Clement Freud exposed as a child abuser

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A shocking story has appeared on the Telegraph site this evening:

Sir Clement Freud, the former broadcaster and politician, was exposed last night as a paedophile who sexually abused girls as young as 10 for decades. 

Freud, who died in 2009, spent years abusing a girl who he brought up as a daughter, and violently raped a teenager while he was an MP. 

His widow, Lady Freud, has apologised to his victims, saying she is “shocked, deeply saddened and profoundly sorry” for what her husband of 58 years did to them.

It goes on to say:

Freud was unmasked as a child sex abuser after one of his victims contacted ITV’s Exposure documentary team, who also broke the story of Jimmy Savile’s paedophilia four years ago. 

Sylvia Woosley said Freud befriended her family in 1948, when he was working at a hotel in the South of France, and started abusing her when she was 10. 

Four years later, following a family crisis, her mother asked Freud and his wife Jill if they would look after Mrs Woosley, and she found herself living under the same roof as her abuser, being brought up as a daughter. The abuse continued until she managed to move away when she was 19. 

Another woman told ITV that Freud started abusing her in the 1970s, when she was 11, and eventually raped her when she was 18.

The story also makes links with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. I have read before that he befriended her parents in the aftermath, but in following these celebrity abuse stories I have formed the view that a reference to the McCann case is a reliable sign that the author is a member of tinfoil bat brigade.

The 1970s and the Liberal Party of that era seem an even stranger, sicker place tonight.

Later. This story is also on the front page of the Daily Mail.

Later still. Exposure: Abused and Betrayed – A Life Sentence airs on ITV at 11:05pm on tomorrow.

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David Boyle gets to grips with Southern Railways.

"Children in the United States from the very earliest days of the Republic ... were raised with practices conceived in direct opposition to Old World notions of authoritarian power and natural hierarchy." Judith Warner reviews a history of American parenting from life on the frontier to the 'managed child'.

David Crystal says reports of the death of the full stop are exaggerated

Wilko Johnson discusses death, depression, cancer and Canvey Island with Every record tells a story.

"The interiors of Leighton House Museum in Holland Park are not only some of the most spectacularly beautiful in London; they are also the most completely unexpected." Let Nigel Andrew take you there.

David Runciman thinks England's reliance on Spurs players is a weakness: "The biggest reason Leicester finished ahead of Spurs is that their players spent a lot less time on the pitch (since the team had fewer commitments in other competitions) and so were able to hold their form to the very end. It’s not romantic, but it’s the truth: by the time you get to April and May, miles on the clock count for just as much as tactics and talent. And by the time you get to June and July, maybe for even more."

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Leicestershire sets aside £2m for the Greville Janner abuse inquiry

From the Leicester Mercury:

Leicestershire County Council has set aside £2 million to cover the cost of assisting the inquiry into Greville Janner's alleged sexual abuse of boys in its care. 

The authority ran the children's homes in the city and county, where the former Labour politician allegedly met, groomed and sexually assaulted boys. 

It believes the £2 million will cover the cost of legal representation and digging out documents and other relevant material from its past. 

It said the cash would also would cover the cost of supporting the welfare of alleged abuse victims. 

The council will give an account of its actions to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, (IICSA) later this year.

The inquiry may cast more light on the actions of the county council in the case of Frank Beck, with whose offences the allegations against Janner are intertwined.

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Francis Pryor takes the long view on Britain and Europe: "Despite what some would have us believe, Brexit wouldn’t mark a return to a glorious past, so much as a dismal future, where our principal legacy would be the destruction of a truly innovative system of multi-national government."

"The British state, under Margaret Thatcher, committed one of its most violent acts against its own citizens, at the Battle of the Beanfield, when a group of travellers — men, women and children — who were driving to Stonehenge from Savernake Forest to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival were set upon by tooled-up police from six counties, and the Ministry of Defence." Thirty-one years on, Andy Worthington asks where the spirit of dissent is in Britain today.

