"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold" - W.B. Yeats.
"We're doomed !" - Private Frazer.
"Like scrolling through a decade's worth of Daily Mail editorials in 20 minutes" - TheLoonyFromCatford
Showing posts with label the way we were. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the way we were. Show all posts
Charming though the Unthanks version is, I always feel that Gary and Vera Aspey get closer to the heart of this moving Frank Higgins song. From their 1974 LP Seeing Double, which I believe is no longer available - correct me if I'm wrong.
As the reproletarianisation of Britain continues, and the life-pattern of our children starts to move towards that of their great-grandparents (a low wage, rent all your life, a few years of retirement on a small pension before death - with the added tweak that they'll be surrounded by strangers who owe them no loyalty or solidarity), they'll be learning the lessons all over again - the lessons their great grandparents knew but their parents forgot.
The song was inspired by 17 year old Patience Kershaw's testimony to Lord Ashley's Mines Commission of 1842. The Mines Act of 1842 that resulted prohibited the employment in the mines of all women and of boys under thirteen. It's good of you to ask me, Sir, to tell you how I spend the day It's in a coal black tunnel, Sir, I hurry corves to earn my pay. The corves are full of coal, kind Sir, I push them with my hands and head. It isn't lady-like, but Sir, you've got to earn your daily bread. I push them with my hands and head, and so my hair gets worn away. You see this baldy patch I've got, it shames me like I just can't say. A lady's hands are lily white, but mine are full of cuts and segs. And since I'm pushing all the day, I've great big muscles on my legs. I try to be respectable, but Sir, the shame, God save my soul. I work with naked, sweating men, who curse and swear and hew the coal. The sights, the sounds, the smells, kind Sir, not even God could sense my shame. I say my prayers, but what's the use? Tomorrow will be just the same. Now, sometimes, Sir, I don't feel well, my stomach's sick, my head it aches. I've got to hurry best I can. My knees feel weak, my back near breaks And then I'm slow, and then I'm scared these naked men will batter me. They can't be blamed, for if I'm slow, their families will starve, you see. All the boys, they laugh at me, and Sir, the mirror tells me why. Pale and dirty can't look nice. It doesn't matter how I try. Great big muscles on my legs, a baldy patch upon my head. A lady, Sir? Oh, no, not me. I should have been a boy instead. I praise your good intentions, Sir, I love your kind and gentle heart But now it's 1842, and you and I, we're miles apart. A hundred years and more will pass before we're standing side by side But please accept my grateful thanks. God bless you Sir, at least you tried.
"Over the centuries, laissez-faire argumentation for low wages has shifted from insisting upon the iron necessity of child labor to the wonderfulness of open borders. But the combination of monetary interest driving intellectual arguments remains very similar." - Steve Sailer.
It should really be in Leeds, but anywhere is good news. London Guildhall from Monday :
Over the last forty years, Atkinson Grimshaw's beautiful and evocative paintings of moonlit suburban lanes, gas lit city streets and docksides have emerged as some of the most popular works of the Victorian age. This touring exhibition is the first major show of Grimshaw's work for over thirty years. It includes more than 60 paintings from his earliest Pre-Raphaelite inspired landscapes to the Impressionist style seascapes of his last years. The show also includes drawings, manuscripts and photographs on loan from public and private collections and descendants of the artist.
The Very Rev Hunter Farquharson, who breeds and shows birds as a hobby, returned to his cottage to find his prize-winning goose Beatrice dead, and a white-tailed sea eagle perched on a fence post nearby. The giant raptor, with a wingspan of up to 8ft, was one of 16 released recently in the east of Scotland as part of a controversial reintroduction programme.
Mr Farquharson, Provost of St Ninian’s Cathedral in Perth, said he was "horrified" to find the goose, worth about £300, "ripped to shreds". He went inside to phone the RSPB, a partner in the reintroduction project, but then heard a "terrible noise" as the eagle chased his champion gander Bertie. When he tried to intervene the raptor jumped on his back, tearing his shirt, leaving a 4in wound below his shoulder and cutting his head.
My kids were up on the west coast of Scotland last week and saw a couple of sea eagles. Reminds me of this - T.O. Beachcroft's The Erne From The Coast - a rite-of-passage favourite of school short story anthologies "in elder days before the Fall".
When they saw Harry come towards them they waited, unmoving. They could hardly see at first who or what it was. Harry came up and dropped the bird at his father's feet. His coat was gone. His shirt hung in bloodstained rags about him; one arm was caked in blood; his right eyebrow hung in a loose flap, with the blood still oozing stickily down his cheek.
“Good God!” said Thorburn, catching him by the arm as he reeled.
He led the boy into the kitchen. There they gave him a glass of brandy and sponged him with warm water. There was a deep long wound in his left forearm. His chest was crisscrossed with cuts. The flesh was torn away from his neck where the talons had sunk in. The doctor came. Harry's wounds began to hurt like fire, but he talked excitedly. He was happier than he had ever been in his life. Everybody on the farm came in to see him and to see the eagle's body.
