Pollution from Shropshire lead mines still reaches the Severn

This information from an Environment Agency page will come as no surprise to regular readers:

There is evidence of lead mining in the Minsterley area of the Shropshire Hills since pre-Roman times. The importance of lead mining grew during the medieval period and had become a major part of the economy of Snailbeach and Minsterley by the late 16th and 18th centuries, respectively. 

This continued to grow throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, until the 19th century, when the mining activity was at its peak. During the 1870s the Stiperstones area was one of Britain’s main sources of lead.

But the page goes on to say that these long-abandoned mines still present a significant pollution problem:

Minsterley Brook is polluted in its headwaters by cadmium, however after the input of a mine water discharge known as Wood Adit at Gravels, the watercourse is polluted along its length for cadmium, lead and zinc down to the confluence with Rea Brook. 

Hogstow Brook is polluted along its length by cadmium, lead and zinc from its source at the outflow of the Boat Level mine drainage tunnel. Further metal polluted inputs enter the watercourse from Snailbeach. 

After the confluence of Rea Brook and Minsterley Brook, Rea Brook is still polluted at the sampling point at Hook-a-Gate Bridge near Bayston Hill. However, Rea Brook is not polluted, when assessed as an annual average, approximately 8km downstream of Hook-a-Gate Bridge at Coleham in the centre of Shrewsbury. 

Rea Brook flows for 25 miles from Marton Pool near the Welsh border to the Severn at Shrewsbury, passing Minsterley, Pontesbury, Hanwood, Hook-a-Gate and Bayston Hill on the way. 

It is joined at Minsterley by the Minsterley Brook, which rises on Stapeley Hill and runs through the wooded Hope Valley. The Hogstow Brook is a smaller stream that joins the Minsterley Brook shortly before its confluence with the Rea Brook.

There is another page on the pollution of these rivers on Restoring Europe's Rivers, but it's 10 years old and I don't know its provenance.

But, for what its worth, it says:

The mines were worked for mainly lead ores, but also zinc ore and latterly barites until closure in the 1940s, leaving spoil deposits and drainage adits which discharge to Minsterley Brook at various points. The mines are a significant source of heavy metal pollution in the catchment, and the discharges from them represent one of the longest continuous sources of pollution in the whole Severn River Basin.

Environment Agency routine monitoring found there were high levels of zinc in Minsterley Brook over most of its length, exceeding the Environmental Quality Standards (EQS) for the brook (75ug/l). As a result, the watercourse isn't achieving the 'Good status' for water quality as set out in our Severn River Basin Plan. 

The Boat Level adit discharge is the main source of the zinc (around 3000kg per annum) and other heavy metals, such as cadmium and lead, and discharges these pollutants into the Hogstow Brook. Immediately downstream of the Boat Level adit the zinc concentrations are up to 47x the EQS. 

At Minsterley, the zinc concentrations are 8x the EQS. Downstream of the mines, concentrations exceed the EQS for over 15km, until the Rea Brook reaches Hanwood and dilution from other rivers lowers the concentration to below the EQS.

Ecological surveys of the brooks have found aquatic insects were suffering as a result of these heavy metals, which can settle in river sediments. There is also a lower than expected population of small fish species.

To end on a happier note, the pretty little bridge in the photograph above crosses the Minsterley Brook in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Hope.

Chris Dillow explains our incompetent political culture

When the centenary of Margaret Thatcher's birth was marked last month, the consensus view on Bluesky was that she had made everything in Britain worse. Not only that: it was all down to her personal wickedness.

Whatever happened to the left having a knowledge of the tides of history that is denied to the rest of us?

One writer who offers a more sophisticated analysis is Rutland's own Chris Dillow. In his latest post he looks at the travails of the government and the BBC asks why so much of our political culture is fundamentally incompetent.

Here's the crux of his argument:

Good politics recognises that public opinion is not a fixed entity but is malleable, not necessarily by rational debate alone. Labour likes to present itself as businesslike. But decent businesses advertise their products, respect their customers, and don’t shout about the merits of their rivals. ...

Good politics also requires something else - a healthy public sphere, in which at least the most egregiously bad ideas and bad actors are subject to sufficient scrutiny that they are weeded out. Which is what we don’t have. Instead, we have a system which often selects for rather than against charlatans and incompetents. And, worse still, neither politicians nor the media are interested in why this might be or how we might change it.

You can read the whole article on Chris's Substack. 

Asquith: The Movie

This television play, screened in 1983 as part of the ITV series Number 10, deals with Asquith's battle with the House of Lords to secure the passage of the budget in 1910.

That measure has gone down in history as Lloyd George's budget, but Asquith himself had done much of the work on it while he was still chancellor.

One thing that must have confused viewers at the time is that Asquith is played by David Langton, who had become well known a few years before for playing a Tory MP, Richard Bellamy in the wildly popular series Upstairs, Downstairs. Think of it as a superior version of Downton Abbey.

As to young Puffin Asquith, I have a book signed by him.

Thames Water tries to force Lib Dem MP to pay ruinous legal costs

The supreme court this week rejected Thames Water’s arguments that Charlie Maynard, the Liberal Democrat MP for Witney, should pay its legal costs after representing the interests of the British public in court.

The Guardian reports:

Maynard was granted unusual permission to represent the public interest in a court battle over an investor bailout for Thames Water. The bailout was approved, but Maynard appealed, arguing that the company, which serves 16 million customers in London and south-east England, should be taken into temporary government control. 

Thames Water’s barristers argued that he should be made personally liable for its expensive legal fees to "deter" future appeals to the supreme court.

It would be interesting to know what the supreme court and parliament think of this argument.

Maynard, says the Guardian, described Thames Water's actions as "retaliation" for pushing for government control of the crisis-hit utility

"I find it completely extraordinary,” he said. "What is the largest water company in the country doing trying to run an MP off the road, and saying they want to deter me and others from taking such actions?

