Dirk Bogarde and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs

Last night it was Highgate Cemetery. Tonight it's the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.

Our Mother's House was one of my 10 British films that should be better known:

A fatherless family of children hide the death of their mother from the authorities by burying her in the garden because they fear being sent to an orphanage. 

Among the children are Pamela Franklin, Mark Lester, Phoebe Nicholls (immediately recognisable as Cordelia in the famous television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited) and Louis Sheldon Williams, whose mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the Sixties, as I did for Liberal Democrat News 40 years later.

If all this sounds tacky or exploitative, the wonderful score by George Delerue - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts the film to a wholly different level. Add in Dirk Bogarde in a very atypical role, Yootha Joyce and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and there's lots to enjoy.

Vote for Layla Moran's Murphy: Other cats can't win here

Battersea Dogs and Cats Home has opened its Purr Minister contest for 2024. It sees politicians' cats competing in a public vote to draw attention to animal welfare issues.

Running an eye over the runners, there's only one choice for the loyal Liberal Democrat. Step forward Murphy, a 21-year-old veteran belonging to our own Layla Moran.

Among the opposition are Mr Speaker's Attlee and the Bishop of Newcastle's Ebba.

Irene Handl and David Warner at Karl Marx's grave

From the film Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966).

The Joy of Six 1284

Ben Quinn explains how the National Trust fought back against the culture warriors: "When it comes to disinformation, [Celia] Richardson speaks of taking 'a broken windows approach' - borrowing from the criminology theory that addressing low-level problems creates an atmosphere that discourages larger ones."

"From the 19th to 20th century, children were physically removed from their homes and separated from their families and communities, often without the consent of their parents. The purpose of these schools was to strip Native American children of their Indigenous names, languages, religions and cultural practices." Rosalyn R. LaPier says Joe Biden's apology for the horrors of Native American boarding schools doesn’t go far enough.

Dominic Grieve has some good advice, which the Conservative Party will ignore, concerning the severe problems that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights would cause.

It is all too clear that unelected bureaucrats now control what happens on the West Yorkshire Rail network on the grounds that declining passenger numbers, a result of their own failures, justify further cuts. Curtailments to Sunday and evening services could soon follow. In a reversal of decades of local progress, argues Colin Speakman, West Yorkshire’s once-thriving commuter rail now struggles under bureaucracy and neglect.

"Arlott was a superlative cricket commentator, a failed Liberal politician (was there any other kind in the post-war era?), and a major catalyst in the D'Oliveira Affair. Were it not for John Arlott we may never have heard of Basil D’Oliveira and the controversy sparked by D'Oliveira’s selection for England’s tour to South Africa, turning South Africa into even more of a pariah state may never have happened." Matthew Pennell wrote a post for Black History Month on British Liberals and the D'Oliveira Affair.

Andy Lear searches for the ghost woods of Rutland's Leighfield Forest.

The McPeake Family: Will Ye Go Lassie Go

I came across the McPeake family through the obituary of Francis McPeake. He was its third generation of celebrated folk musicians, so was known as Francis III. His grandfather (Francis I) and father (Francis II) are playing the pipes here, and his uncle is one of the harpists.

The obituary gives some family history:

The first piping McPeake was Francis I, who learned to play from John O’Reilly, a blind piper. Francis I won competitions and in 1910 attended the Pan-Celtic Congress in Brussels. At this time, there were very few pipers in Ulster and Francis’s rarity was enhanced by his unprecedented practice of playing the pipes to accompany his singing of traditional songs.

Francis I taught his son, Francis II, to play the pipes, and in 1952, Peter Kennedy, working for the BBC, recorded the father and son playing and singing. This led to a performance at the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s annual festival at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in 1953 where they were enthusiastically received. Although the instrument was rare in Irish traditional music, the London visit prompted the acquisition of a harp, which was played by Francis II’s brother, James. The trio visited the World Youth festival in Moscow in 1957, followed by first-prize success at the Llangollen International Eisteddfod.

This recording dates from 1960. Will Ye Go Lassie Go was written from some scraps of traditional Scottish verse and music by Francis I as a tribute to his wife after she died. It has become a folk standard under the title Wild Mountain Thyme.

I love the harmonies here. The way they wash over you reminds me of the psalm singing on the Outer Hebrides.

And I'm sorry about the sound quality, but that's authenticity for you.

People who voted Lib Dem tactically in July are more left-wing than average Lib Dem voters

Paula Surridge has written a post on her PS: Polling Snippets blog looking at the political views of people who voted Liberal Democrat in this year's general election, and in particular of those who cast tactical votes for us.

Her conclusions?

These voters who won them scores of seats in the South of England did so because they really wanted to defeat the Conservatives and because the Liberal Democrats hadn’t upset them recently. To hold onto these votes both of these things will need to remain the case. 

While the former can almost be taken as read, the later is a key challenge for the party as it juggles these voters with those who chose the Liberal Democrats as their first choice party but who may be more willing to consider the Conservatives in the future.

And:

A strategy aimed at positioning the Conservatives closer to Reform seems like a gift to the Liberal Democrats, creating a space for them to oppose the government and delineate themselves from the Conservatives. But they will need to remember that a significant part of their success rests on a group of voters who may be very unforgiving of any perceived slights to their liberal-left agenda. 

