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"With just two days until we mark three years since the invasion, we need to talk about this man, because no one truly knows what could have happened if he hadn’t been there to lead. This is a man who could have left. A man who was expected to leave. The world was really expecting he would run." Victor Kravchuk pays tribute to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Jennie Kermode is worried that US politicians are again talking about mass sterilisation: "The US first began sterilising people with mental illness - requiring neither their consent nor that of their next of kin – in Pennsylvania in 1905, and in 1927 this was formally ruled to be in accordance with the constitution. Although never actually banned, it decreased dramatically after 1978, when new regulations ruled that consent was ... necessary."

When did rock 'n roll die? Chris Dalla Riva and Daniel Parris offer a statistical analysis.

"In an unnamed city, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) keeps his head down in the Department of Records, covering for ineffectual boss Mr Kurtzmann (a brilliant Ian Holm). Meanwhile in his dreams, he is a winged warrior, who soars amongst the clouds, battling a giant samurai creature and rescuing a Botticelli Venus from her aerial cage." Tim Pelan celebrates the chaotic genius of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Londonopia finds that the grazing of sheep in London's parks has a long and complex history: "Just when you thought sheep had permanently retired from their park-keeping duties, along came World War II. With food shortages rampant and every inch of available land needed for practical use, parks across London were repurposed for the war effort. Victory gardens sprung up in many green spaces, and in some cases, sheep were reintroduced to provide both wool and meat."

Ben Austwick takes us to Lud’s Church, a natural geological feature in the Staffordshire Peak District, with rich literary and religious connections.

Memorial to five schoolboys killed by mine on Swanage beach to be unveiled in May

A new memorial to the five schoolboys killed by a mine on Swanage beach in 1955 will be unveiled on 10 May from 10.30am. The event will take place in front of the War Memorial in Swanage, and a short service will also be held in memory of the boys.

I came across the story last year when I found a folder of press cuttings I had saved back in the Nineties - think of them as pre-internet bookmarks. Today's news comes from the gofundme page set up to raise money for a new memorial.

A reminder of Nigel Farage's slavish adoration of Donald Trump

There are whispers that Nigel Farage intends to row back from his support for Donald Trump. So here's a reminder of the slavish adoration he has for years poured upon that grotesque figure.

You may also remember that Farage was once very keen on being filmed and photographed with British veterans of the second world war. But it seems none of them was as brave as Donald Trump.

Milton Jones: "My whole act is reverse engineered"

As I once wrote:

I love Milton Jones's comedy. He doesn't just use puns and word play. If that was all he did, he's be Tim Vine.

It's because every funny line of his creates an alternative world. And that world exists for a second or two on stage with him until its bubble bursts and it is no more.

Here Jones talks to the always likeable Rob Brydon about his career and approach to comedy.

The party's autumn conference is in Bournemouth this year. I doubt I'll have the self-control to resist stealing Jones's joke about the Japanese attack on Poole Harbour for Lord Bonkers.

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Hannah Forsyth surveys the history of the commercialisation of higher education and concludes: "Universities need to be democratic in both structure and purpose."

John Cromby complains that left-wing political commentators treat psychiatric diagnoses as uncontroversial: "This has the effect of reifying psychiatric diagnoses – of making them appear more real, more concrete, more legitimate. It also works to undermine critiques: of diagnosis, and of psychiatry more generally."

"G.K. Chesterton once wrote that journalism was, 'saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive'." A hundred-and-some years later that sounds rather quaint. Today, it’s asking three different sources with a vested interest in the matter whether Lord Jones is in fact dead, and posting their contradictory answers in real-time as you receive them." Martin Robbins argues that Donald Trump - and Robert Peston - have broken the news, and that it's probably time to rethink your information diet.

Many of the oligarchs who supported Hitler ended up in concentration camps, reports Timothy W. Ryback.

David Trotter reviews the new British Film Institute book on Ken Loach's Kes (1969): "Kes marked a conscious departure from the 'go-in-and-grab-it' style of Up the Junction. The aim now was to observe, sympathetically, at a distance, but still with a view to avoiding as far as possible any suspicion of extensive rehearsal."

"In the popular imagination, Birmingham isn’t thought of as an artistic bohemia. The city’s historic stereotype, judging by the backdrop to the likes of Peaky Blinders or the risible Tolkien biopic from 2019, is summed up by no-nonsense men bashing iron in huge factories, often to a heavy metal soundtrack." But there's more to the city than that, says Jon Neale as he looks at the role of the Arts and Crafts movement in its history.

