Frongoch: The internment camp for Irish Republicans in Merionethshire

My great-grandmother, Nora Fitzpatrick, raised 6 children & ran a successful furniture business on Liffey St, Dublin. Travelled alone to Frongoch to secure the release of her son after 1916 rising.
Recognising women's achievements not in the history books. Happy #NollaigNamBan pic.twitter.com/aagCwqdD4R

— Niamh O'Reilly (@DrNiamhOReilly) January 6, 2023

This tweet popped up in my feed and I wondered what or where 'Frongoch' was.

It sounded Welsh and, sure enough, Wikipedia explains:

Frongoch internment camp at Frongoch in Merionethshire, Wales was a makeshift place of imprisonment during the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising.

[In] 1916 the camp housed German prisoners of war in a yellow distillery and crude huts, but in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Ireland, the German prisoners were moved and it was used as an internment camp for approximately 1,800 Irish republicans, among them such notables as Michael Collins, who were accorded the status of prisoners of war.

That entry goes on to say that the camp was emptied in December 1916 when Lloyd George replaced Asquith as prime minister.

The video below, which is in Irish Gaelic with English subtitles, is the start of a documentary on the Frongoch camp,

I was intrigued, not just by the existence of the camp, but also by the fact that it was on the site of whisky distillery.

Welsh whiskies have been distilled and sold in recent years, but was there a whisky industry there early in the 20th century?

Another Wikipedia article spreads some light:

Manufacturing of whisky in Wales declined during the nineteenth century, with the commercial development of liquor discouraged by the rise of the temperance movement. 

The last notable distillery was established by R. J. Lloyd Price in 1887 at Frongoch. His company, the Welsh Whisky Distillery Company, was not a success and was sold in 1900 to William Owen of Bala for £5000. The company was finally liquidated in 1910.

The site of the distillery and camp is today occupied by a Welsh-language school.

Simon Dupree and the Big Sound: Part of My Past

The first single I bought with my own money, or at least my own record token, was Kites by Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, which was pretty damned cool for a seven year old.

Yes, I was into Sixties psychedelia even at the time.

Simon Dupree and the Big Sound eventually evolved into the prog rock band Gentle Giant, but before they did they issued a run of good singles, even if none repeated the success of Kites.

Part of My Past made number 62 in the singles chart in the summer of 1968, and very 1968 it sounds.

Lib Dem shortlist of two for Harrogate and Knaresborough

The Stray Ferret (great name) reports that Liberal Democrat members in Harrogate and Knaresborough will choose their parliamentary candidate for the next election from a shortlist of two:

• Tom Gordon, who fought the the Batley and Spen by-election in 2021;
• Matt Walker, who represents Knaresborough West on North Yorkshire Council.

The selection began in last June, but was restarted when Harrogate and Knaresborough was made a Lib Dem target seat.

And another Stray Ferret story suggests some disappointment at the choice they are being offered among Lib Dem members there.

Incidentally, a Conservative source quoted in the first story comprehensively fails to quash speculation about the future of the current Conservative member for the seat, Andrew Jones:

The Stray Ferret asked the Harrogate and Knaresborough Conservative Association whether he had been confirmed as the PPC and received the following response:

"I think I must have missed something... is there a general election? I am able to confirm that the MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough is Andrew Jones."

#TooCleveByHalf.

Jill Gascoigne and Ken Loach: The Living Theatre in early 1960s Leicester

The other day we mourned the death of commercial theatre in Leicester with the closure of the Royal Opera House in 1960.

The invaluable Arthur Lloyd website takes up the story, as the city council's theatre committee

helped a group of actors set up The Living Theatre in the old St Nicholas School Rooms. These were situated between Holy Bones and Great Central Street in Leicester. This was to be a temporary arrangement as the School Rooms were already due for demolition in July of the following year, for a major road development scheme.

In fact, the Living Theatre was to last until January 1963, but its site was eventually lost somewhere beneath Vaughan Way.

If you click on the image above you will be taken to a film report about this theatre group. The two members interviewed are Jill Gascoigne, star of the ground-breaking The Gentle Touch in the 1980s, and Derrick Goodwin, who became an important director of television dramas.

Among his work you can find 18 episodes of On the Buses - "That's wonderful, darling, but I think we need to feel your hatred of Butler a little more."

Arthur Lloyd has some programmes from the Living Theatre, and they reveal that other significant figures were involved with it, notably Ken Loach.

