The Joy of Six 1528

Tom Williams reports from Southampton: "The demonstration descended into rioting as protesters clashed with police. Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. They marched to Belmont Road, where Nowak was killed. Riot police prevented them reaching Digwa’s family home."

"I had expected to meet a former MP with the usual recollections and political anecdotes. What I encountered instead was something rarer: a political thinker who remained genuinely concerned with ideas, and who was determined to dispel the myths that had accumulated around Liberal history like barnacles on a ship's hull." Andrew Page pays tribute to Michael Meadowcroft.

Matthew Pennell analyses last month's local election results and looks forward to future conquests: "What are the key battlegrounds in England? In 2027 we’ll see if we can build on long term gains in North Yorkshire and East Riding, whether we can retake Bedford and if there’s a chance of completing jigsaw in the far West of England by flipping the status of Herefordshire."

Ellie Davies talks to three Bristol academics about the impact that villages – both literal and metaphorical – have on our health and happiness.

"She wanted to do all that men could do, painting nudes at a time when female art students weren’t allowed to do so. She treated her subjects with seriousness and commitment, but also with enormous sensuous energy and a feel for the pleasures of looking, whether it’s the naked women on Cornish beaches, the garish clowns in her 1930s circus pictures, or even the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force commanders of the 1940s, surrounded by the meticulously rendered paraphernalia of their working lives." Lara Feigel salutes the continuing relevance of Laura Knight.

"There is an unavoidable ethical dimension to all this: though Payne’s deeply-considered and expert work on the sketches was clearly much more than the 'tinkering' Elgar was worried about, we have to acknowledge that the composer’s wish needs to be more-or-less disregarded if we are to perform or listen to the completed work." Jeremy Benson on Elgar's unfinished third symphony.

The poor Lambeth church providing choristers for cathedrals

So many areas of our national life are now dominated by the products of private schools, from journalism via county cricket to film and theatre acting, that it's heart-warming to read this in the Guardian.

St Paul’s Cathedral school, one of the UK’s most prestigious private schools, has long been associated with the musical elite. So was seven-year-old N'raeah, from south London, nervous about auditioning for its internationally renowned choir?

"No," she said, beaming. "Everybody’s counting on me to sing beautifully."

And sing beautifully, she did. N'raeah is the fourth chorister from St John the Divine, Kennington (SJDK) to win a fully funded scholarship to one of the UK’s most prestigious musical institutions in recent years.

Other choristers from the church have secured scholarships at Westminster Abbey, King’s College, Cambridge and St John’s College, Cambridge, with some going on to perform at national events including the coronation of King Charles III.

What makes SJDK even more remarkable is serves an area of Lambeth marked by high levels of deprivation. Yet its success is taking place against a general picture of a decline in music teaching in primary schools – a decline that is doing nothing to widen the talent pool on which cathedral choirs draw,

I remember watching a documentary about York Minster years ago and being struck by how middle-class it all was. Couldn't they find even one working-class kid in the city with a good singing voice?

But there are now three cathedrals in England – Peterborough, Southwell, Bristol – where the choir is not attached to a fee-paying school, so other models are possible.

Patrick Duff: Foolish People

Stranglelove were my favourite slightly obscure Nineties band, so they have featured here three times: Time For the Rest of Your Life, Elin's Photograph and Beautiful Alone.

Patrick Duff was the band's lead singer. Wikipedia records that after they split:

Between 2000 and 2004 Duff went on to travel the world as a solo artist with WOMAD Festival, collaborating with a number of artists, most notably the then 81-year-old veteran African master storyteller and musician Madosini, with whom he lived and worked in the township of Langa, in Cape Town.

Then:

The following year [2006] Duff was commissioned by Bristol City Council to write a Christmas choral symphony intended for a one-off exclusive performance at Bristol Cathedral, which he subsequently recorded over six weeks in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

The 90-minute piece, entitled "Seven Sermons to the Dead", was considered inappropriate by the council and was never staged, but instead released as an album in December 2013.

He's still making music. Foolish People is an acoustic version of a track from an album, Another Word for Rose, that he released last year. The other musician is Woody Taylor.

Duff doesn't sound any less angst-ridden than he did with Strangelove 30 years ago, but this is a pleasant listen until the feds turn up at the end.

