John Betjeman travelled on this line in 1962.
This colour footage of it was shot six years later - a year before it closed.
Click on the picture to view it on the BFI site.
King's Lynn to Hunstanton in 1968
John Betjeman travelled on this line in 1962.
This colour footage of it was shot six years later - a year before it closed.
Click on the picture to view it on the BFI site.
Did the rise of the SNP really spook Lib Dem voters in England?
Last July I began a post like this:
A myth is growing up about the Liberal Democrat debacle at the last general election. It holds that we lost almost all of our seats because the Conservatives ruthlessly targeted them and won over former Liberal Democrat voters.
So they did, but there is little sign that our lost voters went to the Conservatives instead.My assurance was based on my reading of an article by Seth Thévoz and Lewis Baston on the Social Liberal Forum site.
Here are a couple of the paragraphs I quoted back in July:
The Conservative-facing seats showed a remarkably consistent pattern; the main factor at play was Lib Dem collapse rather than Conservative recovery. In each of the 27 seats lost to the Conservatives, the collapse in Lib Dem votes was sizably larger than any increase in Tory votes, by a factor of anything up to 29.And:
This means that although the Lib Dem position in many Tory-facing seats is dire following a collapse of the party’s vote, the Conservative position is not necessarily ‘safe’ or stable; the Conservatives have won many of these seats on relatively small popular votes, and there still exists in these constituencies a reasonably large non-Conservative vote which could potentially be mobilised around a clear anti-Conservative candidate with a more appealing pitch than that of the 2015 Lib Dem campaign.
Nor is the Conservative vote appreciably growing much in such areas. In seats like Lewes, Portsmouth South, St Ives, Sutton and Cheam, and Torbay, the increase in Conservative votes was negligible, and Lib Dem defeat can be laid down entirely to so much of the Lib Dem vote having vanished.I thought of this article when I read the review of David Laws' new book Coalition that Nick Thornsby has written for Liberal Democrat Voice.
Or, to be more accurate, when I read the comments on that review.
In one of them Nick himself says:
The conclusion he [Laws] comes to is that the coalition was probably worst for the party in terms of 2015 results, but that whatever route we took was always going to result in a fairly significant loss of seats, either in a later election in 2010, or in 2014/5.
The particularly big factor in that is Scotland, and the SNP’s rise there would almost certainly been as drastic whatever we did, which had the double-edged effect of denying us seats in Scotland and scaring our voters in the south-west into voting Tory.In reply Glenn says:
The Lib Dem vote was not scared by the SNP or Miliband or The Greens or frankly even UKIP. Many more former Lib Dem voters voted for these parties than for the Conservatives. The vote simply split enough in enough seats to give Cameron an edge. This is a government formed on a small majority, not a landslide victory or masses of popular support.And, Adrian Sanders - the defeated Liberal Democrat MP in Torbay - agrees:
“our voters in the south-west into voting Tory.” No, no, no, this is not what happened. Firstly there was no great swing to the Tories – 500 votes in my seat while I lost over 7,000. Our voters mostly stayed loyal. It was tactical voters who deserted us for Ukip, Labour and the Greens, not the Tories.This debate matters, because our analysis of what went wrong at the last election must be central to our attempts at recovery.
Are we trying to soothe people who voted Conservative last time and praying for something to change in Scotland? Or are we trying to reassemble the coalition of anti-Conservatives that returned us in these seats between 1997 and 2015?
My feeling, backed by the original article by Thévoz and Baston, is that we should adopt the latter approach,
Roy C: Shotgun Wedding
This reached number 6 in the UK singles chart in 1966 and number 8 when it was re-released in 1972 (which is when I remember it from).
In view of the turn 2016 has taken, I better point out that Roy C - Roy Charles Hammond - is still with us.
Read more about his career on his own website.
Leicester Oral History Trail 4: Leicester Market
The fourth of these videos cover Leicester Market - described these days as "the largest covered market in Europe," though I don't know who measures such things.
Six of the Best 592
Internet voting is a terrible idea. In a video, Andrew Appel explains why.
"Having first placed Eliot in his historical and literary context, then having pointed to what is unique in him, Obama ends by showing how he speaks to any individual reader who pauses to listen. This is what the finest literary criticism has always done." Edward Mendelson discovers Barack Obama the literary critic.
Railway Maniac uncovers Ilkeston's forgotten history as a spa town.
"The last time I had seen Panesar at Wantage Road the club shop was fully stocked with Monty merchandise – “I Love Monty” and “Sikh of Tweak” t-shirts, the ill-advised “Monty’s Cricket Madness” DVDs (a compilation of cock-ups, whose cover made him look as though he had just been pulled up for driving a minicab uninsured), those masks." Backwatersman sees Monty Panesar return to play for Northamptonshire.
Curious British Telly on a forgotten (by me at least) comedy starring Rik Mayall - Believe Nothing.
Could Willie Rennie win North East Fife?
Early this week the Telegraph looked at the prospects for the Holyrood election in North East Fife, which is the seat Ming Campbell used to represent at Westminster.
The Liberal Democrat candidate is Willie Rennie:
Rennie is not prepared to predict victory in the constituency (he is more likely to get in as a regional list MSP), but says the fact the Lib Dems came second in the general election last year by around 4,000 votes is “not insurmountable”.
He adds: “It’s the right combination of a good team, the right message and the right circumstances locally plus the best candidate you could possibly ever get.” This last comment is accompanied by a trademark chuckle.
“Because I am from that part of the world I understand the area, I have got a good network of councillors, a good activist base. I would like to do it, but it’s up to the voters and I never take anything for granted.”
St George, the dragon and Danger Mouse in Leicester
Like many other cities, Leicester is keen to develop St George's Day as a folk festival. Quite what it should contain is still up for grabs, but there seems to be a consensus that morris dancers are a central feature.
Today Danger Mouse put in an appearance. I am sure he played a part in the legend of St George, but I forget whether he fought on the saint's side or that of the dragon.
Six of the Best 591
Monroe Palmer outlines the improvement to the government's Housing Bill that Liberal Democrat peers have battled to make.
"The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree. Moscow has found such people throughout Europe; until the rise of Trump the idea of an American who would volunteer to be a Kremlin client would have seemed unlikely." Timothy Snyder dissects Donald Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin.
It is good to see Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End getting a mention alongside the usual suspects in this Steve Rose survey of films about Britain from the 1960s.
Jessica Fielding brings us the Yorkshire Television schedule for Monday 19 April 1971 - Richard Beckinsale, Austin Mitchell and Ena Sharples in unexpected colour.
The defunct Glasgow Central Railway line left behind a trail of stations, tunnels, shafts, cuttings and bridges throughout the west of the city. Alex Cochrane explores its remains.
Denys Watkins-Pitchford ("BB") remembered
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.
