Call for the Rutland Water Monster to be displayed in Oakham

More than 2000 people have signed a petition calling on Rutland County Council to acquire the fossil ichthyosaur found at Rutland Water in 2021 for display in the county museum at Oakham.

Writing on Oakham Nub News, Lawrence Fenelon, chair of the Friends of Rutland County Museum and Oakham Castle, says:

At March last year RCC's accounts showed over £39m of usable capital reserve. Why can't a small bit of it be used to get the Sea Dragon back in Rutland? If it is not spent by March 2028 it will go to the new combined authority and be lost to Rutland.

Our council is in danger of missing a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring a major attraction to Oakham.

A BBC News story about the campaign for the fossil to be displayed Rutland says:

The authority told the BBC risings costs meant it could no longer afford to proceed with its original plan, but confirmed the petition would trigger a debate on the issue at a future full council meeting.

Readers of Lord Bonkers' Diary, whether in Liberator or on this blog, will have known all about the Rutland Water Monster long before 2021.

The Joy of Six 1543

"In many cases, lack of coordination and administrative errors in the Home Office cause failed removals. Complications around booking flights, arranging escorts and other practicalities have all been found to prevent deportations, as well as procedural issues such as lack of travel documents. But continued misrepresentation in the media and political rhetoric means the ECHR has continued to be a scapegoat." Sarah Singer argues that the government's new immigration and asylum bill won't work.

"'I’m Northern Irish', I would say with indignation, every time an English person referred to me as Irish. Growing up in Newtownards in the 1990s there was never any question of my Britishness. British passport, Union Jacks on every lamppost, and fully immersed in British pop culture." Yet Claire JC is now campaigning for a United Ireland – she explains why.

Nick Baird thinks the Liberal Democrats' proposed scheme for Defence Bonds is a bad idea.

"Picked up by the stump microphone as England’s batting unravelled at Trent Bridge, the Kiwis summed up what a lot of us are thinking: 'What are they doing?' It was aimed at the batters in front of them. But by the end of what was an extraordinary, shocking and chaotic day, it felt like the question that summed up English cricket from top to bottom." Elizabeth Ammon asks if anyone in English cricket knows what they are doing.

Timothy Ott on Charles Dickens's visit to Washington: "Dickens and an unnamed official, 'having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered,' simply entered the White House and attempted to find the president on their own."

Nigel Andrew on the forgotten genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett: "The critic Norman Shrapnel wrote: 'Of the two candidates for greatness among comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that looks the more secure.'"

Penguin Cafe Orchestra: Perpetuum Mobile

I can remember studying Penguin Cafe Orchestra CDs, intrigued by their artwork, but I never bought one. I wish I had.

Borderless explains what inspired the band's formation by the classically trained guitarist and composer Simon Jeffes:

In 1972, food poisoning confined Jeffes to bed where he dreamed of a Kafkaesque residential block full of people with empty lives. The following day a voice in his head said distinctly, "I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe. I will tell you things at random." Jeffes tried to imagine what the house band of that cafe might sound like. When he recovered, he transformed his dream into truth and invented the PCO.

Perpetuum Mobile comes from Signs of Life, the fourth of the PCO's five studio albums, and is one of their best-known tracks. I don't set out to impress you with my esoteric taste on this blog, but I may steal "I will tell you things at random" for its slogan.

Jeffes died in 1997, aged only 48. His legacy is two groups inspired by his work. Penguin Cafe is led by his son Arthur, while a loose group of old PCO hands play as The Orchestra That Fell To Earth.

"We have blue passports, but everything else has gone south": Andrew George on the failure of Brexit

Andrew George won back the St Ives constituency in Cornwall for the Liberal Democrats two years ago today – he had previously represented it between 1997 and 2015. 

It's estimated that there was a 54.8 per cent vote for Leave in St Ives at the 2016 referendum, but that hasn't stopped Andrew telling it like it is in the Bude & Stratton Post:

There’s been much commentary on the 10th anniversary of Brexit referendum. I viewed it as a test of UK self-confidence. In the event the answer was negative. That we didn’t see ourselves as leaders in Europe. That we believed we were being taken advantage of, and had become rule-takers and had lost control.