Pineapple Road station, Rhubarb Curve and the Rhubarb Express

Transport for West Midlands

On Tuesday three new railway stations are opening in Birmingham: Kings Heath, Moseley Village and Pineapple Road. They're on the Camp Hill Line, which will see local passenger trains for the first time since the 1940s.

Pineapple Road is a great name for a station. There was one on the site between 1903 and 1941 with the name Hazelwell, but Pineapple Road was the most popular choice for the new station in a public vote.

A Birmingham World report says its champions thought it was memorable and described the station's better than the other two candidates, Hazelwell and Stirchley.

So there's now a Pineapple Road station on the network, but there has long been a Rhubarb Curve. It's in Bristol and mainly used by freight trains, but it does see rate but regular passenger workings. It allows trains from Bath to go to Bristol Parkway and the Severn Tunnel without going through Bristol Temple Meads.

There's also a Rhubarb Triangle in West Yorkshire, of course, but that has nothing to do with trains even though it sounds as though it should have. It's an area famous for the production of forced rhubarb that was awarded Protected Designation of Origin by the European Union in 2010. The points of the triangle are Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell.

But there was a Rhubarb Express, as a post on a railway forum explains:

The LNER "Rhubarb Express" was a 209 mile non-stop overnight run seasonally from Leeds to London Kings Cross (or St. Pancras). Conveyed hundreds of tons of early-season forced rhubarb originating from various locations in the West Riding of Yorkshire for sale in London (Covent Garden/Spitalfields) and the South, the following day. ...

The rhubarb trains were cancelled in early 1940 following the onset of WW2. Not sure if, or when, they were ever subsequently resumed ... following the end of the war.

The last episode of Shoestring: The Dangerous Game

This post is written for the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon on Terence Towles Canote's blog A Shroud of Thoughts. Click on the image above to go to a video of The Dangerous Game.

Shoestring was different. Both the character and the programme were different. A rare BBC show built around a private detective, it ran for two seasons and was screened in 1979 and 1980.

Eddie Shoestring, Radio West’s “private ear”, was a modern hero – so modern that he had suffered a breakdown after working with computers – and his eccentricities immediately cohered to form a believable character. 

I remember my mother complaining that the show was “puerile” and, while I wouldn’t agree with that, there was something boyish about Eddie himself, with his innocence and curiosity. Though he did run into some serious bad hats from time to time, he was to an extent living out a fantasy of being a private detective amid the benign home of a Bristol local radio station.

Two Shoestring novelisations were published around the time the show was screened. In one of them he was warned off a case because “this is a businessman’s city,” and as a young councillor later in the Eighties I identified with him. No one was going to ask me to join the golf club or the Freemasons.

Enter Trevor Eve

Trevor Eve, who played Eddie, was little known when he was cast in the lead of this new BBC show. He had come to notice playing Paul McCartney in Willy Russell’s play John, Paul, George, Ringo ... and Bert, which opened at the Liverpool Everyman and later transferred to London’s West End. 

Robert Banks Stewart says in the BBC documentary The Cult of Shoestring that he had seen Eve directed by Laurence Olivier in a Granada TV production of Hindle Wakes and been immensely impressed by him. He championed Eve against the better-known actors who were being considered for the role of Shoestring and got his way.

Helped by an intermittent ITV strike, the early episodes of Shoestring won audiences of up to 21 million in its Sunday evening slot – a figure that is unthinkable for any British show now in our multi-channel world – making Eve a star.

Essentially playing himself

The regular supporting cast was Doran Godwin as Shoestring’s long-suffering landlady and occasional love, Liz Crowther as Radio West’s receptionist and Michael Medwin as the station’s boss.

Doran Godwin was a more experienced stage and television actress than Eve whose credits included the lead role in a BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma 1972. Liz Crowther is the daughter of the popular comedian and television host Leslie Crowther, who as a child played Lucy in a 1967 BBC adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She had returned to acting a year or two before she was cast in Shoestring and is still working today.

I wrote about Michael Medwin’s childhood and acting career when I covered The Intruder for Terence Towles Canote's 12th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon. By the time Shoestring was made, he had long been concentrating on the business side of the film and theatre business, and with notable success. 

So when Medwin played the smooth station boss Don Satchley, who was always fretting about how much Eddie’s investigations were going to cost Radio West, he was essentially playing himself.

