Lord Bonkers' Diary: A young Marines officer called Ashdown

It's hard to imagine Emlyn Hooson or Nancy Seear playing the shots that led to England's demise in the Perth test. Perhaps they should abandon Bazball and turn to Jezball instead.

Thursday

Talking of cricket, as we were, I remember the early years of the limited-overs game when the Liberal Party XI turned the world upside down by scoring at the then-unthinkable rate of three runs an over. The lobby correspondents dubbed our approach "Jezball" in tribute to our new leader Jeremy Thorpe. 

Our outstanding results owed much to a young Marines officer called Ashdown who proved equally adept at illicitly obtaining the opposition’s batting order before the toss and, if they threatened a successful run chase, at kidnapping their lower middle order. I often wonder what became of him.

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

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins
• "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A phone number for the Overton-Window twins

So that's what Lord Bonkers was up to on Bournemouth Beach! I did wonder.

We all wish the Liberal Democrat team well, but having seen one of Lord Bonkers' early net practices with them, I'm tempted to put a fiver on the Andorrans.

Tuesday

Perhaps you saw me on the sands at Bournemouth, making notes as some of our leading lights played cricket? I am, of course, always on the look out for new talents I can invite to turn out for my own XI, but this time there was more to it than that. 

For we Liberal Democrats have been drawn in the Group of Death at next summer’s ALDE T20 competition, along with Democraten 66, Radikale Venstre and Liberals d'Andorra. 

If I am to lick a team into shape while the party copes with May’s local elections, scrutinising a full Labour legislative programme and the St Pancras Day festivities, the sooner I commence net practice the better. 

The other approach, I suppose, would be to sign up some top-hole cricketers as party members. If anyone has a phone number for the Overton-Window twins, a postcard sent c/o the National Liberal Club will find me.

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

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys

The Joy of Six 1429

"The academics from three UK universities who wrote the report said their analysis had found that 21 of 24 objective performance indicators – key council services or functions – were stable or improved." Jessica Murray says the benefits of a four-day week are becoming ever clearer, despite Steve Reed’s condemnation of Liberal Democrat run South Cambridgeshire for implementing the policy.

Joe Hanley has read Nick Gibb's book Reforming Lessons: "The educational establishment becomes particularly pernicious in that it continues to be Gibb’s obsessive bogeyman, despite him unavoidably being the most consistent person at the heart of policymaking in schools over the past 15 years. He also boasts throughout the book about all the great people he has put into positions of power and influence in education during his time as minister (and, perhaps more notably, those he has actively excluded)."

Ebony Rainford‑Brent talks to Andy Bull about her work to broaden the cultural and class base of cricket: "The two biggest steps she wants English cricket to take are to bring in more means testing so the cost of entry drops for people who are being priced out of playing, and changing the structure of the talent ID system so that opportunities are distributed evenly around the country rather than focused on, say, a handful of private schools."

"On November 2 1925, the dam at Llyn Eigiau burst. A torrent of water and boulders thundered down the valley, sweeping through the northern part of Dolgarrog and destroying the small settlement of Porth Llŵyd. Sixteen people were killed." Lynda Yorke and Giuseppe Forino on a forgotten disaster that that reshaped a Welsh community and the UK’s safety laws.

"The reality is that 92 per cent of wine sold in the UK is consumed with 48 hours of purchase. Maybe we should stop pretending that every bottle is potentially going to mature in a cellar for 10 years, when the majority are going to be opened with a takeaway pizza or ready meal." Andy Neather suggests it may be time for the wine industry to move away from glass bottles and reduce its carbon footprint.

Grace Benfell asks why adaptations of The Lord of the Rings shy away from what is arguably its crucial chapter: "The Scouring of the Shire reflects multiple thematic cores of The Lord Of The Rings, echoing meaning across the novel’s entirety. The book’s environmentalism is threaded throughout. Saruman already represented an industrial threat. Some hobbits’ lack of care and vigilance to their environment, a relentless pursuit of profit, leads to the destruction of their home."

Child prodigies: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

Here's another of the discursive Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Chess, cricket, Steve Winwood... it covers several topics dear to this blog's heart.

You can see Aksel Rykkvin as a treble above and as a baritone below.

