The death of Dennis O'Neill and expertise in a narrow subject

Becoming very knowledgeable about a niche subject is worrying, because you find much that has been published about it is wrong. And then it become more worrying, because you suspect this is true of every subject if only you knew.

One of my niches of expertise is the death of Dennis O'Neill in 1945. He had been fostered by a couple on a farm in the Stiperstones (that's why I first came across the case) and the trial of his killers shared the front pages with news of the last days of the war in Europe.

Now I've come across another example of someone getting things wrong about the affair.

Here's Professor Ray Jones, who's about as eminent as you can get in social work, writing in an article on the Maria Colwell inquiry of 1974:

Following campaigning by the local MP and the local newspaper, a public inquiry was launched.  At the time this was a new and novel response to a child’s death. 

A previous inquiry in 1945 into the killing of twelve-year-old Dennis O’Neil was undertaken by a judge in private and took four days.

The Colwell inquiry, however, was held in public...

But the inquiry into the death of Dennis O'Neill was not conducted by a judge. It was conducted by Sir Walter Monckton, who was a KC and soon to become solicitor general in Churchill's caretaker cabinet.

The Monckton Chambers website says of him:

Monckton served with great distinction as a soldier, then lawyer, politician and industrialist. As well as being recognised as one of the leading advocates of his day, he was adviser to Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936, was appointed Solicitor-General in 1945, served as a Cabinet minister under both Churchill and Eden in the 1950s, and subsequently became chairman of Midland Bank.

So he was many things, but he didn't do any judging.

And Sir Walter Monckton conducted his inquiry in public and its proceedings were widely reported in the national and local press across those four days. You can see the start of one such report above – it's from the South Wales Argus for 12 April 1945.

Incidentally, the lack of cooperation between services that Sir Walter identifies as a problem here has also been found by every such inquiry since.

The Joy of Six 1584

"The judge told him he did not qualify for asylum and asked the 13-year-old to make a choice: a promise of a $3,000 stipend from the Department of Homeland Security to return to Honduras without his mother and family, or a deportation order. 'I don't know,' Angel said before beginning to cry. 'I have no one. I have nothing.' Julia Conley reports on monstrous US deportation hearings where children are given no legal representation.

Steven Beschloss thinks the Republican mid-term candidates now deserting Donald Trump have left it too late.

"Feltham was described as the most violent YOI at the time of inspection, with more than 400 assaults recorded in the previous year, including 126 involving weapons. Wetherby recorded nearly 500 assaults, although inspectors noted it held more children than Feltham or Werrington, which recorded 324 assaults." Joanne Parkes reads an HM Inspectorate of Prisons' report Children in Custody 2025/6. which concludes that standards across the youth estate remain woeful, despite some improvements at individual establishments.

"From a safe distance, the news that one of English football’s most successful clubs has been found guilty of more than 100 charges of financial irregularity, including “sham” payments totalling around £900m, may feel like so much so-what, a thicket of sporting arcana that even devoted fans occasionally struggle to parse. But, of course, the City case goes deeper than one club, one league, even one sport. Fundamentally, it is a parable of power." Jonathan Liew says the Manchester City case shows us how the global mega-rich now expect to operate with impunity.

Francis Young reviews a new biography of M.R. James: "It has been a long time coming, and eagerly awaited by many, and in this year of the 90th anniversary of James’s death, it does justice to the man and does not disappoint."

Farran Smith Nehme watches Quartet, Trio and Encore – three anthology films adapted from short stories by W. Somerset Maugham.

An interview with Bodhana Sivanandan, the youngest woman grandmaster of all time

Because of her performance as top board for the England women's team at the Chess Olympiad in Samarkand – she played all 11 rounds, recording six wins, four draws and one loss – Bodhana Sivanandan has qualified as the youngest ever holder of the women grandmaster title.

This video lists her many other achievements, except one: she is now two-thirds of the way to the full international master title, which is open to both men and women. This is the grade below grandmaster status.

There is already talk of how soon she will play for the open England team at the Olympiad. I note she already has a good line in glares for her opponents; this will stand her in good stead when she becomes a full grandmaster.

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The New World warns that Rupert Lowe is coming for your parents: "Lowe’s success exemplifies how Facebook has weaponised the anxieties and concerns of millions of Britons to drive its increasingly older, isolated users into unreality."

"Monday’s judgment ... means that unless the client agrees to release the material, those private conversations are now beyond the regulator’s reach. This is particularly bad news for the SRA’s ongoing attempts to tackle SLAPPs, the abusive legal actions used by the rich and powerful to shut down scrutiny." Nathaniel Peutherer analyses a judicial ruling that threatens efforts to curb Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.

"He has no visible tattoos, no shaven head, no black overcoat or jackboots. No hood, no Confederate flag and no Nazi images appear in the background as he sits in front of a screen for a recent Zoom interview. Instead, the soft-spoken Christian school teacher and pastor of ... sporting a neatly trimmed beard, was dressed in a charcoal suit and sat in front of a fish tank that seemed straight off the set of Pixar’s Finding Nemo. Then he began talking about Jews." Bob Smietana watches the rise of America's Jim Crow theobros.