Matthew Jenkin on how getting children out of doors can pay dividends in academic performance and also improves their concentration and confidence.

Ely Place is a street in central London that used to be part of Cambridgeshire, explains Flickering Lamps.

Caroline's Miscellany explores abandoned passages at Euston station that are a perfect time capsule from 1962.

J.K. Rowling just can't let Harry Potter go, says Sarah Lyall.

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Boris Johnson buried report on air pollution near London schools

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From the Guardian today:

An air quality report that was not published by Boris Johnson while he was mayor of London demonstrates that 433 schools in the capital are located in areas that exceed EU limits for nitrogen dioxide pollution – and that four-fifths of those are in deprived areas. 

The report, Analysing Air Pollution Exposure in London, said that in 2010, 433 of the city’s 1,777 primary schools were in areas where pollution breached the EU limits for NO2. Of those, 83% were considered deprived schools, with more than 40% of pupils on free school meals. 

A spokeswoman for Johnson’s successor, Sadiq Khan, said the new mayor could not understand why the research had not been published when it was completed more than two-and-a-half years ago.

This reminds me of the campaign to end the use of lead in petrol.

I remember once hearing Des Wilson, who spearheaded it, saying that the key to victory was getting the research published. So damning was it that, once it was in the public domain, the battle was effectively over.

It has been argued, incidentally, that the fall in juvenile offending in recent years can be put down to the removal of lead, and its damaging effect on the brain, from the environment.

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"A Crosby-ified Toryism can eke out victories against average opponents, but it is no guide to winning well or winning at a time when the capitalist system is being questioned; when Thatcherite and Reaganite orthodoxies are being questioned or when, in such places as Scotland (and now London), the Conservative brand is weak and needs rebuilding." Tim Montgomerie on the defeat of Zac Goldsmith.

Lenore Skenazy condemns the use of parents' fears for their children as a marketing tool.

Tony Broadbent rediscovers a murder that scandalised postwar London: the shooting of Alec de Antiquis in 1947.

"As you visit the Polling Station today you may be struck by the rather anachronistic posters which identify those buildings designated as such. Some local authorities have held huge stocks of these paper banners for much of the 20th century, and in some parts of the country those on display today may have been printed many years before you were born." Bob Richardson examines election day typography.

Hope you enjoy this article by Katy Waldman on why we omit initial pronouns.

Kelefa Sanneh explores the benign ruthlessness of Paul Simon.

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Trivial Fact of the Week links Blow-Up and the Double Deckers

Nicholas Whyte has been ploughing a lonely furrow with a series of posts on the early 1970s children's television series Here Come the Double Deckers.

Although this fell precisely into my era, I fear I can recall disliking it at the time. Even then I sensed it was peopled with stage-school brats and aimed too shamelessly at the American market.

As a result I viewed the later careers of two of its stars - Brisnley Forde of Aswad and Peter Firth - with mild scepticism.

I struggled with Spooks in particular. MI5 just would not employ a former member of the Double Deckers and that is the end of the matter.

Still, I am the last blogger qualified to complain about obscure enthusiasms, and Nicholas's latest Double Deckers post has turned up a top piece of trivia. In fact he wins my Trivial Fact of the Week award.

That trivia concerns an episode of the show called Barney, in which the children befriend an entertainer down on his luck and (inevitably) put on a show with him.

Barney was played by Julian Chagrin, who a few years before had been one of the tennis players watched by David Hemmings at the end of Antonioni's Blow-Up. You can see this scene in the video above, which Nicholas included in his own post.

He calls it "the very odd 1966 film Blow-Up," but I think he meant to call it "a key moment in both the creation and the examination of the myth of Swinging London".

Nicholas also reveals that Chagrin appeared as the secret lemonade drinker in the R.White's television commercials.

The song in them was sung by Ross MacManus, the father of Elvis Costello.*

But you knew that already.

* I like Carl Wilson's observation that "a secret lemonade drinker" sounds like a line from one of Elvis Costello's own songs.

