Two ghost signs from the back streets of Northampton

It was a nice sunny day so I headed for the back streets of Northampton. 

Discoveries included The Old Grocery Espresso Bar (have the sausage roll if you go), Heyford Books (interesting stock at miraculous prices) and these two ghost signs.

Roger Blackmore (1941-2024)

Liberal Democrat Voice has posted a tribute from Leicester Liberal Democrats to Roger Blackmore, who died on 6 September at the age of 82:

Having moved to Leicester in 1963 when he became a student at Leicester University, joining the local party whose brief revival that year quickly faded.

Roger managed to establish himself as the main voice for Liberalism in the city as well as contesting the Gainsborough constituency in Lincolnshire. He fought the seat four times, his campaigns being the stuff of legend.

As this excellent tribute says, Roger went on to fight Jeremy Thorpe's old seat of North Devon, to be leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicester City Council and then leader of the council itself, and after that a popular Lord Mayor.

If you click on the picture of a youthful Roger above, you will be taken to a 1975 news report about the strike at Imperial Typewriters in 1975. Roger is interviewed about the formation of an action group that attempted to prevent the factory from closing.

The Joy of Six 1278

Christine Jardine believes that dying people should be able to make their own choice about whether they want palliative care or to end their life: "I would want that choice to be mine. More importantly perhaps I feel I don’t have the right to deny that choice to others. I believe the law as it stands does not offer those facing such circumstances the compassionate and humane options they deserve."

Berna León reviews a study of how Britain’s elite continues to reproduce itself through entrenched structures of privilege, despite the appearance of increased meritocracy and diversity.

"It would introduce a legal requirement for local authorities and the Department of Education to collect and publish data about the extent to which they are finding local placements for children in care ... Local authorities would also have to develop and publish sufficiency plans, setting out what steps they are taking to meet their requirements to find local homes for children in care, under the Children Act 1989." Jake Richards introduces his private member's bill.

"Rural voters stopped caring about the Democrats because the Democrats stopped caring about them." Tom Zoellner searches for solutions to the Democratic Party's "rural problem".

Mary Colwell remembers her early encounters with curlews: "I saw a large group in a field in northern Scotland as I waited for a ferry. It was autumn and they must have been migrating. I remember thinking how elegant and strange they looked with their long bills and legs, and I watched them for ages. When I reached Orkney, one flew over a loch, crying an unearthly, evocative call. It fitted the landscape and the mood of the day perfectly They were with me from then on."

"Rod Argent was the engine room of the Zombies. He wrote She’s Not There and his playing takes it to another level. It’s very English-sounding, very reserved and melancholy, then out of nowhere he plays this incredible solo that’s soulful but slightly classically influenced. It both fits the song perfectly and takes it somewhere else." Elton John on the piano and organ players who inspired him.

The 1966 BBC radio adaptation of The Box of Delights

Look what I've found on YouTube. This radio adaptation of The Box of Delights was first broadcast at Christmas 1966 and repeated in the same season in 1968 and 1969.

It may have been through the 1966 broadcast, but is more likely to have been through the 1968 one, that the story won my heart. Who can resist a healthy blend of the Christian and the pagan? I know I was enthralled by it as a little boy.

Listening to the broadcast today, it's slow to get going. But when the story picks up, the production makes good use of sound and the proper music is used.

Cole Hawlings is Cyril Shaps and the young Kay Harker is Patricia Hayes. Caroline Louisa is played by Carol Marsh, whose first film role was Rose in Brighton Rock, and there's even a small part for Stanley Unwin.

Welsh Lib Dems attack Labour over cuts to rail services in North and Mid Wales

The Liberal Democrats have attacked the Labour government in Cardiff over proposed cuts to services on the Cambrian and Heart of Wales railway lines.

Herald Wales reports that:

Under proposals by government-owned Transport for Wales, services on the Heart of Wales line will be cut from five trains a day to four. They are also removing the two late evening services to Llandovery and Llandrindod Wells.

On the Cambrian Line, TfW will cut four services between Machynlleth and Pwllheli (two in each direction).

