The Grand Union Canal in the 1930s

No sound, but some great shots of canalside industry.

The pub seen right after the 'Hemel Hempstead' slide at 11:20 is the Three Horseshoes at Winkwell. It was at the end of one of our family walks when I was a little boy living in town in the 1960s.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Saturn? Terribly Far

Monday (cont.)

But why, I hear you ask, am I visiting them this Monday morning?

The answer is all to do with the European Union.

It seems that 70 years of peace are not enough to reconcile many to our membership of this excellent organisation. Nor does its sterling work weeding out the curlier bananas from our supermarkets cut the mustard any more.

So a few of us – I fear I cannot reveal any of the other names, but they are all Sound and many can be fairly counted as bigwigs – have got together to do something about this.

“What we need, ladies and gentlemen,” I told our first meeting, “is something spectacular to show what Europe can do.”

Various ideas were kicked around and it was eventually agreed that the most spectacular thing of all would be a European triumph in Outer Space.

It may be that this was my idea: I have taken an interest in interplanetary exploration ever since Raymond Baxter became the first Briton in space in Coronation year. Whatever the truth of that – I am not one to boast – discussion turned to the precise shape our Spectacular Thing should take.
Should we land on the moon? It’s been done. Mars? Everyone is talking about that these days.

Saturn? Terribly Far.

Someone said “We could send a probe to Uranus,” but I wasn’t having that.

Another cove suggested we land on a comet. It sounded a good idea, but it turns out the things don’t stand still, so that if you aimed a rocket at one it would be gone by the time you got there. I don’t suppose even the Department of Hard Sums at the University of Rutland at Belvoir could help with that one!

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Confessions of a Knocker Up

St Vincent: Prince Johnny

St Vincent is the name under which the American singer-songwriter Annie Clarke records and performs. It is also the name of her fourth album, from which this song is taken.

Reviewing it for the Guardian, Alex Petridis said:

Prince Johnny is a fascinating puzzle: it's hard to work out whether the titular character is male or female, whether or not the song's narrator has slept with him or her, or how much their affection is tinged with contempt. 

In fact, the words are often ambiguous ... but they're the only thing here that is: bold, poised, precise without sounding sterile, St Vincent seems to be a straightforward triumph.

Anne Scott-James wears the trousers

#2659822 / gettyimages.com

Anne Scott-James was a pioneering woman journalist and appeared as a panelist on the Radio 4 quiz My Word! throughout my childhood. She was the mother of Max Hastings.

This striking photograph of her appeared in Picture Post in 1941.

Six of the Best 477

"Citizen’s Income (also known as Basic Income and many other names) was Liberal Democrat policy for a while, until it got dropped in 1994. Despite some people wondering if it might make a return under a previous leader, it's remained in the Home for Former Policies ever since." Nick Barlow wants to set that policy free.

Head of Legal has a video of Dominic Grieve speaking on human rights: "There are 'plenty' of Conservative supporters of human rights, he claimed, and he said they will win the internal debate – but 'must not stay silent'."

Andy Boddington writes on homelessness and an encounter in a Ludlow churchyard.

"Post-war austerity and the accompanying rationing were the reasons why spivs existed and during the General Elections of 1950 and 1951 the Conservative Party actively campaigned on a manifesto of ending rationing as quickly as possible." Flashbak looks at spivs and post-war British gangster films.

York Stories hurries to record a fragment of the city's railway history.

The Chelsea Football Fancast pays tribute to the club's former manager John Neal, who died in late November. He rescued us in the early 1980s, when we were threatened with relegation from the old Second Division.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Confessions of a Knocker Up

The new issue of Liberator has arrived, so it is high time we spent a few days with Rutland's most popular fictional peer.

 Monday

To Oakham Studios. I expect some of my readers will be surprised to learn that the old place is still operating. After all, the glory days of the Oakham Comedies are far behind us. I expect you have seen ‘Passport to Pickworth,’ in which a village declares its independence from Rutland – with hilarious consequences! (There is also one about a poor relation of an aristocratic family who murders his way to a title – I have never allowed this to be shown at the Bonkers’ Home for Well-Behaved Orphans.)

