Is The UK heading for divorce? An interview with James Hawes

I referred to James Hawes's The Shortest History of Ireland the other day, and I've just sent Liberator a review of the book by fast orphan. Here Hawes raises wider issues about the future of the United Kingdom, and he's well worth a listen.,

Among his insights are that "England", to the Conservative Party, ultimately means the South East of England and the elite institutions to which it is home. And that the Reform vote is not working class, but a vote for a more hard-line Tory party. I suspect, though, that a good chunk of it is the sort of protest vote that we Liberals used to benefit from.

A word too for Adrian Goldberg, who was one of the most welcome voices in the early day of BBC Radio 5.

The Alcopops panic and other booze of the Nineties

The latest edition of Miranda Sawyer's Talk '90s To Me podcast is well worth a listen. It provides a history of the changes that took place through the decade both in people's taste for drink and in the economics of the pub trade. Peter Brown is a well-informed guest.

As to the panic over children and alcopops, it was largely unfounded. They were expensive, and as underage drinkers take it up because they want to look more adult, a product that was packaged like a children's drink didn't attract them anyway. 

I remember alcopops as a good after-work drink before you got the train home on a Friday.

How Harold Godwinson got to the Battle of Hastings and all that

What if historians have got one of the most crucial assumptions about one of England’s most pivotal battles completely wrong?

asked the Guardian the other day. Its report continued:

That’s the claim of one British academic, who argues that the notorious "forced march" of the English army to Stamford Bridge – interpreted for centuries as a sign of Harold’s recklessness and a key factor in his defeat – in fact never happened at all.

What’s more, he believes that as well as their clash on land at Hastings ... Harold also attempted to resist William’s invasion by sea, sending ships to try to trap the Norman fleet in a pincer movement that was ultimately unsuccessful.

The academic is Tom Licence from the University of East Anglia, who presented his evidence at a conference in Oxford today.

His claim has caused controversy in the media, but if nothing else it has given me a good reason to recommend the podcast Gone Medieval. 

Professor Licence is the guest on the latest edition – 1066 New Discovery: The Myth of Harold's March – talking about the research that has led him to question the accepted wisdom.

Whether you are convinced by him or not, you will learn a great deal about the build up to the battle.

Oh, those Russians: Antony Beevor on Rasputin and the Romanovs

The British military historian Sir Antony Beevor is busy promoting his new book Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs. Here he in the guest on Jackson van Uden's History with Jackson podcast.

Not only did I love Sylvia by Focus when I was 12, I could name all the Romanov tsars in their correct order. I had developed a fascination with Russian history after reading Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie.

Sadly, that knowledge has been lost over the years, along with reams of chess opening theory and the ability to construct proofs in formal logic.

Barlow and Watt investigate Jack the Ripper

Last night I watched the film Murder by Decree on Talking Pictures TV. I've watched it several times because the cast and premise (Sherlock Holmes tracking down Jack the Ripper) are so appealing, and because I always forget how disappointing it is.

But Holmes was the not first fictional detective to investigate the Ripper murders. In 1973 the BBC screened a series in which the nation's most celebrated television detectives Charlie Barlow and John Watt, played by Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor.

It was this series that introduced the public to the theory that the Ripper had been the eldest son of the future Edward VII, Prince Albert Victor. Stephen Knight did not publish his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution until 1976.

The 1973 television series avoided turning these terrible murders into a parlour game – Martin Crookall describes its approach well:

The format is simple, level-headed and unmelodramatic. On one level, Barlow and Watt move around a contemporary investigation room, surrounded by books, copies of newspapers, such documentary evidence as there is, and reconstruct the five canonical murders in chronological order. 

They don’t dramatise things, they talk like senior Detectives sifting evidence, looking for similarities and anomalies, testing the weight of the evidence against their professional experience, building up a picture of the time, the place, the people and the events, as fairly and neutrally as they can. Naturally, they talk as the characters they are playing, indulging in a never belaboured degree of the banter and cynicism of the veterans they are. 

Interspersed with this is the reconstruction. Intelligently, and in keeping with the series’ aim to be as factual and complete as possible, these eschew any reconstruction of the killings themselves and lapse into drama only once, showing fourth victim Catherine Eddowes being released from police cells after sobering up, only to be murdered within thirty minutes. She’s the only one of the five victims to actually be depicted in persona.