All sorts of interesting actors turned up in the series. Harry H. Corbett, playing one of the nastier villains Eddie encountered, shook off years of Harold Steptoe to remind you he had once been Joan Littlewood’s star Shakespearian at Stratford East. Kevin Whatley made his first screen appearance as a professional footballer, and Daniel Day Lewis his first adult screen appearance as a DJ.

Trevor Eve after Shoestring

Shoestring came to an end after two series because Trevor Eve wanted to move on with his career and feared he might become known for only this one role. He soon found success on the stage, winning an Olivier Award for his performance in Children of a Lesser God, and has appeared in films, but has remained best known for his work on television. 

He played the equally unconventional much angrier Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, head of a police unit that investigates cold cases, in Waking the Dead, for nine series between 2000 and 2011, totalling 92 episodes. 

He is now seen, like John Thaw and James Bolam, as a first-rate actor who has made his greatest contribution on the small screen.

The last edition of Shoestring ever made

The episode I have chosen is episode 10 of its second series, The Dangerous Game, which was the last edition of Shoestring ever made – it may be because the series finished so soon that it is fondly remembered. It certainly went out on a high with this one, which displays both Eddie Shoestring in knight in shining armour mode and the series’ sense of humour. He quizzes a department store buyer who turns out to be acting as Santa (“One of the perks of the job. Market research, if you like. I do it every Christmas.”), only to find he is a big Eddie Shoestring and Radio West fan.

A nurse talks to Eddie about a boy who has been admitted to hospital with burns and an eye injury – she is concerned that he and his father are not telling the truth about how he was hurt. After making himself a thorough nuisance to the father, the father admits that his son was injured when the transformer of an electric game he had bought him (the boy’s birthday s a couple of days before Christmas) blew up in his face. Eddie is then faced with the task of tracking down all the games that have been sold before they are opened as presents on Christmas morning.

We see him haunting the shops and markets of Bristol as seasonal music spills from every radio and even the Salvation Army band. This diegetic music makes the show feel absurdly Christmassy, and the city was always part of the show’s attraction, notably here in Eddie’s last-minute dash over the Clifton Suspension Bridge in the small hours of Christmas morning to retrieve the one dangerous game he has not yet located.

Son of British film royalty

The supporting cast in The Dangerous Game is impressive. The importer of the toy, who turns out not to be the villain we imagined, is played by Bert Kwouk, who was the go-to Chinese actor in British films and television for decades – he was in everything from Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Deep End to Last of the Summer Wine via the Pink Panther films.

The injured boy’s parents are Michael Elphick and Celia Imrie – the former a big name in British television and the latter about to become one, as well as enjoying great success on stage and in films to this day. And the boy himself is played by Tom Bolt who, as I discovered while writing this, is the son of British film royalty. His mother is the Oscar-nominated actress Sarah Miles and his father the double Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Bolt.

Tom's casting may have been aided by the fact that the director of The Dangerous Game is his half-brother Ben Bolt, but he is good in the role.

The Duke of Wellington's daughter

Writing this has reminded me just how much I enjoyed Shoestring and how much fun it was. I have linked to a video of The Dangerous Game at the top of this post – just click on the image. (I’m sorry about all the advertisements.) If it disappears from the web because of some nonsense about “copyright”, I shall replace it with the documentary The Cult of Shoestring, which is well worth a watch anyway. 

If nothing else, you will learn how the Duke of Wellington’s daughter played the key role in persuading the BBC to broadcast the show in the plum Sunday evening slot.

The team behind Shoestring went on to make Bergerac, an equally successful police detective series set on the Channel Island of Jersey. But we leave Eddie Shoestring asleep among the ruins of a Christmas party that he has missed while saving children from injury. 

The streets of Bristol were only intermittently mean, and perhaps Eddie was a little tarnished by experience and sometimes afraid, but he was far from mean and people loved him. 

The Joy of Six 1488

"It’s what happens when the NHS has run out of room. It means intimate conversations about cancer, stroke, or dementia in earshot of strangers. It means delays to assessment and treatment, including pain relief, become more likely – dignity stripped away through lack of capacity." Danny Chambers says corridor care will continue for another three years – and that’s not good enough.

