Last night's elections showed Lib Dem progress in Leicestershire

There was a Leicester City Council by-election yesterday in the Eyres Monsell ward. The result was as follows:

Labour: 53.2% (+10.6)
Lib Dem: 30.6% (+23.1)
Con: 16.3% (-1.9)

The slightly odd figures are caused by the disappearance of Ukip, who polled a quarter of the vote last time the vote was fought.

As Mark Pack reminds us, the was a ward the Lib Dems used to hold. That was in the days (2003-7) when we ran the city. So encouraging progress.

We also won a town council by-election in Earl Shilton, electing the town's first ever Lib Dem councillor with 68 per cent.

Mark Pack rightly counsels us against making too much of town council elections, and there is some debate about this in the comments on Lib Dem Voice too.

But from a purely Leicestershire point of view, last night was a good one for the Lib Dems.

Meanwhile, my love of trivial knowledge leads me to reveal that Earl Shilton has produced two obscure England seam bowlers - Les Taylor and Jimmy Ormond - and that Eyres Monsell was named after Patrick Leigh Fermor's father-in-law.

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Photo of Jumbo by
David Hawgood

We must pay more attention to the mental health needs of children, says Paul Burstow on Liberal Democrat Voice.

"Here was its former leadership sitting at a table with exactly the kind of moderate Muslims we are always being told fundamentalists and jihadis do not represent: democrats; secularists; universalists - defenders of what, for convenience, are often referred to as 'Western' values. But the reaction on much of the left has not been one of delight, but one of scorn and cynicism." Jacobinism writes about the recantation of the leaders of the English Defence League.

Annie Lowrey, in the New York Times, looks at the proposal for a basic income in Switzerland.

Jo Hayes tells us that Colchester's Jumbo water tower has been saved from insensitive redevelopment.

"It’s a terrible thing being a biographer," she said. "One is such a rat." Again in the New York Times, Artemis Cooper talks about her life Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Pints and Pubs introduces us to a new Cambridge pub: "There are a quarter of an acre of tunnels under Peas Hill which were fitted out and used as air raid shelters for 400 people during the War."

Marianne Faithfull and Patrick Leigh Fermor

Marianne Faithfull is recovering after breaking a bone in her back - I wish her a swift recovery.

We saw in March that her grandfather Theodore was the inventor of the libido-liberating Frigidity Machine. It turns out that Major Faithfull (he was commissioned in the Veterinary Corps) was also briefly Patrick Leigh Fermor's headmaster.

Artemis Cooper's biography records that at one point the young Fermor was sent to Walsham Hall, a school for 'difficult children', presided over by the same Major Faithfull. It also says that nude country dancing formed part of the curriculum.

Whether this made the children any less difficult she does not say.

Now read about Patrick Leigh Fermor at Weedon and how his father-in-law gave his name to a Leicester suburb.

How Eyres Monsell got its name

When Patrick Leigh Fermor died I mentioned that the Leicester suburb of Eyres Monsell is named after his father-in-law.

Artemis Cooper's biography of him, which I quoted from about Weedon the other day, says of Fermor's wife Joan:

Her mother, Sybil Eyres, had inherited a fortune in woollen manufacturing. On marriage, her husband Bolton Monsell added her name to his, becoming Bolton Eyres Monsell. He pursued a successful career in politics, holding the posts of Chief Whip for the Conservatives and First Lord of the Admiralty; he was created the 1st Viscount Monsell in 1935.

The land for Eyres Monsell was acquired by the corporation of Leicester for housing development by compulsory purchase order in the early 1950s.

Patrick Leigh Fermor at Weedon Bec

While in Shropshire I read Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure. Cooper has clearly succumbed to the Paddy Fermor legend, but the biography is so good that it provides ample material for readers to form a less favourable view.

Because of one of my recent days out, I was struck by the opening sentences:

The village of Weedon Bec in Northamptonshire was an unlikely setting for paradise, but for Patrick Leigh Fermor the years he spent there as a small child were among the happiest in his life. The people he lived with were not his family. While surrounding him with love and warmth, they imposed no constraints and made no demands.

