Alexander Mackendrick, Tony Hancock and Rhinoceros

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One of the many unmade Alexander Mackendrick film projects detailed in Philip Kemp's biography Lethal Innocence is an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros.

An international success, the play was set in a French provincial town where, one by one, the inhabitants were turning into rhinos. It was a political allegory, based on the Romanian writer's pre-war memories of the way his friends gradually joined the fascist Iron Guard.

And the person who Mackendrick wanted to play the hero Bérenger, the only character who doesn't become a rhino, was Tony Hancock.

According to Kemp, Mackendrick said: 

"He was so right. He had this hunted look of a person who knew that everybody was turning into a rhinoceros."

As David Cairns says on his Shadowplay blog, that's "a very precise trait, not easy to find".

But then Mackendrick had a weakness for actors who looked hunted. Remember his slightly worrying comment on the casting of Fergus McClelland to play the lead in Sammy Going South:

He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting.

Anyway, Tony Hancock eventually pulled out of the possible film, just as Peter Sellers did the second time it came close to being made.

But if Mackendrick was so keen to film a rhino, he could have shot this scene from W.H. Canaway's original novel Sammy Going South:

Sammy heard a whiffling of breath behind him, and turned to confront a rhinoceros, which had been waiting behind the thorns before returning to scatter its dung.

Up till that moment the thought of danger from animals had scarcely entered Sammy's mind; he had spent the previous night in his tree because of some atavistic instinct, and not because of any conscious desire to safeguard himself against predatory creatures. Now, he stared at the rhino with sick horror, giving a low moan of fear. He had never realized that a rhino was so big. This one was a huge shape of dirty grey, almost six feet tall at the shoulder and almost twelve feet long; its horn was five feet of polished murderous fibre. The rhino was downwind of Sammy, and had picked up his scent at once.

There were birds sitting on its back, Sammy noticed.

The rhino was perhaps a hundred feet away, at the far left-hand end of the thorns. It snorted again, shook its head once, and then lowered it, charging; the birds flapped on its body. It moved with surprising speed, picking up and setting down its feet with delicate precision, while Sammy turned and began to run, hopelessly.

I do like the placing of that adverb.

Whether Sammy Going South was ever a set text for the examination boards I don't know, but it would have made a change from Lord of the bloody Flies.

Lib Dems watch Reform: Reform watches the Lib Dems

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The Liberal Democrats have set up an internal "Reform watch" to monitor Nigel Farage’s party in local government, reports the Guardian. The paper quotes Ed Davey as saying Labour and the Conservatives are too scared of the threat from Reform to hold it to account.

The report sets out what the work of the unit will be:

A key part of the monitoring will be to see if and how Reform-run councils try to cut services, Davey said. Many families had been “alarmed” by Farage’s comments saying too many people were being diagnosed with special needs or mental illnesses, he said.

Other areas would include culture war battles, such as Reform barring councils from flying the Ukraine flag as a show of solidarity, and trying to cut back on climate and net zero-related work.

Davey said: "When you look at what councils do on climate change, the vast bulk of the work is insulating people’s homes. So is Nigel Farage essentially going to say to less well-off people: ‘We’re not insulating your home, you can pay higher energy bills, and that we’re pleased about that because that can make climate change worse.’ Is that the Reform position?"

It's clear that this work will be more substantial than the trawling of the social media accounts of individual Reform councillors for extremist or embarrassing posts. (If you enjoy that sort of thing, Reform Party UK Exposed on Bluesky is a good follow.)

The unit is being spearheaded, says the Guardian, by Amanda Hopgood, the leader of the opposition group in the Reform-run County Durham; Antony Hook, who performs the same role in Kent; and Mike Ross, the leader of Hull city council, who came second to Reform in the Hull and East Yorkshire.mayoral contest. You'd imagine they have quite a bit on their plates already, though.

Meanwhile, reports Conservative Post, a new website has been launched by Luigi Murton. The Post doesn't mention it, but he is a former Conservative HQ staffer who now works for Reform UK.

The report says Liberals Exposed will expose Liberal Democrat tactics and pledges

support ... for anti-Lib Dem candidates across the UK, offering digital megaphones, campaign muscle, and boots on the ground for those who want to take the fight to the doorsteps of Liberal control.

So far the website has three articles. One explains why we are so keen on getting those 'Lib Dems Winning Here' posters up: a second looks at inconsistent Lib Dem attitudes towards congestion charging.

And the third?

Bizarrely, this looks at the current Romanian presidential election and cheers on George Simion:

Deemed by some as 'Romania's Trump' due to his strong support for the US President and his Conservative views, Simion is offering a fresh direction and perspective for voters. 

How that will be any help in combating the Liberal Democrats in local government is far from clear. But it is a reminder that hanging Nigel Farage's admiration for Donald Trump around the neck of Reform UK is part of the work of defeating it.

Lib Dems gain Dacorum, but where is it and why is it called that?

Dacorum local election 2023 results in full as Liberal Democrats earn majority with six seats gained while Tories fall

says the headline.

Below it is a picture of Ed Davey driving a tractor and demolishing a blue wall of straw bales. Let no one tell you that our now-traditional cheesy media stunts don't work.

But the headline also invites two questions; where is Dacorum and why is it called that?

