The opening titles of Survivors

A propos of nothing, here are the opening titles of the 1970s BBC series Survivors.

It dealt with the struggle to rebuild some form of civilisation after a virus has wiped out 99 per cent of the world's population.

Read all about the series on Survivors: A World Away.

Rowntree Halt, York

Rowntree Halt, which served workers at the company's York chocolate factory, stood on the otherwise freight-only Foss Islands Branch.

This line left the York to Scarborough line to serve industrial sites in the Foss Islands quarter of the city. It also linked with the Derwent Valley Railway.

A film on the BFI's Britain on Film site shows a train calling at Rowntree Halt not long before it and the branch closed in 1988, before presenting some vintage photographs of both.

The Ramones: Blitzkrieg Bop

Most of the punks you saw about weren't punks but middle-class kids dressed up as punks.

Real punks had an air of danger and nylon pullovers with burns from one-bar electric fires.

The Ramones' Sheena is a Punk Rocker from 1977 was not a punk record but a record about punk. So I doubted their authenticity too.

But that seems churlish now all four of the band's original members are dead - you can't get more committed than that.

So here is their first single release from the year before.

A walk round Cromford 1

We were in an English lesson in the lower sixth and the people taking Geography were off on yet another field trip. We may have advanced the observation that it was not fair.

Our English teacher Mr Haydon or Haden - given how good he was I am ashamed that I cannot be sure of his name - told us to leave it with him.

One of the books we were studying was The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence and. sure enough, he put together a trip to Lawrence Country.

We camped at Whatstandwell in the Derwent valley for a couple of nights and visited Cossall (the Cossethay of the novel) and Eastwood library, which housed a large collection of items connected with Lawrence.

Ever since, the Derwent valley has been special to me and I try to visit Cromford (one station to the north of Whatstandwell on the Matlock branch) every summer.

This is the first of a couple of posts featuring photos taken at Cromford last Augsut. It concentrates on the bridge over the Derwent, Willersley Castle and the part of the village called Scarthin, with its wonderful bookshop and repurposed chapels.

Former Brexit Party parliamentary candidate joins Lib Dems

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Who? Where? What?

Kent Online reports:

Evie Martin, who stood as the Brexit candidate for Sittingbourne and Sheppey in the last general election, has joined the Liberal Democrats. 

She said: “Although I disagreed with the Lib Dems on Brexit, I have always supported their key policies on electoral reform, environmental improvements and affordable housing."

In fact Martin did not stand for the Brexit Party anywhere. Because, as the article later admits, she was ordered to stand down for Nigel Farage to help the Conservatives.

Some will be aghast at this news, but I remember Peter Sloman's concept of 'the liberalism of the left-behind'.

When I blogged about it just after the general election, I wrote:

In the far-off days when I was a Liberal activist and then councillor, there was a definite populist strand to our campaigning. 

We were the people who stood up for the unfashionable end of town. We were the people who stood up for the voters against council ruling groups and senior officers. 

I remember doing a survey on council house repairs here in Harborough and being told the next day that the council offices were thronged with people we had encouraged to make complaints. I was proud of that.

If there is to be a Liberal Democrat revival, I suspect it will involve adopting something of this approach again and not involve browbeating people who disagreed with us on Brexit.

Hooray for Holyrood? Rumours that Jo Swinson will stand for the Scottish parliament

From The Press and Journal:

Jo Swinson is being lined up for a seat at Holyrood amid speculation Willie Rennie could stand down as Scottish Liberal Democrat leader after next year’s election, we can reveal. 

North East Fife MSP Mr Rennie will have been in charge of the party north of the border for a decade next May and is understood to be “keen” to see a fresh face take over in 2021. Ms Swinson is believed to be the favoured choice among senior figures. 

The former UK party leader, who lost her East Dunbartonshire Westminster seat at last year’s general election, is now understood to be “seriously considering” a run at Holyrood.