All day his father hung about him, looking into the kitchen every half hour. He said very little, but asked Harry several times how he felt. “Are you aw reet?” he kept saying. Once he took a cup of tea from his wife and carried it across the kitchen in order to give it to Harry with his own hands.
Later in the day old Michael came back, and Harry told him the whole story. Michael turned the bird over. He said it was an erne, a white-tailed sea eagle from the coast.
When Richard Mannington Bowes was born in 1943, the ethnic minority population of Britain was a few thousand people.
When he was eight years old, in 1951, Churchill's cabinet debated immigration into the UK.
David Maxwell-Fyfe, the home secretary, reported that the total of "coloured people" in Britain had risen from 7,000 before the second world war to 40,000 at the time of writing, with 3,666 of those unemployed, and 1,870 on national assistance, or benefits.
It's almost impossible for anyone growing up today to imagine what a peaceful and orderly (and staid) place post-war Britain was. The American anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1955 "Exploring English Character", compared the post-war English with their early Victorian forebears of 120 years previously* :
"One of the most lawless populations in the world has turned into one of the most law-abiding; ...a fiercely and ruthlessly acquisitive society has turned into a mildly distributive society; general corruption in government has been replaced by an extraordinarily high level of honesty... in public life today the English are certainly among the most peaceful, gentle, courteous and orderly populations that the civilized world has ever seen. ... you hardly ever see a fight in a bar (a not uncommon spectacle in most of the rest of Europe or in the U.S.A.)... football crowds are as orderly as church meetings.."
If you had told Mr Mannington-Bowes' parents that, sixty years later, their child would be beaten to death, in Ealing, by a mob of strangers bent on looting and arson, they would have thought you were mad.
This was England. The law was on the side of the law-abiding, and people were killed in riots in far-away countries, not here.
UPDATE - I would be interested to see a report of his trial and conviction, and who the magistrate was. I trust it wasn't this one. I don't want to come over all Polly Toynbee, and the people who beat him to death ARE savages, but the wholesale criminality (mixed with plenty of assaults just for the fun of it) is a product of an assault on the principles of criminal justice that's been going on for fifty years. Fifty years of mass immigration may arguably have been a necessary condition for his murder, but certainly not a sufficient one - and as I've said many a time and oft, there are plenty of native youth who'll beat a man to death for being a good citizen.
As I argued here and here, something in the water of post-Cultural Revolution UK seems to turn the children and grandchildren of previously law-abiding people into bad boys and girls. What could it be ? This Polly Toynbee column - or a read of the Magistrate's blog - may hold an answer.
* to be fair, the peacefulness of the English puzzled him greatly, John Bull being traditionally a pugnacious sort of chap, always ready to scrap when offended by a foreigner of any description.
a) Kate Middleton is very English. Not a Welshman or Irishman to be seen, one Scottish great-great-grandfather. And you have to go back 10 generations to find Gaston Martineau, a surgeon who fled France in 1685 (presumably a Protestant threatened by the Edict of Fontainebleau), and his wife Marie Pierre. The Goldsmith connections don't appear to be Jewish (5 generations married in church, apparently) - in the 1700s they're Kentish carpenters.
b) social mobility
The background of each of Kate Middleton's great-great-grandparents, as far as is currently known, can be summarized as follows:
Middleton - Tradesmen in Yorkshire rising to professionals (attorneys)
Asquith - Tradesmen in Yorkshire
Lupton - Background of his grandparents:
Lupton - Tradesmen in Leeds
Darnton - Tradesmen in Leeds
Greenhow - Professionals from Yorkshire
Martineau - Clergymen and professionals from Norfolk and Northumberland
Davis - Clergymen and professionals from Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and elsewhere in western England
Glassborow - Tradesmen from Surrey
Elliott - Tradesmen from Surrey
Robison - Clerks from Scotland
Gee - "Gentlemen" descending to tradesmen
Goldsmith - Labourers from Kent and Hertfordshire
Dorsett - Labourers in London
Chandler - Labourers from Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, rising to tradesmen
White - Tradesmen from Somersetshire and Buckinghamshire
Harrison - Miners in Northumberland and Durham
Hill - Mariners in Durham, later tradesmen
Temple - Miners in Yorkshire and Norfolk
Myers - Agricultural labourers in Yorkshire
Around 50% middling men and women (the Luptons were a well-known Leeds family - there's a university hall of residence named after one of them), 50% working people. One jailbird, Edward Glassborough, an insurance company messenger - wonder what he was in for ?
c) the seeming total absence of bastardy. Everyone has two parents, and they are married to each other. So much for the historical revisionists.
d) I see one of the Harrison miners married a Jane Liddle. Hopefully there's a Rod Liddle link. What has apparently been established are links to Guy Ritchie, to her husband Prince William, and to various other aristocrats*. The native population of these islands being a partially inbred extended family**, there are bound to be links. Go back 10 generations and you have 2 to the power 10 i.e. 1024 ancestors, which takes you back to the 1600s. Go back another 10 generations, to the 1300s, and you have over a million forebears. There are around 50 million native Brits in the UK, each with getting on for a million forebears in the 1300s - but there were less than 10 million Brits around in the fourteenth century. Obviously we*** have an awful lot of ancestry in common.
