Thanks to Liberal History for pointing out on Twitter that today is the 112th anniversary of a by-election in the Harborough constituency:
17th June 1904
The Liberals hold the Harborough by-election
The Hon. Philip Stanhope, the younger son of the 5th Earl, wins the Harborough by-election in Leicestershire following the resignation of the sitting Liberal MP, J.W. Logan, increasing the Liberal majority by over 400 votes. Stanhope had previously been Liberal MP for Wednesbury (1886-92) and Burnley (1893-1900).
He was strongly anti war, opposing British participation in the Boer War and was sometime president of the National Peace League. He was also vocally against woman’s suffrage and in 1914 was attacked by a suffragette at Euston Station who mistook him for Asquith. He was raised to the peerage in 1906 as Baron Weardale.
The fact that Harborough chose a candidate who had lost his previous seat because of his opposition to the Boer War suggests the local Liberals were good radicals in those days, even if Stanhope was not sound on women's suffrage.
J.W. Logan was to return as MP for Harborough at the general election of December 1910 and represent the seat until he resigned for a second time in 1916.
In the 18th century the Boughton Park estate was owned by the Earls of Strafford. William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford, built six follies there.
The photograph above shows The Spectacle, a castellated archway built to be seen on the horizon from Boughton Hall.
Near it stands a large house in similarly romantic style. this is not one of Wentworth's follies but Holly Lodge, which was built for the Jeyes family (as in Jeyes Fluid) in the following century.
Another of the Boughton Park follies is the Hawking Tower, which I have been looking for on the main road between Market Harborough and Northampton for decades without knowing what it was.
And The Obelisk, which was built by Wentworth as a memorial to his friend William Cavendish, the fourth Duke of Devonshire, loomed up in the distance as I walked around Boughton on Saturday.
One day I will go back and photograph it close up, though I have the feeling that it is one of those buildings that will move around the landscape if you try too hard to pin it down.
There is more about the Boughton Park follies on Painted Pixels and in an old newspaper article about Simon Scott, who has written a book about them.
Despite the presence of the ruined St John a little way out of the village, Boughton has a medieval church. St John the Baptist probably began life as a chapel for Boughton Hall.
It is named for the 19th-century Scottish novelist and poet George Whyte-Melville, whom I have run into a couple of times before.
He wrote many novels of the hunting field. One of them, published in 1861, was titled Market Harborough.
And around 1990 I occasionally played chess for Northampton Working Men's Club. They took part in the national club knock out championship, which was something the Market Harborough team did not aspire to.
The building where we played in Northampton was often referred to as "Whyte-Melville" because George had founded it.
Like so many such clubs, it has now closed. The premises are occupied by a pub called The Fox and Quill (which was previously the Goose on Two Streets).
Vince Cable was in Leicestershire today campaigning in the European referendum. He spoke in meetings in Leicester, Oadby and Market Harborough.
He is seen here outside the Angel, Market Harborough, with East Midlands EU referendum coordinator Cllr Phil Knowles and Harborough Liberal Democrats' parliamentary spokesperson Zuffar Haq.
Conservative councillors Rob McKellar, Kevin Watt and Bridget Watts, who represent Weldon, Gretton and Priors Hall on Corby Council, are campaigning to save the service which Centrebus has announced will cease in July after its county council subsidy was withdrawn.
They have launched a Facebook page calling for the service to be saved and are working with MP for Corby and East Northants Tom Pursglove, Gretton Parish Council and Northamptonshire County Council to try and broker a deal.
Cllr McKellar said: “The Number 67 bus is a lifeline to many residents in Corby’s surrounding villages.
“It doesn’t just transport local people between Gretton and Market Harborough, but it also connects our villages to Asda and to the Corby Business Academy, as well as providing a link between Priors Hall, Gretton and Rockingham.
“We will fight hard to save the service and we will do everything in our power support to those affected by its cancellation.”
The photo above shows a bus at Gretton, but it is not the 67. It was taken during what turned out to be the final Welland Valley Beer Festival.
The 67 bus route, which runs from Market Harborough to Gretton via Corby and Rockingham, is to be withdrawn this summer after the decision by Northamptonshire County Council (NCC) to remove its subsidy.
Andrew Royle, the chairman of Gretton parish council, told the Harborough Mail:
“NCC were surprised by Centrebus’s decision to withdraw the whole of service 67 after July 23 as their understanding had been that the single vehicle operation on Monday to Friday was commercially viable, and Centrebus had given them no indication otherwise when they informed them of the likely withdrawal of their support for the service before Christmas.”
Campaigns against the decision have been set up in both Gretton and Wilbarston.
I did use this bus occasionally to get out into the countryside when there was a Saturday service, but that was withdrawn some years ago.
I wish the campaigners well in their attempts to save this route, but it is the massive cuts in central government funding for councils that are at the root of this.
On Wednesday afternoon news stated coming through on Twitter of a major gas leak in Market Harborough.
Great Bowden Road and Station Road in Great Bowden were closed to traffic, and people in that area were being evacuated from their houses. People said you could smell gas in the town centre.
More importantly, from a purely selfish point of view, the railway line through Market Harborough had been closed. Trains from Leicester to St Pancras were being diverted via Corby.
I left work at 5 sharp, found no sign of the promised rail replacement bus service and caught the scheduled X7 bus instead.
