Santa's new sleigh delayed by snow and won't feature in tonight's Shrewsbury Christmas lights switch-on

Embed from Getty Images

Sad news from Shrewsbury, but at least the Shropshire Star wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Tracing the route of the Nottingham Suburban Railway

The Nottingham Suburban Railway opened in 1889 and had largely lost its passenger trains by 1916. These ceased altogether in 1931.

Goods workings continued until 1951 - the line's southern connection with the rest of the  system at Trent Lane had been lost to enemy bombing in 1941.

Though it was only three and a half miles long, the Nottingham Suburban railway involved some substantial engineering. In this video, Trekking Exploration goes to look for what remains.

The drone footage is good, and a word too for some excellent period photographs of the line.

The Joy of Six 1290

Linsey McGoey listened to Trump voters and suggests the Democrats will have to do the same if they are to win power again.

"The language of social justice - 'wokeness' if you will - is not about social justice at all but acts rather as an ideological glue binding together a section of the elite that want to keep climbing the ladder of privilege but don’t want to see themselves as part of the elite." Kenan Malik reads We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi.

Pam Jarvis fears many multi-academy trusts are putting copious amounts of public money into the pockets of non-teaching managers while giving the nation’s children less quality for more funding.

Alfie Steer asks if Caroline Lucas was really Britain's first Green MP: "One other former MP could plausibly claim this historic title: Cynog Dafis, Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire from 1992 to 2000. The reasons why reveal a unique, and largely forgotten moment in Welsh and British, political history."

"Despite there being no evidence to support their existence, ghosts have haunted humanity wherever they have settled across the planet. Every age and every culture has its own type of ghost and ghost stories, each shaped by its own peculiar context. And despite the rise of scientific thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries, the belief in unquiet spirits is still very much alive." Russell Moul on why we believe in ghosts.

"At St Mary de Castro ... the volunteer on duty is keen to assert that it is in a completely different league from the cathedral. Boasting elements of all eras of English architecture, from Norman to Gothic Revival, its highlight is the triple-arched Norman sedilia. It is really two churches in one, a collegiate and a parish church and thus has two naves." Iain Sharpe goes back to Leicester.

Huey Long: The Donald Trump of the 1930s?

I've long been fascinated by the figure of Huey Long. The Governor of Louisiana and a US Senator, he was a left-wing populist who was planning to run for President in the 1936 election when he was assassinated.

He had a short way with the state constitution, but - unlike those of Donald Trump - his policies did help the poor. The Democrats saw him as posing a threat to Roosevelt in the Presidential election.

This is the most balanced video about him I can find on YouTube.

Write a Guest Post for Liberal England

What should Lib Dem strategy be in this brave new world? Is there a policy you would like to see us adopt? Any heretical thoughts you want to confess?

You're welcome to share your ideas in a guest post for Liberal England. 

I'm happy to entertain a wide variety of views, but I'd hate you to spend your time writing something I wouldn't want to publish. So do get in touch first.

And, as you may have noticed, I'm happy to cover topics far beyond the Lib Dems and British politics.

These are the last ten guest posts on Liberal England:

• Councillors changing party: general election update - Augustus Carp
• The Lib Dems achieved a wide and remarkably deep success - Alex Folkes
• The Lib Dems must meet the challenge of the Greens in the new political landscape - Anselm Anon
• This blog is not suitable for kids - Laurence Warner
• The future’s bright, the future’s orange - Stuart Whomsley
• An Oasis reunion? Have we not suffered enough? - Stuart Whomsley
• The night the Walker Brothers played a Market Harborough club - Jo Colley
• An essay in identifying Englishness - Stuart Whomsley
• No sign of an end to defections in local government - Augustus Carp
• When Syd Barrett met Nick Drake - Rob Chapman

Five schoolboys were killed by a wartime mine on Swanage beach in 1955

Robert Key, who died last year, was the Conservative MP for Salisbury between 1983 and 2010. On 17 March 2010 he gave his last Commons speech, and it was one of the most remarkable ever given there.

It was on the second reading of the Gordon Brown government's Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill, which passed into law before the general election of that year.

Early in Key's speech, he said:

The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) referred to the question of far-off lands, saying that if mines exploded around our shores or in our country there would be immediate public outrage and very swift action indeed. Well, I can tell the House that that has happened in our land. I was there, and I want to pass on, for those who will be here long after I have gone, what happens in those circumstances.

And that is just what he did:

On Friday 13 May 1955, when I was 10 years old, I was on Swanage beach in Dorset with some 20 other children of about the same age. We were doing what children on a beach on a Friday afternoon in May do-building sandcastles, digging holes in the sand, making dams and so on. I was building my castle with a chap called Richard Dunstan: five of my friends were digging holes, and then one of them found a tin. He thought that it was Spam, or something really exotic-yes, Spam was exotic in 1955. He was wrestling to move it, because it was lodged between two rocks. He got out a shoehorn but could not break the tin open. The boys stood back, and were seen throwing things at it.

My friend and I got bored. We turned round. We had our backs to our friends, and were about the same distance from them as I am from you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, when there was a huge explosion. We were blown into the sea, and lived. Five of my friends died. Five British children were blown up by a British mine on a British beach, within my living memory, and the living memory of many other people. It was an extraordinary thing. It happened in the middle of the 1955 general election. The front page of the following day's edition of The Daily Telegraph carried a story with the headline, "4 Boys Die, One Missing in Explosion". Below that, smaller headlines stated, "Big Crater Torn in Beach" and "Wartime Mine Theory".