Searching for Alan Ward

Just unearthed this amateur hand-help clip taken at Lord's at the 1969 Gillette Cup Final between @DerbyshireCCC and Yorkshire - it's 7 seconds of Alan Ward in all his glory - I could never tire of watching this! pic.twitter.com/8S3VA9CI1m

— David Griffin Photography (@dgriffinpix) March 5, 2020

This clip of the Derbyshire and England fast bowler Alan Ward appeared on Twitter today.

Ward played only five tests for England between 1969 and 1976, but at the start of his career he looked a great prospect.

Martin Chandler wrote about Ward in 2013, but was unable to establish his current whereabouts.

Hemel Hempstead wasn't built in a day

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A lovely paragraph from the Guardian obituary of the historian Paul Addison:

His work not only demonstrated how the great forces of history meshed with the agency of individuals but also displayed a wonderfully elegant style and turn of phrase. In The Road to 1945 he characterised wartime Britain as "Colonel Blimp being pursued through a land of Penguin Specials by an abrasive meritocrat, a progressive churchman, and J.B. Priestley". My own favourite line comes in a chapter on Britain’s New Towns in Now the War is Over: "If Rome was not built in a day, neither was Hemel Hempstead."

The obituary also records that Gordon Brown once wrote of Addison:

"I feel privileged to have been taught by him and to have counted him as a friend."

For World Book Day: Wings Over Witchend by Malcolm Saville

A quick tribute to my favourite writer as a child on World Book Day.

I once wrote of the appeal of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine series, which began with Mystery at Witchend, for the Guardian:

Mystery at Witchend tells how the young members of the Lone Pine Club bring to justice a gang of saboteurs hoping, perhaps optimistically, to cripple the Allied war effort by blowing up a dam in the Shropshire hills. 

Though he wrote other series and set books in other places, it is the Lone Pine stories and their Shropshire landscapes for which Saville is best remembered. Quite why so many criminals used this backwater as their base for operations was never wholly clear, but one of the best things about his books was that they were set in "real places you can explore for yourself", as he always said in his forewords. 

Many readers did just that, discovering Bishop's Castle, the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones for themselves.

Wings Over Witchend, a tale of Christmas tree theft from the 'State Forest' on the Long Mynd, was my favourite of the series when I was young. That was probably because it gave a prominent role to the youngest characters.

I also thought I had lost the copy I had borrowed from Hemel Hempstead Library. As I daren't imagine the punishments inflicted upon children who lost library books, I kept quiet about it.

Luckily, I found it one day down the side of a piece of furniture and was even able to read it again before it was due to be returned.

The lovely wraparound jacket illustration is by Charles Wood and borrowed from the Malcolm Saville Centenary Website.

And there is a Malcolm Saville Society you can join.

GUEST POST Belloc, Chesterton and the Distributist League

In an extract from his Back to the Land, David Boyle looks at the emergence of Distrbutism as an ideology.

By 1918, and G. K.’s brother Cecil Chesterton’s death, and the reorganisation of his paper as GK’s Weekly, a Back-to-the-land ideology had begun to emerge among the new Distributists. They had backed allotments against town councils, backed tea parties in the street against officials or market stalls selling the produce of small farmers.

Hilaire Belloc was especially incensed by the growing power of Wall Street – forcing the defeated Germans to repay their war debts when the British had repudiated their own. But for Chesterton, the real battles were smaller scale. “It is time for an army of amateurs, for England is perishing of professionals,” he wrote.

It was in this spirit that I believe his poem ‘The Secret People’ needs to be understood. The words: “We are the people of England,/And we never have spoken yet”, have sent a frisson of fear down the necks of the technocratic left for generations.

If Chesterton was populist, he was also in favour of self-help and human-scale that he believed – quite rightly, in fact – were under threat. “Do anything, however small,” urged Chesterton in 1926.  “Save one out of a hundred shops.  Save one croft out of a hundred crofts.  Keep one door open out of a hundred doors; for so long as one door is open, we are not in prison.”