Promises for an hourly service on the Cambrian Line between Aberystwyth and Shrewsbury ... have also been scaled back and will only be in place for four months of the year when they finally commence in summer 2026.

The paper quotes criticism of the cuts by two leading Welsh Lib Dems. Senedd Member Jane Dodds said:

"At a time where we should be encouraging rail usage and adding extra services, Labour is allowing Transport for Wales to make sweeping cuts to services in rural areas. It is an appalling state of affairs. 

"While services in South Wales are being increased, North and Mid Wales are facing cutbacks. Year after year we see the same story from Labour in Cardiff Bay. 

"I am appealing to the Labour First Minister Eluned Morgan, who represents Mid & West Wales in the Senedd, to intervene directly to stop these cuts."

And the Lib Dem MP for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe, David Chadwick, added:

"These cuts from Labour are an absolute disgrace.

 "You have Labour on the one hand telling people they need to use their cars less, but on the other hand, they are cutting public transport options. The two things don’t go together. It’s a ridiculous situation that shows how poorly they understand rural communities.

"We need more reliable and more frequent rail services across Mid Wales, not less. Access to public transport is vital for increasing economic investment and employment, supporting our tourist industry and attracting highly skilled workers like GPs to work in our communities."

This is a good point to send you to a guest post by Eric Loveland Heath on singing the songs of the Cambrian Railway.

Fred Titmus goes to the opera

In his latest book Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, Mike Brearley writes of being an intellectual among professional sportsmen and turns it into a reflection on the accident of our birth:

Similar cynicism came my way when I was doing philosophy in my early days playing cricket for Middlesex Fred Titmus, the senior player (whose first game for Middlesex in 1949 coincided with the first of my father's two games, so that after Fred played in my last game at Lords In 1982 he was able to say he 'saw the father in and the son out'), would prod me with questions like: "This philosophy that we're all paying for, what's it all about?" He was being sarcastic, goading, but he was genuinely curious. 

I took his curiosity seriously, and tried to give some sort of answer. In other lives, with different backgrounds, Fred might have been doing philosophy and I might have been born and brought up in King's Cross and had left school at fourteen, and learned cricket, football and boxing at a local boys' club. (I once had a spare ticket for Benjamin Britain's Peter Grimes, and asked him if he'd like to go. We sat in the gods, and Fred was taken with it.)

Brearley talked to the Australian cricket journalist Gideon Haigh about this book and his life for the podcast Cricket, Et Cetera. It's well worth a listen.

Traffic Babylon

Paul Rees tells the story of Steve Winwood's second band, with more of an emphasis on its darker side than you normally see:

With the extravagant Capaldi cheerleading, and fragile, mystical Wood bringing with him a traditional English folk tune called John Barleycorn – which he’d heard on Frost And Fire, a 1965 album by Hull folkies The Watersons – the stage was set for Traffic to at last become the band Winwood had wanted all along: one capable of harnessing a dizzying array of musical styles and then make them over into a fresh, original form that ebbed, flowed and soared. 

The John Barleycorn Must Die album was the first, giant step along that path. From there they conjured three more records that marked them out as prodigious explorers and rare virtuosos. Yet it also extracted a heavy price from the three principals – it could be said that not one of them was ever the same again.

Lib Dem MPs voted against Labour's plan to impose VAT on private school fees

News from the Guardian that

The UK’s biggest and richest ­private schools are in line for substantial financial windfalls as a consequence of the government’s plan to impose VAT on their fees, according to official new guidance issued by tax authorities.

has done nothing to undermine the impression that out new government isn't terribly good at governing.

But this wasn't the reason that Liberal Democrat MPs gave for voting against Labour's plans last week.

Today, #LibDem colleagues and I voted against ending the VAT exemption on private school fees because we believe in protecting parental choice and opposing the taxation of education.

— Charlotte Cane MP🔶 (@CharlotteCane8) October 8, 2024

No one is going to march in support of the taxation of education, but that does feel a little like a principle you make up to appeal to once you have decided how you are going to vote.

And I'm pleased to see our MPs supporting parental choice. It's just that I'd like to hear our plans for extending it beyond the seven per cent of parents who send their children to private schools.

