Because of sexism and her early death, it took years for the contribution of Rosalind Franklin to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA to be properly acknowledged.
Her latest posthumous accolade is our prestigious Trivial Connection of the Day Award, because Franklin's great uncle was the Liberal Party leader Herbert Samuel.
Here's a song that anyone who likes sixties music will know, even if many will be pushed to remember which band had a hit with it.
Yesterday Has Gone was originally recorded by Little Anthony and the Imperials, though the strong vocal by Terry Rice-Milton makes it reasonable to prefer this cover version.
What really interests me about Cupid's Inspiration is that they came from one of my favourite nearby towns: Stamford in Lincolnshire.
And to prove it, here is a 2019 story from the Stamford Mercury:
Original members of the Sixties band Cupid's Inspiration are returning to their roots with a show at Stamford Corn Exchange Theatre.
Lead singer Terry Rice-Milton and bass guitarist Laughton James will take to the stage with a new line-up as part of the Sixties Invasion show.
The Stamford-based band shot to fame in 1968 when their hit Yesterday's Gone reached number four in the charts. Their follow up song My World reached number 33 a few months later.
The band has performed on and off with various line ups over the years but as a Stamfordian Terry is looking forward to playing again in his home town.
He said: "It means a lot to come back. A couple of years ago I remember pulling up at the traffic lights and hearing someone shout my name.
"It's strange to still be recognised after 50 years!"
Sally Dawson pays tribute to Maureen Colquhoun, Britain’s first openly lesbian MP, who died earlier this month. She sat for Northampton North between February 1974 and 1979.The coming Holyrood elections should be about the life draining from Scotland's hills and glens and the need for rewilding, argues Adam Ramsay.
Adam Chapman studies an apparently innocent landscape by Ronald Lampitt and finds a wealth of information about the changes to British agriculture after the second world war.
"If Leeds was somewhere to escape from then the Yorkshire Dales were somewhere to escape to. Jake Thackray’s Swaledale was similar to James Joyce’s Dublin: a quasi-magical place rooted in a real geography containing the world’s multitudes." Will Ainsley celebrates the genius of Jake Thackray.
Sir Arthur deserves to be remembered for more than that. He stood for parliament many times and his one victory saw him sitting for Islington East between 1923 and 1924. His last contest was at Shrewsbury in 1945, where he captured a quarter of the votes cast.
Wikipedia says that his expertise in National Insurance led him to co-author a book on the subject in 1912 to which David Lloyd George wrote the preface. He was a member of the Liberal land inquiry committee of 1912 and also sat on the land acquisition committee in 1917.
Outside politics he was a prosecutor in the trials of German and Japanese war criminals after the second world war, and it was for this that he was knighted for this work in 1949. And long before that his cross-examination in a libel case speeded the downfall of the corrupt Liberal MP Horatio Bottomley.
But then the Comyns-Carrs are an interesting family all round. Arthur’s father was Joseph Comyns Carr, a drama and art critic, gallery director, author, poet, playwright and theatre manager. Wikipedia describes him as “a vigorous advocate for Pre-Raphaelite art and a vocal critic of the "short-sighted" art establishment”.
As an adviser to the Royal Opera House, he was responsible for the first English performance of Parsifal.
Arthur’s son Richard worked for MI5 in the same section as Graham Greene, overseen by Kim Philby. His wife, a writer who published under the name Barbara Comyns, explained that this association did little for Richard’s career:
Comyns claimed that MI6 dropped her husband in 1955 because of his association with Philby … : “Oh Kim was a delightful man. So funny. Always here playing cards. Neither of us had a notion! When he disappeared – to Moscow, you know – they sacked my husband. They said that either he must have known and therefore was a traitor, or that he hadn’t spotted it and therefore must have been a fool.”
And, in an essay on Boundless, Lucy Scholes celebrates “The forgotten genius of Barbara Comyns”:
With every new reissue of her novels, the ranks of dedicated Comyns fans swell and strengthen, proof that it’s little more than a stroke of bad luck that so much of her work languishes for the most part unknown. She’s an author of rare genius, ripe for rediscovery, her novels not so much a gentle breath of fresh air, but rather a chilling, bracing blast.
On Opinion, the Parlia podcast, talks to Timothy Garton Ash about the state of liberalism - its past failings, the threats it faces from Left and Right today, and whether it can be rebuilt for the 21st Century.