"What is the government doing letting a bunch of people run the largest water utility in the country and behave this way?"

A good question. Labour's refusal to life a finger against Thames Water is starting to invite discreditable explanations.

The Joy of Six 1435

"The real scandal here is the behaviour of the board. As Patrick Barwise and Peter York detailed in their 2020 book The War on the BBC, the British right has been trying to cow and weaken the BBC for decades, for both political and commercial reasons. But this time is different because the chief saboteurs were board members, chiefly Sir Robbie Gibb. On the Today programme, former Sun editor David Yelland justifiably described this week’s events as 'nothing short of a coup'. The call is coming from inside the house." Dorian Lynskey says the BBC is the biggest prize in the information war and the right may be about to destroy it.

Stacy Patton shows that Donald Trump is not the first US president to be accused of paedophilia.

"In 2024, Pershore and Thrapston became the first towns in the UK to twin their rivers, the Avon and the Nene, creating the Sister Rivers partnership. The idea is simple and scalable. Each town takes guardianship of its stretch of river, monitors it, and shares results, data, and strategies with its twin. Two councils, two communities, one purpose: to restore what regulation has failed to defend." Michael Chapman Pincher on a new initiative to protect our rivers.

Gordon McKelvie finds that historians must be alert to the dangers of AI and its potential to simplify, and ultimately impoverish, the study of the past.

"At one point the White Lady apparently benevolently watches over the father’s daughters as they sleep but she is revealed to be a form of predatory grim reaper when suddenly the silhouetted arc of a scythe she holds appears over their heads." Stephen Prince revisits White Lady, a lesser-known television play by David Rudkin that was broadcast in 1987

The Crow Inn has a guide to some of the best pubs in Derby.

Trivia dump: Woman wakes to find she's bought an emu egg

A BBC News story was shortlisted for Headline of the Day – Woman fulfils childhood dream of rearing an emu – but lost out to a demonic jumper.

The story beneath it does deserve some sort of award though:

A late night shopping spree turned into a dream come true for one animal lover after she successfully hatched an emu egg. 

Rhi Evans, from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, has no memory of buying the egg but woke one morning in 2022 to an email confirmation from eBay saying it was on its way.

We've all been there.

This item gives me an excuse to repost my favourite clip of Rod Hull and Emu. As someone said, "I've watched it dozens of times, but still all I can see is an emu throwing a man into a chest freezer."

Rod Hull began his career on a children's television show in Australia. As it the way with such shows, the presenters sat in front of some shelves with interesting things on them. And among them was an emu's egg.

Someone wrote in to ask if it was ever going to hatch, and shortly after that Hull saw an emu puppet in a shop. The rest is history.

Like the Bee Gees, Rod Hull was given his break into television by an executive called Desmond Tester. Tester had begun his career as a child actor in Britain before the war – he is the boy with the bomb on the bus in Hitchock's Sabotage.

I'm also reminded of a story about someone at Liberal Democrat News finding they needed an illustration for an article on European Monetary Union. Without much hope, they turned to the paper's artwork files, only to find an envelope labelled 'EMU'.

They opened it and found a photograph of an emu. And that complete's today's trivia dump.

"Demonic" Wind in the Willows jumper banned from Westminster Abbey

Today's Headline of the Day Award, which is sponsored by the Great God Pan, goes to the Guardian.

Photo by Linsey Teggert, whose jumper it is.

A conspiracy theory from Neal Lawson: Keir Starmer was never meant to be prime minister

Embed from Getty Images

There influence on the far right means I don't enjoy conspiracy theories as much as I used to, but let's give a hearing to Neal Lawson in the Guardian:

Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of rightwing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. 

At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grownups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured.

But no one reckoned with Covid, Tory turmoil and the collapse of the SNP. Suddenly Keir Starmer wasn't going to just lead Labour to a better defeat and a springboard for victory next time. Against the odds, he was going to win. 

Just as Jeremy Corbyn was Labour's accidental leader in 2015, Starmer was the party’s accidental prime minister in 2024.

This theory is firmly unsourced, but I have always been puzzled at Labour commentators confidence that Starmer would make a good prime minister when he had such a slight political record to be judged on.

A refusal to mourn the demise of police and crime commissioners

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood announced today that police and crime commissioners will be abolished in 2028 when their current terms expire.

A home office press release says:

Since 2012, PCCs have been elected to hold forces to account, but turnout at the polls and public knowledge of who their local PCC is has been incredibly low.  

Public understanding of, and engagement with, PCCs remains low despite efforts to raise their profile. Two in five people are unaware PCCs even exist. 

Their roles will be absorbed by regional mayors wherever possible, meaning measures to cut crime will be considered as part of wider public services such as education and healthcare.  

In areas not covered by a mayor, this role will be taken on by elected council leaders.

I'm pleased to see this move, having called for it 18 months ago.

I wrote then:

Yesterday saw the third round of PCC elections, and I believe we can now say that the experiment has failed. It has not delivered any of what Cameron and the Home Office promised.

Not only that, it has proved an expensive experiment. PCCs have discovered the need to appoint a deputy on a generous public salary as well as the need to employ researchers.

Here in Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, there was no visible campaign - on the doorstep or online - for the PCC election. And the Labour and Conservative candidates were both party hacks who have never made it to Westminster.

Though to be fair to Labour's Rory Palmer, he has, unlike his Conservative opponent Rupert Matthews, never been a lecturer on the paranormal for the International Metaphysical University or expressed the view that "the evidence for UFOs and for the humanoid creatures linked to them is pretty compelling".

You can still see a short clip of Rupert Matthews, who recently joined Reform UK, introducing his university course online.

