The last days of the Ilfracombe branch

I remember passing through Ilfracombe while walking the coastal path in the summer of 1988. Every bed-and-breakfast establishment had its prices in the window, trying to undercut the place next door. It was great for a walker on a limited budget, but not a sign of a prosperous resort.

My theory at the time was that the town had not recovered from the closure of its branch railway from Barnstaple. Certainly, reading about it now, I find that line generated lots of holiday traffic almost to its closure in 1970, but attracted too few passengers apart from that. 

The last stretch of the line into Barnstaple had become part of the coastal path by 1988. I can remember sitting outside the fence of RAF Chivenor listening to Test Match Special - every time the radar transmitter turned towards me there was interference with the reception.

It was the summer of 1988, so England were losing horribly to the West Indies. I fancy the test I was listening to was the one in which Chris Cowdrey (son of Colin and godson of the chairman of selectors, Peter May) captained the team.

His selection was described at the time by the great Matthew Engel as "a combination of nepotism and wishful thinking". Cowdrey fils did not prove a success and, after going down with a minor injury, was bundled out of the team, never to play for England again.

Where were we? 

The video above, narrated by Victor Thompson, shows the last days of the Ilfracombe branch and tells us something of its history. Thompson does have a thing about nasty accidents on level crossings, but it's a good watch.

As a bonus to make up for all that cricket, here's footage of the same line shot in 1898.

Cricket journalist Matthew Engel wins Golden Valley South

One of my favourite cricket writers, Matthew Engel, was this evening elected as councillor for Golden Valley South ward of Herefordshire Council.

He was standing as an Independent in a by-election caused by the death of the sitting Independent councillor Peter Jinman.

Later. Engel received over 60 per cent of the vote, beating Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem candidates, as well as another Independent.

The Joy of Six 1131

'The British press ... converted the book into their native tongue, that jabberwocky of bonkers hot takes and classist snark. Facts were wrenched out of context, complex emotions were reduced to cartoonish idiocy, innocent passages were hyped into outrages.' J.R. Moehringer on his experience of being Prince Harry's ghostwriter.

'Our research revealed 30 different characteristics and qualities of a woman’s identity that emerged as points of criticism creating barriers to women’s success. The clear message to women is that—whatever they are—they are “never quite right.' Amy Diehl, Leanne M. Dzubinski and Amber L. Stephenson find that, whatever women are, they are 'never quite right' for leadership roles.

Mark Knights looks back at John Poulson, the architect and businessman gaoled for corruption in 1974 over the award of local authority building contracts.

Tony Whitehead tells us why Dartmoor's protected areas are in such poor condition and what needs to be done.

'This year, a relishable Ashes series is being squeezed into six weeks of midsummer to leave prime-time August free for the Hundred, a multi-million-pound mess created by the 12-year-olds in the marketing department at Lord’s, which a newly installed counter-revolutionary regime is now trying to clear up.' Matthew Engel reviews the new Wisden.

Ian Visits takes us to Granny Dripping Steps: "This is a bit of a passage, and mostly a footbridge over several railways in West Hampstead that has a remarkable name that’s just too amazing to ignore. It can be found at the far end of West Hampstead tube station, offering a route across six railway tracks used by Chiltern Railways and London Underground."

A memory of the days when you could explore Lubenham station

Lubenham railway station used to stand just to the north of this bridge at the western end of the village. It closed, along with the rest of the Market Harborough to Rugby line, in 1966.

It's all fenced off now, but in 1973 you could wander up what had been the station approach and explore its remains. What I remember most is that one of the platforms looked as though it had just been resurfaced.

And that may well have been done just before the station closed. Matthew Engel, in his history and survey of the state of Britain's railways Eleven Minutes Late, published in 2009, records an incident at another station on this line, Clifton Mill:

The departments of British Railways didn't talk to one another. David St John Thomas noted that some of the maddest acts of all came because the commercial and engineering departments failed to communicate.

"During the 1950s several branch lines were extensively relaid or resignalled shortly before closure. At one station - Clifton Mill [in Warwickshire] - the office was actually being enlarged to take a new stove, which had just arrived, two days before total closure."

