpected change. I took LSD at a party, expecting the effects to be short-term, but ended up losing three or four days. I remember wandering across London, experiencing terrifying hallucinations, then being helped on to a plane with no clue where I was going. 

Touching down, I recognised Glasgow and my parents' stern faces. They'd never approved of me becoming a singer; perhaps this is what they'd always expected.

The hallucinations continued for weeks. I remember lying in bed at my parents' house, hearing the phone ring, but if any of the calls were for me, they were never passed on. My address book hadn't made the journey with me, and I didn't have the money to travel. My friends were all down south and though I desperately wanted to see them, I became completely cut off. 

Over 18 months I began to recover, though when I tried to sing, all that emerged was a strangled croak.

But come back she did, after 30 years of a vagabond life.

This is a track from McDonald's first album, imaginatively entitled Album, which came out in 1970.

The obvious comparison to make is with Sandy Denny. And, sure enough, Wikipedia says:

On her first two albums, McDonald was backed up by many notables within the English folk-rock scene, including Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, Danny Thompson, Keith Tippett, Keith Christmas, the Fotheringay rhythm section, as well as Ian Whitman, Roger Powell and Michael Evans, then members of Mighty Baby. 

Guardian finds Surrey voters unrepentant for backing the Lib Dems

Embed from Getty Images

Good news from Surrey. A focus group convened for the Guardian by UK More in Common suggests that:

Blue wall Conservative voters in Surrey are far from impressed with the government’s obsession with culture wars, and remain unrepentant for tactically backing the Liberal Democrats at last week’s local elections.

The prime minister still looks "out of his depth", uninspiring and unable to set out a straightforward vision six months in the job, according to a panel of Surrey residents who backed the Conservatives at the 2019 election. They believe "the country needs change now", and the Tories need some time in opposition to sort themselves out.

Though we should note the observation that the group

appeared to want to vote for the Conservatives again, but thought the party had "made fools of themselves despite having so many chances" to restart.

This morning Luke Tryl from More in Common tweeted a thread of findings from the group, including one that did not make the Guardian.

And they thought badly of the last coalition "When we had the coalition, oh what's his face? I can't remember his name now. Mr. Facebook, he was walking around puffed out chest and like, oh let's do this with these little tiny wins and was just, I found it just irritating"

— Luke Tryl (@LukeTryl) May 13, 2023

Why the Tories should be wary of consulting their grassroots

Embed from Getty Images

Tomorrow the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) is gathering in Bournemouth. 

This new party group was set up after the party's MPs decided they could no longer stomach supporting Boris Johnson as leader and prime minister. 

A report in the Guardian says its organisers deny it's a 'Johnson revivalist group', but that report also says almost every speaker at the event is a noted Johnson supporter.

The CDO website gives the group's aim:

Our mission is to strengthen party democracy by ensuring the Conservative Party is representative of the membership and fairly represents their views.

And says its vision is to:

Re-enfranchise Conservative Party members to be the masters of their own democratic destiny.

If I wanted the Conservatives to stay in power, I would be worried about this.

And not just because the Conservative membership are the people who elected Iain Duncan Smith as the party's leader and Liz Truss as the nation's prime minster.

I would be worried because even consulting the party's councillors was enough to finish Margaret Thatcher.

Her original proposal was to phase in the Poll Tax over 10 years. I saw what happened at my first full council meeting here in Harborough when we agreed our response to the government consultation.

As I later recalled on the Guardian website:

Conservative members didn't want it phased in over 10 years: they wanted it at once. You could see the pound signs in their eyes as they calculated how much they and their neighbours would save.

So, like Tory-run councils across the country, we told Whitehall we wanted the Poll Tax brought in at once.

Which it was. With hilarious consequences.

"You can always get away with being rude about the Midlands"

On Twitter today, Brynley Heaven, who once wrote a guest post for this blog about three unlikely heroes from Grantham, mentioned the Blair government's long-forgotten proposal for eco-towns.

This reminded me that I had written an article for the Guardian website opposing the idea that one of them should be built just to the east of Leicester.

It began:

These days, there are few prejudices people feel comfortable displaying in public, but you can always get away with being rude about the Midlands.