It may be the LibDems turn to carry the electoral Ming vase, albeit with the Conservatives seeming keen to offer some bubble wrap in case of minor slips.

This is in accord with my experience of campaigning. The core Lib Dem vote is an anti-Conservative one, and we win seats, or put ourselves in a position to win them, by uniting the anti-Conservative vote.

For some objective proof, look at what happened after we went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010. Our opinion poll figures dropped in six months from 23 per cent to 10 or 11 per cent, but why?

Nick Tyrone wrote on Lib Dem Voice a couple of years later:

A common answer I get when I ask fellow Lib Dems how many points they think we lost post tuition fees is “about 8%”.

What I want to do here is not to discuss the pros and cons of the 2010 Higher Education Act, but simply to lay to rest this lazy assumption and to reassert objective reality. Because the fact is that our poll numbers had fallen to the 10/11% level we’re used to now weeks before the Browne report had even landed.

It wasn't the policies of the our coalition with the Conservatives that lost us more than half our voters: it was the fact we joined it at all.

To finish, there's an irony to the debate over whether the Lib Dems should move its economic policy rightwards to attract more disillusioned Conservative voters. It's that we managed to fight the last election without talking about economics much at all.

Pakistani firm apologises for directing Dubliners to nonexistent Halloween event

The Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award, and the judges remind you not to believe everything you read on the net.

John Rogers walks the Walbrook from Islington to the City

Another walk with our favourite psychogeographer, John Rogers. This time it's:

A walk from the Angel Islington to the City of London exploring the northern branch of the River Walbrook, one of the lost rivers of London. We start on Amwell Street then go to the White Conduit in Barnsbury Road. 

From here we locate the possible source of this branch of the Walbrook in White Conduit Street near Chapel Market. The route then basically follows City Road to Moorgate where it meets the branch of the stream that rises around Shoreditch. 

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

Hue and Cry and the 'Dead End Kids' of the London Blitz

Embed from Getty Images

In my original article on children and bombsites in postwar British films, which really needs to be updated with my later discoveries, I noted how children's command of these spaces was celebrated in the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry, but later films came to see them as freighted with danger.

One reason for this positive early view, I now believe, is the role played by London urchins during the Blitz.

In an article on the History Press site, Ian Parson reveals that many of the children evacuated to places of safety in the countryside soon voted with their feet and came back to London. Just before the Blitz:

evacuees, or to give them their proper title, ‘unattended children’, were returning to Liverpool Street Station at a rate of two and a half thousand every week.

What happened next is remarkable:

The youngsters who only a few months before had been tucked away, in England’s green and pleasant and safe land, were as it turned out, brave way beyond their years, and they had a name. They were the ‘Dead End Kids’ and they were the brain child of 17 year old Patsie Duggan, son of a Poplar bin man. 

Soon a gang of scruffy urchins, including Patsie’s 13 year old sister Maureen, and recruits as young as ten, had equipped themselves with an assortment of tools, buckets of sand, rope and axes. Night after night, raid after raid, they were out there. Scouring the area for people in distress, hoping to perform the most daring rescue this time round. With no adults to supervise them, the game very quickly got seriously out of hand.

During the Blitz they were responsible for a series of life saving missions. On one really bad night, as reported in the London Fire Journal, an eye witness describes, ‘They rushed up the stairs, ready it seemed to eat fires!’ The same witness then described them as ‘emerging from the building, some of them with their tatty clothes smouldering.’

They became known as unofficial fire-fighters across the East End. But it was a dangerous game.

During the Blitz children accounted for one in ten deaths, and unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, two of Patsie’s group were killed on duty. Ronnie Ayres and Bert Eden died together on a night when Patsie himself was also badly injured. They were putting out incendiary bombs when without warning three heavy bombs came down the other side of a wall to where they were furiously working away. They died instantly, killed by the falling wall.

This sounds too good to be true - a case of heroes being found at the darkest hour of the war - but there are other sources that tell the same story. One example is Frank Lewey, who had been mayor of Stepney during the Blitz, writing in John Bull magazine (23 October 1943):

We had some bombed-out children billeted at the "People's Palace." One night a cluster of incendiaries fell in the gardens and started to blaze up against some buildings. The resident caretaker, Mr. Crawley, who himself won a reputation as a fire fighter, told me, next morning, how those small boys "went over the wall like a pack of monkeys, and dowsed the bombs as if they were snuffing so many candles." They ought to have been in bed; but their action probably saved the "People's Palace." 

The Stepney Scouts deserve a word to themselves. Into one of our shelters a woman came crying, with five tiny children trailing crying after her. Her house had caught fire, and, in the rush to escape, she had left one of her babies behind. Two small Scouts, almost extinguished beneath steel helmets, instantly raced out through shrapnel and bomb-bursts, calmly entered the blazing house, and brought the little girl back. She looked very proud of her escort. And well she may have been! There were over 700 people in the shelter at the time.

No wonder Hue and Cry was a "notable box office attraction" at British cinemas in 1947.

Telford cheese thief ordered to go to drugs rehab

Though the story soon disappears behind its paywall, the Shropshire Star wins our Headline of the Day Award - and not for the first time.

I don't know what the judges think, but to me the case for legalising cheese is overwhelming. Better that people buy it in supermarkets than buy (or steal) it from street-corner dealers.