Milton Keynes, Peter Pan, Michael Collins, The Seapoint Tragedy and James Joyce

Last night The Year is 1971 posted these TV listing from Tuesday 15 June of that year, pointing out that:

Last week saw the last of the first series of And Mother Makes Three, this Tuesday it is replaced with the start of the fourth series of Father Dear Father.

But for some reason my attention was caught by the late-night programme on Thames:

11.30 Living Architects: Lord Llewelyn-Davies

Llewelyn-Davies? Could he be related to the Llewelyn-Davies boys who were adopted by the dramatist J.M. Barrie. This was relationship depicted in the film Finding Neverland, where Barrie was played by Johnny Depp, and the BBC drama serial J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, where he was superlatively played by Ian Holm. (The whole series is on YouTube and you can buy the DVD for a few pounds.)

It turns out that Richard Llewelyn-Davies the architect was their cousin. His father and the boys' father were brothers.

That Wikipedia entry also reveals that the architectural practice founded by Lord Llewelyn-Davies was responsible for the master planning of Milton Keynes. As this involved the new city being built around the motor car, it was very much of its period.

But Richard Llewelyn-Davies' mother is more interesting than his father.

Moya Llewelyn-Davies was born Moya O'Connor, the daughter of the Irish nationalist MP James O'Connor. She was herself politically active, raising funds for Sir Roger Casement's legal defence and then campaigning for the commutation of his death sentence.

After the Easter Rising she provided a safe house for Michael Collins. It seems they became lovers, but the rumour that Collins was Richard's father was untrue.

And, as a little girl, Moya survived a dreadful calamity that destroyed her family. Choosing the Green tells the story:

John O’Connor  was a well-known journalist and Nationalist politician. He was the M.P. of West Wicklow and a family man who had a loving wife and five young children. This seemingly adoring family was torn apart when almost all of them were fatally poisoned. Only John O’Connor and one of his daughters survived.

The family story says that his children were sent to collect mussels on the seaside, but they decided to choose them from a pool closer to home instead. That pool was contaminated and when the family consumed the mussels, they were all killed. Moya, one of the daughters, did not join them for food due to a random (and lucky for her) family disagreement but O’Connor’s wife, his four other children, and one of their servants died shortly after the meal. The family is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery and their grave is massive and beautiful.

That brings us to another author of the period. The Facebook page for the cemetery says:

The Seapoint Tragedy, as it became known, shocked the people of Dublin and was spoken about for years. James Joyce, whose dad Stanislaus was at the funeral, immortalized it in his Ulysses when Bloom says: "Poor man O'Connor’s wife and five children poisoned by mussels here. The sewage."

It's a long way from Milton Keynes to Ulysses, but somewhere in here must be our Trivial Fact of the Day.

And to return to Father Dear Father, my readers may recall that its star, Patrick Cargill, was the uncle of the Surrey and England cricketer Robin Jackman.

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"I’ve spent much of the past several years reporting on political psychology, asking the country’s foremost experts on human behaviour some variation of, 'What the hell is going on in the United States?'" Now Brian Resnick shares the fruits of his research.

Lions led by pro Mini Golfers? Otto English discovers what Ukip's gay donkey rape man is doing now. In Lewisham.

Nicholas Whyte finds David Goodhart's The Road to Somewhere an annoying book.

"Like many men his age, Dad was raised by a mother who did everything for him, and then he was passed to a wife who seamlessly took over. The result was that Dad never learned how to fend for himself." Stuart Heritage on our changing conception of masculinity.

A London Inheritance takes us to the University of London Senate's House - an impressive building that could have been even more so.

Steven Spielberg has been retelling the story of Peter Pan from the start of his career, says John Dilillo. He argues that Catch Me If You Can is a better and more faithful adaptation than Hook.

At last an anthem for Brexit

We have been told. When Brexit goes horribly wrong it will be the fault of us Remainers for not getting behind the project.

"Every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead," as Peter Pan put it.