This dismissive attitude goes back a long way. Hilaire Belloc described the Midlands as "sodden and unkind", and when Leicester council engaged a London advertising agency to boost the city's image, it was naturally offered an achingly ironic campaign with the slogan "Boring, boring Leicester". 

As with all prejudices, the most insidious effect of "Midlandsism" is the way its victims internalise it.

On his blog Unmitigated England, the writer and photographer Peter Ashley describes one of his favourite Midlands locations, the lane that circles Cranoe church in a hairpin bend as it drops into the Welland valley: "I once used to say to companions on this road 'Look at this. You could be in Dorset. Or Devon. You'd never think you were in Leicestershire.'"

But he has managed to raise his consciousness: "I have now realised what a fatuous remark this is. This is Leicestershire, and in fact very typical of the eastern side of the county."

And Midlandsism has actual detrimental effects on people who live here. In particular, it is hard to believe the Pennbury site in Leicestershire would have got anywhere near Caroline Flint's eco-towns shortlist if it were in the south east.

Read on to learn why Pennbury was not the place to build a new town: thrill as I absolve myself of the charge of Nimbyism.

These days you will find Peter Ashley on Instagram.

Happy St Pancras Day

Embed from Getty Images

With 12 May being both the Feast of St Pancras and Steve Winwood's birthday, it's a public holiday here on Liberal England.

A couple of recent posts.

In March I discovered that the story of the Hardy Tree in Old St Pancras churchyard - its beside the line just before the station - is a recent invention.

And the most popular post here this week has been the one where I revealed that Steve Winwood's grandson was to be a page at the Coronation.

Sudbury Town: Where the London Underground began to use European Modernism

As Jago Hazzard explains, Sudbury Town is where the London Underground began to build its stations in a European Modernist style.

The station today is in something of a residential backwater, but it looks worth seeking out,

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.

Welsh composer Sir Karl Jenkins denies he was Duchess of Sussex in disguise at King's coronation

Embed from Getty Images

Sky News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

A dissenting judge comments: Well, she would say that, wouldn't she?

Classic FM's Zadok the Priest flash mob

This dates from Classic FM's 20th birthday celebrations in 2012, but it's rather wonderful and certainly appropriate to this week.

I don't see any of the shoppers complaining that classical music is "elitist".

Lib Dems gain Dacorum, but where is it and why is it called that?

Dacorum local election 2023 results in full as Liberal Democrats earn majority with six seats gained while Tories fall

says the headline.

Below it is a picture of Ed Davey driving a tractor and demolishing a blue wall of straw bales. Let no one tell you that our now-traditional cheesy media stunts don't work.

But the headline also invites two questions; where is Dacorum and why is it called that?

Those of you who follow the minutiae of Lib Dem campaigning will remember that Ed's stunt was filmed in Berkhamsted. So Dacorum is in West Hertfordshire.

And one answer to the question of why this district council is called Dacorum is: "So that people in Berkhamsted don't have to say they're from Hemel Hempstead." Because Hemel Hempstead is by far the largest town in the district, but for some reason has not lent its name to it.

Though I lived in Hemel as a boy, I've always assumed that Dacorum was a name made up during Edward Heath's reorganisation of local government. 

In fact, it's the name of the hundred covering the west of the county - it's much larger than today's Dacorum District Council. 

Flags of the World says that at the time of the Domesday Book there were two hundreds here: Danais and Tring. They were merged (presumably by an ancestor of Heath's) and the name Hundred of Dacorum was first recorded in 1196.

As to that name, the same site says:

The name Dacorum is thought to mean the 'Hundred of the Dacians' in Medieval Latin. Daci was mistakenly used for 'Danes' in the Middle Ages. According to legend certain tribes from Dacia migrated first to Denmark, then to Angleland in the 9th and 10th centuries. 

And Dacia, says Wikipedia, roughly corresponds to the present-day countries of Romania, as well as parts of Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

Well, you did ask.

Returning to more local matters, I'm pleased to see that the Lib Dems hold Boxmoor, where I spent the brief middle-class period of my childhood. Warners End and Chaulden, the ward we lived in before that, remains Conservative.