Nick Bowes reckons political fragmentation could lead to the most interesting London election results since the 32 boroughs were formed.

"When e-cigarettes first appeared around 2010, they were hailed as a breakthrough: nicotine delivery without the toxic tar and combustion byproducts of traditional cigarettes. Public health bodies cautiously endorsed them as a tool for adult smokers to quit, often citing early claims that vaping was 95 per cent less harmful than smoking. More than a decade later, with millions now vaping regularly, the picture is less clear." Vikram Niranjan reports on warning signs that vaping may not be as benign as we thought.

Black female footballers are praised for their strength, white female footballers are praised for their intelligence. Paul Ian Campbell and Allison Thompson discuss the findings of their research.

Jude Rogers chooses her 10 best folk albums of 2025.

Ray Newman follows in the footsteps of Henry VII, who made a pilgrimage to the holy well of St Anne  near Bristol in 1486: "If you want to stick to something like Henry’s route, you have to push past rows of signs and columns cones, squeeze between temporary fences, evade robotic security sentinels that shout at you if you linger too long, and leap muddy puddles in a road surface turned into no-man’s-land by the constant passing of concrete mixers."

The Joy of Six 1470

Timothy Snyder reports from a frightened city: "In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians."

"I think the way he is trying to interfere with our democracy, generally our country, is quite outrageous. For the richest man to come here with his totally unfounded and ignorant comments is shocking." Interviewed by Big Issue, Ed Davey sticks it to Elon Musk.

"The use of armed militia to terrorise the inhabitants of Minneapolis is not just beyond the rule of law, it is fascistic. It’s the final evidential point between what is happening today and the political forces that ripped Europe apart in the last century: and that’s not just me saying this, it’s some of the most eminent historians of authoritarianism." Carole Cadwalladr says what’s happening in the US is technofascism and it could happen here.

Madeleine Brettingham on the difficulty of making a living as a writer today: "The biggest revolution in how writing is distributed since the printing press has decimated all our assumptions about how creative careers work. Somewhere between the noughties and the pandemic everything changed, leaving many (including me) attempting to climb up ladders that no longer exist."

Norma Clarke reviews a book on working-class lives in Charlie Chaplin's London: "Charlie was a gutter child, a 'street arab' in the language of the time: undersized, skinny, his bright eyes on the main chance as he roamed up and down between Kennington and New Cut, where market stalls overflowed with produce he had no money to buy and probably became adept at stealing."

Did a tsunami hit the Bristol Channel four centuries ago? Simon Haslett revisits the great flood of 1607.

The Joy of Six 1425

"The Cabinet Office, Lord Gove and Ciga Healthcare were approached for comment but did not respond by time of publication." Byline Times has news of another alleged scandal in government procurement during the Covid pandemic.

Max Sullivan on his experiences of introducing on-street bicycle hangars in the London Borough of Westminster: "Make decisions on merit. Objections that don't have merit can be listened to, but not indulged, if you want to move faster. Officers need to have the confidence in the need for the scheme (lack of space to park a bike is a major barrier to cycling) to give their politicians good advice. Politicians must be prepared to respectfully disagree with their residents, to deliver for their other residents. Who are many in number, waiting for somewhere safe to keep a bike."

"A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television." Derek Thompson explains his theory.

James Coverley draws an important lesson from the death of the Roman Emperor Domitian: "Caesar, of course, was betrayed by someone close to him. Mussolini ended up hanging from a streetlamp. You can only bully people into liking you for so long until someone, one day, realises that you’re the problem and that your grip on power is, actually, paper-thin and depends on the illusion of fear."

Koraljka Suton takes us deep into David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001): "Some of these narrative threads appear superfluous at first glance because we seemingly never get back to them. Others take us down rabbit holes that leave us feeling dazed, confused and disoriented. But all of them have their rightful place in Lynch’s surrealist picture that stubbornly defies genre categorization."

"A few clubs have boreholes, able to provide clean water on their wickets which then filters back into the aquifer in a virtuous circle. This was interesting and unexpected, revealing how certain clubs can benefit from their local geology, whereas others rely on ageing infrastructure and water companies." Dan Looney recently walked the Kennet & Avon Canal from Reading to Bath, then onwards via the River Avon to Bristol, visiting 11 cricket grounds along the way to see how they are adapting to climate change.