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Doree Lewak on the 17 year old from New York who solved a family mystery on a recent visit to Auschwitz: "While touring an exhibit of children’s artwork at the notorious death camp,17-year-old Bronx native, Yuval, made a shocking discovery amid the drawings of guards with guns and trains. Alongside the artwork, he noticed the name of his grandfather’s brother, 13-year-old Freddy Popper, whose fate was lost to his family - and history."

"Wilkie is talking about something that has become an increasing refrain in Western capitals - that Ukraine’s military difficulties are not down to a lack of Western support but down to Ukraine’s failure to mobilise its population into the military." Arthur Snell finds that the West is already rehearsing the excuses for its coming betrayal of Ukraine.

Pam Jarvis argues that the jury is still out on the quality of England’s 'improved' state schools, and on the impact of large Multi-Academy Trusts, with their superannuated non-teaching chief executives and directors in particular.

When people have fewer places to socialise they are more likely to turn to populism, says Jeevun Sandher, the Labour MP for Loughborough.

"At the peak of his business Teesside-based court reporter Peter Holbert could make more than £5,000 per week (in 1970s money!). At the end of January 2025, at the age of 84, he will be covering his last case. He says in recent years demand for his services has almost completely dried up from both local and national media." Dominic Ponsford tells a tale that sums up the decline and fall of the regional press.

Andrew Male defends the genius of 'Allo 'Allo against a modern puritan critic: "As much as it derived its humour from the war itself, 'Allo 'Allo! was also lampooning the tropes of serious BBC drama. In fact, many of 'Allo 'Allo!’s archetypes – the covert beret-sporting female Resistance member, the kind Nazi, the bosomy waitress – are based on Glaister's original characters (in a sly moment of industry subversion David Croft even re-employed some of Secret Army’s actors within the 'Allo 'Allo! cast)."

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Tom Forth asks why the North of England is so poor, and suggests a variety of reasons, including the historical lack of universities there and the way Westminster has deprived local government of its powers.

"If George’s world view, and his work, were shaped by the second world war and the postwar international order ... Alex’s has been most influenced by the struggle for civil rights and equality. His father’s philanthropy started in South Africa and the struggle against apartheid, and Alex met Nelson Mandela at a young age." Roula Khalaf meets Alex Soros, the son of George Soros and chair of the Open Society Foundation.

Low public trust in politicians places few constraints on their ability to wield power, so leading politicians may lack the motivation to take meaningful action to arrest low levels of trust among voters. Chris Butler, Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker present their research into how politicians cope with this lack of public trust.

Margaret Brecknell on the African American abolitionists who travelled to Leicester in the mid-19th century to share their stories.

"To Be or Not to Be is twisty, turny, filled with gags and smart writing and humorous quagmires our heroes must rely on their skills to escape from. But it’s also clearly poking fun at Hitler and his gestapo and their countless failings as ring kissers par excellence. Let’s learn a lesson or two from Lombard and gang and not blindly follow our leadership until we’re no more than history’s villainous punchline." Ed Travis, Elizabeth Stoddard and Frank Calvillo celebrate Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 film - one of the "funniest and most groundbreaking comedies ever made".

Graham Fellows has realised. after 40 years, that he likes John Shuttleworth. He talks to Brian Logan about him.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi

Then again...

I love this: you hardly need to ask for subtitles. German satire could be the trend of 2025. 

Bramber Green: From bombsite to stone circle

I photographed these stones, which you can find off Judd Street to the south of St Pancras International, on the way to a Liberator drink one evening. I looked up their history when I got home.

The open space they grace is called Bramber Green. Until the second world war, says Ian Visits, it was an area of Georgian houses - you can see a photograph of an ornate house that stood there on London Picture Archive.

Then came the German bombers, after which the area lay derelict until the early 1960s, when it was cleared to create the park we see today.

I can't find the sculptor of these stones - the large one seems designed to encourage children to climb it - or when they date from, but the last major renovation of the site was in 2019.

Five schoolboys were killed by a wartime mine on Swanage beach in 1955

Robert Key, who died last year, was the Conservative MP for Salisbury between 1983 and 2010. On 17 March 2010 he gave his last Commons speech, and it was one of the most remarkable ever given there.

It was on the second reading of the Gordon Brown government's Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill, which passed into law before the general election of that year.

Early in Key's speech, he said:

The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) referred to the question of far-off lands, saying that if mines exploded around our shores or in our country there would be immediate public outrage and very swift action indeed. Well, I can tell the House that that has happened in our land. I was there, and I want to pass on, for those who will be here long after I have gone, what happens in those circumstances.