And, going back to the interview with Jill Gascoigne and Derrick Goodwin, it's good to hear there was an audience for Osborne and Pinter in the Leicester of the early Sixties. I can get annoyed when people use "provincial" as a pejorative term.

Margaret Mitchell and the Curse of A Canterbury Tale

I once derailed a train by taking the Powell and Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale lightly.

I've no evidence that Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone With the Wind, was similarly flippant about it. But ir remains a fact that she died after being knocked down by a drunk driver when she was on the way to see it.

On the latest episode of the podcast American History Hit, Sarah Churchwell talks about the way Gone With the Wind whitewashes the horrors of slavery, while condemning those who abolished it. 

And, she says, it's not alone. This is something that has happened in popular culture and the media since the civil war and continues today.

The Joy of Six 1101

Neal Lawson believes there’s no point Labour winning the next election unless it acts to dismantle our toxic electoral system.

"Truss was the product, not the source, of her party’s problems. She embodied a Conservatism that embraced creative destruction, that was dismissive of caution and contemptuous of institutions, that prized ideology over experience and regarded opposing voices as heresies to be burned out; a Conservatism that had ceded power to irresponsible think-tanks, contrarian newspaper columnists and a dwindling party membership that nobody has elected." Robert Saunders shows that the forces that gave it Liz Truss still dominate the Conservative Party.

Sebastian Stroud says that botany degrees are disappearing from British universities just when the world needs botanists most.

John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which adapted for the BBC in 1979, is a perfect snapshot of a declining Britain managing its post-imperial malaise in a changing world, argues Eliot Wilson.

"Kay’s great-grandfather, Captain Harker, in whose house Kay lives, lost some treasure - 'church ornaments, images, lamps, candlesticks, reliquaries, chalices and crosses of gold, silver and precious stones' - entrusted to his care by the archbishop of a South American port during the revolutions and uprisings of 1811. The loss haunted the captain until his death, a haunting that also ruined the happiness of his wife and son. Now others more avaricious than Kay are on the treasure's trail. Can he find it before they do? It is only at the end that you realize the book is about the restoration of more than one kind of treasure." Mathew Lyons on The Midnight Folk, John Masefield's prequel to The Box of Delights

Eleanor Parker finds that genteel Buckinghamshire is really wild border country.

Bemusement at ‘barmy’ bunch of 60 bollards near Birmingham school

A nice spot of alliteration wins the Guardian our Headline of the Day Award.

"Really, Mr Calder," remarked one of the judges, "this is like something from the work of J.G. Bollard."

"Your Honour is most amusing," I replied.

Reform thinks the Tories are bound to lose the next election

Embed from Getty Images

Richard Tice announced yesterday that his Reform party would put up a candidate in every constituency at the nest general election. 

There will, he said, be no deals with the Conservatives, even where a sitting Tory MP holds similar views to Reform.

From which we can conclude that Tice thinks the Tories will lose that election, with or without intervention from Reform. 

So his best bet of being relevant afterwards is if disappointed Tory members decide they lost because of Reform and then demand that their party moves further to the right to attract Reform voters.

But it's far from clear that, without the issue of Brexit, Reform will be able to attract enough voters for that strategy to work.

And there's another problem. The voters Reform could attract will probably be looking for some protection from the market, whereas the party's leadership wants to give them more market and give it to them good and hard.

If Labour thinks it worth exposing this contradiction, the electorate may be more willing to listen than they were in the Ukip days, even though that party was similarly broken backed.

Introducing a dog to the realities of police work

A moment of humour from a 1970 edition of Softly Softly: Task Force.

PC Snow is gently breaking in a new dog, Radar, after his previous one, Inky, had been shot. Inky had to appear on Blue Peter the following week to prove he hadn't been hurt in real life.

Snow is played by Terence Rigby, who was one of Harold Pinter's favourite actors and played Roy Bland in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

With him is my early hero Detective Inspector Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler. I later discovered Bowler had been a member of the Soho set in the 1950s.

I can't find a copy of Bowler's memoirs (he is, happily, still with us), but he has read some extracts online.

Hawkins's West Country accent is probably the result of Bowler having been evacuated to Wiltshire as a boy during the war. He seems to have been one of those children who was happier with his new family than he had been back home in London.

Josh Babarinde tipped to be the Lib Dems' first black MP

The Voice profiles Josh Babarinde, saying there is a "high chance" that he will capture Eastbourne at the next election and become the first black MP elected as a Liberal Democrat:

Babarinde, who has a Nigerian father, took an unconventional route into politics. As a volunteer youth worker in east London, he sought to turn around the lives of gang members by offering them a business opportunity fixing mobile phones.