The Joy of Six 1131

'The British press ... converted the book into their native tongue, that jabberwocky of bonkers hot takes and classist snark. Facts were wrenched out of context, complex emotions were reduced to cartoonish idiocy, innocent passages were hyped into outrages.' J.R. Moehringer on his experience of being Prince Harry's ghostwriter.

'Our research revealed 30 different characteristics and qualities of a woman’s identity that emerged as points of criticism creating barriers to women’s success. The clear message to women is that—whatever they are—they are “never quite right.' Amy Diehl, Leanne M. Dzubinski and Amber L. Stephenson find that, whatever women are, they are 'never quite right' for leadership roles.

Mark Knights looks back at John Poulson, the architect and businessman gaoled for corruption in 1974 over the award of local authority building contracts.

Tony Whitehead tells us why Dartmoor's protected areas are in such poor condition and what needs to be done.

'This year, a relishable Ashes series is being squeezed into six weeks of midsummer to leave prime-time August free for the Hundred, a multi-million-pound mess created by the 12-year-olds in the marketing department at Lord’s, which a newly installed counter-revolutionary regime is now trying to clear up.' Matthew Engel reviews the new Wisden.

Ian Visits takes us to Granny Dripping Steps: "This is a bit of a passage, and mostly a footbridge over several railways in West Hampstead that has a remarkable name that’s just too amazing to ignore. It can be found at the far end of West Hampstead tube station, offering a route across six railway tracks used by Chiltern Railways and London Underground."

Vince Cable on 'deniable' conversations with Labour about coalition

Embed from Getty Images

Writing for Comment Central, Vince Cable looks at the Liberal Democrat performance in last week's local elections:

The Lib Dem results were more impressive than the numbers suggest. They built on exceptionally good results in 2019 when the seats were last contested and a record 700 seats were gained. 

The aggregate vote share of 20 per cent was even higher than the 19 per cent in 2019. There were also strong results in some areas where Labour was the opposition, notably in Hull where the incumbent Lib Dem council held off a strong Labour challenge and even made gains.

As to what this means to our approach at the next general election:

Lib Dems are currently targeting a dozen or so new seats but may be tempted to raise their sights.

They will rely on Labour (and Green) tactical voting in these target seats which will be maximised if a pact is agreed with the Greens, as in 2019, to stand aside candidates and if there is tacit cooperation with Labour as in 1997. 

The pollster Michael Thresher concludes from the local results that the Lib Dems could win 39 seats but even 25-30 would be considered a good outcome by the party (with perhaps another one or two Greens).

He suggests that Lib Dem gains on this scale would be crucial to the formation of a stable Labour-led government, but suggests we are unlikely to see a coalition government on the scale of 2010-15:

Ed Davey is right not to rule out a coalition with Labour but it is highly unlikely that the Lib Dems would go into such an arrangement this side of electoral reform being delivered.

A looser 'confidence and supply' arrangement is much more plausible, depending on how the numbers look after an election and subject to agreement on reform of the voting system.

You can be sure that serious, but deniable, conversations will be taking place over the next year.

So we won't be hiring Westminster Abbey to hold them.

Amy Boucher on The Devil in Shropshire

Folklorist Amy Boucher shares tales of ghosts, witches, mermaids and devils from her home county of Shropshire in The Devil in Shropshire, the latest episode of the Tracing Owls podcast,

Through her blog Nearly Knowledgeable, Amy explores Shropshire folktales that highlight the county's unique cultural and historic identity and also an immense amount of high strangeness. 

Among the many tales discussed are stories of ghost barges carrying victims of the Black plague, encounters with the Devil (known in Shropshie as Owd Scratch) and the life of the last known Shropshire sin eater. Amy ends the episode off with tales of a horse-riding spectral ape man.

Cuts to arts education cast a shadow over the future of our culture

Sir John Eliot Gardiner, on the BBC, is not afraid to tell it how it is. Bravo! @thoroughlygood @nfmusic @mrjamesob @nicholascollon pic.twitter.com/PxrFi3Smud

— David Coronel (@King_Ouf_I) May 6, 2023

The wonderful music at the Coronation gave rise to pride at this country's achievements in the field, but also to foreboding.