Sarah Ward explains trauma-informed care in schools: "Strict zero-tolerance approaches to behaviour are not in line with the ethos of trauma-informed care and practice. It can encourage the interpretation of certain behaviour as defiance rather than distress."

"We also have another appearance by James Wentworth Day, who was quite appalling on the previous release and doesn't really add much beyond being a handy reactionary-for-hire to add 'balance', a broadcasting illusion we can now see in action 70 years ago." Discontinued Notes reviews a selection of TV programmes presented by Daniel Farson in the late 50s and early 60s that focuses on social change.

Katherine Alejandra Cross watches Network (1976). Are we all mad as hell now?

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Tom Gordon, Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, argues that we must stop avoiding the subject of student finance if we are to win back younger voters.

Margaret Hartmann reports that Trump's interference in the plans for his White House ballroom has produced a design that is a menace to public safety: "McCrery informed the White House that Trump’s ballroom design did not meet fire safety codes, which require the majority of guests to be able to quickly exit through the main entrance during an emergency ... The architect also pointed out that alternative emergency exit routes out of the building were insufficient, and that there was little in the design to prevent a kitchen fire from rapidly spreading into the event space on the floor above."

"We want children to become physically competent, but we also want them to become confident decision-makers, good communicators and effective collaborators. We might want them to learn how to deal with mistakes, take responsibility and work things out for themselves. None of this is guaranteed simply because a child participates in sport." Children’s sport is great at keeping them busy but, asks Jose Castro, are they learning?

"Born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlin in Moravia, before becoming a triply displaced refugee boy. Having been taken to Singapore as a two-year-old, two days before the Nazis invaded, he was to speak his first words, in Czech, in East Asia, but was soon to forget his mother tongue. Aged four he was again on a boat, this time to Bombay, two days before Singapore fell to the Japanese. So many of his earliest memories were of Darjeeling, in British India, where his mother met Major Kenneth Stoppard, marrying him in Calcutta, before they traveled to Southampton and then Derbyshire, where the young brothers Petr and Tomas became anglicised as Peter and Tom Stoppard." Sunder Katwala reflects on the shifting identity of the playwright Tom Stoppard, who died last year.

Amy Louise Burney says it doesn't have to be Jane Austen. She suggests five other 18th-century writers with whom TV could have a wonderful love affair.

"This is the early 1960s and the physical changes taking place in the city centre, wrecking balls and cranes visible in many shots, mirror wider societal upheaval. You suspect that when Liz (Julie Christie) gets off her train in London, the world will be in colour, not monochrome." Graham Rickson on John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963).

Sammy Going South, Suez and the end of the British Empire

Written for Terence Towles Canote's 13th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon.

We British have a habit of turning military debacles into victories. The retreat from Dunkirk, for instance, has twice been the subject of a film (in 1958 and 2017) and also forms an important part of the action in Atonement from 2007.

But the Suez Crisis of 1956, whether because of the deceit it involved or its abject failure, has proved too shameful a subject for British cinema to tackle. This unsuccessful attempt to overturn Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, made together with France and Israel, and in particular the way we were forced to back down by a threat from the United States to spark a run on the pound, marked the end of British illusions that is could remain an imperial power in the postwar world.

So it’s notable that there is a British film that begins amid the British bombing of Port Said. But, of a piece with the doomed Suez operation as a whole, that bombing kills the parents of a 10-year-old British boy, Sammy Hartland. Finding no help in a suddenly hostile town, the boy sets off, with no concept of the distance involved, to walk to his only relative, an aunt who lives in Durban in South Africa. 

Released in 1963, Sammy Going South was based on a novel of the same name by W.T. Canaway, who had quite a reputation in the Sixties and Seventies, and also had a writing credit for The Ipcress File (1965), but seems forgotten today.

Alexander Mackendrick

It was the first film that its director Alexander Mackendrick had completed for six years. After reeling off some of the best films Ealing Studios was to make – Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy, The Ladykillers – he went to Hollywood to make Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Though it now has a towering critical reputation, it bombed on release and Mackendrick was then taken off two pictures that he had begun to direct – The Devil’s Disciple and The Guns of Navarone.

Mackendrick, who badly needed to complete another film, then went back to work for his old Ealing boss Sir Michael Balcon (the grandfather of Daniel Day-Lewis), who was now the head of Bryanston Films. But there turned out to be a chasm between their views of what their adaptation of Sammy Going South should look like.

As Mark Duguid has written:

Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".

You might say that for Mackendrick, Sammy was another of the lethal innocents in whom he rather specialised – think of the chaos that Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers and Alec Guinness’s manic scientist in The Man in the White Suit provoke around them.

One result of these tensions was that Mackendrick’s original cut, which came in at over three hours, was reduced by Balcon to 128 minutes before release. The version that is shown from time to time on British television, and was released on DVD in 2010, is 10 minutes shorter still – no one seems to know quite when or why this further cut was made. 

