The Joy of Six 1532

About 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in employment, education or training – and the obstacles they face are bigger than ever. Sammy Gecsoyler talks to some who have been unemployed for a year or more about how they are coping.

Kitty Melrose interviews Nova Reid about the creeping spread of book censorship in the UK. Reid says: "Non-fiction books about racism written to help readers learn about the topic and explore approaches to reducing racial injustice are labelled 'racist' as the reason for their removal. By closing discussion of racial injustice, one perpetuates the systemic harms of racism. If injustice for one group is dismissed and ignored, it gives license for other social iniquities to be continued too."

"Years of criminal justice reform have left the state, several counties and towns, as well as the profit-driven private prison industry hungry to fill empty bed spaces or to explore new sources of revenue. Incarcerating and exploiting immigrants for ICE has proven to be an opportunistic and lucrative alternative." Greg Constantine takes us to the Oklahoma communities gutted by ICE.

Larue Leglise and James Scott Vandeventer look at the barriers facing community energy projects in the Outer Hebrides, including ageing turbines and an application process that favours large-scale projects.

Mathew Lyons reviews Nonesuch by Francis Spufford: "Childhood stories and myths suffuse the book: Nonesuch is steeped in Edwardiana, and not always charmingly so. Spufford's world takes the overlap between Nazism and the occult seriously, and the antecedents of both lay in the esotericism of the late-19th and early-20th century. The Edwardian imagination wasn’t all treasure-packed attics, cosy burrows and curious rabbit holes."

"Of all the medieval women I have researched and written about, Aethelflaed is by far my favorite." Susan Abernethy is an Aethelflaed, Lady of Mercia, stan.

Sighcology: The Snake Pit, Out of True and Nellie Bly

It's time to post another of the Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. It used to be called Changes, which must have saved a lot of typing.

You can watch Out of True for free on the British Film Institute Site, and The Snake Pit is not hard to find online.

The Snake Pit, Out of True and Nellie Bly

Olivia de Havilland is sitting on a bench in the sun. We hear a man asking her questions, de Havilland’s thoughts and then her replies. The camera pans a little, but we still don’t see the man. Suddenly a young woman is in shot, talking to her. Then we hear the voice of an older woman calling them both in.

They’re in an institution, but what kind? Seeing some open balconies with bars on the upper storeys, de Havilland decides it’s a zoo. Once inside, she fears it’s a prison. “How did I get here?” A kindly man tells her not to be afraid. She is reassured and explains she is a novelist, in the prison for one day and now it’s time for her to go home. The man asks what her name is and she finds she does not know. She’s in a mental hospital.

This is the opening of the 1948 Hollywood film The Snake Pit, which tells the story of de Havilland’s recovery thanks to the gentle psychotherapy of Dr Kik – her problems turn out to originate in early childhood trauma. How much of his reputation did Freud owe to Hollywood? His work suggested stories whose endings were as surprising and as neat as that of any detective story.

Dr Kik, it seems worth recording, was played by the British Jewish actor Leo Genn. Before the war he combined a stage and screen career with work as a barrister. His last forensic employment was investigating and prosecuting the war crimes committed at Belsen.

The ward from which patients can go home is Ward 1, but de Havilland falls foul of a nurse jealous of the attention the doctor pays her and finds herself dispatched to the most distant back ward of all, the snake pit of the title. There she is forced into a cold bath and then into a straitjacket. 

******

De Havilland is rescued by her kindly psychiatrist and eventually taken home by a model American husband, but this was not the first time such scenes had been laid before the American public. In 1887, Nellie Bly, an ambitious young freelancer, doorstepped the editor of the New York World.

He turned her ideas down, challenging her to investigate instead the notorious New York mental asylum Blackwell’s Island. Bly accepted, feigning mental illness convincingly enough to fool the doctors and have herself admitted. What she saw there was revealed in a series of articles for the World and then collected in a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House.

The articles created a sensation – this is from a paraphrase in a rival newspaper:

Weak, shivering women were plunged into baths of ice cold water, one after another in the same water until the fluid was so thick that it had to be changed. … The bath over, the helpless ones were thrust into their garments wet and so they shivered through the long night. Nurses swore at the patients and beat them. Complaint to the physicians had no other effect than to increase the beatings in number and ferocity until the poor creatures promise to tell the physicians no more.