* as you go back and records are scarcer, those for whom records ARE available tend to be the great and the good, so a tree gets biased towards higher classes as you go back.
** the inbreeding being generally inside the distinct populations of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, at least until the greater mobility of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
*** those who are not, like myself, the son of an immigrant father. That's most of the native Brits.
Japan has low levels of legal immigration and almost non-existent levels of illegal immigration, despite being, like Britain, a northerly, rainy trading island with global connections and excellent international transport links. It's a lot closer to a large number of poor people than the UK is, too. I bet there are more illegal Chinese immigrants in the UK than just over the water in Japan.
There's an interesting post on Japanese culture by Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker - an answer to Ed West's question "why is there no looting in Japan?" (about 3,400 comments and still rising - must be some sort of record). The author, who has lived in Japan, is not writing a piece about immigration, but this passage struck me :
"There is little urban anonymity. When I first lived in Japan on a work visa and had my own apartment in a residential neighborhood of Tokyo, in 1971, I was paid a friendly visit by a local policeman. It was a completely routine matter: police are required to keep track of every resident of their beats, and they want to know the basics, such as your work, your age, and your living circumstances. In my circumstances, immigration papers were also of concern, but for Japanese, it would be the koseki, a mandatory official family record kept on a household basis, reporting births, acknowledgements of paternity, adoptions, disruptions of adoptions, deaths, marriages and divorces. Every Japanese is not just an individual, he or she is officially is a member of a household (ie), and the state keeps track."
First of all, imagine the police in London, Bradford or Birmingham doing this ? I can't, either. They'd need backup.
Secondly, imagine keeping this kind of household record for the UK underclass, with the serial partners and fathers. Imagine the Copper or Inspector Gadget doing the interview and getting the whole tale of who did what to whom.
Not that I want to live in a society like that, mind. But the beauty of antediluvian Britain was that we didn't need the officer's clipboard to police ourselves. But "the fewer internal controls, the more external control there will be". Britain's internal, unspoken controls aren't what they were.
"Following the gathering of my information, the policeman no doubt returned to his local substation (koban), which are found every few blocks in urban areas, to record the information for his colleagues. To an American it seemed quite extraordinary, a violation of privacy. But in Japan a lack of anonymity is the norm.
Soon after the beat cop's visit to me, local merchants began nodding to me as I walked to and from the train station, as if they knew me and acknowledged me. I was fairly certain the word had gone out via omawari san (literally, the honorable gentleman who walks around, a polite colloquial euphemism for the police) that I was a Japanese-speaking American in Japan on legitimate, respectable grounds. For a year or so, I was a member of the community."
Remember, this is a huge capital city, a financial and industrial hub, not a small town. Another anecdote :
"... most contemporary Japanese have internalized a deep respect for private property, that is manifested in a ritual of modern life for children, one which we might do well to emulate. When a child finds a small item belonging to another person, even a one yen coin, a parent takes the child to the local koban and reports lost property. As chronicled by T.R. Reid in his wonderful book about living in Tokyo, Confucius Lives Next Door, the police do not resent this as a waste of time but rather see it as part of moral education, solemnly filling out the appropriate forms, thanking the child and telling him or her if the owner does not appear to claim the item, it will revert to the finder after a certain period of time."
Again, you could imagine that in the low-crime Golden Age That Never Was. But now ? The police would never have the time and would probably think you were taking the mick.
We had, once, the happy state where internal social controls (conscience, shame, self-esteem - 'we just don't do that') were so strong that external controls were not terribly visible or terribly intrusive. Japan make assurance doubly sure with strong internal AND external controls.
"Perhaps more successfully than any other people of the world, the Japanese have evolved a social system capable of ensuring order and good behaviour."
Left, the monstrous East Stand, an Eighties addition to a previously open terrace which ruined the view of the pitch from the landings of Swansea Prison, seen in background. Front, a gaping void in the North Bank, the large terrace which could hold 10,000-plus fans in pre-Taylor Report days.
They're finally demolishing the Vetch Field, former home of Swansea Town, which has been standing empty for six years. The turf trodden by Ivor and Len Allchurch, John and Mel Charles, Terry Medwin, Cliff Jones (not to mention Dave Gwyther and Tony Millington), will become a 'landscaped area'.
There's something awfully sad about an abandoned football ground. I felt the same about Park Avenue, which for years remained empty in Bradford 7, the posts gone and the grass growing a yard high.
"Where now are the coaches and people ? where is the rattle a'rattling? Where are the shirts and the scarves and the two sides battling? Where is the roar and the chant, and the toilet roll throwing? Where is the hand round the pint, and the cigarette glowing?"
The sporting landscape of a Swansea childhood is vanishing - at neighbouring St Helen's, the disappearance of the Mound Stand destroyed one of cricket's great pleasures - the ability to watch the sea and the shipping between deliveries. Then the old East Stand, recipient of a couple of Gary Sobers' six sixes, was demolished and replaced by what looks like an aluminium bus shelter. The stand overhung the Mumbles Road and was supported by pillars on the pavement, giving a cloister effect and shelter from rain. During the early Sixties wave of Welsh nationalism, the letters F R E E W A L E S ! were painted on the pillars. Within weeks some wag had painted out the W, and the pillars advertised free ales until demolition.
