In which William James uses a ladder to spy on G.K. Chesterton

In 1907 the American philosopher William James was invited to deliver a series of lectures to Manchester College in Oxford. (It was not then part of the University of Oxford: it educated Nonconformist students, who were barred by the university.)

After delivering the lectures, he went to stay with his brother, the novelist Henry James, in Rye. Seamus Perry, in the London Review of Books, tells what he got up to there:

He was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely "gurgled and giggled", he apparently came across as "lovable".

Getting a glimpse of Chesterton was irresistible partly, no doubt, because he was enormously, legendarily, fat. Rather more respectably, however, James had long admired him, he told Henry, as a "tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradoxes"; he was especially taken by his book Heretics (1905). To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals, but you can certainly see what James would have warmed to in Chesterton's exuberant, if somewhat remorseless, celebration of the ordinary world, a world unconstrained by what Chesterton called "modern intellectualism".

John Rogers discovers the lost city of Winchelsea

This is a lovely walk – I've done the stretch from Rye to Camber Castle myself. 

John's blurb on YouTube says:

This walk takes on a journey into England's medieval history on the south coast in East Sussex. Starting at Rye, one of the ancient Cinque Ports we follow the Saxon Shore Way past Camber Castle to the medieval walled city of Winchelsea. Originally planned by Edward I in 1288 it replaced the old port of Winchelsea which was swept away by the sea but had once been one of the most prosperous ports in the whole of England.

This is part of a series of walk in places within easy reach of London by train and one of the best day trips from London.

And he even finds the blue plaque on Chelsea Cottage, which was Malcolm Saville's last home.

John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

If Enid Blyton was the Beatles then Malcolm Saville was the Kinks

Now here's a title for a blog post: The Famous Five vs The Lone Pine Club. It's on the blog Unpopular Culture.

I shall resist the temptation to quote it in its entirety, and give you just a taste:

Enid Blyton is perhaps like The Beatles. Certainly she was massively globally successful and subsequently went through dips of critical and popular appeal, before becoming established again as a recognisable global brand whose enormous material success insists on being endlessly reproduced and extended. 

I rather enjoy drawing this parallel partly because I know many Beatles devotees will prickle at the thought of any similarities in artistic merit between the two and partly because Lennon himself poked fun at the Famous Five in his ridiculous ‘In His Own Write’ book. 

In hindsight I wonder if The Comic Strip were as much inspired by Lennon’s parody as anything. Certainly there is a similar smug assumed ‘cleverness’ that irritates me more in my fifties than it did in my late teens or early twenties. Others continue to find it charming, of course, and that is their prerogative.

In this imagined realm of children’s authors as 1960s pop groups then, if Blyton might be The Beatles, who would Malcolm Saville be? Certainly not The Stones and definitely not The Who. The Kinks perhaps? 

Certainly I see Saville as doing something similar to The Kinks in terms of attempting to capture a world (specifically an England) that is dissolving even as they record it. There is too a shared sense of knowingness that what is being lost is in itself partially illusory. They both, at their best, mourn a mediated Englishness.

There's much else about the two authors in the post, which reminds me a little of an article I wrote for the Guardian website years ago.

The writer of Unpopular Culture like Saville's Rye books bests, whereas I'm a Stiperstones man. And he has written at least two other posts on Saville.

There's one on Jane's Country Year, which was Saville's favourite among his own books and shows the influence of Richard Jefferies' Bevis.

And a recent one on, amongst other things, one of the last of Saville's Lone Pine stories, Rye Royal.

The Malcolm Saville Society plaque at the Hope Anchor Hotel, Rye

"The Gay Dolphin is almost as old as Rye itself. I am not sure how old it is, but there is no doubt that it was much used by smugglers and I am now fairly confident that it contains some secret which I have never discovered."

It's little wonder that readers of Malcolm Saville's The Gay Dolphin Adventure* think the Mermaid in Rye was the model for the Gay Dolphin.