What we need is a song we can all sing to show our for support Brexit. And I have found it.

My God, have I found it.



I know England Swings from a sweet version by Roger Miller, but this is, er, different. You wonder if the Bonzos were familiar with Patty Duke's oeuvre when they came up with Cool Britannia.

She, incidentally, won an Oscar for her portrayal of Helen Keller in 1962 and is the mother of the well-known hobbit Sean Astin.

Later. I have just shown the video to Lord Bonkers. He remarked: "Guardsmen and male dancers? It reminds me of St James's after dark."

Peter Pan Goes Wrong: The funniest thing on TV this Christmas

Charlie Brooker's 2016 Screenwipe was as much a wake for liberalism as a comedy, and I have not watched Cunk on Christmas properly yet.

But my vote for the funniest programme on television this Christmas goes to Peter Pan Goes Wrong.

Stage productions do not often benefit from being transferred to the small screen, but this was a triumphant exception.

David Ralf's review for The Stage gets it right:

While there’s a slightly feverish sense that Mischief Theatre have tried to cram every joke from the stage show into this one-hour slot, it does mean that the gag rate is exceptionally high, and the camera catches the exquisite and excruciating details of the company’s physical comedy that might be missed from the stalls ... 

A well-judged prerecorded opening segment introduces each of the characters – delivering plenty of laughs in its own right – and sets the stage for other recorded incursions, including a climactic runaway pirate ship gag which demonstrates just how involved and good-humoured the Corporation were in adapting the show for this one-off broadcast.

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Caron's Musings finds the Liberal Democrats in a pickle over porn: "The truly bizarre thing is that the amendment that was selected is, incredibly, even worse than the main motion. It imposes a bulky bureaucracy that will have very little effect and, does not prioritise education. Why are we thinking that we can just leave it to machines and technology to sort out our warped and unhealthy attitude to sex?"

A new report from the Adam Smith Institute explains why the government's Help to Buy scheme will stoke a housing bubble by boosting demand without doing anything for supply and risk taxpayer money in the process.

Zelo Street reports that Nadine Dorries has been offered a six figure sum to write a trilogy of autobiographical novels.

"He is much concerned that the secret world has become 'the spiritual home' of the British political establishment, an upper clergy that is 'pernicious' and 'widely spread'. Philippe Sands interviews John Le Carré for the FT Magazine.

Archaeologists from the University of Maryland and Morgan State University have uncovered evidence that the first free black community in the US was established as early as 1790 by former slaves who had bought their freedom. Read more on Can You Dig It?

Londonist remembers the day Peter Pan was tarred and feathered.

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The 'Gotcha' style of questioning favoured by John Humphrys damages democracy, argues Robert Sharp on Liberal Conspiracy.

Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell brings psychotherapy to bear on relations between the parties: "Viewed through the prism of Transactional Analysis, it is no surprise that the LibDem-Labour coalition negotiations failed, but the Conservatives and the LibDems managed to strike a business-like agreement."

Germany offers the best model for the successful adoption of renewable energy, argues Osha Gray Davidson in an interview with AlterNet.

"As a child in Bristol in the 1970s, apart from school, mealtimes and the odd bit of telly (mostly Blue Peter!) my life from aged 7-11 essentially consisted of what experts now call ‘free play’. Although I was very lucky to have access to woods and gardens, much of this play took place in less-than-bucolic surroundings – car-parks, estates, disused patches of land and on the street. This didn’t matter. What mattered was having some freedom to roam and to just ‘be’, to call on friends and hang out with other kids, to be away from the adult world and to create our own." Playing Out on the importance of free play - and Peter Pan.

Duncan Stephen on the curious case of Joyce Hatto - who turned out not to be "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of".

"In the sixties and seventies when these pictures were taken, every street corner that was not occupied by a pub was home to a shop offering groceries and general supplies to the residents of the immediate vicinity. The owners of these small shops took on mythic status as all-seeing custodians of local information, offering a counterpoint to the pub as a community meeting place for the exchange of everybody’s business." Spitalfields Life has a selection of Tony Hall's photographs of East End shops.