Bly spoke to as many women as she could and found many were immigrants who didn't understand English and had been sent there in error. Others were just poor and thought they were going to a poorhouse, not an insane asylum. 

Nurses, she reported, administered "so much morphine and chloral that the patients are made crazy," and “attendants seem to find amusement and pleasure in exciting the violent patients to do their worst". The asylum was also hopelessly overcrowded: 400 inmates had to sleep on the floor each night, and 300 had to stand while they ate.

Bly’s investigation brought about reforms at the asylum and then its closure seven years later.

******

For a few years after the war, the British censors were more relaxed than their American counterparts, yet The Snake Pit was shown over here in butchered form. Out went the straitjackets and scenes of what was decreed inappropriate humour – there had been a campaign to ban the film altogether.

In 1951 a British response to The Snake Pit appeared, made by the Crown Film Unit and sponsored by the Ministry of Health as a training aid and to raise public awareness. Out of True told the story of a woman who attempted suicide after a nervous breakdown and of her recovery in a mental hospital.

This is no Freudian detective puzzle: it’s clear from the outset that the woman’s problems are an overcrowded flat and the pressures of running the household. She is played by Jane Hylton, a graduate of the Rank charm school and a little too genteel to convince in the role. Her husband, puzzled but sympathetic, is better and his mother, who is living with them, is no caricature. She senses that her presence is one of her daughter-in-law’s difficulties and takes herself off to live with another relative.

The tone is hopeful, though it’s admitted that not every patient gets better and goes home, and the stigma of being a mental patient is acknowledged. I suppose we should not be surprised that Hylton is given ECT on entry to the hospital without warning, anaesthetic or any mention of consent. Her husband does question the treatment, saying it has affected her memory, but he’s told this is normal and she will soon recover.

Out of True can be watched on the British Film Institute website without charge.

******

Nellie Bly stopped acting when she arrived at the asylum, but the staff assumed her normal behaviours were symptoms of insanity anyway. And if she had told them the truth, that she was there to research an article,  wouldn’t she have sounded just like Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit? The newspaper gave her 10 days as a patient before it informed the authorities of the deceit.

Rosenhan would have understood.

District council backs a parish council for Market Harborough

An extraordinary meeting of Harborough District Council has voted unanimously in favour of a parish council for Market Harborough, reports BBC News.

This vote, which took place on Monday, followed a public poll in which 86 per cent of those who voted supported the establishment of a new council. I was one of them.

The BBC report makes great play of the fact that only 24 per cent of those eligible cast a vote, but I wonder if this is such a bad figure for such a poll.

Given the possibility that Market Harborough will be governed from Glenfield in future – it would be Nottingham if Labour had its way – the existence of a forum where the town to debate and decide what it needs is vital.

Bobby Charlton and Arnie Sidebottom at Stamford Bridge

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Bobby Charlton played his last game for Manchester United at Stamford Bridge on 2 April 1973. Thanks to a rather flukey goal from Peter Osgood, Chelsea won 1-0.

You can see brief highlights and Charlton's exit in the video below, but first take a look at the photo above. Who is the United player looking on as Charlton plays the ball?

It's Arnie Sidebottom, who was to play one cricket test for England 12 years later. His son Ryan played many more.

Arnie Sidebottom, a centre back, played 16 games for United before joining Huddersfield Town and then Halifax Town.

Brechtian television: Leo McKern in Galileo (1964)

"Has anyone ever produced Brechtian television?" I asked when writing about The Exorcism.

To an extent, they have. Because here are the first eight minutes of a 1964 television production of Brecht's play Galileo, and it begins with a shot of the cast arriving with a microphone boom and its operator purposely in shot.

This production was shown on BBC1 on Wednesday 29 April 1964 and the translation of the play is by Charles Laughton.

It's a shame that only this short section of this production is to be found online, because Leo McKern's performance looks very promising.

The boy is Fergus McClelland, who had starred in Alexander Mackendrick's film Sammy Going South the year before.

New chair of North Northamptonshire Council stands down over social media posts

Another triumph for Reform UK's vetting of its candidates. NN Journal reports:

The Reform UK chairman of North Northamptonshire Council has today stood down in response to an NN Journal investigation into his social media activity.

