Nowhere to Go: Maggie Smith's first credited film role

Yesterday we saw the first television appearance by Julie Walters. Tonight it's Maggie Smith's first credited film role, which was in 1958.

Being Maggie Smith, she received what we'd today call a BAFTA nomination for it.

Talking Pictures TV showed it a couple of days ago, but it's not found its way to their catch-up channel TPTV Encore.

Nowhere to Go was the penultimate film made by Ealing Studios. With its jazz soundtrack and refusal to spell everything out for the viewer, it looked forward, not back.

You could call it 'Ealing Noir', and that's not a ridiculous concept. One of the best Ealing films, It Always Rains on Sunday, has a claim on the Noir label too.

In this trailer look for a brief glimpse of Andrée Melly, then Harry H. Corbett in the back of the car in his days as the British Brando (again, this is not a joke) and then we see Maggie Smith. Playing a rich girl looking for kicks, she lights up the screen.

You can find Nowhere to Go on a dodgy Russian site if you ask Google Videos, but I didn't tell you that, right?

If you watch it, here are three notes on the locations.

The disused railway platforms at the start are long since demolished. They were on the still operating North to East curve at Kew Bridge station.

When the villain and Maggie Smith arrive in Wales we see, not the Brecon Beacons, but Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. The chimneys do not belong to a steelworks in the valleys but to the old Tunnel Cement works at Pitstone.

And the big house is Gadebridge House, which was in Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. It was demolished long ago, and its grounds now form Gadebridge Park in the new town.

GUEST POST No sign of an end to defections in local government

Thanks to Augustus Carp for his latest bulletin on local councillors changing parties, though I'll have him know that I lived in Hemel Hempstead between the ages of 3 and 13.

Well, it's been three months now since the General Election, and in Parliament we have seen several expulsions from the Labour Party together with a rather sudden resignation. In my innocence I had assumed that people would have left their political parties before the election, rather than in the immediate aftermath, but the evidence shows that resignations have continued apace amongst our local councillors.

Since July, there have been 17 defections from the Conservative Party, 13 from Labour, 17 from the Lib Dems and 6 from the Nationalists. The net beneficiaries have been the Greens (up 3) and Reform UK (up 12). The balancing figure is described, perhaps not accurately enough, as 'Independents', who have picked up the remaining 37.  

If I had more time and patience I would no doubt try to do a bit of analysis of the various independents. I am using the category to cover ratepayers, residents associations, localists, single-issue hobbyhorse jockeys and people who are incapable of working within any sort of group structure, and many more besides.  

Some councils have one or more competing groups who fall into the Independent category. Note that councillors sometimes become Independent as a sort of casualty clearing station, where they reside after resigning from A before seeing the light and joining Party B.  

Of the 103 defections, only five councillors have made a direct swap between parties - 2 from Labour to Green, 1 from Tory to Green, 1 from Lib Dem to Labour and 1 from Labour to Lib Dem.  

One trend that seems prevalent at the moment is a disproportionately high number of defections in Wales. Since July, 14 councillors have changed their colours – 5 from Labour, 4 from the Conservatives, 3 Independents (who have transmogrified into a Reform group in Torfaen) and a Liberal Democrat.  The situation is similar in Scotland – 4 each from the Tories and the Nationalists, 3 from Labour and 1 Independent. 

The dramatic move for the Lib Dems was the mass defection of eight female councillors in Dacorum, over allegations of sexism and bullying. 

It's a matter of conjecture whether personal grievances or political ideologies are the main reason for councillor defections – there might be a doctoral thesis in it for someone with a high pain threshold.  

Incidentally, the reason the local authority is called Dacorum is to prevent the residents of Berkhamsted from having to say that they live in Hemel Hempstead.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Lib Dems lose control of Dacorum after eight female councillors resign from group

From Hemel Today:

Eight female councillors in Dacorum have left the Liberal Democrat group after accusing the council leader of “failing to deal with allegations of bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment”.

It means the Liberal Democrats have lost their majority on the borough council, which has now moved into no overall control.

The councillors, who included two cabinet members and will now sit as independents, announced they were leaving the group during a full council meeting yesterday (Wednesday, 25 September). They remain members of the Liberal Democrat party.

The report goes on to quote a statement from the eight women and give some of the background to the affair.

Dacorum Council is based in Hemel Hempstead. The borough also includes the towns of Berkhamsted and Tring and surrounding villages. 