There was not much theory involved for the five who were killed, or for the two of us who were the luckiest people alive. I still think that I am the luckiest person alive in this House. Of course, my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Milton Keynes has deliberately put himself in harm's way, and I salute him for it, but I was there as a child and got tangled up in what happened by mistake. So what was the response in Britain when a mine exploded around our shores? Many years later, I was a Minister in the Department of National Heritage, and the Imperial War Museum was one of my responsibilities. One day, I asked the staff there whether they had any records of something happening on Swanage beach on 13 May 1955. A couple of weeks later, a large box arrived, full of all the documentation relating to that horrible event.

I have here in my hand copies of the Dorset police documents entitled "Report to Coroner Concerning Death". They detail how, on 13 May at about 4.20 pm, four boys were reported dead. I also have a copy of the report from the police constable who found them, but the strange thing is that the fifth boy was never found. Within a day or two, a plimsoll that he had been wearing was found. Another was found a few days later. That meant that the then Home Secretary had to issue a document giving authority to the coroner to investigate the matter. The coroner simply declared that there was no conclusion to reach other than that the fifth boy had been a victim of the same mine explosion.

In the inquest, the coroner called for evidence from the officer responsible for de-mining the beach, who had issued a class IIA certificate in January 1950. The officer said:

"I am convinced that this mine had been in the sea and from evidence of marine growth I consider the mine had been washed ashore.

What the boys were seen to have been doing was quite sufficient to have exploded the mine...As an expert I would have allowed boys to walk across the beach."

I have read the mine clearance officer's reports, and have with me a copy of the plan of the mines that were laid on Swanage beach in 1940. A clearance operation was undertaken in 1945, which was repeated in 1947 and again 1949. Eventually, a clearance certificate was issued on 17 February 1950. The documents reveal that 117 mines had been laid, of which five were lifted in clearance. They also show that, although there was some evidence of the existence of 54 others, the remaining 58 are still unaccounted for. That was what I found so horrendous when I discovered all this as a Minister of the Crown so many years later.

The coroner concluded his remarkable summing up-in those days, of course, everything was handwritten, and I have a copy of his notes-by saying:

"I think the bomb was in all probability washed ashore.

I do not think any blame can be attached to any living persons in this matter. The boys were all playing among the rocks in a perfectly normal way so far as"

the master in charge

"could see and I do not consider he has any reason to reproach himself, and after the explosion he could not have done more nor acted more resolutely than he did."

I certainly concur with that. He was my favourite master. He was my French master, and a remarkable and good man. I think that he must have been through hell ever since.

One can imagine how horrified the staff at the school were by what had happened. They, too, were remarkable in the way in which they handled the incident, the enormity of which was overwhelming. The headmaster, John Strange, who was a wonderful man, managed to hold the whole community together. The retired headmaster, the Rev. Chadwick, also played his part. The master who had been at the heart of the incident and who had been taking his charges on the beach was wonderful. 

The school could not have done more to look after the children, but the fact remained that the mine clearances had not been completed satisfactorily. The mine clearance officers had, in fact, refused a certificate of clearance on one occasion, but had been overruled.

In the final certificate of removal of dangerous military defence works, the officer concerned-who, ironically, was operating out of Southern Command in Salisbury in my constituency-stated:

"The whole area has been swept with a detector and those portions of the area which have been subject to disturbances have been explored thoroughly to the apparent depth of that disturbance".

Bulldozers were brought in, and the beach was removed down to the rock and put back again. The officer continued:

"Though no guarantee can be given the area may be considered safe except for the possibility of mines being washed up from other fields",

and that is what happened.

This is a horrendous story, and I repeat it to the House to point out that on the issue of mine clearance, whether it is cluster bombs, cluster munitions or mines of any kind, the impact is the same on a child of 10 at play, whether in Beirut or in Swanage. Personally, I would like to see the mystery of the missing mines of Swanage bay cleared up. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood), who also knows more about military matters than most of us, and who has first-hand experience in his military service, might be interested.

After the event, the coastguard swept the whole coast from St. Aldhelm's head right round past Poole harbour all the way to the Isle of Wight for any traces of that missing body. None were found. 

More significant now is the fact that we have the technology to detect those mines. I would like to see minehunters of the Sandown class or equivalent brought in, perhaps in training, to sweep Swanage beach and the coast right round Bournemouth. We have the evidence in the 1950 statements of the officer who did the clearance and also from the 1955 inquest that the bomb which killed those children had probably been swept inshore by a gale. There is an opportunity for the Ministry of Defence, in the course of training our Royal Navy operatives, to have another go. That would be an opportunity worth taking.

I support the Bill - of course I do, after what I have been through in my life. I still think I am the luckiest Member to be alive. It motivated me in my politics, and it motivated me to be interested in defence once I came to the House. I have done that for 27 years. 

I hope the lessons of Swanage beach will not be forgotten. I hope the Bill will be but one step on the road to realising that although war may have to be fought, we should always strive to do it honourably, morally, with integrity, and always and everywhere with the minimum impact on a civilian population that has not put itself in harm's way. That is my wish, and that is why I support the Bill.

