John Wood: From silly-ass curate to world-weary genius

One of the great pleasures of Talking Pictures TV is spotting, with or without the aid of IMDb, British actors in their early years.

Take this vicar and silly-ass curate from the opening of Live Now Pay Later, a 1962 film that was shown the other day and is currently on the channel's online catch-up service. The vicar (on the left) is unmistakably Andrew Cruickshank, but who is his curate?

The answer is John Wood, a celebrated stage actor who paid the bills by taking small parts in a dozen British films of this era.

He then made an unexpected screen return, playing the world-weary genius Dr Stephen Falken, who has to be persuaded to try to attempt to save the world by Matthew Broderick, in the teen film WarGames.

I don't know how he came to be cast in a Hollywood film, but he was perfect for the part.

After that he appeared in a run of good films (Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, Ian McKellen's Richard III, The Madness of King George) and died in 2011 at the age of 81.

Live Now Pay Later, incidentally, tries so hard to entertain you that it becomes irritating. But you can see Ian Hendry (with hair) in the days when he got top billing, a miscast John Gregson and a generous handful of other British actors you can try to name.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Conservative members are now attacking their real enemy... each other

Quite who Lord Bonkers' scouts and agents are remains a mystery even to me, but there's no doubt that the old boy is very well informed.

The Rutlandshire trot-hound cropped up in one of the first of these diaries. It's a hunting dog noted for its stamina and very small ears - the latter mean that it cannot be made to fall into a deep sleep by its quarry reading left-wing pamphlets at it.

Friday

Labour members, my scouts tell me, are not happy with the early weeks of their government. Tipping buckets of cold water over old age pensioners and sticking out their tongues at Belgians is not what they thought they were signing up for. 

Conservative members, by contrast, are as happy as a Trot-hound with two tails because they are now attacking their real enemy: each other. Informed sources suggest their current leadership contest will come down to a fight between Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch.

Jenrick, I am told, is a useful fellow to sit next to if you want a planning application approved, while Badenoch has been described as putting the ‘bad’ into Badenoch. Come to think of it, she’s put the ‘Enoch’ into Badenoch too.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers
• In case they get peckish during Lent
• The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal

The Joy of Six 1268

In an article stuffed with quotes from unnamed 'senior' Lib Dems, Harriet Symonds looks for possible future fault lines in our larger parliamentary party. Nimby vs Yimby? Tuition fees? Gender? Maybe we should stop using terms like Nimby and Yimby (and Terf and Gammon) - giving your opponents nicknames does nothing for the clarity of your thinking or your ability to win over uncommitted voters.

Sienna Rogers talks to Shockat Adam, the pro-Gaza Independent candidate who defeated Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South.

"The Government’s approach relies heavily on the private sector to deliver against its ambitions. But historically, direct public investment has been key: at the post-war housebuilding peak in 1968, nearly two-in-five homes were built through the public sector, compared to just under one-quarter of homes in 2023." The Resolution Foundation considers whether Labour will achieve its housing ambitions.

Anthony Burgess hated the Beatles but had more in common with them than he realised, argues Michael Shallcross.

Judy Stroud on the reintroduction of dormice to Rockingham Forest: "During the clearance of over 600 acres of the Purlieus between 1862 and 1868 dormice were sometimes found when men were grubbing up the tree roots.  No evidence of dormice was found there during the late 20th century but the wood met the criteria for a successful reintroduction. This took place in 2001 and monitoring by the Forestry Commission has shown a long-term success, with dispersal within the wood from the initial release site."

Bob Lynn introduces us to Mary Webb, the Shropshire novelist and poet whose work, steeped in nature and mysticism, found fame only after her untimely death.

Kiki Dee: Loving and Free

Kiki Dee is best known for her duet with Elton John Don't Go Breaking My Heart, which made number 1 in 1976, but she had been recording since the early Sixties.

Loving and Free was the title track from a 1973 album of hers, yet it wasn't issued as a single until 1976 - it was a double A side with Amoureuse, which I chose as my Sunday music video years ago.

When I remembered the song the other day, I was sure it came from my era of listening to Radio Luxemburg under the bedclothes, so maybe it got some play in 1973. But I doubt it was Tony Prince's Powerplay. Anyway, it still sounds good.

That wholesome image of Kiki Dee with a bicycle and basket reminds me of Felicity Kendall in Solo, one of her post Good Life sitcoms.

But if Kiki tried cycling in those 1973 flairs they'd have got caught in the chain.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal

"This stuff about the beavers is Dragging On A Bit," Lord Bonkers said to me. "Who wrote it?"

"That was you, sir. This is your diary."

"Humph. Should've told 'em something about Mr Asquith and Venetia Stanley. You could turn that story into a novel."

Thursday

The delightful Pippa arrives at the Hall and wastes no time in getting down to business. After listening to my concerns, she goes to talk to the beavers and is away simply hours. She comes back with the bones of an agreement, the long and short of which is that the beavers will agree to take on the maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal, but their lodge and lake will stay. Oh, and I can use their jacuzzi whenever I wish. 

Well, it’s not ideal, but it’s a good sight more than I achieved off my own bat, so I am minded to sign.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers
• In case they get peckish during Lent

The railway wars come to Market Harborough

This mobile electronic billboard was parked in the Northampton Road this afternoon, and I later saw it driving down the High Street.

One of the big problems with the privatised railways is that they are, for the most part, monopolies. But if it's this much cheaper to travel to London from Rugby with London Northwestern Railway than to travel there from Market Harborough with EMR, then maybe it is a realistic alternative.