It can't be easy finding buses at the time of the school run, but I know from experience that if I had waited for a rail replacement to be arranged I might still be there now.
Anyway, the Leicester Mercury has the story of the drama as it unfolded.
When I came home from cooking for my mother, the chip shop in Coventry Road was full of triumphant gas men.
Liberal Democrat councillor Barbara Johnson has tweeted the news that the Hammond Arboretum at the Robert Smyth Academy, Burnmill Road, Market Harborough, is open to the public on Sunday.
It will be open between 2 and 4.30pm - adults £4, children free.
The tree expert, Owen Johnson, has described the collection there as being of national importance.
I visited it and blogged about it back in 2009:
When I heard that the Hammond Arboretum was going to be open to the public last Sunday I was keen to visit it. Because the last time I went there I got sent to the deputy head.
These days I find something too premeditated about televsion comedy. The idea of sitting down to watch something for 30 minutes because it will be funny, feels odd. I much prefer wit in the pursuit of another goal.
But the comedies we watch when we were young don't just form our sense of humour: they form who we are.
When I was in the sixth form ... we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.
Recently Radio Four Extra, my new favourite station, has stated repeating two comedies that take me back further than that.
When I was 11 my favourite radio comedy was The Men from the Ministry. I suppose its anti-Whitehall ethos has its roots in post-war resentment of socialism by the comfortably off - think of the fuss over the Tanganyika ground nut scheme - but it was immensely good natured.
The comedy was in the hands of pros like Derek Guyler and Richard Murdoch,* and it managed to be funny despite, even because of, its formulaic plot.
Their General Assistance Department would have two projects on the go, get them mixed up (perhaps sending the letter referring to one project to the other and vice versa) and there would be a news bulletin describing the resultant chaos.
They would fear the sack, but then discover that their boss was happy with it for some reason and live to cause chaos another week.
So ingrained is the show's comedy in my own sense of humour that I recently heard a joke that I stole for one of the first couple of Lord Bonkers' Diaries. (It is a sobering thought that those first diaries are nearer in time to my 11-year-old self than they are to me today.)
But I can go back further than that.
Radio Four Extra has started to repeat The Clitheroe Kid, which was my favourite radio comedy when I was 8.
You'll get a good idea of Jimmy Clitheroe's schtick if you watch the video above of him with George Formby. He was the ultimate precocious, cheeky schoolboy.
Except that Much Too Shy was made in 1942 and Jimmy Clitheroe was born in in 1921. Which means that he was already 20.
Because Jimmy Clitheroe - and that was his real name - suffered thyroid gland a birth and never grew after the age of 11, remaining 4ft 3in tall.
So by the time I fell in love with his show in 1968, he was 47. He still turned up for recordings in schoolboy cap and short trousers, but he had the face if a middle-aged man. That is why his television and film career had foundered by then.
Jimmy Clitheroe died in 1973, at the age of 51, after taking an overdose on the day of his mother's funeral.
* Richard Murdoch married into the family of Market Harborough's doctor. When he had his appendix out in the cottage hospital here he was plagued by urchins demanding to see "Stinker". He entertained them by putting his bare feet up on the windowsill and wiggling his toes.
There is a pleasant programme about the Northamptonshire writer and illustrator Denys Watkins-Pitchford on the BBC iPlayer at the moment.
The photo above shows his birthplace, Lamport Rectory, and I seem to remember seeing him about Market Harborough in the 1980s.
Deny Watkins-Pitchord also got a mention in my Masters dissertation on Richard Jefferies as one of the many later writers for children who used Bevis as a touchstone.
The Harborough Mail has an interview with Dr Sarah Hill, who will be the Liberal Democrat candidate in next month's police and crime commissioner here in Leicesterhire:
Market Harborough resident Dr Sarah Hill, the only woman in the contest, said: “The last (Conservative) Police Commissioner spent over £1 million per year on their office.
“By minimising the costs of the central office, I want to spend more money on operations, putting more resources into the frontline where the public needs them.”
Dr Hill, a former Robert Smyth pupil and current Harborough District and Leicestershire County councillor, said the last Police Commissioner spent too much on employing people in strategic and consultative roles.
She said she is standing on a platform of challenging the status quo by reducing central office costs and creating a more visible presence of police on the streets.
“The biggest complaint I get from local residents is that they don’t see as many police officers as often as they used to” she said.
Last time, having agreed to their introduction under the coalition agreement, the party did not field a candidate in many of the contests.
Mark Pack brings news that things are better this time.
Yesterday England won their first grand slam for 13 years.
Their team contained a product of my old school in Market Harborough, now called the Robert Smyth Academy, in the shape of Dan Cole.
Back in 2003 it did too - the captain, Martin Johnson.
That is quite an achievement for a small-town comprehensive.
In my day the best sportsman in the school, a couple of years below us, was a footballer. That was Andy Peake, who went on to play for Leicester City in the old first division.
I have just got back from seeing Arthur Brown at the Harborough Theatre. The evening was a mixture of stories and performance theatre about his music career, all interspersed with songs.
He is best known for his 1968 number one hit Fire, which was an early melding of pop and theatre. But there is more to him than that. Finding himself treated as a guru by some because of the themes of his songs, he felt a fraud and has dedicated his life since to seeking enlightenment.
And tonight the way brought him to Market Harborough.
