The Joy of Six 1289

"Biden should have been managed off the stage in time for the party to have proper primaries, introducing a new generation of Democratic party politicians to the American public. Instead, the president clung on to the point where only Kamala Harris could realistically be the nominee. She was left having to campaign as a “change candidate”, trying to define herself as a new face while also defending her government’s record." Alistair Carmichael says the Democrats made one of the worst political mistakes in modern history.

Robert Saunders discusses the supposed role of the monarchy in times of political crisis: "In a democracy, the monarchy can only survive if it stands outside political contention. Yet that makes it a broken reed when it is the constitution itself that is in crisis. The logic of this situation is not that the monarch should be more politically active, but that we cannot rely on a ceremonial monarchy to protect the constitution from attack."

"If I say something is 'typical Boris Johnson', you have a mental picture. But what is 'typical Keir Starmer'? Worse, what is 'typical Jonathan Reynolds”' (He’s the Business Secretary, but you knew that.)" Robert Hutton on why itanto will take the satirists and sketchwriters time to get to grips with Labour.

Ella Creamer and Lucy Knight report on the glut of children's books written by celebrities and ask if the trend pushes aside genuine writers and makes it harder to find great children’s fiction.

Elizabeth Tingle introduces to Anthony Jenkinson, who was born in Market Harborough: "the records of his travels and his surviving letters comprise the first English descriptions of the lands and peoples of Muscovy and Tartary. With recent historical interest in travel, life writing, and perceptions of ‘other,’ the story of Jenkinson adds a Leicestershire and Rutland dimension to the processes of globalisation and empire that made the modern world."

"Now they’re almost gone, some of us have started to feel nostalgic for those wastelands. They were dangerous, mysterious and wide open. Those that remain, pending development, are invariably locked down tight, with heavy security and surveillance." Ray Newman cpnsiders love and death in the rubblescape.

The return of the Rutland Panther

Important news from the Rutland & Stamford Mercury:

A pair of cyclists believe they spotted the elusive Rutland panther while out for a ride yesterday evening. 

Tim Bateman and son Harry, 16, were on the road between Teigh and Market Overton when they saw the mysterious beast prowling in a field. 

It was black, had a long tail and was seen chasing a pheasant at great speed through long grass. 

Tim, who lives in Market Overton, said: “At first I thought it could be a deer, or perhaps a dog, but it was so fast and agile I’m convinced it was the Rutland panther.

I note the sighting took place near Teigh. Could it have been the spirit of the Revd Henry Stanley Tibbs they saw haunting the fields?

Meanwhile in Shropshire, a 'Flying Dorito UFO' has been spotted by a walker on The Wrekin.

Strange days indeed.

Revd Henry Stanley Tibbs, the rector of Teigh imprisoned for his Nazi sympathies

This is the Old Rectory at Teigh in Rutland, now a bed-and-breakfast establishment that wins outstanding reviews.

If it looks familiar it may be because it served as Mr Collins' rectory in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice - you know, the one with Colin Firth and the lake.

In 1940 it was home to the Revd Henry Stanley Tibbs, when he was denounced as a Nazi sympathiser by some of his parishioners and imprisoned.

Most sources say he was sent to Walton prison in Liverpool, though the National Archives page on Tibbs suggests it was the internment camp on Ascot racecourse.

The catalogue of charges against him, according to a BBC News page on the affair, was long:

The 63-year-old was not only accused of harbouring two Gestapo agents in the parish rectory - and genially introducing one of them to a local farmer - but of helping the spies draw sketches of a bomb silo at nearby Cottesmore Aerodrome. 

He was said to have described Germany as "our natural friend" and that a local clergyman caught the Reverend telling his children "that Hitler and Goering were the finest men in the world". 

One witness said he heard him describe Churchill as "a drug addict and a dictator of the vilest kind, in fact the worst dictator in the world and in the pay of the American Jews".

It all sounds unlikely, but Tibbs did make some admissions:

Writing from his cell in Liverpool Prison, Mr Tibbs admitted he had indeed, years before, belonged to the British Union of Fascists. They had an excellent agricultural policy, he said. 

He admitted that one of his sons, who had also been imprisoned, had joined the party. But he said it was the uniform, rather than the fascism, that appealed to him. 

