Reg Calvert and his boarding school of rock

In the Sixties there was more than one way of getting it together in the country. You could, like Traffic, have your own cottage out in the wilds, or you could get a place at Reg Calvert's boarding school of rock.

Pete Clemons explains:

Reg Calvert started to promote rock n roll shows, but then he quickly hit on a difficulty. The best acts were not to be found in and around Southampton. And it was at this point he decided he needed to up sticks again and find somewhere in the Midlands.

He found Clifton Hall near Rugby and it was just right for what he wanted. It was big enough to house three top groups. The were Danny Storm and the Strollers, Buddy Britten and the Regents and Robbie Hood and his Merry Men. Additionally Clifton Hall was central enough for him to promote his shows. And from that base he was able to promote shows at places like Andover, Banbury, Cheltenham, Worcester, Evesham, Kidderminster, Burton, Atherstone and Nuneaton.

Clifton Hall gained the nickname 'The School of Rock' as it conjured up images of young pop singers practising all day for the shows to come. And that was exactly what it became. The hall had spacious gardens, recording rooms, a billiard room, a football pitch and a large and luxurious lounge that Reg would get his singers to work to make the shows he put on as perfect as possible. Songs had to be sung over again in order to get the vocal and any backing correct.

And Reg was a strict disciplinarian, his rules included no alcohol and no girls to be brought to Clifton Hall. But they also had plenty of freedom. There was no set time for bed for example. And if someone wanted to play drums in the middle of the night then there was no irate neighbours to come knocking on the door complaining. They were a world unto themselves.

'Clifton Hall', as far as I can tell, was New Hall at Clifton upon Dunsmore, near Rugby, which no longer stands.

You probably haven't heard of any of the acts mentioned above, but some of Reg Calvert's students did go on to greater things.

Danny Storm was a Leicester lad, and at various times his backing band The Strollers, who later became The X-Citers, contained two future members of Family: Roger Chapman and Ric Grech. I can't spot them in the video above though.

Robbie Hood's backing band The Merry Men later changed their name to The Fortunes. They had two top-5 hits in 1965 and two top-10 hits in 1971.

There's lots more about Reg Calvert on the Reg Calvert - Plays site, and you can also buy three books about him.

And if you're wondering what became of Reg Calvert, as longstanding readers may recall, he was shot dead by a former vice-president of the Liberal Party.

The Joy of Six 1540

"I am speaking out today because many more asylum-seeking children are at risk due to plans to withdraw support and forcibly remove children whose families have failed asylum claims." The children’s commissioner Rachel de Souza says no child should be made destitute to enforce harmful immigration rules.

Zoe Grunewald finds that Brexit has made worse the very problems it was promised it would solve: "What comes in the next decade depends entirely on whether Britain’s mainstream politicians can finally do what it has spent the previous decade refusing to: tell the truth about what Brexit did, who bears the cost, and why the man promising to fix it helped cause it all in the first place."

"That Tory share was its lowest in all 17 sets of full London borough council elections ever held. It was also smaller than every vote share won by the Conservatives in the Greater London administrative area – formally created in April 1965 – in the 16 general elections held since that year." Barnaby Towns finds that the Conservatives are still going backwards in London.

Susanna Crossman sets out to learn more about the beliefs and practices of the folk healers called 'fire-tamers' who operate an "alternative, unofficial and ancient grassroots system of care" across France.

"He swiped, slogged and occasionally savaged, under the guise of scoring 'easier' runs against the new ball given how this pitch is playing. Instead, his 30 off 20 balls created a febrile storm that swept up Jacob Bethell, Harry Brook and Ben Duckett." Vithushan Ehantharajah watches Ben Stokes' last Sunday as England's captain.

Moreau Vazh finds that Witchfinder General, despite its place in the folk horror canon, most closely resembles a Sam Peckinpah Western.

Don't mention the Isle of Wight Separatists' 1950s terror campaign

If it weren't for Lord Bonkers, I should have taken this as a charming portrait of an English backwater 70 years ago.

In reality, 1956 saw the height of the Isle of Wight Separatists' terror campaign and the film was made in an attempt to assure potential visitors that all was well there despite the headlines.

Nowhere in this film do we see the internment camps for suspected Separatist sympathisers, the occupying British Army or the desperate poverty caused by the collapse of the island's major industry of producing tourist souvenirs that incorporate several different colours of sand.