I am blogging about this story today because I found an interview with Robert Key that he gave just after making the speech, in the folder of press cuttings I turned up the other day.

In it he gave some details of the boys' deaths which he didn't mention in the Commons (and which I shan't repeat here), and talked about the effect on him:

"I had just started making friends in my new school when the land mine went off. My mother came to see me, and my father prayed with the other parents, but I was desperately homesick and miserable. My back was badly injured. My friend was taking shrapnel out for years.

"We hated having to go back to the beach every Friday. The Army said they hadn't found any other mines. But we heard the explosions in our classroom, everyone went white. It was very stiff upper lip, pretending not to notice the spaces in the dormitory."

Reading the contemporary news reports of this tragedy and the inquest into it, I get the impression that the authorities seized too readily upon the explanation that the mine responsible had drifted ashore, because it meant that no one need be held responsible. That seems to be what Robert Key believed too.

Swanage was not the only tragedy involving wartime mines. A Sunday Mirror article from 28 June 1959 warned:

Death Hides in the Sands!

Killers, silent, corroded, rusty, lurk where the holiday families play this summer - on beaches and moors, in woods and fields.

The tides, or children with spades, will uncover-some 40 beach mines on Britain’s East and South Coasts. 

These are the deadliest of all, warns Lieutenant-Colonel N. Barker, who commands the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit at Horsham, Sussex. 

They can kill at 100 yards, And they have done frequently since World War II ended - fourteen years ago.

And the report goes on to remind readers:

Killers all - that, only recently, killed four men near Harrogate and five boys at Swanage, Dorset... and maimed six children in Yorkshire.

I now wonder if the danger of mines was something that every holidaying family was once aware of. Certainly, I can remember being told before a family caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967 that I shouldn't pick up anything metal I found on the shore. At the end of this post you can a public information film that was issued after the Swanage tragedy.

The five boys are remembered by a tablet on a building erected in their memory at what was Forres school, the prep school they attended. Forres later merged with another school and its buildings at Swanage are now occupied by a special school, which means the tablet is not generally open to public view.

So money is being raised to provide a more accessible memorial to the boys and one that is near the place where the tragedy took place.

Ed Davey hints that Jane Dodds should resign as leader of the Welsh Lib Dems

The language was coded, but Ed Davey appeared to call on Jane Dodds to stand down as leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats when he appeared on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg this morning' .

Dodds' position was called into question when criticism of her in a 2021 report on the way the Church of England dealt with an abusive bishop was given new prominence by the resignation of Justin Welby.

The Guardian reprints the relevant passage of the interview:

Asked about the case, Davey told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuennsberg show: “I’ve spoken to Jane about this. She has apologised, and she has had a incredible career looking after children, but I’ve made it clear I think she needs to think about her responsibility on this.”

Asked if that meant she should consider resigning, Davey said: “I think she does need to reflect on this very carefully. I accept that she has apologised, but this is such a serious issue, so I think she does need to think about what else she may need to do.”

Asked if this was “code for she should resign”, the Lib Dem leader added: “I want Jane to reflect on this. I have spoken to her. I’ve made my feelings really clear to her about what I think she should do, and I think she’s reflecting. I hope she does.”

You can watch the whole interview, which is mostly about social care, on the BBC iPlayer. It begins at 19:10 and the exchange about Jane Dodds is at 27:30.

Jane Dodds was found to have committed a "grave error of judgement" by the report into the Church's handling of allegations against the late Bishop of Chester, Hubert Whitsey.

So far the Welsh Lib Dems have continued to back Jane Dodds' leadership, but Nation Cymru was able to find critical voices from within the party.

Margery Allingham celebrates the London of 1965

Published in 1965, the year before she died, The Mind Readers was the last complete novel by Margery Allingham. And she, along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, was considered one of the for 'Queens of Crime' for detective fiction's golden age.

So whatever I expected when I opened The Mind Readers, it wasn't this celebration of the London of the Sixties::

The Great City of London was once more her splendid self; mysterious as ever but bursting with new life.

In the tightly packed clusters of villagers with the ancient names - Hackney, Holborn, Shoreditch, Putney, Paddington, Bow - new towns were rising into the yellow sky; the open spaces if fewer, were neater, the old houses were painted, the monuments clean. 

Best news of all, the people were regrown. The same savagely cheerful race, fresh mixed with more new blood than ever in its history, jostle together in costumes inspired by every romantic fashion known to television. While round its knees in a luxuriant crop the educated children shot up like the towers, full of the future.

It just goes to show you'll never know what you find when you open a second-hand book.

It's also a reminder that the golden age of detective fiction was still within touching distance when I was a teenager. Allingham was only 62 when she died, Agatha Christie, as we recently saw, lived to ponder the fate of Lord Lucan, and Ngaio Marsh wrote an episode of Crown Court.

Later. Shedunnit podcast has a good episode on Margery Allingham's career as a writer.

The Beautiful Game: Hollywood in Holloway

The Beautiful Game are a British rock band from London whose self-declared influences include The Jam, The Clash and Oasis. I came across them via a recent Chelsea Fancast podcast.

OK so we're talking dad rock here, but I like the song and Alexei Sayle once said something wise about not trying to please the imaginary cool people in your head.