And the Mermaid surely was the model for its building. But if you read the book carefully you will find the Gay Dolphin occupied a different position in Rye - one with a view across the river to Winchelsea and Romney Marsh.

That position, in real life, is occupied by the Hope Anchor Hotel, which is why you will find this Malcolm Saville Society plaque there.

* No sniggering please. Enid Blyton once published a book called Mr Pink-Whistle Interferes.

Doleham: The least used station in East Sussex

I came back from Hastings via Ashford and the HS2 line to St Pancras. I noticed Doleham because it was the only station between Hastings and Ashford that we didn't call at, so I decided it was time to post this video again.

Until 2005 Doleham enjoyed an hourly service in each direction. But then, until 1959 there was an even more remote station north of Doleham called Snailham Halt.

And things could be worse. I first used the Ashford to Hastings line on the way to a caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967, and I clearly remember that there were people collecting signatures against the closure of the whole line.

My Liberator article on the prospects for a Progressive Alliance

This article on the prospects for a Progressive Alliance of the non-Conservative parties at the next general election appears in the new issue  of Liberator. You can download it (issue 414) from the magazine's website.

It was meant to be a review of Duncan Brack's pamphlet 1997 Then and Now: The Progressive Alliance That Was and the One That Could Be, but turned into the sort of review you get in the TLS or London Review of Books.

By that I mean that it's one where the reviewer is less interested in the book in front of them than setting out their own ideas. Still, a lot of what I say is in line with the views in the pamphlet,

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Four into one won't go

With its thick concrete walls, the Progressive Alliance control bunker lies deep beneath the soil of… We’d better keep its location a secret, but I can tell you what you will find there. The room is dominated by a table whose top carries a constituency map of Britain and across which WAAFs with victory roll hairdos slide little figures representing voters.

“Less than six hundred votes needed for Labour to gain High Peak,” barks a voice from the gantry that overlooks the room. “Withdraw the Liberal Democrat candidate.” A WAAF pushes some orange voters into the red group.” “Labour gain High Peak, sir.”

And that, if you believe what you read on social media, is all opposition parties need do to win the next general election. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, together perhaps with Plaid Cymru and some smaller parties, should reach agreement to field only one ‘Progressive’ candidate between them in every constituency in England and Wales. 

Some early models of this Progressive Alliance (PA) also included the SNP, but such is its dominance of the Scottish scene, holding 48 of the 59 Westminster seats there, that it’s hard to see what it has to gain from joining such an arrangement. Besides, Scottish elections now see Unionist voters operating an alliance of their own, happy to fall in behind whichever party has the best chance of defeating the Nationalists in each constituency, and the SNP may well calculate that keeping a Conservative government in office at Westminster improves its chances of winning majority support for Scottish independence.

Would a PA defeat a reviving Conservative Party? Could it even win if the Conservatives were ahead in the polls? Supporters of the idea point out that the Tories never win 50 per cent of the popular vote, so that in many constituencies they win despite polling less than the combined votes of the parties in the proposed alliance. All we have to do is put those votes together behind a single candidate, the reasoning goes, and the Conservatives may never form a government again.

Problems problems

There would be many practical problems in establishing such an alliance. The first is that Labour’s constitution has always been taken to rule out any electoral pacts with other parties, though some way round this must have been found at Tatton in the 1997 general election, where both Labour and the Liberal Democrats stood down in favour of the Independent Martin Bell.

A second problem is that if Labour agreed to join an alliance, there would have to be agreement between it and all the other parties over who would fight which seats. Liberal Democrats of my generation have memories – perhaps “flashbacks” is a better word – of the endless hours consumed in meetings between the Liberal Party and the SDP to decide which party would represent the Alliance where – hours that would have been more profitably spent on campaigning, watching Dallas or almost anything else. Even if agreement could be reached in time for the next election, it would be at a similar opportunity cost.