A surprising amount of the strangeness and cruelty that Mackendrick found in Canaway’s novel survived into what was marketed as a family film. Within the first 25 minutes, Sammy has lost both his parents, been seized upon by a pedlar who clearly has sexual designs on him, and then found himself handcuffed to the man’s corpse.

As he makes his way south, Sammy is variously helped or hindered by the adults he meets. After a trek across the desert, first with the pedlar and then alone, he is taken up by a rich American woman. He runs away from her when he finds she wants to take him north with her, and then falls in with a group of Sudanese Muslims returning from the haj. 

The pilgrims’ leader, played by a stern Orlando Martins, is the only adult the boy meets in the early part of his journey who cares for him without selfish motives, but the boy abandons him for a Greek journalist who says he will take him to his aunt – and has ambitions to sell his story. The boy comes to distrust him and eventually runs away again.

Then, alone in the bush, Sammy is happened upon by a diamond smuggler played by Edward G. Robinson, whose performance and touching relationship with the boy will be what many viewers remember from the film. 

It looks as though the boy will stay with him permanently, but Robinson’s camp is broken up by the authorities and Sammy makes his way to his aunt alone. Quite how he manages this is skipped over, but in the novel he travels by light plane and train, and still has to fight off a bounty hunter at Durban station.

How Sammy became too happy

The success or failure of the film obviously relied to a great extent upon the casting of Sammy, and Mackendrick thought he had struck gold in Fergus McClelland, the 11-year-old son of Northern Irish actor Alan McClelland who, among many other roles, was in the original cast of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap alongside Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim. 

Mackendrick, quoted in Philip Kerr’s biography of the director, said of him, with alarming objectivity: 

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

But something happened which explains why McClelland, who is convincingly ragged and itchy in his scenes with Orlando Martins, appears so happy and healthy when he meets Edward G. Robinson after trekking through the bush:

"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."

Mackendrick’s treatment of the boy during filming was as hard-hearted as his approach to casting. Appearing on BBC Radio Four’s The Film Programme in 2010, McClelland recalled the unit doctor telling the director at one point that he had to decide whether he wanted “a dead star or a live little boy”.

Some critics complained that McClelland’s acting was wooden until he met Edward G. Robinson, but this is not the first time a child actor had been blamed for following their director’s instructions. Preparing to shoot the film, Mackendrick had been to institutions to study traumatised and orphaned children, and this woodenness was what he saw in in them. McClelland was to go on acting for some years, appearing in both television plays and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so other directors appreciated his talents too.

Edward G. Robinson and Harry H. Corbett

Mackendrick faced greater problems than his young lead becoming too happy and well fed: Edward G. Robinson suffered a serious heart attack early in the filming of his role. The result was that many of his scenes with the boy were shot with the participants being on different continents. 

Fergus McClelland was filmed in Africa, with Mackendrick reading the other part, and Edward G. Robinson in a studio in London, with Mackendrick this time reading the boy’s lines. It’s a mark of the director’s skill that these scenes are still so convincing and moving.

Another actor who deserves a mention is Harry H. Corbett, who plays Edward G. Robinson’s associate in the diamond smuggling game. Corbett had already made one series of Steptoe and Son, the classic BBC sitcom that was to make him a household name – soon every impersonator on television had to be able to take him off – but arguably blight his career. 

Before Steptoe, Corbett was called “the British Brando” by some, because he was a Method actor, and was the star Shakespearian in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East.

Fergus McClelland later became a voiceover artist and a trainer in business presentation, so there are plenty of his videos to be found online. In one of them, he recalls that Corbett did not talk to the other cast members much, but was friendly to him – the boy was allowed to call him “H.” 

Corbett told him that he didn’t plan on doing a second series of the comedy, but perhaps even one had fixed him in the public mind as Harold Steptoe and Harold Steptoe alone. One review of Sammy Going South referred to his “Steptoe accent”, as though it already counted against him as a serious actor.

Racial politics

The racial politics of Sammy Going South are muted: there is, for instance, no suggestion that by 1963 South Africa was a tainted haven for the boy to seek. Orlando Martins is allowed great dignity and Sammy is shown to need and appreciate his paternal authority. And, as a returning haji he appreciates that the boy is on a pilgrimage of his own. 

Beyond Martins, however, there is no other substantial Black character in a film set in entirely in Africa. The men who work for Edward G. Robinson are at least shown as a benign presence, singing a lullaby when the boy wakes suddenly in the back of their jeep.

It is the Greek journalist who suffers the worst stereotyping, particularly from the British officials, who still administrate Robinson’s part of East Africa. Those officials are verging on the comic themselves, and this is certainly no celebration of British Africa. 

The fact that Robinson has drawn for years on fuel dumps the Germans abandoned in 1918 suggests that the European presence in Africa is drawing to a close, something his character explicitly says. That wasn’t to stop Britain’s private schools turning out ideal types to run the Empire for two or three decades after it ceased to exist.