That’s not to say I believed there would be no benefits from Brexit. I acknowledged at the time there was potential to "take back control" of fisheries management and marine conservation. However, even that hasn't materialised. Indeed, it's worse – we’re now outside the rooms where decisions are made and have less influence.

Yes, we have blue passports(!), but everything else has gone south. All authoritative sources agree the economy has suffered; now estimated to be at least six per cent smaller than it would have been. Brexit has been a drag on trade and growth, seen a cut in investment, and opportunities – especially for younger people – have shrunk.

Cornwall has been a major loser after decades of EU support. Promises of replacement funding didn’t materialise. I respect those who voted to Leave, and their hopes and desires. But those who led the Brexit campaign should stand up and be accountable. Their lies and stoking of fear may have succeeded, but they it says everything that they have largely avoided public attention during this 10-year review.

Violent drunk banned from booze after throwing flapjack at police officer's genitals having missed with Pot Noodle

It wasn't a long judges' meeting: the Manchester Evening News has won our Headline of the Day Award.

Incidentally, when I worked at Golden Wonder many years ago I was a member of the Pot Noodle tasting panel. I'd rather have been on a flapjack tasting panel.

Ian Holm as Richard III in the BBC's Wars of the Roses from 1965

First, Fergus McClelland led us to Brecht on television. Now, bless his little khaki shorts, he's led us to Shakespeare.

Ravensbourne University London explains the origins of the BBC's Wars of the Roses:

This production had had a highly acclaimed run on the RSC stage in 1963 and was directed for BBC Television in 1965 by Robin Midgley and Michael Hayes. It was filmed on the stage at Stratford-On-Avon using a multi-camera set up, resulting in a much more fluid filmic result with a greater variety of shots and even the use of hand-held cameras for the battle scenes. 

In this respect the production was a forerunner of today’s recorded theatre productions which are regularly streamed to cinemas and homes throughout the world.

The Wars of the Roses was an abridgement of four Shakespeare plays – the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III – into three plays: Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III.

You can find an extract from the third of these above. McClelland is playing Edward V, the elder of the Princes in the Tower, having played the similarly ill-fated Edmund, Duke of Rutland, earlier in the production.

But the real interest is Ian Holm's Richard III, who here appears not as a monster but very much the younger brother to the charismatic Edward IV that he was.

This recording is of some importance to theatrical history, because Holm was struck down with stage fright in the Seventies and thereafter chose to concentrate on film and television work.

Liverpool Lib Dem boss accused of using "sex appeal to build fanbase" in cover shoot

Today the Liverpool Echo walks off with our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges requested several copies of Attitude. #JustSayin

The Joy of Six 1542

"Multiple sources inside the children’s home division said that, as they prepared for sale, they were pressed to rapidly open more homes and take on more children, even when they didn’t have the staff to keep up. They claim they were told this was so the company could be sold for the maximum amount of money." Jessica Murray says that when private equity takes over a UK care home it can mean the children are treated like cattle.

Ben Worthy argues that, if he is to succeed as a prime minister who takes over in mid-parliament, Andy Burnham will need to create a clear sense of change and offer new policy quickly.

"Surbiton itself is no longer a byword for Toryism. Each of its councillors is a Liberal Democrat, with only two Conservatives elected across the entire Royal Borough of Kingston. At a parliamentary level, the successor seat of Kingston and Surbiton has been Tory for just two years since 1997, that brief period of 2015-17 when the Lib Dems fell away. An area which was once considered a safe base for Conservatives with ministerial ambitions and ability is now the home seat of Sir Ed Davey." John Oxley mourns the Conservatives' loss of the Margot Leadbetter vote.

Danielle Williams on how the US lost its public swimming pools to racism: "When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the US."

Sintija Brence salutes the Queen Of Southern Gothic, Bobbie Gentry.

