Exploring four hidden Leicestershire sites with What Once Was

The first site - the Royal Observer Corps post - is at Billesdon, near the old prisoner of war camp I once explored myself.

I won't reveal what the other three are, but they're all worth seeing.

Wooden bombs, The Goon Show and Dad's Army

There's a story about Word War II that surfaces regularly on social media. It involves the Germans taking an age to build a dummy wooden airfield, only for the RAF to fly over when it's finished and drop a single wooden bomb on it.

I thought of that story listening to a 1955 episode of The Goon Show, as one does, on the wartime career of Neddy Seagoon. In an attempt to be invalided out of the Army on medical grounds, he comes up with madder and madder ideas.

His problem was that these ideas were seized upon by his superiors, put into action and invariably turned out to be a brilliant success.

At one point, he advocated covering Salisbury Plain with cardboard tanks to fool the Luftwaffe. This was followed by a news bulletin:

"This is the BBC Home Service. Last night fleets of German bombers dropped cardboard bombs on Salisbury Plain."

The top brass were delighted with all the extra cardboard because they could use it to make more tanks. (It's The Goon Show: it doesn't have to make sense.)

So it's an old joke: the Snopes page about the wooden bomb story even traces it back to 1940. But is the story true?

Almost certainly not.

The Snopes page lists several reasons not to believe it. To me the clincher is that there is no earthly reason why you would want the enemy to know they have failed to deceive you. You'd want them to think their wooden airfield is a great success and to waste their time building dozens more.

And if you think you've seen such a wooden bomb in a museum, it was almost certainly an aircraft float light.

Back to my episode of The Goon Show.

At one point the following exchange takes place:

Which one of you two is Mr Crun?

I'm Miss Bannister.

Never mind who you are. Which one is Henry Crun.

Don't tell him, Henry.

Yes, it's more or less the "Don't tell him, Pike" joke long before Dad's Army. And I've heard the Pike joke in a more obscure radio comedy, older than Dad's Army, that BBC Radio 4 Extra repeated too.

The audience at The Goon Show enjoyed it - they were having a good time - but the Pike joke barely got a laugh in the obscure comedy.

Which tells that the reason "Don't tell him, Pike" has gained immortality is the characters involved. We know Captain Mainwaring, and that's just the sort of mistake he would make. And we know Pike, and that's just the way he would react.

And now, here's Max Geldray.

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Blue Labour has become a destructive fantasy with little to say about the challenges of the country in which we live, says Marc Stears, who was one of the founders of the movement: "Everyone probably wants to reindustrialise, but we know that there is no future for the UK economy without a vibrant service sector. Everybody similarly wants strong defence. But there is no military alliance to be found in which the UK and Ukraine should be allied against France and Germany."

Eliot Higgins is not impressed by a report from the Cato Institute that claims public concern about misinformation is overblown: "The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities can become locked into belief systems that cannot be challenged - where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t merely distort truth; it breaks trust. When this happens at scale, it isn’t just bad information - it is a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable."

Brian Merchant has been collecting stories from tech workers at TikTok, Google and across the industry about how AI is changing, ruining, or replacing their jobs.

"Articles discussing the report offer lots of different answers as to why this happiness gap exists: better health care, high-trust culture, less pressure to excel academically. But when I asked parents and children in the Netherlands why they thought their children were so happy, they all had one answer: Dutch parents value giving their children independence, possibly above all else." Mary Frances Ruskell responds to a UNICEF report that suggests Dutch children are the happiest in the world.

 "Attachments to places are how we make sense of the world around us. When these places are threatened, so too are our own places within the world": Ben Lockwood on the importance of mapping the meaning of forests in a time of destruction.

Caroline Davies visits an exhibition that explores Charles Dickens' love of the theatre and highlighs the dramatic impact of his works.

Priest denies Lib Dem MP Chris Coghlan holy communion over his support for assisted dying bill

Chris Coghlan, the Liberal Democrat MP for Dorking and Horley was denounced by his Roman Catholic priest before his congregation and banned from communion after voting in favour of the assisted dying bill.

The Observer reports that Chris has described his treatment as "outrageous" and complained to Richard Moth, the Bishop of Arundel and Brighton.

In a short comment piece for the paper, Chris says:

I was moved to receive messages of support from constituents. A couple wrote: “Our faith and our belief in our Church community is based on Jesus Christ and the truth within scripture showing love and compassion.”

This pressure on me and my family did not deter me from voting with my conscience. Quite the reverse, in fact. But I know I am not alone among MPs with faith who faced the same pressure. One MP who is Christian told me she was “overwhelmed” by the strain it had placed on her.

It is my fervent hope that no MP succumbed to that pressure and either voted contrary to their own conscience or, perhaps more likely, abstained from voting at all to avoid the kind of consequences I have been subjected to. I hope not, but I cannot of course be sure.

What I am clear about is that while people inside and outside parliament are absolutely entitled to their religious beliefs and have every right to take into account what their faith may or may not have to say on the subject, it is our duty as MPs to decide what is the right thing to do out of compassion and a commitment to justice and human dignity.

Well said, Chris. 

More generally, it's interesting to speculate whether such conduct towards an MP by a religious minister could constitute contempt of parliament.

Sandy Campbell grew potatoes on an island in Loch Muick

The Scots Magazine for 1 July 1970 has a snippet about my great great grandmother's brother Sandy Campbell:

Winter lingers right into early summer in this area between Dee and Spey, and this must have meant a very late sowing. But crops can be grown in unpromising places. 

In Queen Victoria’s day the stalker at Glasallt Shiel, Sandy Campbell, used to grow a crop of potatoes on a little island on Loch Muick. "Weel, ye see, it's the best bit o’ soil roond aboot," was his explanation.

I think I'll take to speaking like that myself.

Adriano Celentano: Prisencolinensinainciusol

Yes, it's the song from the Birrificio Angelo Poretti cinema commercial, and I notice that EasyJet have started to use if on their online advertising too.

