Mr Colpeper does receive a blessing in A Canterbury Tale after all

I think I've gained a new understanding of my favourite film. Most commentators take their mark from Mr Colpeper's answering to a question at his lecture:

"These ancient pilgrims came to Canterbury to ask for a blessing or to do penance."

They observe that, while Alison, Peter and Bob travel to the city to receive their blessings, Colpeper goes their to do penance.

As it turns out, Colpeper doesn't have to do penance because Peter, having rediscovered his vocation as a musician, loses interest in his plan of reporting him to the authorities.

I now believe that Colpeper receives a blessing too. And to see it we have to go back to the two scenes that run beneath the films closing credits. (If you click play in the video above, you'll be taken to the very end of the film.)

Last month I blogged about the second of them: 

But right at the end of the film, the closing credits play over another scene of the boys who fought a battle on the river. It may be significant that they are no longer playing war but football.

But what about the first of them?

In it we see men and women, some arm in arm, going to an event at the Colpeper Institute. And, though it's hard to read the poster advertising the event, it's similar in typograph and layout to a poster we see clearly earlier in the film. And that is the poster advertising Colpeper's own lecture there.

So Colpeper has been given his heart's desire too: an audience for his opinions on Kent and its history. And he has found it because he met Alison and realised that he should welcome women to his lectures - rather than pour glue on their hair to keep them at home.

I looked again at these closing titles because I read Deconstructing the Imagined Village: A Canterbury Tale, a long post on the film by Paul Banks.

He writes about the these final scenes:

After a series of increasingly distant views of the exterior of the Cathedral, the closing credits appear over a shot of the Chillingbourne boys paying soccer with the new football paid for by Bob. In fact this closing section was originally planned as being rather longer, with striking visual recapitulations and an explicit concluding message:

We see the bells, great and small, shaking the timbers of the roof with their clamour.

We see the towers of the Cathedral, the Angel Steeple, the mass of the building. The bells are still ringing. There is no sign to show whether the time is 600 years ago or today.

We see the Cathedral, far away across the valley of the Stour, the houses of Canterbury huddled round it.

The bells sound faintly, but the Organ is still playing.

High up white clouds are sailing in the wind. A small black speck appears in the sky. It’s familiar hum breaks through the organ music. It is a Spitfire.

The camera sweeps down from the sky, down to Chillingbourne Camp.

A new battalion of SOLDIERS are marching in to take over.

This time they are Americans.

We see their faces as they march: faces not very different from the faces we left in prayer at Canterbury. Only the uniforms are different.

Here the story ends.

As the usual Credit Titles appear at the end we glimpse a little bit more:

A brand new football! There they go! Leslie, Terry and the other boys, one side, with berets, fighting unequal odds.

Here is the ‘Colpeper Institute’.

There is a new poster up, advertising a series of lectures.

And – believe it or not! – soldiers and girls are going in.

The shots of the Cathedral (a few of which do appear in the released version) and the recapitulated Spitfire sequence reinforce the atemporal symmetrical structure of the film, and seem to be designed to close off the narrative, but the last two images behind the closing credits  – the boys and the poster – for all their ambiguous status both within and outside the ostensibly completed chronicle, seem to be intended as glimpses of an imagined sequel and the last would have suggested that Colpeper’s penance was genuine and that for him the pilgrimage had indeed been a significant learning experience after all. 

However, by omitting that final image (which would have revealed what the outcome would be) Powell and Pressburger encourage viewers to make up their own minds about the character’s ultimate spiritual fate.

But the shot of the crowds going to Colpeper's lecture did make it to the final film, though it is shown before the boys playing football. So Colpeper did receive a blessing after all.

Man gets stuck up tree as he tries to rescue parrot

 For this tale of everyday life in Thurnby, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Bryan Magee on Karl Popper's account of human knowledge

Karl Popper's account of human knowledge, which Bryan Magee sets out at the beginning of this clip, seems to me so obviously right that I still find it hard to believe that no philosopher had put it forward before him.

Years ago I wrote the entry on Popper in Duncan Brack's Dictionary of Liberal Biography. 

What I didn't know then was that Bryan Magee, the great populariser of Popper's thought in Britain, had been evacuated to Market Harborough as a boy during the war and had lived literally round the corner from where I lived as a teenager.

Nigel Farage and Reform UK declare war on evil pixies

Reform UK pledged to remove all low-traffic neighbourhoods from the council areas it took control of on 1 May. It turns out that none of these areas has any.