Your move, EMR.

Is Kind Hearts and Coronets the only nasty Ealing comedy?

Reading a recent London Review of Books, I came across Ruby Hamilton's review of three books by Celia Dale:

The appeal of Dale’s writing is clearly the same fetishisation* of English nastiness that bolstered the interwar 'golden age' of crime writing, ruled over by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, or the postwar Ealing comedies, best represented by Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949): "It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms."

I like Hamilton's take on the those women crime writers. There is rarely anything cosy about them - least of all about Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books, predicated as they are on the theory that you can learn about every form of human depravity simply by observing life in an English village.

But Kind Hearts and Coronets is not a typical Ealing comedy, even if it's the best of them. Because there is little nastiness in these films: the criminals in The Lavender Hill Mob have our sympathy, while those in The Ladykillers are rendered harmless by their incompetence.

What the films tend to celebrate is the common good and its triumphs over individual ambition. This is seen at its clearest in Davy, a failed star vehicle for Harry Secombe, which is the last and probably the worse Ealing Comedy. In it, Secombe gives up his dream of an opera career to remain with his family's struggling variety act.

But then dreams of escape tended to come to nothing at Ealing, whether Alec Guinness's in The Lavender Hill Mob or those of a whole London district in Passport to Pimlico.

So I don't find the nastiness that Ruby Hamilton says she finds in the Ealing comedies. Am I missing something?

* 'Fetishising' would save one syllable and the rarer 'fetishing' would save two.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: In case they get peckish during Lent

Jonathan Meades says beaver tastes "like spaniel dipped in cod liver oil", so I don't see selling off the whole colony to a fishmonger as the way out of Lord Bonkers' troubles. You will say that he doesn't mention that possibility in this entry, but I know how the old brute's mind works.

Wednesday

What to do about the beavers? Back in the Sixties I might have asked Violent Bonham Carter’s boys to have a quiet word with them: “Nice dam you’ve got here. Pity if anything happened to it” – you know the sort of thing. But those days are gone, so I have instead been asking around to see who might be able to help. 

This morning I struck gold. It transpires that one of our new MPs from Cambridgeshire, Pippa Heylings, is expert at smoothing over the tensions that arise in communities when beavers are reintroduced, so I feel sure she will make them see reason. 

When I was picking the Revd Hughes’s brains the other day, he mentioned that our Roman Catholic friends count beavers as fish in case they get peckish during Lent. It sounded Rather Far Fetched, but when I phoned my old friend Father Alton he confirmed that it is the case.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers

The Lib Dems now have a local councillor in the Western Isles

The Liberal Democrats, says the Stornoway Gazette, have their first councillor on Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the local authority that covers the Outer Hebrides.

Malcolm Macdonald, who represents the Stornoway North ward on Lewis, was elected as an Independent in the 2022 council election but has now adopted the Lib Dem label.

He told the newspaper:

“I am absolutely delighted to be representing the Western Isles as a Liberal Democrat councillor. As a party that champions communities and puts their needs first, they are a very natural fit for my own values.

“Whether it’s ferries, connectivity, health or population decline, people in the Western Isles feel that no one in government cares about the challenges in front of them. The SNP claim to be strong for Scotland, but they repeatedly ignore the issues that matter to people here.

“It doesn’t have to be like this. Liberal Democrats have a proud and long-standing tradition of standing up for rural communities. We are all about listening to people, understanding what they need and doing everything we can to make a difference for them. That’s exactly where my focus is as a Western Isles councillor."

There was a shopping mall, now it's all covered with flowers: The new Nottingham Broad Marsh

For 50 years or more, visitors to Nottingham have been funnelled through a bus station and a shopping centre if they wish to get from the railway station to the city centre.

I went to Nottingham today, partly for the pleasure of not doing that. Because the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre is no more. In its place is Nottingham's new Green Heart - an urban park and public space that is the first stage in the redevelopment of a significant proportion of the city centre.

And Broadmarsh seems to have become Broad Marsh as part of it.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: My hereditary peer peers

"Beaver Castle" eh? I think I can see what's going to happen this week. 

Meanwhile, I am reminded that in the early days of these diaries Lord Bonkers wrote that the Duchess of Rutland "kindly showed me her Belvoir".

Tuesday

I have been touched by the number of people who have written to express their concern about my position if Starmer expels my hereditary peer peers from the House of Lords. Please do not upset yourselves: I hold a Rutland peerage, and thus under the Treaty of Oakham am guaranteed membership of the House of Lords in perpetuity. 

Sadly, the same treaty guarantees the pre-eminence in this county of the Duke of Rutland, even though he lives in Leicestershire. His home is at Belvoir Castle, which, by an irony I find in no way amusing, is pronounced ‘Beaver Castle’.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills

The last days of the Ilfracombe branch

I remember passing through Ilfracombe while walking the coastal path in the summer of 1988. Every bed-and-breakfast establishment had its prices in the window, trying to undercut the place next door. It was great for a walker on a limited budget, but not a sign of a prosperous resort.

My theory at the time was that the town had not recovered from the closure of its branch railway from Barnstaple. Certainly, reading about it now, I find that line generated lots of holiday traffic almost to its closure in 1970, but attracted too few passengers apart from that. 

The last stretch of the line into Barnstaple had become part of the coastal path by 1988. I can remember sitting outside the fence of RAF Chivenor listening to Test Match Special - every time the radar transmitter turned towards me there was interference with the reception.

