Jonathan Harris chosen as Lib Dem PPC for Daventry

Jonathan Harris, who represents Brixworth ward on West Northamptonshire Council, is to stand for the Liberal Democrats in Daventry at the next general election.

He has an extensive career in leadership development and change management and has worked with many different types of organisations in sectors including engineering, retail, financial services, construction and the motor industry. He continues to work in the UK, Europe and internationally. 

Jonathan wants to build on his experience in local government and fight for causes that affect everyone in the Daventry constituency, particularly the cost of living, rural isolation, the lack of investment in transport, the broken care system, the underdevelopment of social and affordable homes, supporting small businesses, championing nature protection and fighting for action to tackle the climate crisis. 

He has also seen how the government’s disastrous Brexit deal has damaged many small businesses and farmers alike.

Jonathan says:

"The Liberal Democrats offer positive alternatives to the way that this government have run this country and I look forward to meeting people with a positive message of hope."

How Stanley Unwin and Uncle the elephant won the war

Before he became a performer, Stanley Unwin worked on the technical side of radio:

In 1940, Stanley successfully applied for a job at the BBC working on transmitters as a 'key thumper'. The Second World War was now underway and the Corporation desperately needed Morse operators across the country so he went off to do his bit at the Borough Hill transmitting station in Daventry.

Writing the foreword to the history of the station - Daventry Calling the World - in 1998, Unwin remembered that:

All of us at Daventry belonged to the Home Guard, having daily drills and rehearsals for potential air raids. A password was given each time a shift changed.

And there were air raids:

In 1942 a daylight raiding German plane strafed the buildings where we were ensconced, causing me to dash under the desk in the transmitter room. Mr Bill Gilbert, of Middlemore Farm, Daventry, informed us that it was a Dornier 215 fighter bomber. 

During the blitz on Coventry the drone of the raiding bombers accompanied the sound of the BBC monitored programmes as the incendiary bombs illuminated the horizon. Even the buzz of falling shrapnel from the anti aircraft fire could be heard on the transmitter site.

But Stanley Unwin wasn't the only giant of the British nonsense tradition at Daventry during the war. 

One of his grandchildren write about the Rev. J.P. Martin, author of the Uncle books:

With the beginning of the second world war he was minister in Daventry to the BBC engineers who were transmitting to the Empire at war and across occupied Europe.  Before the war they had secret experiments in the development of radar, the weapon which enabled the Spitfires to win the Battle of Britain. German planes crossed his Northamptonshire skies to destroy Coventry and its cathedral. ...

My mother Stella with my brother Andrew and myself was evacuated at three hours notice because Colchester was the initial target for Hitler’s Operation Sealion for the invasion of Britain in 1940. We were the most fortunate of refugees in Daventry with Nancy and J.P Martin. As a child one was always being told Uncle stories which J.P. Martin had dreamed up in the night.

It was exciting to see J.P. Martin collected in a jeep as a chaplain to conduct services at the army munitions depot at Weedon, which had been built in the Napoleonic wars. He was preaching again to men who again were fighting for freedom, dying in yet another war. Little did he think when he had volunteered as a chaplain in 1918 that he would be talking to his own sons, both born in the first world war and now of an age to be killed for their country.

Did Unwin and the Revd Martin meet? Were they friends? I'm sure they would have got on.

Leicester Tories promise a tram to Market Harborough

Forget Daventry Conservatives and their canal. Leicester Tories are promising a tram to Market Harborough.

The Leicester Mercury quotes their chairman Jack Hickey:

“I discussed our ambitious plan with Transport Secretary Chris Grayling in Parliament recently, and he was enthusiastic about the benefits of light rail in Leicester and keen to listen to the business case for the project.”

Mind you, Mr Grayling doesn't look very enthusiastic in the accompanying photograph.

And you can understand it. Hickey was the man who complained that activists coming to Leicester West to campaign for his Labour opponent in last year's general election were trying to "skew the vote".

I would love to see trams return to Leicester just as I would love to see the Grand Union reach Daventry. But there would be many problems with the idea, even if the city could raise the capital to build a system.

Nottingham's trams - "I’m furious Nottingham has a tram and we do not" says Hickey - have been reported as losing almost £1m a week.

This at a time when the county Conservatives tell us they cannot afford a modest town bus service in Market Harborough.

Then there are the practicalities.

As the city's Labour mayor told the Mercury:

"We have done studies before and all parties have agreed the geography of the city – which is very different to Nottingham’s, is not suitable for a tram. 

"Weaving them out in and out of the city would be very, very difficult."

Still, full marks to the Tories for coming up with a startling idea to get some headlines.

They have to do that when, like the Liberal Democrats, they have only one councillor in Leicester.

New canal becomes an election issue in Daventry

Embed from Getty Images

For the first time in a couple of centuries, the building of a canal is a major election issue.

The Conservative-run Daventry District Council has come up with the madcap but magnificent idea of building a two-mile arm to link the town with the Grand Union.

According to a report in the Daventry Express:

The Labour Party will oppose any further expenditure on the proposal for a canal arm and will demand that more is done to make Daventry into an attractive market town again. 

It will press for better leisure facilities and entertainments for people of all ages, believing that "more shops are likely to be attracted to Daventry by a vibrant town centre rather than by a stagnant canal", as well as demand progress on a new cinema for the town.

"A stagnant canal" is silly and mean-spirited. Has Daventry Labour not seen any of the excellent urban canal regeneration projects around the country?

Meanwhile:

The Lib Dems say the canal project needs to have a robust business plan to justify it and it should not be at a cost to Daventry District taxpayers.

which sounds more sensible but probably means in practice that they don't support the new canal either.

Later...