Yet is was not the British government that saw off the Separatists, but their own error in attempting to raise money for arms by muscling in on some of Violent Bonham Carter's legitimate business interests in the East End of London. It was Violent's manor and the were out of order – indeed getting lairy – as they were soon shown.

Fergus McClelland was the last illegal major British child actor

Before Section 37 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963 was enacted it was illegal for a child under 13 to appear in a film made in Britain. As I pointed out in an earlier post, this law was widely ignored. 

And I could have added Mandy Miller to the examples given there. She was six when she made a brief appearance in The Man in the White Suit and seven when she played the title role in Mandy.

The director of both those Ealing films was Alexander Mackendrick, and he was still breaking the law when he shot Sammy Going South, because his young lead Fergus McClelland was only 11.

Though you'd think that a completed feature film would make pretty good evidence in court, producers generally avoided legal trouble by keeping their use of such a young actor secret until the film was released.

So a short article about the boy in the Daily Herald (10 January 1963) says that his three-month absence from school while he was filming on location in Africa was explained by telling his classmates that he was on an educational tour.

The article concludes by saying:

The company who made the film, Bryanston Seven Arts, could be prosecuted for employing anyone as young as Fergus in a film studio. But the maximum penalty would be only a £5 fine. And the film cost £500,000 to make.

Richard Farmer has written about this illegal employment of child actors, and he shows that companies could be fined rather more than that:

In 1949, 12-year-old Bobby Driscoll, who had already appeared in films such as Song of the South (1946) and The Window (1949), arrived in Britain to make Treasure Island for Disney at Denham. Disney did not seek to obtain the necessary employment permit for Driscoll, in large part because of his age meant that he could not legally be allowed to work in Britain.

Driscoll, his father, and Disney were each fined £100. Treasure Island’s producers reworked their schedule, at a reported cost of $84,000, to allow the young star to complete shooting as quickly as possible, claiming to have "too much money involved" in the film to replace Driscoll and concerned that he might at some point be prohibited from returning to the studio.

Farmer says the Disney company felt it was being singled out for special treatment, and you can see why. The year before, David Lean's Oliver Twist, complete with nine-year-old John Howard Davies in the title role, had been chosen for the Royal Film Performance – Davies later described being presented to Queen Mary as most terrifying experience of his life. Sammy Going South received the same accolade in 1963.

The 1963 Act allowed the employment of actors under 13, but made local authorities responsible for ensuring their welfare. This regularised what had often been happening in practice:

Some local authorities found it easier to ensure child safety in studios by coming to extra-statutory agreements with producers that permitted filmmakers to employ children on the understanding that council officers were able to ensure that a child’s welfare and education was being appropriately attended to.

And if you were working for Alexander Mackendrick, you needed protection. Fergus McClelland remembered in his 2020 interview with Matthew Sweet:

There was one point when I worked solid for 17 days from six in the morning till nine at night, and I was 11 and a half. The unit doctor said to Sandy Mackendrick, who was a fantastic director but very driven: "Look, you can either have a dead star or a live little boy. Which do you want?"

What was his answer?

What can we do to make him healthy and get him filming more?

McClelland survived the experience, acting for another 10 years before disappearing from view. He re-emerged later in life as a trainer in public speaking and business presentation, in which guise you can fine him all over YouTube.

Other child stars were not so lucky. Bobby Driscoll died from drug addiction at 30 and was buried anonymously burial in a pauper's grave.

Labour and the Liberals in 1924 and today

Malcolm Petrie reviewed two books on the first Labour government for the London Review of Books a couple of years ago. The books were The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government by Peter Clark and The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government by David Torrance.

In the course of his article, Petrie cast light on the relation between Labour and the Liberals – in 1924 and even, to an extent, today:

Rather than seeking to implement a distinctive socialist programme, then, the Labour cabinet had two main ambitions in 1924. The first was to cement the party's position as the progressive alternative to the Conservatives and to prevent a Liberal revival. 

It’s striking, given Labour's ideological debt to Liberalism, how visceral the dislike of the Liberal Party was among its senior figures. One reason for Labour’s emergence had been the unwillingness of local Liberal associations to accept working-class parliamentary candidates; in addition, Liberal MPs had tended to see their Labour counterparts as subordinate elements in the prewar Liberal coalition: useful, but not equal. 