And that is just what he did:

On Friday 13 May 1955, when I was 10 years old, I was on Swanage beach in Dorset with some 20 other children of about the same age. We were doing what children on a beach on a Friday afternoon in May do-building sandcastles, digging holes in the sand, making dams and so on. I was building my castle with a chap called Richard Dunstan: five of my friends were digging holes, and then one of them found a tin. He thought that it was Spam, or something really exotic-yes, Spam was exotic in 1955. He was wrestling to move it, because it was lodged between two rocks. He got out a shoehorn but could not break the tin open. The boys stood back, and were seen throwing things at it.

My friend and I got bored. We turned round. We had our backs to our friends, and were about the same distance from them as I am from you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, when there was a huge explosion. We were blown into the sea, and lived. Five of my friends died. Five British children were blown up by a British mine on a British beach, within my living memory, and the living memory of many other people. It was an extraordinary thing. It happened in the middle of the 1955 general election. The front page of the following day's edition of The Daily Telegraph carried a story with the headline, "4 Boys Die, One Missing in Explosion". Below that, smaller headlines stated, "Big Crater Torn in Beach" and "Wartime Mine Theory".

There was not much theory involved for the five who were killed, or for the two of us who were the luckiest people alive. I still think that I am the luckiest person alive in this House. Of course, my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Milton Keynes has deliberately put himself in harm's way, and I salute him for it, but I was there as a child and got tangled up in what happened by mistake. So what was the response in Britain when a mine exploded around our shores? Many years later, I was a Minister in the Department of National Heritage, and the Imperial War Museum was one of my responsibilities. One day, I asked the staff there whether they had any records of something happening on Swanage beach on 13 May 1955. A couple of weeks later, a large box arrived, full of all the documentation relating to that horrible event.

I have here in my hand copies of the Dorset police documents entitled "Report to Coroner Concerning Death". They detail how, on 13 May at about 4.20 pm, four boys were reported dead. I also have a copy of the report from the police constable who found them, but the strange thing is that the fifth boy was never found. Within a day or two, a plimsoll that he had been wearing was found. Another was found a few days later. That meant that the then Home Secretary had to issue a document giving authority to the coroner to investigate the matter. The coroner simply declared that there was no conclusion to reach other than that the fifth boy had been a victim of the same mine explosion.

In the inquest, the coroner called for evidence from the officer responsible for de-mining the beach, who had issued a class IIA certificate in January 1950. The officer said:

"I am convinced that this mine had been in the sea and from evidence of marine growth I consider the mine had been washed ashore.

What the boys were seen to have been doing was quite sufficient to have exploded the mine...As an expert I would have allowed boys to walk across the beach."

I have read the mine clearance officer's reports, and have with me a copy of the plan of the mines that were laid on Swanage beach in 1940. A clearance operation was undertaken in 1945, which was repeated in 1947 and again 1949. Eventually, a clearance certificate was issued on 17 February 1950. The documents reveal that 117 mines had been laid, of which five were lifted in clearance. They also show that, although there was some evidence of the existence of 54 others, the remaining 58 are still unaccounted for. That was what I found so horrendous when I discovered all this as a Minister of the Crown so many years later.

The coroner concluded his remarkable summing up-in those days, of course, everything was handwritten, and I have a copy of his notes-by saying:

"I think the bomb was in all probability washed ashore.

I do not think any blame can be attached to any living persons in this matter. The boys were all playing among the rocks in a perfectly normal way so far as"

the master in charge

"could see and I do not consider he has any reason to reproach himself, and after the explosion he could not have done more nor acted more resolutely than he did."

I certainly concur with that. He was my favourite master. He was my French master, and a remarkable and good man. I think that he must have been through hell ever since.

One can imagine how horrified the staff at the school were by what had happened. They, too, were remarkable in the way in which they handled the incident, the enormity of which was overwhelming. The headmaster, John Strange, who was a wonderful man, managed to hold the whole community together. The retired headmaster, the Rev. Chadwick, also played his part. The master who had been at the heart of the incident and who had been taking his charges on the beach was wonderful. 

The school could not have done more to look after the children, but the fact remained that the mine clearances had not been completed satisfactorily. The mine clearance officers had, in fact, refused a certificate of clearance on one occasion, but had been overruled.

In the final certificate of removal of dangerous military defence works, the officer concerned-who, ironically, was operating out of Southern Command in Salisbury in my constituency-stated:

"The whole area has been swept with a detector and those portions of the area which have been subject to disturbances have been explored thoroughly to the apparent depth of that disturbance".

Bulldozers were brought in, and the beach was removed down to the rock and put back again. The officer continued:

"Though no guarantee can be given the area may be considered safe except for the possibility of mines being washed up from other fields",

and that is what happened.