Then there is the problem of what policy platform the PA would stand on – there would surely have to be some sort of agreement on policy to give voters an idea of what they are voting for, particularly if we are asking them to vote for a party they don’t usually support. One idea that you read on social media can be ruled out: a one-line manifesto pledging to introduce proportional representation for general elections. If we fought on that while the Conservatives talked about the economy, defence and education – no matter how stupid we thought what they had to say on those issues was – the Conservatives would win and deserve to win. We would certainly want to secure some movement from Labour on proportional representation and constitutional reform in general, but if we are exhausted after the seat negotiations it would be easier to agree some form of statement promising to undo the worst of the damage the Conservatives have cause on poverty, the environment and the economy.

We should also have to overcome the fact that a PA would threaten to hang around our necks the gaffes and objectionable views of every Labour and Green candidate around our necks. At the very least, Lib Dem candidates fighting the Tories in our target seats would have to cope with being called “the Labour/Lib Dem candidate” on all their leaflets, and even if the other PA candidates conducted themselves blamelessly, we should still have to cope with all the worst policies of their national parties. The Greens, for instance, want to leave NATO, but not while the war in Ukraine is going on. It’s hard to see that rallying disappointed Conservatives to the PA flag.

Would it work?

When all that had been accomplished, one question would remain to be answered: would a Progressive Alliance be worth all this trouble? Parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party because those votes do not belong to them: they belong to the individual voters. Some specially commissioned opinion polls give encouragement to the idea, but the trouble with them is that they do not seek information like conventional polls (“How would you vote if there was a general election tomorrow”) but rather ask people to forecast what they would in a hypothetical situation at some unspecified point in the future (“If there were an electoral pact between X, Y and Z parties at the next election and this resulted in you having only a Y candidate to vote for, how would you vote?” 

And the trouble with that, as psychologists will tell you, is that we are not very good at forecasting our own actions. We are actually better at forecasting other people’s, because we take into account a wider range of factors when we look at them. We wonder how our neighbours will be influenced by the election campaign, but are, wrongly, confident that we are far too secure in our own beliefs for it to affect us.

And even a PA could be agreed, it would contain subtle dangers for the Liberal Democrats. As Simon Titley asked in Liberator 346:

‘Progressive’. What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is ‘not conservative’ or ‘not reactionary’, but those are negative definitions. … The ‘p’ word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean, and that’s a good thing.

It may be that being against the Tories will be enough at the next general election, but in the long run the ideology-light Liberal Democrats need something more to found a party on.

1997 and all that

But maybe we can learn something from 1997, when a limited sort of PA operated between Labour and the Liberal Democrats and helped bring about the rout of the Conservatives. We Lib Dems saw our vote decline by one per cent, yet made a net gain of 28 seats.

Duncan Brack has written a pamphlet for Compass, 1997 Then and Now: The Progressive Alliance That Was and the One That Could Be, looking at the lessons to be drawn from that experience. It reminds us that that the cooperation between the two parties in 1997 was the result of much work, both public and private.

The public work took place in the talks between Labour’s future foreign secretary Robin Cook and the former SDP leader Robert Maclennan talks. Between them they agreed a package of constitutional reforms, which included incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, freedom of information legislation, devolution to Scotland and Wales (and elections by proportional representation to their parliaments), an elected authority for London, the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords, proportional representation for the European elections and a referendum on voting reform for Westminster elections that gave a choice between the existing first-past-the-post system and a proportional alternative.

As Duncan Brack says, much of this was already Liberal Democrat policy – some of it was watered down to be accepted as part of the package – but the agreement did break new ground for Labour. And most of it was implemented by the Blair government. The exceptions were the referendum on a proportional voting system for Westminster elections and the total removal from hereditary peers from the Lords, where a deal brokered by the former Commons speaker Lord Weatherill saw 92 of them allowed to remain.

When Paddy met Tony

Meanwhile, the private work took place in talks between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown. These looked at electoral cooperation and the possibility of a wider policy agreement than that reached by Cook and Maclennan.

Tony Blair, says Duncan Brack, was keen on the idea of the two parties backing a single candidate in a limited number of seats, and accepted that in some the candidate would be a Liberal Democrat. Remembering the hours lost in negotiations with the SDP, Ashdown vetoed this idea saying it would appear “a grubby plan designed to gain power and votes for ourselves, instead of one based round principles and what was best for the country”.