Cllr Maurice Eglin, who was appointed as chairman last month, has resigned this morning ahead of our investigation being published, saying he had in the past been guilty of being a "keyboard warrior". He has also apologised for his posts and said the language he used was "wrong".

We had uncovered a series of offensive tweets which include Islamphobia, support for far right groups and anti-trans views. The tweets predate his election as a councillor last May and are from an account that he shut down shortly before being elected.

The Joy of Six 1531

A network of Russian far-right extremists steeped in neo-Nazi antisemitism – created under the umbrella of a sanctioned oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, and now openly promoted by Tommy Robinson – has been driving White Lives Matter propaganda over the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, reports Nafeez Ahmed.

"In a decisive summer for government, you can view the 'doubling' agenda as microcosm of the wider story. Some big decisions have been made and some vital groundwork put in place. Ministers now need to build on this with bolder, faster action if the impact is to be visible by the next election." James Wright on the government's commitment to doubling the size of the co-operative and mutual sector.

Alex Marshall is keeping an eye on the new Green administration in Waltham Forest.

Eli Davies questions a culinary shibboleth: "The idea that we should sit down for three meals at roughly the same time every day has become such an essential part of how we organise our lives – even when we’re failing to do it – that we forget it isn’t the natural order of things. Instead, it is a regime that was created not to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, however much we may have managed to adapt it for these purposes – but to fit in with a day of labour."

"The police are on the trail throughout. Led by a grimly invigilating inspector they seem an odd bunch, varying from the para-military – pistols and rifles firmly clasped – to the quaintly Victorian, with constables wrapped in immense belted gaberdines and sporting cloche style helmets. A reminder, if any were needed, that Northern Ireland was a decidedly different part of the UK." Simon Matthews celebrates Carol Reed's 1947 film Odd Man Out.

Chris Dyson explores the streets and alleyways of Hull's historic Old Town.

Child mannequin found on train with can of cider

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day award with the tale from the West Somerset Railway.

The judges have declined to sign petitions calling for the banning of cider and trains.

Martin Wainwright's Guardian obituary of Michael Meadowcroft

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Michael Meadowcroft, who wrote so many obituaries himself, is remembered in the Guardian by Martin Wainwright, the son of a fellow Yorkshire Liberal MP:

Michael Meadowcroft, who has died aged 84 after a short illness, was a Yorkshire Liberal politician and activist of great resource and flair. He constantly wrong-footed Labour in its former heartlands in Leeds as a nimble source of new ideas, closely in touch with voters and patient at working with them to get local problems solved.

He served as a Liberal party member of Leeds city council from 1968 to 1983, and then as an MP for Leeds West for four years.

Meadowcroft was famously the only MP in the city’s history who led a weekend jazz ensemble in the main shopping precinct, pausing between numbers to discuss political issues with passers-by.

Exuberantly self-confident, he was a natural challenger with less interest in becoming part of any status quo. But he was steeped in Liberal philosophy as well as being a rigorous organiser, central to the party’s adoption of "community politics" during its resurgence under the charismatic leadership of Jo Grimond in the 1960s.

Chris Isaak: Wicked Game

This was released as a single in 1989 but did not become a hit until it was featured in David Lynch's film Wild at Heart the following year.

Lib Dem Rutland plans cycle-path from Oakham to Rutland Water

Rutland County Council is consulting residents on plans for a new cycling route connecting Oakham town centre with Rutland Water..

The council, which is run by a minority Liberal Democrat administration, says the scheme would improve accessibility for residents and visitors, support tourism and local businesses, and reduce reliance on cars.

Oliver Hemsley, the council's portfolio holder for environment and transport, told BBC News:

Rutland Water is one of the county's most valued destinations for both residents and visitors, and these proposals are about making it easier and safer for people to travel there by bike or on foot.

There's more information on the council's website. 

Lord Bonkers has asked me to point out that the chances of being devoured by the Rutland Water Monster while visiting have been greatly exaggerated by an irresponsible media.

The pine martens of Shropshire

Here's Quentin Shaw writing in the London Review of Books in November 2022:

In September a camera trap monitoring hedgehogs in Kingston upon Thames caught an astonishing snap of a pine marten, the most elusive of English mammals. 