He argues that liberalism is to blame for its troubles - over-exporting free-market ideas, and under investing in culture, community and politics in a world of massive, destabilising change. He argues for a “conservative-socialist-Liberalism” - a civic patriotism focused on the common good deeply embedded in national communities.
On the back of his recent manifesto for liberalism’s renewal in Prospect magazine, he discusses:
The former Liberal Democrat transport minister Norman Baker turned up in an item on rural bus services on Farming Today last week - the item starts at 6:05.
Now the adviser to the Campaign for Better Transport, Norman calls for a reform of the funding of bus services to prevent further cuts.
John Rogers describes this walk on YouTube:
A walk through London's Little Italy up to the fields of Islington, starting at Chancery Lane Station on High Holborn. We go into the curious anomaly of Ely Place, owned by the Bishops of Ely and once technically part of Cambridgeshire. We visit the Old Mitre Pub where Sir Christopher Hatton danced with Elizabeth I.
The walking tour goes along Hatton Garden, the centre of Britain's diamond trade, and into Leather Lane Market. The walk through Little Italy takes us in search of Fagin's den in Saffron Hill, a place visited by Charles Dickens who drank in the One Tun pub. We walk along Hatton Wall into Portpool Lane where the Kings Ditch ran and through the Bourne Estate.
The heart of London's Little Italy lay in the streets falling away from Clerkenwell Road into the Fleet Valley - Back Hill, Eyre Street Hill, Herbal Hill. From here we go up Crawford Passage to Coldbath Square and Mount Pleasant. We stroll through Spa Fields - now Exmouth Market and Wilmington Square where Merlin was said to have a cave in the heart of the hill. The Merlin's Cave Tavern stood in Merlin House on the site of Charles Rowan House.
Next we walk through Lloyd Square to Percy Circus where Lenin stayed in 1905. Back on Amwell Street we recount E.O Gordon's powerful mythology of London at the head of the Pen Ton Mound, now the New River Head Upper Reservoir on Claremont Square. Passing down Penton Street our walk ends at White Conduit House, once a celebrated pleasure garden and the true home of cricket.
Thirty years ago Liberator was put together on a Saturday and the day began with a cooked breakfast at a cafe in Leather Lane. Those were the days.
John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.
Good news from The Victorian Society:
Following an application by the Leicester Group of the Victorian Society, Historic England have recognised the importance of the former “Home for Penitent Females” on Stoneygate Road in Leicester by granting it Grade II listed status.
You can read more about the Home on this blog.
Plashing Vole has fun with the reduced standing of the Liberal Democrats:
Those Chinese chaps had better tread carefully. You don’t want to rile either of the Lib Dem horde. https://t.co/tlkrkEkQuV
— Plashing Vole (@PlashingVole) February 15, 2021
Which reminds me of a story about an old Liberal Party assembly.
It is almost exactly forty years ago that David Steel’s predecessor, Foreign Affairs Spokesman Sir Arthur Comyns-Carr QC, complete in wing collar and side-boots, opened his speech at the Liberal Assembly here in Torquay with the immortal words…
‘I do not wish to say anything which might endanger the security of Quemoy and Matsu off the coast of China.’
But in 1993 we could smile at the Liberal Party of the 1950s. Because Paddy went on to observe:
Well I hope that the large number of foreign diplomats and visitors we have at our Conference today is an indication that what we say today is perhaps taken rather more seriously.
I doubt we will have many diplomates present when the Lib Dems are again able to hold a traditional party conference. We are closer to the Liberal Party of the 1950s than we care to admit.
Another engaging video from Jago Hazzard. He has a Patreon, you know.
I have clear memories of the original Island Gardens station from delivering for the Liberals in a controversial Isle of Dogs by-election.
I have been reading The Bonnie Prince - the autobiography of my first footballing hero Charlie Cooke. No replica kits in those days: my Mum just sewed a number 7 on to the back of a plain blue football shirt and I was him.
Cooke was a key member of the Chelsea side that beat Leeds United in the 1970 FA Cup final replay. And in his book he explains one reason why there was such an edge to the tie:
We seethed at Leeds's referee intimidation, endless whining and gamesmanship, which they had raised to an art from in the last few years under Don Revie. It would be an exaggeration, but not a big one, to say we definitely felt we had right on our side.
Bremner and Giles, both small guys, and Hunter in the middle of the field were involved just about every stoppage and argument and hissy fit there was. It was like clockwork.