The West of England has a Lib Dem deputy mayor

Kevin Guy, the Liberal Democrat leader of Bath and North East Somerset Council, will serve as deputy mayor of the West of England for the next year.

The appointment was made by the Labour mayor Helen Godwin, who was elected last week. The West of England is the vainglorious name for the area covered by three local authorities - Bristol, South Gloucestershire, and Bath and North East Somerset - and the deputy mayor post will rotate between their leaders.

Helen Goodwin told Somerset Live:

"I meant what I said during the election campaign. To get the best for all of us in the West Country, politicians must put politics to one side. That’s how we’ll lay the Bristol to Portishead Line, build new affordable homes, and help create the jobs of the future."

I'm surprised and pleased to see a Labour politician with such a sensible attitude. One reason I distrust the idea of elected mayors, particularly for counties rather than cities, is its Blairite enthusiasm for "someone who will knock people's heads together and get things done".

To me, the best traditions of local government are collegiate and are about reconciling different interests rather than macho management.

The Joy of Six 1342

"Part of this is down to the increasing centralisation of politics. The prime minister’s role has expanded dramatically over the decades, and cabinet government has been a fiction for a long time (Nigel Lawson claimed that cabinet meetings were the only time during the week that he got a rest). Even minor departmental decisions now have to be signed off by the centre and slotted into a communications grid." Sam Freedman on the rise and rise of political advisers.

Luke McGee suspects Putin is up against his biggest opponent yet - Trump's ego: "Trump clearly wants something that looks like a peace deal so he can show off what a great negator he is. If Trump now sees Putin as the block to a deal, that is a problem for Putin, as he has to make a choice between looking weak domestically or losing whatever goodwill he had with Trump’s White House."

"Yes, Pecksniff and Trump are bullshit artists of the highest order and neither ever experiences the least bit of remorse." Robin Bates argues that Charles Dickens, with Mr Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, anticipated Donald Trump.

Ray Newman watches Some People, which was made in Bristol in 1962 with a young cast including Ray Brooks and David Hemmings: "The church opened in 1956 and was typical of the space age houses of worship built on overspill estates all over the country in the post-war period. Unfortunately, though it looked astonishing, it was plagued with structural problems and was demolished in 1994, which only adds to the value Some People holds as a record of a time and place."

Benjamin Poore says that Shostakovich spoke truth to power - both Nazi and Communist - through his Babi Yar Symphony.

"Without any particular training, the animals - like human babies - appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do." Christa Lesté-Lasserre discusses a study that supports my view that cats are much cleverer than they choose to show us.

Man graduates 41 years after being denied ceremony by parrot problem

Thanks to a nomination from a Liberal England reader, the Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Paul Tyler is a direct descendant of Cornish hero Bishop Trelawny

I've seen it claimed and now I have confirmation from the Beast's horse's mouth. The Liberal Democrat peer and former MP Paul Tyler is a direct descendant of the Cornish hero Bishop Jonathan Trelawny.

To be precise, Paul tells me he is the bishop's great great great great great great great great grandson. That's eight greats.

As the glee club at Liberal Democrat conferences never seems to know the tune of Trelawny, here's the Holman-Climax Male Voice Choir to help us.

Six of the Best 999

Stephen Williams makes the case for abolishing Bristol's elected mayor.

Samantha Rose Hill examines Hannah Arendt's writings on the links between loneliness and totalitarianism: "Arendt’s argument about loneliness and totalitarianism is not an easy one to swallow, because it implies a kind of ordinariness about totalitarian tendencies that appeal to loneliness: if you are not satisfied with reality, if you forsake the good and always demand something better, if you are unwilling to come face-to-face with the world as it is, then you will be susceptible to ideological thought."

With evidence for efficacy so thin, and the stakes so high, why is electroshock therapy still a mainstay of psychiatry? John Read explains.

"Nottinghamshire has a long history of libraries, from the old penny libraries prior to the establishment of a public library service. If none of these had existed and I could design a new world the first thing I would want in my utopia is a place where knowledgeable staff help you choose books you can read *for free* then take them back for someone else to have the same pleasure." Ross Bradshaw on the wonder of public libraries.