Alleged cheating scandals rock conkers and chess

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From the Guardian:

The World Conker Championships is investigating cheating allegations after the men’s winner was found to have a steel chestnut in his pocket.

David Jakins won the annual title in Southwick, Northamptonshire, on Sunday for the first time after competing since 1977.

But the 82-year-old was found to have a metal replica in his pocket when he was searched by organisers after his victory.

The retired engineer has denied using the metal variety in the tournament.

Meanwhile on Chess.com:

22-year-old GM Kirill Shevchenko has been expelled from the 2024 Spanish Team Championship with his draw against GM Bassem Amin in round one and win over GM Francisco Vallejo in round two turned into losses. 

When Shevchenko’s regular absence from the board aroused suspicion in round two a locked phone was found in the toilet, with arbiters claiming a link of the phone to Shevchenko based on handwriting and behaviour. 

Shevchenko, who is originally from Ukraine but now based in Romania, also denies the allegations.

Derek Nimmo says "P… p… pick up a Penguin"

If you want an accurate picture of Britain in the Seventies, forget Dominic Sandbrook. Look instead for an archive of Nationwide or of TV commercials from the decade.

As everyone is so young these days, this post probably needs a link to something about Derek Nimmo. What this obituary doesn't say is that, along with Clement Freud and Nicholas Parsons, he was part of the Just a Minute cell of Liberal Party supporters.

Mark Knopfler's father finished second in the 1953 Scottish chess championship

This just in from our Trivia Desk...

His father, Erwin, had arrived in Glasgow in 1939 after fleeing Hungary. Erwin Knopfler was a chessplayer & was runner-up in the Scottish championship of 1953.

(Credit to the formidable Alan McGowan for establishing the identify of E. Knopfler in the cross-table below.)

(2/2) pic.twitter.com/xIqc2bmN6x

— Douglas Griffin (@dgriffinchess) September 19, 2020

And a word too for James Aitken, who not only won the title that year but beat all the other competitors in doing so. As well as winning this championship on ten occasions, he was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the war.

The Joy of Six 1277

Roz Savage explains why she has tabled her Climate and Nature Bill: "While I was out there, alone in the middle of the ocean, I witnessed the beauty and strength of the natural world first hand. I realised how utterly reliant we are on the health of our planet, and how vulnerable we are to the Earth’s changing climate." 

"It is certainly true that the two remaining candidates, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, stand on the far right of the party. Both make Margaret Thatcher, a famously right-wing Conservative prime minister, look like a sopping wet liberal. But anyone who thinks that the far-right capture of the Conservative Party means that the party is now irrelevant is deluding themselves." Peter Oborne warns Britain not assume that it's immune to global trends.

Gemma Gould tells the story of her journey as a child through the care system.

Stephen Parsons gives a detailed account of the challenge offered by LGBT students against the dominant culture among evangelicals that assumes the gay-affirming position is inevitably wrong.

"The city’s leaders were still determined to rehouse as much of the population as it could within the city and, in seeking to do so, the eyes of the leaders of the politicians and planners turned upwards! Glasgow was to embrace like no other city, high-rise housing development." Gerry Mooney on the rise and fall of Glasgow's Red Road Flats.

"We unexpectedly got the seal of approval from Morrissey. His nephew came to the gig in Manchester, met us backstage for a drink afterwards and told us he thought it was a nice thing to do, and the next day, Morrissey posted a photo his nephew had taken at the gig and put a message on his website thanking us, with the headline, 'If there’s something you’d like to try - Astley, Astley, Astley', which I thought was fantastic." Rick Astley sings The Smiths.

Did The Archers get George Grundy's sentence right?

My favourite YouTube barrister Alan Robertshaw looks at the Radio 4 soap's treatment of the trial and sentencing of Ambridge ne'er-do-well George Grundy.

For the most part, he concludes, they got things right. And, as ever, we learn something of the law and how courts operate along the way.