It sounds great, but if you try listening to the words you find they're gibberish. What's going on?

An old New Yorker article describes Celentano (who is still with us at the age of 87) as "a sort of Italian Jim Carrey, a comic actor with a knack for the physical and goofy". 

He is also a singer, and  Prisencolinensinainciusol was intended to convey how the American English of the rock music he loved sounded to people whose first language isn't English. He also claimed a deeper purpose for it as a song about the importance of communication

Novelty records tend not to last, but what has kept this one alive is its music.

As a National Public Radio article explains, Celentano improvised the lyrics over a looped beat:

The song has been characterized as everything from Euro-pop, funk, house and even the world's first rap song — none of which were Celentano's intention.

"From what I know, 10 years later, rap music exploded in the States," he says. "I sang it with an angry tone because the theme was important. It was an anger born out of resignation. I brought to light the fact that people don't communicate."

But is that really what American English sounds like?

"Yes," he says. "Exactly like that."

Also on the record is Rafaella Carra, who in 1978 had an early Europop hit in Britain with Do It, Do It Again.

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Sienna Rogers says No. 10 sleepwalked into a crisis on welfare cuts: "The media rounds of ministers only deepened the frustration of dissatisfied MPs. Cabinet members repeatedly stated that the threshold changes to PIP eligibility were about getting people back into work, yet employment does not preclude receiving PIP; in fact, PIP was seen by the rebels as a key way of enabling disabled people to work."

Jenna Corderoy and Peter Geoghegan report that British police forces are hiding their collaboration with the US spying technology firm Palantir: "In both 2024 and 2025, multiple FOI requests about Palantir’s police contracts  - including from Liberty and the Good Law Project - were referred to the CRU [Central Referral Unit], which advised forces to withhold information."

"The shifting sands of politics are making electoral reform more likely. But almost certainly not before the 2030s. And much will depend on how the party system evolves in the years to come." Alan Renwick reacts to the rising support for electoral reform in opinion polls.

Russia is waging a silent war across Europe, not with tanks, but with propaganda, disinformation, AI and political influence, says Tetiana Toma.

"Like many enduring classics, Jaws - while in essence a rootin-tootin creature feature - is ideologically malleable, capable of meaning different things at different times. Is it a post-Watergate rumination on political malfeasance? A comment on laissez-faire capitalism? With the film now 50 years old, this month marking its half-centenary anniversary, it surprises me that more hasn’t been made about it as a commentary on responses to the climate crisis, given how strikingly this fits with its core messages." Luke Buckmaster argues that Jaws predicted the politics of climate inaction.

Elizabeth Ammon lists six things we learnt from the first test against India.

Zack Polanski's first encounter with the Corbynite left

Zac Polanski's pitch for the leadership of the Greens is centred on the idea of attracting the sort of urban, left-wing voters who were enthused by Jeremy Corbyn.

Which makes this Buzzfeed news story from 2016 unexpected reading:

The man who heckled Jeremy Corbyn at a Momentum rally on Wednesday evening is a Liberal Democrat activist who stood for the party in last month's London Assembly elections.

Zack Polanski told BuzzFeed News he decided to interrupt the meeting of Corbyn supporters because the Labour leader's "passivity and ambivalence for Europe" had contributed to Britain voting to leave the EU in last week's referendum.

The rest of the crowd reacted very angrily to the heckle, with one man stood in the crowd next to BuzzFeed News shouting, "You Tory heckler! You piece of shit!"

But what would a Polanski leadership mean for Green attitudes to Europe in 2025?

I'm no expert on the internal politics of the Green Party, but Polanski wants Britain to withdraw from NATO, and it's fair to say that the Greens have often not always been as pro-EU as they appear today.

Caroline Lucas began as a Eurosceptic, while Jenny Jones wrote an article for the Guardian on the eve of the EU referendum that was headlined 'The EU is an outsized behemoth beyond reform – the Green case for Brexit'.

Jones has since partially recanted, but there is no guarantee that the Green Party will support Britain rejoining the EU if it makes the pitch for left-wing voters that Polanski promises.

But for the mean time, this appears to be his position...

Brexit has been a disaster. We campaigned against it and it's turned out even worse than we feared. Deregulation in particular is a huge risk. Rejoin customs union & eventually rejoin when conditions are right.

— Zack Polanski (@zackpolanski.bsky.social) 27 April 2025 at 12:50

MI6 distances its new chief from Nazi grandfather

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Lord Bonkers happened to look in just now. He remarked that from his long experience of the world of espionage, what worries him about Blaise Metreweli is that she went to Cambridge.

You can see modern road vehicles in two scenes of Shane

The first has been removed at some point in the film's history, but can still be seen in the trailer. The second is harder to spot, but it's there. Porfle Popnecker (crazy name, crazy guy!?!) is your guide in this video.

While we're on Shane, the film's final line may not be what you think it is.

Johanna Campbell, my great great grandmother's sister and housekeeper to Queen Victoria at Glas-allt-Shiel

My great great grandmother Jane Clark Campbell died at the age of 22, having had a son with one Alexander Calder. We've seen plenty about one of her brothers, Sandy Campbell; now it's the turn of one of her sisters.

Thanks to Don Fox and his blog, I can tell you about Johanna Campbell. (According to the article in The Sphere I blogged about earlier this year, Jane, Sandy and Johanna's father - my great great great grandfather - was a keeper rather than a labourer.)

Johanna Campbell was born at Khantore, Crathie in 1852, the daughter of a labourer. She was initially employed as a housemaid and was eventually appointed to the Queen’s service as housekeeper at Glasalltshiel, the Queen’s retreat on the shores of Loch Muick. There she developed a reputation for being welcoming to both visitors and passers-by. Her brother, Sandy, was also in royal employment as a keeper and was well-known for his trout fishing acumen.  