Prodigious talent

Prodigies aren’t always popular with their elders. When Sir Martin Shee, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, encountered the nine-year-old John Everett Millais in 1838, he suggested the boy should be sweeping chimneys rather than seeking to train as an artist. 

And sometimes prodigious genius is misunderstood. At a very young age, my favourite musician, Steve Winwood, was turned away by the man round the corner who gave piano lessons. He found that if the boy heard a tune once he could play it from memory, so it was hard to convince him of the point of learning to read music.

Others were more appreciative. In 1959 his elder brother’s jazz group found themselves short of a pianist, so he brought Steve along:

"He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. Because he was under age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know." 

Soon after that Steve was jamming with newly arrived Jamaican musicians in his home city of Birmingham, and then backing some of the greats of American blues: Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim.

So by the time he joined the Spencer Davis Group at 15, and they had their first number one when he was 17, Winwood was an immensely experienced musician. Something to open the eyes of these new Beatles fans who are convinced there was nothing before the Fab Four and precious little else at the same time as them.

******

The youngest person to play first-class cricket in England was Barney Gibson, who kept wicket for Yorkshire against Durham MCC University in 2011 at the age of 15 years and 27 days. He was also on the books of Leeds United as a goalkeeper.

Most of us heard nothing more of him for a decade. Then an article appeared in a cricket magazine saying Gibson had “chosen enjoyment and freedom” and given up professional sport:

"It wasn’t until I got to the age of 18 that I asked myself: 'Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?'" Gibson recalls. "I think it was just a case of no longer enjoying what I used to wake up looking forward to doing every day."

I hope he is happy, whatever he is doing now.

******

I once attended the first London recital by an 18-year-old Norwegian baritone called Aksel Rykkvin. What was interesting about the event was that a few years before he had been the most celebrated boy treble in the world. For once the American term ‘boy soprano’ seemed justified.

It soon became clear that his wonderful clarity and instinctive understanding of the text had survived his change of voice unscathed. But not every prodigy is lucky or talented enough to pass through puberty with such grace.

Leaving aside the many chess talents lost to a discovery of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, a growth spurt can wreak havoc. The future England captain Nasser Hussain grew a foot in a single winter and found he could no longer pitch his leg breaks on a length:

"I went from bowling out Graham Gooch in the indoor school with everyone watching, to hitting the roof of the net or bowling triple-bouncers to deadly silence."

Hussain was able to reinvent himself as a batsman, but always said batting never felt as natural to him as spin bowling had.

And puberty is the great killer of child actors – boys at least. Either you lose your fetching looks and no one casts you, or you keep them and find you are still playing schoolboys when you are 20, with no one seeing you as a possible adult lead.

But maybe being a child actor isn’t much like being an adult actor. Take the case of William Betty, ‘the Young Roscius’, who enjoyed phenomenal success as a boy at the start of the 19th century. His appearance at the Covent Garden Theatre sparked extraordinary scenes:

Shrieks and screams of choking, trampled people were terrible. Fights for places grew; Constables were beaten back; the boxes were invaded. The heat was so fearful that men all but lifeless were lifted and dragged through the boxes into the lobbies which had windows.

Betty announced his retirement at the age of 17, only to spend the rest of his life making comebacks that failed to excite the public. Perhaps the great Sarah Siddons had him right: “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy but nothing more.”

******

If I didn’t love the music so much, I might agree there was something ridiculous about white, middle-class British boys playing the blues – “Can blue men play the whites/Or are they hypocrites?” as Viv Stanshall asked. But then I generally prefer to leave dreams of cultural purity to the right.

Besides, it’s widely claimed that the Spencer Davis Group had to film what we’d now call a video before their records could get played on white radio stations in the US. It had been widely assumed there, because of Steve Winwood’s vocals, that the band was black.

Eric Clapton had no doubts about Winwood’s authenticity. Here he his explaining his decision to switch to a Stratocaster guitar:

“Steve Winwood had so much credibility, and when he started playing one, I thought, oh, if he can do it, I can do it.”

Or as Clapton once put it more strongly:

“I’d always worshipped Steve, and whenever he made a move, I would be right on it. I gave great weight to his decisions because to me he was one of the few people in England who had his finger on some kind of universal musical pulse.”