Bob Willis in Australia 1970/1

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In my tribute to Bob Willis I wrote that he had been

plucked from the obscurity of Surrey seconds to join a victorious Ashes tour under Ray Illingworth in 1970/1.

Matthew Engel tells the story more fully:

Willis made his debut for Surrey in 1969, but was still nowhere near a regular first-teamer by November 1970. Suddenly, aged 21 and expecting to spend the winter keeping goal for the Corinthian-Casuals football team, he was called out to Australia as a replacement. 

The England captain, Ray Illingworth, had never seen Willis play, but he said he wanted someone scary even if wayward, and the Surrey batsman John Edrich told him Willis was the man. 

There was no eight for 43 or anything like it, but he played four Tests, came second in the bowling averages, took some fine catches, helped regain the Ashes and generally made a good impression with his youthful zest.

In the picture above Willis is dismissing Greg Chappell, also playing his first series, through a gully catch by Edrich.

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Richard Kemp says the Liberal Democrat conference was right to reject the more fanciful elements on Vince Cable's supporters scheme - in fact they should never have been put forward.

"If you are upwardly mobile from a poor background, you have to learn how to fit in. If you are posh, you don’t. You glide from school to Oxbridge to the city or bar all the time surrounded by like-minded people so you know the rules. The upshot is that in the unusual contingency of ever being outside of that environment – as Cox was in Brussels – you put your foot in it." Chris Dillow explains why class matters.

Douglas Murray makes a strong case for prosecuting Bloody Sunday's ‘Soldier F’.

"The lingering belief that it can have it all is precisely what’s so repellent about modern Australia. Because it has come at a terrible cost." Matthew Engel is falling out of love with the country.

"Twenty years on from The Beatles - with synth-pop, dance music and hip-hop still largely niche affairs - the big hitters of the sixties and seventies hit their forties, and because mainstream rock radio was essentially conservative, they kept getting play and selling albums." Dave Holmes introduces us to DivorceCore music.

David Behrens on the rediscovery of the Sheaf - the river buried under Sheffield city centre.

Matthew Engel revisits the d'Oliveira Affair

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The story of how Basil d'Oliveira was omitted from the England party to tour South Africa in 1967/8 after scoring 158 in the last test of the summer, apparently because the Apartheid government would object to his selection, has been told many times.

As Matthew Engel writes for the Guardian Sportsblog today:

It is impossible to know what happened in that selection meeting; everyone in the room is now dead. Was the chairman, Doug Insole, being honest when he said tortuously: "I think we have got better players"? Some cricket writers thought so. 

But Arlott, by now the Guardian correspondent, snorted: "No one of open mind will believe that he was left out for valid cricket reasons."

Engel revisits this 50-year-old controversy because he has a new theory to share:

No, there is another explanation, rarely spoken out loud. The clue lay in another omission from that squad: the rumbustious opening bat, Colin "Ollie" Milburn. In the fallout that followed D’Oliveira’s omission, hardly anyone noticed that Milburn had been displaced by the far less gifted [Roger] Prideaux. 

Only a few months earlier, England had been in West Indies, another alcoholic tour. Ollie was master of the revels. Dolly – a teetotaller until he came to England – was a regular accomplice. This was noted in managerial reports. Perhaps the selectors feared him being sloshed in South Africa, where government agents would have lurked, offering not honey-traps but beer-traps. A drunken Dolly in the cells would have made Vorster’s year. 

I am confident events in the Caribbean were at the heart of the secret. One selector confirmed this to me many years later. He may have been lying, to cover up something worse, but I don’t think so.

His theory certainly could be true. I have blogged myself about English cricket's relationship with drink, and you can imagine the English cricket authorities having a fit of morality and acting like a new housemaster determined to stamp out beastliness in the senior dorm.

But I suspect the reason for d'Oliveira's omission was a fear of how South Africa would react if he were selected. He was left out to save the tour.