"About most of the rescues Gregory is brisk but particular. An elderly couple in a broken-down yacht press biscuits on the crew; a woman makes eyes at the coxswain ('the problem was an open seacock, swamping their bilge'); in failing light a small boy – 'my mum said I should stay with the boat' – is scooped from a flimsy inflatable dinghy just in time." Susannah Clapp meets a literary lifeboatman at Dungeness.

The making of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

Television series that didn't take themselves too seriously in the first place, such as The Avengers or Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), seem to last better than most.

This documentary looks at the latter show, whose 26 episodes were first broadcast in 1969 and 1970. It features interviews with Kenneth Cope, Annette Andre, Cyril Frankel, Harry Fielder, Ray Austin, Ken Baker, Guy Pratt and Malcolm Christopher.

If you've not seen Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) – the original version, not the later one with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer – then my edited version of the YouTube blurb for this documentary will explain all:

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) starred Mike Pratt and Kenneth Cope as private detectives Jeff Randall and Marty Hopkirk. Secretary Jeannie was played by Annette Andre. The series was created by Dennis Spooner and Monty Berman.

In the very first episode, Marty Hopkirk is murdered during an investigation only to return as a ghost whom only Jeff Randall can see.

And having an invisible partner proved useful when Randall was on a case, though sometimes there were hilarious consequences.

Jonathan Liew tots up the price English cricket has paid for Bazball

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Ben Stokes's final text innings was embarrassingly self-indulgent. As Jonathan Riew says in a great article in the Guardian today, it "managed to capture in a single moment everything people dislike about this team".

But he also looks far deeper into what ails English cricket. So he praises Stokes's "legendary" talent, endurance, ambition and competitiveness, and says those qualities could have inspired England to big series wins if they had been intelligently harnessed:

Instead, English cricket was more interested in commodifying Stokes’s talent than channelling it. Under the directorship of Andrew Strauss in the mid-2010s, and then again under McCullum from 2022 onwards, there was a clear culture shift away from team ethic towards individual expression. Play your shots. Fill your boots in franchise cricket. Be where the noise is. Party hard. 

A 2019 ECB strategy document stated that the job of the England team was to "create heroes", noting that young fans were often more inspired by individual athletes than the team they played for.

The results achieved under this new regime were impressive for a year or two, but have long been more disappointing than anything else. And, writes Riew, we have paid quite a price for those so-so returns:

Let’s consider some of the collateral damage English cricket has generated over the past two decades: the terrestrial television audience, state school cricket, the smaller counties, people who can no longer afford England tickets, an entire generation of players who were told they were a useless anachronism with no chance of making it for England. The Blast, detonated to make space for The Hundred, which has now been sold off, along with most of August.

And the future?

Once more, a new era is coming. Most probably it will be Brook, a man with no discernible leadership skills who bats like he left the oven on, but does generate excellent content. 

Perhaps we may even be treated to a display of performative humility, a fleeting attempt to reconnect with the public ahead of next year’s ticket deadline. As ever, we eagerly await the next chapter. Equally, there comes a point when you run out of things to burn down.

I can claim some prescience here, for I wrote this in Liberal Democrat News back in 2004:

People think the cricket authorities are stuffy, but really they are the most shamelessly commercial administrators of all. There are now logos on the players' clothing and painted on the field of play. For the right price you could probably get your company's slogan tattooed on the President of the MCC's buttocks.

But then I suspect that goes for the British upper classes as a whole. 

Centenary of Emily Hobhouse's death marked in Cornwall

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This is a letter published by the Cornish Times:

On June 13, a special gathering was held at The Story of Emily to mark the centenary of the death of Emily Hobhouse, the British humanitarian and peace campaigner whose work exposed the suffering of women and children in the concentration camps of the South African War.

It was a privilege to attend this commemorative event and to join others in remembering one of Cornwall’s most remarkable daughters. Born in the hamlet of St Ive, near Liskeard, Emily Hobhouse dedicated her life to humanitarian causes and the pursuit of justice.

The event offered visitors a deeper understanding of Emily’s life, struggles, determination and enduring legacy. During the South African War, her investigations into conditions within the concentration camps helped transform public understanding of the conflict and contributed to improvements in camp conditions.

She was a woman ahead of her time who sacrificed much in her efforts to alleviate suffering and improve the lives of those affected by war.