What with this and Reform councillors' refusal to attend non-existent training courses, I'm reminded of Sir Mortimer Chris and his campaign against the evil pixies that were the cause of unemployment in Britain.

The Joy of Six 1361

"The thing is, I work for The Guardian, right? So I've got this sort of somewhat misplaced belief that the public sector is great, and will always sort you out. And that's true, you know, if you break your leg. We had some idea that they would sort us out with whatever autism entails; but that just wasn’t the case. The paediatrician said 'Come back in a few years and we'll really know what we're dealing with'. Terrible." Dave Haslam interviews John Harris about his book Maybe I'm Amazed.

Over a decade ago, the Coalition government placed many of England and Wales's inland waterways in the hands of the Canal & River Trust. As it struggles with increasing financial pressure and a furious row with part of the boating community, Alan White asks if the experiment has failed.

Madeleine Bunting reviews a history of the Roma People in Europe: "The persecution continued under Mary I whose law required Roma to give up their nomadic lifestyle. If they refused they were to be rounded up, put on boats and deported to Scandinavia."

Sara King celebrates the rewilding pioneers who've helped bring beavers back to Britain’s landscapes.

"Almost a year ago, I stumbled into a weird rabbit hole, trying to outsmart AI. Since I moderate a number of very large subreddits, I started noticing certain patterns in posts that felt just a little too polished or off. One tell in particular kept showing up no matter what, the em dash." Brent Csutoras on one way AI gives itself away.

Mitchell Beaupre watches Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer: "The end product is an exquisite dissection of a particular breed of All-American Man that mystified audiences upon release and has gained in esteem in the decades since. Its simple plot belies the many philosophical and existential musings that lurk underneath, with each dip in the pool washing away more of Ned’s facade until there’s nothing left."

I spent £25k building massive quirky cupcake in my magical West Midlands garden

The Shropshire Star wins our Headline of the Day Award.

In their ruling, the judges point out that a) it's a free country and b) you can see a video of the massive quirky cupcake on the Shropshire Star website.

BBC2 to screen two-part documentary about the Jesus Army

I've blogged before about the Jesus Army, the cult that originated at Bugbrooke in Northamptonshire, and how compensation paid to survivors of abuse within it may reach £10m. And I've long wondered why this story has not received more media attention.

That may at last be changing, as BBC2 is to show a two-part documentary, Inside the Jesus Army, on this scandal.

I've not seen the transmission dates for them yet, but BBC Factual has page about the two programmes:

Daisy Scalchi, Head of Commissioning, Religion and Ethics, said: "This is a shocking tale of abuse hiding in plain sight. Those who have bravely shared their stories will, I hope, give voice not only to their own experiences but many others like them."

Katie Buchanan, Executive Producer, said: “This is a compelling, urgent and timely story that it is only now coming to light thanks to the powerful testimony of survivors and former members.”

Lib Dems go ahead of Tories in latest YouGov poll

The Liberal Democrats have overtaken the Conservatives have slipped to fourth place in a new YouGov opinion poll published today.

We are in third place in the poll on 17 per cent, with the Tories in fourth place on 16 per cent. 

Reform tops the poll on 29 per cent, with Labour in second place on 22 per cent.

All the usual caveats about making too much of one poll apply, but this still feels like a moment worth remarking. And it is a development that has been expected for some time, given recent trends in such polls.

The Tories are usually ruthless at getting rid of failing leaders, but the problem Tory MPs face is that their next leader will be chosen by the party's membership. 

There is no guarantee that this electorate will come up with someone better than Kemi Badenoch.

In the past Tory MPs have got around this problem by agreeing to put only one candidate to the membership (that's how Michael Howard and Rishi Sunak became leader), but Robert Jenrick and his followers would refuse to be party to such an arrangement unless Jenrick himself were that one candidate.

Matt Monro: We're Gonna Change the World

This was all over the radio in 1970, but it wasn't a hit. Maybe people who liked Matt Monro didn't want to hear about demonstrations and people who went on demonstrations didn't buy Matt Monro records? 

But I've always liked it, and you did find the extra-parliamentary political culture of the era seeping into the charts. Think The Banner Man by Blue Mink or United We Stand by Brotherhood of Man.

After I posted this song in 2009, I received an email from David Matthews, who wrote the music. He explained: "The lyrics were about the lives of my co-writer's ex-fiancées."