As Britain becomes more unequal, there are fears that musicmaking - both pop and classical - may follow the theatre, cricket and rugby union in becoming largely a preserve of the products of wealthy families.

And cuts to BBC arts funding mean there will be fewer career prospects even for them.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner, as you can see above, took the opportunity of the BBC's Coronation coverage to express his concerns.

A debate held by the BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row at a Leicester comprehensive four years ago provided good coverage of the issues here.

The fear is expressed that knowledge of the arts will become what knowledge of Classics is now: a mark of an exclusive education.

But musical education goes beyond formal teaching in schools or organised through them. And I have noticed that many of the pop and rock musicians of the Sixties shared two more forms of it.

They had fathers who played in jazz bands, so they grew up familiar with black American music. And they sang in church choirs as boys.

Both these forms of education have dwindled to nothing or close to it in the years since.

The derelict heritage railway and canal at Elsecar

Trekking Exploration takes us to the mile-long Elsecar Heritage Railway, which was mothballed three years ago and handed back to Barnsley Council by the charitable trust that had run it since 2006.

In December 2022 the Yorkshire Post quoted a statement on the line's future from Elsecar Heritage Centre:

"Over recent months, thanks to the extensive and positive response to consultation earlier in the year, an inspiring new vision has been coming together for the future of a heritage railway in Elsecar.

"That vision to create a sustainable future for a heritage railway in the village will need significant investment, which is currently being explored. We look forward to revealing more details of that vision over the coming weeks and months.

"Thanks to the Elsecar Heritage Action Zone's work, the railway station area and yard site are now a Scheduled Ancient Monument. This means that we need a very close understanding of archaeology and ground conditions to plan for future structures that may be required for that new vision for the heritage railway.

“Over the coming weeks, sections of the modern track in the station area, laid since the 1990s, will be lifted so archaeological digs and ground investigations can take place. This will also allow small temporary structures and cabins, which belong to third parties, to be removed from the site. We are also doing seasonal maintenance work to the rest of the track route.

"The Railway Trust handed its lease to the land back to the council in 2020. This did not include any rolling stock.

"A great deal of work has been carried out to establish how a successful and sustainable heritage railway offer can be re-established at Elsecar, reflecting the pride in our railway heritage and what it can mean for our region’s visitor economy. We look forward to sharing more about that work and the resulting vision soon."

The canal beside the railway is the Elsecar Branch of the Dearne and Dove Canal - there's much more about the industrial archaeology of this site on the Elsecar Heritage Centre site.

GUEST POST Defections, ratting and re-ratting: a final scorecard

How far do defections by councillors predict election results? Augustus Carp brings us up to date with his findings.

Churchill spoke of his various changes of political allegiance as ratting and then re-ratting. The same process affects the occupants of council chambers just as much as it does the denizens of Westminster tea rooms. 

Back in February I wrote a post for this blog on the numbers of defections by local councillors from the party which had endorsed them when they were elected.

My opinion is that these moves are just as important as council by elections as barometers of local political opinion. Indeed, maybe more so, as they might indicate irreconcilable tensions within political groups - and fractious political parties do not make good foot soldiers at future elections.

The figures for defections as at the end of April are telling. In total, in the year since the May 2022 elections, there have been 240 defections by sitting councillors who have not resigned their seats. Conservatives made up 142 of that number, with 93 by Labour Party councillors. The Liberal Democrats have seen eight, and the Nationalist parties four, but the Greens have acquired seven over the year.

The Conservative figure accelerated somewhat - only 100 had gone in February (reader Matt Pennell reckoned that the figure might rise to 120) but by polling day in May the figure of 142 meant that on average about 2.73 councillors were defecting every week. For Labour, the figure is 1.79 defections per week, but those calculations are, as the late Bob Mackenzie would say on election nights, “just a bit of fun” and not to be taken too seriously.

Nevertheless, comparing defections with the 4 May results is illuminating. Sure enough, the 'defection hotspots' identified over the year do seem to tally with poor electoral performance. It would be impossible to determine any distinct correlation, particularly as the results were so bad for the Conservatives this year, but the following might be regarded as predictive:

• Amber Valley (6 Tory defections) - Tories lose 21 seats; Labour gains control of the council.
  
