Six of the Best 604

Alistair Carmichael writes on the Commons debate on the Investigatory Powers Bill: "The Bill is rotten to its core and I wish we could have blocked it as we did in Coalition when faced with the Communications Data Bill. Dealing with Tories in government was difficult. Dealing with Tories in government and Labour in opposition is impossible."

The Sports Direct scandal is the result of successive governments desperate for jobs, says Conrad Landin.

"If I ever see you in the street, I hope you get shot." Dawn Foster on her experience of moderating comments on the Guardian website.

Steve Parnell looks back at the work of the angry and passionate Ian Nairn, the outspoken critic of England’s 'subtopian' demise.

The Birmingham Conservation Trust takes us to Moseley, where 1945 prefab houses can still be found.

"I think these were the first books where I really had a sense of place from them, whereas Blyton’s descriptions don’t tend to be of anywhere specific and nicely pleasantly general, Saville’s descriptions of location were precise and taken from real life. It made me want to visit Shropshire and since I was 16 or 17 I have done, frequently. Its become one of the places I love to be most in the world." A contributor to World of Blyton recalls discovering the charms of Malcolm Saville.

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Michael Winner on the Stiperstones

Another film from the BFI's Britain on Film site. As ever, click on the image above to view it there.

This is a 1961 travelogue taking in haunted sites across Britain. What interests us most is the opening, where David Jacobs (in a suit) is seen with a young lady on top of the Stiperstones, before Edric and his wild hunt put in an appearance up there.

The superstition I know is not that it will rain if you sit in the Devil's Chair. Rather it is that if those rocks are shrouded in cloud then the old boy is sitting there himself.

Edric and his followers also put in an appearance in Malcolm Saville's Seven White Gates:

Suddenly Jenny gave a stifled little scream and pointed up the track which led to to the mines. Shadowy in the thickening mist, the two girls seemed to see a figure on horseback waving ghostly arms but no sound of hooves came to their straining ears. Then, far away on the hilltop, it seemed to Peter than tiny, gnome-like figures flitted in uncanny procession. 

Jenny turned and wailed into Peter's shoulder. 

"Peter. It's true. It's them. They're riding again. What shall we do. Peter? We must hide our eyes. We mustn't even see them. Don't Look. Peter."

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Lord Bonkers' Diary: Cooking hedgehogs for Nick Clegg

Could it be that Lord Bonkers knew Malcolm Saville?

Cooking hedgehogs for Nick Clegg

One does not have memories of last year’s general election campaign so much as flashbacks, but I do recall visiting a hedgehog sanctuary with poor Clegg and Paddy Ashplant. While Clegg was being shown how the inmates are cared for and educated, Ashplant took me to one side and confessed that he used to eat the creatures when he was in the Special Boat Service.

 Having invited Clegg to dinner this evening, I hit upon the happy idea of reminding him of those days by serving hedgehog. Cook is not keen – “nasty, flea-ridden things that don’t belong in a Christian kitchen” – and claims not to know how to manage “all they prickles,” so I enlist the help of the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who quite charm her. They tell us that the trick is to bake the beasts in clay so that when they are done to a turn you simply break the clay open and then peel it and the spines clean off. The Elves also agree to catch the hedgehogs for us using high elven magic (or possibly Pedigree Chum).

I have no doubt that the evening will prove a success and that our hedgehog recipe will appear in the next Liberal Democrat Cookbook alongside Pressed Tonge and Norman Lamb Hotpot.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

A shadow cabinet maker

Giving Isis one up the snoot

Andrew Neil's press gang

Corbyn sends for Christopher Robin Milne

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Radical nostalgia? Helen Macdonald on 'What to Look for in Winter'

'What to Look for in Winter' comes from a time when children were expected to relate sensuously and intellectually to the great profusion of life around us.

Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk and admirer of this blog's hero T.H. White, has written a terrific article on the New Statesman.

'What to Look for in Winter' is a Ladybird book with illustrations by Charles Tunnicliffe (who designed the dustwrappers for three similar titles by Malcolm Saville) that was first published in 1959.