Sammy goes west

I can’t argue that Sammy Going South is a forgotten masterpiece, but it is better than its reputation and is interesting in so many ways. As a study of childhood trauma and recovery; as a document of the last days of the British Empire; and as a film by one of Britain’s best directors, who was soon to give up making films and devote himself to teaching instead.

The film was trimmed yet again for the US market, given a new title (the ludicrous, to my eyes, A Boy Ten Feet Tall) and a new soundtrack. Joe Dante even claims that this version is better than the original: I’ve not seen it, but the omission of most of Orlando Martins’s scenes makes that sound unlikely. 

But I can at least show you the trailer for this version. I wonder if Steven Spielberg saw A Boy Ten Feet Tall: am I alone in being reminded of Empire of the Sun by the scene of the boy amid the bombing of Port Said?

I suspect this American version is closer to what Michael Balcon had hoped for from the shoot. Me? I mourn Mackendrick’s lost, darker three-hour version.

Work, play and creativity: Another column for the JCPCP

This is another of the quarterly 'Sighcology' columns I contribute to the  Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Work, play and creativity

An overexcited website selling business courses tells us:

It’s easy to play it safe. To follow the rules and optimise what already exists. In a world of constant change, sensible can feel smart. Until it stops working. You see, logic will get you to the starting line – but only creativity will win you the race.

 That's why we believe creativity is the most valuable capability for growth. And it’s something that you can learn, practise and embed in every area of life. 

And another devoted to resources for creativity says:

We learn when we play as children, in fact this accounts for most of our early learning. Play acts as a learning laboratory for trying out different internal models on an external world. This is not dissimilar to our traditional brainstorming sessions.

Does this mean that we can all regress into childhood and that making mistakes or behaving foolishly does not matter? Of course not. What we mean in this context is that a certain degree of chaos, learning from mistakes and not playing by the rules is acceptable.

The link between creativity and childhood play in adulthood has indeed been studied by psychologists, with Sandra Russ publishing a book confidently titled Pretend Play in Childhood: Foundation of Adult Creativity. But I wonder if children’s play is as anarchic as the business world makes it sound?

There are philosophers who saw play differently. Michel de Montaigne wrote that “it should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.” Nietzsche agreed, saying man’s maturity is “to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play”.

And if you don’t trust philosophy, listen to the young protagonists of Richard Jefferies’ Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which appeared in 1882 as a three-volume adult novel but was later repurposed as a children’s classic. The two boys explore the farms and reservoir around their homes with heads full of adventure stories, and everything they see or do has to be reimagined in the light of them. They even have to reimagine themselves:

“We ought to be something,” said Mark discontentedly.

“Of course we ought,” said Bevis. “Things are very stupid unless you are something.”

*****

W.H. Auden displayed a map of Alston Moor in the study of his home on Fire Island, near New York. The landscape of decaying lead mines it pictured had haunted his early poetry, and before that his childhood imaginings. Between the ages of six and twelve, he recalled, he devoted much of his waking thought to “the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining”.

There were, however, rules. His was a Meccano world, not a Minecraft one:

I decided, or rather, without conscious decision, I instinctively felt that I must impose two restrictions upon my freedom of fantasy. In choosing what objects were to be included, I was free to select this and reject that, on condition that both were real objects in the primary world, to choose, for example, between two kinds of water turbine ... I was not allowed to invent one.

He was faced with just such a choice between machines:

One type I found more sacred or “beautiful”, but the other type was, as I knew from my reading, the more efficient. At this point I realised that it was my moral duty to sacrifice my aesthetic preference to reality or truth.

The child was father to the poet, because you can see the same morality at work in Auden’s growing dissatisfaction with one of his most celebrated poems, “September 1, 1939”. He omitted two stanzas from its first publication and became increasingly dissatisfied with its conclusion that “We must love one another or die.” 

"Between you and me,” he wrote to a critic in 1957, “I loathe that poem.” He found it too flattering both to him and to his readers, and changed its final line in later printings to “We must love one another and die,” but mostly he refused permission for it to appear at all.

******

So maybe children’s play is not the free-for-all its enthusiasts in the world of business courses assume but has rules that adults are too busy or sentimental to notice. And maybe they have got creativity wrong too.

The classic way of measuring creativity is the Alternative Uses Test which presents the subject with a simple object – a brick is a favourite choice – and asks them to think of as many uses for it as possible in a set time. But this seems a limited view of what creativity consists in. Isn’t it more social than that? As far as brainstorming works in business – and there seems a consensus that it’s not far at all – it’s not because someone in the room says something brilliant: it works because they say something silly, someone else turns it on its head and a third person realises that there might be something useful here.

Solitariness can be the enemy of creativity. In the days when my political party published a weekly newspaper, I would often find myself at our annual conference and being asked to write a column for it in a couple of hours, only to find that I didn’t have an idea in my head. The secret was not to sit there and think harder: it was to get away from the screen for half an hour and go for a wander around the trade stands and the stalls run by party groups. 

I would have a chat with someone, pick up a piece of gossip from an old friend and a handful of leaflets about good causes. I might end up using little of what I had gleaned, but when I got back to the newspaper’s office the gears were whirring again and the column wrote itself.

Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash Scandal shows the danger of the profit motive in the juvenile justice system

If you want to see the danger of introducing the profit motive into the detention of young offenders, watch this video on Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash Scandal.

In the first decade of this century, two judges in Luzerne County, Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella, accepted millions of dollars in bribes to lock up children and teenagers for trivial offences from the owners of for-profit detention centres. At least 2,300 young people were wrongly imprisoned.

And get a load of cuddly Uncle Joe Biden at the start of the video.

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Liz David-Barrett argues that, by making rule-breaking a selling point, Reform UK is signalling it's open for influence trading: "It is no coincidence that some of Reform’s biggest donations have come from individuals in cryptocurrency, keen to ward off the threat of regulation."

"Our findings lay bare the reality of an industry that operates without regulation. Some companies are run by people with no previous experience in care work: directors are security bosses, or come from the music business or the military. One company in our dataset is owned by an overseas private equity firm." Tom Wall reveals the vast scale of England’s £255m illegal care industry.

"Eight in ten of the UK public think mobile phone thefts have increased since 2010 and around six in ten believe both vehicle-related thefts and burglary have increased. In fact, all are down by 50 per cent or more over that time period." Bobby Duffy says that, though crime is falling, the public doesn't feel safer.

Nik Popli takes us inside the attempt to remake the Democratic Party in the US.

"Everyone who knows Muir’s work knows that he grew up as the son of a peasant farmer in the Orkneys, in one of the last communities in Europe practically untouched by Renaissance and Enlightenment culture—and that his poetry and prose are greatly affected, one might even say determined, by the struggle Muir underwent when circumstances landed him in the middle of several modern industrial and political nightmares." Andrew Frisardi mourns the eclipse of Edwin Muir's poetry.

Mari Wilson on how she made Just What I Always Wanted.

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"This is a staggering death rate of 130 per 100,000 care leavers, a figure at least three times higher than the general population. It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure that has led to this point. There are a range of causes of death, but the single largest cause is suicide." Michael Sanders looks at a new government report that lays bare the tragedy of care-leaver deaths.

Keenan Malik says the Grenfell Tower fire has "exposed a social and legal landscape shaped by an exaggerated contempt for ordinary people. It is the story of a corporate world displaying, in the words of journalist Peter Apps, 'a callous indifference to anything – morality, honesty, life safety – that was not related to the bottom line."

Ed Conway explains why the cod on your plate has probably been round the world: "Follow this cod on its way and you begin to see why so many regions in Europe and America feel like they have been 'left behind'; you begin to see why it is so difficult to take on Vladimir Putin and the Russian economy... all from a simple pack of fish fingers."

"If you’ve had a sugary treat and you’re feeling good, you’re probably feeling good because you’re having fun with family and friends, rather than from the sugar." Talitha Best on the myth of the sugar rush.

"Suddenly, he was 43 years old with a solo career that plenty of pundits thought had reached the end of the road. According to his detractors, Simon’s signature sound had nowhere else to go and, based on where he went next, maybe they were right." Matt Fish considers Paul Simon and Graceland.

JacquiWine reads The Bell by Iris Murdoch, "a sophisticated, richly textured novel that explores complicated feelings between complex individuals, encompassing faith, guilt, resentment, anger, fear, and perhaps most importantly, love. Love can take many forms, from a pure, spiritual type of love to a platonic or romantic love to a more carnal, possessive love – and Murdoch touches on all of them here to a greater or lesser extent. It’s also a radical novel for its time, particularly as Murdoch centres her storyline on a provocative moral dilemma: what happens when a person’s sexual orientation (in this instance, their homosexuality) is at odds with their religious beliefs?"

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Matt Gallagher reports that "the UK quietly sent one of its most senior security officials to a Trump administration summit which proposed to turn global counter-terrorism infrastructure against the political left."

"The values that translate to a modern Liberal success in terms of voting demographics are not simply responsible economics, but a commitment to individualism, social justice and equality; values that when communicated clearly can drive the support of those they affect most, alongside the conscientious urban populations, all of whom now flock to the Greens for these same reasons." Rose Runswick argues that the Liberal Democrats should stand for more than "business".

Josiah Mortimer on the problems with the government announcement that domestic plug-in solar panels are now allowed in the UK.

Samir Jeraj says cuts to council spending, including on adventure playgrounds, are jeopardising Leicester's recovery from the riots of 2022: "Staff, supporters and the local community are campaigning against the cuts and there are city-wide elections next year, which could reverse decades of Labour domination in the city. Opposition parties ranging from the Conservatives to the Greens are opposing the cuts to the adventure playgrounds and they could become a symbolic issue in the campaign."

"The digital sources barely scratch the surface of what exists in big archives, in tiny archives, in people’s attics. So save yourself the bother, save the planet, save the erosion of your cognitive faculties and learn to do it properly." Sophie Michell sees no role for AI in family history.