  
• Erewash (3 Tory Defections) - Tories lose 11; Labour gain control of the council.
   
• Derbyshire Dales (4 Tory defections) - Tories lose 6 seats, lose council to NOC, and are the second largest party after the Lib Dems.
  
  
• Bournemouth (6 Tory Defections) - Tories lost 24 seats and are now the 3rd largest party after the Lib Dems and Independents.
  
  
• Tamworth (6 Tory defections) - Tories lose another 6 seats, Council now NOC.
  
  
• Hyndburn (5 Labour defections) - Labour lose 2 seats, now joint largest party with the Conservatives.

The real hot spot for Labour defections is Stroud (nine losses) but there were no elections there this year. Matt Pennell also tipped us off about Babergh, where a complicated Conservative defection happened before our records started. There the Greens have ended up as the largest group, with the Tories now in third place, having lost over half their seats.

I will start keeping notes on the back of an even bigger envelope and bring you any notable observations in a few months’ time. I suspect that the rate of defections will accelerate over the next few months, as Tories become more disillusioned and try to rebrand themselves.

In addition, other councillors, who stood as paper candidates having been solemnly promised that they would never be elected, suddenly develop delusions of grandeur and seek to throw off the shackles of party structure and group discipline.

So, what do we think? A total of 300 defections from all parties by May 2024?

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Lib Dems score best opinion poll rating the 2019 general election

You won't catch Liberal England making too much of a single opinion poll, but it's hard not to be encouraged by Redfield & Wilton Strategies’ latest.

Labour 41% (-4)

Conservative 29% (+1)

Liberal Democrat 16% (+4)

Reform UK 5% (-2)

Green 4% (–)

Scottish National Party 3% (+1)

Other 1% (–)

The figure in brackets is the percentage change since the company's 30 April poll.

This is the Lib Dems highest rating in an opinion poll since the 2019 general election. I can't see exactly when the groundwork for this poll was carried out, but it must have been last week.

As this was a week of great Lib Dem activity and favourable publicity for the party, it would have been a disappointment if we hadn't gone up in the polls,

One swallow doesn't make a silk purse, but this poll may point to the end of an odd period when the Conservative vote has collapsed yet the Lib Dem vote has barely risen.

Lib Dems polled almost half the vote across Rutland

No wonder Lord Bonkers is chipper this weekend. It turns out that the Lib Dems polled almost half the vote across Rutland.

Red Moon has tweeted the figures:

Lib Dems            7085 (46.9%)

Conservatives     4857 (32.15%)

Independents      2392 (15.8%)

Labour                  493 (3.3%)

Green                   280 (1.85%) 

You can see how this turned out in terms of seats in another tweet, this time from Britain Elects.

Rutland Result #LE2023:

LDM: 11 (+8)
IND: 7 (-1)
CON: 6 (-9)
LAB: 2 (+2)
GRN: 1 (=)

No Overall Control - No Change. pic.twitter.com/W3jFT1Avhb

— Election Maps UK (@ElectionMapsUK) May 6, 2023

Trivial Fact of the Day features Church Stretton and Boris Johnson

It's well known to readers of this blog that Boris Johnson was married in the Shropshire village of West Felton.

Andrew Gimson told the story in the first of his many biographies of the former prime minister:

He also arrived for his own wedding without the right clothes. As Allegra said, after relating the story of the ring: "What's more, he was wearing John Biffen's trousers at the time ... Some weeks later I had to send the mo rtgagees our wedding certificate, but it was nowhere to be found. Naturally Bozzer showed not the slightest interest. Months later the Biffens were much amused to find the missing document in the pocket of the famous trousers."

When Lady Biffen was reminded that Boris got married in her husband's trousers, she replied with indignation: "And in his cufflinks, and the reason he didn't get married in my husband's shoes is that his feet were larger - he would have limped to the altar, which would have been worse than the holes in the soles of his own shoes."

Allegra is his first wife Allegra Mostyn-Owen, of whom it was once said: "She speaks to you as though she were launching a ship."