Prodigious talent does encourage such reverence, though personally, when drawn against a chess prodigy, I found myself with a sneaking sympathy for Sir Martin Shee.

The Joy of Six 1425

"The Cabinet Office, Lord Gove and Ciga Healthcare were approached for comment but did not respond by time of publication." Byline Times has news of another alleged scandal in government procurement during the Covid pandemic.

Max Sullivan on his experiences of introducing on-street bicycle hangars in the London Borough of Westminster: "Make decisions on merit. Objections that don't have merit can be listened to, but not indulged, if you want to move faster. Officers need to have the confidence in the need for the scheme (lack of space to park a bike is a major barrier to cycling) to give their politicians good advice. Politicians must be prepared to respectfully disagree with their residents, to deliver for their other residents. Who are many in number, waiting for somewhere safe to keep a bike."

"A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television." Derek Thompson explains his theory.

James Coverley draws an important lesson from the death of the Roman Emperor Domitian: "Caesar, of course, was betrayed by someone close to him. Mussolini ended up hanging from a streetlamp. You can only bully people into liking you for so long until someone, one day, realises that you’re the problem and that your grip on power is, actually, paper-thin and depends on the illusion of fear."

Koraljka Suton takes us deep into David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001): "Some of these narrative threads appear superfluous at first glance because we seemingly never get back to them. Others take us down rabbit holes that leave us feeling dazed, confused and disoriented. But all of them have their rightful place in Lynch’s surrealist picture that stubbornly defies genre categorization."

"A few clubs have boreholes, able to provide clean water on their wickets which then filters back into the aquifer in a virtuous circle. This was interesting and unexpected, revealing how certain clubs can benefit from their local geology, whereas others rely on ageing infrastructure and water companies." Dan Looney recently walked the Kennet & Avon Canal from Reading to Bath, then onwards via the River Avon to Bristol, visiting 11 cricket grounds along the way to see how they are adapting to climate change.

The Joy of Six 1413

Peter Black says the Liberal Democrats must continue to oppose national identity cards.

Wealthy donors are increasingly funding political campaigns, eroding the public’s trust in the political process. The government has the opportunity to reverse that trend by limiting the allowed individual donation amounts and capping campaign spending by political parties, argues Rose Whiffen.

"Our results showed that being bullied was associated with significant reductions in extrovert traits and conscientiousness (that is, being dependable and organised). The drop in conscientiousness could be because the target feels demotivated by the unfairness of being bullied – or the bullying may even take the form of removing meaningful tasks from the colleague." Samuel Farley, David Hughes and Karen Niven have researched how bullying can affect your personality.

Cambridge Town Owl introduces us to Cambridge's Elspeth Dimsdale, a pioneering woman Liberal parliamentary candidate.

Moon In Gemini calls Barry Lyndon (1975) a masterpiece: "He is despicable in many ways, but are the aristocrats he so desperately wants join really that much better? Do they snub him because he is cruel to his wife and stepson, or because he isn’t one of them?"

"He was so worried about being late, for example, that he would invariably arrive hours ahead of time – he once had to scale a wall at Lord’s after arriving so early that the ground was still locked. In 1984, confused about the regulations during an early-season Benson and Hedges Cup tie between Scotland and Yorkshire at Perth, he called two tea intervals. Whether it was bomb scares or pitch invasions, reflecting greenhouses or errant pigeons, they all conspired to trouble him." David Hopps has written the Guardian obituary of the umpire Dickie Bird.

The Joy of Six 1403

Alan Rusbridger questions the convention that the Royal Family cannot be criticised in parliament, and suggests 10 questions that could be asked about them: "William apparently doesn’t want to live in Windsor Castle. None of them wants to live in Buckingham Palace. The King wants to get Andrew out of his house. Do they really need nine Occupied Royal Palaces as well as Balmoral and Sandringham? I think there may be 19 houses, castles or palaces in all, but no one seems very sure."

"The Government’s 10-year plan places heavy emphasis on AI to ease workload and tackle backlogs. I understand why: patients want access, and the Government doesn’t want to fund enough human GP capacity to go round. But impressive exam scores are not the same as safe, sustainable care. What matters in general practice is not just knowledge recall. It is weighing evidence against circumstance, managing uncertainty, and understanding the patient in front of you. No algorithm can replicate that." Sofia Lind says the NHS must resist the urge to replace GPs with AI.