There had been no confirmed sightings in England for a century until July 2015 when a naturalist in Shropshire took a photo. There, gambolling in broad daylight, was an animal from the wishful world of cryptozoology, a fantastic beast, previously no more substantial than a plesiosaur in Loch Ness or a big cat in Surrey.

There had been fleeting hints: a strange animal in the headlights on the A49, something scampering in the trees while a forester ate their sandwiches, but hard evidence was always lacking. Volunteers had cycled around country lanes scraping up roadkill and deep-freezing the flat carcasses for later identification, only to find that they were all polecats or mink. People had sniffed and handled strange scat, which turned out to be from foxes and badgers. 

But now we knew there was at least one marten out there in Shropshire. A massive ongoing programme of camera traps has since revealed about a dozen more. Once in a thousand video clips there is a fleeting glimpse, usually of a marten already half out of shot before the camera triggered.

You can see a Shropshire pine marten in the video above, which is from the Shropshire Wildlife Trust site.

There you will also find discussion of the county's population of these rate animals:

Pine martens are a native species to England, but over-hunting saw them disappear in the country and the British population became restricted to the Highlands of Scotland. The last confirmed record of a pine marten in Shropshire was verified in 1894 (The Flora and Fauna of Shropshire). Anecdotal evidence suggested that a few may have clung on and other martens may occasionally have passed into Shropshire from a small relict population in Wales.

It is possible that escaped martens from private collections and illegally translocated animals could have also settled in Shropshire. Being a species that likes to roam over large distances, there is also potential for marten populations to spread from official release sites in Wales into Shropshire and surrounding counties too.

With work to provide pine martens good quality woodland, with improved connectivity, the future is looking bright for the species in Shropshire and it appears that now are now firmly established in the remotest corners of the county. But that is only possible if we work hard to protect them and create more space for nature overall.

Another site mentions Clunton and Lurkenhope, near Knighton, as places where pine martens have been seen. But how did one get to Kingston upon Thames?

The Joy of Six 1530

"The big red 'stop nudes' button is appealing because it’s a lot easier than investing in proper services to protect children and in the kind of education that will help them grow up in the world as it exists rather than the sterile bubble of Starmer's imagination. Bad actors will circumvent these measures while ordinary people's privacy is undermined, and health information and even art is censored. The design choices that have led to this environment are the same choices that the government courts when it tries to partner with these tech companies." Mic Wright looks at the media's uncritical coverage of government plans to prevent children viewing or sharing nude images online.

Claire Jones analyses the creeping misogyny of Reform's agenda: "To enshrine women’s demotion to second class citizens, Reform has pledged to drop the 2010 Equalities Act which provides legal recourse for maternity leave, sexual assault, domestic abuse and employment discrimination. Reform also plans to ditch the ECHR thus thwarting it’s use by women as another court of appeal. You can hear the sound of doors closing."

David Eddy asks who is protecting our drinking water as an energy company seeks permission to drill through the chalk aquifer beneath the Yorkshire Wolds in search of gas.

"You may heard that if you’re under 25, your brain isn’t fully developed yet. It's an adage supposing that individuals under 25 can’t think things through or make rational decisions, and so are less responsible than older folk. This logic has now formed the basis of official government advice, sentencing, and more. The only problem with this fact is... it’s not a fact. Never has been. No matter how many TikTokers insist otherwise." Dean Burnett takes aim at a scientific myth.

Oliver Bray has been to an exhibition at the Dickens Museum in London: "It reframes Dickens not only through the women he knew, but through the theatrical culture they collectively inhabited. Stepping outside, I felt his familiar voice linger, now joined by the sense that the women behind the scenes were finally stepping into the light – something the dramatist in Dickens might have appreciated." 

"On one level, this is a song about a man who, losing his mother, seeks to make his lover a surrogate maternal figure. On a larger level, it is about the need to find an escape, a haven, from the brutal realities of life. But it must be mentioned that this is a song about the power and necessity of movies... that was written for a movie." Another Paul on That's Why God Made the Movies, one of my favourite Paul Simon songs.

Arriving at one of East Finchley's ghost platforms

Geoff Marshall is our guide to the charms of East Finchley station before he contrives to arrive at one of a pair of little-used platforms there.

In which D.H. Lawrence visits Snailbeach

On Friday we saw D.H. Lawrence getting all Lawrentian about the Stiperstones: "It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers."