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Lynne Featherstone explains how the state killed her nephew. "The crucial papers were destroyed according [to] the Department of Health."

Max Seddon looks at Putin's new army: "Russia’s campaign to shape international opinion around its invasion of Ukraine has extended to recruiting and training a new cadre of online trolls that have been deployed to spread the Kremlin’s message on the comments section of top American websites."

"I had no idea small children could walk so far. We skipped three miles one day and two miles the next, albeit incentivised by fish and chips or ice creams. At night, the children fell asleep like well-exercised puppies." Patrick Barkham says we have betrayed our children from love of cars.

Kashmir Hill on how an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell.

London bombsites are photographed today by A London Inheritance.

Tom Cox explores Dunwich.

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Mark Pack blogs on the polling industry's inquiry into what went wrong with the polls conducted during the 2015 British general election campaign.

"Gould had long carved out an alternative viewpoint to that of Kinnock and Smith, putting forward arguments that were to look much wiser in retrospect than many were prepared to credit at the time." Alwyn Turner on Bryan Gould, who contested the Labour leadership with  John Smith in 1992.

Niall Meehan on Morris Fraser, child abuse, corruption and collusion in Britain and Northern Ireland.

Toni Airaksinen says you shouldn't report your professors' microaggressions.

The Hwicce of Rutland? Caitlin Green speculates on a possible Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

"Every paradise is lost. That’s kind of the point. Loss is the diagnostic feature of every paradise ever lived or imagined. But for five miraculous years and 120,000 miraculous words Gerald Durrell sustained a vision of paradise with joy in every day and every page." Simon Barnes praises My Family and Other Animals.

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Greville Janner was allowed to lie about the Kirkwood Inquiry

Lord Janner 'misled inquiry' over link with abuser Frank Beck

So runs the headline on a story on BBC News. I suppose it is a polite way of saying he lied to the Kirkwood Inquiry, which we already knew.

What is more remarkable, as revealed by documents from inquiry the BBC has obtained via a Freedom of Information request, is that Janner was permitted to lie about the inquiry:

The 1992 documents released to the BBC also reveal that, following his questioning by the inquiry, Lord Janner asked chairman Andrew Kirkwood if he could tell the media waiting outside that he had not been asked about allegations of child abuse against him. 

Andrew Kirkwood replied: "Of course, Mr Janner." 

Lord Janner left the hearing and told a BBC camera crew: "I have the chairman's permission to tell you that there was questioning about the social services and their operation, and none whatever concerning the allegations made against me." 

The documents show this was not true, and the revelation that the real substance of the inquiry's questioning was withheld from the media will further fuel allegations of a cover-up.

Indeed it will. As I blogged last year, the authorities were remarkably keen that the public should know as little as possible about Frank Beck's offences and the inquiry into them afterwards.

Press cutting from Spotlight on Abuse.

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Satnav and the death of our navigation skills

England is a palimpsest of Medieval churches, abandoned mineral railways, ruinous Gothic institutions and follies built by mad aristocrats. But you won’t find them on your satnav.

So I wrote for the New Statesman website in the days when I wrote for the New Statesman website.

Today comes news (via the Telegraph) that a paper in Nature has backed up my anti-satnav prejudice:

Satellite communication consultant Roger McKinlay, former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation, believes the world is losing its way due to over-reliance on navigation aids. 

Writing in the journal Nature, he argues navigation and map reading should be on the school curriculum. 

Describing navigation as a "use-it-or-lose-it" skill, he warned: "If we do not cherish them, our natural navigation skills will deteriorate as we rely ever more on smart devices."

The school curriculum? I won a Map Reader badge in the Cubs and I think it meant more to me than my degrees did later in life. It was a hint that I might one day succeed in being the sort of outdoors child that I felt I ought to be but feared I never would.

Long before satnav came along, I was surprised by how little idea even educated people had of the geography of their own country.

Organise a work meeting anywhere but central London and you would be deluged with requests for directions. Can't you just look at a road atlas?