As to the turnout for PCC elections, here in Leicestershire, at least, that was a function of the other elections being held at the same time. I said of the contest here:

In 2016 it took place at the same time as Leicester City Council elections, so the Labour vote came out there and we got a Labour PCC. Five years later it coincided with county council elections, so the Tory vote came out and we got a Tory PCC. 

The Guardian report on this story claims:

The abolition is a victory for chief constables and a sign of how influential they are in the Labour government’s thinking about policing.

It also makes the merger and abolition of local forces, which chiefs want and government is considering, potentially easier.

This doesn't cheer me, as something of a centralisation sceptic, but the PCC experiment has certainly failed.

The way we talk about and portray children in care really matters

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

In the report of his inquiry into the death of Dennis O'Neill in 1945, Sir Walter Monckton wrote:

It is first necessary to explain the basis of the policy of committing children to a local authority which may board them out. The "fit person," local authority or individual, must care for the children as his own: the relation is a personal one. The duty must neither be evaded nor scamped.

That does not appear to be the view taken by the Reform UK member of Cambridgeshire County Council Andy Osborn. He told a meeting of its children and young people committee that some children in care can be "downright evil".

In an article on East Anglia Bylines, Kerrie Portman explains how damaging such language can be:

Words, especially when spoken by those in positions of power, normalise assumptions and prejudices. They embolden others to think, speak and act in this way, which translates directly to the harms inflicted on Care Experienced people, leading to many of our ongoing vulnerabilities and even shortened life expectancies.

When researching my recent Central Bylines article on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, I came across an article by Josie Pearce. In it she notes that writers of television drama treat the fact that someone was orphaned or adopted as enough in itself to explain why they have grown up to commit murder.

As she says:

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries orphans were most often heroes. ... But since the twentieth century and TV, our most common plotline is that because our parents were dead, dysfunctional, unable... we must be serial killers. I started counting eventually and by my reckoning 90 per cent of TV serial killers were orphans. 

Sir Walter Monckton's report followed the death of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire, where he had been fostered with his younger brother Terry. The case caused a national outcry – more against the council that had sent them there than against the farmer Reginald Gough and his wife, who had actually killed the boy – and gave Christie the inspiration for The Mousetrap. 

In my article on the play for Central Bylines, I quoted Phil O'Neill, who is the son of an older brother of Dennis and Terry: 

"My gentle Uncle Terry always said he wouldn’t seek revenge because that would make him no better than the Goughs. It was a shock seeing him portrayed on stage as a psychotic killer."

The way we talk about and portray children in care really matters. We should give it more thought.

V.S. Pritchett reviews the Sword in the Stone in 1938

V.S. Pritchett (1900-97) was still reviewing for the New Statesman in his late seventies when I started buying it in the sixth form.

Here he is back in 1938, welcoming the publication of T.H. White's The Sword of the Stone in his review for The Bystander:

The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White (Collins 8s. 6 d.), is mixed, but, on the whole successful, fantasy about anachronisms and it contains two chapters at least which are the funniest things I have read for a long time. Mr. White's game is to tell the adventures of a boy called the Wart, at his father's mediaeval castle, in terms which lie somewhere between the language of Grimm, Wodehouse, and the College of Heralds. 

This kind of thing may produce the vulgar comedy of the schoolboy howler or passages of wicked genius Mr. White has both here is an example of the latter. A possible origin of fox-hunting is suggested—

Sir Ector said: "Had a good quest to-day?"

Sir Grummore said: "Oh, not so bad. Rattlin' good day in fact. Found a chap called Sir Bruce Saunce Pite choppin' off a maiden's head in Weedon Bushes, ran him to Mixbury Plantation in the Bicester and lost him in Wicken Wood. Must have been a good 25 miles as he ran." 

The two high spots are the witches' duel—run strictly on what I take to be Camelot rules—with Merlyn; and a wonderful joust between two knights who lumber along towards each other at a mild drayhorse canter and meet with stupefaction in a dull crash of ironmongery. These are both Disney scenes. 

Mr. White has a pleasant learning which gives the whole a comically critical and instructive air. I never recommend humour, because it makes enemies, and many awful people will read this book aloud; but I suggest a prolonged and surreptitious glance at it.

And Disney did buy the rights to the book in the following year, though his film of it did not appear until 1963.

Trivia fans will be interested to know that Pritchett is the grandfather of the cartoonist Matt, who is famous for nailing it.

The Joy of Six 1434

GB News's new show broadcast live from the US features non-stop praise for Donald Trump and the channel’s co-owner Paul Marshall begging MAGA politicians to "save the UK", reports Josiah Mortimer.

Mills Dyer, who spent several years working in the Liberal Democrats' membership department, gives three reasons why they membership surges like the one the Greens are currently experiencing matter – and three why they're completely irrelevant.

Tayo Bero is worried by the explosion in online content promoting the use of antidepressants: "Antidepressant use can be messy, stressful, confusing and seemingly interminable (don’t even get me started on my experience with withdrawal symptoms). It is not the kind of experience that vulnerable young people should be socially coerced into, especially via the machinations of capitalist vultures. Young people need way more than a two-minute TikTok to figure out what they should do to get better."

"Before socialism even had a name, the poet and painter William Blake saw how the Industrial Revolution’s 'dark Satanic mills' harmed humanity. His visionary work condemned the forces of commodification and cold calculation in emergent capitalism." Jonathan Agin argues that William Blake was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation.

"When Pebble Mill opened in 1971 ... it was the most sophisticated in the country, the largest outside London, and the first to combine TV and radio operations under one roof. It was conceived as the regional counterpart to the Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush." Jon Neale remembers Pebble Mill Studios and the golden age of Birmingham television.

Andy Murray explores the Manx folklore that inspired Nigel Kneale, including his Halloween III script that never saw the light of day.