In December 1898, Johanna Campbell became ill and was referred to Professor Alex Ogston in Aberdeen. After examining Miss Campbell, he wrote to James Forbes, the new commissioner on the Balmoral estate and successor to Alexander Profeit (RA VIC/ADDQ/7/65) to inform him of his opinion.  

“My Dear Sir, I was favoured with your letter about Miss Campbell and saw her when she called today.  She has cancer of the left breast which requires to be removed forthwith.  And I have arranged that she will come into the Infirmary on Thursday at 12.30, when I shall be pleased to do all in my power to cure her".  

Sadly, the referral was too late, as was often the case in those days, and Johanna Campbell died in January 1900, the cause of death being given as “carcinoma of the breasts and secondary thoracic and abdominal deposits of 4 months’ standing”, as certified by Alexander Hendry, at the time a general practitioner in Ballater.  

In her final days, Johanna Campbell was cared for in the Balmoral estate sanatorium.  She too was buried in the Crathie churchyard.

And the Fishing Gazette for 27 January 1900 reported:

Miss Johanna Campbell, the Queen's housekeeper at Glassalt Shiel, Deeside, died last week, after a painful illness. Miss Campbell was of an extremely kind and obliging disposition, sod many a tourist and angler will long remember her with gratitude for the welcome cup of tea which was ever ready in her own room to whoever came her way. No introduction was required, and to all she dispensed a queenly hospitality as became a prime favourite and representative of the Queen. 

Her brother, Mr. Alexander Campbell (Sandy), is one of Her Majesty's keepers, and as a trout angler in these part cannot be excelled. He is guide, philosopher, and friend to the princesses and Court party when they go a-trouting on Loch Muick, and at other times supplies the Queen's table with trout.

I shall merely add that if Queen Victoria and John Brown were lovers, then Johanna, as housekeeper at Glas-allt-Shiel, would surely have known.

The illustration shows the monument that Sandy Campbell erected to his parents, and those of his brothers and sisters who already died, in the old kirkyard at Crathie. Johanna is remembered on it, but my photo of her side of he monument did not come out well. So my great great grandmother Jane Clark Campbell features here.

Don Fox's blog post is about Professor Sir Alex Ogston, a remarkable man, and you can read more about his role in the first world war (he was 70 when it broke out) on the University of Aberdeen site.

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"The government’s planned disability benefit cuts could affect the majority of current working-age claimants with ischaemic heart disease, inflammatory arthritis, hip and knee disorders and Crohn’s disease, according to official figures revealed to Big Issue." Chaminda Jayanetti analyses data on the likely impact of the cuts.

Ella Cockbain interviews a representative of SPACE (Stop & Prevent Adolescent Criminal Exploitation) about the authorities' inadequate response to recruitment of children into serious crime: "Nobody’s trying to look beyond that to see the child’s victimisation as the source of their criminality. We’re not asking, why has this child got drugs? Why is this child miles away from home? Why does the story begin where it suits the police – with the child’s criminal act – rather than showing the problem in its entirety?"

Hans Broekman took his school from the private to the public sector. Here he recommends a series of measures the government could take to encourage more schools to do the same.

"From the point, in February 2024, when directors began to tell authors that cash flow difficulties would result in postponed payment, Unbound continued to spend on everything but authors – including the Boundless Substack magazine, launched this January. And the company continued to solicit pledges and sell to readers right up to March 2025." The Bookseller prints a letter from more than 30 authors who published with Unbound.

Finding a tale of British landed gentry, slavery and sugar plantations, Paul Lashmar traces the source of the Drax family's wealth.

Sven Mikulec praises Peter Yates 1973 film The Friends of Eddie Coyle: "The large portion of this masterfully executed film’s appeal lies on the back of Robert Mitchum, one of the best American actors of all time, who never uses his screen time for any affectations or theatricality, only to deliver the distressing story fully immersed into the character he embodies."

Anthony Burgess's time in Leicester now marked by heritage panel

Over a pint of Tiger, somebody told me that Anthony Burgess used to drink in our pub. The story sounded implausible - that Burgess had been a familiar face at the Black Horse, Aylestone in the 1950s - but I filed it away mentally.

Long ago, Phil Beesley kindly wrote me what is still one of my favourite guest posts on this blog. It hold of his discovery that Anthony Burgess had once lived in the Leicester suburb of Aylestone and set one of his novels - The Right to an Answer - there.

Today a friend (thanks, Herbert!) sent me this photograph. It shows that Burgess is now remembered in Aylestone with one of the city council's heritage panels.

I don't go into Leicester as much as I used to, but I shall certainly go and see it one day soon.

Starmer's coming U-turn on PIPs reminds us of the virtues of a parliamentary system

If Keir Starmer backs down on his planned cuts to Personal Independence Payments, he will be attacked for being weak and making a U-turn, but really it will be a sign that our political system works.

He has put forward a policy that does not command a majority in the House of Commons, so he has found that he can't get it through. This ought to happen more often.

If the Conservatives were better at politics, they would have announced they would vote for the cuts, deepening the split in the Labour Party if Starmer went ahead with them.

But Kemi Badenoch made her party's support conditional upon things Starmer was never going to agree to, so it looks as though he will back down.

Watching developments in the United States, where there appears to be no check on what a rogue president can do, has made me appreciate the virtues of a parliamentary system.

Boris Johnson was bundled out of power by a Commons with a safe Conservative majority when his behaviour became unconscionable, and then the ludicrous Liz Truss followed him after only 49 days later.

We Liberals are happiest when we point out the faults of the British parliament, but we ought to remember its virtues too. 

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I love publishing guest posts on Liberal England, whether they're on politics or wider culture.