Some years later, as chairman of Oakham Studios Ltd, I helped win a contract from the Association of Liberal Councillors to make a number of training films. More than one prominent member of our party learnt electioneering from watching ‘Confessions from a Committee Room.’ ‘Confessions of a Canvasser’ and ‘Confessions of a Knocker Up’.

What, with the success of my own tribute to the Officer Training Corps at one of our leading public schools – ‘Carry On Uppingham’ – those were good years for the studios.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

Stockport in 1966

Some shots of the town, including the general election campaign.

The Box of Delights: It was all a dream

The BBC adaptation of John Masefield's The Box of Delights was broadcast weekly in the run up to Christmas 1984. I was too old for such matters in those days - I am not sure that I even watched it - yet somehow I have become one of those for whom these programmes are part of a modern Christmas.

One weakness haunts Masefield's book and the television the series: the revelation at the end that "it was all a dream".

In an article for Lancet Psychiatry looking at Christmas and dreams, Simon Guerrier takes the idea of the story as a dream seriously:

What does Kay's dream in The Box of Delights reveal about his desires and anxieties? For all the magic, there's a sense of the real world as sinister and foreboding: gangsters and murders are in the news, there's a sense of danger in the darkness outside the house, and when Kay goes to deliver a message some boys throw stones at him. Rat, a friend in The Midnight Folk, has now become a villain and Kay's description suggests the politics of the schoolyard: “Kay had heard that everyone had dropped him”. 

There's a sense, too, of issues with authority: clergymen who turn out to be criminals, or the police inspector who several times ignores the evidence Kay brings him. A psychoanalyst might link these things to the fact that Kay's parents are absent—he's looked after by a guardian, Caroline Louisa. 

Alan Seymour's adaptation of the story for television ... deftly adds to this sense of Kay's own anxieties informing the dream. In the first episode, Kay sees large Alsatian dogs running through the countryside. “Many people have them now”, Caroline Louisa tells him, “for protection”. We're not told from what. 

When Herne and Kay transform into animals, in the book it's a delight but on television they're constantly in danger: as stags, they're chased by wolves; as birds they're chased by a hawk; as fish they're chased by a pike. Herne has to teach Kay to look out for these threats. Later, when Kay meets Arnold of Todi—the inventor of the box of delights—where the book had Kay rescue him, here Arnold turns on Kay and tries to trap him back in time. Interestingly, Kay's magical friends can't help him—he's saved by his friend Jemima, in the “real” world, calling out his name. 

The television version gives us a clearer sense of where Kay's dreams begin: after two clergyman have tricked him in a game of cards so that he owes money to the poor box, and after he's met the kindly old man that his dream turns into Cole Hawlings. The police inspector reveals that Kay has always had an interest in magic: they've often swapped tricks from the pages of The Magician. But there's still a sense of disappointment at the end that it's all been a dream. 

It doesn't help that both book and television version are set over several days, with Kay going to bed and dreaming, and even asking aloud if the magical events he's caught up in might be dreams. In fact, it is more than disappointing: it's cheating.

I fear that is right, though my heart was lost to A Box of Delights some time in the 1960s, when I heard a radio adaptation of it.

You do not hear much about Masefield's The Midnight Folk, but my literary hero T.H. White loved it and cited it as an influence on his The Sword in the Stone.

The wisdom of Jeremy Thorpe

#3137092 / gettyimages.com

I suspect we shall here a lot of fresh scandal about Jeremy Thorpe and the Liberal Party over the next few days. I also suspect that this blog will happily pass some of it on.

But before we do, let's remember his wisdom. The passage below comes from an interview Thorpe gave to Allegra Stratton in 2008, when Gordon Brown was still prime minister. His summing up of David Cameron turned out be prescient:

What of Cameron's recent offer to Clegg to build a progressive consensus? He slumps a bit. "I would be very shocked. Our role is not for the Tories." 

Thorpe's constituency was naturally Tory and, like Clegg today, so were many of his target seats. Although Thorpe did agree with Heath on Europe - "without the Liberal vote they wouldn't have had the majority [to get into Europe]. On that we saved the government" - for him and Clegg, the Tories are the opposition. "Cameron is a phoney," Thorpe says of his fellow Etonian. "A Thatcherite who is pretending to be progressive." 