The ref would make a decision, it would be disputed, and he would suddenly be surrounded by a bunch of white shirts, almost always including a bleating Bremner, Giles and Hunter, and sometimes, when he thought they needed some assistance, Big Jack Charlton, with his pointy elbows and towering presence, the veins bulging in his long neck.
The photo above shows Peter Osgood scoring Chelsea's equaliser in the Old Trafford replay. His diving header was made after a wonderful chip by Charlie Cooke.It was understandable that referees got worn down by it. They all did, eventually. It's only human.
Ian Dunt says liberals can redefine national pride and reclaim the flag from nationalists: "Liberal patriotism ... It starts and ends with the individual. It is a personal love story which springs from within, not a slab of uniformity imposed from above. It therefore cares about every individual in the country."
Dominic Dyer on the politics of the badger cull.
"Next Thursday 18 February 2021, it will have been eight years since the town walls fell at the back of St Laurence’s. There is no sign of the repairs beginning this year." Andy Boddington suggests Ludlow’s collapsed town wall should be registered as a Monumental Failure and become a tourist attraction.
Chris Orton offers an appreciation of Moondial, the BBC children's drama series from 1988: "Children’s drama in this era was thought-provoking and intelligent, with real care and attention made during the productions. The BBC seemed to go to great lengths to produce high quality programmes that made children think, entertained them and which didn’t belittle them."
"She loved to perch herself on or near a windowsill, surveying the outdoors for hours. It strikes me now how quintessentially feline that behaviour is: a docile carnivore balanced on the border of a human home, alone and content, yet with all its senses tuned to the world beyond." Ferris Jabr asks if cats are really domesticated.
Rail Advent reports:
Network Rail has announced that restoration work on the Traeth Mawr Viaduct begun on Saturday 13th February.
As part of a multi-million project to upgrade the Cambrian Line, Network Rail has chosen Traeth Mawr to help improve the overall line.
The work will take place over a nine-day closure of the railway.
Work will include the replacement of wooden timbers, which Network Rail says is the main priority.
And why am I passing this on? Because I once got eaten alive by mosquitos taking a photo of this very viaduct, that's why.
So it's time to enjoy Lord Bonkers' latest diary.
Ignorance indignantly pointed out that he had come second in Committee Room Theory and Practice only last term
You will by now have read of my detention by the police of Atherton, CA, on Christmas morning: I will admit that if the Attorney General of California had not turned out to an old golfing chum of the Governor of New Rutland then things might have got distinctly hairy for your humble diarist. So let me take a little time to explain what led to this unfortunate incident.
Some of my oldest friends and I have for some time been concerned for what, at the risk of sounding high falutin’, one might term Nick Clegg’s immortal soul. From having served the noble cause of Liberalism he has turned to the dark side and now serves Mammon. I do not have the Facebook, but I am told it is where the planet’s bad hats and ne’er-do-wells congregate to plot their mischief – and the aforementioned Clegg makes a good screw from promoting it.
After reading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (surely he is our greatest novelist?) I hit upon the idea of staging an intervention. I would see to it that the ghosts of Liberalism Past, Liberalism Present and Liberalism Future appeared to Clegg on the night of Christmas Eve, leaving him feeling pretty small and open to being won back by the forces of light. I rather hoped, for instance, that he might volunteer to take on one of the more challenging Focus rounds in the Bonkers Hall ward.
So it was that my party took the red-eye from Rutland International Airport to San Francisco while the rest of the nation was watching Christmas movies on their electric televisions. With me were Meadowcroft and two Well-Behaved Orphans, along with some gamekeepers to help with scenery changes and a few of the Elves of Rockingham Forest to provide ghostly music. “We call them ‘Aeolian cadences’” one of them replied sniffily when I mentioned this.
In retrospect, it was a mistake to allow Meadowcroft to dress up as the ghost of Liberalism Past: I should have stuck with my original plan of playing the part myself and quoting extensively from the speeches of William Ewart Gladstone. (I should have steered clear of the works of T.H. Green as they would only have sent Clegg back to sleep.) For as soon as Meadowcroft set eyes on Clegg, far from presenting tableaux of our party’s history, he shouted “You be the young varmint who incinemerated my little darlin’s” and went at him with an orchard doughty that he had somehow smuggled through customs. He was referring to an unfortunate incident in which a teenaged Clegg set fire to the glasshouse at the Hall which housed Meadowcroft’s cherished collection of cacti – the old boy had gathered them in the arid south of Rutland on his days off. Well, he had Clegg double digging for a year to pay for the damage, but I suspect a youth from the wrong side of the GNR&LNWR Joint would have been off to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School before his trainers touched the ground.
