Merry Christmas to all our readers

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I'll tell thee;
Little lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee! 

                             William Blake

The Joy of Six 1434

GB News's new show broadcast live from the US features non-stop praise for Donald Trump and the channel’s co-owner Paul Marshall begging MAGA politicians to "save the UK", reports Josiah Mortimer.

Mills Dyer, who spent several years working in the Liberal Democrats' membership department, gives three reasons why they membership surges like the one the Greens are currently experiencing matter – and three why they're completely irrelevant.

Tayo Bero is worried by the explosion in online content promoting the use of antidepressants: "Antidepressant use can be messy, stressful, confusing and seemingly interminable (don’t even get me started on my experience with withdrawal symptoms). It is not the kind of experience that vulnerable young people should be socially coerced into, especially via the machinations of capitalist vultures. Young people need way more than a two-minute TikTok to figure out what they should do to get better."

"Before socialism even had a name, the poet and painter William Blake saw how the Industrial Revolution’s 'dark Satanic mills' harmed humanity. His visionary work condemned the forces of commodification and cold calculation in emergent capitalism." Jonathan Agin argues that William Blake was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation.

"When Pebble Mill opened in 1971 ... it was the most sophisticated in the country, the largest outside London, and the first to combine TV and radio operations under one roof. It was conceived as the regional counterpart to the Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush." Jon Neale remembers Pebble Mill Studios and the golden age of Birmingham television.

Andy Murray explores the Manx folklore that inspired Nigel Kneale, including his Halloween III script that never saw the light of day.

The Joy of Six 1380

"Since the Truss debacle, the UK has had to pay a substantial premium over other G7 countries to borrow in the bond markets. In other words, it has to pay a higher rate of interest on its gilts than it normally would. A similar message is being sent by the stock market where, since Brexit, UK shares have traded at a huge discount to European and US shares." Simon Nixon says Rachel Reeves' misfortune is to be the teller of hard truths in a country only interested in easy answers.

Emily Kenway asks why carers are so often made to feel invisible: "To be an unpaid carer is to be deemed not credible, according to Mary, Ada and several other carers in this study. Mary feels this is especially apparent higher up the professional ladder. The community-based staff listen to her, perhaps because they see what she does for her son on a daily basis. But of consultants and doctors, she said: 'I’m lucky if they’ll even look at me.'"

"The big problem with the DfE’s campaign to improve attendance is that no-one – really, no-one: not a single person – truly believes that attendance at school is the most important factor determining an individual’s attainment or lifetime earnings. Class, status, income, connections, quality of educational provision, home circumstances, breadth and depth of experience… there are a hundred and one reasons why private schools can achieve good academic outcomes without being bound to the 190 day school year which everyone else has to operate." John Cosgrove on government's repeated attempts to improve school attendance.

Ben Cornwell reports that two of the UK’s biggest outdoor media owners have blocked a youth-led anti-junk food advertising campaign, despite its full regulatory approval and recent national acclaim.

Adam Mars-Jones surveys the writing career of Alan Garner: "Even when Garner started writing, it was hard to keep modernity at bay. It must have been unusual as late as 1960 for a dairy farmer like Gowther Mossock to get about in a horse and cart."

"You climb the stairs at Old Street station, hauling a cumbersome cricket bag into the east London sunshine. The hipsters and creatives barely give you a cursory glance, presumably unaware of what lies a five-minute walk away. Take the left bend on Old Street, veer down City Road, past some corner shops and the Bunhill Fields burial grounds where William Blake now rests, and there, through a black iron gate, you find an oasis." Daniel Gallan takes us to the ground of the Honourable Artillery Company Cricket Club.

The Joy of Six 1205

"The rule of law is being eroded because parliament is weak. The Executive is able to ride roughshod over political processes because legislators obediently follow the party-line. This majority needs to be diluted by replacing the First-Past-The-Post voting system with proportional representation, which holds out the possibility of creating an effective opposition in parliament. A written constitution must rebalance the powers of the government with those of the people and the judiciary." Prem Sikka argues that the rule of law has been captured by class interests and proposes a very Liberal Democrat solution.

Katharine Swindells reports on the legal loophole that leaves thousands of children in hostels, but not recorded in official data, because their accommodation is owned by local authorities.

"This gradually diminishing division between adults and children permeating deeply into western society, creating problems that we flail within, finding it difficult to diagnose what exactly is wrong, and how we might try to fix it." Pam Jarvis calls for an end to kidulthood.

Alwyn Turner on the Edwardian mystery of the hooded MP and the Eastbourne murder: "Horatio Bottomley ... didn’t identify the MP in question, only saying that he was a 'wealthy and degenerate representative of an important English constituency'."