"A Labour party member most of his life, and a compassionate socialist, he nonetheless became the leading critic of the British Left’s social liberalism which, he came to believe, was destroying society and in particular working-class life."
Peacefully, at home, on November 13, aged 81 years, Norman, beloved husband of Audrey, a loving father of Julia and John, father-in-law of Phil, devoted grandad of Robert, Sarah and Max. A short service at Sunderland Crematorium at 11.30am will be followed by a service at St Andrew's Church, Roker, at 12.30pm, to which all friends and family are warmly invited. Friday November 26.
In the late 1940s, a group of sociology students who would go on to shape and cement the discipline in Britain started their studies at the London School of Economics. Their number included AH ("Chelly") Halsey, Joe and Olive Banks, Michael Banton, Basil Bernstein, Percy Cohen, David Lockwood and Norman Dennis.
Unlike most members of this sociological establishment, Dennis, who has died aged 81, chose not to seek academic preferment (though chairs were certainly offered) but rather to focus his energies on community life, most notably in his home town of Sunderland. This preference became apparent in 1956 with his first major publication, Coal Is Our Life, the classic community study of "Ashton" (in fact Featherstone in West Yorkshire). Although this study tends to be overshadowed in popular opinion by the well-known Bethnal Green studies of the 1950s, it contains a much harder and less anecdotal edge, especially in analysing the ways in which economic forces structure social relations.
Dennis next turned his attention to the domains of housing and town planning. By then lecturing at the University of Newcastle and back in Sunderland, he was living in Millfield, an area which Sunderland council had selected for slum clearance against the wishes of most of the resident population. In his 1970 publication, People and Planning: the Sociology of Housing in Sunderland, he starkly exposed the social and technical weaknesses of the slum clearance programmes, the insensitivity of their implementation and the shallow nature of resident "participation". In undertaking this study, he achieved a rare degree of empathy with the people of Millfield. He became the secretary of their residents' association. and was in the vanguard of what would now be termed "communitarianism".
In 1972 his sense of empathy led to a further landmark publication. Public Participation and Planners' Blight was an excoriating analysis of the unwillingness of the bureaucratic-professional machine to listen to residents, and the failure of local politicians to challenge the narrative presented by their officials.
The previous year, he had been elected as Labour councillor for the Millfield ward, and I joined him as a fellow councillor for the same ward. It would be fair to say that his relatively short time as an elected member perplexed both the officials of Sunderland council and many of his political colleagues. However, the upshot was that many of the homes he defended from the slum clearance programme are still standing today as a testament to his description of them as "little palaces".
Some academics balked at the idea that a sociologist could be so intimately involved with his subject matter, thereby running the risk of "bias", but Dennis was never one for relativism – for him the possibility of an objective search for truth was not to be easily laid aside. It was a stance that led him into a final phase of work that (again) perplexed many – his association with the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Institute for the Study of Civil Society.
Under this rubric he wrote a series of highly influential studies that railed against what he saw as the decay of the moral fabric of society. These included Families Without Fatherhood (1992 - pdf), Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family (1993 - pdf), The Invention of Permanent Poverty (1997), The Failure of Britain's Police (2003 - pdf) and Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics (2000 - pdf). His call for a return to the moral world of the "respectable working class" of his childhood struck a chord with many, and he found himself transformed from an icon of the activist left to the academic darling of the right. At the same time, he remained an active member of the Labour party in Sunderland. The explanation for all of this lay in his commitment to "ethical socialism" – a philosophy he developed in English Ethical Socialism (1988), which he co-authored with Halsey. Central to this position is the doctrine of personal responsibility, even under unfavourable circumstances, for it is this multiplicity of personal decisions that will form history. In particular he saw reproductive and family decisions as crucial to human destiny, and (in Families Without Fatherhood) highlighted the adverse consequences of raising children without a father. In line with his opposition to postmodernism, Dennis felt no qualms in stating the moral truth as he saw it.
Dennis was born in Sunderland, the son of a tram driver. He was educated at Green Terrace elementary school and Bede collegiate school, Sunderland. After graduating with a first from the LSE he worked at the universities of Bristol, Leeds and Birmingham, as well as spending time at Palo Alto, California, as a Rockefeller fellow. His heart, however, lay in Sunderland and he spent almost 40 years as a lecturer (and subsequently reader) in social studies at the nearby University of Newcastle.
A physically active man, and lifelong teetotaller, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia last July, though he remained active and alert until recently. Our families enjoyed a convivial meal in a Sunderland restaurant only weeks before his death, where he was in typically rumbustious form. He is survived by his wife, Audrey, and their two children, John and Julia.