The Englishman in the High Castle

An Englishman's Castle was a three-part BBC drama that starred Kenneth More and was screened in 1978. It was set in an alternate 1978 where Britain had been conquered by Nazi Germany.

I don't remember it from the time and have long wanted to watch it. The other day I found all three parts on YouTube, namely:

• part 1
  
• part 2
• part 3

If you want a blow-by-blow account, then Archive TV Musings is the site for you. Here I offer some more random thoughts.

To begin, I have a Kenneth More problem: I don't like him when he plays the hero. I'm reminded of Matthew Sweet and his comment on A Night to Remember: 

You almost get the feeling watching A Night To Remember that the ship goes down simply to wipe the smug grin off of Kenneth More's face.

and also of his comment on More's onscreen character in general:

He was heroic in a cocky, big-brotherly way - like a public-school prefect who might have saved a new boy from a beating, but expected three terms of shoe-polishing and crumpet-toasting in return.

But the older, compromised More we see here is more to my taste. He plays the scriptwriter of a popular television drama called An Englishman's Castle, which is set in the recent past and is reaching the time of the German invasion of Britain. 

This, and the complications of his personal life, suddenly make it harder for him to please the viewing public without upsetting the authorities. Up till now, he has made the compromises that allowed him to walk this tightrope.

Then there is the brilliance with which an authoritarian state is conjured up without showing us anything. The violence all takes offscreen and every one running things is British. The only German we see is an amiable young soldier who appears in the drama within the drama.

And then there's the cast. More's wife is played by Kathleen Byron, the mad nun from Black Narcissus. The controller of the television channel is Anthony Bate, soon to play Sir Oliver Lacon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. One of More's sons, though he's not at his best here, is Nigel Havers.

In the minor roles are two figures with pleasing trivial connections. Jonathan Kydd, the son of the actor Sam Kydd, appears on one of my regular podcast listens - Chelsea Fancast - every week. 

While the young German soldier is played by Louis Sheldon. As Louis Sheldon Williams he was one of the children in Our Mother's House and, better still, his mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the 1960s.

If you click play on the video at the top, you'll soon see a scene between Kenneth More and Anthony Bate. If you like it, I think you'll like the whole thing.

Zack Polanski and Alistair Darling: Two soft rides from the Guardian

I'm late to the party on last week's Guardian interview with Zach Polanski, but I've still decided to come.

Reading it today, I find it's not the first time the Guardian has allowed the politician to present a carefully edited version of his past without challenge.

Zoe Williams¹ tells us that Polanksi:

started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016. “That was for one very clear reason,” he says. “Proportional representation – it’s always been really important to me.” He joined the Greens the following year...

But Polanski didn't stand in a London borough election: he stood for the Greater London Assembly. And, a prominent figure on social media, he clearly had higher ambitions with the Liberal Democrats. 

Some say he had his eye on the by-election in Richmond Park, and made up his mind to leave the Lib Dems once the local party decided to stick with Sarah Olney as their candidate.

And then there was that notorious article where he told a Sun journalist he could make her breasts bigger by using hypnosis.²

Reading it now, it looks like a puff piece for his business rather than a hatchet job. Yet Williams defends it on the grounds that "he was only just 30".

But this is not the first such interview I've seen in the Guardian. Here's Decca Aitkenhead profiling the late Alistair Darling back in 2008:

Studying law at Aberdeen, he stood for election in the student union, but not for a party. "I was just quite interested in getting things done." His manifesto favoured "strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory". When he joined the Labour party in 1977, he never expected to be more than a member.

The truth was rather different and will surprise anyone who remembers Darling in days as Gordon Brown's chancellor.

Here's George Galloway remembering a meeting with Darling in 1973:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf.

And joining Labour didn't curb his militant tendencies:

Later ... he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze.

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy.

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left.

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time.

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been.

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

A reader asks: So what's the moral of all this?

Liberal England replies: I suppose it's that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the Guardian.

The reader persists: That a bit obvious, isn't it?

Liberal England admits: I suppose it is. To be honest, I just wanted to repeat that George Galloway story one last time. Oh, and to show that I've found how to do the numbers for notes in superscript.³

Notes

1. Nevertheless, I won't hear a word against Zoe Williams: in my press officer days she was always a pleasure to deal with. Polly Toynbee, by contrast, once made me miss my train.
2. I'm not scandalised by that Sun article, it's just that it reminds me of when P.G. Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts, turns out to be a designer of ladies' underwear. And Polanski's suggested strategy of concentrating on winning an urban, Corbynite vote will appeal to many Green members.
3. See?

