Alwyn Turner on the political radicalism of L. du Garde Peach

I'm enjoying Alwyn Turner's new book A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars, and not just because my name turns up in the acknowledgements at the back. As Andrew Marr says in his New Statesman review, 

Turner builds his account on newspapers and popular magazines. This produces a bottom-up, sharp and often surprising read. 

And Turner's research is commendably thorough. Here he is on L. du Garde Peach, sharing far more than I knew about the author of most of Ladybird Books' Adventures from History series:

If the stage and screen were tightly censored The same was not quite true of the BBC, which had a greater tolerance for political work, so long as it was progressive without being revolutionary. The dramatist L. du Garde Peach, described by the papers as "broadcasting's most versatile playwright" was a committed writer – a failed Liberal parliamentary candidate, and a supporter of the League of Nations and the Peace Pledge Union – and some of his BBC work dealt with difficult subjects: the economic exploitation of Africa in Ingredient X (1929), rural poverty in Bread (1932), the Elizabethan roots of the slave trade in John Hawkins, Slaver (1933), local politics in Our Town (1935).

In Patriotism Ltd (1937), a satirical one-act drama, Peach depicted an arms company deliberately provoking conflict between the invented nations of Andania and Segoviaa And selling weapons to both. It was a story, he said, of "two countries brought to the brink of war by a mixture of buffoonery, self-interest and opportunism which you will find nowhere else in the world except in most of the Chancelleries of Europe. Advance notices said it had a "simple directness that is continually amusing", and talked of the way it exposed "bland cynicism on the part of the firm and its customers".

Three days before its scheduled broadcast, however, the government leaned on the BBC, and the piece was withdrawn, on the grounds that "it might be mistaken for a comment on current national affairs". Which, of course, it was. "No direct veto has been exercised by the Postmaster General," it was reported, but the BBC was given to understand that such a broadcast would be looked upon in an unfavourable light." Peach, who was not personally told about the ban, was furious: "I regard the action as just another instance of BBC timidity."

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Otto.

A podcast on Ladybird Books and L. du Garde Peach

We should soon have the answer to the question of who murdered the Princes in the Tower. 

A YouTube channel says it will be posting the Second Verdict programme from 1976 in which Barlow and Watt from Softly, Softly investigate the mystery.

Let's see Richard III go head to head with Barlow in the interview room and see if he still looks so innocent.

In the mean time, we can listen to an episode of The History of England podcast which looks at Ladybird Books and in particular at their books on British history and the author of many of them, L. du Garde Peach.

Peach who, besides the many accomplishments outlined here, was a Liberal parliamentary candidate - he fought Derby at the 1929 general election - emerges as an attractive figure.

Jonathan Lemalu and Winchester Cathedral Choir: Three Kings from Persian Lands Afar

This is a 19th-century German carol by the composer Peter Cornelius. It became increasingly popular in Britain as the 20th century progressed.

It was the only slightly unusual track on the album of carols that the family owned when I was a child, and it reminds me of a late winter afternoon at Hemel Hempstead School where, aged 12, I was taking part in a play with songs, put on by pupils from the first two years. As we left the rehearsal, somewhere else in the building the school choir was practising this piece.

Our play, incidentally, was The Charcoal-Burners' Son, a sort of spoof fairy tale. It was written by L. Du Garde Peach, who once fought Derby for the Liberal Party and wrote most of the Ladybird history books.

In defence of Peter, Jane and Ladybird's history books

As a video recently posted here went a long way to demonstrate, Ladybird Books were about the most progressive post-war publishers of children's books.

Yet misapprehensions about their publications abound. The other day someone on Twitter was convinced that Peter and Jane exclaimed "I say!" to one another.

The illustrator of these books, Harry Wingfield, explained their social position to the Guardian in 2002 when he was 91:

Wingfield is dismissive of claims in another national newspaper that the model for the real-life Jane has been unearthed in Shrewsbury. There was no real-life Jane. Or Peter, for that matter. Their images were forged from any number of photographs of local children, some taken on the new council estates that were springing up in the late 50s and early 60s.

"They were the sons and daughters of respectable workers," he says, "and they were well dressed. You didn't want dustbin kids. But they weren't as middle-class as everyone made out."

My mother taught me to read from these books before I went to school. We were living in a new town, Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, at the time, and nothing about them felt alien to me.

Ladybird's Adventures from History series is also controversial. Otto English, with his repeated use of the term "Ladybird libertarians" seems to blame it for Brexit. But Ladybird's market was local authority primary schools, not the prep schools that the proponents of leaving the European Union attended.

And L du Garde Peach, the man who wrote the bulk of that series, was no Tory, if only because he fought Derby for the Liberal Party at the 1929 general election.

