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

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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.

Voters are beginning to think the Conservatives are weird - and they look like getting weirder

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Here's some heartening news from the Guardian:

Conservative politicians have started to be seen as "weird", and few members of the public - even including the party’s own voters - are able to identify the Tory leadership candidates, research suggests. ...

Multiple focus groups of former Tory voters suggested that those who switched their vote at the last election were not inclined to back to the Conservatives any time soon.

The research by More in Common said the party struggled with relatability, particularly in Liberal Democrat areas, by focusing on topics "which excite the base, or the highly politically engaged" but were distant from ordinary people’s lives.

In a similar vein to the attack that US Democrats have levelled against Republicans, especially the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, the research found "there is a danger that the Conservatives have started to become seen as 'weird'".

I've also been looking at the findings of a YouGov survey of Tory members that was published last week.

Among them are the insights that:

• 42 per cent of respondents supported the idea of a merger between their party and Reform UK
• 51 per cent believe the party should move to the right under the next leader
• 50 per cent believe its primary target over the next parliament should be Reform voters

The survey also finds that members want to be able to vote on party policy at their annual conference, to have a greater role in leadership elections and to elect a deputy leader.

All good democratic ideas. But given the members' views, if they were enacted they would do little for the Conservatives' electoral prospects.

Jennie interviewed by Kay Burley

Well, Steve Darling did the talking.

A walk along Roman Stane Street from London Bridge to Tooting with John Rogers

John's blurb on YouTube explains:

Part of a series of videos exploring Roman London, this walk follows the Roman Road that led from the Thames at London Bridge to Chichester. Our journey starts at London Bridge and a stop at the Wheatsheaf pub. The road leads us through Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Stockwell, Clapham, Clapham Common, Balham, ending at Tooting in the Trafalgar Inn.

A collaboration with Young's Beer.

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

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

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When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

The Joy of Six 1264

"Psychologists, however, are all too aware that people are reluctant to change their minds and that, when it happens at all, it occurs gradually. Famously, those who invest heavily in ideological projects such as end-of-the-world cults (or Prohibition, or Brexit) are likely to double down when their prophecies fail (numerous cults have seen the hour of the apocalypse arrive and pass without incident, and then simply recalibrated their calendars)." Richard Bentall asks when Britain will change its mind on Brexit.

Gemma Gould sets out what happens to women who speak out on social media: "For women who take a stand on social issues, the backlash can be swift and severe. In the UK, women in politics, journalism, activism and other public spheres who speak out against injustice are often met with hostility. This hostility is not limited to public debate; it extends into their personal lives, affecting their mental health, well-being and sometimes even their safety."

Phil O'Brien celebrates the Welsh socialist writer Raymond Williams on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

"As I learnt more about the history of these stones, I became more interested in them. The myths attached to them are Christian – the church was assigning meaning to all this ancient stuff to scare people into conformity. And that’s really intriguing. Why were the Methodists so keen to come into Cornwall to control the working classes? What the hell were we up to?" Mark Jenkin talks to Bob Fisher about his film Enys Men.

"Towards the bottom right-hand corner is St Georges Recreation Ground. The former cinder running track with a spectator pavilion is highlighted by the green surround. The 100-yard sprint section on which Harold Abrahams qualified for the 1924 Olympics in Paris (where he won the 100-metres Gold medal) can just be seen." Anthony Rowley on the volumes of history to be found in one aerial photograph of a Shropshire village.

Jonathan Pomeroy watches this year's swift season end.

Charles Masterman and the Siege of Sidney Street

Embed from Getty Images

Talking Pictures TV is showing the 1960 British film The Siege of Sidney Street at 22:05 this evening. Thrill to Peter Wyngarde as Peter the Painter. [Later. It's now on the channel's catch-up service TPTV Encore.]

The siege. a real event from 1911, is famous because the Liberal home secretary Winston Churchill called out the Army to deal with two Latvian revolutionary anarchists and had himself photographed at the scene, apparently directing operations.

This gives me an excuse to repeat this extract from Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband Charles, who at the time was Churchill's deputy:

The "Sidney Street incident" had taken place while we were abroad, and the Home Secretary, Mr. Churchill, had incurred a certain amount of criticism for calling out the troops and for being there himself. As Mr Balfour observed later, "I understand what the photographer was doing but why the Home Secretary?"