Kathryn Rix looks at the impact and long-term consequences for parliamentary elections of the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act.

"The term 'psychopath; was popularised in the 1940s and a slew of novels and movies from that point on portrayed a particularly chilling type of killer. Being outwardly in control, and even charming, they were able to walk and live among us." Ray Newman looks at three pulp paperbacks from 1959 that explore the links between deprivation, juvenile delinquency and psychopathy. The third of them, The Furnished Room by Laura Del-Rivo, was filmed in Britain as West 11 (1963).

Olympia Kiriakou celebrates the career of Carole Lombard, the queen of screwball comedy.

When Tony Greig died in 2012, Mike Selvey paid tribute to him: "He was without question the most inspirational captain under whom I played. When England won the third Test in Madras to take an unassailable lead in the five-match series, we hoisted him on our shoulders and carried him triumphantly from the ground, in a more restrained age a spontaneous gesture of the respect and affection in which he was held by the team."

The Joy of Six 1402

"Almost all workers (98 per cent) at SOSE [South of Scotland Enterprise] believed the four-day week trial improved motivation and morale, while there was a decrease in workers taking time off sick and a 25 per cent fall in those taking sick days for psychological reasons." A Scottish government trial of a four-day working week finds that it improves productivity and staff wellbeing, reports Joanna Partridge.

Sam Whewall, Avril Keating and Emily Clark say young people in seaside towns are being left behind and set out what could be done to help them: "Our professionals made two key suggestions for improving the lives of the young people they work with. The first is to invest in safe spaces and leisure activities that are available outside of the short summer season. ... The second suggestion is to invest in and rebuild youth services."

Jonquilyn Hill on the rise of the wellness industry: "Nowadays, in many parts of North America, wellness is everywhere and anywhere, and the definition has really ballooned to include anything and everything. If we ask one wellness guru to define wellness, we’ll hear a different answer from another one."

"There has been a rise in privately operated tournaments set up as little more than vehicles for illegal betting. Organisers are theoretically expected to monitor betting markets for signs of suspicious movements, but problems with manipulation have been manifest." Steve Menary reveals that cricket has been flooded with betting sponsorship since the Covid pandemic.

Adrian Teal examines the eccentricities of the great portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough.

"'The Wolves are running…' is the mysterious message the boy Kay Harker is given by the old Punch and Judy man in Masefield’s The Box of Delights; it was a potent image from Joan Aiken’s childhood reading, complete with snow… and re-reading the book became one of the Christmas traditions that remained with her until she was able 'to write the wolves out of her  subconscious' and into her own story many years later." Lizza Aiken traces the links between The Box of Delights and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

The Joy of Six 1398

Denis Mikhailov, a Russian dissident lawyer now exiled to Poland, explains how Trump’s generosity to Putin only entrenches his tyranny: "For Putin, this meeting was not a platform for negotiations, but above all an instrument of political legitimisation. On the one hand, it was an opportunity to show the world that he is still being received, that he is capable of holding dialogue on equal terms with the President of the United States, despite the warrant of the International Criminal Court and his de facto political isolation."

"Your politically engaged supporters inhabit the networks where these narratives form. They populate the WhatsApp groups, the comment sections, the office conversations where political meaning gets made. When you demoralise them, you surrender these spaces to your opponents. The passionate few shape the context in which everyone else encounters politics." AE Snow discusses the government's failure to get its message across. 

Magda Osman says that though laws are being introduced across the world to reduce 'psychological harm' experienced online, there is no clear definition of what it is.

"Pubs help people feel connected to a local place. When they close, they can become sites of mourning, a painful reminder of change and decline. One resident of a former colliery village in Nottinghamshire said of the pub she had once worked in – now derelict, fire damaged and vandalised as it awaits redevelopment – that despite her wish that it had remained open it was now better to 'knock it down' to 'put us out of our misery'." Thomas Thurnell-Read and Robert Deakin have researched what is lost when pubs close.