I'm writing this post because the whole series has reappeared on YouTube – it has a history of coming and going there.

The clip I have chosen above comes from the sixth and final episode. In it Joseph Gorman sets out the meat of the theory and claims that he is the illegitimate son of Walter Sickert. I don't believe a word of it, and Wikipedia says he later admitted to the Sunday Times that his story was a fiction. Elwyn Jones, one of the writers of this series, was introduced to him when he told one of his police contacts that he was working on a series about Jack the Ripper.

Finally, a moan and then my Trivial Fact of the Day.

The moan is that when the Rest is History tackled the Ripper story, it said that Barlow and Watt were still in Z-Cars in 1973. In fact, they had left the show as long ago as 1965 to appear in Softly, Softly and then Softly, Softly: Task Force. By 1973 Barlow had a series of his own, Barlow at Large.

And my Trivial Fact of the Day? It's that Jack Warner's daughter in the often misremembered Dixon of Dock Green was first played by Billie Whitelaw.

An Observer podcast series on The Real Salt Path

If you were hooked by Chloe Hadjimatheou's reporting of the questionable veracity of The Salt Path, you may be interested to know that the Observer has now produced a series of podcasts telling the story of this exposé, The Walkers: The real Salt Path.

I walked The Salt Path myself – we called it the South Coastal Path in those days – from Minehead to Weymouth, over four summer holidays, in the Eighties and Nineties. 

Don't tell Jennie, but I left out the stretch through Torbay (my guidebook said it was allowed) because it was so built up.

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"At present the Tories are making the same mistakes as their continental cousins – aping the rhetoric and policies of the further right upstart party that is destroying them from the flank. As long as this happens the Blue Wall of small towns and rural hinterland across the South beyond London will disappear altogether with large swathes of the country turning into a Lib Dem/Reform battle (council by election results show this is already happening)." Matthew Pennell asks if centre-right parties are finished across Europe.

AI chatbots are gossiping about us behind our backs. Ashley Fike summarises a paper by the philosophers Joel Krueger and Lucy Osler.

Fiona Sturges says podcasts are being ruined by their rush to video: "Much of the drive behind video content comes from its potential as a marketing tool for the show. Footage can easily be clipped up and shared on social media to help drive audience engagement and, where possible, generate news lines."

Tom Yarrow has been studying heritage railway volunteers to learn about male friendship: "Rather than dismiss their approach as 'repression', I argue in a forthcoming paper that we need to appreciate how people can develop intimate and caring relationships, without naming emotions."

"With a preference for pastel pink powdered wigs and lavender floral suits, Mozart is depicted as a punk rocker before there was punk rock, which worked in the film’s favor in 1984 as a reflection of ‘80s fashion and still works today." Michelle Swope welcomes the appearance of a restored version of Amadeus.

Sam Dalling offers an appreciation of Somerset County Cricket Club's Rew brothers: "There is a danger of getting too hyped up, of heaping too much pressure on young shoulders, but the sense is that both can cope. There is a humility to the pair and an apparent ability to block it all out. They still live at home with their parents and are just enjoying life with their mates."

For World Monkey Day: The death of King Alexander of Greece

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Today is World Monkey Day and to mark it here's the sad story of King Alexander of Greece.

Alexander came to the throne in 1917 after his father (Constantine I) and elder brother (Crown Prince George) were deposed by the Entente Powers and the Liberal statesman Eleftherios Venizelos. Alexander became a puppet king under the control of Venizelos, and Greece continued to fight the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.

In 1919 Alexander married Aspasia Manos, a commoner. This became a major scandal. and the couple were forced to leave Greece for several months. 

Soon after their return to Greece, Alexander tried to separate his dog from a tame Barbary macaque with which it was scuffling. In the process, he was bitten by the monkey and died of sepsis a few days later aged 27.

Wikipedia spells out what his death led to:

Under the restored King Constantine I, whose return was endorsed overwhelmingly in a referendum, Greece went on to lose the Greco–Turkish War with heavy military and civilian casualties. The territory gained on the Turkish mainland during Alexander's reign was lost. 

