Heritage lottery grant for the Richard Jefferies Museum

Good news from Swindon Link:

One of Swindon’s historic gems is about to get a boost after being told it is to receive a £30,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). 

The Richard Jefferies Museum, home of local Victorian writer and naturalist, has been given the grant to help develop a dedicated Trust and breathe new life into this important local landmark.

The report goes on to quote John Price, Chair of the Richard Jefferies Society, whom I met when I visited the museum in 2009:

"Society members is [sic] delighted to hear of the success of the HLF bid, and looks forward to working with the Trust to make the Museum at Coate more accessible to Swindonians and visitors to the Town. It is a most important literary jewel that we have done our best to make available to all, but have been limited by time, money, and availability of volunteers to take responsibility for opening the house more regularly."

Nottinghamshire Police cop Headline of the Day

For their splendidly poker faced:

Mr and Mrs Speed profited from amphetamines

Thanks to Alex Foster.

A new Eleanor Cross at Stamford

I have been to Geddington and Hardingstone in Northamptonshire to see two of the three surviving Eleanor Crosses - the third is at Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire.

Stamford is the site of one of the vanished crosses and a fragment of its cross used to be on show in the town museum. Now the museum has closed, the best place to try is the library.

But when I was in Stamford on Monday I found that it has a new Eleanor cross. The website Stonebtb explains:

It hasn't been the easiest of transitions from commission to construction but Wolfgang Buttress' Ketton limestone and bronze reinterpretation of the Eleanor Cross that once stood in Stamford has finally been unveiled as the centrepiece of the town's ￡1.3million Gateway project. 

The scheme has pedestrianised Red Lion Square and the Sheep Market parts of the East Midlands town. The areas were previously used for car parking. The narrow streets and lanes between the historic stone buildings of the town are one of its attractions, but they don't leave a lot of room for car parking, so losing some of the space that existed for it was not universally popular. 

However, those who wanted to see an Eleanor Cross return to a public area of the town have won the day and on a Saturday in May Wolfgang Buttress, who designed the cross and its associated Clipsham benches and milestone, the masons who produced them (Pierre Bidaud, Ana Ruiz Agüi and Regis Chaperon) and their guests celebrated with Champagne the fact that the cross was finally in place.

The site of the original Eleanor Cross at Stamford has been the subject of much debate, but the best theory seems to be that it stood on a hill by the Great North Road to the south of the town - much as the cross at Hardingstone stands in relation to Northampton.

Jo Swinson and Shirley Williams on what needs to change at Westminster

The House Magazine has a joint interview with these two leading Liberal Democrats on  the challenges of being a female politician, what has changed in the last 50 years, and what still needs to change:

Jo Swinson: Some things have changed for the better. Obviously we now have 146 women MPs – still nowhere near enough by the way, but we have significantly more. Women don’t feel they can’t attack other women in the chamber on a political basis. I don’t think that there are as many personal attacks and I often find that if you look at the environment at Women and Equalities questions, and debates on international development, you tend to get more women in the chamber. The committee I've just finished sitting on, the Children and Families Bill, was a majority of women which is the first time I've ever seen that. And it’s not that you always agree, but women disagree in a slightly different way ... 

Shirley Williams: I should add that the House of Lords is a much easier place to be a woman in. There’s a very fixed ethos of politeness. There’s a gentle hiss if people are rude to one another. They don’t like at all people that personally attack other people. That encourages women in particular and it may be why there are quite a few women from ethnic minorities in the Lords. That measures what is still wrong with some of the attitudes and approaches in the Commons.

I also like Shirley's comment on the old Lady Members' Room:

It had an ironing board in it, much used by Mrs Thatcher who was very keen on ironing. The funny thing was, that was about all it had. It had a sofa in case you felt faint and it had an ironing board.

An anthropologist looks at the Liberal Democrats

I am not the first to link to this article, but if you have not yet read the field study of the Liberal Democrats by Fred Carver on his blog Who Rules Where you should hurry over there now.

A taste:

If you want to be an MP it helps to be rich, charismatic, likeable, hard-working, lucky, good with the media, have a good back story, have a solid track record with the party, and good at campaigning. 