It turns out that Johnson's nuptial connection with Shropshire, and his inefficiency, did not end there.

I'm currently reading Simon Kuper's Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Here he quotes an article in the Oxford Student magazine Isis from late 1987 - its author clearly hadn't been asked to the wedding:

It has been one of the trademarks of Boris Johnson to turn shambling eccentricity into a smart career move. It helped him win the Captaincy of Eton, the Presidency of the Union, and the hand of socialite Allegra Mostyn-Owen. Their wedding this summer in Shropshire seemed to mark a new stage in his life. For once Boris was in control.

But as guests enjoyed the lavish reception, Boris and Allegra set off for their honeymoon to spend their wedding night NOT in romantic Egypt but in nearby Church Strutton [sic; actually Church Stretton]. True to form, Boris had completely forgotten that one needs visas to visit Egypt.

But where did they stay? The photo above shows the Longmynd Hotel, which must be a strong candidate, though an upmarket guest house such as Jinlye must is another possibility.

It's the photo of the hotel I've gone for above, but wherever they stayed, we can be sure that Boris took Allegra up The Lawley.

Handel: Zadok the Priest

It was said of the late Duke of Edinburgh that he didn't favour High Church or Low Church so much as Short Church.

Though Charles III's wish to make the Coronation include more of the Britain of today is to be praised, the service didn't half go on. I would have been happy with I Was Glad, Zadok the Priest and then sloping off to the pub.

And, pace C.P, Snow, not all ancient British traditions date from the second half of the 19th century. The anointing screen you see being deployed here is an innovation by Charles. In 1953 his mother made do with a canopy to give her some privacy from the television cameras.

But why should the most sacred moment of the event be shielded from the public gaze at all? Does this decision arise from a fear that it all looks a bit silly?

Leaving aside Penny Mordaunt's turn as a warrior princess, let's consider the strange assemblage of treasures that were brought out, which varied from the priceless to the odd.

Yes, this sort of pageantry can come over as a calling down of the blessing of the Almighty upon the British class system, but the left's instinct for mockery - which I certainly share - does not always help the reformist cause.

I was reminded of the words of the American philosopher Richard Rorty in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity:

The best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. 

Consider what happens when a child's precious possessions - the little things around which he weaves fantasies that make him a little different from all other children - are described as "trash," and thrown away. 

Or consider what happens when these possessions are made to look ridiculous alongside the possessions of another, richer, child.

So if we want to change this strange country of ours, whose current borders date back to 1922, we need first to understand it.

Zadok the Priest is this weeks' Sunday music video - it's one of the pieces of music I used to play my mother in her last days and yesterday's outing seems to have own Handel many new admirers.

And on another musical note, one of Camilla's pages was a great nephew of hers who is also Steve Winwood's grandson. I hope this marks a decision to honour the Spencer Davis Group in all state occasions from now on.

The Joy of Six 1130

David Frum finds Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union: "In March, the BBC reported that Britain’s departure from the European Union has added 10 to 20 minutes of additional paperwork to every truckload of tomatoes shipped from Spain - longer if the truckload mixes different produce varieties. Ten to 20 minutes may not sound like much. But multiply that burden by thousands of trucks, squeeze the trucks through the bottleneck of the single underwater tunnel that connects Britain to freight traffic from Europe, and costs and delays accumulate. The result: winter tomato gluts on the continent, winter tomato shortages in the United Kingdom."

"Holding politicians to account is crucial to democracy, but it’s also crucial to the provision of public services. When constituents are able to ask questions of politicians, and those politicians have to take the time to justify what they do in office, it slows the whole process down and can help avert or at least mitigate disasters of policy. It can save politicians from giving in to their worst instincts." Leigh Jones mourns the death of democracy on Teesside.

"The tragic death of Ruth Perry has brought extraordinary, unprecedented unity to the education community. It launched literally dozens of blog posts and articles in the press; it has featured in news and current affairs programmes; it has been the subject of radio phone-ins, a BBC documentary, and countless conversations in staff rooms all over the land." John Cosgrove says we are living English education’s 'Me Too' moment, with the focus firmly on Ofsted and its practices.