• Norman Dennis, sociologist, born 16 August 1929; died 13 November 2010
Norman wrote: "I went to the LSE instead of Corpus Christi, Oxford, partly because of [Harold] Laski, Miliband's mentor, but mainly because of RH Tawney" and he described how he had continued to advocate Tawney's "fellowship based on family" socialism.
But this, wrote Norman – "along with its closely related chapel and temperance socialism and the philosophies of the benign, enabling state in which co-operation and fellowship are the best bases for social organisation, not capitalist competition" – was "one of the great lost causes of our age. Who now has any memory that such ideas actually dominated Labour Party thinking, until they were all dumped into memory's hole of oblivion at the time of the countercultural revolution? I really ought to be on a national register of cultural monuments, as one of the sole surviving representatives of this point of view."
For some reason there's nothing about his death on the Civitas website, despite the four of his books which are available there (links in the obit above). I'm very surprised at them - that's quite shameful.
His long essay "Defame Fathers, Create Crime?" is here.
Christian Institute tribute page - including an mp3 of 'Families without fatherhood'
With his passing, the ranks of radical, anti-our-new-Establishment sociologists are thin indeed. I can only think of Peter Saunders as keeping the flag flying.
A fascinating history of the Jews in Wales, from a 1975 edition of the Jewish Chronicle. Interesting for the light it shines not only on Jewish but on Welsh culture as was :
"The brooding hills and green valleys of South Wales are evocative of so many things. To the Jewish traveller they speak of a life's story exceedingly strange and affecting. He sees an alien figure bent low under his outsize pack, walking up hill and down dale for mile after lonely mile. At the mining village tucked away beneath a dark hill, children greet him with: "The packman has come!" He knocks on doors, his only English words, "anything wanting?" (Welsh is a double-sealed book.)
Come Friday, he makes for home and family, Sabbath in synagogue and the Chevra Shass, the talmudic study circle. He is a learned Jew, among the few precious possessions he has brought from in der heim is his shass, his well-fingered volumes of the Talmud, and a desire to 'learn' more. He has brought his determination to keep 'the Law' whatever the difficulties. And so if he was caught on his way by the advent of the Sabbath, he would leave his pack and the small pile of money he had earned on the table of a friendly miner's cottage, and come back for his treasure on Sunday knowing it would all be there untouched."
A little like the story of the Mohammeds of Stornoway, that - their patriarch walked the hills of 50s Lewis with a suitcase. But the story in Wales is of communities growing with the boom years, then decline and in many places disappearance as economic opportunity shrank and (as with the Mohammeds) the younger generation moved away.
Among the other gems are the shortage of marriageable youth in Swansea, Jewish miners, the first Welsh-born Jew (Levi Michael, 1754, in Haverfordwest of all places), the sad decline of the Port Talbot synagogue (derelict in 1975, now built over) the Welsh-speaker who tells the author, only half in jest: "To be a real Welshman, you must be chapel", and the fact (new to me) that Churchill sent troops to Tredegar in 1911 after anti-Jewish riots.
Being a 1975 piece, there is no mention of the most famous Welsh Jew of all, a man who saved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, from burglary, assault and crime of all sorts by his decision, as 1995 Home Secretary, to start locking up criminals- the Blessed Michael Howard.
It's that time of year, when Laban's musical tastes turn a trifle sombre.
You do have to wonder about the amount of misogyny in the mediaeval 'Death And The Maiden' theme. Hans Baldung spares us none of the misery of the young girl being shown her early grave. 'Hier must du hyn' (Here you must go) is the caption.
While there are many similar paintings, I can't think of a single one where a fine young man is the victim, although to be fair the proud and rich of both sexes are targets in the Dance of Death paintings and the poetry of death.
The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against Fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre and Crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crookèd scythe and spade.
This Robin Williamson song is in the tradition of Baldung and Walter Scott's Proud Maisie:
"I'll give you gold and jewels rare And all my wealth in store All pleasures fair, If I may live but a few short years more"
"Oh lady, lay your jewels aside, No more to glory in your pride"
A reminder that giving to the poor and needy is a Christian obligation, to be flouted at one's peril.
"The poem was first collected by John Aubrey in 1686, who also recorded that it was being sung in 1616, but it is believed to be much older."
This ay neet, this ay neet Every neet and all Fire and fleet and candle leet, And Christ receive thy soul
If thou from here away does pass To whinny moor thou com'st at last
If thou gav'st ever hosen and shoon Sit thee down and put them on.
But if hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane The winds will prick thee to the bare bane.
If thou from there away does pass To purgatory fire thou com'st at last.
If ever thou gavest meat or drink The fire shall never make thee shrink.
But if meat or drink thou gavest nane The fire will burn thee to thy bare bane.
I hope this tune doesn't give too much offence to His Holiness - but there's no doubt that the world needs more Japanese people playing and listening to seventeenth-century British dance music - in the appropriate costume. Those dresses are lovely.
They don't make Liberal MPs like that any more - working class, ran a company - not only that, but a company that made things, anti-abortion, pro-capital punishment. Even in the 70s he was a rarity in a party becoming dominated by career politicians.
"Spurred on by the chip on his very large shoulder, he saw it as his duty to fight for the rights of the common man. He was deeply proud of his modest Lancashire origins, and never let anyone forget it.
