Post Office claimed North Kilworth woman stole nearly £2000 after her branch closed

If you thought you'd heard it all about the Post Office Horizon scandal, here's a news story from Harborough FM:

A former Harborough sub-postmaster was accused of stealing nearly £2,000 after the Horizon computer system reported a shortfall despite her Post Office being closed for a year.

The small branch in North Kilworth shut at the start of the pandemic in 2020, because it could not be adapted for social distancing.

Julie Beisner checked her accounts on the computer before closing the doors, which showed they were balanced.

After deciding to retire and close the office a year later before it re-opened, Post Office officials attended to complete a final audit on the system, which indicated a shortfall of £1,970.

Julie Beisner told the radio station that she suffered numerous problems with the system and estimates she paid £3,000 to Post Office to cover alleged shortfalls over the years. She described the experience as "traumatic" and said it showed there were still issues with Horizon even in 2021.

It makes you wonder just how many people have been robbed by the Post Office.

Harborough less affected by boundary changes than expected

HFM News has the news about the Boundary Commission's final proposals for Leicestershire. The idea of a radical redrawing of boundaries within the county has been dropped, with the result that the Harborough constituency will keep its spine of Oadby, Wigston, Kibworth and Market Harborough.

As the trend has been at many boundary views now, the proposals would mean more villages will be moved into other constituencies. 

Fleckney, Saddington, Husbands Bosworth and the Kilworths would move into the South Leicestershire constituency, while villages in the north of the District, along with Hallaton and Melbourne, would become part of a new Rutland and Stamford constituency.

I'm happy to see this. The original proposal was that the Harborough constituency would have the same boundaries as the Harborough local government district. But that is a swathe of rural Leicestershire with few transport links.

Keeping the traditional Harborough constituency much as it is will also encourage the Liberal Democrats. In 2005 we came within 4000 votes of winning here, and these boundary changes look favourable to us.

All we have to do now is return the Labour Party to third place and establish ourselves the clear challengers once more,

You can read the final proposals for Leicestershire and make your comments on the county council website.

Stolen narrow boat retrieved after low-speed chase

From the Leicester Mercury:

A stolen narrow boat was boarded by officers after possibly the slowest police chase ever encountered.

The tension, for police and suspects alike, must have been unbearable as the 13-mile 'pursuit' unfolded earlier today on the Grand Union Canal.

It ended up being a cross-county border affair - at speeds of up to 4mph - as officers with Leicestershire's Harborough Police teamed up with Northamptonshire colleagues to bring the incident to a safe conclusion.

The photo above shows North Kilworth in Leicestershire, where the boat was stolen. Contrary to the hope expressed by one of my Twitter followers, the police did not give chase in a pedalo.

People behind Lutterworth's Church of Pain revealed

Yesterday Lutterworth's Church of Pain won the Leicester Mercury our prestigious Headline of the Day Award.

Today that same paper solved the mystery over who put it up:

Two teenagers, Aaliyah Louw and Joseph Blackmore, both 17, decided to build the structure after coming across the fly-tipped bricks on August 16.

Aaliyah, from Lutterworth, said: "It was starting to rain, and we didn't want to walk any further and were a getting bored, so we decided to just build a small shelter for a laugh.

"Then we just found the sticks that were kind of in the shape of a cross, and put it on top.

"There wasn't really any other motivation behind it, other than wanting to have some fun."

Aaliyah said that her and Joseph spent about an hour-and-a-half building the structure in the rain, and some of the walls had to be reinforced because they kept falling down during construction.

Top sleuthing by Maia Snow, but it doesn't explain why South Kilworth, which is on the way to Lutterworth from here, has a House of Pain.

How the Royal Implement Works became The House of Pain

I was taken with this brick building on the main road in North Kilworth, and a helpful web page explains its history:

The Ball family has worked in the village for nearly two centuries and in the 19th century set up the Royal Implement Works. This was a hive of industry employing over 50 people making carriages, carts, wagons, specialist vans and agricultural implements. Many of their goods went to the Royal estates at Sandringham and Windsor. 

That doesn't explain the sign for The House of Pain though.

Looking for Welford and Kilworth Station

By Lamberhurst [CC BY-SA 4.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons

Between North Kilworth Wharf and the village there used to be a railway station. Welford and Kilworth stood where the Market Harborough to Rugby line crossed the main road.

When I went to look for it on Saturday I had a feeling that there had been a lot of the station left to see years after its closure in 1966. 

By chance I met an old friend this week, and he recalled photographing its remains in the late 1980s, when you could still see the concrete lampposts that appear in the picture above.

You can find the station site easily enough today as the trackbed on either side of the old level crossing is still in use as a private road.

I though I was being fanciful in hoping the building in the photograph below was left over from the station's goods yard, but in fact it is.

You can see its distinctive roof in the background of the photograph of the station above.

On my shelves I found a copy of Recollections of Country Station Life by Harry Aland, who worked at Welford and Kilworth for many years.

He writes:

Mr Double, the Station Master, was another enthusiastic gardener and his private garden was a show-piece. He used to grow large quantities of tomatoes in the open, with corrugated zinc sheets behind the plants to trap the sun. He had wonderful crops and was able to sell some to the staff, as well as to the drivers and firemen.

And inside the slim book I found a review I had clipped from the Harborough Mail in 1981, which shows traffic waiting at the station level crossing.

North Kilworth and the landscape of middle-class affluence

When I blogged about the Erewash Canal at Long Eaton, I said I looked for shabby charm on the canals.

There is still some of that on the Grand Union at North Kilworth, but it is already dominated by the new marina that is being constructed there.

Like a modern golf course, this is the contrived landscape of middle-class affluence.

Such developments are inevitable given the popularity of canal cruising today, but they are hard to love. Perhaps it will look better when it is finished and hosting hundreds of boats.

My perceptions must be warped by having had childhood canal holidays in the days when they were still unusual and rather adventurous.

I remember this Leicester Line of the Grand Union in 1971 - my last middle-class summer for many years. It was choked with weed and my father had to stop the boat every few miles to free the propeller.

Later my stepfather was to moor his boat at North Kilworth, though I don't think I ever visited him there.

I had a chat with the woman in the office at the wharf there and played with the dog until it decided it had won the game and held on to the ball.

Is there a complex set of rules they play to which we have never worked out?

 

North Kilworth beyond the main road

I don't know if it is more true of this part of the world than anywhere else, but in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire the centre of villages are often bypassed by the main roads.

I am not thinking of modern bypasses, just the A roads that were established a couple of centuries ago.

Take North Kilworth. I have always known it as a pub and a few houses on the way to the M1, But having used Google Street View the other evening, I realised there was much more to see.

So I caught the 58 bus - one of Harborough's three threatened services - there today and took these photographs.