This need not have been the result of a deep conspiracy, as Engel suggests. It could have just arisen from decent but unimaginative men trying to protect the game that had been their lives.

And the fact that all theories, including Engel's struggle to account for, is that when Tom Cartwright, a seam bowler, withdrew through injury, it was d'Oliveira (very much a batsman who bowled) who was called up in his place, leading the the cancellation of the tour.

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Ruth Bright find the Liberal Democrats still have a long way to go to achieve gender balance: "I was shocked by the ... balance of male and female Lib Dem councillors on the counties."

"Ferenc Takács is a retired professor of English in Budapest, witty, urbane and past-caring enough to go on the record. 'The worst feature is the general fear in the country,' he told me. 'People won’t express views on Facebook. Teachers are afraid to say critical things about their head teacher or the government.' Matthew Engel has been to Viktor Orbán's Hungary.

"How far will the West go in deserting the Syrian Kurds in their struggle against the Turkish Islamic Ogre?" asks Renaud Girard.

Lorraine Boissoneault on Ted Kennedy, Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

A London Inheritance looks back to the Festival of Britain.

"The stories about the making of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance are almost as infamous as the movie itself," says Dangerous Minds.

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The Pin Prick looks at the influence of Big Sugar on Brexit: "During the 2016 referendum Tate and Lyle Sugars was one of the few big companies to support Leave and this year sponsored the Brexit heavy Conservative Party Conference, a move branded ‘disgraceful’ by British farmers."

Policy wonks want to nudge people to do the right thing, but Tim Harford warns that the same techniques can be used to encourage people to do the wrong thing.

"What Jim Henson’s fantastic creations capture perfectly is Dickens’s interest in the ludicrous and absurd details of seemingly everyday appearances." Emma Curry argues that The Muppet Christmas Carol is best Dickens adaptation ever.

The other day Talking Pictures TV showed The Intruder, a 1953 film that makes an interesting companion piece to another Jack Hawkins film, The League of Gentlemen. dfordoom describes it as "Not quite a crime film, not quite a war film, but an interesting hybrid."

Matthew Engel has heard enough from Geoffrey Boycott.

Where to begin with British psychogeography cinema? Adam Scovell has some ideas.

York Liberal Democrats back devolution for the whole of Yorkshire

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Good news from The Press:

Councillors in York have backed a Yorkshire devolution deal covering the biggest possible geography, despite pushes from the Tory group to abandon the "One Yorkshire" bid in favour of a smaller "Greater Yorkshire" deal. 

Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green councillors together out-voted the Conservatives on the ruling administration, and approved a motion which "recognises the potential advantages of a 'One Yorkshire' deal." 

The "One Yorkshire" proposals sprang out of talks over the summer between 17 local authorities across Yorkshire, but has not been backed by ministers because of an earlier deal struck with councils in South Yorkshire.

As Matthew Engel once pointed out, central government monkeys about with local government boundaries in a way the US States would never tolerate. It is a reminder of how centralised Britain is.

Therefore supporting the resurrection of the whole of Yorkshire is a reassertion of democracy and identity, not just an exercise in nostalgia.

Though, of course, in modern time Yorkshire was always split into three ridings for local government purposes. York, incidentally, was never part of any of them.

The Greater Yorkshire deal in South Yorkshire was meant to bring in parts of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire too, but those councils pulled out of it. Now the whole thing seems to have fallen apart.

Matthew Engel on the existential crisis of cricket (and me on the President of the MCC's buttocks)

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Matthew Engel has a magnificent polemic on the state of cricket in today's Guardian:

This is not the game that enraptured me when I was six years old. Nor the game I have written about happily for much of my adult life. 

I don’t care about the St Lucia Zouks. And I won’t care about whatever names the 12-year‑olds in marketing invent for the new made-up teams when the existing English Twenty20 is engulfed by yet another new competition in the years ahead. 

This wretched idea was sold to the county chairmen by bribery – an annual £1.3m sweetener per county – with a tacit undercurrent of threat.