This line was forced on Ashdown, who had earlier floated the idea of closer cooperation between the parties, by the Liberal Democrats’ polling. This showed clearly that the soft Conservative voters the party was targeting would be happy for it to enter government with Labour in the event of a hung parliament but were hostile to the idea that it should campaign with Labour for that outcome.

So the parties turned to covert cooperation, concentrating on the same issues and using the same language. They avoided attacks on each other, shared information on which seats they were targeting and jointly gave the Daily Mirror a list of 22 seats where Labour voters should back the Liberal Democrats.

In the event, Liberal Democrat supporters proved to be more prepared to vote tactically than Labour supporters. The Labour vote went up in some Liberal Democrat targets, but such was the fall in Conservative support that we still won some of them. I don’t know if they were official targets, but Labour also came from third place to win two seats we had rather fancied winning ourselves: St Albans and Hastings & Rye.

Building trust and relationships

Duncan Brack concludes from this history that parties should not try to negotiate a national pact. Instead, he says: 

Any level of cooperation between non-Conservative parties will need to be more fluid and organic than it was in 1997, built from the bottom up as well as the top down – hence the Compass focus on local groups and building trust and relationships over the long term. 

This could feature a wide range of approaches – including, possibly, local electoral agreements but, more importantly, cooperation in local campaigns and policy discussions, building a common understanding and appreciation of parties’ positions and potential solutions to the challenges the UK faces in the mid-2020s.

And I am happy to support his conclusion, which takes us a long way from that Progressive Alliance Control Bunker:

Whatever the form a progressive alliance takes, whether it’s an electoral pact or encouragement for tactical voting, the parties that form it need to give an indication to the electorate of what will be the result if they vote for it: a positive agenda of reform, not merely the negative case for getting rid of the Tories.

Rye Arts Festival talk on Malcolm Saville's Sussex

Elaine Luke will be speaking on Malcolm Saville's Sussex at this month's Rye Arts Festival to mark the 40th anniversary of the author's death.

Her talk will take place at 11 a.m. on Thursday 13 September at the St Mary's Centre, Rye TN31 7LB.

The billing on the festival website, where you can also buy a ticket, says:

This talk marks the 40th anniversary of the death of writer Malcolm Saville (1901-82).  Born in Hastings, he lived in retirement in Winchelsea in the 1970s. He wrote more than 90 books, plus short stories and magazine articles, whilst at the same time working full-time in publishing. 

In his heyday he was one of Britain’s most critically acclaimed children’s novelists, rivalling Enid Blyton in popularity. Several of his books were serialised for broadcast on radio, and two were made into films. The illustrated talk considers his life and writing, particularly his use of our local landscape in his books, with their vivid descriptions of locations in Rye and the surrounding area. 

Malcolm is considered a master at evoking location. One of his fellow writers said:  ‘Malcolm Saville is an author with an intense feeling for the English scene and a determination to share it with his readers.’ His non-fiction for both children and adults is also of enduring interest. 

Especially relevant are his very knowledgeable nature books. With his passionate concern for conservation, he would have been thoroughly in tune with environmental campaigners of today. Elaine Luke is a retired teacher who has admired Malcolm Saville’s writing for many years.

Dreams and numinous landscapes: How Malcolm Saville made his stories strange

The other day I wrote about how Alan Garner ran up against the limitations of children's holiday fiction. I should also have emphasised that Susan Cooper's attempt to vault over them in Over Sea, Under Stone is not wholly successful.

But maybe that school of writing is more interesting than I made it seem. Certainly, its Ur text, Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies, is shot through with nature mysticism.

And the landscapes authors choose are often numinous or have come to be accepted as so by readers. My own childhood favourite Malcolm Saville set stories in Sussex and on Romney Marsh, territory already sanctified by Kipling and Russell Thorndike.

He also, as I may have mentioned, set stories in the Shropshire hills where the presiding genius was Mary Webb. 