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

These are the 10 most recent guest posts on Liberal England:

• How Dune anticipated Deep Seek - Peter Chambers
• Defections of local councillors have doubled in 2025 - Augustus Carp
• When Doctor Who saved us from the gaping inferno - Peter Chambers
• How a radio station saved my life - Mark Howson
• 256 local councillors have changed party allegiance since 1 January - Augustus Carp
• 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

Charlotte Cane on the long campaign for improvements to the Ely North Junction bottleneck

Charlotte Cane, the Liberal Democrat MP for Ely and East Cambridgeshire, is right:

"Every new government or [rail] minster wants to look at everything again.

"You do a business case under one set of criteria and then, five years later, you're asked to do a business case under another set of criteria.

"Governments need to be less fixated on making new announcements which are their announcements, and more willing to continue things that have already been started."

She was talking to BBC News about the often promised but never delivered improvements to Ely North Junction, a bottleneck on the main railway route from the port at Felixstowe to the Midlands.

As the BBC report says, it's where lines from Norwich, Cambridge, King's Lynn, Peterborough and Ipswich all meet.

I once complained after a journey from Market Harborough to Cambridge, the railways want you to travel to London and nowhere else. Things will be better, at least for me, if the Oxford to Cambridge line is reopened, but I'm beginning to doubt if the final stretch, from Bedford to Cambridge, will ever materialise.g

The state of play with Ely North Junction, says BBC News, is that Network Rail was given £13m by the government in 2020 to develop options for the junction and prepare an outline business case. The report was submitted to the Department for Transport in 2022 and is still awaiting a decision.

Ely North Junction is close to a village called Queen Adelaide, which lends its name to the remarkable Queen Adelaide's Curve. This is a loop of line that allows trains to travel through the area from east to west (or west to east) without going through Ely station.

When I was a lad, every train from Leicester to Norwich (and from Norwich to Leicester) went round it, but almost all the workings that use it now are goods trains. The video above shows a rare exception and also gives you a good view of the area around Ely North Junction.

The Lemonheads: I'll Do It Anyway

This is a track from their 1993 album Come on Feel the Lemonheads. It doesn't feel like 32 years since I bought that album, but then my copy is on vinyl.

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Christine Jardine says it was a privilege to support the Assisted Dying Bill: "The debate has been for all of us MPs a harrowing experience as we welcomed into Parliament the families and friends of terminally-ill adults, who either had to live in pain, or make the heartbreaking trip to Dignitas alone to avoid the risk of their family being investigated for assisting a death."

"Nobody identified more strongly with Britain than that generation, many of whom had a picture of Queen Elizabeth II on their living-room wall. When the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks in Essex, its occupants did not see themselves as 'immigrants', but citizens of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth come to help rebuild the 'mother country' after the war." Dianne Abbott found the Windrush Day reception at No 10 joyous, but it was also a reminder of the ugliness behind the 'island of strangers' rhetoric.

Grieving families are being left without answers because of an overstretched and undertrained coroner's service reports Angela Walker.

Bob Berzins makes the case for banning driven grouse shooting.

John Lanchester discusses the enormous popularity of Agatha Christie. "[Her] great talent for fictional murder is to do with her understanding of, and complete belief in, human malignity. She knew that people could hate each other, and act on their hate. Her plots are complicated, designedly so, and the backstories and red herrings involved are often ornate, but in the end, the reason one person murders another in her work comes down to avarice and/or hate."

Well before streaming and cable TV, the BBC's Moviedrome offered an accessible gateway to cinema. A quarter of a century on from its final instalment, the strand is being celebrated with a two-month season at BFI Southbank featuring some of the most significant titles from its run. Matthew Taylor talks to Alex Cox and Nick Freand Jones about their experiences working on this influential series.

Two frogs fell into a pail of cream - You won't believe what happened next

At Boxmoor County Primary School we had only two pieces of music: Morning by Grieg and Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia. And, as far as I recall, the headmaster, Mr Staten, had only two stories.

That was me writing in 2009, when I found one of those stories repeated in Roger Scruton's Gentle Regrets, where he reports hearing it from Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, who was the Catholic chaplain at Cambridge during his undergraduate days.

As Mr Staten told it, a great artist was painting scenes from the life of Christ. Having begun with the Nativity many years before, he was on the home stretch and tackling the Last Supper. He searched and searched for someone with the right looks to be his model for Judas. He eventually found a beggar who was perfect, only to learn that this beggar had been his model for the infant Christ years before.

These days this story is all over the net, but it's told about Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Summer, with the same man being the model for both Judas and Jesus, which seems less powerful to me. And it's not true, of course.

But what about the other story? This, as I wrote back in 2009:

One involved two frogs who fell into a pail of cream. One swam around for a bit, but then gave up the struggle and drowned. The second frog swam and swan until his strength was almost exhausted. Just when he thought he could swim no more, he found that the cream had turned to butter and he climbed out.

The reason for this post is that I have found the source of this second story. In his book Lost Worlds, Michael Bywater quotes from Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys:

Two frogs were out for a walk one day and they came to a big jug of cream in looking into it they both fell in.

One said: "This is a new kind of water to me. How can a fellow swim in stuff like this? It is no use trying." So he sank to the bottom and drowned through having no pluck.

As you're all sniggering now, let me end with Colin MacInnes's description of the ideology of Scouting, as found in Baden-Powell's works:

the weirdest blend of ritual, non-sectarian religiosity, nature and beast worship, and a passion for peoples (Red Indian, Australian aborigines, African tribesmen) whom Christian imperialism had tried for centuries to destroy.

Another myth that should die: The Victorians covered table legs because they thought were indecent

I think this one is less widely believed than it was, but it never does any harm to give it a hoofing. No, the Victorians did not cover table legs and piano legs because they thought they were indecent.

For a witness let's summon Professor Strange, under whose name I contributed a few columns to Clinical Psychology Forum. This one was in the February 2004 issue:

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boots.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the straitlaced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go than the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

The truth - and this is me, as Mike Yarwood used to say - is that the Victorians were much less Victorian than we moderns imagine. They were, for instance, much more relaxed about male nudity than we are. 