But you don’t need to be any of these things. The only thing you absolutely need is ridiculous, and I mean absolutely ridiculous, levels of self-belief. This is because no rational human being would ever want to do it. 

If you want to be an MP you must give up all semblance of a normal life for years, often decades, at a time. You must be unemployed, or have a very patient employer and a meaningless job, for about a year before the election. You must surrender all meaningful contact with friends and family. 

In the months before an election you must spend around twenty hours a day shaking hands, smiling, and making token purchases. And if you are not driven completely insane by this you also have to come to terms with the fact that there is a very very good chance that you are going to lose.

And:

Liberal Democrats also have formative rituals, or initiation ceremonies, known as 'by elections' to establish identification with the group. The by election ritual is much like the circumcision ritual of the Xhosa tribe: 

"During the time of the initiation, the young men live in special huts, secluded from the rest of the tribe and especially from any females. They undergo training and endurance tests, which require great discipline. All aspects of the initiation are kept very secret."

The only sad thing is that this article is by way of a resignation letter from the party.

My theory is that the more spectacular someone's resignation from the party, the more likely he or she is to come back one day. (It's the ones who are quietly walking away we should be worrying about.)

As resignations don't come much more spectacular - or entertaining - than this, there must be the hope that we shall see Fred again one day.

The ghost signs of Oakham

Conference marks 50th anniversary of C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary

An international conference is taking place at the University of Glasgow on Friday and Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of the great cricket book Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James.

The speakers include Mike Brearley, former President of the British Psychoanalytic Society and (far more importantly) former England cricket captain.

You can watch the proceedings live on the web on Friday 10 and Saturday 11 May from 9.30 a.m.

John Arlott once called Beyond a Boundary "the finest book written about the game of cricket". And it is about far more than cricket: part autobiography, part social history of both the Caribbean and Victorian England, and part call to political action.

The River Welland at Stamford

Some 20 miles downstream of Market Harborough comes Stamford. The Welland is considerably larger by then, and beyond Stamford it was canalised in the 17th century - a century before the dawn of the conventional canal age.

Downstream of Stamford are Spalding and the Wash. There is more about the river on the Welland Rivers Trust site.

"Now we can sit back and watch the Tories go mad" - an apology

When the Liberal Democrats won the Eastleigh by-election in the small hours of 1 March, I got rather carried away on Twitter:

Congratulations to @mike4eastleigh - now we can sit back and watch the Tories go mad #libdemandproud
— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) March 1, 2013

Later that morning I was quoted on the Today programme as a "prominent Liberal Democrat blogger".

But I was wrong. In the aftermath of Eastleigh the Conservatives kept their nerve and behaved sensibly.

Two months later, however, following UKIP's performance in the local elections, they have indeed gone completely hatstand.

Time for moderate Conservatives to show some backbone

From the Leicester Mercury:

A senior Tory county councillor says he was disappointed that a number of his ballot papers were spoiled by voters opposed to changing the law on gay marriage. 

The Conservative politician, who did not wish to be named, was re-elected in Thursday’s Leicestershire County Council election and saw that a number of voters had written that they were against gay marriage by his name on the paper rather than casting a vote.

The unnamed Conservative councillor is later quoted as saying:

"I hope Cameron does not give in to the pressure and abandon this because it is the right thing to do."

That is to his credit, but why did he insist on remaining anonymous?

Perhaps his reluctance to be named is a sign of how far local Conservative associations have been taken over by the clowns and fruitcakes.

But if you don't have the courage to speak up for what you believe, what is the point in being in politics at all?

Jimmy Tarbuck and Terry-Thomas

This is not a comment on the guilt or innocence of Jimmy Tarbuck, but I have come across a piece of trivia that is too good not to share.

In 1960 Jimmy Tarbuck received two years' probation for stealing a cigarette holder belonging to Terry-Thomas.

You can read the details in a Daily Mail piece by Graham McCann from 2008. and Cook'd and Bombed even has a Daily Mirror article from the time of the trial.