Alexander's death in the midst of an election campaign helped destabilize the Venizelos regime, and the resultant loss of Allied support contributed to the failure of Greece's territorial ambitions. Winston Churchill wrote, "it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite".

The Rest is History podcast once chose the greatest 10 monkeys in history and unaccountably left this one out. I have never quite trusted it since.

The murder of Charles Walton at Lower Quinton in 1945

You can't beat the local by-election previews that Andrew Teale posts every week.

Yesterday there was an election in the Lib Dem held Quinton ward of Stratford-upon-Avon District Council. (Don't worry: we held it.) I wondered if Andrew would know about a notorious murder that took place there.

I needn't have worried. Andrew wrote in this week's preview:

The Quinton ward extends north-east from here to take in the village of Lower Quinton. This was the scene for the 1945 murder of Charles Walton, with local rumour having it that he had been ritually killed and that witchcraft was involved. 

Despite the involvement of the Metropolitan Police officer DS Robert Fabian of the Yard as chief investigating officer, no-one was ever prosecuted for Walton’s death and Warwickshire Constabulary class it as their oldest unsolved murder case.

My suspicion is that – as in many an Agatha Christie plot – what appeared to be an extraordinary killing was in fact an ordinary one with mundane financial motives. But, like poor Bella in the Wych Elm, this murder has gone down in West Midlands history.

For a short introduction of the case, you can try the relevant episode of Punt PI. But what I really recommend is the three-part investigation of it by Hypnogoria. I like its observation that it's common to come across, when researching your family history, to come across people who have left no mark on official records.

The case also inspired a new film called The Last Sacrifice. I've not seen it, but the trailer below plays up the idea that the murder of Charles Walton inspired the folk horror cinema that flourished two or three decades later.

I found the press cutting above in my folder of newspaper stories about Dennis O'Neill. The juxtaposition of the two stories is positively spooky, but that was the West Midlands in 1945.

No, Pope Leo XIV did not mail dead rats to American radio stations to promote The Boomtown Rats

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This claim was made in a recent Word in Your Ear podcast, but sadly it appears not to be true.

In fact, the young Bobby Prevost, as the Holy Father was then known, was a temporary replacement for the man who did mail the rats.

So close, but no cigar. You can read the full details on Facebook. And Mike Bone tells the same story on Best Classic Bands, but doesn't mention the young temp there.

One of the problems with our political system is that it produces such inexperienced leaders

In recent days I've come across three instances of people arguing that one of the problems with our political system today is that it produces such inexperienced leaders.

You can hear Robert Saunders making this argument in the latest episode of Nick Cohen's podcast The Lowdown. (Click play on the video and you'll get the relevant extract.)

Mark Garnett also touches on it in his new book Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain's Prime Ministers Since Thatcher, which I review in the next Liberator.

In the book he writes:

Even before Brexit there had been signs that individuals with slender qualifications were beginning to regard themselves as viable candidates. In January 2015 Adam Afriyie, a right-wing backbencher little known to parliamentary colleagues let alone the public, was mooted as a serious challenger to David Cameron's position. Unlike Sir Anthony Meyer in 1989, before the rumours fizzled out Afriyie showed every sign of wanting to run purely on his own behalf.

And you can see the same concern in the Chris Dillow article I blogged about the other day:

Labour party members in 2020 were so keen to see Corbynism without Corbyn that they overlooked questions about Starmer's suitability: is a man who became an MP only in 2015 sufficiently experienced in Westminster politics? Does being head of a large hierarchical organization equip a man to lead a more egalitarian one facing fierce competition? Does he have any good record in developing and selling policy?

Closer to home, how much did Liberal Democrat members know about Nick Clegg when they elected him as their leader.

I know I'm getting old, but I think there is something in the argument that our leaders are too inexperienced.

Not so cosy: A podcast on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap

I came across a new podcast today – Garlic & Pearls – via a really good episode on Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap.

It's thoroughly researched and emphasises how far from cosy Christie's works can be. The Mousetrap is set in a dislocated postwar world in which the class structure has been shaken and there is an air of paranoid watchfulness.