It was the summer of 1988, so England were losing horribly to the West Indies. I fancy the test I was listening to was the one in which Chris Cowdrey (son of Colin and godson of the chairman of selectors, Peter May) captained the team.

His selection was described at the time by the great Matthew Engel as "a combination of nepotism and wishful thinking". Cowdrey fils did not prove a success and, after going down with a minor injury, was bundled out of the team, never to play for England again.

Where were we? 

The video above, narrated by Victor Thompson, shows the last days of the Ilfracombe branch and tells us something of its history. Thompson does have a thing about nasty accidents on level crossings, but it's a good watch.

As a bonus to make up for all that cricket, here's footage of the same line shot in 1898.

Minister for police’s purse stolen – at policing conference

The Guardian, which tells us that Diana Johnson was giving speech in which she said UK was in grip of an "epidemic of antisocial behaviour, theft and shoplifting", wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Lord Bonkers Diary: The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills

Liberator 425 has been posted on the magazine's website in time for the Liberal Democrat Conference. You can download it free of charge.

With more Lib Dem MPs than ever, we have four writing for Liberator about how they see their role and what the party should do next.

That's the good news. The bad news is that it's time to begin another week with Lord Bonkers.

Monday

You find me seated in a deckchair, surveying my gardens and listening to the midsummer hum of insects (and to Meadowcroft grumbling as he works). Life is good: Freddie and Fiona are leaving me in peace (no more demands that I go canvassing in St Kilda) and Matron and the Well-Behaved Orphans have departed for their accustomed holiday at Trescothick Bay in Cornwall. 

There is only one fly in this fragrant ointment: a colony of beavers has turned up and is making free with my demesne. Take this lake I am sitting beside: it was, until last Thursday, my croquet lawn. Why, they’ve even rigged themselves up a jacuzzi! 

Now, I’m all in favour of rewilding – this is, I believe, the only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills – but one does like to be asked. Yet when I went to have it out with the beavers, they insisted I speak only to their elected spokesman, and his answer to everything was to say he had “the backing of the entire lodge” and refuse to give an inch.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Helen Morgan makes the case for reopening the line from Oswestry to Gobowen

Helen Morgan was granted a Westminster Hall debate today on the reopening of the railway from Gobowen to Oswestry.

BBC News gives the background to it:

The restoration of the link was approved last year as part of the Restoring Your Railway fund, but the new government confirmed it was cancelling the scheme.

That initiative would have funded 38 railway projects in total.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the cuts were needed to address a £21.9bn black hole in public finances and the Department for Transport would assess each individual project as part of a review.

The previous government had announced in October the Oswestry scheme would be fully funded to completion.

Helen, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Shropshire, made the case for reopening in her debate:

Poor public transport removes opportunity. It hinders young people, limiting their options for further and higher education and restricting their access to culture and leisure. In short, barriers to mobility are barriers to social mobility. During a recent visit to the jobcentre in Oswestry, the brilliant staff there told me that the No. 1 barrier to people accessing work is poor public transport. 

Meanwhile, I have spoken to businesses in Oswestry that have reported real difficulties in recruiting. They need to be able to attract people to work from a much wider area than Oswestry and not just those who have access to a private car. That means we are in the ridiculous situation where employers cannot recruit and jobseekers cannot find jobs to match their skills because of the same problem of poor public transport.

In reply the transport minister Lillian Greenwood talked about the "£21.9bn black hole" and bus networks.

It's true the last government's Restoring Your Railway fund, which was talked up as a way of "undoing Beeching" by the ultras in a fit of nostalgic post-referendum euphoria, was never properly financed. But this government comes across as having little idea of how to achieve the growth it talks about beyond a promise of "stability".

And good public transport services look like a way of promoting growth rather than an obstacle to it.

The Joy of Six 1267

John Harris says the government needs to start giving people hope and quickly: "Among all the numbers, there is a huge story here about the everyday reality of people’s lives. What I would call ambient austerity – litter everywhere, overgrown grass verges, potholed roads, rusty slides and swings – is now deeply ingrained. It sits at the heart of the cynicism towards politics and politicians that is intensified by social media. It has also been a sizeable part of most of the political ruptures of the past 14 years, not least Brexit – and, at the election, the way that Reform UK seized on so many resentments in traditional Labour heartlands that it often finished second."

Continued austerity is a danger to national security, warns Tom Woolmore.

John Stewart on the history of the feeding of schoolchildren by the state: "Local activists revealed that recipients might be subject to deliberately humiliating treatment or be given sub-standard food.  Frank Field ... was thus moved to write reports with titles such as The Stigma of Free School Meals (1974) and Free School Meals: The Humiliation Continues (1977)."

Paul Salveson remembers Britain's biggest mass trespass in support of the right to roam, which was held at Winter Hill in 1996.

"As a star of numerous revues and sketch shows, she played just about every conceivable kind of female character, and made each one of them sound distinctive, amusing and, in their own peculiar way, believable. Her sheer range, and comic craft, were truly remarkable." Graham McCann celebrates the career of Betty Marsden.

For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the LORD." But what is a cockatrice? Seana Graham finds out.

Tory MPs stride out in the wrong direction

OK, there's more to political leadership than having the right strategy, and Mel Stride has never been the most charismatic of politicians, but I can't help noticing that Conservative MPs have just voted out the leadership candidate who has so far made the most sense.