This is a horrendous story, and I repeat it to the House to point out that on the issue of mine clearance, whether it is cluster bombs, cluster munitions or mines of any kind, the impact is the same on a child of 10 at play, whether in Beirut or in Swanage. Personally, I would like to see the mystery of the missing mines of Swanage bay cleared up. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood), who also knows more about military matters than most of us, and who has first-hand experience in his military service, might be interested.

After the event, the coastguard swept the whole coast from St. Aldhelm's head right round past Poole harbour all the way to the Isle of Wight for any traces of that missing body. None were found. 

More significant now is the fact that we have the technology to detect those mines. I would like to see minehunters of the Sandown class or equivalent brought in, perhaps in training, to sweep Swanage beach and the coast right round Bournemouth. We have the evidence in the 1950 statements of the officer who did the clearance and also from the 1955 inquest that the bomb which killed those children had probably been swept inshore by a gale. There is an opportunity for the Ministry of Defence, in the course of training our Royal Navy operatives, to have another go. That would be an opportunity worth taking.

I support the Bill - of course I do, after what I have been through in my life. I still think I am the luckiest Member to be alive. It motivated me in my politics, and it motivated me to be interested in defence once I came to the House. I have done that for 27 years. 

I hope the lessons of Swanage beach will not be forgotten. I hope the Bill will be but one step on the road to realising that although war may have to be fought, we should always strive to do it honourably, morally, with integrity, and always and everywhere with the minimum impact on a civilian population that has not put itself in harm's way. That is my wish, and that is why I support the Bill.

I am blogging about this story today because I found an interview with Robert Key that he gave just after making the speech, in the folder of press cuttings I turned up the other day.

In it he gave some details of the boys' deaths which he didn't mention in the Commons (and which I shan't repeat here), and talked about the effect on him:

"I had just started making friends in my new school when the land mine went off. My mother came to see me, and my father prayed with the other parents, but I was desperately homesick and miserable. My back was badly injured. My friend was taking shrapnel out for years.

"We hated having to go back to the beach every Friday. The Army said they hadn't found any other mines. But we heard the explosions in our classroom, everyone went white. It was very stiff upper lip, pretending not to notice the spaces in the dormitory."

Reading the contemporary news reports of this tragedy and the inquest into it, I get the impression that the authorities seized too readily upon the explanation that the mine responsible had drifted ashore, because it meant that no one need be held responsible. That seems to be what Robert Key believed too.

Swanage was not the only tragedy involving wartime mines. A Sunday Mirror article from 28 June 1959 warned:

Death Hides in the Sands!

Killers, silent, corroded, rusty, lurk where the holiday families play this summer - on beaches and moors, in woods and fields.

The tides, or children with spades, will uncover-some 40 beach mines on Britain’s East and South Coasts. 

These are the deadliest of all, warns Lieutenant-Colonel N. Barker, who commands the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit at Horsham, Sussex. 

They can kill at 100 yards, And they have done frequently since World War II ended - fourteen years ago.

And the report goes on to remind readers:

Killers all - that, only recently, killed four men near Harrogate and five boys at Swanage, Dorset... and maimed six children in Yorkshire.

I now wonder if the danger of mines was something that every holidaying family was once aware of. Certainly, I can remember being told before a family caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967 that I shouldn't pick up anything metal I found on the shore. At the end of this post you can a public information film that was issued after the Swanage tragedy.

The five boys are remembered by a tablet on a building erected in their memory at what was Forres school, the prep school they attended. Forres later merged with another school and its buildings at Swanage are now occupied by a special school, which means the tablet is not generally open to public view.

So money is being raised to provide a more accessible memorial to the boys and one that is near the place where the tragedy took place.

Hue and Cry and the 'Dead End Kids' of the London Blitz

Embed from Getty Images

In my original article on children and bombsites in postwar British films, which really needs to be updated with my later discoveries, I noted how children's command of these spaces was celebrated in the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry, but later films came to see them as freighted with danger.

One reason for this positive early view, I now believe, is the role played by London urchins during the Blitz.

In an article on the History Press site, Ian Parson reveals that many of the children evacuated to places of safety in the countryside soon voted with their feet and came back to London. Just before the Blitz:

evacuees, or to give them their proper title, ‘unattended children’, were returning to Liverpool Street Station at a rate of two and a half thousand every week.

What happened next is remarkable:

The youngsters who only a few months before had been tucked away, in England’s green and pleasant and safe land, were as it turned out, brave way beyond their years, and they had a name. They were the ‘Dead End Kids’ and they were the brain child of 17 year old Patsie Duggan, son of a Poplar bin man. 