Here's Ronald Hyam writing in his Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience:

Not until 1890 did the Amateur Swimming Association rule that bathing drawers must be worn in competitive schoolboy racing. Cambridge and (even more successfully) Oxford were among the last pockets of resistance to swimming costumes.

Gwen Raverat's rhapsodies about nude swimming in the River Cam reflected a dying practice. It was frowned on by the city fathers after 1894 and finally banned from the town bathing sheds in 1910, although screened and segregated nude sunbathing survived until (ironically) the mid-1960s.

GUEST POST Councillor defections: The trickle becomes a stream

Augustus Carp presents some remarkable figures in his latest report on councillors who have resigned the whip or joined another party.

It doesn’t just continue, it gets worse. One would have thought that the run up to the last major local elections – held not quite two months ago – would have prompted wavering councillors to reconsider their political affiliations then, but it seems not.

Since 1 May there have been 154 identifiable instances of councillors changing their stated political allegiances. Some of these changes have led to an ostensible change of control of the Council. 

The net figures are:

Conservatives: -56; Labour: -41; Lib Dem: +4; Greens: +3; Nationalists: no change; Reform UK: +16; Independents: +74.

This means that 1.26 per cent of Conservative councillors have defected since 1 May. The figure for Labour is 0.66 per cent.

As ever, the press and broadcast media are obsessed with Reform UK, who are getting all the headlines, but the significant number of councillors leaving the Labour Party is surely worthy of some coverage. Are they going because of Gaza, or the Winter Fuel Allowance, or Sir Keir Starmer, or because they regard their erstwhile group as chumps? More information would be welcome

The defections from the Conservatives replicate the tensions within the wider party, with councillors going off "in all directions at once" – to Reform, to the Lib Dems and even to Labour. 

In several councils (e.g Dumfries & Galloway, Sevenoaks, Solihull, Wirral) former Tory councillors have congealed into new "Definitely Not Conservative" groups, which are regarded as Independents for analytical purposes.

Defections of this order of magnitude must be having an impact on the parties' campaigning ability at constituency level.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Manuela Perteghella: "Young people want closer ties with Europe - they know the rights they have lost"

Manuela Perteghella believes Britain will one day rejoin the European Union. 

Asked in an interview with the Europe Street news agency if she thinks such a move will ever take place, the Liberal Democrat MP for Stratford upon Avon replies:

"In my opinion yes, because it is important for the UK to have partners who care about the future of Europe. ... When I speak in schools, it is clear that young people want closer ties with Europe. They know the rights they have lost with Brexit and they want to experience Europe without hurdles, so I hope the new generation will take us back into the EU, where our place is."

She is also critical of Labour's and others' rhetoric on immigration:

"The language that we have heard recently reopened old wounds and reignited the toxic debate of the Brexit campaign, while immigrants have over the centuries enriched massively British society. We need to have an honest debate and my mission will be even more to highlight this."

And, as an expert in the translation of British drama, including Shakespeare’s work, Manuela speaks of the "huge honour" of representing his birthplace in parliament.

It's summer! Coventry schoolboys wear skirts as a protest against not being allowed to wear shorts

We have the final proof that summer's here.

It's not Christmas until we've seen a story about parents complaining about a crap visitor attraction called Santa's Magic Xmasland. And it's not summer until we've seen a story about boys wearing skirts to school as a protest against not being allowed to wear shorts.

And this year's story is in, courtesy of Coventry Live:

Schoolboys are donning skirts after being 'banned' from wearing shorts amid a heatwave in Coventry. Lesley Thompson said they were protesting against the 'unfair' policy enforced at Foxford Community School in Longford.

Temperatures have soared to 27C in recent days across Coventry and Warwickshire. Youngsters who attend Foxford had asked if they could swap their long trousers for shorts, but were reportedly told the clothing item was banned.

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"As I stood outside the barricaded burial site and watched through a peephole, I felt a sense of joy. The grounds are now full of cabins, small diggers and fencing. There are workers in hard hats, forensic archaeologists and a multitude of others who will keep us up to date on what they find. Hopefully it will be the full number - 796 little bodies waiting for a dignified burial." Catherine Corless refused to give up until she learnt what became of the children who died at the mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway.

Ben Ansell dissects the increasing extremism in British commentary about race: "For a large number of writers - from Matt Goodwin to David Goodhart, Lord Frost to the MP Neil O’Brien - the distinctions among British citizens are apparently important and worthy of what can at best be described as suspicion and at worst denigration."

Olivia Bridgen asks if trail hunting is an important tradition or just a cover for illegal hunting.

"Racism, especially Islamophobia, is impossible to avoid in Farage-adjacent TikTok. Some of it is imbued with nationalist melancholia, the screen dotted with Union Jacks, clips of wartime heroics interspersed with laments for what the country has become. Some of it is didactic, explaining to the viewer where Islam originated, and the dangers it supposedly presents." William Davies ventures into Faragist TikTok.

Josh Jones looks at research that confirms what philosophers and writers have always known: walking fosters creativity.

"The six town centres are now littered with empty and derelict historic buildings, many of which are in the hands of absentee owners. Meanwhile, those that are put to use are often terribly managed by what can only be described as rogue landlords." Dave Proudlove weighs the prospects for postindustrial Stoke-on-Trent.

Tintern Abbey: Vacuum Cleaner

All Music explains:

British psychedelic band Tintern Abbey were active for only the blink of an eye in the late '60s, leaving behind just one single, "Beeside"/"Vacuum Cleaner," made for Deram in 1967. But on the strength of that sole 45, they qualify as one of the very best (if one of the more obscure) one-shots of the British psychedelic era. 

The band formed in 1966 and was gone before 1968 came to a close, but accrued a wealth of unreleased recordings that were eventually collected on the 2021 anthology Beeside (The Complete Recordings).

Their only single became a collector's item, fetching up to £1000, because of this track and its guitar solo. But you can enjoy if here for free.

