Cornish museum devoted to the life of Emily Hobhouse wins architectural award

The Story of Emily, a museum celebrating the life of the humanitarian Emily Hobhouse, has been named the Royal Institute of British Architects' South West and Wessex Building of the Year.

Emily Hobhouse campaigned against Britain's use of concentration camps in the Boer War. The Story of Emily is located partly in her childhood home, the rectory in St Ive, near Liskeard.

It is the new buildings on the site, which house the immersive displays about her work in South Africa and a restaurant for visitors, that have won the RIBA award. You can see something of them in the video above and read about them in depth on the RIBA site.

Emily Hobhouse was the sister of the Liberal philosopher L.T. (Leonard Trelawney) Hobhouse. Her campaigning against the camps in South Africa was hugely controversial in Britain - watch Kenneth Griffith's Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman to learn more about the way it was received.

Unsecured penguin caused helicopter crash in South Africa

BBC News wins out Headline of the Day Award.

The judges were relieved to read:

The South African Civil Aviation Authority said the impact sent the helicopter crashing to the ground. No-one on board, including the penguin, was hurt.

The life of the Boer War whistleblower Emily Hobhouse is now celebrated at her Cornish home

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Emily Hobhouse, who exposed the suffering of women and children held in British concentration camps during the Boer War, is now honoured at her childhood home in Cornwall. A new historical attraction called The Story of Emily at the rectory in St Ive, near Liskeard, where she grew up.

The Guardian reports:

From 12 April a series of events are being held at the Cornish home where the pacifist, whistleblower and activist Emily Hobhouse grew up, around the 165th anniversary of her birth, part of efforts to shine a new light on her fight for justice.

Hobhouse travelled from Cornwall to South Africa at the turn of the 20th century and reported back on the awful conditions endured in the British bell tent camps set up during the Anglo-Boer war, but was dismissed as a “hysterical woman” and a traitor.

On Saturday 12 April a talk will be given there by Elsabé Brits, who told the Guardian:

“Emily Hobhouse was an eyewitness of the British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer war. Not only did she provide relief, such as food, clothing, and other necessities, but she also compiled a 40-page report, published in June 1901, detailing all her observations and findings.

“This report was discussed in both [British] Houses of Parliament. It generated a significant amount of negative press and denialism. She was called a traitor and a hysterical woman.”

You may enjoy my post on Kenneth Griffith's film Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman.

Emily Hobhouse was the sister of the Liberal philosopher Leonard Trelawney (L.T.) Hobhouse.

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Ben Quinn explains how the National Trust fought back against the culture warriors: "When it comes to disinformation, [Celia] Richardson speaks of taking 'a broken windows approach' - borrowing from the criminology theory that addressing low-level problems creates an atmosphere that discourages larger ones."

"From the 19th to 20th century, children were physically removed from their homes and separated from their families and communities, often without the consent of their parents. The purpose of these schools was to strip Native American children of their Indigenous names, languages, religions and cultural practices." Rosalyn R. LaPier says Joe Biden's apology for the horrors of Native American boarding schools doesn’t go far enough.

Dominic Grieve has some good advice, which the Conservative Party will ignore, concerning the severe problems that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights would cause.

It is all too clear that unelected bureaucrats now control what happens on the West Yorkshire Rail network on the grounds that declining passenger numbers, a result of their own failures, justify further cuts. Curtailments to Sunday and evening services could soon follow. In a reversal of decades of local progress, argues Colin Speakman, West Yorkshire’s once-thriving commuter rail now struggles under bureaucracy and neglect.

"Arlott was a superlative cricket commentator, a failed Liberal politician (was there any other kind in the post-war era?), and a major catalyst in the D'Oliveira Affair. Were it not for John Arlott we may never have heard of Basil D’Oliveira and the controversy sparked by D'Oliveira’s selection for England’s tour to South Africa, turning South Africa into even more of a pariah state may never have happened." Matthew Pennell wrote a post for Black History Month on British Liberals and the D'Oliveira Affair.

Andy Lear searches for the ghost woods of Rutland's Leighfield Forest.

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Richard Kemp says the Liberal Democrats must be a party of the major cities as well of the shires and suburbs: "We will only be a truly national party when we represent people in all areas and from all walks of life. We will now have a greater resource than at any time in my political career to begin to achieve this."