"As editor of The Nation in Trinidad during the 1950s, C.L.R. James campaigned for the Barbadian Frank Worrell to be appointed as the first full-time black captain. The selectors' 'whole point was to continue to send to populations of white people, black or brown men under a white captain', James later wrote in Beyond a Boundary." Tim Wigmore on race, cricket and the history of the West Indies.

Dave Haslam champions a forgotten film  - The White Bus: "Scripted by Shelagh Delaney in 1965, it’s directed by Lindsay Anderson. The cast includes a very young Anthony Hopkins, and Arthur Lowe who had already played a role in Coronation Street but would go on to star as Captain Mainwaring in the hit TV series Dad’s Army."

The Joy of Six 1397

"I asked the Appellant why, in the light of this citation of non-existent authorities, the Court should not of its own motion strike out the grounds of appeal in this case, as being an abuse of the process of the Court. His answer was as follows. He claimed that the substance of the points which were being put forward in the grounds of appeal were sound, even if the authority which was being cited for those points did not exist." Matthew Lee looks at the problems the increasing use of AI are causing the judicial system.

Paul Kirkley fears British stories are in danger of vanishing from our TV screens: "ITV managing director Kevin Lygo has admitted it probably wouldn’t get commissioned now. Why? Because a miscarriage of justice against British postmasters doesn’t have sufficient global appeal to attract the foreign investment and international sales that are increasingly the topline requirements of any UK drama."

Kathryn Rix looks back to the Pontefract by-election of 1872, which was the first British parliamentary election to use the secret ballot: "In contrast with the unruly behaviour which had often marred previous elections, seasoned observers declared that 'they never saw a contested election in which less intoxicating liquor was drunk' and there were no allegations of bribery or other corrupt practices. So quiet and orderly was the town that 'it hardly seemed like an election'."

Teaching philosophy in prison is a rowdy, honest and hopeful provocation, says Jay Miller.

Koraljka Suton celebrates Quentin Tarantino's postmodern masterpiece: "One of the many reasons why Pulp Fiction is widely regarded as a postmodern classic, lies in the brilliance of its screenplay. In true postmodern fashion, Pulp Fiction plays with narrative structure, presenting us with three interconnected storylines told out of chronological order and centering on a different protagonist each."

"Ahmed is a technicolour player, an energy bath bomb with a textbook technique. The Spin has been lucky enough to watch him razzle-dazzle two hundreds in the flesh this year – both against Lancashire, one at Old Trafford, one at Grace Road, opponent-draining, sparkling innings so much better than the previous blind boundary biffing. He added another against Kent, another against Glamorgan and became the first Englishman to take 13 wickets and score a century in a first-class game since Ian Botham in the Jubilee Test of 1980, after taking Derbyshire to the cleaners with both bat and ball." Tanya Aldred argues that Leicestershire's Rehan Ahmed deservers a place in England's Ashes squad this winter.

Neville Cardus and Emmott Robinson remind us that gamesmanship is nothing new in cricket

Back to Duncan Hamilton's biography of Neville Cardus, The Great Romantic. Anyone who believes gamesmanship is something new in cricket should read this description of one of Cardus's favourite characters, Emmott Robinson of Yorkshire:

When Lancashire required two wickets in three over to gain precious first-innings points, Robinson plunged into defensive mode, hiding the bat so well behind his pads that he seemed to be playing without one. All went according to plan until five minutes to six. Misjudging the line, he got himself trapped leg before. 

"He did not immediately 'walk'," said Cardus. "He cocked his ear at the umpire as though temporarily affected by deafness," and waited "in case some mistake had been made." Eventually, with the umpire's finger still raised, he turned and began plodding to the pavilion like a "shire horse after a wearying day of ploughing". 

It was "artful" and also a "masterstroke", one of the most drawn-out retreats "in the history of cricket", said Cardus. Robinson was so deliberately slow first in leaving the crease and then walking towards the pavilion that he seemed "not to be moving at all".

But Lancashire got their bonus points. The new batsman, Yorkshire's number 11, came down the pitch, had a swing and was stumped.

The Joy of Six 1392

"The general intention of the Act’s drafters is clear: they wanted those who supported terrorist groups to be given long jail terms; they wanted those who campaigned against proscription to remain free. But this is another line that the police are now crossing. Among those arrested in London on 19 July were protesters carrying placards which read ‘Ban Starmer not Palestine Action’, although saying that Palestine Action should not be banned is the one speech act the Act expressly permits." David Renton on the challenge to the banning of Palestine Action.