And what of rescuing Brown? Thorpe doesn't rate the man: "Dour and unimpressive. Like Callaghan ... You have to go back to Attlee to get a really good Labour PM." 

"We are to the left of the Labour party on quite a few things," he says. "Brown has some very Tory views. He's just as responsible for Iraq, clinging on to Bush's shirt-tails."

He was certainly more prescient than I was. When I blogged about that interview at the time, this was not the passage I chose to quote.

John Noakes before Blue Peter

#3291537 / gettyimages.com

Here he is (third from the left) in Arnold Wesker's Chips With Everything at the Royal Court Theatre in 1963.

Now David Parsons turns up in South Holland and The Deepings

From the Leicester Mercury:

Former Leicestershire County Council leader David Parsons has been selected to fight a south Lincolnshire parliamentary seat for UKIP in May’s general election. 

Mr Parsons has been chosen as the party’s candidate in South Holland and The Deepings two months after quitting his campaign to become a UKIP MP in North West Leicestershire. 

The former Tory politician defected to UKIP after quitting as Conservative leader at County Hall in 2012. 

He was chosen for the Lincolnshire seat by UKIP branch members on Saturday. ... 

Mr Parsons told the Mercury: “I am an A-list parliamentary candidate and I have been asked to apply for seats."

Leaving aside the unworthy question about what Ukip's B list can be like, I recommend voters in his new constituency to have a good read of the posts tagged David Parsons on this blog.

Ukip members have no sense of humour

Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grudzinski .. wait!, what!??? #ukip pic.twitter.com/yNSq2cndeP
— UKIP Trumpton (@Trumpton_UKIP) December 4, 2014

Nigel Farage presents himself as the beery scourge of the humourless left. The reality is that he and his party are extraordinarily thin-skinned and cannot stand the faintest hint of mockery when it is aimed at them.

Take David Coburn, who apparently is a Ukip MEP, and his campaign to have the @Trumpton_UKIP account removed by Twitter.

The good news is that his foolishness has helped to win that account more followers.

And you have to feel sorry for Ukip because of this lack of a sense of humour.

As Jeffrey Archer once said to Dame Edna Everage, "The most important thing is to be able to laugh at yourself."

"Yes, Jeffrey," Dame Edna replied, "You’d have to do that. Otherwise you’d be missing the joke of the century."

another fake account has emerged @Trumpton_UKIP - please block/report
— David Coburn MEP (@DavidCoburnUKip) December 2, 2014

Jeremy Thorpe remembered

#79658659 / gettyimages.com

The fall of Jeremy Thorpe had already taken place by the time I joined the Liberal Party, but he was its leader when it won the by-election victories in the early 1970s that helped get me interested in politics.

In his pomp Thorpe was a dazzling figure - though without the intellectual appeal of Jo Grimond - and Jonathan Fryer was from just the generation to be dazzled by him:

I first met Jeremy when I was Secretary of the Oxford University Liberal Club about 1971 and he came to speak at the Oxford Union, as Liberal Leader. He was funny and gracious, a scintillating speaker and at heart a great showman. Which other party leader in those days would have dreamt of conducting an election tour by hovercraft?

As Jonathan goes on to say, Thorpe  nearly destroyed the Liberal Party by his "feasting with panthers". Legend has it that some Young Liberals were so alarmed by the company he was keeping and the risks he was running that they went to the chief whip.

There were others who disliked Thorpe because of the way he ran the party and its finances, though the details of those arguments are probably lost in time by now.

Then came the court case at the Old Bailey where he was tried for conspiracy to murder and acquitted. Thorpe's Telegraph obituary has the basics of this, though several books were written about the case and Thorpe's wider career.

Thorpe's career was very much an act, and that act was a little too blatantly Eton and Oxford Union for my tastes - though if you read that obituary you will find his background was a little more complicated than he made it appear.

Auberon Waugh, who enlivened the 1979 contest in North Devon by standing for the Dog Lovers' Party, once said he disliked Thorpe because he dressed exactly like the bucks at his own public school.