Soon a gang of scruffy urchins, including Patsie’s 13 year old sister Maureen, and recruits as young as ten, had equipped themselves with an assortment of tools, buckets of sand, rope and axes. Night after night, raid after raid, they were out there. Scouring the area for people in distress, hoping to perform the most daring rescue this time round. With no adults to supervise them, the game very quickly got seriously out of hand.

During the Blitz they were responsible for a series of life saving missions. On one really bad night, as reported in the London Fire Journal, an eye witness describes, ‘They rushed up the stairs, ready it seemed to eat fires!’ The same witness then described them as ‘emerging from the building, some of them with their tatty clothes smouldering.’

They became known as unofficial fire-fighters across the East End. But it was a dangerous game.

During the Blitz children accounted for one in ten deaths, and unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, two of Patsie’s group were killed on duty. Ronnie Ayres and Bert Eden died together on a night when Patsie himself was also badly injured. They were putting out incendiary bombs when without warning three heavy bombs came down the other side of a wall to where they were furiously working away. They died instantly, killed by the falling wall.

This sounds too good to be true - a case of heroes being found at the darkest hour of the war - but there are other sources that tell the same story. One example is Frank Lewey, who had been mayor of Stepney during the Blitz, writing in John Bull magazine (23 October 1943):

We had some bombed-out children billeted at the "People's Palace." One night a cluster of incendiaries fell in the gardens and started to blaze up against some buildings. The resident caretaker, Mr. Crawley, who himself won a reputation as a fire fighter, told me, next morning, how those small boys "went over the wall like a pack of monkeys, and dowsed the bombs as if they were snuffing so many candles." They ought to have been in bed; but their action probably saved the "People's Palace." 

The Stepney Scouts deserve a word to themselves. Into one of our shelters a woman came crying, with five tiny children trailing crying after her. Her house had caught fire, and, in the rush to escape, she had left one of her babies behind. Two small Scouts, almost extinguished beneath steel helmets, instantly raced out through shrapnel and bomb-bursts, calmly entered the blazing house, and brought the little girl back. She looked very proud of her escort. And well she may have been! There were over 700 people in the shelter at the time.

No wonder Hue and Cry was a "notable box office attraction" at British cinemas in 1947.

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"There is a strand of conservatism that is protectionist and isolationist but for any admirer of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher to go along with these policies is extraordinary. Trump represents a repudiation of their values on free trade and internationalism." David Gauke explains why Conservatives should have no truck with Trump.

Wera Hobhouse says it's time we had an open and honest conversation about legalising euthanasia.

Despite the fact that governments have spent the last 40 years giving capitalism's loudest voices mostly what they want, such as lower top tax rates and weaker trades unions, in the last 10 years GDP per hour worked has grown by less than one per cent a year. Read Chris Dillow on Labour and the Conservatives' shared belief in "the Scooby-Doo theory of capitalism".

At least 2000 babies were born to Black GIs stationed in Britain during the second world war and a home was created for some of them: Holnicote House in Somerset. Those who grew up there are now telling their stories, reports Steve Rose.

"As a statistician with 20 years of experience in the field of ecology, I recently faced a challenging moment. In August, some colleagues in Canada published a response to a paper that I co-wrote a decade ago, showing that the method my co-authors and I proposed back then is fundamentally flawed." Oliver Gimenez reflects on having a paper of his shown to be wrong.

"Tom Baker was in his fifth full year as the Doctor and was the well-recognised face of the series across the UK. Cleese was also a household name, but for comedy. He had started to build his comedy reputation in the late 1960s and solidified this with his work on the first three series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus between 1969 and 1973 before ascending to comedy royalty with Fawlty Towers, which he created with his then-wife Connie Booth." Oliver J. Wake on the coming together of two giants of Seventies television.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Leonard Rossiter and at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester

There's no end in sight to the Guardian's commemoration of Leonard Rossiter's career. A 1969 interview with him by Terry Coleman from 1969 has appeared on the newspaper's website.

It was published after Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the play that made Rossiter's reputation arrived in the West End:

In a way he achieves some of his Hitler effects by taking his own nervous tenseness and exaggerating it into farce. The tense posturings of Hitler derive perhaps from the angular way Mr Rossiter holds his own arms, from the stiff clasping of his own hands. Hitler spends the evening on stage in a seething fuss which is mostly Hitler but part Rossiter.

And, says Coleman, the play went on at the Saville Theatre "where it succeeded a long run of Danny La Rue’s female impersonations." That must have been Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty, which I went to see as an eight-year-old.

I saw The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester in the spring of 1979. A review in The Stage (19 April 1979) reveals that the Phoenix was threatened with closure and there were fears it might be the last production put on there:

Nigel Bennett, grim-faced throughout, improves with success, as Ui. The gestures, the passionate outbursts, the deep gloom, and the unpredictability of the paranoid dic tator are evident. He misses the chance to ridicule the shabby gangster's early bids for power. ...