J. M. Barrie and Peter Pan

I am watching Alan Yentob's Imagine... programme on J. M. Barrie and Peter Pan.

He has interviewed Andrew Birkin, who wrote the 1978 television plays The Lost Boys. And if you are interested in the background to this tale, there is no better place to go than Birkin's website.

The sharp elbows of the aristocracy

When in November 2000 Judith Keppel became the first person to win the top prize on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? there were those who grumbled that she was too posh. And being posh is just about the worst sin imaginable in New Britain

But in this case "posh" was not being used to mean educated as, shockingly, it so often is. Because Keppel really is posh. She is granddaughter of the ninth Earl of Albermarle and great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel, the mistress of the Prince of Wales (who became Edward VII).

She is even a distant cousin of Camilla Parker Bowles, or the Duchess of Cornwall as we must now call her.

Yes, it is nicer when someone who obviously needs the money wins a big prize, as this rather prissy Guardian editorial pointed out at the time. But it is hard to begrudge Keppel her winnings. I am afraid that until socialism has been established educated people will continue to enjoy an unfair advantage in quizzes.

What no one mentioned at the time was that there is a precedent for someone with aristocratic connections winning a big TV quiz prize.

In 1957 Lady Cynthia Asquith, the wife of Herbert Asquith (second son of the Liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith), won the pioneering ITV quiz The $64,000 Question. It is hard to find out much about the show in general (there is a little information here), but thanks to the miracle of the internet it is possible to discover four of the questions Lady Cynthia answered to win her prize.

Colin Clifford's book The Asquiths tells us that Cynthia Asquith was born Cynthia Charteris, the daughter of the Earl of Wemyss. She became well known as a novelist and writer of ghost stories and was a friend of both D. H. Lawrence and, says Wikipedia, L. P. Hartley. (Herbert, incidentally, was known as Beb and once dined with Lord Bonkers - see Monday.)

Cynthia also worked as secretary to J. M. Barrie, revealing a talent for winning money long before she became a TV star. She persuaded Barrie to alter his will in her favour on his deathbed. The result was that the considerable earnings from his estate went to her rather than to the three surviving Llewelyn Davies boys whom he had adopted.

The story of these boys and their role in the genesis of Peter Pan is well known. It was told in the recent film Finding Neverland and also in Andrew Birkin's trilogy of plays The Lost Boys from 1978, with their superlative performance by Ian Holm as Barrie, and his later book J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys.

If you want to know the depth of Cynthia Asquith's infamy, you should visit the wonderful website Birkin maintains. Click on Davies Family on the lefthand side, then Nico on the right and then Nico's letters to Andrew Birkin 1975-1978 in the middle.

If you scroll down to the letter dated 1975-12-05 and you will read:

When Uncle Jim got really ill, and was not expected to last the night, Peter made the Greatest Mistake of his Life and telephoned her down in Devon or Cornwall. She hired a car and motored through the night. Meanwhile Peter, I and General Freyberg went on watch - 8 to 12, 12 to 4, 4 to 8 am - each of us expecting to see JMB die. Cynthia arrived towards the end of Bernard Freyberg's watch ... still alive ... got hold of surgeon Horder and solicitor Poole with the will ... Horder gave an injection, and sufficient energy was pumped into Uncle Jim so that he could put his name to the will that Poole laid before him ...
Believe it or not, much as I would have relished the money, the two things that broke my heart were firstly that I had no say in the reproduction of his plays - how I would have loved to be consulted in the casting and management of this play and that, all of which I knew so well and had watched so closely as JMB told the various actors what was in his mind etc etc: secondly that the relatively small amounts that were going to my daughter and others of her generation were removed. All very sad.

But then aristocratic families do not gain their wealth by behaving honourably. Except on TV quizzes, of course.