Who gets to play cricket in England is a question of class - Daniel Norcross reviews Duncan Stones's Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket.

Lynne About Loughborough on the Leicestershire town's connections with the Festival of Britain.

A London Inheritance follows his father to Ely in 1952.

Lib Dem elected as a councillor in Salford and the Cotswolds

Chris Twells, already a Liberal Democrat member of Salford City Council, was yesterday elected to Cotswold District Council.

The Guardian says he was a paper candidate there, but the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard reports that he told the Local Democracy Reporting Service before last night’s count that he felt he was in with a good chance of winning the Cotswold seat.

And having won it, he has chosen to serve on the Lib Dem run Cotswold DC rather than in Salford. He told the Standard:

"I am delighted to have been elected to represent Tetbury with Upton ward and I would like to thank everybody who voted for me. 

"I will be taking some time off over the weekend and speaking to the Chief Executive of Salford City Council after the Bank Holiday weekend to establish what action I need to take to resign as a councillor, to allow for a by-election to be held in my ward."

I'm sure something similar once happened to Lord Bonkers or a friend of his, but I can't find the relevant diary entry.

But this incident does illustrate why I declined to be a paper candidate this year: I was afraid I might get elected.

Harborough District Council goes to No Overall Control

Gold would have been a Liberal Democrat majority on Harborough District Council. We didn't manage that, but did win silver by depriving the Conservatives of a majority.

The balance of the new council looks like this:

Conservatives 15 (-7)

Lib Dems 13 (+2)

Labour 3 (+2)

Greens 3 (+3)

Two gains elsewhere in the town were balanced by our losing two seats to the Greens in Market Harborough Welland ward - they also captured the one Tory seat there. This was the result of excellent targeting and, in the longer term, of social and boundary changes. 

Meanwhile, Labour's residual strength in Lutterworth resulted in two gains in the town for them.

But we did win new seats in Lubenham and Fleckney, and came close to gaining two more in Misterton and Kibworth.

I'm not party to the negotiations, but I imagine the non-Conservative parties will now look to run the council between them.

The Joy of Six 1129

"The UK’s key institutions - including parliament and the courts - have yet to recover from the attacks that they suffered during the Brexit period." Forget misleading the Commons over Partygate, says Meg Russell, Boris Johnson's greatest dishonesty was misleading the nation over Brexit.

People who were privately educated are twice as likely to be consistent Conservative voters as people from the same social and economic background who attended state schools. That's the conclusion of research reported by the British Sociological Association.

Joanne W. Golann spent a year and a half at a 'no-excuses' US charter school: "Because teachers constantly narrated expectations for behaviour and scanned classrooms for compliance, students felt as if they were always under surveillance. Even the best-behaved students felt pressure."

"Children should not be reduced to mere 'future investments' or 'adults of tomorrow'. They are also people with present-day rights to citizenship, participation and autonomy in their living environments." Jonne Silonsaari et al. look at the ways social movements are changing European urban areas to make them more child friendly.

Eleanor Parker argues that the Norman Conquest brought new kinds of poetry from France, with new stories, language, and themes - and one of those themes was spring. "There’s something nice about the thought that spring has a history, and that its name, its associations, its meaning have changed over time. It’s not timeless, not always the same. Every year, spring arrives with a feeling of novelty, as if it had never happened before; ‘fresh’ is one of the words Chaucer most associates with it, and that feels right."

Lichfield Lore on the possibility that part of Lady Godiva's summer palace is in someone's living room in Staffordshire.

John Rogers goes in search of the lost rivers of Leyton

John's blurb on YouTube says:

This walk follows a scent of clue in a correspondence about some mysterious underground rivers running through Leyton that link to local folklore. 

So we head to Leyton High Road then down towards the Leyton Orient Ground at Brisbane Road where one of the rivers may be buried. We then explore the other watercourses which link to the Roman occupation of Leyton. 

Our East London walking tour then goes along Church Road Leyton to Etloe House where another hidden river may run before crossing Leyton High Road and going along Markhouse Road to St James's Street Walthamstow. 

