Three Catholic churches have closed in Northamptonshire

Holy Trinity, Desborough

Opponents of the moved vowed to "take this fight to the Vatican", but as far as I know the closure of the Catholic churches in Desborough, Rothwell and Burton Latimer has gone ahead. Certainly, their websites have been closed down.

Holy Trinity, Desborough, was already up for sale when I photographed it last year – the estate agents' particulars say it is "offered for sale in need of significant repair or demolition" and describe it as a "perfect development site".

Taking Stock: Catholic Churches of England & Wales reveals that Holy Trinity was built as a Methodist chapel in 1894 and purchased for Catholic use in June 1971. Its altar is at the north end of the church, though latterly, services appear to have been held in the hall next door.

Holy Trinity, Desborough

I did not discover St Bernadette's. Rothwell, until my last visit to the little town, when I had a good wander. Taking Stock says it dates from 1959 and that alterations made in 1993 radically and detrimentally altered its appearance.

St Bernadette's, Rothwell

St Bernadette's, Rothwell

The Grotto, St Bernadette's, Rothwell

I've not made it as far as Burton Latimer, best known for being the home of Weetabix, so the photo below is by David Dixon on Georgraph. The church is dedicated to St Nicholas Owen, a Catholic carpenter and builder of priest holes who was martyred in 1606 and canonised in 1970. Taking Stock says it opened in 1972.

David Dixon: St John North, Burton Latimer

A second attempt to find Jim Dale's birthplace in Rothwell

First, an apology. The photograph of Jim Dale's birthplace I posted just before Christmas was nothing of the sort, as I was misled by false information on what looked like an authoritative local history site.

So, better briefed, I went back to Rothwell today to try again.

Jim Dale was born (as James Smith) in a cottage in Fox Street that has since been demolished. It was one of a row that stood across the road from the entrance to the United Reform Church, so it would have been where the houses are in the photo above.

I was sorry to see that the church has closed and been put up for sale. I photographed it in 2011 and its former Sunday school too. The sale notice mentioned the possibility of building a four-bedroom house on the site, but I don't see how this can be fitted in without demolishing something.

The better news is that the house that Jim Dale spent most of his childhood in is still standing in Jubilee Street, around the corner from the false birthplace I showed you last time.

Deeper into the destruction of Desborough's high street

I've been looking deeper into the destruction wrought upon Desborough in 1970, both online and at the town's heritage centre.

It turns out that the catalyst for the demolition of the High Street was the widening of the A6, yet this road scheme need have affected only a small part of it.

Demolition on the scale that took place must have been done with money from the county council and central government, but the old Desborough Urban District Council seems to have been thoroughly on board.

It's job advertisements from this period all contain this boast:

Desborough has a population of 5,100, and is a progressive authority now involved in substantial redevelopment and expansion and consequently offers valuable experience.

And I don't know which party controlled Desborough UDC in those days, but the Desborough Labour Party website harks back to this era as a heyday:

The Labour Party has had a branch in Desborough for as long as anyone can remember. Working in the community, serving on the Council and campaigning on the issues that affect local residents.

Some residents may remember the work done by Walter Manton, Harold Goodman and Tony Allen in the days when we had our own Urban District Council. 

How did the local press cover the demolition of Desborough's High Street? The heritage centre has a cutting from an unnamed paper, dated Friday 24 July 1970, that has to be seen to be believed:

£300,000 Desboro' facelift under way

Desborough's £300,000 town centre face-lift has started. Bulldozers have moved into the redevelopment area and have begun a massive demolition job.

Fifty town centre buildings will be demolished and replaced by half a dozen shops, a new library, garages, 24 flatlets, 36 flats and a major realignment of the A6 in Desborough's biggest redevelopment scheme.

Bulldozers moved into the town's redevelopment are on Wednesday to start ripping down old Desborough.

The first houses to come down will include some over 300 years old. Town centre residents are being re-housed gradually as the redevelopment work gets under way.

As soon as the site is cleared work on building flatlets will begin.

The start of the town centre redevelopment is the first signs of four years careful planning by Desborough Urban Council.

The £150,000 0f the A6 through Desborough is not expected to start until 1972. The Ministry of Transport plan to realign the road from its junction with Gold Street to a point near the Co-op Society's corset factory in Rothwell Road.

The re-routing of the A6 has been before the Ministry since 1928.

