Before Paddington Bear there was Mary Plain

If the Paddington phenomenon has Gone A Bit Far, as Lord Bonkers would put it, is there an alternative bear whose adventures we can enjoy?

There is. A post on Scones and Chaises Longues has reminded me that I enjoyed the Mary Plain books when I was very young:

Readers of a certain age (mine) may remember Gwynedd Rae's Mary Plain books. I have fond memories of sitting on one of the little wooden chairs in the children's section of Bromley Public Library, working my way through the adventures of the bear cub from Berne while my mother chose her novels from the grown ups' shelves.

The series was old before I first encountered it (I don't quite date from 1937...although the last Mary P book was not published until 1965), and I did wonder how it would read now, all these decades later. I needn't have worried; I enjoyed Mary Plain on Holiday just as much, in fact probably more, than I had before, because now I could also appreciate Rae's skill in creating stories that entertained children whilst also amusing their long suffering parents; their dry wit that would have flown straight over my six year old head.

Mary Plain is a small bear from the Bear Pits at Berne. And no, as a 6 year old I had no idea what Bear Pits were, nor indeed that Berne was even a place; no matter. Mary is an orphan who has grown up with her grandparents, her small cousins Little Wool and Marionette, and a large extended family. How she came to be living with her friend the Owl Man (he wears horn-rimmed spectacles) in his smart London flat is explained in the first book, Mostly Mary (though there is a diagram of Mary's family tree at the beginning of Mary Plain on Holiday.)

Mary is extremely full of herself, very inquisitive and always getting into trouble.

I assumed the book was Swiss, because Mary Plain came from Berne, and even now I remember her egotism, which was that of a small child.

An unworthy part of me wonders if Michael Bond read these books too.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The nation’s prison governors

With this final postcard from Trescothick Bay, our latest week with Lord Bonkers' Diary draws to a close.

What did become of Freddie and Fiona? What should the Liberal Democrats' new strategy be? Who will win the 2.30 at Wincanton? The answers to these questions will no doubt be revealed when next we visit Bonkers Hall.

Sunday

My long career in public life has convinced me of an important truth: a man who will cheat at golf will cheat at anything. It was therefore no surprise to me when President Trump – can that really be his name? – pressured the organisers to cancel the suspension of the American team’s star striker at the World Cup. 

It’s beginning to look as though the Reform Party will have to pull a similar trick with the nation’s prison governors in order to field a full slate of candidates at the next election.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"
• Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents
• The arid south of Rutland
• "Hooson, we have a problem"
• He would sit there like a stuffed haddock
• Clip the wings of the Russian Bear

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Clip the wings of the Russian Bear

I would point out that Lord Bonkers is more against Landlordism in principle than in practice, but my rent falls due on Lady Day.

Saturday

It was my old friend John Arlott who claimed that Manchester is the only city in Britain where they have lifeboat drill on the buses. No doubt the damp climate has encouraged its mayor to march on London to claim the crown – or at least the tenancy of 10 Downing Street. 

Yes, there is something Medieval about the whole affair; it’s like an episode from a school textbook on the reign of King Henry VI Part 2. 

What will this Burnham do when he gets there? I am told he is Sound on trams, which is to his credit, but hardly constitutes a programme for government. Were I to be asked – and my advice is often sought on such questions – I should counsel him to clip the wings of the Russian Bear, defend our universities (both ancient and modern) and give the scourge of Landlordism both barrels, but the Labour Party has always been in thrall to its social superiors.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"
• Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents
• The arid south of Rutland
• "Hooson, we have a problem"
• He would sit there like a stuffed haddock

Lord Bonkers' Diary: He would sit there like a stuffed haddock

Proof, I think. that Lord Bonkers reads this blog. The theory that Starmer was never meant to be prime minister, but was put in place as a move in Labour's civil war, comes from a Guardian article by Neal Lawson, and I have referred to it here more than once.

Friday

That Starmer fellow didn’t amount to much, did he? Cook, with her generous heart, always thought the best of him and refused to “listen to incinerations”; for myself, there’s an old Gypsy saying that holds… To be honest, I can’t remember what it holds, but I know it would be just the job here. 

My sources in the Labour Party tell me that the man was never meant to be prime minister: the idea was that he would sit there like a stuffed haddock while Mandelson and McSweeney Todd purged the party of anyone who believed in what Labour used to believe in. Then, after an honourable defeat in the 2024 election, he would have made way so that “Streeting” they used to go on about could become PM next time round. 