It is interesting, incidentally, to see that newspapers were still printing street names in the form "Queen's-drive" as late as 1960.

Stamford Water Street station

Stamford has a station on the Leicester to Peterborough line - today it largely houses the railway bookseller Robert Humm & Co. - but the town used to have a second, even grander station. This was Stamford Water Street, as it was known from its opening in 1856 until 1950, or Stamford East, as it was known from then until it was closed to passengers in 1957 and goods four years later.

Its grandeur is out of scale with the two branch lines it served - services to Essendine and Wansford ran from here. That grandeur may have been a tribute to the Marquess of Exeter, who had promoted the Essendine line and lived at the Elizabethan Burghley House. Certainly, the Exeter arms are prominent on the building.

Stamford All Change! How the Railways Came to Stamford by Arthur and Elizabeth Jordan describes the building in its heyday:

Architect William Hurst arranged for the main door to open into a spacious booking-hall above which a gallery, with a wrought-iron balustrade, gave access to the Company's boardroom and offices. A lantern roof provided adequate daylight in the booking-hall.

Today the station house has been divided into two private houses and the trackbed behind it has been taken over by a sheltered housing scheme. A surviving goods shed has been cleverly incorporated into the complex.

The remarkable careers of John Freeman

The consensus is that the death of Rear Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles has left John Freeman, the last survivor of the 1945 House of Commons, as the oldest former MP.

But he is notable for far more than his longevity, as a recent New Statesman profile by Hugh Purcell revealed:

In the 1940s he was a war hero, and then an MP who reduced Winston Churchill to tears in the Commons. In the 1950s he was tipped to become Labour leader but resigned from politics and became a TV interviewer. In 1961 he resigned from the BBC and became the editor of the New Statesman. 

Four years later he resigned and became a diplomat, working first as Britain’s high commissioner to India and then as the ambassador to Washington. In 1971 he resigned and became the chairman of London Weekend Television and then Independent Television News. In 1984 he moved to California to teach, until his return and retirement in 1990.

Six of the Best 350

Gareth Epps tells us what Nick Clegg should have said after Thursday’s elections.

"Putting in 20 mph speed limits in residential streets means more than just making streets safer. It is the beginning of a culture change where people on foot and on bikes, and children playing, take precedence over passing motor vehicles. It's about giving control of streets back to the people who live in them." Great stuff from Lib Dem councillor Roger Symonds on the Local Government Association site.

The mixed messages the British government is giving out to potential foreign students - "at best unclear and at worst unwelcoming" - is hampering our universities' attempts to recruit them, says Nicola Dandridge on Times Higher Education.

Jay Griffiths discusses the politics of play for Orion Magazine.

Diana J. Hale spends May Day following the Jack in the Green around the streets of Deptford and Greenwich. The Victorians did not hesitate to invent ancient traditions and nor should we.

"It was a good fifteen years together. For a long while, I am going to miss her unique blend of affection and cantankerousness when I walk through the door. This place seems a little less like home without her." Andy Boddington mourns the death of his cat Georgi.

Cat of the Day stays right here in Market Harborough

GUEST POST Political defections: Storms of protest or signs of political climate change?

Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell, author of Defectors and the Liberal Party 1910-2010, looks at the history of defections from the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats.

Everyone remembers examples of political defections, the most prominent being Winston Churchill’s ‘ratting’ and ‘re-ratting’ between the Conservative Party and the Liberals. But, Churchill was by no means alone; nor was he the most prolific defector.

Due to its position on the political spectrum, the Liberal Party has been either the donor or the recipient of most defectors. Well over 100 MPs and former MPs defected to or from the Liberal Party in the century since 1910.

With so many individuals leaving their party for another, I decided to research whether the defections were all one-off storms of protest, or whether collectively they were indicators of significant change in the political climate. I wanted to find out if there were common threads behind the reasons for the defections and any indicators suggesting who was likely to defect and who would remain loyal, when faced with the same set of circumstances.

I managed to find out the timing and reasons for all of the defections of MPs and former-MPs to and from the Liberals and Liberal Democrats from 1910 to 2010. Each individual defection was effectively the conclusion of an expert witness (the defector) on their party and its leader at a specific moment in time.