House off High Street are the first victims of the bulldozers. Two bulldozers began tearing down houses that have stood for 300 years on Wednesday, so that sites can be cleared for the new buildings.

Town centre traders will be replaced and new shops built in the central redevelopment area.

Desborough Urban Council's development committee have arranged for a guide to the new town centre to go on public show.

The committee meet next week to finalise arrangements for the redevelopment exhibition.

Desborough did not so much get a facelift has have its head kicked in.

And the process went on and on. An ironstone inn in the High Street was pulled down by the new Kettering Borough Council as late as 1977.

I was chatting to someone at the heritage centre today who said the high street was narrow - "a double-decker bus filled it" - and mentioned the difficulties in transporting the Thor missiles stationed at nearby RAF Harrington around the countryside. You can see a picture of a missile on Rothwell on this blog.

But these were onsite there only between 1959 and 1963, so we can't blame the US military-industrial complex for this assault on Desborough.

So it looks as though the villains were local authorities who used the widening of the A6 as a pretext for wholesale destruction. The past is a foreign country.

Jim Dale: Piccadilly Line

Visiting Jim Dale's birthplace in Rothwell led me to this record from 1957, a parody of Lonnie Donegan's popular recording of Rock Island Line.

The songwriting credits on Piccadilly Line are Dale-Robinson-Dale - perhaps a British anticipation of Motown's Holland-Dozier-Holland?

Jim Dale himself is the first Dale and I suspect the second, no relation, is Stanley Dale, a sort of skiffle entrepreneur. Jim Dale compered his his National Skiffle Contest in 1957-8.

Robinson must be the composer and arranger Harry Robinson - a not very imaginative pseudonym for Harry Robertson.

His story was that he once received a cheque made out to Harry Robinson and reasoned that it would be easier to open a bank account in that name than get the cheque reissued. From then on he used the two names interchangeably.

Robertson's most interesting credit in a long career is that he arranged the strings on what is probably Nick Drake's best known song, River Man.

Oh, and the record's producer is George Martin.

There should be a blue plaque: Jim Dale's birthplace in Rothwell

He is remembered in Britain as the star of 11 Carry On films and, if you really know your stuff, as a pop star of the 1950s who was recorded by George Martin, but there is more to Jim Dale than that. Olivier recruited him to the National Theatre Company, where they acted Shakespeare together.

In the US he is a massive Broadway star and famous for his readings of the Harry Potter books. It would be interesting to know why Stephen Fry's versions were not thought suitable for the audiobook market there.

Dale was born in 1935 in the little Northamptonshire town of Rothwell. As it was a sunny afternoon and a bus bound for Rothwell passes down my road every hour, I thought I would go there and photograph his birthplace.

So here it is. Sure enough for this part of the county, there is a former shoe factory standing opposite.

Later. It's been pointed out to me that there are a couple of problems with this post.

First, you don't qualify for a blue plaque until you are dead, and Jim Dale is happily still with us.

Second, despite what my source said, this is not his birthplace. Dale was born in a cottage in Fox Street, Rothwell, that has since been demolished, and grew up with in Jubilee Street. That house is still there.

Apart from that...

New bus service for Market Harborough's Southern Estate

The air hereabouts is still thick with talk of cuts to bus services, but today there was good news.

Back in February I blogged about our Liberal Democrat campaign against the reduction in the bus service provided to Market Harborough's Southern Estate. (Every street there is named after someone who fought at Naseby, you know.)

I wrote then:

The service around the Southern Estate ... would probably be best provided by a town service using a much smaller vehicle. But that is not what we are being offered.

Today Harborough FM reported that this is pretty much what is going to happen:

A daytime bus service is to return to Market Harborough’s Southern Estate following a campaign by residents. 

Operator Centrebus will launch the new number 30 service on July 1st, with four off-peak journeys to and from the town centre Monday to Saturday.

This is a welcome development, because the trend is now for long-distance services to take numerous detours in an attempt to replace vanished routes.

Until recently the bus from Market Harborough to Kettering took you down streets in Rothwell that were unknown even to people who had spent their whole lives in that little Northamptonshire town.

A flythrough of the bone crypt at Rothwell

I have never found the courage to enter it, but the crypt is open to the public on Sundays from 2.30pm to 4.30pm from Easter to the end of September.

That's what I wrote a year ago in a post about the slightly unnerving news that some of the bones in the crypt under the church in Rothwell, a small town between Kettering and Market Harborough, date from as recently as 1900.