In a speech written for the unveiling of the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein on 16 December 1913, Emily Hobhouse wrote:

Liberty is the equal right and heritage of every child of man, without distinction of race, colour or sex.

These powerful words reflected the values that guided her throughout her life. They expressed her belief in equality, justice and human dignity at a time when such principles were far from universally accepted.

Today, societies across the world continue to confront issues of discrimination, inequality and human rights. Emily's belief that liberty belongs to every person, regardless of race, colour or sex, remains a principle worth defending.

As we mark one hundred years since her death, Emily Hobhouse's legacy is not confined to history. Her courage, compassion and commitment to humanity continue to inspire new generations. For Cornwall, she remains a source of particular pride.

Barry West, Cornish Historian

The Story of Emily is a museum devoted to Emily Hobhouse's life and humanitarian work, housed in her childhood home near Liskeard. She was the sister of Liberal philosopher L.T. Hobhouse.

Taking up the cause of the Boer women and children took physical courage – see my post on Kenneth Griffith's film Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman.

Reg Calvert, Oliver Smedley, Hayek and the nature of liberty

When Oliver Smedley shot Reg Calvert, more was at stake than a row over a radio transmitter. According to a 2011 blog post by Adam Curtis – thanks to a reader for putting me on to it – theirs was a dispute about the very nature of liberty:

A historian called Adrian Johns has written a brilliant book about Pirate Radio in the 1960s, called Death of a Pirate. In it he argues that Reg Calvert and Oliver Smedley represent two completely different kinds of "privateer".

Reg Calvert was part of an old, unruly tradition of true independence and libertarian freedom. A real buccaneer who would ignore rules and the structure of class and power in Britain while merrily going his own way.

Smedley on the other hand was a "privateer" only to the extent that he wanted to bring the private sector back to power in Britain. Other than that he wanted the traditional power structure to remain the same. And to do this he (and his Think Tank) wanted to reinvent the free market as a managed system - managed by them, and any true "privateer" - like Reg - who challenged that power was doomed.

Johns writes about the killing of Calvert.

"At that instant late in Midsummer Night 1966 when Smedley took his fatal decision, two kinds of piracy came into collision. Reg Calvert represented one kind - a kind whose history can be traced back centuries. He was an ingenious and imaginative entrepreneur, opportunistic and ambitious. He spoke in grandiose terms, but his operations were undercapitalized, seat-of-the-pants adventures that might bloom or collapse - as so many radical ventures initially are. The outsider, resistant to all rules.

Calvert represented the kind of pirate that the Institute of Economic Affairs hailed as holding the key to social and cultural progress. But in reality Smedley stood for a different kind of pirate altogether. He was the rational capitalist, well versed in both the maxims of accountancy and the abstract principles of liberal ideology. Privately educated, metropolitan and professional, Smedley saw himself as an agent in the political and cultural affairs of the nation.

It was this that Calvert threatened in 1966 - and what made Calvert so appealing was therefore precisely what also made him so dangerous. And as in military and political life, so in financial and entrepreneurial: Smedley's instinct was to stand fast. Hold his ground."

And the same was true of the ideas of Friedrich Hayek. He wasn't really trying to bring back an old, unpredictable, turbulent laissez-faire system - he wanted to create a new, technocratic system of managed competition that didn't in anyway threaten the existing structure of power.

Before he gets to this argument, Curtis has plenty on Calvert and Smedley and their involvement with pirate radio.

An esoteric walk around Aleister Crowley's London

Lord Bonkers had no time for him, but Aleister Crowley has been crossing my path of late. So here's an esoteric walk across his London with John Rogers and Marco Visconti:

This walking tour weaves a web of mystery and magick through a portion of central London forever haunted by the man known as The Great Beast. Starting at Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment we head up to Charing Cross, St Martin's Lane to Watkins Bookshop in Cecil Court which has been on the site for over 120 years. We then follow the magic thread to Henrietta Street in Covent Garden and from here drift across the Piazza to Freemasons' Hall - one of the most mysterious and beguiling locations in London. 