But when did he visit the area? The answer's in the video clip above: January 1924.

A paper by Lawrence Jones and Paul Simpson-Housley tells us something about Lawrence and Frederick Carter got up too:

They enjoyed a winter's walk together, which they began by climbing Cad's Hill. Later they crossed a narrow gauge railway and ascended the Stiperstones. The tiny Lord's Hill Chapel, located at the edge of the moors, and the works and smoke of Snailbeach came within their view. They then climbed Cranberry to the crest of the Stiperstones, at the southern end of which is located the Devil's Chair, an area of scattered rock.

Lead mining had ceased at Snailbeach by 1924, but the upper levels of the mine and the spoil heaps were being worked for barytes. Colonel Stephens had recently bought Snailbeach District Railways. Most of the line's traffic came from a quarry halfway along the line, but it was still open all the way to Snailbeach mine because that's where its locomotive shed was.

I've not read St Mawr, but Jones and Simpson-Housley say Lawrence combined the Stiperstones and the Wrekin to produce a symbolic landscape with a Devil's Chair and an Angel's Chair, the latter based on Heaven's Gate on the Wrekin.

So D.H. Lawrence visited Snailbeach. I'm sure Mary Webb did too, but did any other notable writers?

Lib Dem energy guarantee would cut prices for all households

BBC News reports today's announcement by Daisy Cooper of new Liberal Democrat proposals for reducing consumer energy prices:

Under the scheme every household would receive an "Essential Energy Allowance", which would provide "enough to get by" and be charged at a discounted price.

There would be an extra allowance for families with more children.

Households that need more help, such as those on the lowest incomes, or with extra needs such as charging an electric wheelchair or a home ventilator, would receive a "discount on all their energy".

Cooper said her party estimated it would mean a saving of £100 a year on average for every household, with the poorest 20 per cent of families saving an average of £140 a year. Those in the most need would see the biggest benefits.

She said the plan would lead to longer-term savings for the state as the cost to the NHS alone of dealing with the consequences of people living in cold and draughty houses was £1bn a year.

It would be funded by the Liberal Democrats ordering the energy regulator Ofgem to "claw back" an estimated £5bn in extra profits they believe energy firms will make by 2028.

Cooper said domestic energy suppliers "operate as total monopolies" and her party believed the regulator should "force energy companies to pay back" what she said were windfall profits and not the product of investments they had made.

The Liberal Democrats also want families on low incomes to be able to insulate their home and install heat pumps for free.

They want to remove green levies on household energy bills and instead have a targeted windfall tax on banks, and to "break the link" between electricity and gas prices and invest in more renewable generation.

The party says these measures together with the new "Energy Guarantee" could save £900 a year from average bills by 2035.

You can watch and read the announcement on the party website, but I have a feeling that a few bullet points and a short interview with Daisy recorded on someone's phone would be of more use to activists.

Still, it's all good stuff and I'm pleased to see a bit of Liberal populism – consumers vs Big Energy – being promoted. 

Green and Lib Dem Southwark brings government closer to voters

Community councils, which last operated in Southwark in 2016, are to be restored by the Green and Liberal Democrat coalition that took control of the borough from Labour at last month's elections.

Victor Chamberlain is the Lib Dem deputy leader of the council and holder of the neighbourhoods, strategic planning and wellbeing portfolio. He told Southwark News:

"This is something that both parties are very passionate about and making sure that we are supporting and empowering our diverse communities.

"That’s best done by bringing the council back into their neighbourhoods and making sure the council is visible and responding to different challenges.

"We have different challenges but by looking at those issues at a community level, we can create change in a more effective way and spend money more efficiently than presuming that everything is the same, which the previous administration did by being so top down and having everything run from this glass Town Hall on Tooley Street.

"But actually if we talk to communities, if we empower them again, we’ll be able to deliver better change and more long-term change for the communities."

Bringing councils closer to the people is an authentically Liberal agenda. Labour by contrast, has embarked on another round of centralisation in local government.

The mysterious mole men of New York caught on video

Adam Gabbatt reports from New York for the Guardian:

The first sewer episode happened on 5 May, at 2am. Three people, wearing hip waders and carrying flashlights, walked to a manhole cover in the middle of the road, hauled the circular cover aside, and clambered down into the darkness.