Why isn't Steve Winwood more celebrated in Birmingham?

Embed from Getty Images

Jon Neale pays tribute to this blog hero Steve Winwood in the Birmingham newsletter The Dispatch...

Sometime in the mid-1960s, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell was staying overnight in Birmingham. He’d managed to turn teenage Jamaican singer Millie Small into a star with the single ‘My Boy Lollipop’ — the first ska track to go mainstream. She was filming for Thank Your Lucky Stars, the teatime pop show that preceded Top of The Pops, at the Alpha Studios in Aston.

Later that night, Blackwell was taken to see an early version of the band The Move, called Carl Wayne & the Vikings. Unimpressed with the group’s sharp suits, and polished, ‘showbiz’ performance, Blackwell headed to another venue: the Golden Eagle pub on Hill Street. He was warned that the band playing might not be to his taste, that they might be “a bit different.” This would be Blackwell’s introduction to a remarkable teenage prodigy, perhaps the greatest musical talent Birmingham has ever produced. It would be an encounter that would shape Britain’s music scene for the following decade.

As Blackwell climbed the Golden Eagle’s stairs, he heard a voice which could only be described as “Ray Charles on helium”. He was immediately absorbed by the “incredible” musicianship on display. “On this stage was this skinny white kid with floppy hair, about 16, the same age as Millie Small, playing guitar and sometimes amazing keyboards as well, like it was second nature… I’d never heard anything like it — white boys playing the blues like it meant the world to them,” he would later recall.

The skinny white kid in question was Stephen (Steve) Lawrence Winwood, of Atlantic Road, Kingstanding. He became one of the most celebrated musicians of the 1960s and 1970s: moving between the worlds of R&B, blues, psychedelia, jazz and folk — playing on albums such as Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland and Lou Reed’s Berlin. Winwood topped the charts with the Spencer Davis Group and defined the shape of the 1970s rock album with his band Traffic, before reinventing himself as a very different sort of pop star in the 1980s.

YouTube is a good place to appreciate how startling seeing the teenage Winwood must have been, in particular the clip of the Spencer Davis Group performing the song ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ It seems almost impossible that an 18-year-old is making that sound, especially while executing a virtuoso Hammond organ performance.  

...and then asks why he isn't more celebrated in is home city.

But what is equally remarkable, aside from his precocious musical talents, is how little Birmingham, his native city, remembers him. There is no Steve Winwood bridge or Traffic-related sculpture in Victoria Square. Asked in the street, older Brummies would probably mention a few other artists before getting to him. 

This indifference from Brummies might be understandable if Winwood had left early on to pursue fame in London. But his musical roots are entirely in the city, from Perry Barr choirboy to stoned hippie performing at Erdington’s legendary Mothers. Both his major bands were formed, and had their debut gigs, locally: featuring either Birmingham natives or those long-immersed in the city’s vibrant scene. And it’s not as if he is forgotten globally either: ‘Dear Mr Fantasy’ was heard by millions a few years ago at the start of the film Avengers Endgame.

One reason he comes up with is that heavy metal has come to be seen as the musical genre that defines Birmingham:

There’s something about Heavy Metal and Black Sabbath in particular — its working-class associations, its unsubtle sound, its honesty and directness and the disdain it used to generate among the cognoscenti — that appeals to a working-class, industrial city that always wants to make itself out to be rougher and tougher than it is, or was (see the TV shows Peaky Blinders and This Town). 

But Winwood represents another, underacknowledged and awkward, Birmingham: one that is softly spoken, self-effacing and self-deprecating, one that ploughs its furrow regardless of what the world thinks, constantly reinventing itself, with sometimes questionable results. In some ways, that’s a more honest identity. It’s time to celebrate that legacy and reclaim one of Britain’s finest musicians as our own.

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is on BBC 2 tomorrow evening

[Later. The film is now on the BBC iPlayer.]

Martin Scorsese's documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is being shown on BBC2 tomorrow evening at 10.

I saw it at the Phoenix in Leicester earlier this year and warmly recommend it to any lover of cinema.

The British Film Institute said this of it on release:

Martin Scorsese presents an impassioned and highly personal tribute to Powell and Pressburger’s work, richly illustrated with clips and rare archive material. It’s been said that had Martin Scorsese not become one of the world’s great filmmakers, he would still have been one of its greatest teachers of film history. 

This impassioned exploration of the films of two of his formative and most treasured inspirations follows the US filmmaker’s film essays on American and Italian cinema, delivering deeply personal reflections on what Powell and Pressburger’s work has meant to his life, alongside wonderfully illuminating analyses of the films themselves. 

Drawing richly from the BFI National Archive, as well as private material from Scorsese and the film’s editor (and Powell’s widow) Thelma Schoonmaker, David Hinton’s film is both an ideal introduction to Powell and Pressburger’s work, and the perfect complement to our recent Cinema Unbound: The Films of Powell + Pressburger season.

John Smyth, Mary Whitehouse and the Gay News blasphemy trial

The blurb on YouTube explains:

In 1977, Gay News, UK, was committed to trial at the Old Bailey for publication of a blasphemous poem, entitled "The Love That Dare Speak its Name" by James Kirkup, which featured a Roman centurion having sexual fantasies about Christ on the cross. Media morals campaigner, Mary Whitehouse, initiated the charge against Gay News for the publication of a blasphemous poem. The programme features re-enactments of the scenes in court as the trial progressed, as well as interviews with Mary Whitehouse and Gay News editor, Denis Lemon.