The story was told in heightened terms in the foreign press, with illustrations in red and blue; every English person we encountered demanded what was happening, with vocal complaints that they did not expect this sort of action by a British Government. I will not deny that by the time he reached home Masterman's official loyalty was beginning to show signs of wear and tear.

He burst into Mr. Churchill's room at the Home Office with the query "What the hell have you been doing now, Winston?" The reply, in Winston's characteristic lisp, was unanswerable. "Now Charlie. Don't be croth. It was such fun."

The Bailey Head, Oswestry: One of the 17 best pubs in Britain

I have been to one of the best 17 pubs in Britain.

Remembering a post from July about Grace Goodlad and Duncan Borrowman's pub in Oswestry, the day after showing the philosophers around Malcolm Saville Country I broke all my rules and customs and headed for the north of Shropshire.

The Bailey Head occupies a great position in the centre of town, and the orange umbrellas outside display a Liberal Democrat's knowledge of which colour stands out best from a distance.

I found Grace and Duncan behind the bar. We talked Shropshire politics, I sampled their beers and the regulars were friendly.

One of the best 17 pubs in Britain? When I blogged about the pub in July, it was to say that it had just been named as the CAMRA's West Midlands Cider Pub of the Year.

Now, reports Shropshire Live:

The Bailey Head in Oswestry has been named as one of the top 17 pubs in the UK as part of the Campaign for Real Ale’s (CAMRA) prestigious Pub of the Year competition.

The pub has one of the largest beer ranges of any in Shropshire, claiming to have sold over 3,400 different draught beers since March 2016.

Six constantly changing cask beers, always including one dark beer, are supplemented by eleven other draught beers, plus four ciders and a perry. The pub also has a substantial range of canned and bottled beers from across the UK and overseas.

The Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) named the pub the UK’s Best Rural Independent Craft Beer Pub or Bar in 2020 and has been a finalist many times since. Regular tap take overs and meet the brewer events, among other activities are organised for the local community. The Bailey Head is very dog friendly, being voted Most Dog Friendly Pub in the West Midlands in 2017 by DogBuddy.

17 fantastic pubs have battled it out with thousands of pubs across the UK to be crowned the winner in their area. Pubs in the competition are scored on their atmosphere, decor, welcome, service, inclusivity, overall impression, but most importantly – the quality of live beer, real cider and perry.

The regional and national finalists will now compete for the UK National Pub of the Year award, with judges whittling the 17 pubs down to just four in late September. CAMRA’s esteemed National Pub of the Year title is the topmost accolade the campaigning group can bestow upon a pub. The overall winner will be announced in January 2025.

Good luck to The Bailey Head!

Ace Kefford Stand: Daughter Of The Sun

Every band needs a lost genius, and with the Move it's Ace Kefford. He played bass on their first hits of the Sixties, but left the band in mid 1968 because of the stresses of touring.

After leaving the Move, he worked on a solo album with the producer Tony Visconti, but it never appeared. 

In 2003 the tracks he had recorded for it appeared on a CD, Ace the Face, that promised "the lost album and more". The more was some tracks by the Ace Kefford Stand, the band he formed in 1968, and Daughter of the Sun is one of them. Very good it sounds too.

In 2002 Ace Kefford talked about his mental health problems to the Move's lead singer, Carl Wayne, on BBC WM:

AK: I've been unsettled since I was a kid. Our fame was instant really: within about a year we were in the charts, weren't we? I think similar to a lot of people who were growing up and described as sensitive children, I was like that.

CW: We were. Do you think we were insensitive to your needs in the Move?

AK: No, I don't think you understood. People didn't understand then. I mean, if I was having a panic attack on the Hendrix Tour - which is what we call it these days, a panic attack - people wouldn't understand. If I'd got a panic attack on the Hendrix Tour or on Top of the Pops and I've got to get out of that place as fast as I can, people don't understand. So really that's what it was, but I've been in and out of mental homes and drug rehabs on all sorts of stuff all my life to get myself to here.

I hope Ace is doing well today. There's a long interview with him recorded this year on YouTube - in two parts - that I've not listened to yet.