The result was that Labour MPs felt, often justifiably, that the Liberals were unbearable snobs; and, in the case of Lloyd George and his followers, corrupt, dishonest hypocrites. 

As Torrance remarks, MacDonald thought he "could get on with the Tories": while there might be disagreements over policy, they ‘were gentlemen’; the Liberals, however, "were cads". There was also a sharp awareness that Labour and the Liberals were, in effect, competing for a single vacancy: if Labour was to have a long-term future as a governing party, the goal had to be, as Clark argues, "to destroy" the Liberals.

That point about competing for a single vacancy explains a paradox about the Liberals and Liberal Democrats. Liberal in the West Country often sound rather right wing to the rest of the party, yet they and the Conservative Party are at each other's throats there. Equally, Northern urban Liberals sound left wing, but hate the Labour Party.

And Labour's second attitude in 1924 reminds me of that of many Labourites and Liberals over my political lifetime:

The second objective was to repudiate the accusation, voiced most bluntly by Winston Churchill in 1920 when he was still a Liberal, that Labour wasn’t fit to govern. This explains the composition of the cabinet, and Labour ministers' willingness to appear in court dress, despite the unease this provoked on the political left. It is also the reason some of the party’s most prominent policies were discarded as soon as it became clear that Labour could form a government. 

The proposed wealth tax, the capital levy, was dumped: Snowden called it "an electoral millstone". Scottish home rule, a cause inherited from Radical Liberalism, was also abandoned. When, in May 1924, George Buchanan, the ILP MP for Glasgow Gorbals, introduced a Private Members’ Bill on the issue, it was talked out by Conservative backbenchers. 

Buchanan, backed by his fellow Clydesiders, pleaded with MacDonald to grant additional parliamentary time, but MacDonald, who was Scottish and had been a supporter of home rule, refused. Torrance, who makes excellent use of material from the Royal Archives, reveals that MacDonald, in his updates to George V, was happy to criticise, and even ridicule, the advocates of home rule.

Which suggests that the monarch had more political nous than his prime minister, as George V is widely reported to have said to MacDonald: 

"What fools we were not to listen to Gladstone on Ireland!"

Family: Scene Through the Eye of a Lens

This one ticks a lot of Liberal England boxes.

Family grew out of a band called The Farinas that was formed at Leicester School of Art in 1962. By 1966 they had moved to London, and the following year they recorded Scene Through the Eye of a Lens, their first single.

The track's producer was the American Jimmy Miller, who had previously worked with the Spencer Davis Group and was now working with Steve Winwood's new band Traffic.

Which is why you will find three members of Traffic – Dave Mason, Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood – contributing extra percussion here. And Winwood himself is playing the Mellotron. 

Family's first album, Music in a Doll's House from 1968, was produced by Mason, with the result that the band was obliged to include a song by him that they didn't much like. The rest of Traffic knew how you felt, guys.

I had assumed that this connection with Winwood was why Family's bass player and violinist Ric Grech was asked to join Blind Faith alongside Winwood, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker.

But Danny Wilson, who later played with Grech and has written about him, tells me that Eric Clapton had been an admirer of his bass playing since his days with the Farinas and it was Clapton's agent who signed him up to the new 'super group'.

HMO plan for Market Harborough's Bottom Club

Stop sniggering at this story from HFM News there. I shall explain.

 

Market Harborough used to have two working men's clubs in the town centre. The one that stood towards the top of the High Street was known as "Top Club" and the one on The Square was "Bottom Club".

Top Club is now a branch of Zizzi, while Bottom Club now houses a Waterstones and a Pret a Manger. They don't call Harborough "the Notswolds" for nothing.

The white building in the photo above was also part of Bottom Club. Its ground floor was where the club's snooker tables were to be found and where Market Harborough's British heavyweight boxing champion Jack Gardener once trained. This is the building for which a planning application for conversion to an HMO has been made.

When I was a lad, I sometimes played snooker there because one of our gang's dad was a member, so they let us use the tables if it was quiet and we behaved ourselves. In those days it was possible to enter the club on the Square and walk through it all the way to that white building, so there must have been some demolition when the front of the club was converted into the two shop units.