This dramatisation of the trial was formed an episode of Everyman, the BBC's religious documentary programme, which went out in a late slot on Sunday evenings between 1977 and 2000.

The prosecution counsel was John Smyth QC, who was Mary Whitehouse's favourite barrister but is now best known for posthumously bringing down an Archbishop of Canterbury.

In his piece on Justin Welby and John Smyth, David Aaronovich says of Smyth:

To me, what was clearly being repeatedly beaten and physically punished was his own repressed homosexuality.

It's hard to resist that conclusion, particularly if you add to the evidence this paragraph from p.33 of a Winchester College review of its part in the affair:

The third concern raised in 1978 was described by Euan MacAlpine in an email dated 28 January 2017, as part of the internal investigation conducted by the College. He stated that in 1978 he had confronted Smyth and accused him of inviting "only goodlooking boys" to his house. He stated that Smyth "curled into a ball and admitted he had gone too far". He said he was sitting in an armchair and then "slowly went into the foetal position, knees right up to his chest and arms holding them".

MacAlpine was a housemaster at Winchester, and I have heard him interviewed about this encounter. There he gave the impression that his tone was conversational, not confrontational, and he said he had first observed that it was good of Smyth to give up his time for the boys and that they obviously enjoyed the time they spent with him. Only then did he add the observation about Smyth only inviting good-looking boys, all of which makes Smyth's reaction seem more extreme.

Anyway, the documentary is now of historical interest, and it stands as a warning to those who seek to restore Mary Whitehouse's reputation.

Blakey off of On the Buses and radical theatre

In Kibworth the other day, I visited Daker Books and bought a second-hand copy of John Russell Taylor's Anger and After, a book about the British theatre in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

I think the Fifties were a more interesting decade than we now imagine - the centrality of live theatre to the culture being just one reason. 

As Sebastian Millbank pointed out in an article on The Critic, it's noteworthy that the modern left shows no affection for a decade that saw full employment, widespread union membership and rising wages.

When I got Anger and After home, I looked up one minor writer in the index and was directed to a pleasingly chunky passage:

Another improvisation along rather the same lines was Stephen Lewis's Sparrers Can't Sing, a lackadaisical picture of Stepney life revolving round the return from jail after nearly ten years of the paterfamilias to meet again the wife he hit with a poker. There was no plot to speak of, but the characters who wandered in and out, particularly the two old derelicts locked in deadly combat with the National Assistance, made pleasant enough company while they were around and lent a certain colour to the assertion by their ex-electrician's mate creator that "The world as seen through the bottom of a pint pot is much more entertaining than that usually seen through opera glasses, and less distorted." 

The play, after a not very successful transfer to the West End, became the basis of Joan Littlewood's first foray into the cinema; slightly retitled as Sparrows Can't Sing and almost completely reworked by Joan Littlewood and the author, it emerged as the story of a randy young sailor's return from the sea to find his pretty young wife living with a bus driver in a rebuilt East End of towering modern flats, most of the material about the old people, the National Assistance and so on having disappeared somewhere along the way. 

Subsequently Stephen Lewis has written Wagger, a subdued television piece in a very similar style about a crippled cobbler and the tentative beginnings of his romance with a girl who works in the baker's across the road, sat against a background of bitter family bickering.

Stephen Lewis could act as well as write. He appeared at Stratford East and the Royal Court, and his turn as the caretaker of a new block of flats who relishes all the regulations he has to enforce is one of the best things in Sparrows Can't Sing.

Anger and After was written before be became famous as Blakey in On the Buses.

We need to talk about "discombobulated"

‘Gimp play is a craft’: how a Canadian writer went from fetish sex work to creating powerful BBC drama

runs a headline on the Guardian website. And if it marks the birth of a way to a showbiz career that doesn't involve the Cambridge Footlights, then it's nothing but good news.

No, it's the first paragraph of the article below that worries me:

When the Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill moved to London in 2016, it was the week after the EU referendum. “For my partner at the time, who was British, it was a devastating kind of discombobulation,” Tannahill says.

Because you can't have "a devastating kind of discombobulation".

"Discombobulation" comes from "discombobulate", a word invented in the 19th century for comic effect. Dictionary.com explains:

Discombobulate “to confuse, upset, or frustrate” was originally a jocular American coinage from the North Midland U.S. (from Ohio west through Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, to Nebraska). Discombobulate is a pseudo-Latinism like absquatulate and confusticate, and based on learned Latin words like disaffiliate or disaggregate, or humorous alterations of discompose or discomfort. 

The many variant spellings include discombobligate, discombobolate, discomboberate, discombooberate, and discumboblificate. Discombobulate entered English in 1825 in the spelling discomboberated.

And for me the word maintains its slightly enforced jocularity. It's redolent, if not of red noses and outsize shoes, then at least of an uncle who can waggle his ears and wants to organise the children to play party games.

It's fine in letters between friends - not that friends write each other letters any more - and, if you must, on social media.