Aris Roussinos.argues that Paul Kingsnorth has emerged as Britain’s foremost critic of industrial modernity and the  literary heir to a strain of thought that has survived in the English imagination, on both Left and Right, since the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Didn't you used to be Josh McEachran? The former Chelsea starlet reflects on his career and why things did not work out for him at Stamford Bridge,

A snapshot of forgotten post-war railway history

Embed from Getty Images 

Browsing railway photographs on GettyImages, as you do, I came across this. Taken at Bristol Temple Meads in May 1952, it shows a locomotive with a remarkable history.

British Rail 18100 was a prototype gas turbine-electric locomotive commissioned by the Great Western Railway in the 1940s but not delivered until 1951. It spent its working life hauling express passenger services on BR's Western Region.

In 1958 it was withdrawn from service to be converted into an electric locomotive, numbered E1000 (E2001 from 1959), and was then used for testing and staff training in connection with the electrification of the West Coast main line.

It was put into store at the end of 1961, but lasted until November 1972 when it was cut up for scrap.

Tory councillor who opposed any change to Bristol statue had a golliwog mascot

One of the suggestions for making the Bristol statue of Edward Colston more acceptable was to add a second plaque that spelt out his role in the Atlantic slave trade.

Even this was too much for one Conservative councillor, according to a 2018 report on Bristol Live:

Cllr Richard Eddy said someone taking the law into the own hands and ‘unilaterally removing’ the plaque, which recognises Colston’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, ‘might be justified’.

The website went on to quote him:

"This pathetic bid to mount a secondary revisionist plaque on Colston's Statue is historically-illiterate and a further stunt to try to reinvent Bristol's history..

"If it goes through, it will be a further slap-in-the-face for true Bristolians and our city's history delivered by ignorant, left-wing incomers."

If this is how a leading Tory met such a reasonable suggestion, it's easy to understand why people decided to take the matter in to their own hands.

You can see Cllr Eddy and his golliwog mascot in the Bristol Live report.

Six of the Best 924

Michael Mullaney says the Liberal Democrats must be a party for all of Britain.

"Face-to-face work is especially important for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. And they may find it harder to study in environments that are not conducive to learning. Remote learning must not allow these groups of students to become ever more remote." The former Conservative minister Chris Skidmore argues that universities must introduce extra financial and pastoral support to look after their remote students

"In Polanyi’s opinion, whenever the profit-making impulse becomes deadlocked with the need to shield people from its harmful side effects, voters are tempted by the 'fascist solution': reconcile profit and security by forfeiting civic freedom." Caleb Crain believes Karl Polanyi's thinking is newly relevant today.

Alan Morris finds that the Covid-19 lockdown has given Bristol people a sense of how much pleasanter their city would be if it was not dominated by motor vehicles.

Brendan Cormier looks at the home-made signs that have appeared during the Covid-19 pandemic.

What's the difference between Jack-in-the-Green and the Green Man? Icy Sedgwick explains.

Thank you, Roland Hall: In praise of generous university offers

After I left Boxmoor and my good school reports, life was difficult. I had moved from a comprehensive that had recently been a very traditional grammar school to one (a middle school) here in Market Harborough that had been a secondary modern.

I was left by my new school to sink or swim. There was no pastoral care and no help coping with a very different curriculum. I suppose my problem was that, though I was poor, I could pass as middle class so no one thought I might need help.

Most damaging, I found that if I did not work, no one was going to make me. I reacted as any 13-year-old boy would in such circumstances and stopped working.

When I moved to the upper school I found I had been put in a CSE set for maths. Having done mathematical aptitude tests in later life, I can say objectively that this was a crime.

Fortunately, I had an ally in the same situation and we fought and won a campaign to be moved up to an O level set.

Still, my O levels were not great - seven passes, two at grade B and five at grade C.

After that life got better. I was in the sixth form studying subjects I liked and was back on even keel academically.

I finally had a teacher (Mark Clay-Dove) who took a special interest in me and helped me with university entrance. I remember going to his house for coffee one Saturday morning, being introduced to his wife and looking over a statement about why I wanted to study Philosophy that one university had asked for. He told me it was fine and I don't think I changed a word before I sent it in.

I remember another conversation with him after school when I confided that I was worried about my A levels and what I would do if I didn't get to university. He told me not to worry and that I was bright enough to do a postgraduate degree.

One reason for my doing a part-time Masters in my thirties was to honour that conversation.