Those of you who follow the minutiae of Lib Dem campaigning will remember that Ed's stunt was filmed in Berkhamsted. So Dacorum is in West Hertfordshire.

And one answer to the question of why this district council is called Dacorum is: "So that people in Berkhamsted don't have to say they're from Hemel Hempstead." Because Hemel Hempstead is by far the largest town in the district, but for some reason has not lent its name to it.

Though I lived in Hemel as a boy, I've always assumed that Dacorum was a name made up during Edward Heath's reorganisation of local government. 

In fact, it's the name of the hundred covering the west of the county - it's much larger than today's Dacorum District Council. 

Flags of the World says that at the time of the Domesday Book there were two hundreds here: Danais and Tring. They were merged (presumably by an ancestor of Heath's) and the name Hundred of Dacorum was first recorded in 1196.

As to that name, the same site says:

The name Dacorum is thought to mean the 'Hundred of the Dacians' in Medieval Latin. Daci was mistakenly used for 'Danes' in the Middle Ages. According to legend certain tribes from Dacia migrated first to Denmark, then to Angleland in the 9th and 10th centuries. 

And Dacia, says Wikipedia, roughly corresponds to the present-day countries of Romania, as well as parts of Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

Well, you did ask.

Returning to more local matters, I'm pleased to see that the Lib Dems hold Boxmoor, where I spent the brief middle-class period of my childhood. Warners End and Chaulden, the ward we lived in before that, remains Conservative.

Six of the Best 805

Brexiteers who look to Donald Trump for help will be disappointed. Dana Allin explains why.

Oliver Stanton has some sensible ideas from improving the Liberal Democrats' online presence.

"A shorter overall running time and a focus on producing even smaller bits of content risks robbing viewers of some of the current programme’s interrogative depth. Save for the various Sunday shows British TV is not running over with dedicated political interview programming, and [Andrew] Neil is one of the best in the business." Henry Hill is rightly critical of the BBC's decision to scrap the Daily Politics and Sunday Politics.

Neal Ascherson contributes a characteristically brilliant review of Katherine Verdery account of her time in Ceauşescu’s Romania: "The crowning mercy of human relations is that we don’t know what other people are really thinking about us. They – those others – decide what redacted selection we are offered. But to read one’s police file is – suddenly – to have the curtain pulled open. The self you think you know becomes a mask, concealing a devious somebody else whose relationships are mere espionage fakes."

Helen Day introduces a Canterbury exhibition of the other work of the artists who illustrated Ladybird Books. We get to meet the real Peter and Jane too.

Have a look round Shrewsbury's last watchtower with Chris Schurke. I want to live there.

Four Class 56s at Leicester this evening

Readers who follow me on Twitter will know that I often tweet pictures with the caption "Exciting times at Leicester station".

Sometimes this is an ironic comment on run-of-the mill freight workings, but sometimes the pictures really are exciting to rail enthusiasts of a certain age.

That is because there is a depot to the immediate north of Leicester station that now belongs to UK Rail Leasing:

UK Rail Leasing own, maintain and lease out freight locomotives, with the core of our operations being the leasing of our fleet of Class 56 locomotives. Our main business is long-term leasing, but we are also able to offer locomotives on shorter terms, for emergency needs or as maintenance cover. 

UK Rail Leasing’s fleet consists of 15 Class 56 as well as two Class 37 locomotives.

Those two classes are now on the elderly side. Class 37s were introduced at the start of the 1960s and handled both passenger trains (notably out of Liverpool Street) and heavy freight.

They appeared clumsy and bulbous to me 40 years ago, but are still going strong. They handle the odd scheduled passenger train in East Anglia to this day.

Class 56s were introduced from 1976, with the first 30 of them being assembled in Romania. Those were the days when Nicolae Ceaușescu was seen as a more reasonable sort of Eastern Bloc leader who deserved encouragement.

As part of this effort David Steel presented the Romanian dictator with a labrador puppy.

Anyway, the Class 56s were withdrawn at the start of this century as the coal traffic they hauled had largely disappeared.

This evening, waiting for my train home, I saw four of them on manoeuvres coupled together. You can see them in the picture above.

UK Rail Leasing also owns a cute green shunter that puts in an appearance from time to time.

I think it is a Class 03, though in British Rail days these had to push a trolley wherever they went because on their own they were too small to trigger the track circuiting that tells signallers there is a train on the line.

Later. I am told by someone knowledgeable on Twiter that it is not an 03, it is a Hudswell Clark locomotive that was never owned by British Rail.

Romanian man requests the annulment of his death declaration, loses case

Our Headline of the Day comes from Romania Insider.

King Michael of Romania the chicken farmer

The former King Michael of Romania died this week at the age of 96.

His Guardian obituary tells of his impossible task as monarch as he was ground between Stalin and Hitler, his exile and final return to Romania.

But it also says:

When Michael’s second reign abruptly ended in 1947, life in exile came as a shock. His loving marriage to Princess Anne of Bourbon-Parma in 1948 and their five daughters gave him a family life, but the daughters remember a “silent, sad, serious” man during their childhood. 

He tried his hand at chicken farming in Hertfordshire, commercial flying in Switzerland and stockbroking in the US while simultaneously working with the national committee he had established to maintain links with Romania.

The King of Romania farmed chickens in England? Can it be true?

The video above, which is unused footage from British Pathe, shows that it is.