Simon Williams is one of those invaluable chess players who talks about games as he plays them and then posts the whole thing on YouTube (see also John Bartholomew and Daniel Naroditsky). If he succeeds in disrupting his opponent's smooth development in a game, he may remark that "White's queenside is discombobulated", and the word works in this informal context. But I have doubts about the use of "discombobulation" in a serious newspaper

And "a devastating kind of discombobulation" doesn't work at all. It's yoking together two words in completely different registers. All I see is a clown blowing his nose and miming exaggerated weeping.

The Joy of Six 1289

"Biden should have been managed off the stage in time for the party to have proper primaries, introducing a new generation of Democratic party politicians to the American public. Instead, the president clung on to the point where only Kamala Harris could realistically be the nominee. She was left having to campaign as a “change candidate”, trying to define herself as a new face while also defending her government’s record." Alistair Carmichael says the Democrats made one of the worst political mistakes in modern history.

Robert Saunders discusses the supposed role of the monarchy in times of political crisis: "In a democracy, the monarchy can only survive if it stands outside political contention. Yet that makes it a broken reed when it is the constitution itself that is in crisis. The logic of this situation is not that the monarch should be more politically active, but that we cannot rely on a ceremonial monarchy to protect the constitution from attack."

"If I say something is 'typical Boris Johnson', you have a mental picture. But what is 'typical Keir Starmer'? Worse, what is 'typical Jonathan Reynolds”' (He’s the Business Secretary, but you knew that.)" Robert Hutton on why itanto will take the satirists and sketchwriters time to get to grips with Labour.

Ella Creamer and Lucy Knight report on the glut of children's books written by celebrities and ask if the trend pushes aside genuine writers and makes it harder to find great children’s fiction.

Elizabeth Tingle introduces to Anthony Jenkinson, who was born in Market Harborough: "the records of his travels and his surviving letters comprise the first English descriptions of the lands and peoples of Muscovy and Tartary. With recent historical interest in travel, life writing, and perceptions of ‘other,’ the story of Jenkinson adds a Leicestershire and Rutland dimension to the processes of globalisation and empire that made the modern world."

"Now they’re almost gone, some of us have started to feel nostalgic for those wastelands. They were dangerous, mysterious and wide open. Those that remain, pending development, are invariably locked down tight, with heavy security and surveillance." Ray Newman cpnsiders love and death in the rubblescape.

Mitchell's Fold stone circle: Just in Shropshire and almost in Wales

Richard Vobes, the Bald Explorer, together with Harriet and her dachshund Lola, visit the Bronze Age Mitchell's Fold stone circle which is just in Shropshire and almost in Wales.

I've been to this circle myself, and remember its wonderful setting more than the stones. I do, though, recall lying down among them in the vain hope of falling asleep and having a prophetic dream.

The nearest village to Mitchell's Fold is Priest Weston, which is just in Shropshire and almost in Wales too. There the Miners Arms is one of those pubs were you used to find Ronnie Lane, who had a home and studio nearby, and his rock-star friends playing unannounced.

GUEST POST When Syd Barrett met Nick Drake

Rob Chapman on the genesis of his novel about Syd Barrett and Nick Drake - and what happened next.

My self-published novel, Unsung Unsaid : Syd and Nick in Absentia, emerged from what was initially a whimsical tweet:

Greatest music bio-pic never made. Nick Drake and Syd Barrett sitting in a café in the summer of 1974 discussing their final ill-fated attempts to make a record.

I realised very quickly that this was in a fact a brilliant idea and that I should turn it into a novel. With the 50th anniversary of these events fast approaching I had no doubt that publishers would engage in bidding wars to sign my book, with film or TV rights inevitably to follow. I hastily deleted the tweet in case some other bugger nicked it and set about my task. 

It turned out to be the easiest, quickest and most enjoyable book I have ever written. Based on a lifetime of enjoying the slim body of work produced by these two men the thoughts flowed out of me. Unfortunately, publishers did not beat a path to my door. The film offers did not arrive. 

It turned out that no one was remotely interested in taking my great idea further and so the greatest bio-pic never made remains never made. Undeterred I decided to publish it myself, a decision that seems to have been vindicated as it has sold getting on for 600 copies now and received several glowing Amazon reviews. 

I can’t account for why everyone turned it down. Publishing is in a very parlous state of late. I think it is advantageous to already be a well-established writer if you want to secure a book contract these days, or famous perhaps in another field entirely, a TV chef perhaps, or a comedian or chat show host who was reasonably funny several years ago. 

Or perhaps it was that spectre of the dreaded bio-pic that put publishers off. Where I saw potential perhaps they only saw cliché and caricature. Certainly, that’s that most bio-pics are. As much as anything else I suspect I was damned by other people’s low expectations. 

Having previously written a well-received biography of Syd Barrett, I am on fairly good terms with the Barrett Estate. I did once tentatively sound them out as to the potential for a Syd bio-pic. Rather than offering me the outright dismissal I was expecting, they made it clear that they remain open to the idea of a good one. “But we get sent scripts all the time” they warned. “And they are uniformly awful.” 

This I can well believe. I’ve seen a few myself, have even been sent a few. They are full of laughably wooden characterisation and clunky dialogue. Syd becomes a mere cipher for his songs and subsequent mental collapse. 