Nicholas Wroe talks to the organisers of a new William Blake exhibition: "Yes, he was a great English artist just as he was a great English poet, but despite the fact that during his lifetime he barely left London and never left England, he was also subject to wider European intellectual and creative currents."

"Down by the railway tracks, hemmed in by streets of little houses, is this caravan encampment. Some of the dwellers in the old vans claim to be of pure Romany stock. Their ancestors came, so they say, year after year in the long ago when all around was Surrey countryside." A London Inheritance goes in search of the six Battersea locations covered in a 1951 book on Curious London.

The Joy of Six 1142

"There’s been a fair bit of discussion about Lib Dem housing policies and our record recently. It’s become obvious to me that many members, especially Young Liberals, don’t appear to know what our national housing policy is, or our track record." Mattthew Pennell sets out some of the housing achievements of local authorities run by the party.

George Llewelyn makes an unexpected discovery: "More interesting perhaps is the change in mood from the Brexit voters I spoke to in 2021. Many of them have graduated from Eurosceptics with a general dissatisfaction at how things turned out to becoming ardent rejoiners themselves."

Our suspicion of anyone who expresses the ambition to be a politician is one of the reasons for the poor quality of our MPs, says Adam Hawksbee.

Emma Fergusson, Shona Reed-Purvis and Lucy Foulkes argue that "some young people’s emotional and behavioural difficulties are now too readily being viewed as problems that require (and require only) medical intervention, typically in the form of assessment and one-to-one treatment from a mental health professional."

"These Spiritual Defenders of the game stood, using the theatrical backdrop and the powerfully echoing acoustics of their private cricketing palace to bray and honk like entitled asses." Emma John on the behaviour of MCC members on Sunday.

John Walsh remembers Martin Amis: "Although he was seen, by some critics of his first three novels, as a sex-obsessed snake in the garden of fiction, he was also the most self-consciously literary of writers. The names (or allusions to the works) of D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Fielding, Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, Gerald Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman and William Shakespeare are all dropped in the first thirty pages of The Rachel Papers. By page 60, Dickens, Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Jane Austen, George Herbert and Franz Kafka had also been press-ganged into the action."

Thomas Hardy had nothing to do with The Hardy Tree and its legend dates from the late 20th century

When The Hardy Tree in Old St Pancras churchyard came down last December, I dutifully repeated its accepted history:

When the Midland Railway built its line from Bedford to St Pancras, part of the churchyard of Old St Pancras Church was sacrificed to make way for it.

The man in charge of clearing the burials in the path of the line was a young Thomas Hardy. It's no wonder his novels turned out like they did.

Hardy had some of the redundant gravestones piles around the base of an ash tree in the remaining portion of the churchyard, and its roots later spread amongst them. It is this tree that has fallen.

But the current issue of Fortean Times suggests that Hardy had nothing to do with the tree and that this story dates from the late 20th century.

In support of its scepticism, the magazine cites an article on The London Dead:

There is no evidence that Hardy had anything to do with the tree named after him but even so I had, like most people, assumed that the gravestones had been arranged around the tree in the first place. 

It was with something of a jolt therefore that I came across a photograph of "St. Pancras churchyard and it’s disturbed gravestones" in 'Wonderful London' a book edited by St. John Adcock and published in 1926. 

The caption to the photo mentions the Midland railway Company obtaining an Act in 1863 allowing them to build a viaduct over the churchyard and says "the rockery made of tombstones is a result of the headstones being removed and 'dumped'". 

The photograph shows the familiar circular arrangement of headstones but with one significant difference; there is no tree! 

In 1926 the Hardy tree did not exist. The tree, presumably self-seeded, has grown since the late 1920’s and is less than one hundred years old.

The article goes on to quote an account by Hardy of his work at Old St Pancras that makes it clear he was not in charge of the exhumations but merely dropped by in the evenings to keep an eye on progress.

So where does the legend of Hardy and his tree come from?

The London Dead says:

In ‘Lights Out for the Territory’ Iain Sinclair tells us that he was working on a long London poem provisionally entitled RedEye and gives an extract from the abandoned work (‘May 16, 1973: at St Pancras Old Church. Drawn against the repetitive boredom of the pavements to investigate the building - its slight eminence....’) which goes onto to mention Hardy and his supervision of the exhumations and "his ever-recurrent interest in churchyards".  

Later he describes the photographer Marc Atkin’s fascination with the Hardy tree "with its cluster of surrounding headstones - like a school of grey fins circling the massive trunk, feeding on the secretions of the dead." 

This was in 1997 which is as close as I can get at this stage to the naming of the Hardy tree - sometime between 1978 and 1997.

It isn't just Sinclair and Atkin who had a deep interest in Old St Pancras in those years: Aidan Dun published a visionary poem about this corner of London, Vale Royal, in 1995. Like Sinclair's early books, it was published by Mike Goldmark in Uppingham.