He also conceded he had subscribed to the British Union newspaper, Action.

This basis of fact was inflated by local gossip. The Guardian thinks it know who was behind it:

Those who informed on Tibbs to MI5 included churchwarden Joseph Morley and his brother Fred, and the Rev Douglas Bartlett, of neighbouring Market Overton. 

According to the Rutland chief constable, Tibbs had expressed admiration for Hitler and, like the Mosleyites, said he wanted a negotiated peace.

The Guardian goes on to say that the appeal committee recommended Tibbs' release, but restricted him to his parish. Later all restrictions on him were lifted.

In 2008 the BBC interviewed the then vicar of Teigh (and many other parishes) James Saunders:

So what happened in the end to the hapless Mr Tibbs? 

According to Mr Saunders, he returned to the village a broken man, slipped into obscurity and died shortly afterwards. The parish was declared vacant in 1943. 

"For understandable reasons, he kind of dropped from the village's memory."

Let us leave the last word to the Revd Tibbs' earthly boss. The Bishop of Peterborough wrote in support of his defence against detention:

"Mr Tibbs is, in my opinion, a foolish, slippery-tongued fellow, but a harmless one." 

Teigh in Rutland is a Thankful Village

There are no settlements in Scotland or Northern Ireland that did not lose a member of the community in the First World War.

In England and Wales there are 52, known as Thankful Villages. And Teigh in Rutland is one of them.

The photograph shows the low obelisk and sundial that was erected in 2014 to mark this fact. The plaque lists the names of the eleven men and two women from the village who served in the war and came home.

They are commemorated inside the church too.

At the edge of the village there is a plum tree planted by his parents to commemorate their son who died in 2004 at the age of 36.

When I visited Teigh the fruit was ripening.

The beheading of Richard de Folville outside Teigh church

Teigh village. Looks harmless, doesn't it?

But when I showed you the perfect 18th-century interior of its church I said there there "much else - light and dark - to tell about this little Rutland village".

This is the first of three posts telling those stories.

As the BBC page for an old edition of Jonathan Freedland's The Long View says:

The Folvilles were a Leicestershire gentry family who, throughout the 1320s and 30s, terrorised their local community, committing numerous crimes. In 1310 the father of the family, John de Folville, Lord of Ashby Folville, Leicestershire and of Teigh, Rutland, had died leaving a widow, Alice de Folville and seven sons. 

The eldest, also named John, inherited the manor of Ashby Folville and seems to have lived within the law. However, his brothers, Eustace, Laurence, Richard, Robert, Thomas and Walter formed the core of a criminal gang.

But Richard was to meet a brutal end:

However, in Feb 1340 justice finally caught up with at least one of the Folville brothers. A commission was appointed to arrest Richard de Foville under the statute of 1336 and send him to the Tower of London. 

In late 1340 or early 1341 Richard, who had been made rector of Teigh by his elder brother, took refuge in his church along with a band of followers - including, perhaps, some of his brothers. 

Shooting arrows from within, Richard killed one of his pursuers and wounded others before being dragged out by the angry crowd and beheaded outside the church by Sir Robert de Colville, a keeper of the peace.

Holy Trinity, Teigh: Village church or Georgian country house?

Holy Trinity in the village of Teigh has an interior that feels as much like a Georgian country house as a village church.

Leicestershire & Rutland Churches speaks of its "unique feature":

the fantastic triple pulpit built into the west wall, the ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’ pulpit, prayer desk and Lectern are all built over and around the entrance to the nave. The rector and readers would have been in the different position and heights during the service. You would only see their heads and tops of their bodies a most unusual feature. We see why the pews are facing each other so they could see up to the rector at the pulpit and then turn to view the altar.

Enjoy it now, but there is much else - light and dark - to tell about this little Rutland village.

GUEST POST "A modest county": Pevsner in Leicestershire

Susie Harries published her Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life last week. In this guest post for Liberal England she looks at Pevsner's treatment of Leicestershire and Rutland.

Pevsner's mood as he set off to tour the buildings of Leicestershire was subdued. By the mid-1950s Penguin Books were losing money on every volume of the Buildings of England and Pevsner had been pressed into service as a fundraiser - a role in which he did not shine. His letter to Sir Hugh Beaver, Managing Director of Guinness, was hardly brash: "The sum involved is not large per annum and the use within the field of English art and architecture is quite big."

