"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
A hybrid of The Titfield Thunderbolt and The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery made for children in 1966, you say? With Ronnie Barker and Jon Pertwee in the cast? Count me in.
Pertwee is not the film's only link with Doctor Who. Among the child actors is Roberta Tovey, who appeared in the two films in which Peter Cushing played the Doctor.
Sadly, I did not see Runaway Railway when Talking Pictures TV screened it as part of their Saturday morning pictures the other day, but I was alerted to it by a Twitter thread from Tim Dunn.
There is a short article on the film with stills on the Obscure Train Moves blog and you can enjoy the first few minutes above.
Gwyn Topham, the Guardian's transport correspondent, writes:
Britain’s bus services outside London were so damaged by privatisation that people were unable to access basic needs such as work, education and healthcare, according to a scathing report by the former UN special rapporteur on human rights.
Many people in Britain had lost jobs and benefits, been forced to give up on education, or been cut off from communities and healthcare as bus services grew more expensive, unreliable, and dysfunctional after the 1985 reform, the inquiry found.
It provides more evidence that the Thatcherite model of privatisation, which imagined powerful corporations being reined in by publicly appointed regulators, has been a failure.
This chart, which is included with the Center's press release for the report, by drawing on the findings included in the government's new bus strategy for England, shows how it has failed in the bus industry.
There was a meme on Twitter a while back about the five albums in your collection that meant most to you when you were 17.
I doubt that I owned five albums at that age - blame poverty and the lack of anyone to guide me. And I am certain that when I was 14 I relied on Radio One and (under the bedclothes) Radio Luxembourg for my music.
Thanks to them, I have fond memories of this single from 1974. It may be an obvious Beach Boys pastiche, but it reached 13 in the UK singles chart. And in the US, where you think they'd have a good nose for such things, it got as high as number 4.
The song was written by John Cater and his wife Jill Shakespeare. Carter had already written Funny How Love Can Be for The Ivy League and Let's Go to San Francisco for The Flowerpot Men.
He had also sung the lead on Winchester Cathedral (in reality recorded by a group of session musicians but credited to The New Vaudeville Band) and backing vocals on The Who's I Can't Explain.
The First Class did not exist any more than The New Vaudeville Band or a number of other groups credited with Carter's hits had, so when Beach Baby made the charts a group had to be assembled to appear on Top of the Pops, (The Bonzos, incidentally, turned down the chance to tour as The New Vaudeville Band.)
I can see what attracted me to Beach Baby when I was 14: the production is stylish and it uses plenty of fun elements from The Beach Boys' back catalogue. But it's interesting that in 1974 we were already looking back to a golden age of pop and youth culture:
Just like before We could walk by the shore In the moonlight
Our legal correspondent writes: If the theme that enters just after the three-minute mark sounds familiar then consider yourself cultured, It was lifted from Sibelius's Fifth Symphony and the estate of the Finnish composer accepted a settlement out of court. Perhaps fortunately for the song's writers, most radio plays had faded out by then.
John Rogers goes in search of the course of the lost River Peck, which gives its name to Peckham in South London:
The Peck is said to rise near One Tree Hill in Honor Oak and then flows above ground across Peckham Rye before re-entering its culvert as it flows through the streets of Peckham just to the west of Copeland Road. Our walk then goes past Peckham Bus Garage to Kirkwood Road and picks up the course of the river again at Asylum Road near Queens Road Station.
The river most likely flows beneath Brimmington Park but we continue along Asylum Road to look at the Licensed Victuallers’ Benevolent Institution Asylum. The walk takes us along the Old Kent Road to the point where the Peck crosses the road and heads along Ilderton Road to make its confluence with the Earl's Sluice near Bermondsey South Station.
John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.
"The Lost History not only gives an account of the different meanings that have been ascribed to liberalism and evoked in its uses, but recovers some of those meanings that have been eclipsed, distorted and eroded." Alex Tebble reviews Helena Rosenblatt's book The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century.
David Edgerton argues that Labour's lost red wall is a myth. The idea that working-class people voted Labour until Brexit came along, he maintains, is a fiction only the Conservatives benefit from.
"Rorty was deeply worried by the widespread but in his view fundamentally-mistaken equation between the questioning of traditional philosophy’s ‘quest for certainty’ on the one hand and the assumption of a truly ‘post-truth’ politics on the other. " Rupert Read on Richard Rorty and how postmodernism helped elect Donald Trump.
