Row over the 'African grave' at Bishop's Castle

There are some remarkable graves in Bishop's Castle churchyard in Shropshire.

One of them, as this video from the Shropshire Star shows, is currently the cause of controversy:

A wood and perspex cover protecting the Grade II-listed “African grave” may have to be removed as it does not have permission to be there. 

But the locals who made the cover and put it there to save the 200-year-old monument say action needs to be taken now to stop it eroding further. 

The grave belongs to a man only identified as ID, who is said to be a native of Africa who died in Bishop’s Castle on September 9 1801.

Such monuments have to be looked after, but the locals say the cover is only temporary.

It is hard not to see this incident as a new Ealing Comedy. An inspector, perhaps played by Raymond Huntley, is dispatched to Shropshire to call the locals to heel.

Once there he is plied with beer from The Three Tuns, shown the wrong churchyard and sent back to Whitehall defeated.

And this part of Shropshire is one of the few places in England where you can still imagine this happening.

I recently saw an old episode of The Green, Green Grass of Home, which is set in the county. An American who had been stationed there as a serviceman decades before wanted to go round the village to see how it had changed.

"Oh it's not changed, sir," came the reply. "If anything it's more like it was now than it was then."

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Phyllis Nicklin's photographs of Birmingham

Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know the weakness I have for photographs of building and street scenes from the mid 20th century.

So the work of Phyllis Nicklin was bound to appeal to me.

She was the staff tutor in Geography in the University of Birmingham's former Department of Extra Mural Studies in the 1950s and 1960s.

She died in post in 1969, leaving behind thousands of slides she had taken for her classes.

The video above, made for a recent exhibition in Birmingham, celebrates her work.

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The Saddleworth air crash of 1949

Earlier this week Newsnight reported on a mystery - you can see the report below.

On 11 December a man travelled from Ealing Broadway to Euston and then caught the train to Manchester. He then made his way to Saddleworth Moor, where his body was found the next day.

He has still not been identified, which is mysterious enough. But, as Newsnight reported, Greater Manchester Police have added to the mystery.

Perhaps fuelled by watching too many reruns of Lewis on ITV3, they have suggested that the man's death may be connected with an air crash that took place near where the body was found.

In 1949 a British European Airways Douglas DC-3 on a flight from Belfast Nutts Corner Airport to Manchester came down at Saddleworth. You can see some scraps of footage of the wreckage above.

The crew and 21 of the 29 passengers on board died. But among the survivors were two little boys. That is what interested the police. Could one of them be the mystery body, grown old and gone back for a final pilgrimage to the site of the crash?

The boy survivors were Stephen Evans (5) and Michael Prestwich (2).

Michael, the 2016 press agrees, died at the age of 12 in a railway accident. It sounds as though he did not have the misfortune to be caught up in two disasters but was hit by a train on the way home from school.

A search of The British Newspaper Archive does not reveal a report of his death, but does throw up headlines like 'Michael (2) gets family fortune' and 'Boy who survived air crash inherits £35,000,' because the rest of his family died at Saddleworth.

But could the body be Stephen Evans?

No. Because, as Newsnight revealed, he is now a distinguished professor and lives on the south coast.

The latest theory is that the mystery man is Hugh Toner from Armagh, who has not seen his family for 20 years.

The moral, as ever, is that the recent past is a stranger place than we think and that stories that once hogged the headlines are soon forgotten.

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Six of the Best 570

Ed Miliband has an article on inequality in the London Review of Books.

"If you criticise the party of government, you become a pariah - all of a sudden, you're faced with a deluge of SNP warriors to defend yourself against. What is becoming of democracy in Scotland if this is the situation that we have been left in?" Jordan Daly on life in post-referendum Scotland.

David Brindle talks to Brian Rix, who was 92 this week, about his two careers: farceur and activist for people with learning disabilities.

Labour peer Lord Berkeley warns against a pause in Network Rail's work to protect and improve the route to the South West.

Roger Mills introduces us Lilian Bowes Lyon, the Queen Mother's rebel cousin.

The Liverbirds were Britain's first all-female rock band. Paul Fitzgerald describes how they found fame in Hamburg.

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