Here he is being quoted by the Standard yesterday:

"And what that is going to need is somebody that can lead our party over months and over years to get the right policy platform together that we can unite around to reach out to those voters that we lost to Reform, but equally not to forget those at the centre, those that we lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats."

It's not just Tory members who are growing weirder, Tory MPs are too.

The locomotive shed at Snailbeach

This is the locomotive shed for the Snailbeach District Railways, which you will find among the preserved mining buildings at Snailbeach. The line took lead ore away for smelting and brought coal to power the mining complex. The last locomotives ran here in 1946. 

I've visited this site many times, but I'd not noticed before this summer the loco shed is roofed with corrugated iron, the vernacular building material of the Shropshire lead-mining country. (Of course, the shed may once have had a slate roof.) The way buildings were thrown up in the mid 19th century gave its townships the feeling of the Wild West.

The Lucy Letby Inquiry and expressing concern about trial verdicts

Lady Justice Thirlwall's inquiry into events at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester while Lucy Letby was employed there opened today. 

Letby is a former neonatal nurse who has been sentenced to 15 whole-life terms after she was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others. There has since been widespread concern about the safety of these convictions.

I was taken aback by Lady Thirlwall's remarks on this concern, as quoted by the Guardian:

"So far as I’m aware it has come entirely from people who were not at the trial. Parts of the evidence have been selected and criticised as has the conduct of the defence at trial, about which those defence lawyers can say nothing.

"All of this noise has caused additional enormous stress for the parents who have suffered far too much."

Setting the condition that you must have been at the trial before you can express concern at a verdict would have disbarred the campaigners against the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four.

Expressing concern at a verdict seems bound to involve criticising some of the evidence presented but not all of it, and dismissing such concerns as "noise" is surely too dismissive. We lay people are allowed to have opinions about the British legal system that go beyond mute admiration of the state of perfection to which it has been brought.

If you want to know more about what the Thirlwall Inquiry will and won't be looking at, I recommend the video by Alan Robertshaw above.

And, while I'm not suggesting anything here about the verdicts on Lucy Letby, I can also recommend the book Three False Convictions, Many Lessons: The Psychopathology of Unjust Prosecutions by David C. Anderson and Nigel P. Scott, which I've just written a short review of for Liberator.

Trust re-formed to fund repairs to Ludlow's town walls

In Ludlow last month I saw the failure, 12 years after a stretch collapsed, to repair its town walls as a metaphor for national malaise. (The photo above shows a section in a better state of repair.)

Now BBC News reports that the charitable trust that used to care for Ludlow's town walls is re-forming and will begin raising money to assist local authorities in carrying out the repairs:

"This blot on our landscape has been left unattended and it's now presenting a risk of further collapse," claimed Colin Richards, chair of the trust.

"What we're trying to do as a community is to come forward through the Ludlow Town Walls Trust to say look...we can help as a community."

Mr Richards was responsible for the wall for 24 years as a conservation officer with the former South Shropshire District Council.

The report also touches on the dispute over who is responsible for the upkeep of the walls:

The section of wall is owned by the Parish Church of St Laurence, Ludlow, as part of the Church of England estate.

However, responsibility for repair lies with Ludlow Town Council, according to the parish and Shropshire Council.

Ludlow Town Council has not responded to the BBC's request for comment, but earlier this year said it was still taking legal advice.

Watch interviews with former inhabitants of St Kilda from 1972

St Kilda was evacuated in 1930. We see the remote archipelago, which lies 40 miles west of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, in this Thames Television documentary from 1972.

It includes interviews with former inhabitants of St Kilda to give us an understanding of what life was like there. Expect seabirds and that wonderful psalm singing.

Who else is in that photograph of John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck as boys?

This photo has been floating about social media for years, and I tweeted it myself the other day because Jimmy Tarbuck was trending. This led to some debate about who is in it.

I have always understood that the three boys from the left are the future journalist and newsreader Peter Sissons, John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck. I've also seen it suggested that the tall boy at the back is the future Everton and England centre back Brian Labone.

But it's not Labone. As he explains in the video below, it's Michael Hill. He was to remain a friend of Lennon's through their teenage years and grew up to become "a well-known figure in the international business of marine insurance," according to this page promoting a book he wrote about the teenage Lennon.

He also explains the photo's provenance. It was taken in 1951 on a Dovedale Primary School trip to the Isle of Man and not discovered until about the year 2000, when the teacher who took it died.

What made me nervous is that Hill doesn't mention Peter Sissons, who was a couple of years younger than Lennon and Tarbuck and to become a good friend of Paul McCartney's at secondary school.

But it is him. A reader kindly tweeted me the cutting above from the Mail, which names all six boys. (Apparently the Mirror had it first, but didn't get further than Lennon and Tarbuck.) And also in the photo are Ivan Vaughan, who was to introduce Lennon and McCartney, and the future professional footballer Jimmy Blain, who didn't make it at Everton but was to become an Exeter City legend.

There remains only for me to remind you that Frank Duckworth, co-deviser of the Duckworth Lewis method, lodged with John Lennon and his Aunt Mimi.

Mystery at Witchend is Went the Day Well? and Seven White Gates is A Matter of Life and Death

Malcolm Saville wrote his first two Lone Pine books while the second world war was raging. He somehow found time to work on them while holding down a day job in publishing and fire-watching by night. 

