Deep joy in Long Buckby at blue plaque for Stanley Unwin

A good news story at last. West Northamptonshire Council has installed a blue plaque outside Stanley Unwin's old bungalow on Long Buckby's High Street, reports BBC News.

Unwin lived there for decades, having worked at at the Borough Hill transmitting station in Daventry during the war along with another hero of the English nonsense tradition. After the war he joined the BBC as a sound recordist, until illness among the cast of a show led him to do his doing his party piece in front of the microphone.

His act involved speaking nonsense in a way that made it sound perfect sense if you weren't listening too closely – or overtroiling your eardroves. You can see him in action in the video above. I did a couple of turns in his style in the last iterations of the Liberal Revue at Lib Dem annual conferences.

Unwin's heyday was the Fifties and Sixties when he appeared on radio, television and in films. After that he was regularly rediscovered by new generations of radio producers and creative directors, and I remember seeing him on Inside Victor Lewis-Smith when he was past eighty.

I've already made one pilgrimage to Long Buckby to photograph the headstone for Unwin and his wife in the village churchyard. I'll have to go back soon to see his blue plaque.

Kings Sutton: The least used station in Northamptonshire

What's the least used station in Northamptonshire?

After some thought, you might come up with Long Buckby. But you'd be wrong.

The line from Oxford to Banbury cuts through the far south west of the county, and there you will find King's Sutton station.

East Midlands Liberal Democrats Autumn Conference

East Midlands Liberal Democrats are holding their autumn regional conference in Long Buckby, Northamptonshire, on Saturday 3 November.

Click here to book a place or book a stall.

That page also has details of a local party dinner taking place that evening at nearby West Haddon.

Long Buckby and the battle for religious liberty

I have come across a history of Long Buckby United Reform Church, as the village's Congregational church now is.

One passage, discussing the ministry of David Griffiths between 1803 and 1842, reminds us just how hard won religious liberty was in England:

During the ministry of Mr. Griffiths, the village chapels at East Haddon and Whilton were erected. Mr. Griffiths used to "lecture" once a month in a private house in East Haddon and so many people desired to hear him that the accommodation was soon insufficient and a chapel was built. 

This did not please (the squire of that time and he gave notice to the farmers on his estate that if they continued to deal with or employ shopkeepers who attended dissenting services, they would he removed from their farms. 

Although legal help was sought, nothing effective could he done and the tradespeople concerned lost the custom of nearly all the farmers in the parish. In spite of these difficulties, the chapel was completed in 1811.

Long Buckby Castle

Take the road out of Long Buckby towards the village's railway station and you will soon come across a sign directing you down a close of modern houses to reach this castle.


A page about it says Long Buckby has been described as a certain timber castle and also as a probable masonry castle:

A trial excavation in 1955 revealed a shallow ditch or an enclosure of uncertain shape, possibly of pre-conquest or early post conquest date, which was superseded by a wall and subsequently by a bank with a deep ditch on the outside. The main motte was created in the mid C12 and may have been constructed by the de Quincy family who held the manor until 1264.

The interpretation board also suggests that what appears to be a moat around two sides in the mound is in reality the remains of a medieval track that was worn into a hollow way.

Radical Long Buckby

St Lawrence, where Stanley Unwin is buried, was locked, but I had already found an impressive Congregational church in the village. Pevsner says it dates from 1771, though there was a poster elsewhere mentioning a celebration of its 305th anniversary, so the congregation must be older than this building.

The picture above shows the rear, but the front is both monumental and plain too. With its large manse and later Sunday school, the grouping was reminiscent of Rothwell.

There is a Holyoake Terrace in Long Buckby, which I suspected had been named for George Holyoake - and I was right.

Because LongBuckby.Net confirms the village's radical history:

The tradition of absorbing incomers, the periods of serious poverty and the presence of many people working in industry and not on the land, gave rise to a village very radical in its politics and favouring the non-conformist churches. The Chartist movement was strong here in the 1830s and 1840s. 

A few years later (1858) the first co-operative society in Northamptonshire was set up and was to become a major influence in the village. In the mid 19th century there were three chapels which, between them, attracted more than four times as many in their congregations as attended the Church of England.

Ronnie Lane & Slim Chance: How Come

Yesterday's expedition to Long Buckby and the grave of Stanley Unwin has naturally put me in mind of the Small Faces. Unwin narrated the second side of the group's LP Ogden's Nut Gone Flake and was surely a better choice than their original thought Spike Milligan.