GUEST POST The state of our canals - and canalside pubs - today

Fresh from a canal holiday made difficult by unannounced closures, Peter Chambers looks at the many challenges facing the Canal & River Trust.

The British have been using waterways for a long time: we are told that the canal called the Fossdyke was created by the Romans. 

Things started to get busier as entrepreneurs such as the Duke of Bridgewater and Josiah Wedgewood raised capital for specific ventures that would pay for something that by-passed the toll roads of the day – iron mining and pottery in their cases. 

This was the start of the first Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. Once these connections existed, the marginal cost for other uses dropped and more firms used them. The logic of places such as Birmingham became evident, as you were taught in O level Geography. The more you link, the more profitable it is to link more.

At the time. each new major canal required an Act of Parliament. Limited liability companies solicited funds, and shopped around for an MP to propose another Canal Bill. The canal age had started. The emergent network was a strange one. Different fees, widths, depths, keys, windlasses, heights and naming conventions. It topped out at about 8000 miles. Today we have the best 2000 in preservation.

The canals survived into the 20th century. They played a part in winning the two world wars, helped by a big public works programme run by Herbert Morrison in the 1930s.

Then reality caught up. The combination of the post-war car economy and the railways removed most of the profitable trade. The network was taken into public ownership under the British Transport Board. The canal network was put under the British Waterways Board (BWB). Even today there are artefacts stamped BWB. 

The Department of Transport debated the future of the waterways with its boards. However, despite attempts at running high-latency cargo, leisure was the only viable long term use identified. The BWB settled in for a long stretch running a national ‘linear leisure park’. 

During this time a large number of restoration societies restored hundreds of additional miles to use. They then handed over the restored mileage to the BWB, often during ceremonies involving the Queen. Or Prunella Scales.

This led to a happy time for many people. The canals had been built by thirsty 'navvies' for whom real-ale pubs had been constructed. These pubs were retained for the thirsty boatmen who worked the boats during and after the first Industrial Revolution. 

Generally, blond continental beer was kept away from key waterway junctions for decades. Additional supplies of real ale could be supplied by breweries such as Wadsworth's at Devizes on the Kennett and Avon Canal, which operates today and runs tours ending in a small shop only a short walk from the Caen Hill flight of locks.

The restoration effort even benefited from additional charitable funds from the National Lottery. An umbrella body – The Waterways Trust – was formed in 1999 to use charity funds to open new facilities and attract new interest and spending to the waterways. 

Restorers entered a peak activity phase, linking up old routes, and pushing into Wales with the Montgomery Canal past Offa’s Dyke. The "Monty", as it is known, is only a few miles away from the award-winning real-ale pub The Bailey Head in Oswestry (dogs welcome). 

It is probably best to moor outside the Queen’s Head (closed on Mondays) and make your way into town. Alternatively you can cross the border near Chirk and press on to Llangollen, with its excellent hostelries. Ideally do both.

Time, however, moved on. In 2012, during the time Justine Greening was transport secretary, all of British Waterways responsibilities and assets in England and Wales were transferred to a new charity, the Canal & River Trust (CRT). This had the advantage of removing the liabilities of the waterways from the books of the government. 

The CRT was endowed with the assets of the BWB. It was also intended that it would receive tapered funding from the state. It would continue to provide a public benefit, but would increasingly stand on its own thousand feet. One day licence fees and other charges would have to rise, and the ageing physical infrastructure of the endowment would require gradually increasing maintenance charges. 

The restored plant of the waterways had been stabilised, but no programme of replacement or upgrade was baked into the system. There would be no refresh, only an endless set of repair patches, done in priority order. The staff and facilities of the BWB started to age out. After a while the maintenance capability became increasingly contractorised.

Following the Covid pandemic, many old canalside pubs closed. They lacked the financial 'bottom' of large chains, and often served distinct local clienteles. A victory for continental lager seemed certain,, with blond 'craft beer' often substituted to tempt the unwary.

In 2025 there exist many unplanned remedial works that will consume millions in unbudgeted funds. This will mean that planned work to partly remediate the effects the pandemic will not happen, and the deficit of the CRT will rise above £10m. A general review of fees is promised, with all up for grabs – widebeam fee increases, loss of green initiatives, possible closures.