Malcolm Saville knew Church Stretton and the Long Mynd before he started writing his stories, but I once heard his son, the late Revd Jeremy Saville, tell a meeting he was sure Malcolm had not visited the Stiperstones when he wrote Seven White Gates (1944), the first book he set there. 

So its distinctive atmosphere came from a reading of Webb's novels, which is why we find Jenny and Peter (Petronella) encountering the Wild Hunt on the Stiperstones during World War II:

Then the atmosphere became cold and clammy as the fog swirled round them. suddenly Jenny gave a stifled little scream and pointed up the track which led to the mines. Shadowy in the thickening mist, the two girls seemed to see a figure on horseback waving ghostly arms but no sound of hooves came to their straining ears. Then far away on the hilltop, it seemed to Peter that tiny, gnome-like figures flitted in uncanny procession. 

Jenny turned and wailed into Peter's shoulder. 

"Peter. It's true. It's them. They're riding again. What shall we do, Peter? We must hide our eyes. We mustn't even see them. Don't look, Peter."

Saville had another way of making his stories: the dream. His characters (in the three I've remembered off the top of my head all girls) can see the past or the future in dreams.

So, in the opening chapter of The Secret of Grey Walls (1947), Peter, before she had ever met Penny, has a dream that foretells the adventure they and the rest of the children are to share:

Peter began to see the dream country through which she was running. First, she realized that everything around her was cold and grey, but the light was so weird that she could not tell whether it was day or night. ... 

She turned her head and, with a sudden shock, saw that she was not alone. A few yards to her left  a girl of about her own age was running with her, and as, in her dream, Peter looked at the with curiosity, the girl turned towards her and have her a friendly smile. ... 

Then the girl at her side broke the spell by stepping forward a few paces to where they could see, between the trees, a rough cart-track, winding downhill. She clutched Peter's arm and pointed ahead, and suddenly Peter felt that the ugly, grey-walled house squatting in the hollow below them was one of the things for which she had been searching.

Later in the series, in Treasure at Amorys (1964), Penny herself has an extraordinary dream in which she witnesses a Mithraic ritual from Roman times:

The torch-bearers were now lining each side of the central aisle, and although she was surrounded by soldiers somehow she could see the faces of those in white robes who were taking their places between them. But they weren't faces. Not ordinary faces. Their heads were enormous and inhuman. One was beaked like a raven with a great mop of hair, another was a snarling lion and several others, the most frightening of all, were completely blank.

It's no surprise that a Mithraic temple is later found under the grounds of the house where the children are staying.

And late in his career, in one of his less popular series, a Saville heroine had another, less frightening, dream of Roman Britain. Here is Lucy's dream in The Roman Treasure Mystery (1973):

She was alone and not frightened. Happy and at peace. She heard the sound of running water and of a sweet voice  singing words that she did not understand. ... 

Then, in her dream, she was almost overwhelmed by the desire to hurry through the trees to meet the singer with the silver voice. Now she knew that the singer was a boy and suddenly, with a feeling of indescribable joy she saw him, standing between the trees in a pool of moonlight waiting for her. 

A boy of about her own age dressed in a white tunic. His arms and legs were bare and he held his head high as he sang. Then he looked towards her and smiled, and at that moment she was sure that she would never forget the beauty of his face.

So Malcolm Saville could make his stories strange when he wanted, which might just make him the master of the children's holiday adventure I thought him when I was 10.

Walking the Rye Harbour branch

From the description on YouTube:

This 1½ mile standard gauge branch left the Ashford-Hastings line just west of Rye station. It can be joined on the southern edge of Rye at grid reference TQ 920199, where a kissing gate leads on to a narrow waymarked path enclosed by bushes. This is the trackbed, which soon opens out on to a shallow embankment across sheep pastures, with fine views of Camber Castle to the south. 