Labour demands probe into Leicester South Monster Raving Loony Party candidate

There's a new theory about how Labour's Jonathan Ashworth contrived to lose his Leicester South seat at the last general election. Apparently, it's all the fault of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

A report from The i explains:

Labour is demanding a police investigation into possible breaches of electoral law claiming an Official Monster Raving Loony candidate was used to help unseat a shadow cabinet member, i can reveal.

In one of the shock results of the election, Jonathan Ashworth who was tipped for a major role in Sir Keir Starmer's government, lost his seat to an independent candidate who campaigned against Labour’s policy towards Israel.

Mr Ashworth lost the Leicester South seat by fewer than 1,000 votes after a campaign by rival Shockat Adam focused on events in Gaza and Labour’s reluctance to demand a ceasefire.

An i investigation has learned that an occasional campaign volunteer for Mr Adam, Amaar Suliman, also ran against Ashworth as the candidate for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party under the name Mr Ezechiel Adlore.

As Mr Adlore, Mr Suliman spent almost £2,000 producing and distributing thousands of leaflets across the constituency during the election campaign criticising Mr Ashworth.

Mr Suliman’s fliers attacked Mr Ashworth’s 13-year record representing the constituency. They were headed "Missing MP alert" and asked voters "have you ever seen this man?".

Labour say they want the police to investigate the relationship between Mr Adam, now Leicester South’s MP, and Mr Suliman as they believe it raises questions over the accuracy of Mr Adam’s election expenses.

The i goes on to say that both Adam and Suliman deny any suggestion of wrongdoing and Adam has described any claim the two worked together as "bizarre and false".

h/t Mark Pack.

Randy Edelman: The Uptown, Uptempo Woman

Here's another memory dredged up from the singles charts of the Seventies, and one that has to fight not to be overwritten by Billy Joel's Uptown Girl.

Randy Edelman is a successful composer for film and television who, as a young man, recorded several albums of his songs. Several of those songs were later recorded by major artists.

He had his biggest hit in the UK (no. 11) with an inferior cover of Concrete and Clay, but The Uptown, Uptempo Woman, his own song, reached no. 20 in September 1976.

Listening to it today, it's a pretty but very simple song - just verse, chorus and repeat, with no instrumental break. 

And the lyrics are about a man who is walking out and is, of course, in the right. But that was the Seventies for you.

Harborough Town are through to the first round of the FA Cup

Harborough Town FC will be in Monday's draw for the first round of the FA Cup after a 1-0 home win over Bury in the fourth qualifying round this afternoon.

This is a new high in the club's history:

"Sir Robert Peel! Richmal Crompton! Guy Garvey! Peter Skellern! Gary Neville! Phil Neville! Tracey Neville! Neville Neville! Can you hear me, Neville Neville? Your boys took one hell of a beating! Your boys took one hell of a beating!"

The very lost tunnels of the Hereford and Gloucester Canal

Paul and Rebecca Whitewick take us to Oxenhall and Ashperton, the two abandoned tunnels on the Hereford and Gloucester Canal.

For more about this lost waterway, see the Herefordshire and Gloucestershire Canal Trust website.

None of the six Young Musician of the Year semi-finalists went to a state school

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I've been moaning about the way the BBC is presenting Young Musician of the Year this time. It's being treated as though it were The X Factor or Master Chef.

Give it a couple more years and the contestants will all have stories about their dying granny's wish that they should play the bassoon and cry when they are put through to the next round.

But there's something even more depressing at work this year, as Richard Morrison points out in an article that has somehow escaped The Times's paywall:

None of the six semi-finalists for the UK’s most famous instrumental competition studies at a state school. Two are at private schools, two at the Royal College of Music, and the other two attend specialist music schools. 

The last are fee-paying too. And although the government offers bursaries to help exceptionally talented children from less wealthy families to attend them, most parents still need to fork out a hefty sum to send their child to one. 

This private-school dominance of the arts and sport is becoming a real problem in Britain. When I was writing about the film Last Resort last month, I said of Paddy Considine: 

I used to wonder what it was that was so different about him, but now suspect  it’s just that he’s a working-class actor in an industry where that has become a rarity.