That was that, until Thursday 28 May, when a group of people shifted a manhole cover and climbed into the sewer in south Brooklyn. Hours after that, a group of people lowered themselves into a sewer hole in north Brooklyn.

"I could tell they were up to no good," Aki Jakupovic, who witnessed the first event, told NBC New York. "They went in there, closed the cover, like, you know, they were never here."

He added: "Three random guys walking around in a strange suit. Open the sewer, [and] go in like the Ninja Turtles."

 He goes on to quote an email from the city's department of environmental protection:

"Sewers can contain numerous hazards, including noxious and potentially deadly gases, unstable surfaces, flooding risks, and confined spaces. For these reasons, members of the public should never enter a pipe, drain, catch basin, manhole, or outfall."

No mention of the alligators that are rumoured to live down there, you note.

Whatever these modern ninjas are up to, they are not alone down there. Gabbatt tells us:

The sociologist Terry Williams spent two decades visiting people who live in tunnels, hidden passageways and abandoned railroads, documenting their lives in the 2024 book Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York.

And New York isn’t the only place with a track record of people seeking refuge underground. Hundreds of people live in tunnels beneath Las Vegas, in passageways designed as storm drains to manage flash floods. Last year, Greater Good Charities, a non-profit, estimated that 1,500 people live in 600 miles of tunnels and culverts under the city.

But how many people are there living beneath London?

The Joy of Six 1529

Chris Dillow on Labour's mistaken strategy: "All good businesspeople know that it’s easier to keep a customer than to win a new one; that you can’t always choose your customers; and that one must never 'do a Ratner' and insult your customers. In ignoring all this Labour has been simply grossly amateurish.

Keyvan Hosseini and Dawn-Marie Walker say their research shows that the electric SUV boom is a problem for climate, health and equity: "Larger vehicles can also make streets more dangerous, especially for children. A study using Great Britain crash data found that children aged 0-18 hit by SUVs, rather than passenger cars, had 77 per cent higher odds of fatal injury. For children under nine, the odds were more than three times higher."

"Too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning." David Didau argues that systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better.

"Boudicca and co surprised the Reserve staff by digging canals. Because there are plenty of trees on the edge of the lake, the presumption had been that they would not require canals. The beavers knew otherwise, and the ditches are altering the way water flows around the site. They’ve built two lodges and, as well as stripping bark and eating foliage, have begun to fell some larger trees. In one area, they have cut down most of the young saplings." Isabella Clarke reports on the remarkable success of the Nene Valley beavers.

Discontinued Notes has been to Somerset House to see the the M.C. Escher exhibition.

"The Station Hotel, the original home of the Crawdaddy Club where the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds played some of their earliest gigs, is now a gastro-pub. L'Auberge, the coffee bar at the bottom of Richmond Hill where beatniks and then hippies gathered to trade gossip and other substances, has become a branch of Nando’s. A little further up the hill, there is no trace of Sandover Hall (another early venue for the Stones), Potter’s Music Shop, or the Hanging Lamp, one of the key sixties folk clubs." David Buckingham goes in search of the South West London venues that fostered British rhythm and blues.

Blondie: Sunday Girl

Here's something I didn't know: this chart-topping Blondie single from 1978 is an elegy to a lost cat.

Sunday Girl was written by the band's guitarist Chris Stein about Debbie Harry's lost cat Sunday Man. He once told Jools Holland:

"The cat ran away and we were very sad. It was just a sort of plaintive, evocative number."

This is not the first such record to feature here on a Sunday. Henry Gross wrote Shannon about the death of a red setter that belonged to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

Knaptoft: The very heart of England

The passage below is from W.G. Hoskins' Midland England. Published as part of Batsford's The Face of Britain series, that book captures the charm of this part of the world better than any other I know:

There is, for example, the green deserted country around Knaptoft in the south of Leicestershire, where the pastures of central England hardly touch five hundred feet above the sea and yet they are the watershed between Trent and Severn; and streams gather here that end in the Humber, the Wash and the Bristol Channel.

This, more than anywhere, is the very heart of England: Knaptoft, with its ruined church, its font under the trees, its village under the sheep-pastures since Henry VII's time, its medieval manor house marked only by a rectangular island within a drying moat, and the later Elizabethan hall itself falling into slow ruin at the top of the field.