And this attitude persists in quiz programmes where questions about British geography or treated as something no one can be expected to know.

What can people who know so little about the subject make of the news?

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"The UK has gone further down the road of co-opting its citizens into immigration policing than most European countries," says Frances Webber.

Tesco's marketing strategy involves making us feel warm towards farms that do not exist, explains Tom Levitt.

Charlotte Gill is not impressed by a Leeds primary school's decision to ban the game of tag: " I find all of this safeguarding a great shame. It shows how childhood, which should be a free and exploratory time, is now being over-policed."

JohnBoy pays tribute to Barry Hines. Among the facts he is uncovers is that Hines once played in a Loughborough Colleges team alongside Dario Gradi and Bob Wilson.

"Though the origin of Easter eggs and Easter bunnies can be traced back to ancient times, the Victorians did not begin to celebrate Easter in the way that we know now until the late 19th century. It was then that Easter bunnies became fashionable." Some fascinating social history from Mimi Matthews.

Eric Grunhauser on the stave churches of Norway, which combine Christian architecture with Nordic designs and the motifs of a Viking great hall.

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Andrew Grice reminds us that David Cameron and George Osborne should not forget the Lib Dems know where the bodies are buried.

Jeremy Corbyn is "acting as though he is the leader of a 3rd or 4th party, rather than leader of the opposition," says William Barter.

"As Milne walked down a corridor, the six-foot colleague approached from the other direction. They smashed into each other, sending Milne flying, along with the papers he was carrying. 'Seumas was in shock,' recalls an onlooker. 'No one had ever done that to him before. He expected people to show deference to him.'" Alex Wickham profiles the Winchester-educated Stalinist who is Labour's executive director of strategy and communications.

A reader sent me a link to Futility Closet, where Alfred Kahn's concept of the "tyranny of small decisions" is discussed.

Hunter Oatman-Stanford takes us to Scarfolk, a strange land built on the public information films made to terrify children in the 1970s.

"In the 1960s, trip boats from Little Venice would take extended tours across the Thames into the depths of Peckham and Camberwell, and even in the 1970s, some insisted the canal should be saved." Peter Watts on the loss of the Grand Surrey Canal.

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Garth Stahl explains why white, working-class boys shun university.

"The word 'Zio' was part of the club’s lexicon, despite its connotations eventually becoming widely known." Alex Chalmers on why he resigned as co-chair of Oxford University Labour Club.

Andrew Allen says the government should forget the idea of an trans-Pennine road tunnel.

Sarah Mills looks at the way the Girl Guides' evolving badge programme reveals wider changes in society over time.

"I remember crying all the way through the scene where he did the 'Singin' in the Rain' number. And my sister said, "What are you crying for?" and I said, "Well, he just seems so happy.'" Michael Koresky interviews the film director Terence Davies.

"I don’t think I have ever wanted something to happen more in sport in my entire life than for Claudio Ranieri’s side to win the Premier League," says Gary Lineker.

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The sugar tax and the infantilisation of coffee

"Osborne’s new sugar tax is a tax on the poor" announces an article in the Spectator - a magazine not hitherto noted for its concern for the poor.

In the short term it may operate like that, but the long-term effect of the tax is likely to be that manufacturers reformulate their products to avoid having to charge the tax.

Good news for the poor, though not for the school sports schemes that will benefit from the money it raises.

Children like sweet things and there are good evolutionary reasons why this should be so. Sweet things tend to be safe to eat. If children loved bitter green things the race would never have survived.

But in the last few years something terrible has happened to coffee. Queue in one of the chains today and the odds are you will find yourself queuing behind an adult buying a drink that looks like an ice cream sundae. It may well contain a similar amount of sugar.

We are, of course, free to eat as much sugar as we like, but there is a political dimension to this remaking of public taste.

Maybe it is the coffee shops that should be reformulating their products to avoid a sugar tax?

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The Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square

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After visiting Old St Pancras I wandered down to Brunswick Square and the Foundling Museum.