And there are elements to those books that put me in mind of the most interesting British wartime propaganda films. I even wonder if one thing Saville sought to do in writing the first book, Mystery at Witchend, was to warn children that they should be alert to the existence of fifth columnists and Nazi spies 

If the point of Went the Day Well? was to remind its audience that everywhere, even a village as remote and insignificant as Bramley End, was in danger from Nazi infiltrators, then Mystery at Witchend said the same thing about the even remoter countryside of the Long Mynd.

So Dickie has to accept that even the dashing RAF pilot he and Mary helped find his way on the Long Mynd was a Nazi - "one of the worst".

And Mary makes an observation that could come from Went the Day Well?:

"And there was something else, Dickie. Did you notice what I noticed? Did you hear."

He looked puzzled for a moment.

"Wasn't anything to hear, was there?"

Then they stared at each other without speaking, and Dickie's second shoe dropped to the floor.

"Of course," he went on. "Of course there was something to hear. They were all talking all the time."

"'Course they were," said Mary slowly. "But they weren't speaking English."

If Mystery at Witchend is about the risk of a German invasion, then Seven White Gates is about Anglo-American relations. You will find this theme in A Canterbury Tale and, above all, in A Matter of Life and Death.

When David Niven appears before a Heavenly court to plead to be allowed to stay on earth with his new American love, counsel for the prosecution is Abraham Farlan, who hates the British for making him the first casualty of the American Revolutionary War. 

Niven wins his case, and his and Hunter's love becomes a metaphor for relations between the two nations.

In Seven White Gates the metaphorical relationship is that of an estranged father and son. When Peter goes to stay at White Gates farm under the Stiperstones, she finds it presided over by the daunting figure of Uncle Micah, who speaks like someone out of the Old Testament and soothes his broken heart with midnight rambles to the Devil's Chair.

He is followed on one of these by the twins, who become trapped in old mine workings. They are rescued by some American soldiers on a training exercise, and their officer proves surprisingly knowledgeable about the area and inquisitive about the farm.

Mary realises he must be Uncle Micah's son Charles, who left for America after a terrible row with his father. And she duly brings them together at the end of the book.

I don't think you can carry on with the filmic comparisons after Seven White Gates. The Lone Pine stories becoming more formulaic and concern themselves with finding buried treasure or rounding up criminals.

But the first two of those stories display themes that you will also find in British films of the period.

The Joy of Six 1266

Peter Apps untangles the chain of cover-ups that led to the Grenfell Tower fire: "The report traces a long and unpleasant history of this with regard to cladding fires, and it is clear reading it that the lack of honesty came at a fatal cost to those who lived in Grenfell Tower. What is worse is that it continued even after the fire destroyed much of the building."

Josh Self finds that the rise of Robert Jenrick reveals a cunning, ruthless operator.

"There is a growing sense that the future of work might not unfold in our favour. People are expected to work longer, for less, with less security and fewer protections. Rather than making work easier or more rewarding, we expect the development and application of new technologies, particularly in the areas of automation, computation and artificial intelligence, to disempower us." Craig Gent says research into logistics and the gig economy shows workers are tracked, instructed and managed by a dystopian world of algorithms.

"Babarinde grew up quickly, becoming a father figure to his five younger half-siblings. 'I found myself helping them with homework, going to sports days, Christmas plays, parents’ evenings, to hear about how they were doing, to go and cheer them on.'" Harriet Symonds profiles the new Liberal Democrat MP for Eastbourne.

Samantha Rayner takes us through the reasons why bookshops are bucking the decline of the high street: "In a time when people seek out 'destination; experiences, bookshops are getting savvier about not just being a gateway to a myriad of worlds and perspectives, but also becoming spaces that are aesthetically rewarding to visit."

Patrick Comerford visits the East End to search for echoes of the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911.

Judy Collins: Farewell to Tarwathie

Farewell to Tarwathie was written by the Scottish poet George Scroggie (1826-1907) and published in his 1857 collection The Peasant's Lyre. Scroggie lived on Tarwathie Farm, which is in Aberdeenshire.

It takes the form of a paean to his homeland by the protagonist, who is about to leave for Greenland on a whaling trip.

This Judy Collins recording of it can be found on her 1970 album Whales and Nightingales. She was by then an internationally known artist, having had a hit with Joni Mitchell's song Both Sides Now. I love the clarity of her voice here.

The whales on Farewell to Tarwathie, incidentally, also sang on the Kate Bush track Moving. They later took part in a world music tour with Trio Bulgarka and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, but have since retired.

Danny Chambers calls for penguins to be moved from “dark and cramped basement”

Danny Chambers has backed the call for a colony of penguins to be moved from the Sea Life London Aquarium.

The Liberal Democrat MP, who practised as a vet for 16 years before being elected for Winchester at the general election, is the focus of an article in today's Express. The paper prints the statement he issued after seeing the way the gentoo penguins were being kept:

In the heart of London, I witnessed grown penguins confined to dark and cramped conditions underground.

Little freedom to roam and no glimpse of sunlight. I thought to myself, is this really befitting of a country of animal lovers?

This is what I encountered at Sea Life, London’s Aquarium. Gentoo penguins, glum looking, behind a misty screen in a cramped basement-style room.

I applaud the likes of Chris Packham and Feargal Sharkey who have campaigned to get these penguins freed. Now, as a Member of Parliament, I join that cause. It is time to free the penguins.

You can read more about the campaign in a BBC News story. Sea Life London Aquarium is quoted in the Express story as saying the penguins' habitat was designed with the help of specialist vets.