“Oh, look Syd, a scarecrow” someone will say. “That gives me an idea for a song” Syd will say, and a song called Scarecrow will magically appear. In the next scene Syd will go walking past a house late at night and see a cross dresser stealing women’s clothes from a washing line. 

This is the kind of vacuous reader insulting stuff I resisted at every turn while writing Unsung Unsaid. Instead, I tried to get inside the heads of the central characters, and give a multi-faceted view of their lives (both fictional and actual) to do in fact what most conventional biographies can’t or won’t do, not just because of the constraints of the form but because of the limits of the writer’s imagination too.  

This I realise now was a huge mistake on my part. I think I did too good a job of writing plausible believable protagonists. I won’t make that mistake again. Next time I’m going to write a novel about Freddie Mercury. In one scene he will get the rest of the band to stamp out the rhythm of We Will Rock You, the moment it spontaneously occurs to him. They of course will comply with choreographed perfection. 

Oh, no wait, sorry. I keep forgetting. It’s already been done hasn’t it? Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.

• You can order Unsung Unsaid : Syd and Nick in Absentia from Amazon UK.

Rob Chapman is a writer - see his website for more on his books and music journalism.

Continued on next monument: A tribute to Timothy West

Or, to be precise, a tribute to Timothy West and Bradley Hardacre.

There were three seasons of the Channel 4 comedy Brass in the early 1980s. It was written by two Coronation Street veterans, John Stevenson and Julian Roach, in the days when that soap contained some of the funniest writing on British television.

Brass was a parody of everything from Charles Dickens' Hard Times, via novels by the likes of A.J. Cronin and Francis Brett Young to the works of Catherine Cookson, which were everywhere at the time it was made.

An old Guardian article recommending the boxed set sums it up well:

Self-made man and owner of the village mine, mill and munitions factory, Bradley is the head of the Hardacre clan, which comprises his three sons, Bentley (deceased), Austin and Morris; as well as two daughters, Charlotte (passionate about doing good works and, says her father, "innocent to the point of simplicity") and Isabel, whose bedpost is more notch than wood. Then there's his wife, Lady Patience, a wheelchair-user ever since her terrible tambourine accident.

On the other side of the colliery tracks is the Fairchild family. George, its nominal head, worships the ground his employer Bradley treads him into, while his magnificently-cleavaged wife Agnes, so poor-but-proud that she irons her clothes before washing them, rails with fury at all life throws at her. 

They have two sons. One is hardworking Jack, who has inherited his mother's socialist leanings, but is periodically diverted from bringing down capitalism by his secret and exhausting life as Isabel's sex-monkey. ("I love him hopelessly! Passionately! Recklessly! Frequently.") 

The other is poetry-writing Matt, who is determined, once he has made the final payments on the family pencil, to go to Cambridge despite his love for Charlotte H ("Thou are more lovely and more interesting/Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May but that's quite another thing") and his good job – "a job wi' a stool!" - at the mine works.

The whole cast of Brass was great - I once saw Morris Hardacre playing Oscar Wilde in Terry Eagleton's Saint Oscar at the Leicester Haymarket - but its undoubted leader was Timothy West as Bradley Hardacre.

Let this tribute to his character serve as a tribute to the actor. Continued on next monument.

Vin, 92, turns his mobility scooter into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

The story soon disappears behind its paywall, but it was enough to win the Shropshire Star out Headline of the Day Award.

The judges were particularly impressed by the fact that Mr Wardman comes from Craven Arms and the video above.

Two questions raised by the John Smyth affair

The announcement that Justin Welby is to hand in his mitre was inevitable. I've formed the impression in recent years that his lack of candour and lack of action over the crimes of John Smyth have made it harder for the Church of England to act against abusers more generally.

I am left with two questions.

The first is to ask if there wasn't something unchristian about the practice of the Iwerne Trust (and of the Titus Trust that succeeded it) of holding camps only for boys from expensive public schools.

Their ambition was to change society by changing its future leaders. But their actions look like a parody of Christ, who included fishermen and a thief among his companions. 

Did they imagine there was a separate heaven for those who'd been to the same schools as them?

My second questions is why Evangelicals are so unhealthily keen on corporal punishment. They continued to fight the ban on it when even the teaching unions had given up:

John Friel, acting for the claimants, told Mr Justice Patrick Elias that the group "believe as part of their religious worship and part of their religious belief, that corporal punishment is part of their Christian doctrine".

Meanwhile, students of human nature will not be surprised to learn that Smyth was an admirer and confidant of Mary Whitehouse.

What did political parties do on polling day before 1945?

I once heard a story about polling day in the Brecon and Radnor by-election of 1985, which saw a gain for the Liberal Alliance candidate Richard Livsey.

A hirsute Young Liberal was telling on the day at a remote rural polling station when an old farmer arrived and challenged him.

"What are you doing? I always take the numbers for the Liberals."

It turned out that he had for years been coming here on polling day for an hour or two, taking voters' numbers and then going home with them.

This was a folk memory of political organisation. All that remained of it was the notion that taking voters' polling-card numbers somehow helped the Liberals.

After a while I began to doubt this story, however much I wanted it to be true. Because the Wikipedia article on Get out the vote says:

The traditional GOTV method used in the UK is the Reading system, developed by the Reading Constituency Labour Party and its MP Ian Mikardo for the 1945 general election. Once canvassing was performed to identify likely Labour voters, these were compiled onto 'Reading pads' or 'Mikardo sheets' featuring the names and addresses of supporters and pasted onto a large table or plank of wood. On election day these lists, with identical copies underneath, were torn off and given to GOTV campaigners.