I identified characteristics which distinguished defectors from loyalists – defectors were disproportionately male, wealthier, more militaristic, more likely to be divorced, likely to have begun their careers at a younger age and were likely to come from a minority religion. Paddy Ashdown proposed a theory from his knowledge of international spying, that it was the ‘toffs’ who defected. I tested his theory and found it to hold true in politics too.

Overall, defection was a career-enhancing move, resulting in a higher chance of ministerial office and a peerage. Defectors from the Liberal Party went fairly equally to the right and to the left, but those who went to the Conservatives were much happier than those who went to Labour. Over half of those who defected to the Labour Party became unhappy with their new political home. This reveals an underlying compatibility between the partners in the 2010 coalition, which took many commentators and even the parties themselves by surprise.

The most prolific defector was not Churchill, but Edgar Granville, who lived to the age of 100 and had five defections to his name. Defection was rarely a comfortable experience, as is revealed in detail from the tales of each defector.

At the moment, the Liberal Democrats are enjoying the luxury of not being involved in the furore of defections – the Conservative Party is currently more prone to defections. Against the odds, Nick Clegg has a clean sheet, having suffered no defections of MPs or former-MPs during his leadership – a record shared only with Ming Campbell and David Steel. Lloyd George comes out as the most careless leader for losing defectors.

My research has now been published by Manchester University Press as Defectors and the Liberal Party 1910 to 2010 – a study of interparty relations. The foreword to the book is by Lord Andrew Adonis, former cabinet minister and himself a defector from the Liberal Democrats to the Labour Party.

Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell is an honorary research fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester. His other publications include a biography of Clement Davies, Liberal Party leader from 1945 to 1956. He writes a blog on the connections between political history and current events and can be found on Twitter @liberalhistory.

Paul Williams: Look What I Found

Like several people who have commented on Youtube, I remember liking this song in 1973 and have never heard it since. Being objective, it is not a great record, but it is good to be able to hear it again.

Is John Freeman now the oldest former MP?

Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Charles Morgan-Giles (born 19 June 1914) died yesterday.

If an earlier post on this blog is correct, that means that John Freeman is now the oldest former MP. He is certainly the last survivor of the House of Commons elected in 1945.

Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades in conversation

An hour with two of this blog's heroes - you may want to skip the introductions and go straight to 6:30.

Lyddington Bede House, Rutland

Lyddington is a village stretched along a single road. Its buildings, which include two good pubs, are of an almost gaudy orange limestone. If it were in the Cotswolds it would be full of coaches. Because it is in Rutland I had it almost to myself yesterday.

I was there to look at Lyddington Bede House. I had visited the village before, and knew that it was a pleasingly ramshackle medieval building standing next to the church, but I still had no real idea of what a bede house is.

It turned out that it used to be the village almshouses. But before that it had been something far more remarkable.

For what is called the Bede House is the only surviving wing of the palace of the Bishops of Lincoln. This diocese once stretched from just outside London to the Humber, so Lyddington was somewhere near its centre and served as its administrative centre.

And it wasn't a bad life being Bishop of Lincoln: the diocese once maintained a large hunting park just outside the village.

The palace was seized by the crown at the dissolution of the monasteries and much was demolished. The bottom storey of the surviving wing was established as an almshouse in 1600, with accommodation for 12 poor men, two women and a warden.

The last residents appear to have left in 1930. The rooms were like cells, cold and damp even in yesterday's sunshine. One of the women's apartments (on the first floor) has been furnished as it would have been in the 19th century.

And upstairs you will find the bishop's chambers, which are in a remarkably good state of preservation, and you can climb another flight of stairs to the attics above.

In 1954 the Bede House passed into the care of the Ministry of Works. You can catch a glimpse of the years between these two dates in "Just Rutland" by J. & A.E. Stokes, which was published in 1953. The authors describe borrowing the keys from a house in the village.

You will find the tower below on the village street at the corner of the Bede House grounds. It was at first defensive and then ornamental. Today you can pass through an arch at its base on your way from the street to the church and Bede House.