David Perkins writes of him in History Today:

There was more to Peach than a mere producer of patriotic homilies. As a radio dramatist, he did not shy away from controversial issues, including war, the arms race, and pacificism: Patriotism Ltd (1937) was subject to BBC internal censorship and pulled from the air, a decision that was reported around the world; Night Sky (1937) sought to bring home the realities of modern warfare. Peach also wrote a play about the First World War with no men in the cast: Home Fires (1930). 

He became known, too, for hard-hitting radio dramas: Bread (1932) was a family farming saga of poverty and emigration from the agricultural depression of the 1840s to the Great Depression. Three Soldiers (1933) highlighted the predicament of ex-soldiers from the Great War who had been thrown on the dole. 

Several of Peach’s radio plays touched on racial issues. His stance on the subject was more nuanced than that of many contemporaries and his attitudes ahead of his time. In Ingredient X (1929) he wrote about the corporate exploitation of Africa, spurring a journalist to complain that the play was ‘Bolshevist in tendency’. 

In John Hawkins – Slaver (1933) Peach adapted Hakluyt’s 16th-century account of the notable voyages and made a point of showing how Hawkins – like other Elizabethan explorers – made profits from slave trading to secure the monarch’s support. In The Cohort Marches: An Episode of the Roman Occupation (1937), Peach recast contemporary issues of colonialism in the context of Roman Britain. 

You can watch a lecture on L. du Garde Peach by Perkins in the video above.

Two Leicester exhibitions: Ladybird Books and the Imperial Typewriters strike

I braved the rain and went into Leicester today to visit two exhibitions.

The first was The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists at the museum and art gallery on New Walk.

On the walls was some of the original artwork from the Keywords books with which my mother taught me to read before I went to school.

They first came out in 1964, so they must have been the latest thing when she bought them.

And I learnt that most Ladybird history books were a collaboration between sometime Liberal candidate L. Du Garde Peach and the Leicestershire illustrator John Kenney.

A plaque in the latter's honour was recently put up in Kibworth, though a letterhead in the exhibition has him living in Smeeton Westerby.

On to the Newarke Houses museum and the exhibition remembering the Imperial Typewriters Strike of 1974.

It began when an Asian worker at one of the company's Leicester factories was mistakenly given the pay packet of a white friend and discovered she was being paid more.

A BBC News report says the Transport and General Workers Union refused to support the Asian strikers because its local negotiator believed they had "not followed the proper disputes procedure" and "have no legitimate grievances".

The strikers stayed out for 14 weeks, but a shutdown of the factory by its American owners ended the strike. A year later they closed the factory and a few years after that manual typewriters were museum pieces.

This exhibition is well put together, with lots of video interviews with people involved. It's themes of race and gender and white resentment resonate today.

And you can still find Imperial Typewriters' main factory on East Park Road.

Six of the Best 849

Populists like to blame elites, but from Israel to Britain to the United States their crusade against hardworking civil servants is undermining the foundations of democracy, argues Shalom Lipner.

A creeping trend of anti-immigrant educational material is worming its way into the curriculum, portraying EU migrants as outsiders and criminals, says Tanja Bueltmann,

Gary Younge is right to be critical of Liam Neeson: "Neeson is angry and upset and decides to invest his rage in the collective punishment of a group of people based on the colour of their skin. It is perhaps now clearer to some why the early 21st century needed a movement called Black Lives Matter."

Simon Sherry and Martin M. Smith discuss what they learnt from their study of perfectionism: "This epidemic of perfectionism in modern western societies is a serious, even deadly, problem. Perfectionism is robustly linked in the research to anxiety, stress, depression, eating disorders and suicide."

Writing for the Conservative site Bright Blue, Tom Chapman defends the 1998 Human Right Act,

Tom Holland on what he learnt from Ladybird Books and L. du Garde Peach.

Great Hucklow celebrates King George V's Silver Jubilee in 1935

These gorgeous scenes of Great Hucklow capture the Derbyshire village's preparations for the celebration of King George V's Silver Jubilee. Shot by one of its most famous residents, British screenwriter L. du Garde Peach (who's probably better known as Ladybird Books' most prolific author), it's a charming portrait of life and laughter in the Pennine village. 

We also see a glimpse of the Village Players, a local theatre group led by Peach. The same year this film was shot he worked on the script for The Tunnel, a spectacular sci-fi tale about the troubled construction of a transatlantic tunnel (also available on BFI Player).

Click on the still above to watch the film on the British Film Institute site.

L. du Garde Peach fought Derby for the Liberal Party at the 1929 general election. He also wrote the book for a musical play, The Charcoal Burner's Son. I once appeared in a school production of it.