She writes:

Books of this kind were designed to build young naturalists with an in-depth knowledge of Britain’s natural and national heritage. Full of assumptions about the correct relationship between children and the natural world, 'What to Look for in Winter' suggests that the world is full of mysteries, such as the mechanism of the germination of mistletoe, which you, the reader, might one day help to solve. 

And it expects you, too, to interact physically with things outside: shake the branches of ivy so that “drunken insects fall to the ground”; collect fungi that are “nice to take home”; discover that snowberries have a strange softness when you squish them; bite the pungent seeds of cow parsnips, which taste of “earth, and autumn and sunshine, and several other things”.

If this is a personal, spiritual response to the Ladybird world, then back in 2005 Malcolm Clark offered a more political appreciation of it:

Public space was not thought to be dangerous then, and this is not just nostalgic idealisation. I grew up in a small town in the early 1970s. The vast public park really did have attendants. It also happened to have well-tended flowerbeds and a boating pond. These days, you have to train your dog to tiptoe over the syringes. The war memorial is covered in graffiti and there isn't a police station for ten miles. If you sent Peter and Jane there to fly a kite, you'd kit them out in bulletproof vests first. 

In fact, the entire old Ladybird project had an indefinable public-spiritedness about it. This partly reflected a strain in British culture that went all the way back to Samuel Smiles's Self-Help and the Victorian reference libraries. The quest for knowledge was seen as an uncomplicated and enjoyable pursuit, one in which young citizens should be encouraged to share.

Dismissing such analysis as mere nostalgia seems to me an inadequate response.

At the heart of political radicalism is the idea that the world could be different. And the idea that the world once was different is not such a bad starting point.

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Paddy Ashdown, Malcolm Saville and eating hedgehogs

Today in someone's review of the year I came across an interview Nick Clegg gave to the Evening Standard on the eve of the general election:

Looking back at the campaign, it is the comic moments he remembers. For instance, his first visit was to a hedgehog sanctuary, with Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown muttered under his breath to Clegg: “When I was in the Special Boat Service we used to eat hedgehogs.”

Talk of eating hedgehogs inevitably reminds those of us who grew up on Malcolm Saville of his second Lone Pine story Seven White Gates.

At the beginning of the book Peter (Petronella) Sterling is cycling to her mysterious uncle' farm under the Stiperstones.

On the way she comes across a Gypsy caravan whose horse is running away with the little girl driving it (Fenella) after being frightened by a tank (the book was published in 1944). Peter risks her life to bring the horse under control.

Later she eats with the Gypsy family:

Peter stood by and watched the other gipsies rake away the hot embers of their wood fire, until two cylinders of baked clay were exposed. Fenella ran for a dish from the Reubens' van and one of the glowing cylinders was poked on to it. Then, with mutual expressions of good will, the cooks and the Reubens with their guest parted. 

Round their own fire, Peter watched how the baked clay was cracked and peeled off, bringing with it the spines of the hedgehog and leaving him bare but beautifully cooked. From the pot came a stew of gravy and vegetables, a generous helping of which was piled on to the plate of the guest of honour.

She didn't see how Reuben divided up the hedgehog, but her share was certainly tasty - something between rabbit and chicken - and she was so hungry that she finished her plateful almost as soon as Fenella.

I don't know if that is how they cooked hedgehog in the SAS. And, though this method would deal neatly with the spines, Saville does not mention what has happened to the giblets.

As to the taste of hedgehog I am reminded of Jonathan Meades' comment:

People say frogs' legs taste of chicken. They are wrong. They taste of frog.

Read more on Malcolm Saville and Gypsies.

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Two policemen and the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree, 1948

Embed from Getty Images

"Yes, Dickie, but I don't think this gentleman is very interested in policemen. Uncle Alf - that's Mr Ingles - told me this morning that he likes to have a few policemen around at this time of year. He said they reminded him of Christmas, but I can't think why, can you?"
Malcolm Saville Wings Over Witchend (1956)

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Listening to the Long Mynd and Stiperstones shuttle

The Long Mynd and Stiperstones shuttle bus will start running again on Saturday 30 April 2016, running every weekend and bank holiday Mondays until the end of September.

While we wait for spring, we can enjoy the audio commentaries on the website devoted to this service. If you know these hills you need only close your eyes to see them.

There is even one that mentions Malcolm Saville.

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