Once full of life, a thriving village of plough-land and meadow in the thirteenth century, the squire within his moat and the parson in the newly built church, now it dreams its life away in the autumn sunshine, deserted by all save occasional blackberry-pickers.

Remembering Liz Truss and her dogs that barked at drones

A news story on the Shropshire Live website has put me in mind of one of Liz Truss's early triumphs in the House of Commons.

That story begins:

Police are reminding the public that drones are forbidden in the airspace over HMP Stoke Heath and surrounding villages. 

The prison is a men’s prison and young offender institution on the outskirts of Market Drayton, and there are currently robust plans in place to respond to sightings of drones and any suspicious activity near to the prison. 

Drones are often used to drop illegal contraband into prisons, contributing to issues within the facility and Organised Crime Groups outside.

Lib Dems are reviewing policy and strategy says PoliticsHome

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The Liberal Democrats are undergoing an overhaul of strategy and policy, "with key areas of discussion including the economy, welfare, and, as the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum approaches, a bolder stance on the European Union", reports PoliticsHome.

Unusually for such articles, which generally rely on anonymous senior Lib Dems and party strategists, this one by Matilda Martin and Zoe Crowther has quotations from named MPs.

One is Tom Gordon from Harrogate and Knaresborough:

Lib Dem MP Tom Gordon said that while the results last month were generally positive for his party, losses in the North that weren’t seen during the coalition years rang “alarm bells” for him.

For Gordon, the results were a "warning sign" that the Lib Dems have been operating in "a very cautious way" so far.

"I don't think it was necessarily the wrong approach, but just given the nature and the timeline of where we're at in this parliament and the political events and that fragmentation, I think there is now a rethinking of what we do, what we offer, how we're more punchy, how we're bolder, and what the offer from us is."

And the other is Layla Moran from Oxford West and Abingdon:

"There's definitely a frustration that it feels like we've been talking about the same things – social care and rivers – and that just felt like we weren't really moving forward.

"So us evolving the position and being quite mindful about how we do that now is really important.”

Daisy Cooper also spoke to them on the record.

The authors found a broad consensus too that how Lib Dem policies are then communicated to the public is key, with multiple sources telling them that the party is growing its social media teams in a bid to boost its digital operation.

Layla Moran said told them the party needs to be better at selling Moran admitted that the party needs to be better at selling policy:

"That’s not just Ed – it's all of us. We all need to get literate on social media; we all need to make this sexy again. We all need to understand how to sell this stuff in 30 seconds."

The media rarely do us any favours, but there is a worrying sense that the Lib Dems' concentration on so few policies has left us, despite our 72 MPs, somehow irrelevant to the national political conversation. If we could write our own headlines, what would they be?

And, when both Labour and the Conservatives are both so unpopular with voters, it is a worry that our performance in opinion polls is so static. So such a review is certainly needed. What will it come up with?

Northern Ireland debates the future of its railways in 1957

From YouTube:

The first documentary produced by the BBC Film Unit in Northern Ireland looks at the problems the railways are facing in NI. Can anything be done to arrest the decline of the permanent way in the face of rising competition from road traffic? Indeed, should anything be done?

Something was done: they were largely closed down, particularly in Nationalist areas. 

"The old savage England": D.H. Lawrence visits the Stiperstones

From St Mawr by D.H. Lawrence, published in 1925:

They came at last, trotting in file along a narrow track between heather, along the saddle of the hill, to where the knot of pale granite suddenly cropped out. It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England, whose last blood still flows in a few Englishmen, Welshmen, Cornishmen. The rocks, whitish with weather of all the ages, jutted against the blue August sky, heavy with age-moulded roundnesses.

Lewis stayed below with the horses, the party scrambled rather awkwardly, in their riding boots, up the foot-worn boulders. At length they stood in the place called the Chair, looking west, west towards Wales, that rolled in golden folds upwards. It was neither impressive nor a very picturesque landscape: the hollow valley with farms, and the rather bare upheaval of hills, slopes with corn and moor and pasture, rising like a barricade, seemingly high, slantingly. Yet it had a strange effect on the imagination.