In addition to the effects of long-postponed asset failures, the long-term effects of climate change are making themselves felt. Several waterways this year have restrictions or stoppages due to low water conditions. The Pennines are all but closed. The Macclesfield is in doubt. The Rochdale looks rather dry. The Trent is low, but usable. When planning journeys in these areas, the bleating of the fossil-fuel shills sound particularly self-serving.

Finally, I could mention the pollution levels and the water companies. It is enough to say that you should wash your hands every time you go indoors afloat. I mean it.

Layla Moran on Gaza: "Starvation shouldn't be a weapon of war"

The senior Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran has warned that people in Gaza face "unbearably cruel levels of destitution" and called on the government to match its recent tougher tone on Israel with action.

Speaking to the Guardian she said:

I remain frustrated that while the government’s words and tone have changed, in terms of concrete actions, not much has changed.”

She called on the government to recognise a Palestinian state, which would "safeguard Palestinian interests and also send a very clear signal to Israel that there are consequences to their actions". She also condemned the government for allowing trade from illegal settlements and for "still arming Israel when they shouldn’t be".

The report goes on to detail the suffering of the family of Mohammad, an NHS doctor who operated on her last year and whose elderly parents remain stuck in northern Gaza.

He describes conditions on the ground as a "slaughterhouse" and says people are on the brink of starvation.

Layla told the Guardian:

"Starvation shouldn’t be a weapon of war and it is unbearably cruel that it’s got to the levels of destitution that Mohammad’s family are describing, but their story is just one of millions that are now trapped in northern Gaza in a situation that seems even worse than at the beginning.

"It has to stop now and the UK government needs to redouble its efforts to make that happen."

Disney child star looks unrecognizable on Cannes red carpet 32 years after hit film’s debut

Embed from Getty Images

In making our Headline of the Day Award to the Independent, the judges congratulated the online newspaper's editors on grasping the fact that children grow up.

Spyro Gyra: Morning Dance

In the summer of 1979 this track was everywhere. It made the UK top 20. It was radio friendly, Radio 2 friendly and made for use in television trails. But I wonder if I've heard it this century.

Spyro Gyra come from Buffalo in New York State. Morning Dance was the title track from their second album, which reached no. 11 in the UK charts - high for a jazz album in that or this era.

The unusual elements on it, like steel drums, make it more interesting than I have so far made it sound.

And Spyro Gyra are still going. Here's an advertisement for a gig of theirs at Buffalo State last year:

In 2024, Jay Beckenstein and band observe the 50th anniversary of what started as a diversion, something that was just for fun (and twenty-five cents at the door). It began inauspiciously when Beckenstein and a few musician friends in Buffalo NY organized a get together on their shared night off from working in bands that actually made money. It was a simple, humble idea with a name that was likewise simple and humble, "Tuesday Night – Jazz Jam". 

Fast forward 50 years and this jazz super group has released over 30 albums, garnering gold and platinum along the way. They’ve played over 10,000 concerts on six continents. Spyro Gyra has maintained its standards of excellence and that has sustained them on the "A list" of live attractions in jazz for 50 years.

The Joy of Six 1360

"If Morgan can beat the BNP in Barking, goes the argument, then surely he can do the same for Reform in Britain too. Yet in all the coverage of McSweeney’s supposedly unique ability to slay the far right, through deploying tough messages on crime and immigration, almost nobody has actually bothered to check whether it’s true." Adam Bienkov explodes the founding myth of Morgan McSweeney.

Nandi Msezane says migrant workers prop up the UK’s social care system, but are now being forced out.

Cameron Joseph argues that Donald Trump is borrowing a playbook from other elected leaders who have used the tools of democracy to destroy it: "Would-be autocrats often move to eliminate structural checks on their power. They intimidate opposition parties, threaten potential dissenters within their own ranks, and defy the courts. Autocrats punish and bully the news media, protect allies from legal prosecution while targeting political opponents, and purge senior military and government ranks of career staff in favor of loyalists."

"There were numerous attempts at creating Labour-affiliated clubs, as Labour became a serious party of government for the first time. It is also easy to see why the inherent contradictions around that gave these clubs a limited appeal within the Labour Party." Seth Thévoz on the attempts to establish a London club for Labour parliamentarians.

