Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese

An article in today's Guardian by Steve Rose tells the story of the friendship between the two film directors.

Though many today would name him as the greatest ever British director, when the two first met in 1975 Powell was living in obscurity and poverty. His reputation had never recovered from the furore over his 1960 film Peeping Tom and many of his best films were known only in inferior, re-edited versions.

Scorsese describes their meeting thus:

"He was very quiet and didn't quite know what to make of me," Scorsese recalls. "I had to explain to him that his work was a great source of inspiration for a whole new generation of film-makers - myself, Spielberg, Paul Schrader, Coppola, De Palma. We would talk about his films in Los Angeles often. They were a lifeblood to us, at a time when the films were not necessarily immediately available. He had no idea this was all happening."

What followed was remarkable:

After Scorsese found him, Powell was taken to the US by Francis Ford Coppola and feted by his new Hollywood fans. They saw him as a kindred spirit: a fiercely independent film-maker who had fought for, and justified, the need for complete creative freedom.

Coppola installed him as senior director-in-residence at his Zoetrope studios; he took teaching posts; retrospectives were held of his work; and the great and good of Hollywood queued up to meet him. Scorsese even had a cossack shirt made in the same style as that of Anton Walbrook's character in The Red Shoes, which he wore to the opening of Powell and Pressburger's 1980 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

To that event, Scorsese brought along his editor on Raging Bull, Thelma Schoonmaker. "Marty told me I had to go and see Colonel Blimp on the big screen," Schoonmaker later tells me. She introduced herself to Powell, they hit it off, and four years later they married.

Michael Powell died in 1990.

The article also confirms that Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker are working on a long-promised documentary about their appreciation of British cinema.

A tale from the Brecon and Radnor by-election

One of my favourite by-election stories - I now forget where I heard it - comes from the 1985 contest in Brecon and Radnor.

A young Liberal activist was telling at a polling station out in the wilds somewhere, when an elderly farmer turned up.

"What are you doing?" he asked. "I always take the numbers for the Liberals."

It turned out that for years the farmer had come along on polling day, collected numbers for a couple of hours and then taken them home with him.

It represented a folk memory of Lloyd George's day. Any Liberal organisation in the area had long since disappeared. All the was left was the ancestral knowledge that taking numbers somehow helped the party.

Professor Strange: Victorians, modesty and piano legs

Following his thoughts on trainspotting and normality, here is another contribution from Professor Strange. It was first published in Clinical Psychology Forum in February 2004.

Victorians, modesty and piano legs

The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of the Internet finds the American AIDS Czarina complaining of a ‘Victorian society that misrepresents information, denies sexuality early, denies homosexuality particularly in teens, and leaves people abandoned with no place to go.’ A sermon tells us that ‘Thanks to the 1960s, we have given up Victorian hypocrisy when it comes to ourselves.’ And a journalist announces that ‘Victorianism today is generally interpreted to mean little more than an atmosphere of sexual repression and hypocrisy’.

Well, I knew Victorians; I worked with Victorians; Victorians were friends of mine. (Indeed, I cannot wholly rule out the possibility that I was a Victorian myself.) And I do not believe that they were any more repressed or hypocritical than we are today.

Yet this libel persists. So much so, that many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that the Victorians were so afraid of the power of sexuality that they felt obliged to cover up the legs of their pianos. Perhaps you believe it too?

You are not alone. An Australian website on sexuality and modernity is convinced they did. Another on culture and colonisation reports that ‘An era that could wrap table and piano legs with frilled covers that men may not harbour “certain” ideas is incredible, to say the least.” How true! For something does not fit when a website on the Victorian pantomime tells us that “audiences were not accustomed to viewing the legs of a pretty actress, especially in an era when even piano legs were cloaked for modesty's sake! However, in a male or ‘Breeches’ role, the actresses were allowed to display as much leg as they dared.’

So piano legs have to be swathed but, in certain circumstances it is fine for human legs to be displayed? The Victorians I knew were odd, but not that odd.

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boots.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the straitlaced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go than the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

Just as the Bloomsbury lens distorts our picture of the Victorians, so the Swinging 60s have given us a false view of the 1950s. But they want to close the College Library and there are macaroons for tea, so that story will have to wait for another day.

Speaker Martin on the brink

The Daily Mail says that Michael Martin will face a no confidence next week.

And the Guardian says that his attempts to prevent information about the work of MPs becoming known go even further that we realised.

Note the class card being played at the end of that report by an unnamed Labour MP.

Fabian Hamilton and Elliot Morley named in latest Telegraph revelations

Fabian Hamilton is a flipper and Elliot Morley is accused of claiming £16,000 for a non-existent mortgage.

Professional and family models of public childcare

Channel 4's season on children in the care system is an honourable attempt to shed light on a forgotten group, even if its centrepiece "Find me a Family" is infected with some of the cliches of modern television (the money shot of someone crying, the wait for the judges' decision on whether the person will be allowed to adopt).