The entire open stage war trans formed into a vegetable market by designers. Peter Ling and Patsy Pearce. Slides succinctly outlining the Nazi rise to power intelligently anticipated that the younger generation could be unaware of its odious intricacies. But the extremes of menace and humour were not exploited sufficiently. 

Reviews in The Stage often turn out to have been surprisingly sniffy, but I still remember this production 45 years on.

Woodhead railway tunnels to Hadfield today

I first saw the Woodhead route - the lost railway from Sheffield to Manchester - in the summer of 1978. In those days Sheffield to Huddersfield trains used it to reach Penistone, running through the derelict Sheffield Victoria station on the way and also taking sweeping curves about the valley of the Don.

At Penistone you could watch a constant stream of goods trains taking coal from the South Yorkshire coalfield to a power station at Widnes or returning empty.

The class 76 locomotives were unique to this line and you could tell they had been designed in the 1930s, before the war put a temporary stop to electrification.

And I did manage to ride on the whole route shortly before it closed. In the winter of 1980/1 the Hope Valley line, the alternative way to Manchester that all Sheffield trains now use, closed for engineering works on Sundays and passenger services were diverted via Woodhead. I can still remember coasting past the reservoirs you see in the video on the way down to Manchester.

This is an excellent video from Trekking Exploration, showing the remains of the line between Woodhead and Hadfield today as well as some archive footage and photos of its last days.

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"Labour’s recent creative industries plan, published in March, avoids any talk about new horizons or radical change, either in the country or the wider world. Rather, it presents arts and culture as an existing 'part of 'our national story' and 'our sense of national pride.' References to technology are always balanced with something more traditional." Wessie Du Toit reminds us that Labour has lost Tony Blair's faith in creativity and the future.

Anno Girolami looks at the Flixborough disaster and its place in the battle for workplace safety: "Fifty years ago, at tea time on a Saturday in June, the Nypro chemical plant near the North Lincolnshire village suffered an explosion that killed 28 of the 72 people on site and seriously injured a further 36. Had it been a weekday, many more people would probably have died."

Stuart Whomsley on being a working-class professional: "When a person enters clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms."

Children's playgrounds are part of the solution to many problems, argues James Hempsall.

Philippe Broussard searches for a mysterious photographer who snapped occupied Paris and mocked the Nazis.

"No writer before T.H. White, I think, had been so flamboyantly anachronistic in fantasy. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is rooted in anachronism, steeped in it, inhabits it as its element. The clash of periods is embodied in Merlyn, the ancient wizard, who not only lives backwards ... but seems to have lived for hundreds of years, since he remembers all the major incidents and changes of fashion between White’s lifetime and the fifteenth century." Rob Maslen accounts for the magic of The Sword in the Stone.

Farewell to the Reverend Ruggles Fisher

When Market Harborough first competed in the Leicestershire chess league in the mid Seventies, a stalwart member of our team was the Reverend Fisher from Husbands Bosworth.

He was a kindly man - everyone's idea of a country vicar. I wish I had known he was called Ruggles (as more people should be), but he was always the Reverend Fisher to me in those days.

I knew he had retired to Oakham and had lived to celebrate his 100th birthday. When I thought of him again today, I found his obituary in the Church Times. He died in December 2022 at the age of 102.

The early part of the obituary is very much about his chess:

On his retirement from parish ministry in 1982, he joined the Clergy Correspondence Chess Club. After winning the clergy championship for three consecutive years, in 1985, 1986, and 1987, he retired, returning to compete against Canon John Morris and winning another three consecutive times, in 1993, 1994, and 1995 ... 

He went on to win again in 1997 and 2000. Fittingly, the 2000 win was jointly with Canon Morris, for whom it was also his final win. Fisher remained a member of the Club until his death.

But there was more to his life than that. He fought in the Burma campaign with the Royal Norfolk Regiment and retired from the Army with the rank of Major.

Church Times suggests his longevity made him "a direct connection to a now-lost era". This was for two reasons.

The first was that his father, the Revd Steward Travers Fisher, served as a chaplain in the Boer War - my Revd Fisher was the fourth generation of his family to be a Church of England clergyman.

And the second was that his grandfather, like his grandson the Revd Thomas Ruggles Fisher, "was a signatory to the Remonstrance in response to the decision of the Privy Council in Hebbert v. Purchas in 1871".

Thanks to Wikipedia, I can tell you that John Purchas was an author and Church of England clergyman who was prosecuted for ritualist practices:

Purchas introduced the use of vestments such as the cope, chasuble, alb, biretta, etc., and used lighted candles on the altar, crucifixes, images, and holy water, together with processions, incense, and the like.