With the threat that the series might be abandoned hanging over him, it was perhaps not surprising that when he came to write the introduction to Leicestershire he lacked zest. As Reyner Banham pointed out, he wrote at his best when dealing with extremists - Mannerists, High Victorians, Brutalists. Pevsner himself identified a love of the extreme as a typically German characteristic - and he found few extremes in Leicestershire. He preferred mountains to plains, and listed his favourite recreation as the 12-mile walk: Charnwood Forest, he noted glumly, was no more than seven miles by four across.

"A modest county", Pevsner called Leicestershire, with few outstanding buildings. Specifically, it seemed to be short on the types he particularly liked. Its medieval churches were often ruined by over-restoration: 'Much of the aesthetic pleasure in, it may well be true to say, half her ancient churches ... is obliterated by the zeal of the restorers.’

Its contemporary buildings, too, were few and far between: "Clearly Leicestershire, Leicester, and the clients of the architects in Leicestershire have not yet understood what the new style in architecture is about." When Pevsner visited Leicester University the Engineering Faculty Building by James Stirling was still on the drawing-board - perhaps fortunately, given his resistance to overbearing self-expression in architecture. (Inconsistent as ever, though, Pevsner could appreciate the boldness of some garish gestures.

"In HUMBERSTONE GATE, [Leicester]," he wrote, "is LEWIS’S STORE (by G. De C. Fraser, 1935-6) with a tall modernistic tower, definitely not in a good taste [sic], but by its very queerness and uncouthness an established landmark. The rest of the frontage is tamer.")

Nor was Leicestershire, having had no Industrial Revolution to speak of, rich in the kind of Victorian buildings he found interesting, . With no steep increases in urban populations, there had been less need for new churches. For Catholic churchgoers there was Augustus Welby Pugin. But while Pugin's drawings were brilliant - "rapid, unfettered, impulsive"  the completed buildings were not: "They are at best correct in forms and mood (Mount St Bernard), at worst of an unprecedented gloom which makes one yearn for the fantastical Gothic of the C18 or the richer forms and styles of the Victorian proper."

And then there were the Nonconformists - rarely for Pevsner a source of joy. "1866 by Thomas Carter," he wrote of the Baptist Church in Friar Lane, Leicester, "and, as far as architecture is concerned, thoroughly horrible. It would take up too much space to describe the discrepant motifs and demonstrate the unfeeling way in which they are assembled."

So he had to find his pleasures in unexpected places. Always cramped for space in the BoE volumes, nevertheless he usually made  room for inscriptions that took his fancy. In Barrow on Soar it was the epitaph for Theophilus Cave (d.1656):

Here in this Grave there lyes a Cave,
We call a Cave a Grave.
If Cave be Grave and Grave be Cave,
Then reader judge I Crave
Whether doth Cave lye in Grave
Or Grave here lye in Cave?
If Grave in Cave here buried lye
Then Grave where is thy victorie?
Goe reader and report here lyes a Cave
Who conquers death and buries his own Grave.

Monuments, too, were an unfailing source of interest. He was moved in Prestwold by the tomb of Charles Hussey Packe, who had died in 1862 at the age of 15: "Recumbent figure of a youth in Eton clothes on a mattress, very pathetic."

In St Michael, Brooksby, he noted that Sir William Villiers and his young wife had both died in the same year, 1711: "Standing figures side by side in the dress of their time but draped with big cloaks of a vaguely Roman kind. Sir William looks somewhat pompous with his big wig, his wife has a round attractive face, the shape and features that Renoir liked."

Pevsner may have complained of Leicestershire's architectural diffidence, but when it came to individual buildings it was, in fact, often precisely their modesty that appealed to a man who had been known to use 'introvert' as a term of praise. Just as he disliked aggression and irrationality in architecture, so he valued manners and equanimity. Admiring of the early Tudor detached chapel at Withcote - "a perfect example of this rarely surviving type of building" - it was Withcote Hall to which he warmed: "A plain, reasonable, cream-coloured and extremely lovable house of the early C18." (Withcote Hall is on English Heritage's Heritage at Risk register.)