As its website explains:

The Foundling Hospital, which continues today as the children’s charity Coram, was established in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram to care for babies at risk of abandonment. Instrumental in helping Coram realise his vision were the artist William Hogarth and the composer George Frideric Handel. Their creative generosity set the template for the ways in which the arts can support philanthropy.

It also claims to be Britain's first children's charity and its first public art gallery.

The image above shows the original building, with its girls' wing, boys' wing and chapel in between them, which demolished in 1928. The current building, once the headquarters of the charity, was put up in 1937.

When I went round last week their was an exhibition of children's book illustrations in the basement, a cafe and heartbreaking exhibitions about the charity's history on the ground floor, and exhibitions of art by the institution's 18th-century patrons on the floors above.

It was an odd combination, but somehow a compelling one.

When the Hospital closed in 1926, the children were moved first to Surrey and then to a new building at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire.

An account of its later days (it closed in 1954) shows it was one of the barrack-like institutions that children's charities insisted on running early in the 20th century. Their disappearance after the second world war marked a long stride forward.

I did, however, come across one fact about the Foundling Hospital's history that may be of interest to someone I know.

It seems that fashionable London would flock to see the children (or at least the girls) eating their Sunday lunch.

I shall suggest this to Lord Bonkers as a nice little earner for the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans.

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Banning tackling in school rugby

I want to play cricket on the green
Ride my bike across the stream
Cut myself and see my blood
I want to come home all covered in mud

The Who, I'm a Boy


Schoolboy rugby appeals to this blog's prejudices, but the open letter from doctors and other health experts should not be dismissed:

The majority of all injuries occur during contact or collision, such as the tackle and the scrum. 

These injuries which include fractures, ligamentous tears, dislocated shoulders, spinal injuries and head injuries can have short-term, life-long, and life-ending consequences for children."

My impression is that rugby clubs are good at introducing children to the game gradually, whereas one often sees a pack of small boys chasing the ball across a muddy soccer field that is far to big for them.

But an article by Anna Maxted in yesterday's telegraph skilfully brought out the dilemma for rugby parents:

My 13-year-old staggers home pink-cheeked and mud-splattered after rugby practice. I order him up for a bath, and stuff his sodden kit into the wash. 

This ritual gives me a similar feeling to singing 'Lavender’s Blue' to him as a baby. I’m part of a great tradition, upholding the basic tenets of parental duty and care, giving him a textbook happy, healthy childhood. 

But later that night he complains he can’t sleep: he hurt his neck during the game.

At the heart of this debate, I suspect, lies just not a dilemma for parents but one for rugby union itself. What is the game meant to be like?

Robert Kitson wrote a very good article on the subject earlier this year:

What sort of attacking spectacle are we encouraging if up-and-coming young fly-halves and centres keep getting man and ball simultaneously and barely have time to catch the ball, never mind pass or run? When youth teams are kicking penalties as a first resort rather than being encouraged to move the ball?

Boxing used to be taught in state schools, but disappeared in the 1960s after a campaign led by Dr Edith Summerskill.

If rugby union as we know it today does not want to go the same way, it needs to decide what kind of game it aspires to be.

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The Boy in Striped Pyjamas vs I am David

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 children’s novel by John Boyne that was made into a film two years later.

I imagine that anyone who wanted to read the book or see the film has done so by now, but I had better point out that what follows contains spoilers.

The book and film tell the story of nine-year-old Bruno, whose father is made commandant of Auschwitz. He befriends Shmuel, an inmate of his own age. The two boys concoct a plan to smuggle Bruno into the camp to help look for Shmuel’s father – Shmuel brings a set of prison clothes and Bruno leaves his own outside the fence.

While Bruno is in the camp, the two boys are rounded up and gassed.

I thought the film was good, but found the book (perhaps unexpectedly for a modern children’s novel) excessively wordy and did not persevere with it.