He lost on every point of the case when it reached Pricy Council, but as he had put his property out of his hands he couldn't be pursued for costs. And he continued to conduct services as he chose until his death the following year.

I don't know if the signatories were supportive of his Romish practices or simply wished to defend the autonomy of individual clergymen.

One other point... If you were a chess player called 'Fisher' in the Seventies then every opponent would make a crack about your name, convinced that he was the first to do so. The Revd Fisher bore it with the patience of a saint.

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"It doesn't matter what statistics Musk does or doesn't announce, or which advertisers stay or which leave - this statistic is the real ballgame. Engagement numbers that can't even reach a dozen, for an account that boasts over 30,000 supposed fans, is an outright apocalypse." Hunter Lazzaro offers a post titled How to Kill Your Tech Company (Elon Musk edition).

Katie Rosseinsky claims Euston Station is hell on earth: "You stand, neck craned towards the departures board, squinting under artificial lights that seem perfectly calibrated to induce migraines. You dodge passengers who stampede like wildebeests towards platforms announced moments before trains are due to leave."

Simon Price says Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history. Hear him.

"Art historians look carefully at images to search for incongruities. In authenticating or attributing a painting, we don’t just look at brushstrokes and pigments. We consider the painting’s ownership, the hands through which it has passed, and other information about the history that the painting has accumulated along the way." Sonja Drimmer suggests the profession will be invaluable in the battle against misleading AI-generated images.

"For many urban planners, desire lines are a sign of failure; evidence that a public space hasn’t quite met the needs and wishes of the people who use that space. And there’s some truth in that. But for me, they’re also a reminder that our cities are uniquely human places, and the ones that function best are those that are safely navigable not by private vehicle, but on foot." Laurie Winkless celebrates desire lines - the unofficial footpaths the public makes for itself by repeated use.

J.J. Jackson on the ticking time bomb that threatens south Essex: "The SS Richard Montgomery was a United States Liberty Ship. It was transporting explosives from the USA, to use in the war against the Nazis. She ran aground and broke her back off the Kent coast in August 1944. Salvage crews were able to remove 5,000 tons of explosives after the wreck. But they had to abandon the attempt, leaving 1,400 tons still on board."

Vaughan Wilkins: The writer in wartime

I've found the transcript of a radio interview this blog's hero Vaughan Wilkins gave to the BBC's North American Service in 1943. 

It formed part of a programme in a series called Bridgebuilders. This edition looked at the book trade in wartime and, as well as the novelist Wilkins, a bookseller and a publisher appeared.

A transcript of the programme was printed in the 5 August 1943 issue of The Bookseller. Wilkins was interviewed by Nicholas Stuart.

Stuart: Before you can sell your book or publish it, it's got to be written. So to give us the low-down on that side of the question, here is Vaughan Wilkins, author, among other publications of the best-selling novel And so Victoria. Now, Mr. Wilkins, just you tell us all about writing books in war-time. 

Vaughan Wilkins: Writing is a difficult business at the best of times. Don’t you believe it if anyone says otherwise. When I was a newspaper editor, I thought it was easy. Now I know better. And it is far harder in war-time Britain. 

Stuart: Well, I guess that’s quite understandable.

Wilkins: There are two reasons. One physical, and the other psychological. 

Stuart: Perhaps you’d care to expand that statement, Mr. Wilkins. 

Wilkins: Like the publisher and the bookseller, the author suffers from labour shortage - his own labour. In peace-time, if that happens, it is usually his own fault - his own laziness. But to-day he is not the master of his own labour. He can’t do or not do, what he chooses, or does not choose. If an author is of military age and fit he may be called up. Even if he isn’t, there are still lots of duties which he owes to his country, civil and home defence duties of all sorts. Difficult to write books, you know, when you’re soldiering or sailoring, or even Home Guarding. Take my own case. My publishers in London and in New York - that means you, Lathom - will tell you that I have been behind time - horribly behind time - on those books I contracted to write for them. 

Stuart: What are your particular difficulties? 

Wilkins: When war broke out, I was struggling to write a book with six children under twelve years old evacuated from London billeted in my house. They were fine brave children, as good as gold. But to have one’s paternal responsibilities suddenly increased by half a dozen, doesn’t speed up book production. 

Stuart: No, I'll bet it doesn’t. 