The moral is don’t appoint temporary leaders, as they may turn out not to be temporary at all. Vinnie Jones’s disastrous stewardship of the Royal Ballet should have alerted everyone to that danger.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"
• Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents
• The arid south of Rutland
• "Hooson, we have a problem"

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "Hooson, we have a problem"

I never know how much of Lord Bonkers' reminiscences to believe. In this case, I suspect he should have gone back for his Panama.

Thursday

The orphans and Cook have taken to the cool of the caves for which Trescothick Bay is noted, but I am happy here on the beach even though I have left my sun hat back at the boarding house. 

Today I have been thinking of Emlyn Hooson, an inspirational leader of our party in Wales and a source of wise counsel on any matter touching upon the Principality. His phone would ring at all hours and, more often than not, when he had answered the thing he would hear the words “Hooson, we have a problem.” 

Later in life he revealed an unexpected talent for Association football, captaining Liverpool to three league titles and two European Cups. This led to his being invited to be a team captain on the moving television show A Question of Sport, where his duels with Binkie Beaumont kept the nation on the edge of its seat.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"
• Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents
• The arid south of Rutland

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The arid south of Rutland

As ever, Lord Bonkers was ahead of the curve on the climate crisis. Perhaps the sands at Trescothick Bay remind him of the deserts of southern Rutland?

Wednesday

They say these heatwaves will soon render the South of England uninhabitable, which is a bit of a facer seeing as we Liberals have worked so hard to ensure we don’t have MPs anywhere else. But don’t despair: the arid south of Rutland is simply teeming with life – human life included. 

Of course, if the Home Counties do turn to desert it will require changes to the way we fight elections there, which is why, a couple of years ago, I invited some of the ALDC’s leading lights to an awayday at an oasis near Uppingham. 

There I instructed them in the polite way to canvass bedouin, the correct tying of the kafiyeh and the use of camels in Focus delivery. It won’t be my fault if we fail to gain Runnymede and Weybridge next time round.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"
• Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents

Yes, Jeremy Thorpe really did pester the voters from a hovercraft that summer and Paul Tyler was on board. Lord Tyler's lawyers have asked me to point out, however, that at no time did he turn into the Beast of Bodmin at full moon or devour his then constituents.

I bet he did though.

Tuesday

Do you remember when hovercraft were all the rage? The boffins told us that within a decade we would have one each and use them to commute to the moon. As it turned out, they proved a great disappointment, but it was aboard a hovercraft that I first discovered this charming resort. Jeremy Thorpe had hit upon the idea of visiting the beaches of the South during the summer of 1974 to firm up the Liberal vote in anticipation of a second general election that autumn. 

I think it fair to say that we met with a Mixed Reception from holidaymakers – it was the way the natives of Trescothick Bay lobbed bottles at us that convinced me the village was a nest of free-thinkers among whom I should like to spend more time. 

Not everyone saw things that way. Poor Paul Tyler was so traumatised that he could be found 25 years later wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents who had lacked the sense to bolt their doors, bar their shutters and remain in their cottages. Thank goodness one of the Wise Woman of Wing’s tinctures sorted him out!

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"

The new Liberator is out. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

And that means it's time to spend another week with Rutland's most popular fictional peer. When I first mentioned the Well-Behaved Orphans' summer holiday in the pages of Liberator, Marcus Trescothick was a 14-year-old playing alongside his father for the Keynsham club in Bristol. In those days the WBOs went to a different Cornish resort: Trebilcock Bay.

Monday

I write these words in a deckchair on the sands of Trescothick Bay, the Cornish resort where I always bring the Well-Behaved Orphans for their summer holiday. As I watch, the mites are scaling the cliffs their predecessors have always declared to be "better than a chimbley", while Cook, who has accompanied us this time, is searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies". 

One advantage of being away from the Hall and Westminster is that I am no longer being pestered by Liberal Democrat HQ about what has become of Freddie and Fiona. Between you and me, gentle reader, I rather thought they had been burnt alive in a giant wicker hare by the Elves of Rockingham Forest at Beltane, but just before I left for Cornwall I overheard two young elves complaining that the "penguin ladies" had turned up at the eleventh hour to spoil their fun. 

Can it be that the sisters from the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes rescued F&F from the flames? I shall pump Sister Sid on my return to Rutland.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Labour's weakening of local government will do nothing for voters' confidence in the political system

So Harborough District Council is to disappear, subsumed into a single authority for the whole of the county outside the city of Leicestershire. And Leicester is to be expanded to make the hole in the doughnut bigger.