Market Harborough chess club met for a while in what is now the first floor of Waterstones. This was at a time when what had been the town's roughest pub, The Talbot, had just closed and some of its ne'er-do-well customers had taken to using the Bottom Club instead. The result was that the club lost its alcohol licence for a while over concerns about drug use.

So it was that, having won a county league game with a particularly outrageous swindle, I lent over the board after my opponent had resigned and asked: "Would you like a glass of orange juice?"

And The Talbot?  As this is the Notswolds, it's now a Hotel Chocolat.

The Joy of Six 1539

Roz Savage says our electoral system is not just unfair but dangerous: "Manifestos are written for floating voters in constituencies that might change hands – not for the country as a whole. And when governments make spending decisions, the incentive structure pulls them in exactly the same direction. The Towns Fund, which directed 40 of 45 allocations to Conservative-held seats, was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed."

"Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse." Harry Paticas explains why hot spells now turn British schools into heat traps.

Jack Meredith says it's time for Liberals and trade unions to talk again: "The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing/"

Simon Skinner reviews a history of the World Cup: "Argentine reverence for Maradona endured because and not in spite of his anti-Corinthian ethos, up to and beyond the point in 1991 that he failed a drugs test when unable to deploy his habitual expedient of squirting someone else’s urine through a prosthetic penis. The penis was later displayed in a Buenos Aires museum as a quasi-religious relic (before being stolen)."

"Plans to moor a large vessel beside London Bridge have run into an unexpected complication – a disused tube tunnel buried beneath the Thames," reports Ian Mansfield.

Maria J. Pérez Cuervo looks at legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and what may lie behnd it: "The Pied Piper, like the Trickster, is a shape-shifter who wears a number of different masks – the psychopath, the hero, the rebel… even Death himself. Like Shakespeare’s Puck or Barrie’s Peter Pan, he spreads a net of enchantment, leading our children to the Otherworld. Whether this Otherworld was a new land to colonise, an altered state of consciousness or the realm of the dead remains a mystery."

What remains of the locations where Hue and Cry was filmed

The best-known scene from a British film involving children and bombsites is the climax of Hue and Cry (1947), where the office boys and errand boys of London stream across a ruined cityscape to confront the villains. It feels more Roberto Rosselini than Ealing.

Here, you sense, is the exotic London captured by Rose Macaulay in her novel The World My Wilderness (1950). A city where the bombsites are bright with flowers and lush with vegetation. A city of sudden unaccustomed vistas of Italianate churches. A city where the displaced sleep at night among the ruins.

That was me writing on Lion & Unicorn earlier this year. This video looks at the locations used in the filming Hue and Cry and what remains of them today.

Franz Kafka in North West Leicestershire

From BBC News:

Barbara Skedd was in "absolute horror" when she opened a letter addressed to her executors offering them condolences on her death.

The 74-year-old received a letter to her Ibstock home, in Leicestershire, from North West Leicestershire District Council in May to update its council tax records following the family's "recent bereavement".

And that's not all:

Skedd said she was in tears after the initial shock of reading that she had died in the council letter, dated 21 May.

She said anger then followed when she discovered all her benefit money, including her Personal Independence Payment (PIP), Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit (IIDB), pension and pension credit - had been frozen.

"Everything stopped dead," she told the BBC.

"I've not had money to buy food, no money to put petrol in my car. I can't do anything or go anywhere."

There's more:

She contacted the government department several times to correct the issue and was told an officer would visit her to confirm she was alive, she added.

"That horrified me to be honest," she said.

"I said, 'I'm talking to you. What more proof do you need?'"

Skedd said since the visit she has had "no explanation, no apologies, nothing" from the DWP.

"Just tell me why it all happened," she said.

How four bison brought new life to ancient woodland in Kent

Here's a video from Dr Edmund Hale that makes rewilding seem not a flight of fancy but common sense:

Bison reintroduction in England began in 2022 when four European bison were released into West Blean Woods near Canterbury, Kent – the first wild bison in Britain for thousands of years. This rewilding experiment had one goal: save a dying ancient woodland that conventional conservation, chainsaws, and machinery had failed to fix. What these ecosystem engineers did next with bark, hooves, and pure instinct stunned the scientists monitoring them.