One of the first campaigns by the emerging new Distributists, that followed New Witness with enthusiasm, was one in favour of the former soldiers who had been encouraged to sink their war gratuities into buying buses, which they drove themselves.

But these had fallen foul of the monopolistic London General Omnibus Company, backed by the transport union who called the ‘pirates’ and – suspicious of self-employment – began to run them out and to deliberately deprive them of custom.

The Distributist campaigners took the unprecedented step of launching their own pirate bus service. They leased a series of ancient omnibuses, painted them in rainbow colours and called them ‘Morris’, ‘Ruskin’ and names with similar radical echoes – and took on the giant bus company on its most lucrative routes.

The campaign failed.  London General swept all before it, including the small bus operators the campaigners were defending, only of course to be nationalised under the auspices of the London Passenger Transport Board.

It was clear that Distributism was emerging as an ideology. There were even now two financial backers, the Olympic powerboat racer and Marylebone landlord Lord Howard de Walden, and Cedric Chivers, an alderman from Bath.

The first meeting of the new Distributist League took place in Essex Hall in Essex Street, off London’s Strand on 17 Septmber 1926. The launch was marked by the publication of Chesterton’s Outline of Sanity, and Back-to-the-land was at the heart of it – and the horror of wasting food when people remained desperate. “We are destroying food because we do not need it; we are starving men because we do not need them,” he wrote.

On their plans for the League itself, Chesterton said this: “We hope in the end to establish within the state a community, almost self-supporting, of men and women pledged to Distributism, and to a large extent practising it. Less and less, then, will the juggling of finance have power over us; for it does not matter what they call the counters when you are exchanging hams for handkerchiefs, or pigs for pianos.”

This kind of statement seemed deeply old-fashioned at the time, but – with its emphasis on being the change, and new kinds of barter – it now seems strangely forward-looking. But the central message – the vital importance of small-scale property ownership – has never been fashionable, hence

Chesterton’s frustration that the prevailing culture failed to grasp his critique of institutions inhuman in scale. “The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue,” wrote Belloc.

Painfully and slowly, he and Chesterton were beginning to develop their ideas, aware how out of kilter they were with the collectivist spirit of the time, emphasising always that not even property is an absolute – it is small-scale property they were underpinning, because it supported the medieval family unit of production.

For Belloc, the key was to defend the yeoman farmer tradition, only too aware that – for centuries – the yeoman families held their land by tradition, rather than by legal paperwork, and this could be overturned by statute at any time, and reduced to tenant status. It was important therefore to understand the history. That explained his prodigious production of history books and biographies, always dictated to long-suffering secretaries at great speed.

For Chesterton, on the other hand, the key argument was about corporate scale and retailers in particular. It was the great age of chain stores and ribbon developments reaching out beyond the suburbs. Chain stores undermined income and reduced people to wage slavery: where there were, say, 40,000 independent grocers, wrote Belloc, “there cannot be forty thousand managers, the wage slaves of a combine, because the cost of administration is less, and this economic advantage handicaps the small man against the great.”  Chesterton was writing poems like his ‘Song against grocers’.

Distributism also managed to dodge issues around public versus private. Yes, you would need to use the power of the state to end capitalism, with “its clique of masters and its myriad of dependents”. You would need to prevent the mergers and encourage de-mergers. You would need differential taxes on the small and on big combines, chainstores and multiples. But the purpose would also be to guarantee independence against the state. It was – as it so often was with Chesterton – a kind of paradox.

Even so, it was never entirely clear how they planned to make the change happen, whether by expropriation of the land or by enabling tenants to buy out their landlords along the lines of the Wyndham Land Act in Ireland that Belloc so admired.

But Chesterton always pointed out, in his set-piece debates with Shaw, that this ambiguity was shared by the socialists. The point was that life would be better. “The peasant eats not only of his own produce but off his own table and at his own house,” wrote Belloc.  “And he eats better food and brews better drink.”