Liberal Democrat Women responded to the Women and Equalities Committee consultation on misogyny and the manosphere.

"To encourage young people to flourish as learners, we need to help them value non-formal and informal learning contexts. Hobbies are great for this. Hobbies are serious leisure activities which young people find interesting and fulfilling. They are serious because hobbies require perseverance to gain experience, a skillset and a knowledge base." Ioannis Costas Batlle reminds us that learning doesn't just take place in the classroom.

The England and Wales Cricket Board has admitted it has no evidence to show the Hundred as attracted new fans to other forms of cricket, reports Simon Burnton.

Roads.org.uk argues that Britain's first motorway is unclassified, tolled and links a small Dorset village to a chain ferry.

Graham McCann remembers a forgotten comedian: "Paul Squire was a comedian who shot to fame in 1980 with the ITV talent show Search For A Star and a spot in that year's Royal Variety Performance. He was promptly hailed as 'television's newest superstar', handed his own series by ITV in 1981, starred in another show for the BBC in 1983, and then, little more than one year later, he found himself ostracised by television so completely that he spent the rest of his career playing working men's clubs and the cruise ships."

"Where's my bloody toast, Churchill?": Our Trivial Fact of the Day

A.C. MacLaren, captain of Lancashire and England, once made 424 against Somerset. He was a hero of the great cricket journalist Neville Cardus, who had watched him as a boy, but few others:

The truth is that MacLaren wasn't good with people, his judgements of them often colossally wrong headed. He had a bedside manner based on the barked order, a fact traceable as far back as his schooldays at Harrow. 

His fag was a "quite useless" and "snotty little bugger" unsuited to the sporting life, which in MacLaren's opinion made him the legitimate butt of ridicule and ritual cruelty. The fag's name was Winston Churchill.

This passage comes from Duncan Hamilton's The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus. 

The book begins with a moving tribute to John Arlott's kindness to Hamilton when he was a young journalist and ends with an acknowledgment to Michael Meadowcroft for his searches in the National Liberal Club's archives. You can't ask for more than that.

Jimmy White's grandson takes 6-53 for England Under 19s

Embed from Getty Images

On Tuesday Ralphie Albert, a left-arm spinner on Surrey's books, took 6-43 to give England a first innings lead over India in the second under-19 test match.

Though Albert was again England's best bowler in India's second innings, taking 4-76, the game ended in a draw. He also played in the first test and scored a fifty.

Trivia fans will be pleased to hear that Ralphie Albert is the grandson of the snooker legend Jimmy White.

John Arlott's second son remembers T.H. White

 

The first time they met, my father and Tim were so captivated by each other’s company that they went out for a drink and did not return until late the following morning.

My favourite book on John Arlott is the memoir of him by his son Timothy, which also gives a much sunnier picture of another of this blog’s heroes, T.H. White, than you will find elsewhere. (T.H. stood for Terence Hanbury, but White was always ‘Tim’ to his friends after the retail chemists Timothy Whites, which was for many years Boots’ main rival on the high street.)

I’ve never understood why the biography of White by Sylvia Townsend Warner is quite so highly regarded – Timothy Arlott’s elder brother Jim, who died in a road accident at the age of 21, is the ‘Zed’ of that book – while Helen Macdonald concentrates in H is for Hawk on what you might call the more hysterical aspects of his personality.

Timothy Arlott, however, gives us a White more like the Merlyn of The Sword in the Stone:

‘Tim’ White looked a bit like Ernest Hemingway – tall, white-bearded and strongly built, also a lover of the outdoors, animals and alcohol, and a writer by trade – but that is where the similarity ends.

In summer he sometimes wore just a large scarlet towelling bathrobe over shorts. One night two rather serious young men came to his door and introduced themselves as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Flinging the door open wide, Tim boomed, ‘I am Jehovah.’ …

Biographies of Tim White have made him out to be a melancholic homosexual. I can only say we saw nothing of either. With my mother and us children during those summer holidays he was a riot. He was an enthusiast about movie cameras and making his own films about twenty years before it became popular with the general public – and Tim’s films were full of humour. 