The Joy of Six 1528

Tom Williams reports from Southampton: "The demonstration descended into rioting as protesters clashed with police. Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. They marched to Belmont Road, where Nowak was killed. Riot police prevented them reaching Digwa’s family home."

"I had expected to meet a former MP with the usual recollections and political anecdotes. What I encountered instead was something rarer: a political thinker who remained genuinely concerned with ideas, and who was determined to dispel the myths that had accumulated around Liberal history like barnacles on a ship's hull." Andrew Page pays tribute to Michael Meadowcroft.

Matthew Pennell analyses last month's local election results and looks forward to future conquests: "What are the key battlegrounds in England? In 2027 we’ll see if we can build on long term gains in North Yorkshire and East Riding, whether we can retake Bedford and if there’s a chance of completing jigsaw in the far West of England by flipping the status of Herefordshire."

Ellie Davies talks to three Bristol academics about the impact that villages – both literal and metaphorical – have on our health and happiness.

"She wanted to do all that men could do, painting nudes at a time when female art students weren’t allowed to do so. She treated her subjects with seriousness and commitment, but also with enormous sensuous energy and a feel for the pleasures of looking, whether it’s the naked women on Cornish beaches, the garish clowns in her 1930s circus pictures, or even the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force commanders of the 1940s, surrounded by the meticulously rendered paraphernalia of their working lives." Lara Feigel salutes the continuing relevance of Laura Knight.

"There is an unavoidable ethical dimension to all this: though Payne’s deeply-considered and expert work on the sketches was clearly much more than the 'tinkering' Elgar was worried about, we have to acknowledge that the composer’s wish needs to be more-or-less disregarded if we are to perform or listen to the completed work." Jeremy Benson on Elgar's unfinished third symphony.

The Disneyfication of Hayley Mills

By definition, a child star is a temporary phenomenon; and making the transition to adult roles is rarely straightforward.

So writes David Buckingham in an article on Hayley Mills. He discusses the way the films that she made for Disney in the US failed to recognise the social changes of the Sixties, which were by then underway.

And his conclusion could apply to many more successful child actors:

The contrast between Mills’s experiences in low-budget British films and in the Disney Studios must have made this transition more difficult than it might otherwise have been. Tiger Bay and Whistle Down the Wind offer very different representations of childhood from the Disney version – and very different opportunities for Mills as an actor. 

Of course, the production context of Disney Studios was (and still is) very different from that of independently produced British cinema, in all sorts of obvious ways. Yet in these two British films, there is an element of genuine spontaneity in her performances.

It was this spontaneity that Disney clearly noticed, and yet in taking it and using it, he transformed it into something merely cute. Mills later credited her time at Disney for giving her the opportunity to "learn her craft"; but in fact it was a particular kind of craft she was learning – and one that did not easily transfer to more mature, adult roles. 

In her Disney films, it is as though Mills is self-consciously acting the part of a child, and doing so in quite narrowly defined terms. When she could no longer do this, there was really nowhere for her to go. In this sense, Hayley Mills was "Disneyfied", in a way that did not ultimately serve her very well.

Hodge and his Masters and The Choirmaster's Burial

Looking again at Gillian Avery's Victorian People, I find she quotes one of this blog's heroes:

Richard Jefferies in Hodge and his Masters spoke of some of the changes that had come about with an energetic new vicar. His predecessor had been a man of whom it was said, "he was a very good sort of man: he never interfered with anybody or anything," 

The new vicar introduced a choir, doing away with the old motley collection of village instrumentalists. He brought colours into the hangings and decoration of the church, and put flowers and candlesticks on the altar. He held early morning celebrations of communion, he left the church open all day for private prayer. He reminded the people of Lent and Easter, festivals and saints' days, and emphasised the importance of the communion service. He saw to it that the district was visited, that no cottage was left neglected. 

All this was an immense change from the days when gentry dozed peacefully in high boxes-in pews while the preacher in black gown and white bands thumped the red velvet cushion in his pulpit during the lengthy course of his forty-minute sermon, which with the Litany and the Psalms formed the main part of Sunday worship.

I'm left wondering how much of an influence Jefferies was on Thomas Hardy, because here we are very much in the world of Hardy's poem The Choirmaster's Burial - an earnest, reforming new clergyman sweeps away the old ways.

You can read the poem on Hello Poetry and listen Benjamin Britten's setting of it below.