Those Lib Dem targets for the next general election in full

Embed from Getty Images

Michael Mullaney, who was our candidate in Hinckley and Bosworth on Thursday, has tweeted a list of the Liberal Democrat near misses at this election. They form a handy list of targets for the next election.

The second column gives the number votes we were adrift of the winner, and the third the percentage swing needed to win it next time. It is this latter figure that determines a seat's ranking in the list.

All these seats are held by the Conservatives except Burnley, which is held by Labour.

                                                                         %

Godalming and Ash                         891         0.81

Farnham and Bordon                     1349        1.27

Hampshire East                              1275        1.27

Shropshire South                            1624        1.57

Dorset North                                   1589        1.60

Romsey and Southampton North   2191        2.19

Cotswold North                               3357        3.34

Torridge and Tavistock                    3950        3.89

Burnley                                            3420        4.31

Hamble Valley                                 4802        4.35

Hertfordshire South West                4456        4.62

Salisbury                                          5285        5.27

Buckinghamshire Mid                      5872        5.44

Sevenoaks                                       5440       5.45

Hinckley and Bosworth                    5408       5.66

When I blogged about Gordon Birtwistle, who was our candidate in Burnley having been MP for the town between 2005 and 2010, I wondered about his claim that the contest was between him and Labour, But he turned out to be quite right.

The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists exhibition comes to St Albans

On Friday the exhibition The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists opened at St Albans Museum and Gallery. It runs until 8 September.

The venue's billing says:

Uncover the story of the talented artists who illustrated Ladybird books for more than 30 years. This colourful, family-friendly exhibition includes rare books, original artwork and artefacts, and reveals how illustrators played such an enormous role in Ladybird’s extraordinary success. 

Tracing the interconnected work of these artists, the company’s story is recounted over Ladybird’s ‘golden years’ – 1940 to 1975. Visually rich and varied, the exhibition will evoke many memories of childhood.

This exhibition has been touring the country for a few years now, and I saw it when it came to Leicester. I can thoroughly recommend it. I came away impressed by the sheer quality of the illustrations that Ladybird Books laid before children by commissioning leading commercial artists.

Those who dismiss Ladybird as purveyors of nostalgia are mistaken. Many of their books were about technology, social progress and the future. In fact Ladybird has a good claim to to be the most progressive children's publisher in those post-war decades.

Their history books were written by a Liberal, L, du Garde Peach, whom some at the BBC (he was a pioneer of radio drama) suspected of Bolshevism.

And I learnt to read with Ladybird's Key Words reading scheme ('Peter and Jane') in a new town in the 1960s. The world of those books was the world I saw around me.

A walk with John Rogers: Roydon in Essex to Ware in Hertfordshire

The Harcamlow Way is a figure-of-eight path through Cambridgeshire, Essex and Hertfordshire. This John Rogers walk follows it from Roydon station in Essex to Ware in Hertfordshire.

We visit the mediaeval moat in Moat Wood and cross the River Ash, passing through what John calls "some of the most beautiful countryside I’ve seen on my walks".

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

We were Vikings once: British primary schools in the Sixties

A few years ago it was the French who had the secret of parenting: their children ate up their vegetables and didn't get ADHD.

Now it's the Scandinavians, hitherto envied by the British for their tasteful interior design and more adventurous sex lives.

The other day Helen Russell wrote a piece for the Guardian to promote her book How to Raise a Viking – The Secrets of Parenting the World’s Happiest Children.

Those secrets, it seems, include lots of outside play, family meals and singing together in schools.

The more I read Russell's article, the more the enlightened world of child-raising she described reminded me of my own primary school days in the Sixties - particularly of my first primary, which was one of those post-war Modernist schools that Hertfordshire went in for and had enormous playing fields, and seems to have been demolished without leaving a photograph to show it was ever there.

I don't think it is just nostalgia that makes me say that this was one of those rare decades when the English rather liked their children.

Ever since Jim Callaghan's 'secret gardens' speech at Ruskin College in 1976, education has been at the mercy of politicians. Reform has followed reform, with many of them deserving scare quotes.

The right attacks progressive ideas because that's what the right does. While the left's lack of confidence in its own economic ideas has led them to intervene in schools instead.

It's easier to propose yet another reform of the curriculum than to talk about the need to restructure the economy, which is what the left used to do.