"It was a reminder of a time when democratic politics wasn’t viewed with contempt but was understood as a form of collective expression and - for some (for very many in the 1940s) - as a means of making a better world." Municipal Dreams looks at the at creation and reception of the 1943 County of London Plan.  

Katherine Stockton explores the problematic implications of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys.

St Paul's, Covent Garden: The Actors' Church

"George Smiley! Oh, but you lovely, darling man!"

Down in London on Thursday, I came across St Paul's, Covent Garden, which is known as 'The Actors' Church'.

I found some interesting figures remembered in the dedications on the churchyard benches.

Brian Glanville, greatest of football reporters, has died aged 93

The first things I can remember, as a child, reading with pleasure in an adult newspaper are Brian Glanville's football reports for the Sunday Times.

He was still teaching me new words when I was 16. I can recall his writing about England's 3-2 victory over Italy in the USA's Bicentennial tournament. England fielded two young debutants: Gordon Hill, a left wing from Tommy Docherty's exciting Manchester United side, and Ray Wilkins (often called Butch Wilkins in those days), the 19-year-old Chelsea captain.

He described Hill as an "urchin" figure and Wilkins - in a new word for me - as a "gamin". Wilkins had looked thoroughly at home in midfield, passing the ball like an experienced international. You can see England's starting XI in the image above.

This morning I heard that Glanville has died at the age of 93. Richard Williams is quoted among the tributes on the Football Writers' Association site:

Some of us are old enough to remember a time when colleagues often sniggered at Brian Glanville’s ability to pronounce the names of foreign footballers – particularly those of Italian players – correctly.

They stopped laughing when English teams were suddenly filled with foreign players, and the ability to avoid mangling their names became a necessary part of a football reporter’s skillset. 

Brian’s interest in the game as it was played in other countries sprang from his cosmopolitan nature; it turned out to be prophetic, and I often felt that the rest of us should have been paying him some sort of pathfinder’s royalty.

A sophisticate as much at home at the Chelsea Arts Club as at Stamford Bridge, he came from a time before football became gentrified but played and wrote about it with wholehearted commitment and without condescension towards those who’d come to it via routes very different from his own.

London's lost underground lines - with a note on the wine cellar of the National Liberal Club

Jago Hazzard is our guide to a collection of lost lines, repurposed lines and abandoned oddments, some of them 50 miles out of London and deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside.

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

One scheme that never advanced far enough to carry trains was the Waterloo & Whitehall Railway, which:

was authorised in 1865 to construct a pneumatic railway (that is, one where trains are pushed though a tunnel by air pressure) from Great Scotland Yard to Waterloo station. The single cast iron tube, 3.89 m (12'9") in diameter, would have crossed the river by being laid in a ditch dredged in the bed of the Thames. 

Though work did start, a general financial crisis prevented additional capital being raised, and the work was abandoned in 1868, with the company being wound up in 1882. The trench excavated at the northern end is now the wine cellar of the National Liberal Club.

That Reform UK programme for Leicestershire: Bus cuts and a consultants' bonanza

Reform UK won 25 of the 55 seats on Leicestershire County Council on 1 May and has now formed a minority administration.

What will they do with this power? It's hard to know. They didn't produce a local manifesto for the elections, and I'm not sure things are much clearer after the new council leader's interview with the Leicester Mercury.

A few extracts...

Q: Reform UK has promised an audit of the county council’s finances to identify waste and efficiencies. How are you going to fund the audit given the council’s difficult financial position?

A: We'll find that sort of money because it's vital. It's vital. We'll be able to do that, don't worry.

The Mercury could have pointed out the council's finances are audited internally and externally every year. So this sounds like a firm commitment to unnecessary extra spending.

On flooding, they want to solve the problems in the county, but don't seem to know what needs to be done or how much it will cost.

There will be not cuts in social care: apparently these new auditors are going to be "an external company of experts" and will tell them what to do.

This sounds very like the practice among Conservative councils of spending a fortune on consultants because you don't trust your own officers for ideological reasons.

Reform UK's clearest commitment seems to be cuts to bus services:

Q: What will you do to ensure rural communities have access to public transport?

A: If we've got efficiency and if we've got savings, we can then do something. But, we've got to review the buses because the problem was we had buses driving around with two or three people in and there was no take-up.

So when it suddenly goes, everybody wants to join a petition to say ‘yes we want it back’. So it's one of those, if you're not using it, you could lose it.