Katherine Willis says government policies will promote further loss and fragmentation of the UK's natural environment/
Nick Bartlett has been watching a 1945 Ealing Studios horror anthology: "Dead Of Night is that rare thing – a classic horror film where the hype is completely justified. It’s an unusual film for Ealing, even for the period it was made, but it’s a masterpiece, and aside from a handful of old-fashioned moments, it still stands up today as one of Britain’s very best horror films."
"I feel inspired by this place, it really deserves the restoration and recognition it is now about to receive." Janine Moore takes a walk beside the Bennerley Viaduct in the Erewash Valley.
Lord Bonkers may be off on his travels, but we can still see what he was up to 30 years ago.
Liberator 198 was dated July 1991 and in it we found that Lord Bonkers had got caught up with the New Age Travellers who were so alarming respectable opinion at the time.
I suppose one can be an Anglican and a member of the Church of Rutland at the same time. Lord Bonkers has always been in favour of having it both ways.
Friday
On the morning of the summer solstice, what should the practising Anglican do but journey to Stonehenge to dance around the hele stone? Unfortunately, when my companions and I near the monument it becomes apparent that the greater part of the Wiltshire Constabulary is arrayed before it with the intent of frustrating our purpose.
As the inclement weather has obliged me to don snorkel, mask and flippers, my attempt to evade capture by fleeing across the Plain prove futile and I soon find myself "banged up" (as I believe the expression is) in a cell at Salisbury police station with the very minimum of domestic staff - I fear that all one reads of poor conditions in Her Majesty's gaols is only too true.
Even so, we manage to improvise a cricket net and keep up our spirits with readings from Morley's Life of Gladstone. At first I am regarded as something of an eccentric, but when I explain that I am a Liberal the authorities appear to understand.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Jeremy Thorpe had an ambivalent relationship with rock and roll, as we saw last week. But he did have a close family relationship with it.
Because when Marion Harewood became his second wife she already had three sons with George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood. Lascelles was a grandson of George V and had been sixth in line to the throne when he was born.
The eldest son, David, duly became the 8th Earl, but it is the two younger brothers who interest us here. Because James and Jeremy were both members of the Global Village Trucking Company and are still on the scene today.
You can hear James Lascelles playing keyboards on the track above and read about his music career on his website.
Below you will find a BBC documentary about the band, which draws heavily upon an earlier one made in 1973.
Jeremy Lascelles features prominently - at the time it was made he was chief executive of Chrysalis Music. In fact, he may well be The Man.
Like Traffic before them, Global Village Trucking Company got it together in the country. But life in a commune had its downsides, as Dinah Jefferies once made clear in a Guardian article.
"It was incredibly cringe. We all knew that," says one senior Liberal Democrat. "We all thought, this is awful, but it’s also brilliant. And it worked, right?"
Ailbhe Rea - her Twitter handle is @PronouncedAlva - reveals that the blue wall Ed Davey smashed down with his hammer five days was ordered from Grantham five days before the Chesham and Amersham by-election.
And it did work:
Overnight, the "blue wall" was cemented in the political lexicon to name and amplify an idea that had barely been acknowledged before: that the Conservatives are vulnerable in a lot of their traditional, southern seats, and vulnerable in particular to the Liberal Democrats, who are second to them in 79 of those constituencies.
Which is encouraging, given that I blogged this back in May:
The idea of a blue wall that may crumble will appeal to the media and a Lib Dem victory in Chesham and Amersham will give that idea more credibility.
And that will gives the Tory government a headache as it is faced with defending its gains in the red wall while keeping its traditional voters in the blue wall happy.
Particularly as there is nothing in Boris Johnson's journalistic or political career to suggest that be believes in levelling up anything.
Rea, who sets a new record for the number of "senior Liberal Democrats" consulted for one article, suggests the danger the Conservatives face is actually that they are too interested in pleasing their new red wall voters:
The Conservatives are, famously, pursuing a "Red Wall" strategy, having courted and now hoping to retain voters in Labour’s traditional heartlands. This has been in the expectation that their own traditional voters will stick with them – and in 2019, they did. But the current Conservative government has little to offer these traditional Tories and much to repel them – such as planning reforms, which were a major factor in the Chesham and Amersham contest.
"They’re leaving their flank open and we’re coming in and having a big good go," Davey told me during the campaign in Amersham. That’s before you look at the underlying demographic shifts in these seats, the gradual post-Brexit realignment of British politics, and the "Boris Johnson toxicity factor", which senior Liberal Democrats identify as one of the biggest current Conservative vulnerabilities among its traditional voters – a factor they think was masked at the last election because of the similar unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn.