"There are six publicly known positive DNA results that match the leopard (Panthera pardus), two from recent years: from Gloucestershire in 2022, from a hair snagged on a barbed-wire fence in the vicinity of a sheep kill; and from Cumbria in 2023, when DNA was found on a carcass – again, of a sheep." Rick Minter makes the case that there are big cats living in the British countryside.

Marjory Allen encounters the ban on child actors in British films

Embed from Getty Images

Returning to Marjory Allen's memoirs after my holiday, I've come across a passage that refers to it being illegal to employ actors aged under 13 in a British film until the early Sixties.

One of Lady Allen's many wartime good works was chairing the Advisory Council on Children's Entertainment Films between 1944 and 1950. She writes that J. Arthur Rank had launched Saturday morning film shows "to help relieve war stress amongst school-age children".

The problem was that no one was sure what sort of films children enjoyed, so Rank set up the advisory council that Lady Allen chaired to tell him. It found that what they most liked was films about other children.

Lady Allen continues:

We were in some difficulty over one of the complaints made by our alert and outspoken young critics. They insisted that all children's parts ought to be acted by children of the right age, but we were constrained by the government and local regulations which made it extremely hard to employ child actors at all. 

The rules were not so strict in other countries and the problem was partly solved, after the war, by making some of our films abroad.

And I do recall seeing an old adult film with a precocious girl as a character on Talking Pictures TV. Something seemed odd about the actress, and when I checked her credits on IMDb she turned out to be pushing 30.

As I showed in an earlier post, this law was blatantly ignored by some producers, to the extent that two films with a child in the title role – Oliver Twist and Sammy Going South – were chosen for the Royal Film Performance before it was relaxed.

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Tom Perry links to a review of the duty to report child sexual abuse brought in by the Crime and Policing Act 2026. It finds that because of the way the law is framed, this new duty will have little effect.

Anand Kumar is part of the team writing the next edition of psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This edition will, for the first time, attempt to draw on findings from neurobiology – a reminder of how little we currently know about the biology of mental health and neurodevelopment.

"In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children can’t be charged with child neglect or manslaughter. Supporters of this protection over the years have included lawmakers who voiced support for 'traditional' Idaho values." But, as Audrey Dutton shows, between the 1880s through the early 1970s it was illegal for parents in in the state to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake."

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite reviews four books on the General Strike of 1926: "The miners said that if some pits really were uneconomic, they should shut. The owners wanted to make all pits profitable again by squeezing the workers. The president of the owners' association freely acknowledged that in mines producing for export, wages would fall to levels that he did not shrink from describing as miserable'."

"Eaton was keen on a different director and format for each film. It meant each had its own reference points. I thought about Chinatown a lot with 1974. The design and costumes were all smoky and brown, like the 70s. The cast went for the material big time. David Morrissey really did his research and Sean Harris is nothing if not method. It’s a very masculine story but we wanted strong female characters too – we had Maxine Peake and Rebecca Hall. I kept the most horrendous violence off-screen. Violence you imagine is much worse than anything you’ll see. Your mind does the work." Michael Hogan talks to people involved in the making of the trilogy of television plays Red Riding.

"Sounds fascinated Joe from an early age. He would build circuit boards and take radios and record players to pieces, even creating his own recording equipment (there’s a tale that he put speakers up trees so that the local cherry pickers could listen to the radio whilst they worked, which is brilliant if true). Signing up for his National Service, he became a Radar Technician which also helped nurture another of his fascinations – outer space." Samantha Veal discovers the mercurial Joe Meek.

Olly Lambert's The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke

Olly Lambert's three-part documentary The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, which is currently on the BBC website, is a brilliant and horrifying piece of work. It's like a David Lynch film, every frame of which is true.

Lambert has written about the making of it in the Independent:

Last May, I sat in a Utah coffee shop with Chad Franke, the son of the infamous 'momfluencer' turned convicted child abuser Ruby. Once regarded as 'America’s mom', Ruby and her family’s former counsellor Jodi Hildebrandt are now both serving up to 30 years in prison for aggravated child abuse on Ruby’s young children. “My mom would always tell me I’d end up in prison,” Chad says casually, then turns to look out the window. “Which is kind of ironic, when you think about it.”

Eight months earlier, Chad and his family had become headline news all across the US and beyond. Theirs was a dark tale of a spectacular fall from grace, with Ruby’s mugshot appearing on magazine front covers and branded a 'Monster Mom' after her 12-year-old son was found in the haze of the Utah desert begging for food and water.

He was emaciated and covered in deep wounds, and would lead police to discover his youngest sister – mute and similarly malnourished – in a closet at the home of the family therapist. Medics later determined that the young boy would have died within two weeks had he not unlocked his own handcuffs and heroically sneaked out an unlocked door to get help. His actions undoubtedly saved his and his sister’s life.

Questions about what had happened behind the façade of this 'perfect' Mormon family still remained unanswered, and Chad, his sister Shari and their dad Kevin were keen to give their first, detailed account of what really went on behind closed doors and when the cameras were turned off.