And he also told me that the school had given me a remarkably generous academic reference. It is now obvious to me that he had written it himself.

In retrospect, choosing a non-school subject like Philosophy was a smart move for someone with ropy O levels. It meant universities were more likely to rely on their own judgement and pay a less attention to exam results.

So when I went to Nottingham, was interviewed and wrote an essay while I was there, they responded by making me an offer of EE to read Philosophy with them. Delighted? You have no idea.

Another thing that made life good in the sixth form was my Saturday job in a secondhand bookshop. Yes, Market Harborough readers, there was once a bookshop in Nelson Street.

It was run by Mark Jacobs - an expert on the poet Laura Riding who still has letters published in the London Review of Books from time to time - and his wife Barbara.

When I told Barbara Jacobs (now a successful author) that I was off to the University of York for another interview, she told me that she had met a member of the Philosophy department there at a party while Mark was doing his PhD. He was called Roland Hall and was a very nice man.

I arrived at York to find that, sure enough, my interview was with Roland Hall. I was filled with a sense of confidence and wellbeing.

And he was a very nice man. We had quite a casual chat about Philosophy and why I wanted to study it, before he said: "What shall we say for an offer? Three Cs?"

Given that York accepted General Studies towards their offers in those days, this was generous yet challenging enough to ensure that I continued to work.

I still had to persuade my school to let me take A level General Studies. They said no at first - I am beginning to see a pattern here - but I persisted and in the end quite a few of us took it.

Since you ask, I got an A.

I am sorry to have written so much about my teenage self, because this post was meant to be a tribute to Roland Hall.

When I took it into my head to look him up a few months ago, I found he had recently died. I also found that he had lived a life that made his patience with spotty herberts like me remarkable:

Here are some extracts from an appreciate of him published in the journal Locke Studies:

In 1949 he joined the British Army for National Service. After basic training, which included touch typing, he was found a position where, in the words of one of his superiors, “his brain would not atrophy.” 

This was as Clerk to General Frank Simpson, the President of the Court at the British War Crimes Unit in Hamburg, during the four-month trial of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, regarded as Hitler’s greatest General Manstein had been taken prisoner by the British in August 1945. He testified for the defence of the German General Staff and the Wehrmacht supreme command at the Nuremberg trials of major Nazi war criminals and organizations in August 1946. 

Under pressure from the Soviet Union to hand him over, the British cabinet had decided in July 1948 to prosecute Manstein and several other senior officers held in custody since the end of the war. Roland’s job was to collate and safeguard all the written evidence for the Court, which he read in its entirety, and to keep track of the Court’s proceedings. 

This experience had a profound effect on Roland, only 19 at the time. It convinced him of the justification for war in the face of great evil, though, having seen the evidence against Manstein, he was amazed at the severity of the sentence passed upon him. 

When the sentence was given, he was able to hear it through the sliding doors of the room behind the court in which he was working and wondered whether he had misheard “18 years” for “18 months,” which would have made more sense to him.  

At the end of the trial, General Simpson was instrumental in Roland joining the British Forces Network, where he was responsible for producing classical music programmes at the Musikhalle for the Allied forces in Western Europe. 

He often ate at the Church Army cafe near the Alster and spoke with the German musicians playing there. One day he asked them about a particular piece of music they were playing. After that, they played Brüch’s Violin Concerto whenever he came in. 

Lest the impression have been given that his Army service was not very military, it should be added that Roland’s pay-book records that he was a first-class shot, meaning that he could hit the bullseye with a rifle at 300 yards.

And because I was taught by him, I am only two moves away from some of the greats of 20th-century British Philosophy:

He obtained the B.Phil under the supervision of two of the great names of linguistic philosophy, J. L. Austin and, briefly, Gilbert Ryle (when Austin was away in America). It was Austin who suggested that Roland should work on “a big word like ‘as’” when contemplating topics for his Bachelor’s thesis and who gave him a method, this being to “start with the dictionary.” 

Ignoring his supervisor’s sage warning against going into the academic profession - “There’s no money in it” - he took his first job in 1956 as Assistant in Logic at the University of St. Andrews. The next year he moved to Queen’s College, Dundee, as Lecturer in Philosophy, becoming Senior Lecturer in 1966. From 1961 to 1967 he was Assistant Editor of The Philosophical Quarterly. In 1967 he was appointed Reader in Philosophy at the University of York, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. 