"There’s no doubt that dislike of Johnson in the seat wasn’t just an overnight thing," says a senior Liberal Democrat. "We were also getting the sense that they didn’t like him before. But they voted Tory before because of Corbyn."
"He was toxic. Maybe former Labour people like him. Maybe former Brexit people do. But a lot of traditional Tories don’t like him," they add. Those traditional voters are less keen on Johnson’s entire approach to politics: the conduct of Brexit, the proroguing of parliament, or what they see as a wider culture of impunity in his top team, exemplified by the Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock scandals. It is a private worry of plenty of Conservative MPs too.
Maybe they will end up alienating both red and blue walls? That would be fun to watch.
Bob Seeger entered the lower reaches of the UK singles chart a dozen times, but this - which I suspect is his best-known song - wasn't a hit over here.
comes from its softened piano and half-powered musical flow. It isn't a ballad, but Seger manages to master the tempo to perfection in order to set the song's mood so that it's just right.
Seger wrote the song after traveling to Hollywood and meeting people who enjoyed living the high life -- motivated by power, greed, and the opportunity to take risks whenever possible.
This type of West Coast attitude had been somewhat foreign to Seger, coming from such a blue-collar city as Detroit, so he used this experience to write 'Still the Same'.
If your team wins the FA Cup when you are 10 then the rest of life is bound to prove a bit of an anticlimax.
Those years are being covered by Chelsea Fancast, which is putting up a separate podcast on the club's fortunes since its 1970 victory over Leeds.
The collection is not yet complete, but there are already plenty of good things to enjoy.
I had forgotten just how well we did in the mid-1980s, finishing sixth in the old first division in 1984/5 and 1985/6, while the 1982/3 podcast makes clear how close we came to being relegated to the third tier.
And a theme that runs through many of these shows is that Ken Bates, despite his courting of controversy and rebarbative views, served the club well as chairman.
Nigel Scott on the Liberal Democrats, queer theory and transsexual rights: "The Liberal Democrats’ have adopted a queer theory centred approach to trans rights. This means that the party implicitly opposes women’s sex-based rights, because women no longer exist as a fixed sex class. Accordingly, any man can adopt the status of a woman on demand and because 'transwomen are women' in the words of the party's mantra, there is no longer a rationale for single sex spaces."
"Having been for centuries essentially a comprehensive for the aristocracy, Eton changed into an oligarchical grammar school. With the incomes of the super-rich racing ahead, especially after Thatcher;s tax cuts for the wealthy and ;big bang; deregulation of the City, the sky was the limit for both fees and resources." To understand Boris Johnson you must understand Eton, arguesAndrew Adonis.
Heather Burns says the new Online Safety Bill gives government enormous to redefine, constrain and censor the boundaries of free and legal speech.
"Today there is no former rust-bucket city, no sometime edgeland, no crumbling dock, no monument to asbestos that has escaped rebranding as a 'creative quarter'." Jonathan Meades pours cold water on fantasies of regeneration.
Jane Nightshade celebrates Nicholas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now.
"In the collection’s final poem ‘Who’ Causley writes of seeing the ghostly figure of himself as a child haunting the places around Launceston he has known his whole life. He sees his younger self wandering beside the River Kensey in old fashioned clothes and has a vision of the fields where he once played, now covered by houses." The Cornish Bird surveys the life and work of the Cornish poet Charles Causley.
Harborough FM, which these days provides the best local news service, reports that the government is again looking at the idea of electrifying the railway from Market Harborough to Sheffield.
A Department for Transport spokesperson has told the radio station:
"Enabling and design work is currently taking place to progress electrification of the Midland Mainline beyond Kettering to Market Harborough, as well as to enable the introduction of the new bi-mode trains to be introduced on the route in 2023.
"Further electrification of the MML to Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield is currently being examined by the Department and Network Rail, and is at an early stage of development.
"This work will be subject to the development of a satisfactory business case."
And earlier this week Construction Enquirer had news of a "market engagement day" for potential contractors for this work.
The Conservatives said during the 2017 general election campaign that the wires would reach Sheffield, even though Chris Grayling had also taken the decision to scrap the project.
Visiting Derbyshire during the 2019 campaign, Boris Johnson suggested that it might go ahead after all.
Our prime minister has a well-established habit of saying whatever will get him through the next 10 seconds regardless of its truth, but maybe he was not lying here.
Here, photographed backstage at the Royal Festival Hall in 1967, are Jimi Hendrix and the then leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe. Other photos taken on the same occasion show Hendrix tutoring Thorpe in playing the guitar.