And in 2007 I quoted a post on BLDG Blog:

I think it's from Dun – but I don't actually know; I just associate this with him - maybe I made it up? - that I heard a legend claiming that St. Pancras Old Church, stranded on its small hill behind the train stations next to the old London Hospital for Tropical Diseases, is actually the secret burial place of Christ.

The church, obviously, was built much later, as a means of marking the site - at the same time keeping silent its little secret.

I suspect The London Dead is right, and the legend of The Hardy Tree originated somewhere in this neo-Blakean, psychogeographic, Sinclairian school of literature. And the idea that his experiences at Old St Pancras had a profound on Hardy and thus his novels does seem to date from 1997 and Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory.

Walking London’s Civil War defences in Islington with John Rogers

From the blurb on YouTube

Waterfield Fort was at the top of St John's Street, exactly where Spa Green Estate stands today, linked eastwards by trenches running along Sebastian Street to a huge fort at Mount Mills off the Goswell Road. Westwards, the lines cut to New River Head's circular reservoir and on to Mount Pleasant, east of Black Mary's Hole and another city dump. In between, a covered walkway was cut up the hill that is now Amwell Street, to Islington Pond, which would soon became the extant reservoir in Claremont Square. 

The author, Guy Mannes Abbott, makes the link between this system of fortifications that stretched eastwards through Shoreditch and Whitechapel to Wapping, built to protect the fledgling English Revolution, and the Utopian aspirations of the municipal architecture of Berthold Lubetkin built in the old London borough of Finsbury. 

This video starts at the old Roman wall at Aldersgate then passes the Barbican. We then follow civil war line of communication from Mount Mills, just off Goswell Road, along Sebastian Street to Northampton Square, up St John Street to Spa Green Estate site of Waterfield Fort. We then walk through Spa Green to the site of the New River Head and down Rosebery Ave to Mount Pleasant Fort. The final stage of this classic London walking tour goes up Amwell Street to Claremont Square site of the Fort Royal. 

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

Walking the secret alignments of London with John Rogers

A walk linking Bunhill Fields, Bunhill Row, Old Street, St Luke's and City Road. It takes in the burial places of William Blake and Daniel Defoe.

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

The spooky background of Boris Johnson's new chief of staff

The Guardian reports today:

Boris Johnson has appointed Dan Rosenfield, a relatively little-known former Treasury official and banker, to become his chief of staff, a key part of a reorganisation process following the departure of Dominic Cummings.

Rosenfield currently works for Hakluyt, an upmarket corporate advisory firm that has a number of former intelligence members among its staff.

I came across Hakluyt some years ago on sites like WikiSpooks, which tells us:

Hakluyt fills a niche in the spook sector by specializing in upmarket business, with which it has been very successful. In its brochure, Hakluyt promises to find information for its clients which they "will not receive by the usual government, media and commercial routes". The company tries to distinguish itself from other business intelligence consultants, spinmasters and clipping services. 

"We do not take anything off the shelf, nothing off the Net—we assume that any company worth its salt has done all of that," Hakluyt's Michael Maclay explained at a 1999 conference in the Netherlands. "We go with the judgement of people who know the countries, the élites, the industries, the local media, the local environmentalists, all the factors that will feed into big decisions being made."

WikiSpooks also says Hakkuyt was set up in 1995 by three "UK spooks" and by 2001 claimed a quarter of FTSE 100 companies as its clients.

That year it ran into controversy when the Sunday Times claimed that it had underhand tactics to gain information about Greenpeace and those dangerous radicals at Body Shop.

The most colour about Hakluyt I have found is in an article on the website of the wealth management firm Spears. It begins:

When Christopher James launched his business intelligence firm in 1994 - before anyone knew what business intelligence was - he named it after an international man of mystery.

Richard Hakluyt was an Elizabethan priest, diplomat, spy and travel writer who, while posted to Paris as secretary to the English ambassador, had kept Walsingham informed about French and Spanish activities there. 

That’s not a career so different from James’s own, which has taken in the SAS, MI6 and the FCO, the core of Britain’s secretive global influence.

It also tells us that "a friend from the Welsh Guards, Christopher Wilkins, chipped in with some money to rent an office" when the company began trading.

Why was I interested in Hakluyt?

I disappeared down this particular rabbit hole because Christopher Wilkins is the son of the once popular and now forgotten historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins, whom I have blogged about from time to time.

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise," as William Blake put it.

When I thought of writing this post I found I had quite forgotten how I knew Christopher Wilkins was Vaughan Wilkins' son. But I managed to prove it all over again via the University of Sheffield's catalogue of its holdings of the papers of an obscure Labour peer and a website about Suffolk artists.