Eurythmics: When the Day Goes Down

When the Day Goes Down, performed live here on the David Letterman Show, is my favourite Eurythmics song. 

As the recent evening devoted to her on BBC4 confirmed, Annie Lennox is an amazing talent.

Reform-run Leicestershire could pay £90m to consultancy firm

Last week I wrote that Leicestershire County Council, which is run by a Reform UK minority administration, is to pay £1.3m to consultants.

That's peanuts!

The Leicester Mercury reports:

Documents published last week revealed that the "estimated contract value" has actually been set at "up to £30 million" as a whole, with the £1.4 million audit just phase one of that contract. A spokeswoman for the authority has stressed that no further work beyond phase one has yet been agreed.

The county council currently needs to plug an expected £90 million gap in its day-to-day spending by 2029 in order to balance its books – something it is legally bound to do. It also has an £80 million shortfall in money set aside for projects and an £118 million deficit in its special needs budget.

In other words, Reform came to power in Leicestershire with no policies that didn't involve flags and has found itself overwhelmed by the task it faces. So it's paying someone to tell it what to do and how to do it.

Time for the opposition parties at County Hall to work together and rein Reform in.

Hilary Mantel on the finding of Richard III

Here's Hilary Mantel, writing in the London Review of Books, 21 February 2013:

Royal bodies do change after death, and not just as a consequence of the universal post-mortem changes. Now we know the body in the Leicester car park is indeed that of Richard III, we have to concede the curved spine was not Tudor propaganda, but we need not believe the chronicler who claimed Richard was the product of a two-year pregnancy and was born with teeth. 

Why are we all so pleased about digging up a king? Perhaps because the present is paying some of the debt it owes to the past, and science has come to the aid of history. The king stripped by the victors has been reclothed in his true identity. This is the essential process of history, neatly illustrated: loss, retrieval.

For myself I found the archaeology and the cutting-edge science involved in proving Richard's identity fascinating, and was unexpectedly moved by the day of his reburial in Leicester Cathedral:

When the plans for taking Richard's bones around the Bosworth battlefield and the villages associated with it were announced, I wondered if it was a good idea. But it turned out to be an act of genius and I found myself ridiculously moved.

This, I think, had less to do with Richard III and more to do with the community involvement. Councillors, ex-servicemen, Scouts and Brownies... 

What we saw on BBC News and heard on BBC Radio Leicester was the sort of civic England you fear had been lost to modernisation and the turbo-capitalism.

Because the day was not about celebrating Richard III or the monarchy: it was about celebrating our pride in Leicester and Leicestershire. In the end, the day was about ourselves.

And then Richard's return to Leicester in triumph, rather than naked over the back of a horse.

Let no one tell you that history cannot be rewritten.

Ed Davey speaks up for the BBC: Why won't Keir Starmer?

The BBC is under attack as never before. Donald Trump and his cronies have it squarely in their sights – and there are no prizes for guessing why. The BBC is the world’s number one source of trusted news, so of course snake-oil salesmen such as Trump see it as their enemy. 

If your power is built on conspiracy theories and distortions of the truth, the last thing you want is respected, independent journalists exposing that and holding you to account.

Ed Davey speaks up for the BBC in a Guardian article today. Later on he says that Robbie Gibb, a former director of communications for Theresa May who was appointed to the BBC board by Boris Johnson, must have no role in the appointment of the new director general.

Well said, Ed.

Meanwhile, the silence from Keir Starmer is deafening.

Jago Hazzard celebrates the gothic history of St Pancras

Jago Hazzard posted this, his thousandth video, a couple of weeks ago. And he found a fitting subject for it.

Iain Sinclair once referred to "the bat-chewed pinnacles" of St Pancras, which struck me as exactly right. Old St Pancras church and its churchyard are well worth visiting if you have time to kill at the station. The Beatles went there on their Mad Day Out.

Jago is right to sound a little sceptical about the myth of the Hardy Tree though.

There's good news about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs

Crystal Palace Park is undergoing a multi-million-pound regeneration project, reports News Shopper, which is particularly good news for its most famous residents:

The restoration of the iconic dinosaur models, a staple of the park since the Victorian era, is now underway with specialist steam cleaning and repair work revealing their original look.

Scaffolding has been erected around larger models on Dinosaur Island to allow targeted work on their upper sections.

This gives me the excuse to post a clip from Our Mother's House, which was one of my 10 British films that should be better known.

The Joy of Six 1433

Before his books about the Royal Family, Andrew Lownie wrote about Britain's intelligence services. He found them much more helpful than royals have been. Here he talks to Peter Geoghegan about the way that British institutions protected Prince Andrew for years.

Peter Oborne reports that Alistair Burt, the former Middle East minister, admits he was wrong to give Israel unconditional support and wonders if other British politicians will follow his lead.

Polly Mackenzie maps the limitations of the 'add it to the school curriculum' mentality. "If we want a society that is literate in money, media, and citizenship, we need an infrastructure for lifelong learning that reflects how adults actually live. Schools are only one node in a much bigger information system, and we’ve been neglecting the rest." 

"[Ewen] Cameron destroyed the lives of his subjects, many of whom were exceptionally vulnerable, and achieved nothing of scientific value. His work is a catalogue of exploitation and abuse. Yet there is no comprehensive account of Cameron’s studies to be found anywhere in the bioethics literature." Carl Elliott on the way that scandals in scientific research are conveniently forgotten.

"Imagine walking out of Camden Town tube station, turning north towards Camden Market and finding yourself facing a twelve-lane concrete motorway full of roaring traffic. This was the intended outcome of the 1960s Ringways plan to drive four giant circular roads through the capital in order to enable millions of Londoners to drive their private cars straight through the heart of the city." Jim Waterson meets the man who has spent 20 years researching that plan.

Boak & Bailey discover Rustic Ale and what became of it.