DAVENTRY ELECTIONS: Conservative council leader Chris Millar says spending on canal arm plans now on hold because of uncertainty over future of councils. He says idea is NOT scrapped. (NOTE: If this pushes any decision on to a council not yet in existence, big uncertainty).

— Sam Read (@samrread) April 19, 2018

David Hemmings and Robert Powell in Daventry

"People thought I was dead, but I wasn't. I was just directing the A-Team."

That was how David Hemmings described his career in the 1980s in an interview he gave a couple of years before he died.

But at the start of the 1970s Hemmings promised to be an interesting director of British films.

His second film The 14 used to be Youtube and is now available on DVD. It starred Jack Wild and (at the very start) June Brown.

But his first, Running Scared, seems to have all but disappeared. Hemmings' Guardian obituary described it as "an ambitious, if ultimately flawed, exercise in psychological tension, made in an elliptical narrative style seemingly influenced by Antonioni". Antonioni was the director of Blow-Up, the film with which Hemmings is most identified as an actor.

Yet the other day I came across footage of Running Scared being filmed. It is on the Media Archive for Central England site.

I cannot embed it here, but if you follow the link and you will see Hemmings directing his wife Gayle Hunnicutt and Robert Powell in the centre of Daventry.

It would be interesting to see Running Scared, not least because some of it was shot on the Grand Union Canal at Braunston, also in Northamptonshire.

And at least one print of it does exist. In 2011 Braunston Cinema Club somehow located one and showed it in the village hall.

An article in the Daventry Express at the time says it took 600 emails and phone calls and letters across five different countries to find that copy in the USA.

Harborough Mail to be edited from Kettering

Hold the Front Page has details of a Johnston Press internal memorandum proposing to axe three editors in a restructure its titles in the Midlands.

The titles affected by the move are the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, Northants Telegraph, Daventry Express, Harborough Mail, Leamington Courier and the Rugby Advertiser.

We are told that the memo says:

Following changes to the portfolio across Northamptonshire Newspapers, the company has carried out a strategic review of editorial management and production processes. As a result of this review, it is proposed to combine the editorial management responsibility of three newspaper centres. 

It is proposed that the Group editor in Northampton will also take on the responsibility for the Daventry Express; the editor’s role at Kettering will also take responsibility for the Market Harborough Mail and the role of editor of the Leamington Spa Courier would take responsibility for the newspapers in Rugby.

Times are hard in the local newspapers, but this sounds to me the move of an industry locked in a downward spiral. Why would people in Market Harborough be more likely to buy the Mail if a good editor is sacked and it is run by someone based in another town?

Later. I have heard from the Harborough Mail. They say that the paper will continue to be edited from Market Harborough by Alex Blackwell, with an editor-in-chief having an overview from Kettering. If that is how things pan out I shall feel more hopeful.

When nuclear missiles were stationed near Market Harborough

A story in the Leicester Mercury today brought me up short:

A green energy company is considering an appeal after plans for a wind farm on a former nuclear missile site were rejected.
Nuon Renewables wants to build seven 415ft towers five miles south east of Market Harborough.

A former nuclear missile site five miles from Harborough?

Incredibly, it is true.

The site in question is the former World War II airfield RAF Harrington. It was opened in September 1943 and played host to a number of American bomber squadrons until the end of the war.

Afterwards the airfield fell into use and was returned to farmland, according to Wikipedia, or was used for storage by the RAF, according to the Wartime Memories site. Either way, things changed remarkably in 1958.

The Thor missile programme was the USA's first generation of ballistic missiles. Because of their limited range (around 2000 miles) they had to be stationed in Western Europe if so that it would be possible to use them against the Soviet Union.

With the enthusiastic agreement of the British government, 60 Thor missiles were deployed here: three each at 20 different sites. RAF Harrington was one of those sites, as was RAF North Luffenham in Rutland. The Thor missiles were quickly superseded and were withdrawn in 1963.

I discovered RAF Harrington in one of my teenage bike rides around here. It was clearly a substantial and interesting site - though I did not know then just how interesting - but somehow I never got back there.

This year I will, because it turns out that there is a museum there. According to its website (from which I have borrowed the photo above), the Carpetbagger Aviation Museum:

The Carpetbagger Aviation Museum was formed in 1993 for the 50th Anniversary reunion of the USAAF's 801st / 492nd Bomb Group (The Carpetbaggers) at Harrington. It is housed in the Group Operations Building on the Administration Site of the former Station 179 airfield at Harrington, Northamptonshire, England. The Museum is administered by members of the Harrington Aviation Museum Society ...
Displays and exhibits within the museum depict the history of the airfield and vividly show the work carried out by the 801st (Provisional) / 492nd Bomb Group, especially during Operation Carpetbagger, and their secret missions to deliver agents and supplies to resistance groups in Occupied Europe during the Second World War.
Other exhibits and displays include the secret work of the British Special Operations Executive from their RAF base at Tempsford; the cold war roles of the airfield at Harrington with the Thor rockets; and the Royal Observer Corps.

A "former nuclear missile site" puts you in mind of some blighted wasteland of feral beasts and mutant children, but in reality Harrington is a lovely rural area. And it was the airfield's historic importance, particularly its role in the Thor years, that led Daventry District Council to turn the wind farm application down.

I find it hard to be sorry that they did. The proposal was for seven 415ft towers, and that represents the sort of industrialisation of the countryside that I instinctively oppose.

Stanley Unwin's epitaph

This is from Wikipedia. I do hope it is true:

Stanley Unwin died in 2002 in Daventry, England. He is buried in the churchyard at Long Buckby, Northamptonshire with his wife, who pre-deceased him. Their gravestone has the epitaph, "Reunitey in the heavenly-bode - Deep Joy".