The old railway can now be followed, with very minor diversions, as far as the former level crossing on Harbour Road (TQ 936192). Do not turn back here, but continue by road to Rye Harbour, turn left at the T junction where Harbour Road ends, and walk past the William the Conqueror pub to the water's edge. Turn left here and you will see the railway trackbed heading back towards Rye. Look around carefully, and you will see another grassy embankment nearby, which carried a branch off of the branch.

A Sixties advertisement for Brede Place near Rye

Another advertisement from that guide to Rye dating from a 1967 family holiday. It's proving to be the best 1/6 my parents ever spent.

What makes it more interesting is that Brede Place does not appear to be open to the public today.

Day trips to the Continent from Lydd Airport in 1967

Writing about Malcolm Saville and Lydd Airport a few years ago, I said:

I have a guide book to Rye, the relic of a family holiday in a caravan on Winchelsea Beach in 1967 - yes, readers, I remember the Summer of Love. In it there is a British United Air Ferries advertisement featuring return trips to Ostend and Le Touquet for 71/-.

And here is that very ad. There's more about British United Air Ferries on Wikipedia.

When the Monastery in Rye was a pottery

In 2014 the Monastery in Conduit Hill, Rye, was up for sale. The Rye & Battle Observer told us:

The Monastery building was once ear-marked as potential site for a new theatre by the Fletcher Group but the Group is now set to open a new two screen cinema in the former Further Education Centre in Lion Street later this year. ... 

In 1903, the then Vicar of Rye, the Rev. Howes, interested himself in the chapel building, and proposed its conversion into a Church House. It had been the Salvation Army Barracks for some time. 

During the last war it was used for community events, dances and films.

The paper also said that the Monastery was once a pottery, and my 1967 Rye guidebook shows it was right.

A 1967 advertisement for The Oxney Ferry Inn, Kent

Another advertisement from my 1967 guide to Rye.

The Oxney Ferry Inn is still flourishing, though it seems to have dropped the 'Oxney' from its name. Malcolm Saville fans may recognise it as the Smuggler's Rest of Treasure at Amorys:

Just over a mile to the north of Amorys, and standing well back from the road was an old inn called the Smuggler's Rest. It was a low-pitched, straggling building with white-washed walls and with several shabby sheds and outbuildings at the rear. 

It is probable that this isolated building was once a toll-house with a toll-gate across the road, for still on the wall today is a board with faded lettering stating the toll to be levied on carriages, horses, cattle, sheep and pigs.

A souvenir of Rye from 1967

They say that if you can remember the Sixties you weren't there. But I do remember them and I was there.

I even remember the Summer of Love, though it may help that I was that I was only seven years old at the time. I wore shorts, sandals and those T-shirts with horizontal stripes and three buttons at the neck that were suddenly fashionable again a few years ago.

In 1967 we had a family caravan holiday on Winchelsea Beach.

The songs that bring it back to me even after all these years are Up, Up and Away by the Johnny Mann Singers and All You Need is Love by The Beatles.

I own a souvenir from that holiday in the shape of a guide to Rye we bought then. It cost1/6.

The advertisements in it now have period interest, if not period charm, and I shall post some of them here.

This is the first.

I seem to recall that we took a trip via Robertsbridge and Tenterden, courtesy of the East Kent Road Car Company Ltd.

Camber Castle from above in 1931: Malcolm Saville there in 1945

When they came up to the gap in the walls which once had been a gateway they saw that nothing but the central tower remained inside, Sheep were nibbling on the very ground where Henry VIII's garrison may have sat down to eat, ivy climbed the walls from which armoured sentinels had watched the Channel, and from the crumbling mortar of the keep lusty wallflowers were swaying in the wind. 

They stood for a moment in the big, grassy space. The sun beat down upon them, and they were sheltered, too, from the breeze which was rustling the leaves above them. The only sound was the monotonous baaing of the sheep and the ceaseless song of the larks overhead. 

Malcolm Saville, The Gay Dolphin Adventure, 1945

The railway from Hastings to Ashford: Part 2

The waiting is over. On Thursday evening I posted part 1 of a video about the Hastings to Ashford line.

Here is the second and final part.

Another memory from that holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967.

My parents told me that I should not pick up any metal object I found on the beach.