Patience and Prudence: Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now

Viola Wills featured in the Top 20 countdown on one of Friday's vintage Top of the Pops on BBC4. I had to look her up to see what song it was and found that it was her disco interpretation of Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now.

A little research into the song showed that the most influential, though not the first, version of it was by this blog's old friends, the slightly spooky Patience and Prudence.

Patience and Prudence? A reminder from Ear Candy:

Patience & Prudence were actually sisters and the daughters of orchestra leader Mack McIntyre. Patience (11 years old) and Prudence (14 years old) McIntyre were encouraged by their father, who was already a well know piano player and songwriter (who also co-wrote the B-sides of their two hits). 

Mack McIntyre brought his daughters into the Liberty Records recording studios in Los Angeles in the summer of 1956. One of the songs from their audition tape was a cover of the 1927 hit by Gene Austin called, Tonight You Belong to Me. 

Liberty Records (also the home of rocker Eddie Cochran) signed Patience and Prudence and rushed the tune into distribution. The bouncy song became a hit, charting at #4 in September of 1956 and became Liberty's biggest selling record for two years.

Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now had charted earlier that year, but it and Tonight You Belong to Me were their only hits in the US or the UK.

Prudence, who died in September 2023, grew up to embrace the counter-culture, marrying Dan Conka, a founder member of Arthur Lee's band Love. Conka, the correct spelling of his name and his drug problems are discussed on Andrew Hickey's post on the Love song Alone Again Or.

Patience, the older sister, is still with us. She was married to John Fleck of the Sixties American band The Standells for a while.

Dead 2 Rights has an article on The Tragedy of Patience and Prudence, but I don't know how much of it is true.

Talking of girl stars, I can recommend this Gyles Brandreth interview with Petula Clark.

High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Music Scene Volume II by Shaun Knapp

In Leicester this afternoon, I called in at the launch of Shaun Knapp's book High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Music Scene Vol II.

As the publisher's website says: 

High Flying Around Volume II continues the remarkable story of Leicester’s 1960s arts and music scene via the people who were there. Their memories and reminiscences bring back to life the buildings long since demolished, the groups who packed out the venues and the people who filled the halls and clubs.

Find out how some of the biggest names in music performed in some of Leicester’s smallest and long-lost venues, revisit the 1969 free festival, and discover the incredible stories of Leicester band Gypsy and the 1960s creatives. Discover the importance of the college and university circuit, the arts lab, the city’s underground music, folk and poetry scenes and the music that influenced Leicester playwright Joe Orton.

Leicester women tell their stories about life in the city during the 1960s, while singer/songwriter Ryan Dunn explains how the decade influences his songwriting and fashion.

Dipping into it, I find plenty of new bands to research and the odd anecdote I might share here.

And, yes, my home town gets at least one mention:

The first time we played in Market Harborough was at a place called the Embi Club, on St Mary's Road. The building had a great doorway, which was the entrance, then you went to the back building through a small yard. That was where the club was. The club itself was long and it looked like a few rooms had been knocked into one. It was a very busy venue. Jethro Tull had played there as did Edwin Starr. I later learned the site had been an old cinema. the Oriental, which opened in 1921. The interior decor consisted of Egyptian mummies Chinese dragons, palm trees and pyramids.

The main building had, I think, gone by the time I moved here – the length of it ran behind what is now the House of Art tattoo studio and probably a couple of other vanished buildings – but the exotic domed entrance on St Mary's Road lasted through the Seventies.

Sheep in nappy spotted on Polish high-speed train

The judges were in no doubt: Notes from Poland wins Headline of the Day.

There will, as they observed, be dancing in the streets of Kraków tonight.

Not so cosy: A podcast on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap

I came across a new podcast today – Garlic & Pearls – via a really good episode on Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap.

It's thoroughly researched and emphasises how far from cosy Christie's works can be. The Mousetrap is set in a dislocated postwar world in which the class structure has been shaken and there is an air of paranoid watchfulness.

The BBC's adaptations of the Miss Marple books, which starred the incomparable Joan Hickson, were set firmly in this world. And it's noticeable that when Bertram's Hotel appears to have survived the changes unscathed, it turns out to be too good to be true.

Meanwhile, after the Colonel died, Dolly Bantry sold the big house and moved very happily into a modernised lodge house with all the latest conveniences. The future need not always be resisted, as the worldly Marple grasps.

I recently wrote an article for Central Bylines about the 12-year-old foster child called Dennis O'Neill whose death on a farm in Shropshire Christie to write the play.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

One of the things I enjoy most about blogging these days is publishing guest posts. Have you thought of writing something for Liberal England yourself?

I'm happy to entertain a range of political views, but I'd hate you to spend time writing something I wouldn't want to publish, so please get in touch first.

These are the 10 most recent guest posts on Liberal England – as you can see, I welcome posts on subjects beyond politics:

• Dad’s Army and the decline of the Conservatives - Anselm Anon
• The state of our canals - and canalside pubs - today - Peter Chambers
• Forget your two-horse race: Increasingly it's a cavalry charge - Augustus Carp
• Shut it! Two words of advice from Jack Regan - Peter Chambers
• Councillor defections: The trickle becomes a stream - Augustus Carp
• Let next week's online summer school rekindle your Radical Liberal fire - William Lane
• What is the technical debt of Thames Water? - Peter Chambers
• The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle - Anselm Anon
• Defections Update: Lib Dem Conference Special - Augustus Carp
• Artist Nick Jensen steps into history's shadow at Belvoir Castle - Matthew Pennell

The Joy of Six 1432

Rose Runswick argues against building Liberal Democrat strategy on an attempt to win over one-nations Conservatives. They are not natural Liberals and our advance at the last general election came through tactical anti-Conservative voting.