Meeting Roland Hall and walking round York afterwards was enough to convince me that this was where I wanted to study.

So, thanks to his generosity and that of the department at Nottingham, my last university interview consisted of my gently breaking it to an academic at Bristol - a university that school rumour maintained would not even look at you unless you gave them your first preference - that I would not be studying with them.

In the first year at York I had to pass two papers: one on general philosophy and one on formal logic, which Roland Hall taught us. I passed both with an upper second mark, putting me in the top third or quarter of students on the course,

Thank you, Roland Hall.

Six of the Best 788

"I became involved with Labour Against Antisemitism, and looked at what local Labour members had been doing online. I saw Holocaust denial sitting side by side with Corbyn worship; accusations that ‘Israhell’ and ‘the Rothschilds’ were organ harvesting alongside heartfelt prayers for aliens to ‘kill the Zionists’." An anonymous contributor to Bristol Live shares her experience of antisemitism in the city.

"If political and TV programming decisions are determined by opinion polls and focus groups – and failing that by some image of a narrow-minded voting and viewing public with no attention spans– there’ll be no room for the high-minded. Debate will be replaced by an exchange of sound-bites." Chris Dillow blogs about Britain's intellectual decline.

John Stuart Mill's annotations in the margins of the books in his library tell us a lot about his mind, says Albert Pionke.

Andy Boddington explains how Joe from the Windrush generation helped shape his life. "As a shy, skinny weakling, I learnt the principles of equality even before I knew what those words meant. I got to understand the value of friendship. Joe treated me as an equal."

In Britain hauntings don't just occur in ancient manor houses, old inns and Gothic asylums. as Ray Newman shows.

NG and Beyond explores Nottingham's Lenton railway triangle.

Labour really does have a problem with anti-Semitism

If you doubt the Labour Party has a problem with anti-Semitism, take a look at the motion debated by its Bristol West constituency party this week. (It was defeated by 108 votes to 84.)

It includes these words:

when people see inequality, ecological disaster and war alongside the accumulation of unprecedented wealth, in the private hands of a few, it is reasonable that they seek out explanations.

Given that this motion was condemning the constituency's Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire for joining a demonstration against anti-Semitism in the party, there is only one construction I  can put on them.

It is saying that it is understandable if people attribute the bad things in the world to a Jewish conspiracy.

True the motion also says racism is "completely unacceptable", so the proposers must be believe such theories are mistaken, but what is this idea doing in the motion in the first place?

I conclude that the Labour Party really does have a problem with anti-Semitism.

And to those who say the right has much more of a problem with it, I am not sure that is any longer true.

Everything I see from the far-right these days is obsessed with Islam. I do not see Jews and Jewish conspiracies mentioned at all.

The two series of Shoestring to be released as a DVD set

Good news! The series of Shoestring are about to be released on DVD.

The Network on Air site says:

Trevor Eve stars as radio "Private Ear" Eddie Shoestring in the massively successful BBC drama series. 

Co-created by Robert Banks Stewart, Shoestring also stars Michael Medwin as Eddie's long-suffering boss Don Satchley; Liz Crowther as station receptionist Sonia; and Doran Godwin as Eddie's landlady, on-off lover and occasional assistant Erica. This complete-series set also features appearances from Diana Dors, Harry H. Corbett, Toyah Wilcox, Geraldine James and Michael Elphick. 

Poison phone-ins and threats to a disc jockey lead Radio West to hire private investigator Eddie Shoestring – who discovers it may be a longer-running job than he first thought! 

This set also includes a brand-new book on the making of the series by archive television historian Andrew Pixley, with contributions from original cast and crew members.

The two series were broadcast by the BBC in 1979 and 1980, and made Trevor Eve a household name.

I once wrote of the programme's appeal:

Eddie Shoestring was always a bit of a fantasist. He had suffered some sort of breakdown while working in computers and his new image as a Philip Marlowe figure - stalking the streets, not of Los Angeles, but Bristol - was his way of coping. He life as a private detective did not represent an exploration of the real world so much as an escape from it. 

So Shoestring never was grittily realistic, In fact, like many fantasists, Eddie drew people into his world.