Withcote Hall (photo by Stephen Pointer)

Lack of pretension again attracted him in Holy Trinity, Staunton Harold. As a historian, he noted that the church was one of very few to be built during the time of the Commonwealth. He relished the originality of its exterior: "Perhaps as a demonstration in favour of old times, a completely new church was built entirely in Gothic forms" - and the miraculous preservation of its contrasting interior - "as consistently 'Jacobean' in style – that is, at that moment and in Leicestershire 'modern' - as the exterior is Gothic.’ But it was the church's "engaging humility" that won his affection: "Altogether Staunton Harold church was not intended to be a showpiece, and that makes it all the more lovable."

Given Pevsner's enduring fascination with national character in buildings and landscape, Staunton Harold was special: "For position, Staunton Harold, the house and the chapel, are unsurpassed in the country... as far as Englishness is concerned. One must see the group with the lakes from due E – from the main road or from the drive nearer by."

In contrast, a carving in the church of St Michael, Stoney Stanton was totally alien:

Norman tympanum now over the N doorway of the chancel. A very odd representation. On the l. an ox (lamb?) and behind it a bishop with crozier and blessing raised hand. The ox attacks a dragon (is attacked by a dragon?). On the dragon perches an eagle, and from the r. a second dragon attacks the first. What is the meaning of this Germanic barbarity?

Tympanum, St Michael, Stoney Stanton (photo by John Salmon)

Pevsner had a rather English sympathy for the aspirations of the humble. 'COALVILLE', he wrote, "A pathetic and unpromising name for a town. But the CLOCK TOWER by Henry Collings, of 1926 makes up for such misgivings. Quite a proud thing to build for a small town."

On the same principle, he rejoiced in Rutland, which he would have given its own volume if he could. Echoing the words of W.G. Hoskins, he declared: "They say the best things come in the smallest parcels: Rutland is both very small and very good."  He revelled in the chancel arch at St Peter, Tickencote, Voysey's The Pastures at North Luffenham, the Norman carvings in the church of St Andrew, Stoke Dry, and, perhaps most particularly, the church of Holy Trinity, Teigh. Built in 1782 by George Richardson for the Earl of Harborough, it had retained a 13th-century tower, but the interior was entirely 18th-century. Pews were ranged along the walls as in a university college, and the pulpit was pure Strawberry Hill Gothic:

The W and E walls are articulated by slender shafts into three blank arches. On the E side the window is in the middle space, the boards with the Ten Commandments are in the lateral ones. The W wall is more surprisingly and entertainingly organized. The lateral spaces have boards with the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. In the middle space the doorway, a little higher up l. and r. of it two reading desks in boxes accessible from behind, and, above the doorway, the pulpit also accessible from the tower. The wall l. and r of the pulpit is painted with mock glazing bars and trees appearing behind them. The three boxes give one an irresistible hope that at any moment preacher and readers might pop out like the little figures in a weather-house.

Holy Trinity, Teigh (photo by Philip Wilkinson)

Pevsner had, after all, enjoyed himself. And it seems likely that Sir Hugh Beaver responded well to the modest approach. When Leicestershire appeared in 1960, Beaver was the dedicatee and Guinness the first sponsor to step in and keep the Buildings of England on the road.

Anthony Jenkinson: From Meerkat Harborough to Moscow

The Leicester Mercury's report on Meerkat Harborough quotes Bernard Bresbode from the town's civic society:

"It is an interesting idea. A community donation would also certainly be welcome."

He said a Russian connection may not be a million miles from the truth, as in Tudor times Harborough-born merchant Anthony Jenkinson travelled there and set up trading links.

Mr Besbrode said: "It could well be that a form of twinning could have been established then between Harborough and a Russian village."

Anthony Jenkinson was born here in 1529 and made four trips to Muscovy and beyond. You can read extracts from The Voyage of Master Anthony Jenkinson, made from the city of Mosco in Russia, to the city of Boghar in Bactria, in the year 1558: written by himself to the Merchants of London of the Muscovy Company on the web.

Jenkinson became lord of the manor of Sywell in Northamptonshire and is buried at Teigh in Rutland. The family later moved to Oxfordshire and one of Anthony's descendants, Robert Banks Jenkinson, became prime minister as Lord Liverpool.

Now vote for Meerkat Harborough by leaving a comment on Facebook.