It may have been at that point that Miriam called the feds, but our next scene was not a success either. I had intended to bring home to Clegg the importance of spending on education and social welfare by having Well-Behaved Orphans labelled ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Want’ appear before him. When it came to it, however, Ignorance indignantly pointed out that he had come second in Committee Room Theory and Practice only last term and was still doing so when the rozzers called a halt to proceedings. So it was off to the hoosegow for all of us.
******
Little has changed in my absence: the village is still under lockdown, with the Bonkers’ Arms presenting a particularly sad picture. How I miss its windows glowing with light and the sound of merry chatter! If it weren’t for the secret passage from the Hall that emerges in the pub’s cellar, where I occasionally enjoy a Rutland egg – and you can’t get a more substantial meal than that – and a pint of Smithson & Greaves Norther Bitter, I would feel far more despondent. I am bearing the closure of St Asquith’s, however, with fortitude.
******
A quiet day in my Library, looking over my precious collection of Classical Latin manuscripts. You will be familiar with the story about Caligula making his horse a senator, but you will never have seen one of the Focus leaflets the horse put out. They reveal that he was assiduous at carrying out casework, while his slogan “It’s a One-Horse Race” show a sharp mind for electoral tactics. So those modern historians who suggest that by bestowing a high public office on his horse, Caligula was showing his underlings that their work was so meaningless an animal could do it, have got it entirely wrong. Incidentally, one of my own horses was once elected to Market Harborough Rural District Council after agreeing to stand as a paper candidate. While I will admit to putting out a leaflet in his name, I suspect his election had more to do with the racing tips he supplied to anyone who stopped by his field for a chat.
******
This morning, still recovering from my West Coast adventures, I walked by the shore of Rutland Water and was rewarded with one of nature’s most remarkable phenomena. All at once the surface of the lake was boiling with fish. They danced upon their tales, clapped one another on the back and sang in joyful voices. For Rutland fish are happy fish, perhaps most of all because no foreign trawler has ever found its way here from the North Sea. It is a difficult passage and not one to be attempted without first engaging the services of an experienced pilot. I imagine the prospect of being caught and eaten is no more attractive than that of being imprisoned while wearing an orange jump suit, so I joined the fishy chorus to celebrate my deliverance.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
The Leicester Mercury wins our Headline of the Day Award.
"It originally was a song I was writing for Artie. I was gonna write a song for his new album, and I told him it would be a nasty song, because he was singing too many sweet songs. It seemed like a good concept for him."
Incidentally, Liberator is now a free online publication, appearing every two months.
Christmas Eve
To St Asquith's for the Festival of Lessons and Carols. I am sure that I speak for many when I say that I do not regard the festive season as truly having begun until I have heard the tremulous voice of a choirboy singing the opening verse of "Lloyd George Knew My Father".
With the afternoon sunshine illuminating the window depicting The Annunciation of Sir Archibald Sinclair, the old place has never looked finer, but the expense of maintaining the fabric remains a fearful burden.
Once we would meet the cost by the occasional sale of a stalwart member of the Church Ladies' Circle in the slave markets of the Levant; it is a mark of the success of Liberal social legislation that today we must rely upon the humble round of rummage sales and beetle drives.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
"It’s been more than 100 years since the Commons took away the power of the unelected Lords to block legislation. Yet, here we are, still with an entirely unelected second chamber despite decades of tinkering. Johnson’s largesse would make a Renaissance pope blush (Ian Botham, for services for Brexit; Evgeny Lebedev, for services to lavish parties; and his own brother, for services to Johnsons)," George Chesterton says Britain's absurdly undemocratic second chamber needs urgent attention.
How are children coping with school closures? Surprisingly well, finds Peter Gray: "Forty-nine per cent of the children agreed with the statement, “I have been more calm than I was in regular school,” and only 25 per cent disagreed."
Sue Brunning looks at how The Dig compares to the momentous excavation at Sutton Hoo.
J.D. Collins rescues Nineties favourite 2point4 Children from the realm of cosy sitcom blandness to explore its supernatural undercurrents and brooding production values.