And amid the Guardian's celebration of Leonard Rossiter, it's a sobering thought that, obliged to go out to work at 18 after his father's death in wartime bombing, it's unlikely that he would have made it as an actor today.

Bear 'not out the woods' after brain surgery

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award. Congratulations to them and best wishes to Boki.

Tory Reform Group refuses to back Badenoch or Jenrick

The Tory Reform Group (TRG) issued a statement today saying it will not be backing either of the candidates for Conservative leader being put to party members in a ballot.

I don't know how unusual this is for the TRG, but their statement is strongly worded:

As the home of One Nation Conservatism since 1975, the TRG is committed to being radically moderate, values-driven, and focused on the future. Throughout the contest, we have sought to engage extensively with all the leadership campaigns in order to understand the views and approaches of the candidates. Unfortunately, we have been consistently disappointed by the lack of engagement from the two candidates chosen by MPs. 

TRG members were consulted throughout the process, and the results clearly show that neither candidate has secured widespread support from the majority of our membership. Both have used rhetoric and focused on issues which are far and away from the Party at its best, let alone the One Nation values we cherish and uphold. Therefore, the Board of the TRG has unanimously concluded that we are unable to endorse either candidate. ...

While the TRG will continue to advocate for those values as part of the Conservative family, we will do so by urging the final two candidates to recognise where the values of the British people lie, and to work for positive change rather than try to divide us. 

Look our for speculation - well founded or not - about moderate Conservative MPs joining the Liberal Democrats.

Roz Savage to table Climate and Nature Bill in the Commons

Roz Savage, the Liberal Democrat MP for South Cotswolds, has chosen the Climate and Nature Bill as her private member’s bill. She finished third in the recent ballot for these bills, meaning she has a realistic chance of getting legislation on to the statute book.

If passed, reports the Independent, the Bill would compel the government to adopt climate and nature targets, including "limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels".

Ministers would also have to draw up a strategy with yearly targets in a bid to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, halt oil and gas exploration and imports, and reverse nature decline so it is "visibly and measurably on the path to recovery.

The Independent report also quotes Roz:

"I’m really, really feeling that groundswell," Ms Savage ... told the PA news agency, adding she had already spoken with Labour MPs who have indicated their support.

"Every day really does count and it feels like since this Bill was first tabled, there’s been such a growing awareness of these twin crises of climate and nature that … its time has come.

"There’s such public demand, if my mailbag is anything at all to go by, I have had so much correspondence from people urging me to pick up the Climate and Nature Bill."

Similar bills were promoted in the last parliament by the former Green leader Caroline Lucas and the Labour MPs Olivia Blake and Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley), but none became law.

The Joy of Six 1276

Where do all those young right-wing media commentators spring from? Olly Haynes exposes the talent agencies funded by American fossil fuel billionaires.

Joe Ware on the campaign by Chris Packham and other celebrities who have challenged the Church Commissioners to rewild 30 per cent of their estate to "give British wildlife the salvation that it desperately needs".

Rebecca Jennings says that whether you want to be a published author or professional artist, you have to market yourself of social media: "Self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to 'build a platform'; we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream - working for yourself and making money doing what you love."

"Although the judge has no sympathy for Black Power, he can’t help to some extent at least to be won over by Darcus. The courtroom just erupts in laughter when Darcus and the judge are trading quips." The Mangrove Nine were black Londoners tried for protesting against police harassment in 1970. They were acquitted, marking the first acknowledgment of racial bias in the police. Now, reports Richard Sudan, a recording of Darcus Howe's closing remarks in his own defence has been found.

Pat Nevin remembers his hero Pele: "Then there was the lay-off for the fourth goal in the final, scored by the captain Carlos Alberto. The build-up is phenomenal, and then it comes to Pele. He doesn’t just pass it, it’s the languid way in which he knows exactly where his team-mate is and he just strokes the ball so comfortably."

"Fiction discourse is a wreck, and we can't look away." Chris Winkle and Oren Ashkenazi offer a glossary of bullshit writing terms.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Leonard Rossiter and at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester

There's no end in sight to the Guardian's commemoration of Leonard Rossiter's career. A 1969 interview with him by Terry Coleman from 1969 has appeared on the newspaper's website.