We've just had a major review of bus services in Leicestershire under the last Conservative administration, but, sure, let's have another consultants' bonanza. It's only taxpayers money.

The real test of what Reform UK are about will come when they discover there's not millions of pounds of wasteful spending to be cut or reallocated. But the early signs are not promising.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles

Lord Bonkers mentioned the other day that my rent falls due on Lady Day. I took this as a subtle reminder that it's a long time since I looked to see what the old brute was saying 30 years ago.

So here's an entry from his diary in Liberator 227 (March 1995), when John Major was fighting the bastards of Euroscepticism - he now seems a giant in comparison to the Tory leaders who were to come after him:

The Palace of Westminster is not a happy place at present. One can hardly enter the gentlemen's lavatory without seeing a gang of Europhobes forcing some poor moderate Conservative's head down the pan and pulling the chain, and this morning I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles. 

The problem, I would argue, lies in a lack of leadership at the very top of the Conservative Party. This little grey chap they have nowadays may be very good when it comes to traffic cones and motorway service stations, but he is not the sort one would readily follow into battle. It is all too reminiscent of Woolacombe in 1968, when Jeremy Thorpe had to be rescued after he was pushed through a trap door and imprisoned under the stage by the Young Liberals.

I also enjoyed a detail from his visit to Wales, where he passes and enjoyable evening at a village whose name, he is informed, is best translated as: 

The Church of St Mary in the hollow by the pool where Lloyd George seduced Bronwyn - you know, the big girl who used to work in the Co-op.

It doesn't go back quite this far, but there's a free archive of back numbers of Liberator on the magazine's website.

The Joy of Six 1359

"Adults are going hungrier to keep children better fed. The most vulnerable – infants, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and others needing special diets - are already starving. The very poorest, those unable to call on better-off relatives, those cut off by military checkpoints, are already wasting away as their internal organs suffer irreparable damage." Alex de Waal on starvation in Gaza.

Ben Jackson says the government must change direction on child poverty: "When governments are remembered after they lose office, their achievements are unforgivingly distilled into a few pithy bullet points. Does Keir Starmer really want one of his bullet points to be that he was the unusual Labour prime minister who presided over an increase in child poverty?"

Rose Dixon reports the success of Iceland's experiment with a four-day working week.

"The men would wait for the Germans to pass over them and then come out at night. Their role was not to fight the Germans face-to-face. Their brief was to hit the supply chain, causing enough chaos to slow down the German advance, blowing fuel and ammunition dumps, destroying railway lines, bridges, and convoys. Local country houses that had been taken as German HQs were to be destroyed and German officers and British collaborators assassinated." Andrew Chatterton explains how the British Resistance would have fought Nazi occupiers.

"Meryl marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. She had read Corman’s novel and found Joanna to be 'an ogre, a princess, an ass,' as she put it soon after to American Film. When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody." Michael Schulman tells the story of how Meryl Streep battled Dustin Hoffman, retooled her role and on her first for Kramer vs. Kramer.

Peter Black discovers an Edwardian mystery: The story of Violet's Leap.

William Wallace: Reading Biggles in Westminster Abbey

Liberal Democrat Voice has a thoughtful post by William Wallace - Lord Wallace of Saltaire - on the relation between Liberalism and religious faith.

But I was most taken by this personal reminiscence:

I grew up as a Protestant Anglican. I learned what I now understand as social liberalism from the sermons of Canon Marriott, preaching the 'social gospel’'in Westminster Abbey (putting down my Biggles book, which choristers were allowed to take in to keep us quiet during sermons).

Reform council leader thinks circumcision causes transgenderism

The new Reform UK leader of Lincolnshire County Council has suggested there's a link between circumcision and transgenderism in children, reports the Jewish Chronicle.

In a now-deleted post on social media, Sean Matthews, who earlier this month became leader of Lincolnshire County council, said: “It's no surprise that children want to remove their penises and become girls.

"Most of their parents started the process shortly after birth, by chopping their foreskin off in the name of (insert deity).”

I'm not going to blog about every fruitcake, loony and closet racist that got elected as a Reform councillor on 1 May, but this guy is a council leader.

Incidentally, in the Britain of the 1930s, 35 per cent of boys were circumcised, with the practice being particularly favoured by upper class parents.

But I bet Mr Matthews will tell you there were no transexuals in the good old days.