A shade puritanical, he had far more affinity with the lower middle class than with a Liberal establishment — the Bonham Carters, Thorpes and Grimonds — which he despised. He was the only Liberal to oppose the abolition of capital punishment and abortion law reform (“We are the backstreet abortionists for the rest of Europe,” he declared)."
A feminist classic of Edwardian times, recorded in 1932 by the Spanish mezzo-soprano Conchita Supervia.
I once walked with her by the Arno, in Florence, where navvies engaged in road work put down their picks and stared in frank admiration as she passed. Supervia, without even a glance in their direction, sensed their admiration and visibly preened herself.
"You surely don’t enjoy men looking at you like that?" I asked.
"I do," she replied, amused at such a very Anglo-Saxon question. "I don’t find it unpleasant to think that they are all saying to themselves, “If I was a rich man, that’s what I’d want.”"
If you want to learn a lesson with the fan, I'm quite prepared to teach you all I can So ladies, every one, pray observe how it is done, It's a simple little lesson with the fan.
If you chance to be invited to a ball, And meet someone that you don't expect at all, And you want him close beside you, While a dozen friends divide you, Well of course, it's most unladylike to call,
So you look at him a minute - nothing more And you cast your eyes demurely on the floor, And you wave your fan just so, Well, towards you, don't you know, It's a delicate suggestion - nothing more ...
When you see him coming to you, simple you, Oh be very, very careful what you do With your fan just kindly play, And look down as if to say It's a matter of indifference to you,
Then you flutter and you fidget with it so, And you hide your little nose behind it so, And when he begins to speak You just lay it on your cheek, In that fascinating manner that you know,
And when he tells the old tale o'er and o'er, And vows that he will love you evermore, Gather up your little fan And secure him while you can, It's a delicate suggestion - nothing more ...
“He was the eternally correct and reserved Air Force pilot. He didn’t drink. He exercised like a college athlete in training. He was religious. He was an usher in the Roman Catholic chapel of the base and never, but never, missed Mass. He was slender, black-haired, handsome, intelligent — even cultivated, if the truth were known. And he was terribly serious. He was not a beer-call fighter jock.” - Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff.
Bob White, the 5th American in space but the first in the world to get up there in a winged craft - and more importantly, to fly it back down through the atmosphere and land on a runway, has died aged 85. He was also the first pilot to exceed Mach 4, Mach 5 and Mach 6.
Robert Michael White was born in New York City on July 6, 1924, and entered military service in 1942. He flew more than 50 fighter missions during World War II before he was shot down over Germany in February 1945 and taken prisoner.
After leaving military service in December 1945, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from New York University. Re-called during the Korean War, he served with a fighter squadron based in Japan, and in the mid-1950s he was assigned to Edwards.
Returning to combat in the Vietnam War, he flew 70 missions over North Vietnam and received the Air Force Cross, the service’s highest award for valor after the Medal of Honor, for leading an August 1967 attack on an important railway and highway bridge in the Hanoi area. He retired from military service in 1981 as a major general.
As Allavie rolls the B-52 onto the heading of 222 degrees, at the launch speed of 0.82 Mach, I start the first-stage ignition. Think of this as a pilot light on a gas stove; there is no real power yet because it’s "idling." Joe Walker calls the countdown: "Four…three…two…one…LAUNCH!"
I flick the "Drop" toggle switch. The X-15 falls away and I shove the throttle forward. The acceleration is tremendous, and as I pitch up in a 40-degree climb, the G-forces build. X-15 pilot Bill Dana was fond of saying that because of the 4 Gs against the chest endured during powered flight, the X-15 is the only aircraft in which he was glad when the engine quit.
The plan called for an 80-second burn to reach 282,000 feet and Mach 5.15. But this engine performed very well, and by topping off the LOX, I was able to burn the engine for an extra two seconds, which allowed me to accelerate to Mach 5.45 and peak at 314,750 feet, becoming the first person to fly an aircraft above 300,000 feet and also the first pilot to fly a winged vehicle into space.
The X-15 now starts to decelerate... at this (airless - LT) altitude my standard controls are ineffective, so the aircraft is now using jets of hydrogen peroxide to control yaw, pitch, and roll, keeping the nose on the proper heading.
When re-entry begins, the "eyeballs out" negative G forces start to build. I place my helmet against the reverse headrest, which allows my helmet to settle forward slightly and stay in place as the aircraft decelerates and the pressures on my body increase. Without this headrest, the negative G forces would push my head so far forward I could lose sight of the control panel.
The X-15 soon encounters enough atmosphere to regain the use of the aerodynamic control surfaces. Coming out almost directly over Edwards Air Force Base, we are still at Mach 3-plus and around 75,000 feet, much faster and higher than previous X-15 flights. Overflying the landing site, I make one circle and roll out on heading, having lost enough altitude to be right on target for the lakebed runway. The Gs are so great that after the flight I find a huge patch of burst capillaries all over my right shoulder and chest .
Another British company bites the dust. Now all our chocolate will have processed cheese in it.