That was certainly polling day as I knew it in the Liberal Party before personal computers came along. To Liberals, of course, Reading pads were 'Shuttleworths' - the SDP called them 'Cowley pads".

But did party workers sit round and do nothing on polling day before 1945? It sounds very unlikely.

As Michael Steed and Tony Greaves are no longer with us, I asked Mark Pack what he knew about the history of polling day operations. He replied:

The pre-1939 Woodings election manuals have a section on polling day, including 'fetching up voters' with instructions on crossing out names from cards etc. to record which supporters have voted so far. Not sure when 'fetchers-up' became 'knockers-up'.

I now suspect Ian Mikardo's contribution to polling day was harnessing the power of carbon paper to come up with better stationery.

So the moral is you shouldn't believe everything your read on Wikipedia. As for myself, I shall go on believing that story about Brecon and Radnor.

Hunting for Liberator Drive, Market Harborough

I had started to receive reports of a Liberator Drive on the new Farndon Fields estate here in Market Harborough. Google Street View wasn't much help: the road was on the map, but the houses were too reccent for Google's van to have been there. So I went to look for it.

And here it is, though any road that's called 'Drive' and points at open fields is unlikely to remain a dead end for long.

Here, while we're at it, is the website for Liberator magazine too.

The Farndon Fields estate is the sort of place you don't go to unless you know someone who lives there or you're delivering in a by-election. But I was impressed with it. The architecture is pleasant and the housing types varied, including some terraced houses.

I suppose the traditional architecture of the town is brick with a leavening of ironstone. You won't find that at Farndon Fields, but the houses don't feel out of place.

There are no shops there, and certainly no ghosts signs or repurposed tin tabernacles. But I did find an electricity substation.

I don't know how Liberator Drive got its name, but then the names of the new roads here seem a bit of a lucky dip: Charley Close, Summerhill Place, Bridgeroom Street. [Later. Mystery solved: the streets here, including Liberator Drive, are named after racehorses because of the race I mention below.]

One name does have an obvious derivation: Steeplechase Way. That's because in 1860 Farndon Field saw the first running of the National Hunt Chase Challenge Cup, a race that is still run each year as part of the Cheltenham Festival.

No doubt the ditch in my last photo is the result of drainage work carried out before the new houses were built, but I like to imagine that it predates them and is where a Victorian gentleman took a purler while leading the race.

Eric Portman proposes a murder in West 11

Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.

Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?

Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.

That's what I wrote when choosing West 11 as one of my 10 British films that should be better known. I should have mentioned that there's also a walk-on part for David Hemmings.

Here you can see Eric Portman first proposing the murder to Lynch. Portman did seedy wonderfully well later in his career.

The Joy of Six 1287

"Kemi maintained her attack on the machine. Everything was their fault. The previous Conservative government was entirely blameless. Especially her. In her own mind she was the saviour of the post office operatives. Though judging by the laughs from the back of the room, they don’t see it in quite the same way." John Crace says Kemi Badenoch was seen at her brittle, narcissistic worst while giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today.

Alwyn Turner tells a story that has dropped out of remembrance of the first world war: "On 19 July 1919 - declared by the government to be Peace Day - parades were staged all over the country to mark the signing of the Versailles Treaty, and at many of those parades there were demonstrations and protests. A banner in Glasgow sarcastically announced: '400,000 unemployed ex-servicemen. A grateful country will never forget you'."

Patrick Howse asks if Labour will restore the BBC to the national broadcaster we need it to be or believe it can benefit from a subservient corporation afraid to hold power to account.

"Many of the jokes, besides being hilarious, are jaw-dropping in their audacity. And there is sex, too: masses of it, sometimes erotic, sometimes shocking, but always - like the rest of the book – profoundly truthful. Fundamentally is certainly a wild ride, but besides being one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read in a long while, it will also leave you deeply moved and (incidentally) much better informed than you were before about one of the key political crises of our time." Jonathan Coe chooses five favourite recent political novels.

Hannah Long believes that Night of the Hunter is a Christmas film. Hear her: "This promise - that evil is powerful, but ultimately ridiculous and defeatable - carries us into the final hope of the last scene, set at Christmastime. It says, in the least sentimental way possible, that it’s possible to move beyond abuse."

"‘The Whiting’ is an absent-minded vicar so passionate about entomology that he forgets everything in pursuit of an elusive Wood White or a Purple Emperor. Then there’s old Smokoe Joe, a gruff charcoal-burner with a gargantuan nose who lives in the Chase; and the boys’ nemesis, the ponderous local bobby, Sergeant Bunting." Helena Drysdale celebrates Brendon Chase by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford).

Listen to Mike Martin on the new world disorder

Mike Martin, military expert, writer, former soldier and Liberal Democrat MP for Tunbridge Wells, is the guest on the latest edition of Arthur Snell's Behind the Lines podcast.

He talks about the international order under a second Trump Presidency, and also about the frantic weeks that all newly elected MPs face.

Cambridge could lose city centre cows if council cuts out-of-hours rescue service

This sad story wins the Guardian our Headline of the Day Award.