The BBC's adaptations of the Miss Marple books, which starred the incomparable Joan Hickson, were set firmly in this world. And it's noticeable that when Bertram's Hotel appears to have survived the changes unscathed, it turns out to be too good to be true.

Meanwhile, after the Colonel died, Dolly Bantry sold the big house and moved very happily into a modernised lodge house with all the latest conveniences. The future need not always be resisted, as the worldly Marple grasps.

I recently wrote an article for Central Bylines about the 12-year-old foster child called Dennis O'Neill whose death on a farm in Shropshire Christie to write the play.

The Conservative Party: A warning from history

Nick Cohen's guest on the latest edition of his podcast The Lowdown is the novelist and historian James Hawes, who reminds us that history has shown that there are no lengths the Conservative Party will not go to in pursuit of power.

Hawes forecasts a pact or even a merger between the Conservatives and Reform UK, and Cohen points out that no Conservative leader since David Cameron has mounted a serious attack on Nigel Farage and his parties.

If these is hope of keeping the far right out of power in Britain, Hawes concludes, is lies in the Liberal Democrats winning even more Tory seats in the South of England.

It's not the most optimistic podcast I've heard, but it's well worth a listen.

BBC4 is repeating Bryan Magee's series The Great Philosophers

Good news. BBC4 is repeating Bryan Magee's 1987 television series The Great Philosophers. The first three programmes – on Plato, Aristotle and medieval philosophy – are being broadcast late on Monday evening, prefaced at 22:30 by a new introduction to the series by Professor Angie Hobbs.

This is just the sort of television that they don't make any more - there's now a strong aversion to "talking heads". But if the heads are interesting enough, there is nothing more riveting. And what are podcasts but talking heads? 

They've even proved that two is the ideal number for the format. A podcast with one person is ultimately just a guy reading something out, and if there are three people (certainly if there are three men) they get excited and interrupt each other too much.

I remember watching Magee's earlier, similar series Men of Ideas – and they were men: the only woman guest in the 15 programmes was Iris Murdoch – while I waited to go up to York to being my philosophy degree. It was the best possible preparation.

What I didn't know then was that Magee had been evacuated to Market Harborough during the war and had lived literally round the corner from our house. I only worked out after my mother died that the "poor old Kath" she used to talk to was the daughter of the family Magee stayed with.

Carry on Sergeant, some real crimes that inspired Agatha Christie and It's Trad, Dad!

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Three podcasts to enjoy.

Susan Calman and Mike Muncer have begun going through the Carry On films one by one. I listened to their edition on Carry On Sergeant, the very first of them. The makers had no idea they were launching a franchise and national institution, though several actors who were to become Carry On actors were in tha cast. It comes over as a gentle and likeable British film comedy.

Camper Donovan spoke to the Agatha Christie International Festival in Torquay last week and that talk is now an edition of his podcast All About Agatha. His subject was the real-life crimes that inspired some of her best-known novels and her best-known play. Regular readers of this blog will know that The Mousetrap drew upon the death of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill in Shropshire in 1945, but Kemper gave many more examples of such inspiration that were new to me.

And Andrew Hickey has taken time off from his own magisterial music blog to talk to Goon Pod about the 1962 film It's Trad, Dad! He regards it as the best British pop music film made before A Hard Day's Night. (Lord Bonkers once claimed to have made a controversial film in the same era - I'm a Jihadi, Daddy.)

Mark Kermode on Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

Not as bad as you feared: not as good as you hoped.

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Helen Charman dissects the claims of the flag-bearing demonstrators. "One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George's Cross, is 'Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners'. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and 'foreign' women and children. The category of the vulnerable always already excludes the marginalised group being targeted."

All good Liberals know the tale of Harry Willcock – "I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing" – and his part in the abolition of national identity cards after the war, but there was another hero in his court case. It was the unexpected figure of the ferocious Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard. Neil Hickman explains.

"For over three years, the people of the UK have opened their homes to Ukrainian families and welcomed them into our communities. Offering them safety in the face of Russia’s indiscriminate shelling of cities and the illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory. However, at no point over these three years has our government provided Ukrainian families with certainty or stability." Rowan More looks ahead to a debate at the Liberal Democrat Conference.