That was because it was only 22 years after the end of the Second World War when the beach would have been mined.

And here I am well into the 21st century.

The railway from Hastings to Ashford: Part 1

In 1967 my family had a caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in Sussex. And I do remember the summer of love: All You Need is Love by the Beatles and (rather less cool) Up, Up and Away by the Johnny Mann Singers were always playing.

What I also remember, on the journey there, is that people were on the train at Ashford collecting signatures on a petition to save the line across Romney Marsh to Hastings.

It worked. The line is still open today.

This is the first part of a film made in 1987 that will tell you all about it and also about the branch to Dungeness.

Six of the Best 723

Vince Cable challenges the Tory fallacy that migrants are taking British jobs and driving down wages: "By implication, unskilled jobs should be reserved for British workers. But it isn’t clear where, with record levels of employment, the reserve army of unemployed, unskilled Britons is currently billeted."

"In 1964, a young town planner working for York City Council wrote a booklet that was to have a profound impact on York and other historic towns and cities across the country." Stephen Lewis meets Joan Hargreaves.

William Grimes contributes an obituary of Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens, an amateur spy who passed a wealth of information to the British about the development of the V-1 and V-2 rockets during World War II and survived stays in three concentration camps for her activities.

A Legacy of Spies, John le Carré's new novel, is reviewed by Robert Potts.

Paul Sorene listens to Louie Louie, the song that sowed the seeds of garage, punk and heavy metal.

Jonathan Fryer visits Lamb House in Rye, home to both Henry James and E.F. Benson.

Doleham: The least used station in East Sussex

We had a caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967 (the Summer of Love) when I was seven.

I remember the train from Ashford to Rye and that there were people collecting signatures to keep the line open. Luckily, they succeeded.

Anyway, this is another banter-rich video from Londonist.

Why I am a sceptic about the idea of a Progressive Alliance

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Last night, in a Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council by-election, the Conservatives held Trench ward with an increased majority.

Not a big surprise, you may think. But there was more to it than that.

Because both the Liberal Democrats and the Greens had stood down to give Labour a clear run.

It is always unwise to read too much into a single local contest, but the outcome here should remind us of an important lesson.

Parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party.

And that is why I am a sceptic when it comes to the idea of a "progressive alliance" against the Tories.

Think of the Richmond Park by-election.

Would it have helped Sarah Olney if Labour had declined to field a candidate? I doubt it very much.

Think of the way that we hung the support that Zac Goldsmith had received from Ukip around his neck.

If Sarah had been endorsed by Labour she would have been "Jeremy Corbyn's candidate" on every Tory leaflet in Richmond Park.

That would have made it less, not more, likely that she would have won.

The Green Party did stand down in Richmond, which may have helped Sarah. Only people who were already going to vote Tory would have been discomfited by that.

But that is because the Greens do not matter than much at present. If they did come to be more significant in the minds of the voters, then deals with them would become more problematic,

True, they are not laden with decades of embarrassing baggage the way Corbyn and McDonnell are,
but they would then put off potential Lib Dem voters as well as attract them.

We should also ask what the Greens are after in return for standing down in seats like Richmond. I suspect it is because they are after a clear run in their own most promising seats.

As these are generally ones that we Liberal Democrats held as recently as 2010 - Bristol West, Norwich South - I am wary of giving them what they want.

(If you want a alternative view of a Lib Dem - Green alliance, read Clifford Fleming on the Social Liberal Forum site.)

Let's end by returning to the central point: parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party.

The corollary of this is that when voters have made up their mind to throw out the Tories, they are quite capable of organising themselves to do it.

Think of 1997, when the operation was carried out with ruthless efficiency.

Sometimes that was to the detriment of us Liberal Democrats. In several of our target seats (St Albans, Hastings and Rye, Bristol West again) Labour came from third place to beat the Tories.

Yes, some of our gains because Labour did not try to hard in those constituencies, but that is because informal pacts like those are more likely to bear fruit that any grand, publicly announced Progressive Alliance.