At the heart of Distributism was the idea of going back-to-the-land, and that was not going to be easy. “We have got to say to our friends, ‘you are in for a rough time if you start new farms on your own,” said Chesterton. “But it is the right thing to do.’ There is no way out of the danger except the dangerous way.” 

Then there was the question of how in the meantime we could defend people’s small-scale property, given that they probably did not own it outright – it was “in the hands of the money-lenders”. Here it was another Distributist, the architect and promoter of ‘guild socialism’ Arthur Penty, who developed an answer: the revival of the medieval guilds. To fight back against the giant financial institutions, in other words, people would need to create institutions of their own.

“I cannot count how many vital and valuable human institutions have been sacrificed to this one simple and silly idea – the idea that, by making a thing large, we make it more orderly; whereas making it large is obviously more likely to make it loose.”

When the 1660 Restoration threw to the winds the “common morality of Europe”, wrote Belloc, our organisations of economic self-defence were destroyed. The only guilds left were the ones for doctors and lawyers. In the Distributist world, the banks would have to meet and come to terms with, for example, the small traders’ guild. You may not be able to get rid of the banks, but you could undermine their power by supporting small-scale property ownership.

It was simple in a sense, but it so flew in the face of conventional political categories, that many found it all too confusing. There were also more conventional, and increasingly bitter divisions among the Distributists themselves. These had begun four months before the launch of the League, when both Belloc and Chesterton were publicly on the side of the strikers in the General Strike.

On March 19 you can here David speaking on 'Could Distributism still change the world?‘ at the Ditchling Museum in Sussex.

The Derwent Valley in snow and flood

From the Britain on Film site:

From the Big Freeze of 1963 to gales, landslides and, most memorably, the major flooding of December 1960 and November 1965 - local photographer Harry Gill was on the spot to capture these moments of extreme weather in Derbyshire. 

Motorists try to negotiate Crown Square in Matlock as waves of muddy water from the Derwent flow into the town. The streets seems eerily quiet as residents take to the largest vehicle available: a huge quarry lorry, to navigate the deluge.

The frozen water wheel was filmed in Cromford.

Charles Masterman answers a question on the flight of Dr Crippen

From Hansard:

Chess Valley Walk: Rickmansworth to Chesham

Another walk with John Rogers.

He takes us along the Chess Valley Walk, starting at Rickmansworth on the Metropolitan Line ending at Chesham in the Chilterns.

The River Chess is a beautiful chalk stream rising in the Chilterns and runs into the River Colne.

The Arkwright Houses, Cromford

North Street in Cromford contains the earliest planned industrial housing in the world.

Built by Richard Arkwright, the street's three-storey houses had sec[,d-floor workshops for framework knitting.

You can read more about them on the Historic England site.

Young women on their way to work in Leicester's textile factories, 1948

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This photograph first appeared in a 1948 Picture Post feature that examined the claim that Leicester was home to the prettiest girls in England.

The photograph was taken in St Saviour's Road and the factory building still stands.

Junior Wells: Messin' With the Kid

Junior Wells recorded this Blues classic in 1960.

He was best known as a harmonica player in the style of Little Walter, but it not feature here.

His Independent obituary from 1998 said:

The virtuoso Larry Adler took the harmonica to the concert hall and gave it respectability. Junior Wells took it right back to the gutter and gave it a fire and passion that made one think the instrument would burst at the seams.

Norman Lamb on Rebooting Capitalism

Radix feels like a think tank that was set up to serve a new centre party that never happened, but it has published an important paper by the former Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb.

His recommendations in Rebooting Capitalism include:

• Using the upcoming decampment from the Palace of Westminster to move the national Parliament to the North of England, separating the UK’s economic and political capitals and building a real Northern Powerhouse.
• Devolving power radically, including over setting taxes, to cities and regions, enabling them to determine their own destiny and empowering local innovation. 
• Streamlining the creation of employee-owned businesses to encourage the transfer of ownership of businesses to their employees. 
• Setting a new lowest rate of corporation tax, applicable only to those companies which share prosperity equitably with staff.
• Setting tough new competition rules to challenge concentrations of power and wealth and to drive up wages, drive down prices and improve consumer choice.
• Reforming company law to incentivise firms to act as a force for good, recognising a wider purpose than narrow shareholder value.