Turning into Coppermill Lane we pick up the course of the Dagenham Brook to Blackhorse Road Station and the new development of apartments around Vanguard Way. Finally we walk along Blackhorse Lane looking for signs of the Higham Hill Brook at Blackhorse Yard.

The walk begins at Leyton cricket ground, which was the headquarters and principal ground of Essex County Cricket Club from 1886 until 1933. It was used again by Esses between 1957 and 1977.

Despite what John says, it has never hosted a test match, but in 1932 Yorkshire's opening pair Percy Holmes and Herbert Sutcliffe put on 555, which was for many years the record first wicket partnership in first class cricket.

John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

Boris Johnson up before the headmaster

Embed from Getty Images

Martin Hammond, who was Boris Johnson's housemaster at Eton, famously summed up his 17-year-old pupil:

"Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. [He] sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the school for the next half).

"I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else."

On Sunday the historian and public school headmaster Anthony Seldon summoned him to his study.

Seldon was interviewed on Johnson by Tim Adams, who wrote:

Seldon is a man who has devoted his life to understanding and nurturing the kind of emotional intelligence and civic responsibility from which society can be woven. Johnson represents the wilful rupture of those beliefs. 

Talking about him, Seldon acknowledges the former prime minister’s charisma "lights up the room", but you sense too his almost personal feeling of betrayal at the squandering of those gifts, that headmasterly reaction that Johnson had let down his school, his family, his nation, but most of all, himself.

And here is Seldon's view in his own words:

“"The great prime ministers are all there at moments of great historical importance,but they have to respond to them well. Chamberlain didn’t; Churchill in 1940, did. Asquith didn’t; Lloyd George did in 1916.

"Johnson had Brexit, he had the pandemic, he had the invasion of Ukraine and incipient third world war. He could have been the prime minister he craved to be, but he wasn’t, because of his utter inability to learn."

Moving on from school, I'm currently reading Simon Kuper's Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Over the UK. 

My conclusion so far is that Oxford, with its emphasis on the ability to talk plausibly on a subject you know little about, fits its alumni to be contrarian journalists but not serious politicians.

Ding Loren is the new world chess champion

We have a new world chess champion. Yesterday, Ding Loren from China beat Ian Nepomniachtchi from Russia in a rapid tie break after a tied 14-game match (they recorded three wins each and eight draws).

I have long been an admirer of Ding's: he is a brave player and it did not surprise me that when things got really tense he prevailed over the more fluent Nepo. (The match was Ding vs Nepo to all chess fans and, incidentally, Ian is pronounced Yan.)

The two contested the match because the reigning world champion, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, declined to defend his title. Carlsen, who had been champion for a decade, came to resent the time that preparing for a championship match every two years used up and was enthused by his wider chess business interests.

He remains the strongest player in the world and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future, but Ding is the world champion.

Richard Greene was not the grandson of William Friese-Greene

Enjoying a leisurely breakfast before some Bank Holiday delivering, I put Talking Pictures TV on. They are showing The Card, a adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan.

One of the stars is Richard Greene, in his matinée idol period and before he took to wearing Lincoln green and riding through the glen.

Looking Richard Greene up on IMDb, I find that he was the grandson of the film pioneer William Friese-Greene.

Why didn't I know that? I was even interested in the Friese-Greene family early in this blog's history.

I didn't know it because it isn't true. 

The Wikipedia entruy for Richard Greene says it's not true and sends you to an article by Paul Pert that is pretty conclusive:

It is not known when or how a relationship to Friese-Greene was first mooted, but it could have potentially arisen or been misinterpreted from a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Players Biography, in which it states ‘Greene's great-grandfather was one of the first to introduce motion pictures to British audiences. He hired a hall, erected a screen and invited all comers’.

The MGM entry obviously related to showing motion pictures and not contributing to their invention, and would tie-in with a theatrical/showman family background, but could be where the relationship story had its roots, with others looking round for someone with a 'Greene' surname connected with early cinema.

So the judges have declined to make a Trivial Fact of the Day Award.

But the video above does give me the chance to mention the bride who asked for "The song from Robin Hood" to be played at her wedding, meaning Bryan Adams's (Everything I Do) I Do it for You.

The organist, however, being from an older generation...