Within weeks, the bison tore open the sealed forest canopy, stripped bark to create life-giving deadwood, and churned the soil into new habitat – and the woodland responded almost instantly. Dung beetles, rare plants, and wildlife began returning to ground that had been silent for decades.

But here's the twist: this species was once down to just 12 animals on Earth. The four bison rebuilding this English forest are the living end of a 100-year fight against extinction – and their return is forcing conservationists to rethink everything about how forests should be saved.

And the stern tone Dr Hale adopts here makes him sound much as you imagine a European bison who had made a deep study of the sufferings of his species would sound.

The street in Australia named after my great great grandfather

My family history stuff is put away and I'm far too hot to go and look for it, so this is written from memory, but I think it's right.

I've posted a lot about my great great grandmother's brother Sandy Campbell and also about her sister Johanna Robertson Campbell. Both were senior members of Queen Victoria's staff at Balmoral. But what about my great great grandmother Jane Clark Campbell?

She died aged only 22, having already had an illegitimate son with a man called Alexander Calder.

The boy, my great grandfather, was brought up by the Campbell family in Scotland, but Alexander left for Australia. He became one of the first residents of the town of Smeaton in Victoria, and this road there is a street named after him.

Calder Street is the one going off to the right in the photo above – you can see the Calder St. signpost pointing the way. The inscription below is on the Campbell family monument in the old kirkyard at Crathie.

The rigged system Freda Jackson overcame to become an actress in the 1930s

I wrote about the actress Freda Jackson's background on Central Bylines:

Jackson was born in Nottingham in 1907, the daughter of a railway porter. She was educated at High Pavement School and the city’s University College. In 1933 she was teaching English and Drama at Haywood School, Sherwood, and spending her evenings acting with a local theatre group, when a letter to the director of its repertory company won her an audition at Northampton’s Theatre Royal.

Yesterday's purchase Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92 tells us what happened after that successful audition:

Miss Jackson's status for her first five months in Northampton was that of pupil, which meant that she received no salary. She had originally applied to Herbert Prentice, by then at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, but, since the pupil system did not operate there, he advised her to try Northampton. The pupil arrangement was confined to actresses, young actors being in such short supply that they could command a salary from the outset.

The dedication of the pupil actress extended not only to support herself without salary, but also to providing an adequate personal wardrobe for modern plays, a much more onerous requirement than for her male colleagues.

Were young male actors really in such short supply, or was it simple sexism that saw them paid from the outset when young actresses weren't.

Whatever the reason, this arrangement made it next to impossible for a young working-class woman to embark on a theatrical career. It explains why maids in Thirties films, of which there were many, were usually played by upper-class girls with unconvincing cockney accents.

We are seeing a return to such an arrangement in Britain today: every well-endowed private school has its own theatre, but the public facilities open to youngsters from poorer homes are under increasing financial pressure.It's no wonder we see the same limited group of privately educated actors snaffling the star roles in British films. And narrowing the pipeline of talent entering the acting profession can only result in a reduction in quality.

Anyway, you can see Freda Jackson above as Mistress Quickly in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Henry V.

The other actors in the scene are Robert Newton as Pistol and two who were to be dead within months of shooting it: Frederick Cooper (with the nose) as Nym and Roy Emerton as Bardolph. The boy is unmistakably a young George Cole.

The Joy of Six 1538

Kevin Collins asks how modern Britain would cope with a drought on the scale we experienced in 1976: "The public of 1976 learned to cope with these unusual weather conditions, and per-person use of water dropped from an estimated 190 litres per day in 1972 to 95 litres in 1976. This was a generation with direct or family experience of the hardships of the second world war – including following government restrictions on food, clothing and fuel rationing, which finally ended in 1954."

Roger Mosey finds the latest BBC cuts mystifying: "As misinformation and disinformation swirl around the globe, audiences will want to know what is true – and the BBC can provide a place where our querulous nation can share its views. The onslaught of YouTube, Netflix, Disney and the rest means that we risk having most of our viewing choices made by giant American companies, with algorithms devised in Palo Alto replacing editorial choices made in Britain."

From hedgehogs to buzzards, Britain's wildlife is being quietly killed by rodenticide poisons, report Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson.

National politicians should keep their noses out of the decision-making processes of local councillors, argues Richard Kemp.