But now you don't have to travel to the church to view its bone crypt. You can just watch this flythrough of a 3D model produced by the University of Sheffield.

Big Brother is watching you - but you don't take any notice

Remember this poster? I came across it on a bright January day this year when I visited Rothwell.

I thought of it when I read this post on the British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog:

Imagine there was an honesty box in your coffee room at work, do you think it would make any difference to your behaviour if there was poster of staring eyes on the wall? 

A hugely influential study published in 2006 suggested that it would – that feeling watched, even by a picture of eyes rather than an actual person, increases people’s honesty. In fact, in the study, donations to the box were an average three-fold larger in the presence of an eye poster rather than a picture of flowers. 

The finding even inspired the West Midlands Police in the UK to launch a poster campaign featuring staring eyes and the strapline “We’ve got our eyes on criminals”.

I suspect this study also inspired the poster I photographed in Rothwell.

Trouble is, attempts to replicate the 2006 study have failed. Not only that. As the Research Digest says:

two meta-analyses combined the data from over 50 studies involving collectively tens of thousands of participants and found no evidence overall that watching eyes boost people’s generosity.

So not only was that poster distasteful in its use of Big Brother imagery, it may well have beeen ineffective at changing behaviour too.

Rothwell bone crypt contains remains from as recently as 1900

The church of Holy Trinity in Rothwell has a bone crypt housing the remains of 2500 men, women and children.

A BBC News story reveals an unexpected fact about it:

Skulls and bones stored under a church date from 1250 to as recently as 1900, tests have revealed. 

Holy Trinity Church in Rothwell, Northamptonshire - home to one of only two 13th Century crypts in the UK - contains the remains of 2,500 people. 

Radio carbon dating found some skulls were older than first thought. 

But scientists from the University of Sheffield, who "assumed the ossuary was a medieval thing", were also surprised to find bones from the last century. 

"It seems people continued to put skulls and bones down here, not only into the post-medieval period but even as late as around 1900," Dr Lizzie Craig-Atkins said.

I have never found the courage to enter it, but the crypt is open to the public on Sundays from 2.30pm to 4.30pm from Easter to the end of September.

Market Harborough to Melton Mowbray by bus

My most recent Six of the Best included an article by John Disney that says our rural bus services are in meltdown.

Judging from Market Harborough he is right. In the last couple of years we have lost a bus that served Northamptonshire villages on the way to Clipton and our service to Wilbarston, Corby and Gretton. Even the mighty 44 has been reduced in frequency.

Given that background, I have long been intrigued by the 303, which claims to run from Rothwell via Market Harborough to Melton Mowbray on the first Tuesday of every month.

Finding myself at a loose end last Tuesday - the first Tuesday in August - I had a mind to catch it.

So unlikely did the service sound that I rang Hamiltons & Buckbys Coaches the day before to make sure it was running.

They assured me it was. Where it stopped in Harborough was a slight mystery, but my mother said she had caught a bus to Melton years ago and her memory of where she had got on it coincided with my theory.

So I presented myself at the bus stop on Northampton Road shortly before 9.30. By the time the bus was due I had been joined by half a dozen old ladies and when it arrived it proved to be the mighty beast you see in the photo above.

We followed the B road through High Leicestershire from Market Harborough to Melton, taking in little-visited settlements like Three Gates and New Inn. It would have been an education to those who tell me the Midlands are flat and uninteresting - as would my ultimate destination Burrough Hill.

The 303 appears to be a purely commercial venture to take the active pensioners of Rothwell to Melton Mowbray market. I wish it well.

A ghost sign from Rothwell

Photographed on Saturday, along with Big Brother.

Big Brother in a Northamptonshire park

I came across this notice in a park in sunny Rothwell this morning. How long have the authorities felt themselves free to use such totalitarian imagery?

When I was a child I acquired the idea that not having to have an identity card was part of our reward for winning the war. As a teenager it seemed almost a moral duty to read Nineteen Eight-Four to learn about the sort of society Britain Was Not Like.

Today we have lost this instinct for defining ourselves by contrasting Britain with tyrannies. The Soviet Union has gone, while drawing parallels with Nazi Germany makes the cool kids laugh at you. Godwin's law and all that.