"Our polling suggests that a clear divide exists in local government along overlapping economic and cultural lines. Reform councillors typically take the most right-wing positions (except on the NHS), followed by the Conservatives, including on the tax and spend question. There is often little difference between Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the centre left/left, and then the Greens take the most left-wing position." David Jeffrey and Mitya Pearson report the results of their survey of local councillors' political views.

Cambridge Town Owl tells the story of an early electoral defeat for Henry Fawcett, who went on to become an influential Liberal politician. Fawcett was blind from the age of 25.

"Ancient Greek and Roman writings reveal ancient concerns about our negative impact on the environment. They show that places once rich and fertile later became desolate and barren. Although the Greeks and Romans linked environmental harm with climate change to a more limited extent than we do today, they nevertheless knew harming the environment could change the climate." Konstantine Panegyres on concern for the environment in the Classical era.

Animals in children’s stories are often depicted as living in neat mum, dad and children family units, but in reality there's a huge diversity in what family looks like within the animal kingdom, says Louise Gentle.

Ian Mansfield goes to see the National Gallery exhibition of the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby: "With the aim of opening knowledge to the masses, many of Wright’s paintings are philosophical and scientific in nature, yet executed in a style that is also incredibly atmospheric. It’s worth remembering that while exaggerated to a degree, the lighting was reasonably authentic for a time when people's homes were lit with rush lights or candles, and the varying availability of moonlight affected working hours."

The last days of the King's Lynn to East Dereham line

This Terence Carroll documentary on the last days of the line from King's Lynn to East Dereham was first broadcast on BBC2 on 2 June 1969, though Wikipedia tells us the line had been closed for the best part of a year by then:

The line was not listed for closure in the original 1963 Beeching Report. But it was nonetheless closed to passenger and freight services by the Eastern Region of British Railways on Saturday 7 September 1968, save for a three-mile section for sand freight from King's Lynn to Middleton. 

Wendling station continued for a short while as a filming location, with the station and its road bridge featuring in several episodes of the British situation comedy Dad's Army.

"I've met men on the road who could tell you the name of every star in the sky"

I thought I'd played chess for Northampton Working Men's Club (or Whyte Melville, as we were often called) only in the national club knock-out competition, which was a tournament to which Market Harborough did not aspire.

But, sorting out some old files, I found I had also played a season for them in the Northamptonshire league and done rather well too.

All of which makes more sense of this memory...

I was playing some five-minute games at Whyte Melville after winning my league game, and there was a beat-up old guy watching us. Even non-players are entranced by people playing blitz.

We got talking, and he asked me his favourite quiz question. What was the correct name of the Southern Lights? I knew the answer and he was suitably impressed.

And then he said something I've never forgotten: 

"I've met men on the road who could tell you the name of every star in the sky."

It sounds like a tale from the pre-war days of tramps and tramping, but that is what he said. 

I blogged here about the Whyte Melville Club last summer.

The Doom painting at St Peter and St Paul, Great Bowden

Yesterday I went into the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Great Bowden for the first time, and here's the Doom painting on the north wall of its north chapel. I photographed another one in Wycliffe's church at Lutterworth a few years ago.

They were doing coffee in the church, and one of the women in charge was a friend of mine. Not only that. Her husband, who I was at school with back in the day, had written the words for the plaque explaining this fine Edwardian stained glass window.

Perhaps we really are the grown ups now?

The Joy of Six 1431

"Nine of the groups are being run from Sri Lanka, three have admins in Nigeria, and the admins of six other groups appear to be located in Mexico, the US, Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Kosovo. The remaining eleven have hidden their locations, but conform to the same pattern of fake address – AI memes – gaming video creator, suggesting they are similarly moderated." Katherine Denkinson explains how foreign entrepreneurs are monetising the clicks of British racists.

Rebecca Hamer on the common thread that links abusers, from grooming gangs to Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.

"His speech on Monday was a sprawling grievance tour, hitting every GB news talking point: immigrants, net-zero, lefty lawyers; all responsible for our economic woes and declining living standards." Zoe Gruenwald deconstructs Nigel Farage's big speech.

"In July 1616, nine women from the small South Leicestershire village of Husbands Bosworth were hanged after being found guilty at the Leicester Assizes of bewitching the teenage son of the Lord of the Manor." Margaret Brecknell says the case of the so-called Witches of Husband Bosworth shines a spotlight on the atmosphere of fear and superstition sweeping the entire country during the reign of King James I.

Rob Goulding reports on disagreements over the restoration of the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire. This marvel of Victorian engineering lifts boats from the River Weaver to the Trent and Mersey Canal.

Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow show that Orson Welles notorious 1938 radio dramatisation of War of the Worlds did not cause hysteria across the US and ask why this legend persists.

Scott Walker: Farmer in the City (Remembering Pasolini)

The fiftieth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's death put me in mind of this wonderful track from Scott Walker's album Tilt.

In a Guardian article last Saturday, Olivia Laing argued that Pasolini's warnings of corruption and rising totalitarianism offer a chilling message for our times.

Prince Andrew's Road residents ask for name change

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The judges' decision is in, and BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

They also noted this comment from the story below:

"There's a kind of misconception that this road is named after Prince Andrew... now Mr Mountbatten Windsor," said Gurney, a Conservative county, district and parish councillor. 

In fact, she said, research indicated it was named before he was born, in honour of his grandfather, who died in 1944, and was father of Prince Philip, formerly the Duke of Edinburgh.

That him above with his missus.

Reform in Leicestershire to hand consultants £1.3m of pubic money to tell it what to do

Leicestershire County Council is run by a minority Reform UK administration. And like Reform up and down the country, it took power with no policy agenda beyond banning the flying of the Pride and Ukrainian flags.

So, reports BBC News, Leicestershire is to spend £1.3m on consultants to carry out a review of council spending.

The council leader claims the consultants will find savings worth many times their fee. That sounds like sheer guesswork to me.