There's much more about Tintern Abbey from The Strange Brew, which interviews their bassist Stuart Mackay.

Fears of lead poisoning killed off the idea of a new Snailbeach

All you Snailbeach fans out there are in for a treat. Remember 1946 and the plan for this former lead-mining village to be moved to a new site?

I know why it didn't take place. 

So do you because of the headline, but let's start with a letter in the Shrewsbury Chronicle (18 January 1946) from F.H. Edwards of Snailbeach:

Housing at Snailbeach 

I would like to congratulate Mr. William Humphrey for the way he is putting the most serious housing problem to the Clun R.D.C. No wonder the chairman, Mr. J. Norton, wants a move in this housing business. I personally have been in contact with Government officials regarding housing water and electricity. I have explained how we are in need of at least 60 houses in the Heath Ward for Service men and girls alone, and another 20 for couples who are not in the Forces but have got married during the last six years. ...

I can well imagine the Minister of Town and Country Planning having a good laugh when learning there was no electricity and water in the Snailbeach district, and we applied for industry to be brought here. Probably we shall have to wait until March before being able to get a move on, when we may see fresh faces on the council.

So it sounds like there was a plan, not just to move Snailbeach, but to expand it because of the the local housing shortage and lack of amenities.

Wondering exactly where the Heath Ward of Clun Rural District was, I googled it, though without much expectation of success.

But I can tell you that it covered the villages of Snailbeach, The Bog, Stiperstones, Pennerley and Tankerville. (The Bog was largely razed in the early Sixties, and you wouldn't call Tankerville a village today.)

I got this information from the preamble of a thesis submitted to the University of Edinburgh [this link will download a pdf] in 1951 by a George Kenneth McKenzie:

The investigations recorded in this thesis were initiated as a result of a report sent to the surveyor of the Clun Rural District Council, Shropshire, by Professor W.G. Fearnsides, MA, FRS, FGS, MIME, senior geological consultant to the National Coal Board.

Professor Fearnsides had been asked to investigate the suitability of a site in the Snailbeach District for the erection of a new housing estate. In his report he had stated that in his opinion the site was unsuitable, because the tenants would be exposed to lead poisoning from the slag heaps deposited by the old mines in the area; and that the anaemia which past doctors in the area had believed to be present, was in all probability due to lead intoxication.

If I'm reading the thesis correctly, McKenzie found from his testing of people of the district that there was a high incidence of anaemia, but no reason to think that it was caused by lead poisoning. 

It sounds, though, as if this finding came too late to save the dream of New Snailbeach.

GUEST POST Shut it! Two words of advice from Jack Regan

Peter Chambers doesn't want any Barney Rubble as he looks forward to owning some television history.

tl;dr – Series One of The Sweeney is shortly to be released on Blu-Ray.

More – Initially in 4:3 with original ad-breaks, later in 16:9 continuous, somehow.

Any mention of the 2012 shambles – Shut it!

To describe The Sweeney as iconic would be a damp British understatement. It drew a line under what had gone before – Dixon of Dock Green, Z-Cars, and Softly Softly – and then threw the book away.

It did this using a small team of ‘guerilla film-makers’ at Euston Films, a subsidiary of Thames. Directors such as Douglas Camfield – who made Inferno for Dr Who – were given 10 shooting days and £40,000 budget to go out on location in London in small teams carrying 16 mm equipment and using the background they found. 

Producer Ted Childs created the role of Jack Regan for John Thaw and picked writers such as Ian Kennedy Martin to provide the outstanding scripts. Much of the action happens in pubs, where the characters consume unbelievable amounts of alcohol and smoke like chimneys.

The dense use of London criminal slang changed crime writing forever after. Many later shows pay obvious homage – Endeavour is replete with seemingly linked references. Swapping the Ford Granada for an Audi Quattro – and adding SF – gives Ashes to Ashes. Swapping the genders of lead characters, and shifting to Manchester gives Scott and Bailey (“Ours not to reason why. Ours just to catch the bastards.”). Moving the Jags from the villains to the cops, and re-locating to Oxford is the obvious evolution to Morse – losing the London lager and gaining real-ale. Your round George.

Now I am sure I had fifty quid around here somewhere…

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

David Boyle: Remembering a friend and important Liberal thinker

I learnt this afternoon that David Boyle, the author, thinker and former editor of Liberal Democrat News, died suddenly yesterday.

My happiest memory of him is at the Alternative Summit that took place alongside the G8 Summit in Birmingham in May 1998. This was so long ago that the Alternative Summit produced, not a Bluesky account, but a daily printed newspaper.

David was the editor, and he asked me to come to Birmingham to write a column for him each day. I remember him being in his element as he dealt patiently with crises and contributors, and ordered taxis, only to keep them waiting while he solved some new problem. Clad in a pale linen suit, he resembled a very English Tom Wolfe.

It was when he asked me to write for Lib Dem News, the weekly newspaper published by the party until 2012, that I first got to know David. As an editor he was always encouraging, and when I noticed that he removed all the brackets I put in my writing, I stopped using them.

David was an immensely productive writer, yet always thoughtful and entertaining. His label on this blog brings up dozens of links to explore. I can't promise they will all work now, but many of them will.

He had the ability to notice social trends early and to sense where they might lead. You see this in what was perhaps his best book - The Tyranny of Numbers: Why counting can’t make us happy, which was published in 2001, the heyday of Blairite targets and benchmarking.

For an introduction to David's work and personality, I recommend you listen to the documentary he made for BBC Radio 4 in 2015: Clinging On: The Decline of the Middle Classes.

I knew David had been unwell for some time, but news of his death still came as an awful shock. My thoughts are with his wife Sarah and their sons Robin and William.

Medbourne station and the emptiness of the countryside between Leicester and Peterborough

I went to look for Medbourne station, which closed as long ago as 1916. You may remember that I blogged about a 1922 campaign to reopen it.