Note too the subject matter of this notice. Have a million Focus leaflets demanding that councils do something about minor nuisances brought us to this? Must Liberals and Liberal Democrats bear a share of the blame?

Whatever the reason, we have won the victory over ourselves. We love Big Brother

Six of the Best 317

"What I have found talking to a large number of service users around the country, and polling them more widely, is that a large majority of people are positive about choice in theory ... but are sometimes confused about it in practice ... They certainly want to choose – there was really no desire to go back to a deferential system where you got the service you were given – but they want to choose in a whole range of other areas where, at the moment, they can’t." David Boyle writes on Liberal Democrat Voice about his experiences heading a government review of choice in public services.

Carl Minns argues that we should support Michael Gove's education reforms and challenge the idea that children from deprived backgrounds cannot achieve: "This attitude seems prevalent in certain sections of the left who seem either ignorant of, or disagree with the driving ambition of most working class parents – they want their kids to go up that social ladder. They want them to get on and succeed and practically the only avenue for people on many of our estates to do this is through a good quality academic education. There was a time when the progressive tradition recognised this and it set up a myriad of institutions to ensure this was achieved."

What's next for the for the German Pirate Party?  asks Jon Worth on Tech President.

"Both the late nineteenth century and the present day are characterized by an economic volatility that seems to go hand in hand with the ossification of social inequality. There is the dazzling inventiveness of the markets, the gripping drama of the upswing and the plunge. Yet at the same time there is stasis: the wild ride never seems to unsettle the static divisions of wealth and power." Kim Phillips-Fein considers the alchemy of finance on Public Books.

On Sunday morning 500 Royalist soldiers will march along the Mall to muster in Horseguards. IanVisits explains.

aliwalks takes a snowy walk from Rothwell to Desborough and back.

Missile sites at Harrington and North Luffenham listed

BBC News reports that two Cold War missile sties near Market Harborough have been given listed status:

The former RAF sites - in Harrington, Northamptonshire, and North Luffenham, Rutland, are the most intact examples of Thor missile bases in England. 

They were put on alert as the Soviet Union and the US came to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962. 

The USSR eventually agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba and the US pledged not to invade the island. 

The Thor missile site at the former RAF North Luffenham, Rutland, has been given a Grade II* listing. 

And the site at former RAF Harrington, Northamptonshire, has been listed as Grade II. 

The two sites still have concrete launch pads and blast walls, along with mounting bolts for the platforms that would raise the missiles into a vertical firing position

I have written twice before about Harrington - in February and March 2010. And I have again used the extraordinary photograph of a missile being driven through the blameless streets of Rothwell that I must have borrowed from the Harrington Aviation Museum website.

Lord Bonkers adds: They will be pleased in North Luffenham. At present South Luffenham gets most of the tourist traffic because of its connections with Herman Goering and Matt Monro.

Six of the Best 238

"Instead of, say, three main parties and some fringe ones, what we have in effect are dozens of parties which dominate public bodies and which all remain in office, regardless of elections and the politicians passing through. One of the scariest and most formidable of these parties is the national security and anti-terrorism party, which dominates the Home Office, the police, and the 'security services'." Jack of Kent on reports that the government wants to be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK.

Alex's Archive is concerned by those reports too.

The Libertine tells us that four young bloggers interviewed Lib Dem President Tim Farron at the party's Federal Conference last month.

"Right from the start I was fascinated by the story of this man who went round the countryside asking people to sing for him. Even though the people he met hadn’t actually written the songs they sang, he was still asking them to share a part of themselves, of their memories and childhoods. The fact that they were willing to do this, even though he was a complete stranger to them, shows that they had a natural pride in their folksongs and also that they were warm-hearted and open-minded enough to want to share them." Zanyzigzag's Blog writes about Cecil Sharp's trips to Somerset to collect folk songs.

Go Litel Blog, Go... documents the demise of Rothwell Town Football Club.

The cute lambs of spring 2012 are celebrated by Martin Brookes - and I have borrowed one of his photographs.

The Union Inn, Market Harborough

This is the Union Inn, Market Harborough. You can find it on the Leicester Road - the town's canal basin is just behind it. It is also the pub where I used to do my underage drinking.

It has been closed for some time and now Brooke House College wants to take it over as boarding accommodation for its students. Brook House takes foreign students who want British school qualifications and appears to be taking over the world. It recently bought the ground of Rothwell Town a few miles away as a home for its football academy. At this rate it will be the University of Market Harborough before the year is out.