Juggling knives upside down: Felicity Footloose at Arts Fresco Lite

Felicity Footloose claims to be the only acrobat who juggles knives while hanging upside down: "Some days I can't even do it myself!"

And she was doing it in The Square at Market Harborough for Arts Fresco Lite. This was a fund-raising event for the town's annual street theatre festival Arts Fresco, which is finding funding harder to come by these days.

You can see the highpoint of her act in the photo above, and see her and a couple of other acts who took part today in the photos below.

Proof that Bluesky is primmer than the Victorians

I'm close to completing that Book Challenge meme:

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

You can see my choices so far on Twitter and Bluesky.

One of them is Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet. Not only is it beautifully written, it also reinforced a view I had come to not long before I encountered it: namely, that the Victorians were far less Victorian that we imagine. 

The caricatured view we have formed of them serves a way of congratulating ourselves for not being like that. Notably, while the Victorians were horribly repressed when it came to sex, we are wonderfully liberated.

In reality the idea of covering table legs for the sake of decency, for instance, was a joke that 19th-century Britons told at the expense of the straitlaced Americans.

So I was amused that the cover of Inventing the Victorians, which features a chaste Victorian nude, was flagged on Bluesky as 'Adult Content'. Users of the platform have to click on this warning to view the naughty image.

I've no quarrel with Bluesky doing this: you can override the setting if you wish and many people have signed up with them because they want a more civilised place to hang out than Twitter is now.

But this flag does tend to support the thesis of the book it is worried about.

The latest connections from our Trivia Desk

These just in.

In her London Review of Books review of Barbra Streisand's memoir My Name is Barbra, Malin Hay records:

By the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’).

Did he really dress like that? When Fischer burst on to the international scene aged 15, he dressed like any other American teenager of the Fifties and wore a T-shirt. A few years later, he agreed to fly over to record a programme for the BBC because he had calculated that the schedule would allow him enough time to be measured for a Savile Row suit.

Certainly, he was well turned out for his world championship match against Boris Spassky - there was no sign of a deranged pilot then.

******

At the start of his biography of Noel Coward, Oliver Soden writes:

Violet Coward doted on her son. He was blond-haired, blue-eyed, disarmingly bright, and he showed signs of being musical, reaching tiny fingers up to the piano in the parlour of the Cowards' semi-detached house, known as "Helmsdale", at 5 Waldegrave Road in Teddington.

Violet and her husband, Arthur, had befriended the local celebrity Robert [actually Richard] "R. D." Blackmore, bestselling author of Lorna Doone, and he agreed to become godfather to their child, sending a carriage drawn by a white pony to trundle the boy, resplendent in his Victorian skirts, around the streets of the prosperous Middlesex suburb.

But this was not Noel: it was his older brother Russell Arthur Blackmore Coward, who died, aged six, the year before Noel was born.

Because I think I already knew about Neil Diamond and Bobby Fischer being classmates of Barbra Streisand, R.D. Blackmore being the godfather of Noel Coward's brother is our Trivial Fact of the Day.

Later. As well as correcting my and Oliver Soden's errors, Richard James tells me that R.D. Blackmore and Noel Coward's father were both chess players.

The first test innings I can remember: Colin Milburn at Lord's, 1968

I have a faint memory of an International Cavaliers match on television that may predate it, but the first time I can remember being aware of cricket was England's 1967/8 of the West Indies.

And even then the things that impressed me were the crowd riots and (look away now if you are squeamish) Fred Titmus losing several toes to a boat's propellor.

Apparently, as long as you keep your big toe, you don't much miss them because your balance is not affected. Sure enough, Titmus was to play on for years.

So the first test series I can remember watching is the 1968 Ashes series in England. And the first action I recall is Colin Milburn hitting Australia all round Lord's on the second morning of the second test.

Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can see some of the action here.

Milburn was to lose an eye in car accident the following year. He attempted a comeback for Northamptonshire, but eventually had to accept that his cricket career was over.

In a sad echo of Milburn's misfortune, the other England batsman I can remember hitting Australis around Lord's like this is Ben Hollioake, who was to die in another accident aged only 24.

Two to share leadership of Lib Dem group on Shropshire council

Shropshire Council's Liberal Democrat group is to have two leaders in the run up to next year's elections, reports the Shropshire Star before its paywall kicks in.

The current group leader Roger Evans, the councillor for Longden, is to share the leadership with Heather Kidd, who represents Chirbury and Worthen.

As well as scoring some remarkable local by-election victories in the last two years, the Lib Dems polled more votes across the county at the general election than any other party.

This saw them hold Helen Morgan's seat in North Shropshire and come close to winning South Shropshire, where Matthew Green was the candidate.

Turning the Devil's Stone on 5 November at Shebbear in Devon

The new Fortean Times has a strong emphasis on folklore and folk horror. In his article on local traditions, Ben Edge takes us to Shebbear in Devon and the annual turning of the Devil's Stone on 5 November:

It soon fell dark and the scary-looking Devil on the pub sign was illuminated spookily by lights. Children were playing wildly around the stone itself, leaping over each other and getting rougher in their play. The fact that no parents intervened suggested that this always happened, almost as if it too was part of the tradition.

Behind this tradition lies the story that the Devil is trapped beneath the stone. It takes him a year to burrow away from the stone and be on the point of escaping, so it has to be moved every 5 November.

You can watch the proceedings from 10 years ago in the video above. It starts promisingly - morris dancing in the dark! - but I could have done with a bit less from the vicar. Was there no reputable warlock available?