My only interest – in common with many other cricket lovers – is the hope that the damnable thing is a total flop and that we can somehow save the game I once adored, and still love more than the people who have seized control of it.

Do read the whole thing.

You can argue that Twenty20 has led to batsmen being more aggressive and even inventing new shots. And leg spin has returned - if only because every bowler gets caned now.

But there have been greater losses. Few batsmen now seem equipped technically or mentally to play a substantial defensive innings. And I have heard Graeme Swann say that a spinner who has grown up keeping things tight in limited overs cricket has no idea how to take wickets if he is thrown the ball in the fourth innings of a first class match.

At the heart of cricket's crisis - and Peter Tinniswood's Brigadier did once accuse Engel of fomenting revolution in concert with Vic Marks - is money.

As I wrote in my Liberal Democrat News column as long ago as 2004:

People think the cricket authorities are stuffy, but really they are the most shamelessly commercial administrators of all. There are now logos on the players' clothing and painted on the field of play. For the right price you could probably get your company's slogan tattooed on the President of the MCC's buttocks.

Engel asks:

When did you last see a group of children (public schools and Asian community partially excepted) playing cricket without an adult?

For me, I think it was in the summer of 2005 as England finally won back the Ashes and the authorities decided to sell the rights to screen future tests to Sky.

It was 40 years ago today: The Centenary Test

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In one corner of the Hilton, Don Bradman broke bread with England's Bodyline attack. In another, 84-year-old Percy Fender, when reminded that in 1930 he had doubted Bradman's ability to succeed in the lushness of England, ruefully replied: "An indiscretion of youth." 

On the concourses of the MCG, scoreboard nameplates of old greats hung, exuding history. On match morning, 18 past captains were paraded on the ground, Ian Chappell in a green safari suit. Well, it was the '70s.

40 years ago tonight, the Centenary Test began in Melbourne. Australia and England came together for a one-off game to mark the 100th anniversary of the first Ashes test.

It was a great occasion and the cricket lived up to it. Australia won by 45 runs, just as they had done a century before.

But for a long time it looked as though they were going to make the 463 runs needed to win in the last innings.

Derek Randall scored a wonderful 174, interspersing his clowning with ravishing strokes. I remember, listening in the small hours, hearing John Arlott quoting Shakespeare:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.

But though Mike Brearley, Dennis Amiss, Tony Greig and Alan Knott all passed 40, no one was able to give him enough support for England to win. The scorecard is on Cricinfo.

Randall won Man of the Match, but an account of the test by Greg Baum suggests Dennis Lillee's performance in defying illness and injury to take 11 wickets in the match was greater:

[Rodney] Marsh protests to this day that though Randall made the match, Lillee won it.

Lillee did not tour England in the summer of 1977 and England, by then captained by Brearley because Greig's involvement with Kerry Packer had been revealed, won back the Ashes.

And Derek Randall never quite had the career that that innings in Melbourne promised. A few years later Matthew Engel was to suggest that there were three rules for new selectors:

Don't have more than two glasses of port after dinner, don't interrupt the Chairman of Selectors and if in doubt drop Randall.

Matthew Engel foresees the strange death of Labour England

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Labour is in many ways clueless, disunited and perhaps in terminal decline. Whatever happens in the by-elections, it faces another crisis in the mayoral elections in May: the Tories are now favourites to win in Birmingham and there are worries even about Corbyn’s former rival Andy Burnham in Manchester.

Last summer I reviewed Engel's England, in which Matthew Engel visited all 39 English counties.

He has been on his travels again, visiting the Labour campaign in Stoke-on-Trent Central for the Financial Times. He found it in an almost comically suspicious of him:

Even before I left home, Chris Lee, the Labour party’s press officer in the Stoke-on-Trent Central constituency, made it clear that the Financial Times would not be allowed to interview their candidate in this month’s by-election. Nor could I accompany their canvassers on the streets. 

On arrival, the restrictions were tightened. I could not talk to any other Labour members either. Asked if it was OK to speak to anyone at all in Stoke-on-Trent, Lee seemed to think it over before concluding that might be a problem.