Ruby Hamilton analyses the appeal of screwball comedies: "Some Like It Hot (1959) doesn’t work just because Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are men pretending to be women (though they’re always funny about it) but because nobody notices or cares. Lies and truth have indistinguishable effects, so what’s the fuss? Screwballs aren’t miserabilist-humanist comedies about learning to revel in imperfection; they’re comedies of fantasy and will."

A soft pop op-art space rock opera from 1970 starring Olivia Newton-John? Yes please, says Discontinued Notes.

Professor Joad sees his play at the Theatre Royal, Northampton

I braved the heat today, went into town and called at the market. I came a way with a book called Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92. As you would hope, there's plenty about this blog's heroine Freda Jackson, but this post is about C.E.M. Joad.

Joad was once a substantial public figure, chiefly as a member of the panel of the wildly popular radio programme The Brain's Trust. There he allowed himself to be called "Professor Joad" when he was no such thing, which riled his fellow philosophers. They also, whether from jealousy of his fame or impartial study, regarded his writing as either eccentric or plagiarised.

According to hero of the blog Bryan Magee:

He was an engaging but essentially fraudulent character. His popular books on philosophy thick-skinnedly recycled Russell’s work without acknowledgement; asked once to write a recommendation of a book by Joad, Russell replied: 'Modesty forbids.'"

While Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, in a meeting where Joad had delivered a paper criticising the form of analytical philosophy popular at Cambridge, that "naturally a slum landlord would object to slum clearance". In other words new thinking was clearing away the sort of stuff that Joad still came out with. 

The Magee quote is from an article by Richard Symonds that tries to rescue Joad's reputation as a philosopher, while the Wittgenstein quote is from Wikipedia entry on him.

Reading that Wikipedia article on Joad, you get the impression that he embraced just about every nutty theory going in the first half of the 20th century. He was a thumping sexist, though some of his braver views on social issues are now widely accepted. You may think the law of averages means he was bound to be prescient sometimes.

Anyway here's the story about Joad from my book on the Theatre Royal, Northampton. There it is credited to a manuscript in the county record office written by a theatre manager called Stephen Sylvester – presumably this Stephen Sylvester – and Alex Reeve was also on the management side of the theatre.

Northampton stuck to its commitment to new plays. In March 1946 Crackling of Thorns by C.E.M. Joad the philosopher and radio Brains Trust personality attracted widespread interest for its first professional production.

The substantive scenes, for which locations included a youth hostel and a national school, advanced the author's ideas on the reduction of the nation's population. These were interspersed with duologues between Mr .Playwrite and The Critic (Mr James Aggravate – alias for James Agate) discussing the craft of play writing.

Joad attended the first night, but although he had lent Alex Reeve, making one of his rare stage appearances as Mr. Playwrite, one of his suits he was less than enthusiastic about the identification of the character with himself:

Being the same size as Joad he [Reeve] was able to make himself up to resemble him, beard and all, and when he imitated Joe's squeaky voice the impersonation was very funny. Jude was a famous public figure ... and the audience quickly recognised the character and fell about. 

When Joad came to see the show his lack of amusement was positively Queen Victorian. In the bar afterwards he told Reeve, "I'm sure I don't speak in that squeaky voice." He said this in such a squeaky voice that we thought he was being funny, and laughed. But he wasn't, and in his subsequent radio broadcasts it was noticeable that his voice had gone down quite a few semitones.

You can hear Joad in the video clip above. If you watch the whole thing on YouTube you may form the opinion that he was a bit of a poseur. And an article on Herestical will give you the reason for the sudden end to his radio career,

Still, such was him fame that he got a mention in Shirley Bassey's first recording, which was banned by the BBC for being too sexy. Do watch it if you've not seen it before: she's wonderful. 

Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons: The Night

This  wonderfully dramatic single failed to make an impact here in 1972 and wasn't released as a single at all in the US.

But by 1975 it had become a Northern Soul classic and made 7 in the UK singles chart when it was re-released.

School uniform, boys in skirts and Marcuse's 'repressive tolerance'

For years, just as the coming of the Christmas season is marked by the appearance of the first disappointing 'Santa's Magic Xmas Wonderland, so the arrival of High Summer has been marked by a news story about boys being banned from wearing shorts to school in hot weather and, after a careful reading of their school's uniform regulations, turning up in skirts as a protest.