He explains: "I would go on to estates at stupid-O’clock at night. I would go wear a big black coat, and inside it there’s all this phone repair paraphernalia. So I was going into stairwells where lads were smoking weed at night, and would say 'you can make cash from fixing phones, I can show you how, I can give you a demonstration right now.' 

“And some of them thought I was an undercover police officer, or thought 'who is this dude, just rocking up on my estate?' But there’d be some who would give me the time of day, so I got some of them signed up."

His social enterprise, Cracked It, won contracts from several local authorities, and he won the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30, recognising the leading entrepreneurs in Britain.

Alexei Sayle on the psychology of managerial incompetence

The UK is suffering because of the "outright incompetence" of government ministers, says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Alexei Sayle explained the reason for Britain's incompetent leadership almost 40 years ago.

Woman in tears of laughter after accidentally printing huge green Asda logo onto her head

 

The judges of our Headline of the Day Award compliment DevonLive on a strong start to the new year.

Joan Aiken on American orphans

I recently came across a website devoted to the work of the children's writer Joan Aiken (1924-2004).

Here she is writing in the London Review of Books in 1980:

American orphans, on the whole, did have to work extremely hard. The log-cabin-to-White-House fable was implicit in all their stories: if only you chopped up enough kindling and shooed the chickens off the porch with sufficient vigour, you would end up putting yourself through college and at least become a teacher, if not President. 

My comfortable family-buttressed childhood was cheered by comparison with the hardships of a whole series of American orphan sagas. There was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, who had to slave for her harsh aunt Miranda Sawyer in order to pay off the mortgage on her home. Fleda, in Queechy, had the same problem; the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. 

There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. 

Boys did not seem to work quite so hard as girls. Huck Finn, of course, is the Orphan that Got Away. That is his charm. No one can harness Huck, or put him to work: "No one is going to sivilise me. I been there before."

David Hemmings at the Royal Opera House, Leicester

The actor David Hemmings met and became engaged to his first wife Genista Ouvry, who acted under the name Jenny Lewes, during a two-week repertory engagement in Leicester in 1960. 

You'll know that if you've read a 2016 post on this blog about the obscure punk single Bored by The Stains.

And, sure enough, here is an advertisement for the play they were both in from the Leicester Chronicle of 21 May 1960, though I see Jenny Lewes came out as Jenny Lewis.

There is a piece of Leicester theatrical history in that advert, because Leicester's Royal Opera House had already closed once, and apparently for good, in 1953. 

However, the building proved impossible to sell and, when the Palace Theatre in Belgrave Gate closed in 1959, the Opera House reopened for a Christmas pantomime.

It stayed open for a few months more after that, and the final play to be staged before it went dark for ever was Five Finger Exercise, which you see trailed in the notice for Hemmings's play.

You can read about the history of the Royal Opera House, Leicester, on the Arthur Lloyd site. 

I've come across a couple of films about how theatre was kept alive in the city after Royal Opera House closed, leaving no commercial venues there, and will blog about them soon.

Exploring Jane Austen’s Worthing with John Rogers

John abandons London - the capital city of psychogeography - to explore a Sussex resort with the author Travis Elborough.

As he explains on YouTube:

Our walk starts at Worthing Station and then heads down into the heart of the Town Centre. We are looking for sites associated with Jane Austen who stayed in Worthing in 1805 and used it as the setting for her unfinished novel Sanditon. This is based on one of the chapters in Travis Elborough's latest book The Writer's Journey (White Lion Publishing). https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-.... 

The locations visited include: the Connaught Theatre; Stanford Cottage (where Jane Austen stayed in 1805); the Dome Cinema, as featured in the 1987 film Wish You Were Here starring Emily Lloyd and Tom Bell; the Royal Arcade; Shelley House; and Worthing Pier.

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

Write a guest post for Liberal England

The new year's here, so why not have your say?

I welcome guest posts on Liberal England. Not only that: I'm happy to publish posts on subjects far beyond the Liberal Democrats and British politics.

I'm also happy to entertain a wide variety of views, but I'd hate you to spend your time writing something I really wouldn't want to publish.

So if you'd like to write for this blog, please send me an email so we can discuss your idea. 