Jason Beer KC discusses being crowned Barrister of the Year, the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and what it has done for public understanding of the role of barristers.

"If you don’t already have generational wealth, your kid will feel it sooner or later. The average fee for an independent school is £16,650. If the schools pass on the VAT increase, that will mean an extra £2,500 a year. If that is too much for your family, then you are better off not sending your kid to a substandard private school." Stella Tsantekidou has some advice for parents.

"There is ... only one sustainable future for the series and the now completed volumes for England, Scotland and Wales, and that future is digital. A small group of supporters are actively pursuing this prospect. Should the project succeed, subscribers will benefit from corrections and updates and a GPS locator." Gillian Darley looks to the future of Niklaus Pevsner's Buildings of England series.

"From writer-director Cy Enfield’s desire to capture native customs on film to the acknowledgement of Cetewayo’s tactical expertise, the picture depicts the Zulus in a manner far removed from the way Africans had been previously depicted on film." Richard Luck defends the politics of Enfield's 1964 film Zulu.

John Lewis-Stempel makes a plea on behalf of eels and for a change in human thinking about nature: "Like everything about the eel, the reasons for its calamitous decline - 95% globally since the 1970s - are mysterious, although shifts in the oceanic currents which bring the elvers to Europe and the pollution of waterways are causal contenders. And it is the eel’s bad luck to be enigmatic rather than charismatic."

England beat the All Blacks away from home in 1973

I'm fond of quoting the Irish hooker Ken Kennedy on English rugby in the amateur era: 

"England have the players. What they've got to do is find the selectors who will pick them."

Some evidence he was right comes in the shape of this victory against the All Blacks in New Zealand. Such wins are rare today: they were almost unthinkable in 1973.

England chopped and changed their team throughout the Seventies, yet three of the pack playing here - Fran Cotton, Roger Uttley, Tony Neary - were in the Bill Beaumont's grand slam XV almost seven years later. What might they have achieved if they had been selected consistently?

Similarly, Jan Webster and Alan Old had been the England half backs when, almost as unexpectedly, they had won in South Africa the year before. It's quite possible that they never played together again.

As you can see, 50 years ago rugby union was almost a different game. Not every player was a giant, there was no resetting of scrums, there was no lifting in the line out (or if there was it couldn't be too obvious) and it was the wingers who threw the ball in.

I wish England well tomorrow and shall watch the game, But I don't enjoy rugby union on television as much as t used to.

How much of that is down to the style of rugby Eddie Jones's teams came to produce, I may find out.

Kenneth Griffith's film Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman

I'm not bringing you a contemporary newspaper account of the 1899 meeting to oppose the Boer War that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch chaired in Liskeard: I'm bringing you a dramatic reconstruction of it.

Kenneth Griffith was an actor and maker of documentaries whose strongly held political views regularly brought him into conflict with television bosses and the broadcasting authorities.

His Independent obituary from 2006 was candid:

He could exasperate colleagues by his cantankerous manner and stout refusal to compromise his artistic and professional integrity, especially when offered work by those whom he called the "priggish cuckoos" of the BBC's middle management. Even those who were kind to him found he would insist on marching to a different drum.

For someone normally seen as on the left, Griffith had a surprising sympathy for the Afrikaners. From it flowed his 1984 documentary Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman, which dealt with her humanitarian and political efforts to help the inmates of the concentration camps the British had established in the Boer republics.

This tactic of removing the civil population from areas of conflict so guerrilla forces cannot use it as cover had already been used by Spain in Cuba and was recently used by the Sri Lankan government in Tamil areas of the island.

In Cuba and South Africa at least, the conditions in which these civilians were held were appalling and resulted in many deaths. 

I have chosen the section of Griffiths's film that deals with the Liskeard meeting, but the whole of it is worth watching if you do not know the story. All the parts are played by Griffith or the South African actress Hermien Dommisse.

Six years later, a film called That Englishwoman: An Account of the Life of Emily Hobhouse was made in South Africa, with Veronica Lang in the title role. Lang enjoyed a long but not stellar career in British television.