He need not have worried. The Labour campaign is also inept, so these restrictions soon fell apart.

Engel also offers an interesting analysis of the reasons for this long-term decline, quoting Mark Seddon:

“Within the party the soft middle-class drifted away over Iraq. The hard left stayed and fought their corner,” says Seddon. Thus, a decade later, the left had the numbers in the constituencies to elect Corbyn."

Book review: Engel's England by Matthew Engel

Engel's England: Thirty-nine counties, one capital and one man
Matthew Engel
Profile Books, 2015, £9.99

When I was a small boy one of my favourite things was a wooden jigsaw of England and Wales, where each piece was an individual county and the pieces were decorated with little pictures showing the local industries.

It is very much that England that Matthew Engel sets off to look for in this book. Rarely does he find it, but he is an amiable companion and Engel's England is a likeable book.

I first came across Engel as the Guardian’s cricket correspondent. He reminds be particularly of the summer of 1985 when David Gower batted and batted and England won back the Ashes. He writes on a wider range of subjects these days and the travel book format certainly suits him.

Here he is in Norfolk:

Norwich is more than just a county town, more like a capital. It evens feels like a capital, of an agreeable and small Continental country: all those huddled, companionable streets with Dutch gables – plus repulsive modern additions that hint at a phase of joyless Communism. A bit like somewhere round the Baltic, maybe. 

There are many good things in the book and places Engel makes you want to visit. Farleigh, an unspoilt village four miles from the centre of Croydon. Barrow-in-Furness, where he seeks and finds the England of Coronation Street. Dungeness, which is “not everyone’s cup of tea,” as a resident tells him, but is mine.

Talking of places I know well, in Leicestershire Engel covers the obvious subjects of multicultural Leicester and fox hunting, but he gains bonus points for getting to Breedon on the Hill. He does better in Rutland, where he meets the indefatigable blogger Martin Brookes.

When he gets to Shropshire there is a lamentable failure to write about derelict lead mines, and his sociology of the south of the county is awry. Bishop’s Castle was a centre of the counter culture two decades before London foodies discovered Ludlow.

Few places are treated unfairly. I would suggest the east side of Derbyshire (the Derwent Valley is a marvel), Birmingham and Swindon, where has more to it – the Great Western Railway, Richard Jefferies, Don Rogers – than the Magic Roundabout.

And in Buckinghamshire, after being half seduced by Eton, he is damning of the county’s selective secondary education. Hell hath no fury like a privately educated Guardian journalist confronted by a grammar school.

Before he return to his adopted home of Herefordshire for the final chapter, Engel takes us to London. In his discussion of the way the capital dominates our national life, and the way it is being remade by foreign monies, he makes important points.

Local boundaries have been rubbed out or redrawn in a way that would be simply unthinkable in the more federal United States. My jigsaw, for instance, can be dated to between 1965, when Huntingdonshire absorbed the Soke of Peterborough, and 1974, when it was itself absorbed into Cambridgeshire.

Some counties have resisted their erasure from history, notably Yorkshire (the largest) and Rutland (the smallest). Elsewhere Berkshire is fading from memory and no one seems to have heard of Huntingdonshire at all.

Soon it will be as lost as the Cotswold county of Winchcombeshire from the 10th and 11th centuries.

The surprising history of walking in cricket

Though it wasn't the only incident of its type in the first test, Stuart Broad's decision not to walk after edging a catch and being given not out by the umpire gave rise to a lot of outraged comment.

A good example was Charles Crawford on The Commentator - which has nothing to do with cricket, but is a blog of right-wing opinion.

Crawford wrote:

In earlier years it was part of the moral code of cricket that a batsman ‘walked’ (ie left the field without waiting for any formal umpire decision) when he knew that he had been caught out. He would not want to take unfair advantage by continuing to bat.

And:

...the spirit of our times is being redefined and dumbed down before our very eyes. Stuart Broad yesterday joined that swinish charge. It’s not about what is right or decent or fair or reasonable. It’s what you can get away with.