There was some criticism of the story’s morality. Wikipedia leads us to a review of the film by Rabbi Benjamin Blech which points out there were no nine-year-old boys in Auschwitz (anyone who could not work was murdered on arrival) and expresses the fear that viewers may conclude that the camps can’t have been as bad as all that if a German boy could form a friendship with a boy of the same age.

What struck me about The Boy in Striped Pyjamas is how it contrasts with a favourite book from my own childhood – Anne Holm’s I am David, published in 1963.

The young hero, with cooperation from the authorities, escapes from a labour camp behind the Iron Curtain (in Bulgaria, if I have got my geography right) and makes his way across Europe to find his mother in Denmark.

I suspect that, along with an early reading of Oliver Twist, this book helped form the paranoid libertarian strand of my politics. To the young David, anyone in uniform is one of Them and wants to kill him.

I am David was made into a film in 2003. Despite the presence of the wonderful Joan Plowright, it was deeply disappointing to those of us who had grown up on the book.

The contrast between the two stories seems to me to tell us something about the changes in our thinking over the four decades that separate them.

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas reflects the modern belief that moral education involves the young being taught about the Holocaust and being able to recite the correct lessons from it. It also reflects the high status we give to victimhood.

In short, there can be no more moral character than one who dies in a gas chamber.

I am David was written in a different era. It is not about death, but about escape, moral growth and the finding of happiness.

Schooled in a labour camp (and Holm is also in danger of making it seem not so bad), David is a strange, even scary, creature. He is morally innocent and lethal, along the lines of the hero in an Alexander Mackendrick film.

But you are on his side and want him to find happiness. Today those hopes seem harder for us to entertain.

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The Mandela Effect and the social production of knowledge

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As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a "categorical pledge" were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

There has been some discussion on Twitter today of the Mandela Effect website. I tweeted a link to it myself.

Nick Barlow describes what you find there:

The Mandela Effect falls into that confused territory between conspiracy theory and weird belief system that you often find in these corners of the internet. It’s named after some people’s belief that they have memories about how Nelson Mandela died in prison, so never got to be President of South Africa and everything else that happened after his release. They believe that either history was changed, or that they slipped into a parallel universe where that event happened before coming back to ours where they were confused to find that it hadn’t.

He also offers a critique of it:

Like any conspiracy theory, the Mandela Effect is interesting for what it reveals about those who believe in it. We want to believe our memories are perfect records of our histories because they’re an important part of what we are, so when we discover that we’ve been remembering something wrongly, we can either admit our fallibility, or adopt the position that the universe must be fallible instead.

All true. But we should not overlook the extent to which what we know is subject to social confirmation.

Two examples. First, when their was widespread discussion a few years ago of the practice of sending children from British institutions out to Australia, I read letters in the newspapers from people who had come across those children. One had been a ship's barber who had cut the boys' hair on the voyage out to Australia.

I don't suppose they had talked much about this experience in the intervening years because the sending of children from homes to Australia had dropped out of public memory. It was never a secret - at one time it was a widely discussed public policy: it was just forgotten.

Second, in 1971 my father returned from a business trip to South Africa and (illegally) Rhodesia, he brought with him the news that Tony Greig was an epileptic.

I never heard anyone else mention this, and if I raised the subject I was met with scepticism. Years later Greig chose to talk about his condition and I could console myself that I had known this all along.

But had I? It seems there is an inescapable social element to what constitutes human knowledge. It was for this reason that the French philosopher Michel Foucault talked about "power/knowledge".

I am a Liberal, not because I am confident the human spirit will overcome any social pressure, but because I fear it may not.

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Paedophile activist suspended from the Labour Party

Last night The Times broke the news that Tom O'Carroll, the public face of the Paedophile Information Exchange around 1980, had joined the Labour Party.

To Labour's credit, he was suspended today.

But his brief presence was in line with the Corbynistas' attempt to return Labour to the early 1980s.

When I worked in Birmingham in 1981 and 1982 it was possible to find literature from the PIE among that from other municipally approved good causes in the city's central library.

The idea that the professional left was the scourge of child abusers did not arise until some years later.

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