I watched all three parts last week and was left with three overriding impressions:

• just how weird the Mormon faith is. It has taken the least appealing aspects of Evangelical Christianity and added bucketfuls of its own woo. And then imagine whole towns dominated by it.
• the immense damage to people that such high-demand religions and bad psychotherapy can do. All practitioners should be constantly aware of the dangers of what they are doing.
• the heartbreaking politeness of the abused child.

I hesitate to recommend something so dark, but this is a brilliant piece of work. 

How Joan Aiken fought to defend the wolves of Willoughby Chase

For years the children's books magazine Books for Keeps published a series of interviews with authors – there was one of these 'authorgraphs' in each issue.

Here is the wonderful Joan Aiken from issue 39 (July 1986):

"The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was the first book to make money for me. I’d actually done two chapters just before my husband was ill but had put it away. Abelard Schuman, who’d published some short stories in America, accepted it (called 'Bonnie Green' then) but said it was too scary – could I prune it, take out the wolves? I said Never! 

My agent literally forgot it for a year, then apologised and sent it to Cape. It did quite well here, but after a lovely, whole-page review in Time it sold like mad in America, and so confirmed me in my mad resolution to freelance.

"Doubleday, who published Wolves, asked me (amazingly conveniently) about crime novels, so I interspersed children’s books with thrillers. ...

"Margery Allingham spoke of left- and right-hand writing, what you do for yourself and what you do to satisfy others: I suppose Wolves was for myself, and the Dido books – in fact, they’re probably too self-indulgent, full of dialect and adult word-play. But children’s books should be written on different levels, or there will be nothing for them if they read it again at a later age."

I blogged about the magazine's interview with Malcolm Saville a couple of years ago.

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"Violence has prevailed against the freedom of the press. I was denied the right to report on the disgraceful acts which later unfolded after I left for my own safety – and that is wrong. Violence against anyone should be condemned, that's a fact. But violence against a person simply trying to report is an obstruction of truth." Henry Durand tries to report on the mob violence in Thetford.

Carole Cadwalladr introduces a timeline of The Nerve's investigation of Nigel Farage’s biggest funder, Christopher Harborne, and argues that Farage is a symptom, not a cause, of forces reshaping politics across the world: "Farage has never known anything like it. There are now questions which even he can’t dodge. Questions even the BBC is finally asking. And his luck seems to be running out. A hasty plan to throw off a parliamentary investigation by quitting parliament before he could be sanctioned has spectacularly backfired in the biggest own goal of his career."

Rebecca Nicholson reviews the pitch-dark documentary series Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, which is currently on BBC iPlayer: "As a vlogger, she and her husband, Kevin, made a living from YouTube, posting videos on the popular channel 8 Passengers, now defunct, about Mormon family life and parenting their six children in the picturesque city of Springville, Utah. But in 2023 Franke was arrested and charged with aggravated child abuse and sentenced to up to 30 years in prison."

"This is a pattern seen repeated throughout our society and system: a government quick to make 'hard choices' that involve easy solutions, but seemingly entirely unwilling or unable to take on the tougher opponents and ... seek harder more essential solutions." Paul Rowlston argues that Britain's proposed social media ban for under-16s tackles a symptom while leaving the real problem untouched.

"Caricatures of the Luddites as history’s losers are simply false," says Brian Lewis. "We have not stopped talking about them ever since."

Giles Wilcock looks back to 1919 – the last time cricket's county championship faced a serious threat: "When the war ended, the Bradford League remained attractive, and the Lancashire League began hunting for star names to compete. And because of the unique circumstances of the 1919 season – two-day games and relatively low county wages – they were often successful."

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Stefan Wolff, Elīna Šteinerte and Hervé Ascensio have investigated Russia’s military indoctrination of Ukrainian children in its occupied territories: "The headteacher of the local school, accompanied by heavily armed soldiers, went from house to house to question parents who do not send their children to school and had not yet applied for Russian passports. He threatened them with the removal of their parental rights. He also said their children would be placed in institutions if they didn't yield to the pressure to do so."

"The university’s own financial reports show that 16 members of the University Executive Board are paid an average of £241k – a 27 per cent increase over three years while the institution has been going through financial difficulties. We have also seen the recruitment of highly paid and non-academic 'professors of practice', who are often industry figures without teaching and research experience. New managerial roles with grandiose titles such as 'associate pro-vice chancellor for education and student experience' have been created across the institution." John Heathershaw takes us inside the crisis at the University of Exeter.

"Deaths, misconduct in public office, rat infestations, and a climate of fear." Emma Guy reports on Leicester's privately run HMP Fosse Way.

Gawain Towler explains Rupert Lowe's sudden interest in cooperation with Reform UK: "A  man of sixty-eight, a man elected twice on the coattails of Nigel Farage, who has spent eighteen months declaring that his purpose was the destruction of Nigel Farage, has looked at 8.7 per cent in a nationally ignored by-election and concluded that his moment is now or never. It is not unity he wants. It is relevance, and he is in a hurry for it."