The station master's house survives, but you can't get a good photo of it from the public road. You can see a picture of it on the Medbourne village website.

So all I can show you is the pillars at the entrance to the station, which are quite a way from where the platforms would have been. The second pillar is next to the litter bin, if you're struggling to locate it.

And below is a heavily altered (Notswoldised?) terrace of railwaymen's cottages, which stands close to the station entrance.

In 1910 the Great Northern Railway ran a service from Leicester Belgrave Road to Peterborough North (the present-day Peterborough station), which called at Medbourne. It probably took a more direct route than the Leicester to Peterborough trains via Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Stamford do today.

What brings home the emptiness of this part of the world is the list of stations the GNR trains called at between Leicester and Peterborough. After the Leicester suburb of Humberstone, there was not a place of even middling size among them.

The list ran: Humberstone, Thurnby & Scraptoft, Ingarsby, Lowesby, Tilton, East Norton, Hallaton, Medbourne, Rockingham, Seaton, Wakerley & Barrowden, King's Cliffe, Nassington, Wansford, Castor.

“Historically, no one lived past age 35”: The myth that won't die

Thanks to Dr Jenn Dowd for spelling it out so clearly:

I’ve heard *so* many versions of this claim over the years, including recently from a prominent menopause doctor/influencer (implying that menopause is not “natural” because no one lived long enough to go through it). Every time someone states this “fact,” a demographer loses a piece of their soul.

What’s the truth?

When life expectancy was in the 30s, you were more likely to die in your 70s than in your 30s.

Why?

• Life expectancy is an average
• Mortality under age 5 was extremely high historically
• If you survived to age 5 your chances of living to old age were decent.

I’m sure if you think about this for a minute it this will be obvious. But a picture is worth a thousand words...

Go to the full post for graphs that make the truth clear.

What was the children's book involving Bourton-on-the-Water?

That news story about Bourton-on-the-Water, which provided a recent Headline of the Day, was everywhere. Not least, it provided liberal Bluesky with a target for the day's Two Minutes Hate.

But Bourton-on-the-Water put me in mind of a book I read at primary school. And a big of googling showed that I'm not the only one with that memory. Over to Mumsnet:

I read this book at primary school, when it was at the back of a dusty "free reading" cupboard and would love to find it again.

The story is, a group of children are out on holiday by themselves and someone offers to drop them off at an unknown destination so they can play at being explorers. They make their own names up for the towns they pass through and draw up maps etc. After a while they decide to pretend the "natives" are hostile and travel at night and/or hide in trees whenever someone comes past. One of the towns they went through they named "Million Bridges" At the end of the book we discover they've been walking through the Cotswolds (so I assume it was really Bourton on the Water or somewhere). ...

Anyone have the least idea what I'm talking about?

I remember it as "Hundred Bridges" or "Thousand Bridges", and am sure it did turn out to be Bourton-on-the-Water at the end of the story, but this is clearly the same book.

What I now wonder, given that our class library was also housed in a cupboard, is whether the writer was a fellow pupil at the old Boxmoor Primary School in St John's Road.

But what was the book called and who wrote it?

Hunting for the Bonkers Arms in Medbourne

I went to Medbourne today. The county's new on-demand bus service has made dozens of villages easy to reach - it's just a shame that so many rural pubs are closing.

One that is thriving is Medbourne's Nevill Arms (on the left of the photo above). Some scholars have concluded it is  the model for the Bonkers Arms (I would say it is at most one of the models), and if it is then it's more Freddie and Fiona than Meadowcroft these days.

But it was a lovely day to sit outside above the brook. I drank Birrificio Angelo Poretti, because it was chilled and I liked the cinema advert, and enjoyed the entertainment in the water.

The Joy of Six 1374

Andrew Chandler makes a Liberal case for the right to die with dignity: "There’s a peculiar cruelty in forcing someone to live in unbearable pain for the comfort of others."

Last year, Ofsted investigations revealed the existence of more than 900 mostly single-occupant illegal children’s homes in England, over six times the number it had found three years earlier. And The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found a council spending £29,000 per week to place a vulnerable 10-year-old in one of them.

Keith Frankish, a philosopher looks at what it is that large language models are doing. (The link will download a pdf.)

"While cranes have been elevated by rarity, gulls were once quasi-angelic, their clinging to inhospitable coastal rocks evoking the monks who established their cells at the extreme edges of these islands. Now diminished in popular perception, they are seen as gutter-life, scavengers on the trash-tides of our consumerism." Amy-Jane Beer reviews The Cuckoo's Lea by Michael Warren - "a magical ornithological history of Britain."

"The third 'fun fact' about Truro Cathedral is that it’s one of three Cathedrals in the UK with three spires. This is bollocks. I have no idea why people say this. There are four spires. I will elaborate later, but I have become a Spire Truther." Jay Hulme looks round - and climbs - Truro Cathedral.

Film-Authority.com watches the 1977 British thriller The Squeeze: "[Michael] Apted died not so long ago, and while his obituaries found much to discuss in his ground-breaking 7 Up documentary series, or his Bond movies, his first feature film is a fearsome beast, recommended but with the strongest of warnings; this really ain’t a pretty sight."

12 opening scenes from Malcolm in the Middle

History suggests that the planned revival will turn out not to have been well advised, but Malcolm in the Middle was brilliant in its first incarnation between 2000 and 2006.

The slightly larger-than-life performances of Jane Kaczmarick and Bryan Cranston as the parents were particularly memorable.

So enjoy. This is the internet: there's no copyright.

Solar farms could be the saving of insects and birdlife

Photo by Bango at Morguefile.com 
  

Here’s the thing: to our untrained eye, a corn field looks more "natural" than an array of solar panels. But a corn field is a biological desert - basically there are no pollinators there at all (corn is self-pollinating) because they are sprayed with pesticides and herbicides. Put up some solar panels, and add some plants that only need to be mowed once a year or so (sometimes with sheep) and you see an explosion of life.