There is an inferior story of this sort in the Manchester Evening News. A father has protested because his son was almost banned from taking a mock exam because he turned up for it wearing shorts:

"She told me it isn't a policy for girls or boys, it's just a uniform policy," said Chris, a contracts manager. "I asked if I'd sent him in a skirt would he be allowed to sit his mocks and was told 'yes'. I said 'do you understand how stupid that sounds'. When I asked 'what's the difference between him wearing shorts or a skirt' she said that's our rules."

This tolerance of boys in skirts appears admirable – "we understand that some students want to experiment with their gender identity and we're cool with that" – but in reality the school is still enforcing petty uniform regulations. Today's teachers are the spiritual great grandchildren of the teachers who made small boys wear shorts in the snow.

And the school's apparent tolerance reduces the possibility of disagreement with its rules. For the power of such protests lies in the notion that the boys have been driven to do something ridiculous, but how can boys wearing skirts appear ridiculous in such an understanding school?

The story says the school has backed down, as schools generally do when confronted about such unreasonable rules, but I think for the first time I understand Marcuse's concept of "repressive tolerance".

We have no idea what history will say about Keir Starmer and it may not be right anyway

I see a lot of people saying that history will be kind to Keir Starmer - much kinder than commentators have been in recent weeks.

Three points...

First, history is not a single agreed narrative but a collection of debates. History will say lots of things about Keir Starmer, some of them quite contradictory.

Second, we have no idea what history will say about Keir Starmer, because his career will be seen in a wider context, much of which hasn't happened yet.

Andy Burnham may be lead Labour to defeat at the next general election, or he may win that election, bite the bullet and start the process of rejoining the European Union. How Keir Starmer is viewed by future will depend greatly on how Burnham and Burnham's successors fare in office.

Third, history may be wrong about Keir Starmer. History may be wrong about a lot of things.

There is an implicit assumption here that the judgements of future historians are bound to be correct, both factually and ethically. This blog's hero Karl Popper used to call this view "moral futurism", whether it was inspired by the Marxist view that socialism was historically inevitable or Liberal confidence in the inevitably of "Progress".

But these future historians will operate in a social and academic climate they have not themselves made. Imagine a far-right government coming to power in Britain – sadly it's much easier to imagine than it used to be.

We have seen the accommodations that American academia has made to please Donald Trump, and I see no reason to believe that its British counterpart would behave any differently Now imagine the sort of history that would be produced here after five or ten years of that.

And even without the intervention of a far-right government, there is no reason for us to assume that the judgements of future historians will be informed by years of moral progress.

So it's no use appealing to future historians. If there are any, we don't know what they will say and we might not like it if we did.

Lib Dem billboards attack Farage’s £5m "reward for Brexit"

The only person to profit from Brexit is Nigel Farage, who has walked away with a £5 million payout he described as his reward for Brexit, the Liberal Democrats claimed yesterday.

The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey launched a nationwide billboard campaign to mark the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum. The campaign highlights how ordinary families across the UK are facing skyrocketing household bills in the aftermath of Brexit, all while taxpayers face a £90 billion hit every year.

Speaking at a rally held in front of one of the billboards in London, Davey said:

"After ten years of the Conservatives’ Brexit experiment, the British public have had enough. We are the ones who have had to pay for their lies.

"Nigel Farage pocketed a £5 million 'reward' for the damage he’s caused, while the rest of us are paying for it dearly. When he promised we would be better off, he clearly only meant himself.

"We are taking over billboards across the UK today to say enough is enough.

“Our message to Andy Burnham and the rest of Labour is clear: drop the damaging red lines on Europe, and drop them now. It’s time to end the chaos and fix our broken relationship with Europe.”

Sparrows Can’t Sing Q&A with Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin

Joan Littlewood directed only one film, Sparrows Can't Sing. It was based on the play Sparrers Can't Sing, which was written by Stephen Lewis (better known later as Blakey off of On the Buses) and staged by her at Stratford East.

Here two cast members, Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin, remember the making of the film and Littlewood's approach in general. Barbara Windsor is in sparkling form.

As I posted this video on Liberal England about 10 years ago, I'm adding another one with Murray Melvin . It's very good, but I'll admit it's here mainly because of the still photo of Joan Littlewood and Stephen Lewis that appears early on.

For another appreciation of Joan Littlweood, try Sheila Hancock.