City boundaries have to be expanded from time to time, but I'm not sure the areas Leicester is taking will be delighted. For some years there has been criticism that its elected mayor Peter Soulsby, now in his fourth term, is keen on prestige projects in the city centre, but less interested in bread-and-butter issues like litter and the state of the pavements out in the suburbs.

Meanwhile, the abolition of all the district and borough councils in the county can only make government feel more distant, and this at a time when our democracy is being challenged from within and without. 

I was in Loughborough today. It's a large town with a university, but it will soon lose Charnwood Borough, the council that looks after it and its hinterland. And Leicestershire, of course, is not the only county seeing huge changes.

This revolution in local government was not mentioned in Labour's last manifesto and there has been little debate about it since the election. It does appear to have been set in place because Labour has a vision for revitalising local democracy, but simply because someone has told ministers that there is an ideal size for a council and many are smaller than this.

I am reminded of a comment by Lord Bonkers:

I’m told that when a Labour junior minister discovered that councils are not All The Same Size, he started screaming and had to be sent home in a taxi. 

Gilbert Adair: The orphan has lost not only his parents but his status

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This post is about another essay by Gilbert Adair, but first a quotation from Sammy Going South by W.H. Canaway. If you've not seen the movie, this is a novel about a 10-year-old British boy whose parents are killed by an RAF raid on Port Said during the Suez Crisis of 1956:

Reminded by the scene he had witnessed, he thought, I’m an orphan! The idea intrigued him. He said aloud, "I'm an orphan!" savouring the words in the air. Then he said, experimentally, “My mummy and daddy are dead,” and wished he hadn't said it, for it made him feel sad. To say "I'm an orphan" sounded not sad, but – well, important. He repeated the words again.

In his essay 'Dr Barnardo's Orphans', Adair discusses this status once enjoyed by orphans:

The prominence accorded to the orphan by nineteenth-century novelists - not only Dickens, not only in this country - became in consequence rather hypertrophied when compared to his actual footing on the social hierarchy, both qualitatively and quantitatively; and, in a much-quoted witticism from The Importance of Being Earnest (Lady Bracknell's observation that the loss of both parents resembled 'carelessness'), Wilde, no devotee of Dickensian sentimentality, mocked what might be called the rampant orphanomania of the Victorians.

But, as Adair says, time moved on and the absence of war and disease meant there were no longer the waves of orphans there had once been. After the Second World War the term came to acquire a foreign, Third World connotation - Korean orphans, Vietnamese orphans. Meanwhile, Barnardo's was diversifying its childcare activities, moving far beyond just the provision of homes for orphans.

Adair, emphasising he means to respect to the children and that he is concerned only with their public image, says the result is that:

There now strikes one as something dated and irreducibly kitschy about an orphan: a Barnardo Boy reminds one of nothing so much as a Bisto Kid. In effect, the social specificity of a nineteenth-century orphan was contingent upon an uncompromisingly normative conception of society, from which he was therefore – if in this manner alone – not alienated, since he had been assigned a codified place within it, however luckless.

Today, or at least in 1986, when Adair's Myths & Memories was published:

When what would have been regarded until quite lately as unimaginable anomalies compete with each other for the attention of the sociologist, the social worker and the investigative journalist (single-parent families, lesbian mothers, test-tube babies), the orphan has lost not only his parents but his status.

It's worse than that. The Children and Young Persons Act 1969 sought to remove the stigma if criminality from children who broke the law and treat them like any other children who are in need of care. But its effect was to spread that stigma to all children in public care.

So it is thar, today, orphans being moved between care placements are likely to find themselves put in handcuffs. We have turned being an orphan into a crime.

Reader's Voice. So your diagnosis is that we have lost the concept of the "well-behaved orphan".

Liberal England replies: Precisely. But I can console myself that I did manage to slip the phrase into my book chapter on Oliver Twist.

Black market weight-loss jab factory found in stately home

Our Headline of the Day comes from BBC News. 

I noticed that Lord Bonkers was taking a keen interest in the finer details of the story.

"Ahaarrrr!" A voiceover session from hell

One of my favourite podcasts is the Chelsea Fancast, which has kept me informed and entertained through my club's recent travails. Its two regular presenters are Stamford Chidge and JK.