That's Mike Kiernan talking. He's set up a small non-profit business that grows plants that native pollinators like between the rows solar farms in Vermont and is a neighbour of Bill McKibben, who writes The Crucial Years blog.

And Bill has some more good news about solar farms from pv magazine:

Biologist Matthias Stoefer said the high density of breeding larks in one of Germany’s largest solar parks in Brandenburg, north of Berlin, is astonishing. In his breeding territory mapping, he counted 178 spots within the solar park and surrounding areas. 

On average, there are 21 to 47 breeding pairs per 10 hectares. This is the highest lark density he has ever encountered. The reference area on a nearby field has only 33 spots, equivalent to 7.6 lark pairs per 10 hectares. Whether they can breed successfully there when the farmer sprays, fertilizes, and harvests throughout the summer is questionable, however.

The high numbers in the ground-mounted PV systems are also surprising because larks avoid vertical structures. The birds prefer open, wide landscapes away from forests and forest edges. However, the long photovoltaic rows with six modules stacked on top of each other do not seem to bother them. Instead, they benefit from the advantages of the location.

People rarely visit the fenced-in facility. The vegetation is kept short by sheep, which are currently lying in the sun with their lambs between the rows of modules. The sheep’s droppings and a changing selection of flowering herbs provide the birds with a varied insect buffet.

I'm not one to rage against Nimbys: people are bound to be attached to green spaces where they walk their dogs or played as children, and there are other villains in the housing debate who get off too lightly.

But much of the debate about development and the environment is wrongheaded. Suburban gardens are usually much richer in life than the fields they replace; while everyone's favourite target for development - brownfield sites in towns and cities - can be ecologically valuable too.

And now is sounds as though solar farms, properly managed, could be the saving of wildlife on farms.

Duke of Rutland is urged to sell 'trashed' grouse moor to the people of Sheffield

The campaign group Reclaim Our Moors wants the Duke of Rutland to to sell Moscar Moor near Sheffield for £1 because they think it is in such poor condition, reports the Sheffield Star:

Members say they walked across part of the 6,000-acre estate, between Stanage Edge and the A57, and found "almost no insect life, few birds and no grouse".

They claim it has been "trashed" by the duke, "who sets it on fire - sending smoke into people’s homes, worsening flood risk downstream and releasing carbon that adds to the climate crisis."

They also state it has been “scoured of wildlife by gamekeepers who kill anything that could affect gamebird numbers.”

The report goes on to say that in October 2023 deliberate fires on the moor blanketed Sheffield in smoke and caused a city-wide pollution incident. Heather is burnt to encourage the growth of green shoots that grouse can feed on.

It also says Moscar has received an average annual subsidy of £175,400 since 2012 under a Natural England stewardship scheme.

The Duke declined an invitation to comment.

Lord Bonkers is, of course, chuckling at this story. I get the impression he finds grouse shooting rather ungentlemanly:

"Shoot at a Rutland partridge and it will take cover and fire back. Now that's what I call sport!"

Anyway, there is more about Reclaim Our Moors online.

Jago Hazzard goes in search of the oldest bridge in London

London Bridge was first bridge over the Thames in London, but it's been rebuilt several times.

The oldest surviving bridge on the Thames is now Richmond Bridge, which dates from 1777.

But it's not the oldest bridge in London. To find one that's centuries older, head for Kingston and the Hogsmill River.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page and follow his YouTube account.

The Joy of Six 1373

"Weaponising food deprivation has been Israeli policy for decades. As a senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it in 2006, the government’s aim, in strictly restricting the entrance of foodstuffs into Gaza, was to 'put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.' Now, Israel seems to have committed fully to the latter goal." Jennifer Zacharia details the sufferings of the Palestinians.

Roland Smith weighs the objections to the European Convention on Human Rights and says we'll need good arguments against them if we're to resist the coming campaign for Britain to withdraw from it. 

"I moved to the city eight years ago to study neuroscience at University College London. Since then, rents have nearly doubled but the square footage of my digs has stayed the same. As I grow up in age and out in size, I begin to see that the hoped-for upgrade that should come with time now looks impossible. My generation is running but we’re not moving." Rose Dodd reports on life as a private tenant in London.

Michael Rosen proves that educational research did not begin with Michael Gove.

Londonopia tells the story of a unique London store: "Arthur Liberty wasn’t just flogging  fabrics. He was hawking a vision - a sensual rebellion against the stiff moral corsetry of Victorian Britain. Where others sold sensible serge, Liberty offered peacock-feather glamour, hand-painted decadence, and the vague but thrilling possibility that you might run away with an artist and spend your life eating figs in an atelier."

"War is a dreadful thing, amongst all of the horrific things that human inflicts upon other human in the name of 'war' there are some events that stand out as atrocities: one such atrocity took place in the aftermath of the battle of Naseby." Keep Your Powder Dry tries to pin down the exact location of The Farndon Massacre in the villages just south of Market Harborough.

High Court overturns approval of 200,000-bird intensive poultry unit in River Severn catchment area near Shrewsbury

River Action is hailing a "turning point" for the movement against polluting factory farming. The High Court has overturned the planning permission Shropshire Council granted for a 200,000-bird intensive poultry unit near Shrewsbury in the River Severn catchment area,

The campaign group says:

The case was brought by local campaigner and River Action board member Dr Alison Caffyn, supported by River Action. The judgment quashes Shropshire Council’s planning decision and marks a major turning point in the fight against the irresponsible and harmful spread of factory farms and the protection of the UK’s iconic rivers.

This victory sends a clear message that planning authorities must:

• Assess the cumulative impacts of having multiple intensive agricultural developments in one river catchment before granting permission for another. 

• Consider how livestock production units dispose of the waste from treatment facilities downstream, including from anaerobic digestion plants.

You can read the full High Court judgment online. Shropshire Council, which has been run by the Liberal Democrats since last month's local elections, has announced that it will not appeal against it.