But the Small Faces and the solo career of Steve Marriott have featured in Sunday videos before, so it is time to catch up with the band's bass player and other songwriter Ronnie Lane.

After Marriott left to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, the remaining members of the Small Faces joined Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart to form the Faces, enjoying enormous success.

Ronnie Lane gave all that up, moved to the remotest part of Shropshire and former the wonderfully loose Slim Chance. How Come was there only hit - their second single The Poacher suffered from the cancellation of Top of the Pops at the vital time. This was the seventies.

There are many tales to tell of Ronnie Lane in Shropshire - I have already blogged about those days and shall return to the subject soon. A Shropshire friend of a Shropshire friend there assures me that Lane and his rock star companions were "very naughty boys", but it remains wonderful to me that there was a time when you could wander into a remote pub under the Stiperstones and hear them playing unannounced.

Ronnie Lane's most remarkable project was Passing Show, a sort of travelling musical circus. Writing in Uncut, David Cavanagh described it as:

A picaresque odyssey along the highways and byways, it framed Ronnie's love of good-time music within the wider context of a Romany way of life. Viewed through the eyes of conventional rock tour promotion, 'The Passing Show' was crazy. It required the country's least flexible officials – the town councillors, police constables and fire chiefs – to look at life not as a protocol but as an adventure.

Soon afterwards Lane fell ill with multiple sclerosis and in 1983 his friends put on a celebrated charity concert to raise funds for him - you can see a clip from it here. Ronnie Lane died in 1997.

Note, by the way, that the video above comes from The Basil Brush Show. You don't get children's television like that any more.

Stanley Unwin's grave at Long Buckby

Today I have been on a pilgrimage to Long Buckby in Northamptonshire to pay tribute to one of my comedy heroes and to see if the story about the inscription on his gravestone is true. Happily, it is.

Unwin moved to Long Buckby when he started working for the BBC at the nearby Daventry transmitting station in 1940 and lived there for the rest of his life.

Although all his attempts to retire were thwarted because he was constantly being rediscovered by new generations of producers and directors, it is probably necessary now to tell my younger readers about him.

As his Guardian obituary said:

To say that Stanley Unwin, who has died aged 90, was a comedian gives no idea of his unique brand of plausible malapropisms, grammatical distortions and straightfaced nonsense. As a prewar BBC sound engineer, he befuddled private conversations and entertained his children, but, from the 1950s, he delighted a much larger audience on radio, television, stage and in films.

And it wasn't just that Unwin was admired, he was loved. The World of Stanley Unwin says:

For someone who was modesty itself and forever grateful for the opportunities he had been given, he would probably have been quite embarrassed at the length and breadth of the obituaries that appeared over the following few days: 'top billing' across seven columns in the Times; nearly a quarter page in the Guardian; two columns and a whacking great photo in the Independent, and online obits from the BBC right across to newswire agencies in Australia.

Deep joy.

I have been known to to perform an Unwinesque turn myself at the Liberal Revue, but it is harder than it sounds, because Stanley Unwin's art was to have his nonsense so nearly make sense. It is easy to overtroil and falollop as a result.

Debdale Wharf near Market Harborough

Leicestershire and Northamptonshire Union Canal was originally planned to go from Leicester via Market Harborough to Northampton, there joining the Grand Union main line. But when construction began, says the Old Union Canals Society website:

it became obvious that the budget was not going to allow for completion of the canal, so a decision was taken to stop at Debdale in 1797. The tiny hamlet became a busy canal terminus, with a purpose-built wharf, warehouse and pub (The Debdale Wharf Inn), and goods were stockpiled for onward transportation by horse and cart to the turnpike (A6) and thence to Harborough and beyond.

In due course the line reached Market Harborough, but later the connection with the main canal system was made by a cut from Foxton to Long Buckby, leaving Market Harborough at the end of a branch.

I was at Debdale Wharf on Saturday, which today is home to a new marina filled with boats. I talked to a woman who lives in one of the few houses there. She told me that the farmhouse next door had been the inn and that the remains of the old stables for the horses that pulled the narrow boats could be found at the bottom of her own garden.

And we both admired this ruin across the road with its oak doors (and though you cannot see it in this shot) Swithland slate roof.

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".