He would organise imitations of the new ‘whiter than white’ Persil TV commercials and startle Alderney housewives leaving the grocers by descending on them with a movie camera, my brother Jim as the compere asking which washing powder they had chosen and pulling fresh ‘whiter than white’ samples out of his pockets like a conjurer If they had not chosen Persil. Even in his early teens Jim could do superb deadpan imitations of smarmy suave comperes.

The Joy of Six 1381

"Any real 'change' promised in Labour’s manifesto has been betrayed by a continuity with tired and damaging tropes of deserving and undeserving people. This is contributing to the sense, a year in, that this Labour government is merely repeating past government failures rather than striking out in a new direction." George Newth identifies the paradox at the heart of Keir Starmer's first year in power.

Aisha K. Gill sets out how we can make sure that the new grooming gangs inquiry is the last.

Andrea Pitzer on why we shouldn't talk about 'Alligator Alcatraz': "It’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed."

"While terms like 'gaslighting' have existed in therapeutic practice for decades or longer, most only started to become common lingo within the past few years, fuelled by use on social-media platforms. One viral Reddit post or TikTok video is all it takes for the masses to latch onto a previously overlooked word." Angela Haupt picks 10 such terms and explains their precise meaning, which can soon be lost when they escape the consulting room.

"Despite extensive state support for over-the board chess, the longed-for international ascendancy was never to return. Furthermore, no significant new talents emerged apart possibly from Klaus Junge; as Taylor Kingston shows, this contrasts tellingly with the Soviet Union whose policies quickly generated a massive growth in registered players, as well as world-beating players who would become dominant after the war." Tim-Jake Gluckman reviews a new book on chess in the Third Reich.

Dan Liebke considers the overlap between cricket and comic books, and asks if Ben Stokes is Alan Moore.

The Joy of Six 1380

"Since the Truss debacle, the UK has had to pay a substantial premium over other G7 countries to borrow in the bond markets. In other words, it has to pay a higher rate of interest on its gilts than it normally would. A similar message is being sent by the stock market where, since Brexit, UK shares have traded at a huge discount to European and US shares." Simon Nixon says Rachel Reeves' misfortune is to be the teller of hard truths in a country only interested in easy answers.

Emily Kenway asks why carers are so often made to feel invisible: "To be an unpaid carer is to be deemed not credible, according to Mary, Ada and several other carers in this study. Mary feels this is especially apparent higher up the professional ladder. The community-based staff listen to her, perhaps because they see what she does for her son on a daily basis. But of consultants and doctors, she said: 'I’m lucky if they’ll even look at me.'"

"The big problem with the DfE’s campaign to improve attendance is that no-one – really, no-one: not a single person – truly believes that attendance at school is the most important factor determining an individual’s attainment or lifetime earnings. Class, status, income, connections, quality of educational provision, home circumstances, breadth and depth of experience… there are a hundred and one reasons why private schools can achieve good academic outcomes without being bound to the 190 day school year which everyone else has to operate." John Cosgrove on government's repeated attempts to improve school attendance.

Ben Cornwell reports that two of the UK’s biggest outdoor media owners have blocked a youth-led anti-junk food advertising campaign, despite its full regulatory approval and recent national acclaim.

Adam Mars-Jones surveys the writing career of Alan Garner: "Even when Garner started writing, it was hard to keep modernity at bay. It must have been unusual as late as 1960 for a dairy farmer like Gowther Mossock to get about in a horse and cart."

"You climb the stairs at Old Street station, hauling a cumbersome cricket bag into the east London sunshine. The hipsters and creatives barely give you a cursory glance, presumably unaware of what lies a five-minute walk away. Take the left bend on Old Street, veer down City Road, past some corner shops and the Bunhill Fields burial grounds where William Blake now rests, and there, through a black iron gate, you find an oasis." Daniel Gallan takes us to the ground of the Honourable Artillery Company Cricket Club.

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Sienna Rogers says No. 10 sleepwalked into a crisis on welfare cuts: "The media rounds of ministers only deepened the frustration of dissatisfied MPs. Cabinet members repeatedly stated that the threshold changes to PIP eligibility were about getting people back into work, yet employment does not preclude receiving PIP; in fact, PIP was seen by the rebels as a key way of enabling disabled people to work."