So was Thorpe keener on rock and roll than Cyril Smith was?
Judge for yourself. Here he is talking about the film Rock Around the Clock on BBC Radio in 1956:
"I am a lover of music; therefore I am prejudiced and don't like jazz. Jazz to me comes from the jungle, and this is jungle music taken to its logical conclusion. This is musical Mau-Mau."
The racism here makes you catch your breath, particularly as Thorpe was a principled opponent of Apartheid in South Africa.
I remember hearing this extract played on the radio more than once when I was a boy - it may be that John Ebdon used it in his creative archive programmes.
In his book The Restless Generation - How rock music changed the face of 1950s Britain, Pete Frame suggests that it comes from an edition of Does the Team Think (DTTT), but that sounds unlikely. DTTT was a sort of parody of Any Questions? with comedians on the panel, so it's more likely that it comes from Any Questions? itself.
I heard Elvis Presley's (Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame playing in the Co-op today. But I was 17 when the King died and to me then he was just some fat, old bloke, so I have chosen a song a Smiths that was inspired by it.
Smiths on Guitar quotes Johnny Marr on the evolution of that song:
"Rusholme Ruffians came about because my parents used to play 'Marie's The Name' by Elvis Presley and I liked the chord change.
"That was blatantly done. Morrissey said to me, 'Let's do a song about the fair,' and for some reason my association with the fair was to pull out that Elvis riff. We tried, but we couldn't get away from it."
Rusholme Ruffians is The Smiths at their sticky-fingered peak. From the alliteratively-alluring Ealing comedyesque title down, it’s a masterclass in Morrissey’s stolen kitchen sink observations backed by a Johnny Marr riff flat-out filched from Scotty Moore via Elvis Presley’s (Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame 1961 single.
We have our Trivial Fact of the Day, though the judges admit that you have to have been around in the 1970s to appreciate it fully.
Patrick Cargill (1918-1996) was an actor best known for starring in the situation comedy Father, Dear Father between 1968 and 1973. (Typically for the era, there were also a film in 1973 and series made in Australis in 1978 and 1980.)
He also had a film career, appearing in Carry on Jack, Help! and The Magic Christian.
Robin Jackman (1945-2020), a seam bowler with a brisk, short-stepped run up, was a Surrey stalwart who played for England late in his career.
He played his county between 1966 and 1982, and for England in 1981 and 1982, though he had appeared in a one-day international as early as 1974.
Because he had played and coached in Apartheid South Africa, the Guyanese government refused him an entry visa during England's 1981-2 tour of the West Indies, with the result that the Georgetown test was cancelled.
The two are paired here because I have discovered that Patrick Cargill was Robin Jackman's uncle.
At last! A big-hitter has backed my campaign for the Palace of Westminster to be allowed to fall to ruin and Parliament to be sent to meet in Arkwright's Mill in Cromford.
Imagine how much more attractive it would be as a ruin alive with feral cats, buddleias and fragments of Gothic tracery.
Until now, I will admit, this campaign has gathered steam only slowly. But tonight all that changed.
Home from caring for my mother, I logged into Instagram and found this on the Cromford Mills account.
OK, it says it's Sir Richard Arkwright, but it's clearly our current prime minister. He's in Derbyshire and pacing out the dimensions of a new debating chamber within the mill.
"When the Anglican Church declared its schism from the Pope in Rome, it unilaterally transferred from Rome to Canterbury the power to appoint bishops, but seems to have forgotten to provide the Archbishop of Canterbury with the power to fire them." Gavin Ashenden examines the crisis that has enveloped the diocese of Winchester.
Charlotte Armitage and and Kenneth Murray talk about growing up in the care system in Scotland: "My records are full of conversations like this. Disputes about whether claims I was making were fact or questioning my motives in a way which seems odd when you remember I was eleven. Throughout my records it’s clear something is missing. My voice."
Shaft, the coolest detective in pop culture history, is also one of the most important, argues Kieran Fisher.
Don't let James Wright hear you say that Nottingham does not have "a proper castle".
John McMahon ventures into the crypt of St Pancras Church in the Euston Road: "This week Ritual Britain, a new exhibition exploring these traditions and reflecting on their potential role at this tumultuous point in our Island story, opens in London. Probably the most complete gallery-based survey of British Calendar customs in over a decade, the exhibition brings together a wide selection of objects and images from the collection of the peripatetic Museum of British Folklore ... and twenty original paintings plus film, photography, and music by the artist Ben Edge."