It was published after Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the play that made Rossiter's reputation arrived in the West End:

In a way he achieves some of his Hitler effects by taking his own nervous tenseness and exaggerating it into farce. The tense posturings of Hitler derive perhaps from the angular way Mr Rossiter holds his own arms, from the stiff clasping of his own hands. Hitler spends the evening on stage in a seething fuss which is mostly Hitler but part Rossiter.

And, says Coleman, the play went on at the Saville Theatre "where it succeeded a long run of Danny La Rue’s female impersonations." That must have been Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty, which I went to see as an eight-year-old.

I saw The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester in the spring of 1979. A review in The Stage (19 April 1979) reveals that the Phoenix was threatened with closure and there were fears it might be the last production put on there:

Nigel Bennett, grim-faced throughout, improves with success, as Ui. The gestures, the passionate outbursts, the deep gloom, and the unpredictability of the paranoid dic tator are evident. He misses the chance to ridicule the shabby gangster's early bids for power. ...

The entire open stage war trans formed into a vegetable market by designers. Peter Ling and Patsy Pearce. Slides succinctly outlining the Nazi rise to power intelligently anticipated that the younger generation could be unaware of its odious intricacies. But the extremes of menace and humour were not exploited sufficiently. 

Reviews in The Stage often turn out to have been surprisingly sniffy, but I still remember this production 45 years on.

Sausage company launches free rural bus service

We have our Headline of the Day - and a possible solution to the lack of public transport in the countryside - thanks to BBC News.

Manuela Perteghella, Stratford-upon-Avon and John Profumo

Liberal Democrat Voice is doing sterling work posting the maiden Commons speeches of all those new Lib Dem MPs. It's a particularly valuable feature if you write a satirical column about the party that purports to be the diary of an Edwardian peer from Rutland who has somehow survived into the 21st century.

One of the new MPs featured today is Manuela Perteghella from Stratford-on-Avon, who reminded the house:

Although I am proud to be the first female MP for Stratford-upon-Avon, I am not the first to bring Italian heritage to the role. That distinction belongs to another of my predecessors, John Profumo, who beat me to it - although I plan on a much quieter stay in the history books.

This gives me a chance to recommend Bringing the House Down, David Profumo's book about his parents - John Profumo and the actress Valerie Hobson.

Accounts of the Profumo Affair often suggest that John Profumo was a future prime minister whose political career was ended by scandal. But David makes it clear that his father was not a good minister and had done well to get as far as he had.

But John kept his sense of humour through it all. As Tim Adams' Guardian review of Bringing the House Down records:

He recounts a telling little story of wheeling his father into Edward Heath's memorial service not long before his death: 'It's the great and the good - and us,' Profumo senior noted.

Scottish Lib Dems question use of live facial recognition technology

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From Scottish Legal News:

The Scottish Liberal Democrats have filed 40 parliamentary questions on Police Scotland’s proposed use of live facial recognition in a bid to force the Scottish government to explain how the measures are compatible with equalities and civil liberties concerns.

The party’s justice spokesperson, Liam McArthur MSP, asked the questions after Police Scotland Chief Constable Jo Farrell vowed to utilise artificial intelligence technology and live facial recognition technology as part of the service’s forthcoming six-year strategy, despite police services south of the border facing legal challenges over their usage.

Campaigners have identified a series of problems with the technology, from the possibility of misuse to the propensity for errors, particularly in misidentifying ethnic minorities and women.

Liam McArthur has spoken to the website:

"I am concerned that decisions that dramatically reframe the relationship between the police and the public are being treated as an inevitable consequence of the march of technology.

"There needs to be a compelling need, an appropriate legal basis and a proper public debate before the police can consider moving forward with measures like this. That simply has not happened.

"If the Scottish government share these concerns, then they have been awfully quiet about it. Certainly they are concerns that the Justice Committee heard loudly and clearly in the previous session of parliament.

"Ministers and senior officers need to set out why these decisions are being taken and answer for the consequences."

Liberty has a page on police use of live facial recognition technology with links to numerous briefings and resources.