Finlay McLaren finds that the chief effect of podcasting has been to give more publicity to people who were already famous.

James Wright suggests commercial interests may encourage the spreading of unverified stories and pseudo-archaeology connected to ancient buildings.

"Old Nick was so enraged he laid an everlasting curse upon them, and hence it was said that after Michaelmas Day, any blackberries on the bushes now belonged to the Devil Himself and it was most unwise to pick them." Jim Moon knows why you shouldn't pick blackberries after Michaelmas.

Ed Davey on how the Lib Dems can fight Reform and rival Labour

The Liberal Democrat leader joins tells Alison Phillips, Matt Green and Hannah Fearn as the guest on the latest Oh God What Now podcast.

He gives a reasoned defence of his general election stunts and talks about fighting Farage, Labour’s travails, the war on cruelty in politics and what the Lib Dems can get done in parliament.

I have wearied of this school of political podcasting - if everything right-wing parties do is laughable, how come they win so many elections? - but the comedian here is Matt Green, who I rather like.

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"Why did this person decide to open a home in my ward? Well, there is a lot of evidence around now that these are not people with altruistic ideas, they don’t want to change the lives of a frightened young girl, they don’t want to change society. What drives many people to move into this area of activity is pure simple greed. They see the opportunity to make money out of other people’s suffering." Richard Kemp says making profits from the needs of SEND children should be illegal.

Bill Wyman itemises without mercy the many mistakes that podcasters make: "Most podcasts begin with a few minutes of painful-to-listen-to impromptu banter amongst the hosts. I wish that they had a 'skip intro' button a la Netflix so folks could just get to the substance of the show. The solution to this is to think up something better to give listeners. This involves a thing called preparation."

Jo Jones, head of arts and museums at Leicester City Council, shares her thoughts on the city's reopened Jewry Wall Museum: "There’s ... a 90-metre interactive wall that covers the work of the pioneering archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who led the excavations of the Jewry Wall site in the 1930s, as well the latest archaeological finds to be discovered in Leicester."

Andrea Ashworth published Once in a House on Fire, a a memoir of her working-class childhood in Manchester in the 1970s and 1980s, to universal acclaim in 1998. She has not published anything since, but Dave Haslam has tracked her down.

Steve Rose discusses the reasons behind the decline of pub food.

"The town later became home to Henry VII’s eldest son, Arthur, who lived there from the spring of 1493 until his death in April 1502. This, in the words of Ralph Griffiths, gave the town a 'unique profile among England’s provincial centres', and an importance far beyond its population of about 2,000." Simon Payling explains the importance of Ludlow.

Shelagh Delaney is interviewed by an alien in 1959

The latest Backlisted podcast is a great edition on Shelagh Delaney and her 1958 play A Taste of Honey. It was her first play, written and produced before she was 20. It was then filmed in 1962 with Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan and Murray Melvin.

As the Backlisted blurb asks:

How did a Salford teenager change the face of British theatre? Nearly 70 years on, why do the play's themes and characters continue to resonate in the 21st century? And what did Shelagh Delaney do for an encore (and why do so few people know about it)? This show will open your eyes.

The show certainly reminds us that the modern world did not start with the Beatles. Take the interview above from 1959, which you can hear in it.

Delaney comes over as a thoroughly contemporary figure, while the interviewer sounds like an alien. Where did he learn to pronounce the world "play" like that? 

It would be comforting to think his assumptions that Delaney must had help to write the play and faint derision for her "native Lancashire" are equally strange to us now, but I'm afraid I often hear echoes of such views.

I can't recommend this edition of Backlisted highly enough. Listen out for an anecdote about an exchange between Dirk Bogarde and Murray Melvin during the filming of HMS Defiant. 

And let's end this post with a piece of A Taste of Honey trivia from 2003:

Earlier in the day Home Office Minister and Salford MP, Hazel Blears, revealed that she appears in kitchen sink classic, A Taste of Honey, shown at the Festival. "They filmed it at the bottom of our road" she recalled "And I was in one scene wearing bunches and a little kilt. My brother sang `The Big Ship Sails On The Ally Ally O'..."