Writing in the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown drew this moral from the series:

We need fabulous, high tech new care homes with professionalism of a standard we have not had hitherto.

This is the instinctive reaction of the liberal-left when they come across the awfulness of the public care system for children. We need more professionals and more professionalism.

But listen to the experiences of David Akinsanya, the presenter of "Find me a Family" who grew up in the care system himself:

came into the care of Essex social services when I was 14 months old because my private foster-care bills were no longer being paid. I moved to a small family group home in Basildon with 10 kids – where I spent nine ­fantastic years, thanks to Aunty Betty and her ­dedicated, untrained team. We were well cared for, and I felt loved and at home.

When I was nine, a change in childcare practice meant that social services closed many of the family group homes in favour of larger homes staffed by trained and qualified workers. The effect on me personally was catastrophic. I became uncontrollable and was excluded from school at 10.

I was considered institutionalised, and the five attempts to foster me failed. I was sent to a boarding school for maladjusted children, and it was here that I lost my innocence and learned how to bully, steal and fight.

Because Akinsanya, born in 1965, lived through the transition from a family paradigm of public care to a professional one. And he did not benefit from that change.

In a paper I gave to a meeting of the British Psychological Society's Psychotherapy Section in 2004 (which evolved into a chapter in the book Making and Breaking Children's Lives) I quoted Christian Wolmar's Forgotten Children:

As late as 1967, the service was very female dominated and the staff largely lived in the homes. The Williams Committee, reporting on the staffing of residential homes that year, noted “two thirds of people at present employed in residential homes are single women and one third of all staff are over 50 years of age”. All but 7 per cent of workers in the survey lived on the premises, which provided an important but hardly noticed safeguard for the children.

Researching that paper and chapter I learned that it was not adequate to see a straightforward opposition between the family model and the professional model. In the immediate post-war period lay campaigners and advanced psychotherapy made common cause against the charities who had hitherto seen themselves as the experts in institutional childcare.

Nevertheless, I think that the left's unthinking call for more professionalism needs to be questioned.

Perhaps the real problem today is that we lack a clear picture of a happy family life. So it is that Polly Toynbee writes in favour of the SureStart scheme on a weekly basis, but never mentions the joys of looking after your children yourself.

Disused railway stations in Leicestershire

A new site called Beechings Ghosts offers a "compendium of disused railways and stations in Leicestershire, mostly affected by the Beeching Axe of 1963".

The photograpgh I have borrowed shows Desford station in the old Leicestershire coalfield. It is on a line that is still open for freight but lost its passenger service in 1964.

There have long been plans to reopen this line and run trains from Leicester to Burton on Trent through Coalville and Ashby de la Zouch, two sizeable towns without a railway service. But at present the hopes of this seem slim.

Has Hazel Blears signed away her political career?

Until I saw her flourishing that cheque on the news yesterday, I had some sympathy for Hazel Blears. Like Iain Dale, I suspected that No. 10 was encouraging the press to go after her to deflect attention from other ministers who had made embarrassing expense claims.

Now I sincerely hope her career is over.

As Craig Murray says:

the sight of a "Public servant" who can at the drop of a hat dash off a current account cheque for over £13,000 is deeply unedifying. For more than half her constituents, that cheque was for more than a year's income after tax and national insurance. It was nearly three years of the state pension.

Her actions yesterday treated the voters with contempt. I look forward to her sacking in Gordon Brown's forthcoming reshuffle.

Something else. In a report in this morning's Guardian says:

Challenged over why she "flipped" the designation of her second home, Blears said she was "forced" to name her constituency address as her second home by Commons officials: "The only reason that my Salford home was designated my second home was at the insistence of the fees office, who said that when you become a minister you live in London."

This cannot possibly be true. Whips office minister Baroness Thornton, for instance, claims that her main residence is the bungalow occupied by her mother in Yorkshire. (Later. And Shahid Malik is another example.)

How much simpler things must have seen when Blears was a little girl.

Nick Clegg launches Lib Dem Euro manifesto

Thanks to Jamie Saddler for the video. The Lib Dem Euro manifesto is on the web.

More on the Daily Telegraph and Lib Dem MPs' expenses

Let me see. The Telegraph fingers Andrew George, Nick Clegg, Menzies Campbell, Chris Huhne, Lembit Opik and Julia Goldsworthy.

Lembit, it seems:

charged taxpayers for a £40 court summons he received for the non-payment of his council tax. He will refund it.

Bless.

Tomorrow's Daily Telegraph looks at Lib Dem MPs' expenses

From the Daily Telegraph website this evening:

Like MPs from all parties, Liberal Democrats have used their expenses to carry out lavish decorating work and refurbishment of their second homes, often putting the stamp duty and legal costs associated with buying their houses on their expenses.

Expenses claims submitted by 12 Liberal Democrats, from senior spokesmen to a number of backbenchers, will be disclosed, with some of those involved having already volunteered to pay back some of the money.