Michael Mullaney, the leader of the Liberal Democrat group on the council, sounds more authoritative:

"£1.4m is a lot of money to spend on consultants to cut costs. The reality is the council has been cutting its spending for years and if there were more savings to be found, they would have been identified."

Before May's council elections, the Leicester Mercury reminds us. Reform accused the then-Conservative leaders of the authority of "wasting staggering sums" including through spending "more than £35 million in consultants in just three years".

They also made noises about existing council contracts being "fraudulent", but we've heard no more about that since they took power.

A stroll along the Thames Path from Hampton Court to Shepperton

A lovely walk in autumn sunshine. John Rogers describes it thus in his YouTube blurb:

Starting at Hampton Court Station in East Molesey we walk one of the most beautiful sections of the wonderful Thames Path. 

We pass through Hurst Park, look across the river at Taggs Island, Garrick's Temple, pass by Molesey Reservoirs with its WW2 tank defences, stop for lunch at Walton Marina and cross the river at Walton Bridge. 

Our walk is guided by Donald Maxwell's 1932 book A Pilgrimage of the Thames and takes us to the ancient St Nicholas church at Shepperton. A church has stood on the site since the 7th Century. 

Our Thames path odyssey ends at the Shepperton home of author J.G Ballard.

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

What does our campaign against the Family Farm Tax seek?

What exactly do we Liberal Democrats want from out campaign against the "Family Farm Tax"?

It's important we know, because The Agri Brigade column in the latest Private Eye suggests the government may be about to make some concessions on the issue.

These concessions, the Eye suggests, would raise the Inheritance Tax threshold on farmland from £1m to £5m (so, £10m for a married couple). 

This would mean that the tax would not be levied at all on anything that can sensible be called a family farm. At the same time, technical changes would see a higher tax take from larger estates. The proposals are contained in a policy report from the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation.

If this happens, I hope the Lib Dems will declare victory for their campaign and move on to other issues.

However, much of our campaigning has given the impression that we are against inheritance tax on land at all. It's hard to find anything countering that impression on the party's page on the Family Farm Tax – please let me know if you can.

Yet it is the failure to levy inheritance tax on farmland that has caused the problem that page complains about most. That is, that the value of farmland bears little relation to the income that can be generated from farming it. 

If we allow farms to be used as a tax shelter, then that will always be the case.

GUEST POST Artist Nick Jensen steps into history's shadow at Belvoir Castle

Matthew Pennell on an art exhibition that's hosted and inspired by Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire.

The notion of an artist or poet in residence at a large stately home conjures up images from a bygone age, but the concept has been revived by two arts organisations to provide a shot in the arm to the Midlands arts scene. 

Painter and ex-professional skateboarder Nick Jensen swapped his London studio for Belvoir Castle last month, the experience culminating in a two-day exhibition opening today (4 November).

A project spokesperson says:

"The Dot Project and HeritageXplore

(@heritagexplore) are reawakening three extraordinary heritage homes – Kelvedon Hall, Elveden and Belvoir Castle – through residencies with contemporary artists. 

"These historic spaces will be seen through a new lens. Stepping into history’s shadow, the artists are drawing out forgotten stories, creating new ones, and breathing new life into these properties."

As you can see in the picture above, Jensen’s work blurs the lines between abstract and figurative, with echoes of post-impressionism and the Belle Époque period – a good fit for the 19th century castle built by the Duke of Rutland. This move cements Jensen’s position as a fine artist, having spent nearly 20 years as a pro skater, latterly co-owning Isle Skateboards.

Matthew Pennell blogs at returnoftheliberal.

A 1959 Monitor feature on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop

I've struck gold with this 1959 report on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at Stratford East from the BBC arts programme Monitor.

The first comment on YouTube reckons you can spot Pat Phoenix. James Booth, Dudley Sutton, Yootha Joyce, Richard Harris and Glyn Edwards among the company.

I've long been interested in Stratford East's links with ITV sitcoms: half the cast of On the Buses (Stephen Lewis, Bob Grant, Michael Robbins) came from the Theatre Workshop. I didn't know before seeing this that, through Pat Phoenix, it was also linked with Coronation Street.

Joan Littlewood's remarkable career proved there is an audience for challenging theatre beyond the affluent West End. If you enjoyed this film, see my post on The Living Theatre in early 1960s Leicester too.

The Joy of Six 1430

David Howarth knows how to make the BBC less afraid of Nigel Farage: "Proportional representation would free the BBC from fear, but more than that, since under PR many parties would enjoy a reasonable prospect of entering government and so of supplying the secretary of state for culture, the BBC would have better incentives to maintain impartiality among democratic parties."

"Calling Andrew entitled is beside the point. He was raised with no economic purpose and now he finds himself as a connector to whom no one wants to be connected. 'I have no idea who he will socialize with,' one Norfolk grandee told me. 'All his friends are Chinese spies.'" Tina Brown claims to have the inside story on how King Charles pulled the plug on Andrew.

AI is supercharging abuse against women journalists, but Megha Mohan argues that it doesn’t have to be that way.

"For a period beginning in the 1960s and ending around the turn of this century, the preferred form of the homicidally inclined was the drawn-out danse macabre of serial murder. This was especially true in America’s Pacific Northwest, where an astonishingly large number of serial killers, from Ted Bundy to Israel Keyes, from the Green River Killer to the Shoe Fetish Slayer, from the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane to the Beast of British Columbia, grew up or operated." James Lasdun on the serial killers of Seattle.

Stephen Prince introduces us to the 1970 book Filming the Owl Service (1970), which is "long out of print and rare as hens' teeth to find second hand, which is a shame as it is a fine companion piece to the series, full of rather lovely photographs, artefacts, anecdotes, background story, prop sheets and designs from the filming and the series itself".