Our 'Crowley Crawl' takes us up Kingsway to Museum Street in Bloomsbury and the brilliant Atlantis Bookshop which "was established in 1922 by magicians, for magicians. It is the birth-place of modern witchcraft, with Gerald Gardner holding regular coven meetings in the basement of the Shop." It was also a favourite bookshop of Aleister Crowley. The final leg of our walk of mystery and magic takes us down Oxford Street, Kingley Street to Regent Street, ending at 93 Jermyn Street where Crowley lived for a period of time.

And not the reference to Frieda Harris.

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

Tears and celebrations as river 'wiggle' restored

The judges have torn themselves away from England's World Cup game, and our Headline of the Day Award goes to BBC News.

The headline stands above an encouraging story from Shropshire:

An 18-month-long project to "re-wiggle" a river after more than a century has been successfully completed prompting "tears and celebrations".

A section of the River Kemp, in south Shropshire, had been straightened by landowners in the 1800s, disconnecting it from its natural floodplain and reducing biodiversity.

Now water is flowing in the meander again, after it was restored in a project led by Severn Rivers Trust and involved local landowners.

The illustration shows the distinctive signpost at Little Brampton, where this work has been carried out.

The Joy of Six 1541

"Former MI6, counterterror, and police officials expressed disbelief at the refusal by the British authorities to countenance a full murder investigation into Perepilichnyy's death. 'It's so obvious that it’s an assassination,' said Chris Phillips, the former head of Britain’s National Counter Terrorism Security Office. 'There’s no way it wasn’t a hit. It’s ridiculous.'" In 2017, Heidi Blake and her BuzzFeed investigations team published a seven-part investigation of suspected assassinations on British soil by the Russians government.

Richard Kemp reposts a Byline Times article that condemns SLAPPs – strategic litigation against public participation – as a shocking abuse of the legal system where the rich try to bully the weak and poor into submission.

Guy Shrubsole argues that Andy Burnham's Manchesterism is ultimately a politics of land: "Burnham’s keen interest in regaining public control of housing and key utilities leads very quickly to questions of who owns land, and how the public sector might reverse decades of asset sales begun under Margaret Thatcher’s governments."

"For much of the 18th century, even though Number 10 (actually Number 5 for much of its early existence) remained the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury, it was by no means always occupied by the Prime Minister." Robin Eagles finds that prime ministers once preferred to live in their own houses.

Adam Scovell goes to look for the London locations used in A Hard Day's Night, the first film featuring those lovable mop-tops The Beatles.

"Her national standing was confirmed with a damehood in 2000, an honour which she prized, though it didn’t make her decorous. She was shortlisted for the Booker five times without ever winning (no one forgets this). She remains a figure who is hard to place – widely appreciated, but not a member of any acknowledged group of writers, and without much discernible influence on those who came after." Dinah Birch on the work of the novelist Beryl Bainbridge.

David McWilliams: The Days of Pearly Spencer

Wikipedia says this is about "a homeless man McWilliams had encountered in Ballymena," but when I heard this in the Seventies, I saw Pearly Spencer as a criminal figure, like Pinkie in Brighton Rock or an associate of Violent Bonham Carter, whose time and luck are running out. 

It's odd the things you read into songs.

Reg Calvert and his boarding school of rock

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

Pete Clemons explains:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Joy of Six 1540

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fergus McClelland was the last illegal major British child actor

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

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

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

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

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

The article concludes by saying:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was his answer?

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

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

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

Labour and the Liberals in 1924 and today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family: Scene Through the Eye of a Lens

This one ticks a lot of Liberal England boxes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

HMO plan for Market Harborough's Bottom Club

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Joy of Six 1539

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

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

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

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

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

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

What remains of the locations where Hue and Cry was filmed

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

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

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

Franz Kafka in North West Leicestershire

From BBC News:

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

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

And that's not all:

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

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

"Everything stopped dead," she told the BBC.

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

There's more:

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

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

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

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

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

How four bison brought new life to ancient woodland in Kent

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

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

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

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

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

The street in Australia named after my great great grandfather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Joy of Six 1538

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

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

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

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

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

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