The Telegraph also says that "a number of senior figures in the party have volunteered to refund the taxpayer after being challenged over claims which they now admit were unacceptable".

And:

In one case, a frontbencher spent thousands of pounds on furniture, including a rocking chair and sofa-bed, over the course of a few days in the run up to the deadline for submitting her expenses.

Later. More details here.

Lib Dem Euro manifesto published

The Liberal Democrat manifesto for the European elections on 4 June was published today, under the title Stronger Together, Poorer Apart.

Norman Baker on Mr Speaker and the expenses scandal

The saintly Norman Baker writes on the New Statesman website:

Worse, however, has been the appalling attitude of the Speaker, who on Monday reacted with fury to probing and perfectly proper questions from the Labour MP Kate Hoey and myself.

To be frank, there’s long been widespread unhappiness with Speaker Martin, right across the House, but MPs have naturally been reluctant to attack the Chair (and of course risk not being called to speak).

But if the Speaker is going to take off his umpire’s hat and put on his player’s one to shut up MPs and attack them from the Chair, then he cannot in return be surprised if MPs attack him back.

Britblog Roundup 221

At Amused Cynicism.

Gordon Brown: Polly Toynbee must go

Polly says the PM must go in this morning's Guardian.

It would give us all a break if Polly Toynbee resigned too.

Daily Telegraph promises revelations about Tory MPs

From the Daily Telegraph website tonight:

Senior Conservatives have claimed tens of thousands of pounds for work on their country estates, leaving taxpayers to subsidise lifestyles far beyond those experienced by most Britons.

Some MPs claimed costs, including council tax and repair bills, associated with multiple properties on the same estates.

The claims of eight senior Conservatives will be disclosed and the identity of one MP, who claimed more than £380 for horse manure, will also be published.

Later. And here they are.

Commons Table Office approves text of motion calling on Speaker to quit

Following today's embarrassing performance by Michael Martin, the Tory MP Douglas Carswell has put down a Commons motion calling on him to go.

On his blog Carswell says that the Table Office has approved the text of a suitable motion.

Cooking asparagus while listening to Willie Rennie

I have just taken part in a conference call with Willie Rennie on the Liberal Democrat campaign for next month's Euro elections. I was cooking my supper at the same time. (You don't have to boil asparagus: try doing it in a hot oven with olive oil and sea salt.)

Anyway, Willie is promising a very different Euro campaign from the ones the party has fought in the past. He said that the other day a Guardian journalist phoned him and said: "I've heard an outrageous rumour that the Lib Dems are going to fight the European elections on Europe."

It seems that rumour is true.

Ernest Millington has died aged 93

When a lot of people arrive on this blog after searching for a particular name it usually means one of two things: either they have just appeared on television or they have died.

Unfortunately, in the case of Ernest Millington, the latter explanation turns out to be the correct one. He has died at the age of 93.

Millington was the last surviving MP who had sat before the 1945 general election. He won Chelmsford for Common Wealth in a wartime by-election and held it from them in 1945. He subsequently joined Labour, but lost his seat to the Tories at the 1950 general election.

According to his Daily Telegraph obituary, by the time of his death Millington held the record for the longest time lived after leaving the Commons.

I mentioned Millington a few weeks ago in an article about the Association of Former Members of Parliament and linked to an article about him.

It appears there are now three MPs from the 1945 Parliament - Michael Foot, John Freeman and Francis Noel-Baker - still with us.

The Monks: Cuckoo

For a while I have been staring with admiration and bemusement at videos of a band called the Monks, taken from German television in the 1960s. An article by Alex Petridis in Friday's Guardian has explained what I have been looking at and inspired me to explore a little further.

Petridis writes:

The Monks were former GIs, stationed in West Germany, who had been transformed by a German management team from covers band the Torquays into the "anti-Beatles": dressed in cassocks, their heads shaved into tonsures, howling anti-war slogans over a primitive, feedback-riven "deconstructed" brand of rock, in which an amplified banjo figured heavily. They attracted fans playing the clubs along Hamburg's Reeperbahn.

He suggests "you can hear something of Krautrock's "motorik" beat in the Monks' tightly wound playing" and says the band is now hailed as figureheads of garage rock - a musical movement they knew nothing about at the time or subsequently. "Unwitting," says one former Monk, "is definitely the word."

The song I have chosen sounds like a lost Frank Zappa track. It is described thus on the Monks' own website:

The Monks' rhythmic attack is intact on "Cuckoo." It's the lyrics and vocals that strike one as eccentric. Burger's vocal opens the tune, swiping a page out of some outlandish Beach Boys' songbook. He nails high notes that no male, unless he's a castrato, should be able to hit. Next, the drummer finally gets his chance to be in the spotlight. Johnston's monotonal singing voice tells an odd story about somebody stealing his pet cuckoo. During the bridge, fuzzed-out guitars and booming drums remind the listener that, yes, this is the Monks. Then, Burger reprises the chorus, jarring the listener back to unreality.

Enjoy.