Robert Hartley explores the Leicestershire connections of George Stephenson, the father of railways.

Heather Kidd welcomes project to restore habitats at old industrial sites in rural Shropshire

A new nature recovery project, the Rescuing Rocks and Overgrown Relics scheme, is will restore natural habitats at four sites in the Shropshire Hills. The locations involved include Poles Coppice in Pontesbury, Snailbeach and The Bog.

The work will include scrub management and coppicing to expose rocky habitats that support species like slow worms, grayling butterflies and bird's-foot-trefoil. 

It will be carried out by Shropshire Council's outdoor partnership team and the Shropshire Hills National Landscape team, with help from volunteers.

Heather Kidd, the Liberal Democrat leader of Shropshire Council, told BBC News she is delighted by the project:

"Bringing these historic sites back to life for both nature and people is a fantastic example of partnership working in the Shropshire Hills.

"It's especially welcome that this important work is being funded by Defra, supporting our shared commitment to nature recovery without placing additional pressure on local council budgets."

Market Harborough welcomed a 1905 unemployed workers march

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Market Harborough gets a bad press because the Jarrow Marchers did not meet with a particularly warm reception here. But things were different in 1905, when over 400 men Leicester men set off to walk to London to draw attention to the plight of the unemployed.

The Leicester Gazette recalls:

Local supporters in Market Harborough organised and paid for the first night’s supper and accommodation in the town. Each man was given a supper consisting of one pound of bread and two ounces of cheese, with tea or coffee. 

They were then encouraged to rest their heads for the night on straw beds in the covered sheds of the town’s cattle market, but, amidst reports of boisterous behaviour, the Leicester Daily Post commented that "sleep and rest did not reign supreme".

Unemployment was a particular issue in the Leicester boot and shoe industry in 1905 because of competition from cheaper American imports and a drop in demand for army boots following the end of the Boer War.

The marchers received support and press publicity in the other towns they stopped at or passed through, but it proved harder to interest London in their cause.

Nevertheless, the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905 was passed. It established local distress committees that could make grants to businesses or local authorities to allow them to take on more workers.

Has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?

I've given up writing "why oh why oh why" posts about the decline of Bonfire Night and the rise of Halloween.

In part this is because, while it's rather fun to play the old fogey when you're young, it's less fun when your older. You start to fear that you really are an old fogey.

But it's also because we British seem to have found a way to adapt the reimported American Halloween so it's more to our liking. So there's lots of M.R. James but very little Casper the Friendly Ghost.

For myself, I never miss a chance to post a rendition of Carl Orff's Trees and Flowers that sounds, as I always say, like something from the soundtrack of a lost folk horror classic.

But as Halloween is behind us, we can be a little more analytical about things that go bump in the night.

In the current London Review of Books, Jon Day reviews, alongside another volume, How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines.

Baines, says Day, identifies the writer Horace Walpole as the father of our modern idea of a haunted house through Stawberry Hill, "his kitschily Gothic Twickenham retreat":

Before Walpole, ghosts in English literature tended to haunt people, or generic geographic locations: crossroads, bridges, graveyards. After him, they came inside, haunting domestic spaces.

And there were socio-economic forces behind the rise of the haunted house too:

Baines’s central argument is that the rise of the haunted house in the popular imagination coincided with the emergence of the modern home as a physical and psychic reality: a building designed specifically as a dwelling, separate from farm or workplace, where a single nuclear family lived together in isolation from the rest of society. This led to a turning inward of domestic experience that is, as many historians have argued, reflected across culture more broadly. ...

Most ghosts, in the UK and America at least, are still domestically coded. Gruesome ghosts and body horror are rare. Instead there are female spectres who walk the same paths night after night searching for lost loves, or dead children who peer unnervingly through windows. Poltergeists are a relatively recent addition to the haunted house pantheon, only really gaining ground in the second half of the 20th century (and exploding in popularity after The Exorcist was released in 1973). 

Unlike fully embodied ghosts, which tend to favour grander backdrops, they often attach themselves to "dysfunctional, disenfranchised or otherwise unhappy families", Baines writes, so that parapsychic researchers and ghost historians sometimes call them "council house ghosts". 

This attachment might be exacerbated by the presence in the home of a "young, emotionally volatile female family member" – as with the Enfield Poltergeist, the haunting of a family with two young daughters in London between 1977 and 1979 – to whom such ghosts might be attracted (or who might themselves be responsible for the reported hauntings). 

But as Baines sees it, lack of ownership is also a significant factor in ‘purported haunted house cases, with people living in borrowed or rented houses tending not to properly “bond” with their place of residence, causing them to feel perpetually ill at ease’. If you’re more likely to be haunted if you rent than if you own, has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?

There's more about How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines on the Profile Books website.

The Kinks: Autumn Almanac

Time to get his posted before autumn turns to winter. Autumn Almanac is a non-album single from 1967 that made no. 3 in the UK singles chart.

Ray Davies once explained its genesis:

The words were inspired by Charlie, my dad’s old drinking mate, who cleaned up my garden for me, sweeping up the leaves. I wrote it in early autumn, yeah, as the leaves were turning colour.

And Andy Partridge of XTC has commented:

It’s a miniature movie, basically, that unravels itself as you are listening to it, and it has all these little movements or scenes. And they all seem to take place in the kind of mythical cozy London that the Ealing studios always had in their films, like The Lavender Hill Mob. The song just keeps turning and changing; you see a new facet every few seconds. But there’s nothing unsettling about the fact that there are so many parts.

Thanks to PowerPop for these quotes.

The character sketches you get in British songs of the later Sixties hark back to the traditions of music hall, and those songs, in turn, influenced the Britpop bands of the mid Nineties.

So maybe it was appropriate that Britpop took place during the premiership of John Major, the son of two music hall artists, and not that of Tony "Young Country" Blair.