This is typical of the strange arrangements that Empire required of children and parents - often with less happy results. Artemis Cooper is unable to establish the relationship between the young Paddy's parents in India and the Martin family in Weedon with whom he stayed.

But she does provide a good picture of the complicated geography of Weedon Bec:

It was a big village divided into three parts. The cottages and smallholdings of Upper Weedon were sunk in green fields. The church and village school were in Lower Weedon, whilst busiest of all was Road Weedon, which straddled the old turnpike between Northampton and Daventy. This was where the Martins lived, on the main road ... with shops and pubs on either side.

And she writes about the Royal Ordnance Depot:

Road Weedon was dominated by Weedon Barracks and the huge complex of the Royal Ordnance Depot. Set up for the storage of arms and ammunition during the Napoleonic wars far from possible landing sites on the coast, t had its own well-defended branch of the Grand Union Canal to secure safe delivery of its stores. ... 

When the First World War ended in November 1918 Paddy-Mike was almost four and Margaret almost twelve. They stood in the road and saw the German prisoners in carts on their way back to Germany - they wore rough grey uniforms with big red diamonds on their backs, so they would be easily identified if they tried to escape.

And her (and Fermor's) last word on the village is this:

His memories of Weedon became greener and more rural as they receded into the past. The Royal Ordnance Stores faded, as did the parade ground and the shops, the pubs and traffic of the High Street. 

What was left was "a background of barns, ricks and teazles, clouded with spinneys and the undulation of ridge and furrow ... I spent these important years, which are said to be such formative ones, more or less as a small farmer's child run wild: they have left a memory of pure and unalloyed bliss."

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"Welcome to Pyongyang" - Simon Titley, writing on Liberator's blog, mourns the overwhelming advantage enjoyed by incumbents in internal Liberal Democrat elections.

"Scientific research drives economic growth, innovation and improved wellbeing, yet science is underfunded and undervalued in the UK. Commitment to long-term investment in scientific research is crucial to keep our future economy strong and competitive." In the New Statesman Julian Huppert, Lib Dem MP for Cambridge, emphasises the importance of science to our economy  - and name checks Market Harborough's Nobel laureate William Bragg in the process.

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, in the New York Review of Books, look at the problem of rape in American prisons.

Artemis Cooper, in History Today, reflects on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s flexible approach to historical fact.

"Edith Nesbit does something much more special – something that only a tiny handful of truly great writers can do. She takes our world – the ordinary one of trains and coal and cooking and brothers and sisters and arguments and games – and she shows us that it too is fabulous." Frank Cottrell Boyce, writing on the Guardian Books Blog, looks at the magic of The Railway Children.

Sptialfields Life presents some photographs of Bow Cemetery in the snow.

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor 1915-2011

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor has died at the age of 96.

The New York Times says of him:

Once described by the BBC as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene,” Mr. Leigh Fermor was as renowned for his feats of derring-do as for his opulent prose.

After joining the Irish Guards during World War II, he was judged to be promising officer material for the Special Operations Executive, the unit created by Winston Churchill to wage war by unconventional means. Mr. Leigh Fermor’s superiors deemed his fluency in modern Greek useful in leading resistance to German occupation in the Aegean.

For 18 months he lived disguised as a shepherd in Crete, emerging from the mountains with a team that in 1944 kidnapped Gen. Heinrich Kreipe, the island’s German commander. The operation provoked brutal reprisals toward the local population. It earned Mr. Leigh Fermor the Distinguished Service Order and later became the basis for the 1957 English film “Ill Met by Moonlight,” directed by Michael Powell and starring Dirk Bogarde.

Latterly Leigh Fermor was best known as a travel writer, particularly for the two volumes - A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water - describing his journey as an 18-year-old across a Europe on the verge of war. The good news is that he did complete the final part of the trilogy and it will be published.

One trivial fact that will not make the obituaries is that there is a suburb of Leicester named after Leigh Fermor's father-in-law. Eyres Monsell is named after Bolton Eyres-Monsell, from whom the land upon which it is built was compulsorily purchased. His daughter Joan married Patrick Leigh Fermor.