Let's leave the last words with Nick Harvey, the current MP for the constituency:

In North Devon he was a greatly loved champion of the community and is remembered with huge affection to this day. 

It would be wrong to recall only the tragedy of his downfall - where in hindsight he can be seen largely as a casualty of the era in which he lived. Instead we should celebrate a towering force in shaping the political landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Belvoir Castle Tramway

#90747674 / gettyimages.com

The Narrow Gauge Railway Museum site explains:

In 1815 the Duke of Rutland built the Belvoir Castle Tramway in Leicestershire to carry coal and other supplies from Muston Gorse Wharf on the Grantham Canal up to the Castle. Wagons were pulled up the hill by horses. The route can still be traced and many of the stone block sleepers remain in place. A short section in the castle grounds survives and extends into the cellars beneath the castle.

Lord Bonkers has asked me to point out that the railways on the Bonkers Hall Estate are far more impressive.

Nick Clegg in Penzance

© Philip Halling

Andy McSmith's Diary in the Independent is always worth a read. In his latest column he notes Nick Clegg's absence from the Commons:

Today he was in Penzance, to announce a £150,000 study into whether the town needs a new breakwater. "I’ve spent four years dutifully sitting there on the green benches and this year I thought it would be a nice change to get out of the Westminster," he told the Western Morning News. Penzance is in the St Ives constituency, which the Liberal Democrat Andrew George held in 2010 by a perilously small majority. 

So Clegg was really telling the locals that if they want that breakwater, they had better re-elect their MP.

Former Harborough councillor becomes shadow attorney general

The resignation of Emily Thornberry meant that Labour needed a new shadow attorney general.

And the choice has fallen upon Lord Bach who, as Willy Bach, once represented one of the Lutterworth wards on Harborough District Council. (This was after my days on the authority.)

BBC News has the other changes in today's minor shadow cabinet reshuffle.

Durham in 1960

This film about new developments in traffic control has some lovely shots of the city in the year I was born.

Why did Lib Dem MPs back Chris Grayling on judicial review?

Ian Dunt writes about last night's Commons vote on judicial review:

Judicial review sounds boring but it is one of the most democratic legal mechanisms available to the British citizen. It allows us to challenge illegal government decisions, to fight government irrationality and to challenge the decisions made by authorities. In the words of one peer, it is "the British defence of freedom" and the means by which we avoid "elected dictatorship". 

Chris Grayling has lost several judicial review cases this year, for the simple reason that he keeps acting illegally and irrationally. So he has decided to try and eradicate it. That's not what it's called, of course. It’s called 'reform'. But his reform will make it impossible for anyone but the very rich to use it.

Grayling's proposals were mauled in the Lords, with Liberal Democrat peers playing a major role.

Yet last night Lib Dem MPs, with one exception, voted to reverse the Lords' amendments and restore Grayling's original proposals.

Dunt is damning about this:

Apart from Sarah Teather, who has shown herself to be the beating heart of the Liberal Democrat soul this parliament and is consequently leaving it at the earliest opportunity, no other Lib Dem MP rebelled.

No-one else. Of all the Lib Dem MPs who liked to get on their soap box about liberalism, or how they are the only party which still believes in civil liberties, or which opposed the authoritarian tendencies of Labour – no-one apart from Teather had the courage of their convictions.

This seems a bizarre decision by the Liberal Democrat leadership. Does anyone know why it was taken?

And does anyone know to whom Nick Clegg is now trying to appeal?

Ed Reynolds to fight Rutland and Melton for the Liberal Democrats

Martin Brookes has the story:

Edward is truly a local candidate. His family were tenant farmers in Cold Overton for 60 years. In fact both his grandfathers farmed in the constituency. Ed and Robyn have just bought a new house in Oakham using the government's help-to-buy scheme. Ed still occasionally pulls on his rugby boots for Oakham RFC.

Lord Bonkers wishes him well.

Behind The Scenes: Television Centre (1971)

"The producer here is John Howard Davies, and he is holding a planning meeting for an episode of 'All Gas and Gaiters'."