Stamford Chidge, I worked out eventually after putting the clues together, is David Chidgey. He's a former television producer, a psychotherapist and the son of the late David Chidgey, who was Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh from 1994 to 2005, and the pilot of the Liberal Democrat spacecraft Bird of Liberty in the early years of Lord Bonkers' Diary.

JK is not such a mystery. He is Jonathan Kydd, son of the once-ubiquitous British film actor Sam Kydd and an actor, writer and voiceover artist in his own right.

In this short film, which has won many festival awards, he plays both the actor and the director in a voiceover session from hell.

And to prove that all rabbit holes join up eventually, he writes on his website that, when he was a boy, Alexander Mackendrick saw him several times for the title role in Sammy Going South.

Call for the Rutland Water Monster to be displayed in Oakham

More than 2000 people have signed a petition calling on Rutland County Council to acquire the fossil ichthyosaur found at Rutland Water in 2021 for display in the county museum at Oakham.

Writing on Oakham Nub News, Lawrence Fenelon, chair of the Friends of Rutland County Museum and Oakham Castle, says:

At March last year RCC's accounts showed over £39m of usable capital reserve. Why can't a small bit of it be used to get the Sea Dragon back in Rutland? If it is not spent by March 2028 it will go to the new combined authority and be lost to Rutland.

Our council is in danger of missing a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring a major attraction to Oakham.

A BBC News story about the campaign for the fossil to be displayed Rutland says:

The authority told the BBC risings costs meant it could no longer afford to proceed with its original plan, but confirmed the petition would trigger a debate on the issue at a future full council meeting.

Readers of Lord Bonkers' Diary, whether in Liberator or on this blog, will have known all about the Rutland Water Monster long before 2021.

An esoteric walk around Aleister Crowley's London

Lord Bonkers had no time for him, but Aleister Crowley has been crossing my path of late. So here's an esoteric walk across his London with John Rogers and Marco Visconti:

This walking tour weaves a web of mystery and magick through a portion of central London forever haunted by the man known as The Great Beast. Starting at Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment we head up to Charing Cross, St Martin's Lane to Watkins Bookshop in Cecil Court which has been on the site for over 120 years. We then follow the magic thread to Henrietta Street in Covent Garden and from here drift across the Piazza to Freemasons' Hall - one of the most mysterious and beguiling locations in London. 

Our 'Crowley Crawl' takes us up Kingsway to Museum Street in Bloomsbury and the brilliant Atlantis Bookshop which "was established in 1922 by magicians, for magicians. It is the birth-place of modern witchcraft, with Gerald Gardner holding regular coven meetings in the basement of the Shop." It was also a favourite bookshop of Aleister Crowley. The final leg of our walk of mystery and magic takes us down Oxford Street, Kingley Street to Regent Street, ending at 93 Jermyn Street where Crowley lived for a period of time.

And not the reference to Frieda Harris.

John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

Don't mention the Isle of Wight Separatists' 1950s terror campaign

If it weren't for Lord Bonkers, I should have taken this as a charming portrait of an English backwater 70 years ago.

In reality, 1956 saw the height of the Isle of Wight Separatists' terror campaign and the film was made in an attempt to assure potential visitors that all was well there despite the headlines.

Nowhere in this film do we see the internment camps for suspected Separatist sympathisers, the occupying British Army or the desperate poverty caused by the collapse of the island's major industry of producing tourist souvenirs that incorporate several different colours of sand.

Yet is was not the British government that saw off the Separatists, but their own error in attempting to raise money for arms by muscling in on some of Violent Bonham Carter's legitimate business interests in the East End of London. It was Violent's manor and the were out of order – indeed getting lairy – as they were soon shown.

Violent Bonham Carter features on Fake or Fortune?

The notorious gender-fluid London gang boss of the Sixties gets a mention in a post from last year on the Herstmonceux Castle website.

BBC’s Fake or Fortune here at the Castle

On Monday, 21st July, viewers were treated to a fascinating episode of Fake or Fortune, much of which was filmed here at Herstmonceux Castle.

We thought Dylan and Claire acquitted themselves brilliantly on camera in the garden and amongst the archives.

The episode provided insights into a painting, seemingly by Winston Churchill, of his wife Clementine, as they were staying at Hertsmonceux Castle together with his mother and Violent Bonham Carter, as guests of Claude Lowther, in the summer of 1916. 

I mentioned this to Lord Bonkers. He said that if Violent says a painting is kosher, it's prudent to agree with him.