"Works such as Robert McFarlane's The Old Ways, Tom Cox's 21st Century Yokel, Benjamin Myers' Under the Rock, and Edward Parnell's seminal Ghostland explore the connection between the self, the landscape, and the stories and histories that permeate and in many ways 'haunt' these landscapes." Lydia Waites considers the role of environmentalism in recent 'folkish' English writing.

Fed Kandi photographs the public art on the campuses of Lougborough University and the University of Leicester.

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"Dartford Warblers skim across the heather before diving into the vegetation, defying all but the quickest observers. At dusk Nightjars churr from the isolated trees or fly overhead, the males clapping their wings in display flight." David Jobbins mourns what has been lost to the fire at Dunwich Heath.

Sam Power explains why Reform UK will find it hard to shake off questions about its donors: "An important thing to note is that the legal onus rests almost entirely on the donor. The party in receipt of the donation simply needs to show that it has conducted a permissibility check on them. In the case of Reform, some of its biggest donors (like Tice) are effectively woven into the party apparatus. This makes it much harder for the party to be seen to be one step removed from the money."

An increasingly narrow English curriculum, with its emphasis on phonics and 'teaching to the test', is squeezing reading for pleasure out of our primary schools, experts in the field tell Lydia Chantler-Hicks.

Rebecca Johns finds that British scientist James Lovelock warned executives of the risks of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s. Rather than share his reports with the public, claims an imminent legal case, Shell responded by funding the Global Climate Coalition – an industry group that pursued multimillion-dollar influence campaigns promoting climate denial and misinformation.

Leanne Tritton reports on the fate of Shrewsbury's Shirehall, the modernist former home of the Shropshire County Council.

"Dirk Bogarde came in for some stick from certain quarters for his portrayal of General Sir Frederick 'Boy' Browning, who was under considerable pressure from Monty to deliver Operation Market-Garden. Dubious about taking Arnhem, Browning stated that they’d be going 'a bridge too far.' He said this before the operation, but there is no scene with Montgomery in the film, instead Bogarde gets the line after the snafu, coming across like an aloof clever-dick 'told you so' type." Tim Pelan looks back to to 1977 and the making of A Bridge Too Far.

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Benjamin Goodair says Andy Burnham is right to want for‑profit firms out of social care: "The majority of social care in England is run for-profit. The consequences of this go far beyond unfair profiteering. It actually worsens many of the core problems with England’s social care systems – making it less available, of worse quality and widening inequalities."

Children from poorer families do worse at school. Nadia Siddiqui explains why and what can be done to narrow the gap in attainment.

Steff Aquarone makes the case for a minister for coastal communities: "Too many coastal towns face lower than average wages, poorer transport connections, seasonal economies, shortages of affordable housing and increasing pressure from coastal erosion and climate change. Despite their enormous contribution to our economy, our heritage and our identity, they are too often overlooked when national investment decisions are made."

"Growing up there in the early 60s, the countryside never seemed too far away. We kids were often out and about, playing in the woods, making dens and tree swings, watching cows graze in farmers' fields and scrumping in nearby orchards where Warwick University and Cannon Park shopping centre now stand. There were brooks to jump across (or fall into regularly in my case) and an old Roman ford near to the busy A45." Ruth Cherrington celebrates Coventry's Camley Estate.

Ben Duckett is puzzled that attendances for cricket's Hundred tournament are falling, despite the presence of more star names, reports The Sports Encounter. What he and the games administrators need to grasp is that British sports fans' attachment is to teams, not to individual players.

Claire Madge has been to see the Richard Dadd exhibition at the Royal Academy: "There is no moment of finding 'madness' in Dadd's work, whether it was completed before his breakdown or after. Even the eyes of his figures from scenes of Hamlet completed in 1840 and the strange fairies that ring a sleeping Titania from 1841 show an artist with an ability to capture the uncanny and one who could easily get lost in the detail even before his psychosis came to the fore."

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"The idea that England has always been governed from a single political centre is surprisingly recent. Westminster may now appear almost inseparable from the state, but for much of English history, government was far more mobile." Stephanie Brown says Andy Burnham’s No 10 North has a precedent in medieval York.

Nafeez Ahmed examines the links between George Cottrell’s Reform UK network in Montenegro and sanctioned Russian oligarchs.

"When social workers become involved with a family, the focus is often on parenting, safeguarding concerns or family relationships. But new research suggests that one of the strongest drivers of repeated involvement with children’s services is something more basic: whether families have enough money to live on." Rick Hood explains the findings of his research.

Jennifer Rubin Grandis confronts the systemic bias in academic publishing: "I’ve been studying sexism in academic medicine since 2019, and I’ve learned from countless interviewees that my experience as a woman in medicine is common. Women are rarely mentored well—in fact, when they ask for advice from senior faculty, they’re often discouraged from submitting their papers to high-impact journals, despite making just as many scientific discoveries as men."

Boak & Bailey recommend pub crawling as a way of practising psychogeography.

"Few science fiction relationships stick in my mind better than the love/hate between Dr. Zachary Smith and Robot in the original 1960s version of Lost in Space." J.G. Follansbee on one of television SF's great double acts.