Six of the Best 912

"Brexit has given nationalists the confidence to cast suspicions upon a wide array of independent public bodies, from universities to the Bank of England. One thing that neoliberals and nationalists can agree on is that anyone whose education and career has been spent in publicly funded liberal institutions, telling a story about 'the public interest' is a fraud." William Davies on the Conservative attack on the humanities.

"The report that Johnson wants civil service briefings to be short and simple is not so remarkable – many politicians share that desire – but the suspicion must be that he also wants them to pander to, rather than to challenge, his pre-existing beliefs." Chris Grey finds that Brexit is going feral.

Mona Wang and Gennie Gebhart say American schools are pushing the boundaries of surveillance technologies.

Mary Beard, who grew up in Shrewsbury, says the prime minister should be visiting flooded settlements. "People who have been inundated need to know that those in power have some sense of the reality of flooding beyond the words and the headlines."

Harry Potter’s dwindling popularity dismays Patrick West.

"His anguished cry, “It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand” is more relatable than ever in these toxic times." James Gent watches John Cleese's 1986 film Clockwise.

It was 51 years ago today that I sang with Danny La Rue

There has been controversy this week over a visit paid to a Scottish primary school by a drag queen.

Having sung on a West End stage with Danny La Rue when I was eight, I take a relaxed view of the matter.

When I first told this story I wrote:

I was one of the children asked up on to the stage halfway through one of his pantomimes - Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty, to be precise. We sang "Doe, a Deer", as it happens, and having a deep voice I was given the first line. 

Anyway, my strongest memory of the evening, apart from my own performance, is of Danny La Rue coming out in front of the curtain, as himself, and announcing that someone had died and singing his own signature tune "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep" as a tribute to him. 

I have tried to make sense of this memory in recent years, assuming that the person who had died was the writer of the song. But on investigation he turned out to be George Stevens, and he died in 1954. 

Then a few days ago I heard Barry Humphries on Desert Island Discs. One of the records he chose was "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep, as sung by Randolph Sutton. 

Sure enough, Wikipedia tells us that Sutton made a famous recording of the song and died on 28 February 1969. Which dates my first and last West End performance to within a day or two.

I remember leaving school a little early so I could get home in time to go the show. It was during hymn practice (we had such a thing in those days) and when I left we were about to sing Hills of the North Rejoice, which was one of my favourites. Hymn practice was on Friday afternoons.

Looking at a calendar for 1969, I find 28 February was Friday. So that must be the day it happened.

Take it away, Danny.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I welcome guest posts on Liberal England. So if you have views on what the Liberal Democrats should do next, why not share them here?

As you can see from this list of the 10 most recent guests posts, I am happy to consider a wide range of subjects beyond the Lib Dems

If you would like to write a guest post yourself, please drop me an email so we can discuss your idea.

• For Liberalism to succeed we must embrace all of its creed - Patrick Maxwell
• Forgotten Victorian folklore collectors: An undiscovered treasure trove - Francis Young
• Joseph Merrick in the cigar factory - Joanne Vigor-Mungovin
• Why we need a GCSE in Natural History - Mary Colwell
• Three unlikely heroes from Grantham suggest a future for smaller towns - Brynley Heaven
• Political parties must be rooted in their communities once again - Mike Gayler
• Why am I a Liberal Democrat - Simon Beard
• How the Revoke policy harmed Lib Dem chances - Michael Mullaney
• Unionism is making the Scottish Lib Dems irrelevant - Mark Stephens
• With Valour and Distinction: The 2nd Battalion Leicestershire Regiment in the First World War - Nigel Atter