Lord Bonkers: "Something less terrible than the truth"

G.K. Chesterton was a brilliant literary critic and there's an observation of his on Dickens that I've quoted more than once in print:

It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Clennam, Miss Havisham, and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth.

I have an uneasy feeling that Lord Bonkers sometimes soothes me with something less terrible than the truth.

Lib Dem Rutland plans cycle-path from Oakham to Rutland Water

Rutland County Council is consulting residents on plans for a new cycling route connecting Oakham town centre with Rutland Water..

The council, which is run by a minority Liberal Democrat administration, says the scheme would improve accessibility for residents and visitors, support tourism and local businesses, and reduce reliance on cars.

Oliver Hemsley, the council's portfolio holder for environment and transport, told BBC News:

Rutland Water is one of the county's most valued destinations for both residents and visitors, and these proposals are about making it easier and safer for people to travel there by bike or on foot.

There's more information on the council's website. 

Lord Bonkers has asked me to point out that the chances of being devoured by the Rutland Water Monster while visiting have been greatly exaggerated by an irresponsible media.

Michael Meadowcroft (1942-2026)

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Sad news on Liberal Democrat Voice this morning: Michael Meadowcroft has died at the age of 84.

His victory in Leeds West in 1983 – the first Liberal gain from Labour at a general election in decades – was one of the few high points of what was, in the context of the Alliance's hopes and ambitions, a deeply disappointing election night.

By then Michael already had a reputation as the Liberal Party's thinker – I remember the frisson when he turned up on the final day of a Union of Liberal Students conference in Leeds in 1979. His pamphlets for Liberator gave you some hope that there was still a coherent Liberal philosophy that was distinct from centrism or social democracy.

Michael was unable to hold Leeds West in 1987 and the West Leeds Dispatch summarises his later career:

Following his defeat he turned to journalism and was a columnist in The Times and The Yorkshire Post. In later years he wrote obituaries of political figures for both The Guardian and Yorkshire Post.

From 1990 he was a consultant to new and emerging democracies and for 26 years led or was a member of 50 missions to 35 different countries

His attempt to run a continuing Liberal Party after the foundation of the Liberal Democrats soon foundered, and he later joined the merged party. It's a mark of his forbearance that he never once objected to my purloining his name to give to Lord Bonkers' gardener.

The suspicions of Beaver Hateman: Kate Summerscale on the Uncle Books

I read the first ‘Uncle’ book in the British Council library in Santiago, Chile, when I was about eight and my father was working as a diplomat in the city. I borrowed the next five volumes of the series in turn. 

I was delighted by Uncle – a millionaire elephant who wears a purple dressing gown, engages in savage skirmishes and is wildly generous to his followers – and he became more famous in our family than Babar. When we returned to England, I was amazed that no one seemed to have heard of him.

So wrote Kate Summerscale in The Complete Uncle, a collected edition of all six of the Revd J.P. Martin's books that was published in 2013.

It now fetches silly prices, just as the individual titles did before it was published. Which makes you wonder why the books have not remained in print.

Years before The Complete Uncle appeared, Imogen Russell Williams asked the same question in the Guardian, under the headline The Elephant Not in the Room:

Bizarrely, Jonathan Cape, the original publishers, don't want to reissue Uncle because the protagonist is rich, capitalist and deeply complacent, and therefore the books are "classist". But no one can fail to detect the gleeful humour and wry justice in the lampoons propagated by the Badfort tribe, even as they applaud the righteous wrath with which Uncle "kicks up" offenders 50 feet into the air. ...

Insurgent little pamphlets are dropped by Hitmouse from rickety biplanes: "TO ALL FREE CITIZENS: This is to announce that we have at last completed our plans against Uncle, the arch-bully, tyrant, and boaster!" Described by the Independent as "Animal Farm for pre-teens", Martin's sly ridicule of the imperious and pompous master of Homeward should be required reading for all baby Lefties.

With his hating book, where he writes the names of his enemies, and the skewers he uses as weapons, Hitmouse anticipated the modern journalist. But I will admit his Badfort News was my model when I wrote Focus leaflets.

Anyway, if you ever see one of the Uncle books at a reasonable price, snap it up. You will enjoy it.

I shall end by:

• admitting that Uncle was a subconscious influence on my creation of Lord Bonkers, though it took me years to realise it;
• sending you off to read my post on the discovery that the Revd J.P. Martin and Stanley Unwin, two giants of the British nonsense tradition, were both attached to Daventry transmitting station during the war.