Emily's father, the Rev. Reginald Hobhouse, was played by Terence Alexander, in the era when he was Charlie Hungerford in Bergcrac. 

You can see a fragment of the film below. 

Emily Hobhouse: A Cornish humanitarian

Looking for an account of the meeting against the Boer War that Arthur Quiller-Couch chaired at Liskeard in 1899, I came across this tribute to one of the speakers, Emily Hobhouse.

It comes from the Western Morning News for Friday 11 June 1926, when she had just died at the age of 66. It's more about her male relatives than Emily, but it's a start as an introduction to someone I want to know much more about. (John Hall's book, whose cover I've used as an illustration here, looks the place to go for that.)

A Cornish Humanitarian

Opinions differ still as to whether the humanitarian zeal of Miss Emily Hobhouse always found the wisest outlet, but the noble motives this distinguished Cornish woman there are, so tar as I know, no two opinions. A great many people in London and elsewhere think of her as the Florence Nightingale of South Africa, and they will probably be present at Kensington Cemetery to-morrow when Miss Hobhouse's remains are laid to rest. 

Among them I should not be surprised to see Mr. Lloyd George, with whom many Cornishmen may remember Miss Houhouse spoke from the same platform at Liskeard in the 'nineties in connection with the South African War. The district was familiar to her, for it was at St. Ive near Liskeard that Miss Hobhouse was born. Her father, the Venerable Reginald Hobhouse, was then rector. He became afterwards Archdeacon of Bodmin. 

As the niece of Lord Hobhouse on her father's side and of Sir William Trelawney, for some time Radical member for East Cornwall, on her mother's, Miss Hobhouse was related to two Lord Byron's most intimate friends. Her work in the concentration camps South Africa was followed with sympathetic attention nobody more than her famous fellow-Cornishman, Leonard Courtney, then a commoner. 

Cornish settlers in Minnesota still remember gratefully, no doubt, the two years Miss Hobhouse spent in their settlement after the loss of her venerable father. Her brother, Professor Leonard Hobhocse, is probably Cornwall's most distinguished son the sphere of philosophical and sociological research. He is, of course, the author of the little book "Liberalism" the Home University Library.

Leonard Courtney, incidentally, became the 1st Baron Courtney of Penwith. He is described by Wikipedia as "an advocate of proportional representation in Parliament and acting as an opponent of imperialism and militarism".

He was MP for Liskeard between 1876 and 1885 as a Liberal, and then for Bodmin between 1885 and 1900. There, from 1886, he sat as a Liberal Unionist, but his radical views became an increasingly uncomfortable fit with that party.

He did not stand in Bodmin in 1900, and when he did stand for again in 1906 it was as a Liberal.in Edinburgh West. There he was defeated by a Liberal Unionist.

I'll look out for an account of that Liskeard meeting and for more on Emily Hobhouse. The more you know, the more there is to find out.

Later. A bit of googling has turned up a dramatic reconstruction of the Liskeard meeting and a South African film biography of Emily.

Later again. Despite what the contemporary report here says, Emily Hobhouse was cremated and her ashes were ensconced in a niche in the National Women's Monument at Bloemfontein.

Church bans Desmond Tutu's daughter from taking Shropshire funeral due to same-sex marriage

Yes, the Shropshire Star wins my Headline of the Day Award, but the judges felt it necessary to add a rider condemning the Church of England.

As the story below that headline explains:

The daughter of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been banned from officiating at a church funeral in Shropshire, because she is married to a woman.

Instead the family of Martin Kenyon will be holding the 'service' in the back garden of his country home in the south of the county.

The former army officer split his life between London and the county and his family had been hoping to hold his funeral in St Michael and All Angels at Lydbury North.

But his wish to see priest Mpho Tutu - daughter of his close friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his own god-daughter - conduct it in the church has been denied by the Church of England because she is in a same-sex marriage. ...

Mr Kenyon was friends with Desmond Tutu for 60 years after he looked after the South African archbishop when he arrived in London in the early 1960s to study.

Mpho Tutu told the Star of her reaction to the decision:

"I couldn't believe my ears. Our same-sex marriage is again a reason to hurt people for no reason.

