"His glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice": On being the monarch's second son

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Being the second son of a monarch is a difficult career, because you cease to be of use to the family firm – assuming your older brother has healthy children – when you are still young.

Here's Jonathan Parry writing about Victoria's second son in the London Review of Books in 2020:

The monarch’s younger sons in each generation are fated to follow the same trajectory. Few now remember Prince Alfred – except tourists visiting the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town who assume that its name is a misprint for ‘Albert’. 

In the 1860s Alfred, Victoria’s second son, named after the founder of the English monarchy and, as a naval cadet, the first official imperial tourist, became a global superstar. Aged 14 he visited the Holy Land, a year later he conquered South Africa, and before he was 20 he was seriously proposed as king of Greece. Polkas were written for him. At 23 he toured Australia and survived an Irish assassination attempt; soon afterwards he was fêted in New Zealand, Hong Kong and India. 

But his glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice, he married a haughty Russian princess, and he ended in forced exile presiding over his father’s German duchy.

Discuss with relation to the careers of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Prince Harry (as indeed Parry does).

The long history of Chinese food in Britain

The view that the British subsisted on overcooked vegetables until the Eighties is a tenet of faith for many, but the reality is more nuanced and interesting.

Here's an extract from an article on the Newham Chinese Association website:

The history of Chinese food in Britain is best understood in relation to the history of Chinese immigrants. Historically, the first Chinese eating houses in Britain catered not for local customers, but for Chinese sailors who had settled around the docks in London’s Limehouse and wanted a taste of home. Until the 1940s, the majority of customers in the restaurants were not English but Chinese immigrants.

In the aftermath of World War II Chinese food began to grow in popularity. British servicemen returned from various parts of the Empire and the Far East with a willingness to try different foods and cuisine and a new enthusiasm for Chinese food and restaurants. This in turn saw the rise of the restaurant trade in Soho. Chinese people entered the catering trade because of the downturn in shipping and the closing of laundries, traditional areas of employment.  

In the 1950s and early 1960s there was an influx of Chinese from Hong Kong who provided the necessary workforce. The restaurants served Cantonese food because of Britain’s old colonial links to Hong Kong where most of the chefs came from. The lack of certain authentic ingredients meant having to improvise and also adjust a few dishes to suit the liking of British customers, for example Chop Suey, an old style Chinese cuisine consisting of meat and eggs, cooked quickly with vegetables such as bean-sprouts and a starch-thickened sauce.

With the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China, staff at the Chinese Embassy in London were recalled but the majority chose to stay in the UK and many of them then went on to open Chinese restaurants. Kenneth Lo, a former Chinese diplomat, became a popular and well known author of several Chinese cookery books explaining the intricacies of Chinese cooking to the British public throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. He went on to become a legendary figure on the capital’s restaurant scene and also the foremost expert in Britain on Chinese food, and played a huge part in popularizing and improving its consumption.

What I find particularly interesting here is the insight that servicemen returned from war in the Pacific with a taste for Asian food. That's a useful corrective to the consensus view that the Fifties took place entirely in black and white.

But being an imperial power had affected our tastes well before then. Tea became the quintessential British drink, and we take it with milk because we learnt to drink it in India.

My only question about the article is whether it takes too London-centric a view. Chinese restaurants soon spread far beyond Soho – the advertisement above dates from 1962, and the headline below relates to an incident at The Painted Fan in Market Harborough in 1966.

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Wera Hobhouse demands to know why she was deported from Hong Kong.

"As we toured the site - not just the blast furnace but the iron ore and coal piles and the continuous casting works and the rod mill and the old coke ovens, shut down a couple of years ago - we began to glean that the workers here were reeling from a terrible shock. Most of them were just discovering, that very day, that Jingye was planning to starve the blast furnaces to death." Ed Conway tries to get to the bottom of what is happening at Scunthorpe.

"Could we see protests akin to the Luddite attacks - this time targeting server farms instead of knitting frames?" John Cassidy discusses how we might survive the AI revolution.

Michael Mechanic and Nina Berman report allegations of abuse at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida: "The scientists came out with an announcement that was disturbing, if not surprising. They had excavated 55 sets of remains at Dozier’s Boot Hill cemetery, 5 more than they’d originally identified, and 24 more than were indicated in the school’s official records. Other campus locations remain to be searched."