Don't treat social problems as problems within individual children

Embed from Getty Images

There was a good letter from Dr Lucy Johnstone in the Guardian earlier this week about the supposed mental health crisis among schoolchildren.

She wrote:

The "staggering" rise in anxiety among children (NHS referrals for anxiety in children more than double pre-Covid levels, 27 August) deserves a more sophisticated response than installing counsellors in every school, useful though that may be in some cases, and I say this as a mental health professional - a consultant clinical psychologist.

Well-meaning awareness campaigns that encourage us to translate every feeling into a "mental health issue" convey the message that children have an individual deficit, while obscuring the reasons for their distress. And yet research consistently shows that their feelings are understandable in context.

Your article mentions pressures from target-driven education, online bullying, poverty and uncertainty about the future. None of this will be resolved by funding extra mental health professionals, helplines and support hubs. Indeed, that is likely to perpetuate the cycle, since these are not fundamentally medical problems – they are social ones.

This is a point that I hope my fellow Liberal Democrats will bear in mind, as the call for a mental health professional in every school was in our general election manifesto.

There's is currently a vogue for imposing zero-tolerance behaviour policies on pupils in state schools, particularly in areas where many of them are working class or from ethnic minorities.

Meanwhile, free from the ministrations of Ofsted, private schools now, as I once put it:

trade ("children can get muddy") on their freedom from the straitjacket imposed by the Gradgrinds at the Department for Education.

Will the new Labour government makes things better?

The signs are not promising. Pam Jarvis has pointed out on Bluesky that the DfE's new behaviour and attendance external reference group includes a police officer but not a psychologist.

Max Wilkinson and Roz Savage come second and third in ballot for private members' bills

Congratulations to the Liberal Democrat MPs Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) and Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) who finished second and third in this session's ballot for private members' bills. With such high placings, they do have a realistic chance to getting a bill through parliament.

Further down the list, you will also find Danny Chambers (Winchester) in 17th place and Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) in 19th.

The 20 places in the ballot were filled by 15 Labour MPs, these 4 Liberal Democrats and 1 Traditional Unionist Voice. Remarkably, no Conservatives were drawn out of the hat.

My Tory MP, who once put up a creditable fight against the anti-Covid-vaccination nutters, seems to have taken this badly.

I may well be about to embarass myself here - so please do put me right - but if we assumed all 121 Conservative MPs put in, and exclude Sinn Fein and government ministers, then isn't the probability of no Conservatives in the top 20 for the PMB ballot less than 1% ? https://t.co/jLo47WhHBJ

— Neil O'Brien (@NeilDotObrien) September 5, 2024

The Joy of Six 1265

"The Labour government appears to think that improving the delivery of public services will be sufficient to resolve the embittered alienation of so many voters from British politics. Do we dare as liberals to argue that democracy requires a much more active engagement with our citizens, at national and at local levels?" William Wallace says the Liberal Democrats should be setting the agenda, not following it.

Christian Wolmar claims he has the ideal road plan for Britain: take the 16 major highway schemes worth £15bn and bin them.

"White privately-educated British male cricketers were 34 times more likely to play professionally than state-educated British South Asians." Taha Hashim on the work of the South Asian Cricket Academy.

Red Flag Walks looks back to the feminist protest against the 1970 Miss World contest: "Sarah Wilson was chosen to start the protest. 'When Bob Hope was going on and on with terrible, grotesque stuff, I got up and swung my football rattle. It seemed ages before anybody responded – people were lighting their cigarettes to ignite the smoke bombs – but then I saw stuff beginning to cascade down.'"

"He was fiercely loyal to the series. Although he consumed my words at an alarming rate, he had an armoury of looks, leers, shrugs and incredulous expressions that earned me laughs I never had to write. Len was the driving force behind Rising Damp." The late Eric Chappell, creator of the series, tells the story of Leonard Rossiter and Rising Damp, the show he created and wrote 50 years ago.

A London Inheritance goes in search of the power station on what is now St Pancras Way: "The first phase of the power station faced the Regents Canal and the large area of railway coal depots, and this was one of the reasons why the power station was located here – the easy access to supplies of coal, whether delivered to the power station via train to the depot opposite, or along the canal from Regents Canal Dock (now Limehouse Dock), brought in from the north east of the country using colliers."

Farewell to the Reverend Ruggles Fisher

When Market Harborough first competed in the Leicestershire chess league in the mid Seventies, a stalwart member of our team was the Reverend Fisher from Husbands Bosworth.

He was a kindly man - everyone's idea of a country vicar. I wish I had known he was called Ruggles (as more people should be), but he was always the Reverend Fisher to me in those days.

I knew he had retired to Oakham and had lived to celebrate his 100th birthday. When I thought of him again today, I found his obituary in the Church Times. He died in December 2022 at the age of 102.

The early part of the obituary is very much about his chess:

On his retirement from parish ministry in 1982, he joined the Clergy Correspondence Chess Club. After winning the clergy championship for three consecutive years, in 1985, 1986, and 1987, he retired, returning to compete against Canon John Morris and winning another three consecutive times, in 1993, 1994, and 1995 ... 

He went on to win again in 1997 and 2000. Fittingly, the 2000 win was jointly with Canon Morris, for whom it was also his final win. Fisher remained a member of the Club until his death.

But there was more to his life than that. He fought in the Burma campaign with the Royal Norfolk Regiment and retired from the Army with the rank of Major.

Church Times suggests his longevity made him "a direct connection to a now-lost era". This was for two reasons.