Nick Cohen's podcast: Don't back any horses tipped by Nick Tyrone

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Nick Cohen's latest podcast dropped two days ago. His guest, billed as an expert on the Conservative Party, was Paul-Marshall-era Liberal Democrat turned Reform supporter Nick Tyrone.

In the course of their discussion Tyrone argued that when Robert Jenrick replaces Kemi Badenoch, as he surely will, he'll prove no more popular than she has.

He then suggested that the Tories should go for someone untainted by their 14 years in government and choose a leader from their 2024 intake of MPs.

Pressed for a name, he suggested Patrick Spencer, who was arrested the following day.

Spencer denies the charges against him and may go on to have along political career, even leading his party. But this exchange did reinforce the impression that Tyrone isn't the great political forecaster out there.

Because he has previous. Here he is in the Spectator on the eve of a 2021 by-election:

"The Chesham and Amersham by-election is on Thursday. Thank God it’s almost here — hopefully then we can stop hearing any rubbish about how the Lib Dems are set to tear down the Conservatives’ ‘blue wall’ in the home counties. As the campaign has demonstrated, the Lib Dems are miles away from being able to cause such an upset.

"Instead, the Lib Dems will lose on Thursday, most likely fairly badly, and they will have no one to blame but themselves. If they want to get back to being the by-election masters of old, they will have to do a lot better than this."

As you may recall, Sarah Green won the election for the Lib Dems with a 25 per cent swing from the Conservatives.

He was more confident about the Lib Dem performance in 2015:

Ahead of the 2015 General Election, Tyrone predicted that the Liberal Democrats would receive "17 per cent" of the popular vote and that the vote share for the two largest parties appeared "on course for an all time low". 

The two largest parties subsequently both increased their vote share, while the Liberal Democrats received 7.9 per cent.

Nor did he much admire Nigel Farage in the run up to the European Union referendum:

In 2015, Tyrone argued that fellow pro-Europeans should give their "gratitude to Nigel Farage for hanging around the British political scene just a little bit longer" as he believed it would ensure "the pro-Europeans win".

We all like to sound confident when we make predictions, but I wouldn't back any horse that Nick Tyrone tipped. 

Fleetwood Mac: Dust My Broom

Scintillating slide guitar from Jeremy Spencer. 

Thought for the Day: “We know that at night-time someone goes by amongst the trees, but we never speak of it”

I first came across this saying in Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil's study of the artists Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones. If I'm remembering correctly, it was a favourite of the latter.

Looking for it online the other day, I found this formulation of it in several places:

A Pacific island chief was being bullied by a missionary about his beliefs.

"Have you, my dear, no conception of a deity?"

The chief replied: "We know that at night-time someone goes by amongst the trees, but we never speak of it."

"Come back, Shane!" are not the last words spoken in the film

I've come across another Mandela effect online, this one involving the classic Western, Shane. Some people - and I'm one of them - are convinced that after calling out "Come back, Shane!" several times, little Joey Starrett's final words in the film are "Bye, Shane." 

This changes the meaning of the film's ending by turning it into something about growing up and the death of the old West. Yet any time you find this final scene online it seems to be missing those two words. Have we misremembered the film?

No, because here is the full version and you can clearly hear Joey call out "Bye, Shane". 

Do people posting clips online end the scene early because they've become convinced that the famous "Come back, Shane!" ends the film? Or has television's cavalier attitude to cutting films short to trail the next programme infected them?

I don't know, but I did once work out that Joey Starrett would have been 73 when Shane was released. And I have also written about the career of the boy who played him, Brandon deWilde.

And now we have the correct ending, another question arises. The last we see of Shane, he is slumped in the saddle and riding through a graveyard. Is he already dead?

You may say this is reading too much into the closing shot. But as someone pointed out, George Stevens spent 18 months editing the film, so nothing you see on the screen is there by accident.

New Leicestershire Reform councillor was sacked as a police officer last year

BBC News reports, nay reveals, that a newly elected Reform member of Leicestershire County Council was dismissed from Leicestershire Police in January 2024:

Andrew Hamilton-Gray won a seat in Loughborough for Reform, with almost 40 per cent of the vote.

It has now emerged that a police misconduct hearing in January 2024 found he had called in sick, to travel to Spain, when he should have been working as a PC.

The misconduct hearing found that was one of two occasions when he reported sick to pursue his outside business interests.

The BBC says Hamilton-Gray has told them he has been advised not to comment.