It's Longbridge (followed by Longbridge II, no doubt) all over again. The A38 south from Brum looks set to become an industrial wasteland to compare with the north of the city, where the remains of the Ansells brewery and the HP factory are long gone, and only the redeveloped Fort Dunlop remains as a reminder of past glory. The east has been mostly deindustrialised (and the natives displaced) as far out as Solihull and the Land Rover plant - only in the west do you still find people making things.
A very long time ago my primary school class sat in the dining room to watch "The Story Of Bournville" - chocolate from Africa to Brum. Now (I might have been 6 or 7) I knew the full story of the Cadbury trucks and tankers we passed on the Bromsgrove to Birmingham line, in their sidings opposite 'The Factory In A Garden'.
The open spaces and gardens around the factory are used by staff during lunch breaks. There are sports grounds. Men play football. There is a swimming bath for the women and an open-air pool for the men. Scenes in Bourneville village, the Day Continuation School, Selley Manor and Minwirth Greaves, the Friends Meeting House, the Church, the Almshouses and the school. Young employees are seen at summer camp under canvas, washing-up, playing cricket, on an excursion in a boat, sea-bathing and playing music in the evening. The nightwatchman says "It's pretty wonderful, isn't it?"
Flickr photoset here. Wonderful description of a 1920 factory visit here :
Kraft said all the nice things about investment and the brand when it took over Terry's of York. Now the York factory is empty and the chocolate oranges are made in Poland.
Already the first talk of redundancies is coming from the company. I guess it was nice while it lasted.
The rioting began after Thursday's shooting, in which two men - one from Nigeria, the other from Togo - were lightly injured. The foreigners angrily blamed that shooting on racism, and groups of protesters stoned police, attacked residents and smashed shop windows and cars. Friday, angry migrants, mostly from African nations, some armed with metal bars or wooden sticks, scuffled with police and residents in the streets of Rosarno. Other residents were holed up in their homes, state radio reported, and schools and shops were shuttered.
Thousands of Coptic Christians clashed with police in southern Egypt on Thursday during a funeral procession for seven people shot dead as they left a Christmas service hours earlier. The protesters pelted cars with stones and set fire to ambulances in the town of Nag Hamadi, 40 miles from the ancient ruins of Luxor. The riots were sparked by a drive-by shooting. Three men sprayed automatic gunfire into a crowd leaving a midnight Mass to mark the Coptic Christmas.
There have been more attacks on churches in Malaysia, in a growing dispute over the use of the word Allah by non-Muslims. The police say petrol bombs were thrown at a church and a convent school in the northern state of Perak, and at a church on the island of Sarawak. Another church in the south of the country was daubed with black paint. The attacks come days after four churches near the capital, Kuala Lumpur, were hit by petrol bombs. Religious tensions in Malaysia have increased since a court ruled last month that a Roman Catholic newspaper could use the word Allah in its Malay-language edition to describe the Christian God.
On the banks of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, the old cotton mill stands as a gigantic ghost-like relic of England’s industrial past. It seems unthinkable that this immense sprawl, a key source of employment for a century and a half, should have been idle for three years.
But an ambitious project to give the cluster of buildings a new lease of life, converting them into a boarding school for up to 5,000 Muslim girls, has bitterly divided the local community.
The eager support of parents of prospective pupils is rivalled by a deep hostility that has been shown in responses ranging from anxious questions in parliament to extreme right-wing allegations of plots to “Islamify” Britain.
Another extreme right-winger, former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, adds fuel to the flames of hatred :
We have had to wait decades for this moment, but it has finally happened. A leading British clergyman has said something sensible about immigration.
Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, this week signed a declaration by the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration calling for an urgent tightening of borders to stop the British population reaching 70 million by 2029. He also gave an interview yesterday in which he called for a tougher Church. "We Christians are very often so soft that we allow other people to walk over us, and we are not as tough in what we want, in expressing our beliefs, because we do not want to upset other people," he said.
Adn two damn stupid articles in the New Statesman, which moderates its comments but can't afford to have anyone doing it over the weekend.
Labour, like the wider social-democratic tradition, has been unable to build a counterculture that can offer an alternative ethics of living and working. As a result, it has colluded in distinguishing morally between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor.
It has ? You could have fooled me, mate.
History has shown us that economic crises generate middle-class panics about a "dangerous" underclass and its racial and sexual transgressions. In the 1980s, the new right embarked on a project to theorise an underclass in Britain. It drew on the work of the American political scientist Charles Murray, whose research had revived eugenicist debates about race and intelligence. Murray was invited to Britain by the Sunday Times in 1989 and his ideas were taken up by Digby Anderson's Social Affairs Unit. The American academic Lawrence Mead was also influential in reviving the belief that poverty was about behaviour and dependency, rather than economics and justice. The problem was not environment, but individual failing. The work of the new right laid the foundations for New Labour's welfare reforms.