Maybe someone in the intelligence field should offer me a job?

Six of the Best 958

"I will never forget the relentless anxiety of living hand to mouth. When you're in that position, you go through every possible emotion. Shame. Panic. Fear. Ultimately everything becomes about survival." Liz Jarvis makes the case for a basic income.

David Henig explains the fundamental problem with Brexit now: "The problem is not the UK, whether Labour or Conservative, wanting a deal. It is that the deal that the UK seems to want, of privileged non-membership access without cost, it not available, has not been available since 2016, and that neither Labour or Conservative Party is prepared to admit this."

Karen Shalev Greene says that children transitioning from care to adult life are being badly let down and falling prey to criminal gangs.

"Extraordinarily, we now live in a world in which the best evidence that Royal College of Psychiatrists has been able to muster for the real-world effectiveness of ECT exactly parallels the claims for homeopathy," claims Peter Kinderman.

Gareth Dennis investigates the role that capital from slave owners played in the development of the railways.

William Blake saw angels and ghosts and the Hallelujah sunrise, even on the darkest day. We need to foster his state of mind, argues Mark Vernon.

Six of the Best 891

"Conservatives are at their best when they are terrified. The fear of losing everything persuades them to give ground on some things," argues Nick Cohen, but they are not frightened enough of a Labour government.

Chris Dillow says that for market economics "every billionaire is a market failure - a sign that competition has failed".

"Some are epic tales of the ancient kings who battled to rule Britain. Others are books about bakers in abandoned northern towns or novels about mild-mannered fascists in 1930s rural England." Donna Ferguson on the rise of Brexlit.

Eleanor Gibson looks at the Italian architect Stefano Boeri's plans for a forested smart city in Mexico that is designed to be a pioneer of more eco-efficient developments.

"There is an excellent commitment to show Blake’s work as it originally came to an audience, not just in framed works hanging on a wall." Philip Hensher visits Tate Britain's William Blake exhibition.

Janine Moore admires Southwell Minster.

From Waterloo to Putney

Time for another walk with John Rogers. This time he takes us along the Thames Path from Waterloo to Putney.

You can continue the walk to Richmond in another video posted on this blog.

Iain Sinclair on William Blake's radicalism

Iain Sinclair explores the historical background to William Blake's radical writings.

This video was filmed at Vauxhall in 2014.

Six of the Best 405

The Liberal Democrats are unpopular, but things can change argues Neil Monnery: "Labour now lead the polls just ten years after going into a very unpopular war and five odd years after overseeing the tanking of the economy. They are doing that with a leader who has zero personality or political nous and a shadow Chancellor who is, to be frank, vastly out of his depth. That says a great deal about how politics can ebb and flow...."

Ian Smart on the wide appeal of the Anti-Apartheid movement and how he didn't meet Nelson Mandela.

"When Mandela donned a Springbok jersey and walked onto the field to congratulate the captain, Francois Pienaar, not only was he making a sporting gesture, but reaching deep into the heart of white South Africa. Implicit in his gesture was a reassurance that he would value the things that whites held dear and seek to accommodate their interests, alongside others." Angela Gilchrist writes for Discursive of Tunbridge Wells on her time as a young journalist in South Africa and the process of national reconciliation.

Information Right and Wrongs reminds us that children can refuse to have their fingerprints taken for internal school systems.

Landscapism visits the Uffington White Horse and Wayland's Smithy.

"From here we conducted a quick march down Oxford Street, dodging the throng of Christmas shoppers, and into Soho Square for another reading from Jerusalem." Richly Evocative joins a walk taking in a variety of sites associated with the artist and visionary poet William Blake.

Six of the Best 364

Roger Williams MP, in an article on Liberal Democrat Voice, calls for urgent action to save Britain's bees. He is right [though you may wish to add your own joke about Plan Bee here].

Jock Coats suggests market anarchism as a way forward for the Lib Dems.

"Four years ago, polls suggested that about 40 percent of the American public favored gay marriage. Today, those figures are above 50 percent. According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted last month, 72 percent of Americans viewed legal recognition of same-sex marriage as 'inevitable'." Colleen Walsh writes for Harvard Gazette on the shift in public opinion.

Professor Athene Donald discusses ways of encouraging women scientists on the Royal Society's Inside Science site: "This paper exemplifies, albeit in a very different situation, why having women visible on conference platforms matter. Without such obvious role models, those women setting out may see only a sea of unrelentingly male faces and be unable to imagine themselves breaking the pattern."

Charlotte Du Cann looks at the work of William Blake, Samuel Palmer and Paul Nash.

"It is tempting to see [Matthew] Hoggard as the last of his breed (the steam-powered trains, perhaps, or the heavy horses)," says Backwatersman.