Yet the history of walking in cricket is more nuanced than Crawford believes.

The other day Backwatersman who a) writes Go Litel Blog, Go…, which all cricket lovers should read, and b) lives across the road from me, turned up a 1966 article by E.W. Swanton on just this subject.

Backwatersman calls Swanton the "Pope of Cricket", and if you doubt the status he held in the game, here is Matthew Engel contributing to Swanton's Guardian obituary in January 2000:

It is hard now to convey the influence he wielded in his prime. Perhaps only a thundering Times leader in the mid-19th century carried as much weight at Westminster as Swanton's pronouncements did at Lord's. But he was doubly influential; he was so deeply involved in the inner counsels of the MCC that what he said in private mattered as much as what he said in print.

In his post, Backwatersman quotes Swanton's views on walking - from 1966, remember:

Yet this is a new thing, and old cricketers in the Press-box out here such as J.H. Fingleton, W.J. O’Reilly, A.R. Gover and others fortify my own conviction that before the war the batsman waited almost invariably for the decision. Jack Hobbs, for instance, regarded as the beau ideal of a sportsman, always waited: so did a man of an equally highly considered integrity in the other camp, Charlie Macartney.

Not only that, Swanton goes on to cite four reasons why the practice of walking may not be good for the game. Behind them is the suspicion that some batsmen were careful to cultivate a reputation for walking when it did not matter so that they good fool the umpire by staying put when it did matter.

As so often, the appeal to a Golden Age proves problematic when you look at the evidence more closely.

Two scenes from jobsworth Britain

A couple of articles I have read recently display the reality of life, and in particular of travelling by public transport, in today's Britain.

Writing for the Financial Times, Matthew Engel describes a week spent exploring the country by train:

If you think well of Britain’s railway companies for a second, they will turn round and prove you wrong. Standing on Leeds station, I was struck by a big double TV screen showing that all the trains for the next hour or two – about 50 of them – were allegedly on time. I thought this was magnificent enough to be worth a picture and whipped out my camera. 

Up strutted a junior jobsworth, full of institutional paranoia and his own importance, to denounce me as a potential terrorist. “Show me those pictures!” “Why?” “You could be photographing the pipes!”

And in the Guardian Simon Hoggart:

The other day I was on a bus ... when an inspector got on. She was a kindly woman, but had to go through the routine, so when it turned out that a girl of around 11, who was going to the dentist with her mother, had the wrong photopass, she settled down for a long session. 

It was quickly clear what had happened – the lass had accidentally picked up her brother's pass and he had doubtless taken hers to school. You'd think a breezy "better check next time" would have sorted it all out, but of course that's not possible. 

The inspector had to take names and addresses, impound the pass, issue instructions on how to avoid a fine, how to reapply for the next pass, issue a temporary pass for the remainder of the day even though it would be weeks before the replacement arrived. 

We were stuck in traffic and it must have taken 20 minutes to do it all, leaving a clearly not wealthy family out of pocket and mired in endless paperwork.

We Britons used to congratulate ourselves on not having to submit to such petty tyranny. For instance, I grew up with the firm idea that not having to carry an identity card was part of our reward for having won the war.

Why did this change come about? And how do we reverse it?

Graham Roope

Graham Roope, the former England batsman and notable slip fielder, has died at the age of 60.

When I was young, he was one those batsman (Peter Parfitt, John Hampshire, Frank Hayes) who would regularly be picked for a couple of tests and then be dropped, only to reappear again a couple of series later.

A few years after that, Matthew Engel suggested that there were three rules for new selectors:

• Never interrupt the Chairman of Selectors;
• Don't have more than two glasses of port after dinner;
• If in doubt, drop Randall.

Roope suffered from a similar attitude on the part of the selectors.

Cricinfo, as ever, has the best obituary. It records that he was batting at the other end when Geoff Boycott completed his 100th century during the Headlingley test in 1977. What it doesn't say (and the story in confirmed by the Craven Herald) is that he was also batting with John Edrich when the Surrey opener reached the same landmark that season.

Uncanny, wasn't it?