The Union Inn is the pub's original name - it was named after the Leicestershire and Northamptonshire Union Canal - but for most of its life it was known as The Six Packs (as in packs of foxhounds). This is because the Market Harborough Union Workshouse was just up the road and the association was not good for business.

I took this photograph yesterday morning before meeting two prominent Liberal Democrat bloggers on their narrowboat.

Rothwell Congregational Sunday School

There I was in Christine's Book Cabin. They had a book on Rothwell Congregational Church, so I had to buy it.

When I was there a couple of weeks ago I was taken by the Sunday school that stands next to the church, though I felt there was something a little home-made about it.

I may have been on to something. For the book, Memorials of the Independent Chapel at Rothwell by G.T. Streather, says:

After all the heartaches and attendant problems which had led the way, a new block of buildings for use as a Sunday School and general purposes had finally been erected. Amid great rejoicing these well-built spacious rooms, designed by Mr William Dawkins, the church organist, had come to fruition.

Built on two levels, the entrance to the upper room was about ten-feet from the south-east corner of the Church. The entrance to the lower room was from Gas Street, as Meeting Lane had then become. Direct communication between the two levels was not made at that time.

Or perhaps I am being unfair to Mr Dawkins as he was a stonemason in his day job. A genealogy site records that he was the organist at the Congregational Church for 36 years and died in 1890 aged 66.

The Sunday School was opened on Good Friday 1886, but the book says that Rothwell Independent Church already existed in embryo form as early as 1655.

Nikolaus Pevsner revisited

After my post on Pevsner and Rothwell Congregational Chapel I received an email from Susie Harries, who is writing a biography of the great man - Bringer of Riches: A Life of Nikolaus Pevsner.

She wrote to me:

Pevsner was aware of his weakness where Nonconformist churches were concerned. Part of the problem was that his county trips were limited to university vacations and he worked to a fairly hectic schedule, based on research from existing sources, which were much more comprehensive for the CofE ...

His wife was indeed a fast and erratic driver; in one car (a Ford Prefect) the horn sounded every time she turned right, and she nearly killed them during the tour of Essex, when they were towing a caravan. But it would have been much worse if he had been driving himself: he failed his driving test so often that the driving school were embarrassed into offering him a discount.

You can read more from Susie Harries on her blog about Pevsner.

Another good introduction to Pevsner and his series The Buildings of England is Jonathan Meades's 2001 programme Pevsner Revisited. The first part is at the top of this post and Youtube will offer you the subsequent ones automatically.

Rothwell Congregational Church: Pevsner nods

Pevsner goes into raptures over Holy Trinity, Rothwell, discussing it for three pages. It is a large church that used to be even larger, though no one seems sure quite how, and has a bone crypt that I shall have to visit it one day.

But the building I really wanted to see is not in the first edition of Pevsner at all. I had glimpsed it many times, as it faces side-on to a drive that leads off one of the main roads out of town. Perhaps that explains why Pevsner missed it. Stella & Rose's Books describes his methods:

during the Easter and Summer breaks, as this was the only time Pevsner could afford to take out from his other commitments, he would travel around the countryside in a car driven by his wife Karola. They would drive from dawn until dusk with Pevsner scribbling on a clipboard, then that same evening Pevsner would write the first draft.

Clearly, Karola took Fox Street, Rothwell, at to fast a lick for him to spot the town's Congregational Church.

That church is the right-hand building in the photograph above. Now a United Reformed Church, it dates from 1735 with later additions up to 1852. You can read a full description on British Listed Buildings, but it is clear that this church's real glory is its interior - it "has a simple facade but has a remarkable interior in a sophisticated classical style" says Wikipedia - so I shall have to go back.

But I was rather taken with the other building in the photo, which is a Sunday school that dates from late in the 19th century. It is essentially a red-brick industrial building - the rear, with its bricked-up windows, looks like a mill that has fallen on hard times - but it was given an ironstone frontage in a loosely defined Gothic to make it respectable enough to face the church.

Rothwell water tower

They are fond of their water towers in Northamptonshire. Every town seems to have one standing above it as you approach by road.

This is Rothwell's tower, complete with bungalows clustered around its skirts.

Geograph comments: "The most prominent site for some miles around, probably only still standing as a useful income generator for Anglian Water - a mobile phone mast." But they didn't have such a nice day for it.