To give you some inspiration, here are the last then guest posts published here on Liberal England:

• Saving Church Langton's open space from the Diocese of Leicester - Anthony Lawton
• The Bielsa dream is over - Stuart Whomsley
• Can trade unions make a big comeback? - Stuart Whomsley
• The essays and reviews of Angela Carter - Cathy Kirby
• Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Were Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood very naughty boys? - David Grace
• A newspaper for and by Leicester people - Reece Stafferton
• Wealthy Rishi Sunak should give it all away - Eduardo Reyes
• Did the Russians kill President Kennedy? - Jack White
• The Secret Diary of Charles Dickens aged 13¾ - Lee Jackson
• LadBaby number one for Christmas again: what does it say about Britain? - Stuart Whomsley

Benjamin Britten: A New Year Carol

A happy new year to all our readers.

An article in the Financial Times gave the background to this haunting piece:

In May 1934 the young Benjamin Britten composed a carol — not for Christmas, but for New Year. In “A New Year Carol”, he set to music a lyric that had been circulating among folk song collectors for some decades, and which had been sung long before that: “Levy Dew”. 

As with many carols that are sung around Christmas and New Year, its origins and meaning were — and remain — a mystery.

Britten’s carol, with its sweet, simple melody, was published in Friday Afternoons, a collection of songs composed by him for the pupils of the school in Prestatyn, Wales, where his brother, Robert, was headmaster. (Friday afternoons were reserved for singing.) 

Britten used the verses that had been published in poet and novelist Walter de la Mare’s book of collected children’s poems, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, in 1931; this in turn was largely the same as the “standard” version that had been in print since 1850.

By composing the song for a school in Wales, Britten was taking it back to its roots: “Levy Dew” describes a ceremony that used to be performed in parts of Wales. Very early in the morning on New Year’s Day, children and youngsters would gather evergreen foliage, draw fresh water from the well, and go from house to house sprinkling water over the inhabitants or on their doors, sometimes in return for a few coins. As they did this, they would sing “Levy Dew”; it’s not known what tune they were using.

When I put together my Advent calendar I tried to avoid having too many boys' choirs, and you can find this, under the odd title Residue, on a recent Waterson Carthy album.

But there is a magic to the recording of Friday Afternoons by Downside School, a prep school in Purley that closed years ago. Wes Anderson used two songs from it in the soundtrack of Moonrise Kingdom.

Alastair Campbell's lament for Charles Kennedy

Annual trip to Charles Kennedy’s grave in Clunes. Seven years since his death and oh my has politics changed for the worse since then … playing the lament that was played there at his funeral. Lovely tune. The cold playing slight havoc with one or two notes! pic.twitter.com/vaiAFCpH8M

— ALASTAIR CAMPBELL (@campbellclaret) December 31, 2022

The Joy of Six 1100

"I was also lucky in being rescued by people I barely knew, friends and my family. I can never repay that debt but I can help others." Andy Boddington, a Liberal Democrat councillor from Shropshire, talks about his own experience of homelessness and about combating it in Ludlow.

Harry Pearse considers the arguments against giving children the vote and finds them wanting: "The fact that adults don’t need to show franchise credentials or an independence of mind shows that voting is not a privilege of competency, but rather a right of citizenship."

"He disliked cars, perceiving correctly that the post-War conviction that motor vehicles must dictate the future shape of cities had been responsible for wrecking many venerable town centres. One of his most successful books was Britain’s Lost Cities (2007), which pointed out in heartfelt terms the damage that planners of the sixties, seventies and still more recently, have done to Birmingham and Bristol, to Glasgow, Liverpool and many other places." Gillian Tindall remembers Gavin Stamp.

Joy Wiltenburg finds that the idea that women can't do humour is a 20th-century heresy.

"The community of the early modern English village was transposed to the vast and untamed New World, populated largely by the most enthusiastic religious adherents. To the claustrophobia of the village was added the terrifying emptiness of the wilderness that lurked beyond the homesteads—as well as aching fears engendered by subsistence farming thousands of miles from home, where the failure of the land or of the farmer’s skill meant death." Francis Young reviews of a book on the fear of witchcraft in 17th-century America.

There are pubs that claim to be the oldest in Britain, but most of these claims do not stand up to scrutiny. James Wright investigates the necessary criteria, from the age of the building to its history as a pub to its current use, to determine whether it is possible to declare a winner.

Let's hear it for tiny urban forests

Elizabeth Hewitt wrote in National Geographic last year:

Data released by Wageningen University researchers in April shows that the forests host a range of animal and plant species. Across the 11 Tiny Forests in the study, volunteers observed 636 animal species. They also identified 298 plant species in addition to the original species planted in the plots. Maintenance of the forests occasionally involves thinning out aggressive weeds, but in general new plant species, such as wildflowers that appear, are allowed to grow.