"Martin’s daughters, grandchildren, friends, the Tutu family, and also my wife, Mpho, who are all mourning because of the death of their beloved Martin are being punished because she fell in love with me and dared to marry me

"I feel it is my time to speak up for my wife."

And the Star claims the Diocese of Hereford told it:

“We acknowledge this is a difficult situation. Advice was given in line with the House of Bishops current guidance osame-sexex marriage.”

Yes, I think it probably did.

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Anne Applebaum says Alexei Navalny is showing the world what courage means: "Nothing is secret about the poisoning, false trial, or harsh imprisonment of Navalny. Like the multiple attempts to murder him, these things are playing out in public, in the open, for everyone to see."

"For 48 hours, soccer stood on the brink. Fans took to the streets. Players broke into open revolt. Chaos stalked the game’s corridors of power, unleashing a shock wave that resonated around the world, from Manchester to Manila, Barcelona to Beijing, and Liverpool to Los Angeles." Tariq Panja and Rory Smith on how the Super League fell apart.

T.J. Coati explains what's wrong with Secure Schools.

In 1982 the South African government bombed Islington. James Morris has the story.

"A fascinating essay by Tom Holland describes a mysterious artefact which may show a West Indian slave playing cricket and then follows C L R James in analysing cricket as a pathway to equality." Richard Heller and Peter Oborne argue that the new Wisden is a global record of war, plague, racism and environmental change.

Jessica Pickens looks back at juvenile Oscars - 12 were awarded between 1935 and 1961.

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"First, some figures. From 1899 to 1902, roughly 48,000 people died in British concentration camps in South Africa. Of the 28,000 white deaths, 22,000 were children under the age of 16. More than 4,000 were women. The 20,000 Black deaths were less clearly recorded - a mark of official indifference - but most estimates suggest that about 80% were children." Robert Saunders puts Jacob Rees-Mogg right on British concentration camps in the Boer War.

"Being Asian and a curry lover you would think that I would feel sorry for him but I don’t. Those from immigrant communities who vote or advocate for narrow interests always draw my ire." Jane Chelliah is not moved by the secretary general of the Bangladesh Caterers Association's regret at influencing his members to vote Leave.

Paul Russell reconsiders the moral philosophy of Bernard Williams, whom I heard speak at York as a student.

John Boughton examines the history and architecture of the Church of England's engagement with council estates.

"We have one of the most complete town walls in Europe. But neglect and overdue repairs have led Historic England to add Ludlow town walls to its Heritage in Danger list. The town council should be ashamed of this." Andy Boddington on the failure to repair Ludlow's fallen town walls.

Tim Holyoake watches Shoestring again after 40 years and is not disappointed.

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Why do nations sometimes commit spectacular acts of self-destruction? Tom Scott argues that  strange fervour that seized the Xhosa people of South Africa in the 1850s may shed light on Brexit.

"When Jean Phillipson's family returned to Fairfax, Virginia, after living in Bolivia, the main thing her 10-year-old son complained about was the bus ride home from school. 'He wasn't allowed to have a pencil out,' says the mom of three, 'because it was considered unsafe.' Lenore Skenazy on American overparenting.

Boak & Bailey are frankly gutted about Asahi's takeover of the brewing wing of Fuller’s.

Adam Scovell revisits the 2019 television adaptation of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.

Birds can see a colour that human can't, explains Tessa Koumoundouros: "In our eyes, we have three types of colour receptors, or cones - they are sensitive to red, blue and green frequencies of light. Birds have a fourth receptor that varies across species in the type of frequency it can detect."

The archaeologist Francis Pryor recalls the day his mother met Viv Stanshall.

Leicestershire vs South Africa, 1924

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Leicestershire take the field against the touring South Africans on 3 May 1924.

The ground is not Grace Road, where Leicestershire play their games today, but the old Aylestone Road ground.

As I wrote when I visited it three summers ago:

This is the ground where, between 1901 and 1939, Leicestershire played their county games. According to the club's website, the great names who played hear include Grace, Bradman, Hammond and Hutton. ... 

The county played a couple of further championship games at Aylestone Road after the war and the final first-class match here was between Leicestershire and Cambridge University in 1962. Mike Brearley was a member of the visiting team.

You can see it's the same ground if you compare the photograph below, which I took that day, with the one above.