"The four principal characters have signed on to a suicide mission, driving two truckloads of nitroglycerin across three hundred miles of winding, mountainous, badly paved roads. After a lengthy setup, the movie itself becomes a fuse of indeterminate length. 'You sit there waiting for the theater to explode,” the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther ended his review when The Wages of Fear opened in early 1955 at the posh Paris Theater in Manhattan.'" J. Hoberman reconsiders Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film.

John Lacey traces a pre-historic trading route across Leicestershire.

Wera Hobhouse MP refused entry to Hong Kong to visit grandson

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From the Mail:

A Liberal Democrat MP has been refused entry to Hong Kong to visit her newborn grandson.

Wera Hobhouse, 65, flew to the region, which was a British territory until 1997, on Thursday.

However she was held at airport security and questioned before being put on the first flight home five hours later.

Chinese officers confiscated her passport, and the MP for Bath was asked about her job and the purpose of her visit.

She also had her luggage searched and stabbed and was then taken to a boarding gate by four immigration officers.

 And here is Ed Davey's comment on Bluesky (the Sunday Times story is behind its paywall):

Wera just wanted to visit her son in Hong Kong and meet her baby grandson for the first time. But after a 13-hour flight, the Chinese authorities turned her away – just because she’s a British MP. So heartless. And totally unacceptable.

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— Ed Davey (@eddavey.libdems.org.uk) 12 April 2025 at 19:11

Two further thoughts.

It's only a week since two Labour MPs were barred from entering Israel. Once authoritarian governments see other governments getting away with this behaviour, they are likely to try it themselves. It just shows how wrong Kemi Badenoch was to support the Israeli government: soon it will be a Conservative MP who is affected.

In 2020 Ryan Coetzee, mastermind of the Liberal Democrats' 2015 general election campaign and the Remain effort in the EU referendum, was given a £5m budget to promote the Hong Kong government as part of his work for a PR firm.

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Sian Norris and Daisy Steinhardt on the call on Britain to act on Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation: "SLAPPs are often used by wealthy and powerful individuals and organisations to silence journalists and civil society organisations from exposing wrongdoing, and have a chilling effect that allows for wrongdoing to flourish in the shadows. The UK is particularly vulnerable to SLAPP lawsuits, including litigation against journalists not even based in the country, due to the country’s libel and defamation laws."

Restore Trust presents itself as a grassroots organisation of National Trust members, but lawyers claim it is funded by powerful, hidden sources. Charlotte Jansen investigates.

During the second world war the Palace of Westminster was home to a munitions factory, reports Zoe Crowther.

"Over much of the globe, night has been cancelled. The night sky in Hong Kong is 1,200 times brighter than the unilluminated sky. Millions will never see the constellations so central to the stories humans have told about the cosmos." Charles Foster mourns the end of the night.

Neil Fox celebrates the 20th birthday of Michael Winterbottom's film 24 Hour Party People: "Tony Wilson was a postmodern figure. He infiltrated capitalist spaces with a rakish charm and a rebellious streak, believing in the power of art to nearly the same degree he believed in self-narrativisation and mythology. He believed music could change the world, or more specifically, he believed Manchester music could change the world."

Past Tense takes us on a radical wander down North London's longest aqueduct.

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Bruno Maçães says the attempted coup in Washington this week is further proof that we live in an age that is collapsing the distinction between fantasy and reality.

"Any story which depends on obtaining documents from US government sources will become impossibly dangerous. No British journalists would dare to handle it, let alone publish it." Writing before the unexpected verdict, Peter Oborne and Millie Cooke considered what the extradition of Julian Assange would have meant for journalism.

William Yang asks if the mass arrest of pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong signals the beginning of the end for the territory's civil liberties.

Gillian Darley mourns Coventry's failure to cherish its modernist architecture.

"The jargon made you part of the country’s largest and least violent gang, the drifts of boys of all ages and social classes who gathered at the edge of cuttings, the ends of platforms and the mouths of tunnels: the fellowship of the number and the name." Ian Jack on the history of trainspotting.

"In St Mary’s Church, in the village of Frensham, Surrey, the strangest object can be found. Propped up on a tripod, near the pews, beneath the arched windows, in among all the other fittings you’d expect in an English country church, stands what appears to be a witch’s cauldron." David Castleton tells a strange story.