The government calculated that it could triangulate the Conservatives and subject the underclass to punitive measures without alienating Labour's core supporters. Its refrain of "hard-working families" attempted to codify this division. But the so-called underclass is not a class apart as the new right and the social investigators of the 19th century tried to prove. It is an imagined body of people - chavs, hoodies, junkies - projected on to single mothers, the sick and parts of the working class impoverished by the impact of recession and unemployment.
Against stupidity the gods themselves battle in vain, what ?
And something even more weird by one Francis Beckett. Who he, you may ask ? Oh. Not an encouraging upbringing for anyone, really. Poor little rich kid.
His basic thesis - that the baby-boomer generation messed up big time - is one that few would dispute. Even the Magistrate is on board. Magistrate :
I am one of the lucky-sod generation, born just after the war. I have had to cope with economic ups-and-downs, but I went to a grammar school, thanks to the 1944 Education Act, and thence to a university that was flush with funds, and at which I received £360 per annum grant. There were no tuition fees to pay, and a handsome room with full board cost me £6 per week. In the student bar beer was (in new-fangled money) 9p per pint.
Beckett :
The idea that one might have to pay for education, at any level, seemed to us primitive and backward-looking. In the Thirties, my grandmother used to save pennies in a tin in her kitchen, fearfully guarding against the day when one of her children might require medical attention. In the week that the National Health Service was inaugurated in 1948, GPs' surgeries were overwhelmed with patients whose painful and often life-threatening conditions had never been treated or even shown to a doctor. When we baby boomers were ill, we expected, as a right, the best treatment available. Paying for it never occurred to us.
There was full employment, and the slums were torn down and replaced with council housing, built to Aneurin Bevan's high standard. And what did we do with this extraordinary inheritance that had eluded our ancestors, and that an earlier generation had worked and fought to give us?
We trashed it.
It's in the 'why did we trash it' bit that he seems to lose touch with reality. Indeed I can't actually understand what, if anything, he's trying to say. We did indeed 'use up' the manifold blessings showered upon us - but how, exactly ? He almost seems to be suggesting that if only the Sixties had gone on for ever ...
Religion, royalty, government: nothing was sacrosanct in the Sixties, and everything could be questioned. But we used up the time when nothing was sacred. The age of deference seemed to be over, yet the baby boomers, who now run things, have seen how useful deference in for the governing class and are bringing it back as fast as they can.
How about - 'we trashed the existing culture and didn't replace it' - save with the dreadful secular liberal nostrums with which our rulers attempt to put back the ruins of the house, so carefully built - no, not so much built as grown organically on the bedrock of patriotism and Christianity, over generations, so easily destroyed in one.
When I was a wee lad, we used to eat tinned 'tunny fish', caught in the North Sea. Tasted great.
Then they were fished out, and we ate tinned 'tuna' instead, caught not in the North sea but more exotic waters. Came in varieties like 'skipjack', 'yellowfin' and 'bonito'. Not as nice as tunny, we thought, but we got accustomed to the new stuff, and now I can't remember what tunny tastes like - must be 45 years since I ate any.
Any fule kno that the world's first passenger railway, the Mumbles train, would have been 200 years old this year. It was scrapped in 1960 by the local council, all of whose members are now being toasted here. Ever since I can remember, Swansea councils have been corrupt, incompetent or both - and according to this blog the tradition lives on.
I'm just old enough to have ridden the beastie. The terminus was at the back end of the long-gone Victoria Station, in what used to be a fascinating hinterland between station and docks. Railway lines ran in the roads between the warehouses and docksides - the Swansea of Kingsley Amis' novel 'That Uncertain Feeling'. Alas all gone, replaced by dual carriageway, retail sheds and a sanitised marina.
The journey - along the sea front past the prison, the Vetch, the Slip (with its station, floral gardens, bridge and beach funfair), Patti Pavilion and St Helens, to Blackpill (where the accompanying main railway line turned off towards Gowerton), Oystermouth and the Pier - is still pleasant now, as a walk or bike ride on the path where the line ran. But it doesn't compare with a pasteboard ticket, a box of Paynes Poppets from the machine at the terminus, and a gloriously rackety journey. In winter the ride could be scary. The train always rocked a bit, but in a gale it would move disconcertingly. Upstairs, where the motion was accentuated, you'd wonder if it was about to fall over into the sea. Downstairs, with a stormy high tide the spray of breaking waves would slap against the windows - if you left them open you could get wet. We loved it.
I'm pleased to see that someone has put this excellent video tribute, showing then-and-now video of the line, onto Youtube. The first part's soundtrack is Spencer Davis' (of this lot fame) lament 'The Mumbles Train', from his latest 'So Far' release. A Swansea boy (didn't his mum work in the Lewis Lewis department store ?), Spencer is still playing .
At 4:58 you can see children retrieving their flattened pennies from the line after the train has passed.
I said that in a storm at high tide you could get wet unless you shut the downstairs windows. This recent video, taken on a stormy day near the end of what was the line, shows that you'd sometimes need to shut the upstairs ones too. The line ran right alongside the water. You can see why a ride on a stormy night was an adventure.
I trust Sarah and Liz will enjoy the video, if they've not seen it before. More stills of the Blitz and (near the end) the train here.