The first was that his father, the Revd Steward Travers Fisher, served as a chaplain in the Boer War - my Revd Fisher was the fourth generation of his family to be a Church of England clergyman.

And the second was that his grandfather, like his grandson the Revd Thomas Ruggles Fisher, "was a signatory to the Remonstrance in response to the decision of the Privy Council in Hebbert v. Purchas in 1871".

Thanks to Wikipedia, I can tell you that John Purchas was an author and Church of England clergyman who was prosecuted for ritualist practices:

Purchas introduced the use of vestments such as the cope, chasuble, alb, biretta, etc., and used lighted candles on the altar, crucifixes, images, and holy water, together with processions, incense, and the like.

He lost on every point of the case when it reached Pricy Council, but as he had put his property out of his hands he couldn't be pursued for costs. And he continued to conduct services as he chose until his death the following year.

I don't know if the signatories were supportive of his Romish practices or simply wished to defend the autonomy of individual clergymen.

One other point... If you were a chess player called 'Fisher' in the Seventies then every opponent would make a crack about your name, convinced that he was the first to do so. The Revd Fisher bore it with the patience of a saint.

Consumer protection against online fraud may soon be slashed

I've expressed before my surprise at the way the banks have been able to walk away from the high street with barely a comment, let alone criticism, from politicians.

The result of this move has been to force people into banking online, some of whom have little knowledge of the digital world and are not street smart, web smart or whatever we want to call it,

At least, I have thought till now, the banks are good at reimbursing customers who've been the victim of fraud.

Now come news from the Guardian that an organisation called the Payment Services Regulator is poised to slash the amount it was planning to require banks to refund the victims of fraud - from £415,000 to about £85,000 "after strong lobbying from lenders, fintechs* and some politicians", the paper's report says.

The Guardian goes on to say:

Consumer groups and others have been eagerly awaiting the regime’s October start date and the higher threshold, and any decision to cut it after lobbying by banks is likely to trigger a major row.

But will it? The politicians who have been lobbying for a less generous scheme include, not only wicked old Tories from the last government, but Labour figures in the new one.

With Labour determined upon higher economic growth, without having a strategy for achieving it beyond establishing 'stability', there's a danger that the policy will come to mean giving business whatever it asks for.

We saw how that ended last time Labour were in power.

And if people put off financial transactions because they are afraid of being defrauded, that can only slow growth. So let's hope Labour finds the courage to support banks' customers rather than bankers.

* 'Fintechs'? I believe this is a running together of 'financial technology companies'.

Norfolk Lib Dems stand down in favour of Independent by-election candidate in Lib Dem seat

Those who follow local elections may remember a striking victory last August, when John Crofts gained the Conservative-held Norfolk County Council ward Freebridge Lynn for the Liberal Democrats.

The sad news is that John died recently. You can read some moving tributes to him in the Lynn News.

So there is to be another Freebridge Lynn by-election and, reports the Eastern Daily Press, this time there will be no Lib Dem candidate. Instead, the party has endorsed the Independent candidate Simon Ring.

Brain Watkins, leader of the Lib Dem group on Norfolk County Council, explains why:

"It's tragic that John Croft's tenure as councillor was cut short, and we mourn his passing.

"Normally, we would be looking to field an official Lib Dem candidate, particularly in a seat that we have held previously.

"However [Lib Dem county and borough councillor] Rob Colwell has worked very closely with Simon Ring, who is well respected as deputy leader of West Norfolk Council.

"Rob has endorsed Simon as someone who would represent Freebridge Lynn with passion and enthusiasm if he is elected.

"John would have also approved of us backing Simon on this occasion."

The Freebridge Lynn ward covers North and South Wootton, Castle Rising and Grimston.

The aerial ropeway trestle at The Bog

When in the Shropshire Hills be sure to visit the visitor centre at The Bog. It's housed in what was the school for this lost mining village and serves tea and wonderful cakes, as well as selling local crafts and books on the area.

I got there using the Shropshire Hills shuttle bus, which will run on every Saturday for the rest of September. I remember the days when these buses would take you to far off places like Much Wenlock and Knighton. They have gone along with reasonable funding for local authorities, but they still take you round the Long Mynd and Stiperstones.

This time there was a new (for me) attraction at The Bog: a trestle from an aerial ropeway that has been put up as a tribute to all who worked at the mine here.

The Shropshire Mining Club explains:

Bog mine was redeveloped before the 1st World War and different ways of transporting ore from the mine to the railway at Malehurst and of coal back to the mine were considered. Traction engines would cause extensive damage to the roads, and extending the railway from Snailbeach would be prohibitively expensive. 

The solution adopted was a five mile aerial ropeway which took less land and could cope with rough ground and gradients. Its drawbacks were its limited carrying capacity, problems in frost and high winds and the amount of maintenance it required. 

It was designed and constructed by "Ropeways Limited" during 1918, much of the construction work being done by German prisoners of war. The mine closed in 1925 and the ropeway with it.

The trestle, which is of the same design as those used on the original ropeway at The Bog, came from Claughton Manor Brickworks, which had the last functioning ropeway in the country. You can see a video of it in use on this blog.

The trestle isn't as tall as I expected, which makes sense of the stories you hear at Minsterley. There the ropeway taking coal up to the boilers at Snailbeach mine ran across people's back gardens. If times were hard, residents would reach up with a stick to tip a bucket as it passed overhead and receive some free fuel.

And then it was time to get the bus to the pub at Bridges to meet another friend from Twitter.