The LNER and Great Central used to cross on the level at Retford. Signalboxes,com has pictures of the building of the Great Central's dive under between 1963 and 1965, which meant heavily laden coal trains no longer had to cross the King's Cross main line.
Jackanory? It was a television programme in which someone sat down and read you a story. No animation. No special effects. Just a few illustrations if you were lucky.
Mortimer Also concerned a test match umpire and a mouse who lived in his cottage. The umpire did not want anyone to know his eyesight was failing, so the mouse would sit on his head, peer out through a hole in his panama and yank his hair to signal whether or not to give a close lbw appeal.
I know would be too far-fetched for today’s children. Just imagine: an umpire standing in a test in his home country!
But it was a lovely story and it introduced me to Francis Thompson’s poem At Lord's:
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro, To and fro:
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!
One of the eerie things about the Internet is the way it allows you to recover your childhood.
Thanks to the IMDB I can tell you that I heard Mortimer Also read on Jackanory by Harry Fowler in May 1969. Fowler had made a good living playing chirpy cockney evacuees in 1940s films, but his acting career never really took off after that.
And thanks to eBay, I now have my own copy of the book. It was written by Jo Rice and illustrated by David Knight.
Extensive research (reading the blurb on the book’s jacket) suggests that Jo Rice was a woman and thus probably not the Jonathan “Jo” Rice who has written many cricket books and is the brother of Sir Tim Rice.
One other point: trawling the further recesses of the Internet reveals that Jackanory repeated “Mortimer Also” in July 1971.
It is notable that this page tells you: "Next week: The Village That Slept with Rosalie Crutchley."
Children’s television in the early seventies was a lot racier than people imagine.
******
This post first appeared on The Corridor, where Tim Rice's brother left a comment confirming that he was not the author of Mortimer Also.
A blog post on Ramblings on my bookshelves suggests the story was inspired by the 1961 Ashes series in England and that Graham McKenzie and Ted Dexter appear in it as lightly fictionalised characters.
John Rogers writes on YouTube:
This walk from East to North London starts on Homerton High Street. We take a look at the Tudor Sutton House built in 1535, before walking through St. John's Gardens to Hackney Central. Along Mare Street we ay homage to the Hackney Empire, designed by Frank Matcham in 1901 as a Music Hall. Our walk takes up Graham Road to Ridley Road Market, Dalston and then along Kingsland Road to the Rio Cinema.
Next we go up John Campbell Road and Mildmay Road to Newington Green where we look at Richard Price's Unitarian Chapel built in 1701. From here we pass along Ferntower Road to Petherton Road where the New River runs beneath a green strip of land running along the middle of the street. Highbury New Park takes us to Highbury Grove and we turn up Baalbec Road to Highbury Place. Highbury Fields is one of my favourite spots in London, a beautiful open space covering a high ridge of land which was once known for its springs and conduits.
We walk around Highbury Fields contemplating the possibility that the name suggests that this was once the location of an ancient burial mound or barrow given that the area was previously known as Newington Barrow. Our walk ends at Highbury Barn at the site of the former pleasure garden famed for its milk, custards, and concerts.
John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.
Who is the youngest player to appear in first-class cricket in England?
The answer is Barney Gibson, who kept wicket for Yorkshire against Durham MCCU in April 2011 at the age of 15 years and 27 days.
I marked the occasion with a post on the long-defunct cricket blog The Corridor, but nothing has been heard of Gibson since.
Thanks to a Cricketer article by Nick Friend we now know what happened to him. He chose "enjoyment and freedom".
As a boy and young teenager he was on the books of both Yorkshire as a wicketkeeper and Leeds United as a goalkeeper:
"I don’t think I realised how much I wasn’t enjoying it until I didn’t have to go to training, until I didn’t have to put in the extra hours, which at one point was something that I really wanted to do. It wasn’t until I’d done it and it had taken its toll that I realised how much hard work does go into being a professional athlete."
As a teenager ... his entire existence had been devoted to academy sport until the moment he decided it was no longer for him. So much so that it was all he knew and all his family could foresee. Having started so young, it was engrained in him.
"It wasn’t until I got to the age of 18 that I asked myself: 'Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?'" Gibson recalls. "I think it was just a case of no longer enjoying what I used to wake up looking forward to doing every day."
Good for him.
Just because you are good at something, you don't have to do it. And there may be lessons here about the pressures we put on talented young athletes at a ridiculously early age.