Jenna Corderoy and Peter Geoghegan report that British police forces are hiding their collaboration with the US spying technology firm Palantir: "In both 2024 and 2025, multiple FOI requests about Palantir’s police contracts  - including from Liberty and the Good Law Project - were referred to the CRU [Central Referral Unit], which advised forces to withhold information."

"The shifting sands of politics are making electoral reform more likely. But almost certainly not before the 2030s. And much will depend on how the party system evolves in the years to come." Alan Renwick reacts to the rising support for electoral reform in opinion polls.

Russia is waging a silent war across Europe, not with tanks, but with propaganda, disinformation, AI and political influence, says Tetiana Toma.

"Like many enduring classics, Jaws - while in essence a rootin-tootin creature feature - is ideologically malleable, capable of meaning different things at different times. Is it a post-Watergate rumination on political malfeasance? A comment on laissez-faire capitalism? With the film now 50 years old, this month marking its half-centenary anniversary, it surprises me that more hasn’t been made about it as a commentary on responses to the climate crisis, given how strikingly this fits with its core messages." Luke Buckmaster argues that Jaws predicted the politics of climate inaction.

Elizabeth Ammon lists six things we learnt from the first test against India.

The England cricketer Peter Richardson used to fill the Telegraph with hoax reports of private-school cricket

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Remember that absurd Telegraph story about the investment banker his and wife who have a joint salary of £345,000 but are no longer able to take five holidays a year because of VAT on school fees?

As everyone suspected it was phoney, and PressGazette blames a finance industry PR for pitching it.

My own view is that even if every word were true, it would still have made most people cheer the idea of VAT on school fees. So I blame the news editor for putting in the paper at all.

But then the Telegraph has always been susceptible to this sort of thing. Here's Ian Wooldridge writing in the Daily Mail in 2002:

For several years the late E.W. 'Jim' Swanton, cricket writer emeritus, published a Monday morning column in The Daily Telegraph extolling the outstanding feats of obscure players, mostly pupils of lesser-known, fee-paying preparatory or public schools.

Thus Robin Fortescue-Smythe (Jim did love double-barrelled names) took all 10 for next to nothing for St Swithin's bowling offspin against St Agnew's the previous week.

It transpired that many of these entries were fraudulent, the work of that incorrigible hoaxer, Peter Richardson, the former Kent and England opening batsman. Peter used to appropriate headed notepaper from minor seats of learning and bombard Swanton with hilarious and utterly spurious information.

Peter Richardson made five centuries for England.

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"Our shared values and security pacts with Europe may eventually lead to a different ‘special relationship’ than the one we believed we had. A swift referendum, though likely to reverse Brexit, wouldn’t be sustainable (or trusted by the EU) if it leaves too many voters entrenched in old biases. So it’s baby steps for now, while the media and government catch up with changing attitudes." Jenny Rhodes looks at the UK/EU relationship after last month's reasonably successful summit.

Toby Buckle argues that the dominant narrative explaining the appeal of Donald Trump has got it all wrong: "Far-left radicals, socialists, liberals, centrists, old-fashioned conservatives, academics, mainstream journalists, and everyone else who simply cannot imagine voting for the man themselves, all tend to default to one narrative: Many Americans are struggling economically, left behind, urgently wanting a more egalitarian society, and turned to a fascist movement in desperation."

Gregory McElwain on the importance of the philosopher Mary Midgeley.

"Los Angeles’ roads have contributed to climate change not only for the obvious ways in which they’ve encouraged the extraction and consumption of petroleum-derived fuels. They’ve also contributed to climate change in the way they’ve required the drying-out of millions of cubic-feet of soil - soil that, were it still wet, would do much to moderate the severe wildfire events that will continue to reshape the city’s urban landscape and livability in this century." Charlotte Leib looks at what a century of landscape manipulation has done to Los Angeles.

Nadia Khomami reports on new research that suggests the novelist Barbara Pym may have worked for MI5.

"While today a dot ball in limited-overs cricket is often seen as an achievement, in 1969 a Somerset spinner finished with figures of 8-8-0-0 in a 40-over match." Martin Williamson remembers a bowling fear by Brian Langford that will never be repeated.