Wilkins: Well, then, I was also billeting officer for my parish. Which meant that I was at the beck and call of some 70 or 80 evacuees and their hosts. A cross between a quartermaster-sergeant and a fairy godmother. Another hold-up there! Then the invasion threat came, and with it the formation of the Home Guard as it is now called. Well, we dug trenches. We made rifle pits. We flung together against the invader barricades of farm carts and barbed wire. We learned to throw bombs. We keep watch. Doing that doesn’t help getting a book written. In the mere matter of time for writing. 

Stuart: That must be so indeed. But you mentioned psychological reasons, Mr. Wilkins ? 

Wilkins: Many people read books just to escape for a little from the present. There can be no reason why they shouldn’t. But all they’ve got to do is to open the book and read it. It’s a very different matter for the author: He’s got to sit down and write that book of escape in cold blood. He’s got to withdraw himself from the present, in which Britain's fate, and the fate of humanity, are in the balance. And when it comes to war books. The tremendousness of the issue, the tragedy and the glory and the speed of the drama are so vast that the imagination is overwhelmed. Here in Britain one sees made manifest the actuality of our new brotherhood: the truth that Britain and America are, in the words of the Atlantic Charter, "met together". I have come to London to find the streets thronged with Americans - our Allies, more than that, our brothers. No, one doesn't have to search for inspiration now, the problem is dealing with it.

Stuart: And that bridgebuilders was the voice of the author. You may like to know that Vaughan Wilkins' new book, Being Met Together, is appearing in your country very soon.

It was when a friend and I noticed that every secondhand bookshop in the country had a copy of the World Books of edition of Fanfare for a Witch, and I mean that literally, that I started collecting him, almost as a joke.

But I do remember enjoying his first book, And So - Victoria, when it was serialised for Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 in 1976.

Ronald Lampitt: The Ladybird artist as social historian

This illustration, A Farm in February, is not from a Ladybird book, but it is by a Ladybird artist, Ronald Lampitt.

And if you're tempted to dismiss it as an exercise in nostalgia for that reason, you should read an article by Adam Chapman:

Lampitt has captured a time of change. The Labour government’s 1947 Agriculture Act secured prices and hastened investment and development and here we can see the tangible results in affordable technology. This farm is perhaps the result they imagined. 

That’s most obvious in the juxtaposition of bright red tractors - the nearer pulling a disc harrow, breaking up the heavy Kentish clay, the further ploughing. The Second Word War brought American tractors to the British countryside in huge numbers (the same ‘Lend Lease’ programme supplied tanks and planes in their thousands). 

Chapman also says:

Even the animals signify the time. The black and white cows that most urban dwellers think of as normal (on milk bottles and children's books) are Holstein Freisians, another post-war introduction. These were the tools by which farmers boosted milk production, but they displaced native breeds like the Dairy Shorthorn and native, dual purpose (milk and meat) breeds.

And he concludes:

Ronald Lampitt saw all this and recorded it for Treasure Magazine. It can be dated, just by what it shows, to a February day in the late 50s [the picture was published in 1963 but may have been produced a few years earlier] but the details it includes show the past and present of this small farm and hints at its future.

The biography of Ronald Lampitt on the Ladybird Fly Away Home site reveals that he illustrated nine books for them. Among them were Understanding Maps, which I had as a boy, and a pair on what to look for inside and outside a church.

I was touched to find these two when I cleared my mother's house and have kept them.

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Liz Gerard says that newspapers coverage of Sunak's retreat from the beaches of Normandy has been desperately inadequate: "The Mirror aside, every one of them missed or misinterpreted the biggest gaffe of the election campaign so far. And at the same time rendered meaningless all the reams of newsprint dedicated to saying how much we respect and owe to those D-Day heroes."

"I have lost count of the number of examples from previous cases where a house parent has received complaints of abuse by another house parent, but done nothing to take the complaint further. The point is that the offence of failing to report by someone in a position of care of children should be on the basis of 'reasonable suspicion that an offence has been committed', rather than 'observed recognised indicators of child sexual abuse'." Peter Garsden is not impressed by the government's response to the recommendations on the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

"It is moments of sudden change, for example, the case of Cirencester Park, that provide us with the opportunity to look beyond the status quo towards alternative models of access and ownership of the natural world." Henry Snowball looks at the wider questions raised by the Bathurst Estate's act of shutting public access behind a ticket booth.

Alex Massie debunks the mythology that has built up around George Orwell's stay on Jura, the Hebridean island where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"With the exception of Potter’s 1986 masterpiece The Singing Detective - which is now generally available on BBC iPlayer - the writer’s output is scattered to the winds of out-of-print and costly DVD editions or lo-fi stints on YouTube." Fergal Kinney on what remains of Dennis Potter.

Hadley Mears discovers the fascinating and varied life of Maria Rasputin, the daughter of Russia's greatest love machine.