Moonraker, Dolly's braces and the Mandela Effect

Do you remember the scene in Moonraker?

Dolly helps Jaws out from wreckage of the ski-lift. He looks at her showing his metal teeth. She smiles back, showing the braces on her teeth.

His heart is softened and he is eventually redeemed by his love for her.

Except... that scene never happened. When Dolly smiles she shows nothing more than her teeth.

I thought I remembered seeing braces, but I was wrong.

Equally, I thought that Brian Dennehy, the American actor who starred in Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect in the 1980s was dead. But he is still with us.

Both these are favourite examples of the Mandela Effect. This is the idea that our memories do not always fit the public record, not because they are faulty, but because that record is somehow falsified.

The Mandela Effect gets its name from the fact that many people were convinced that the death of Nelson Mandela had been announced many years before he was released from prison.

It seems pretty clear that this is because people's memories of the death of Steve Biko have somehow become muddled up with their memories of Mandela.

I suspect this is an American phenomenon. Opposition to Apartheid was central to the British left when I was young - I even heard Biko's friend Donald Woods speak when I was at university - and Britain has many historic links with South Africa.

Dolly's nonexistent braces seem to have lodged themselves in our minds because the scene would have been wittier if she had worn them.

And there was a false report of Dennehy's death in the US, though I have no idea how I came across it.

I have seen it suggested that the Mandela Effect is a creation of the internet. Once, if we looked something up and found our memory was wrong, we would probably have accepted it.

Today, we can go online and find a community of people who have just the same memory as us.

And that must prove something really weird is gong on, right?

Lord Bonkers' Diary: “Free-ee Me-ee-ee-ee-ee”

Thursday

When Nelson Mandela was banged up I sent him a cake with a file in it, but I had not great confidence that the South African authorities would be sportsmen enough to give it him. So I decided to raise public awareness of his plight here in Britain by writing a song. I called it “Free Me”, but as fitting the words and music together proved harder than I had expected, it came out more like “Free-ee Me-ee-ee-ee-ee”.

The idea, you see, was that someone should sing the song while in the character of Mandela himself, and I wrote to both Harry Belafonte and Nat King Cole proposing the idea. When they failed to reply I had hopes of persuading a popular actor or entertainer of the day – say Bryan Forbes, Tommy Trinder or Dickie Henderson – to black up and sing it, but their people never rang my people back.

The good news is that the song was eventually taken up by some jolly young fellows from Coventry who made the bold decision to recast the lyrics so they referred to Nelson Mandela in the third person. I questioned the wisdom of this, but It turned out that they fitted the tune much better after this and the record became something of a hit. Perhaps you have heard it?

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• I am the Lib Dems' new pastoral care office
• David Grace vs the drones
• Oh, those Russians!

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The Liberal Democrats are unpopular, but things can change argues Neil Monnery: "Labour now lead the polls just ten years after going into a very unpopular war and five odd years after overseeing the tanking of the economy. They are doing that with a leader who has zero personality or political nous and a shadow Chancellor who is, to be frank, vastly out of his depth. That says a great deal about how politics can ebb and flow...."

Ian Smart on the wide appeal of the Anti-Apartheid movement and how he didn't meet Nelson Mandela.

"When Mandela donned a Springbok jersey and walked onto the field to congratulate the captain, Francois Pienaar, not only was he making a sporting gesture, but reaching deep into the heart of white South Africa. Implicit in his gesture was a reassurance that he would value the things that whites held dear and seek to accommodate their interests, alongside others." Angela Gilchrist writes for Discursive of Tunbridge Wells on her time as a young journalist in South Africa and the process of national reconciliation.

Information Right and Wrongs reminds us that children can refuse to have their fingerprints taken for internal school systems.

Landscapism visits the Uffington White Horse and Wayland's Smithy.

"From here we conducted a quick march down Oxford Street, dodging the throng of Christmas shoppers, and into Soho Square for another reading from Jerusalem." Richly Evocative joins a walk taking in a variety of sites associated with the artist and visionary poet William Blake.

Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock, 1964

Nelson Mandela has died.

Let us remember him through his words from the dock at the opening of his trial in 1964 - you can read the whole statement on the African National Congress site:

In my youth in the Transkei I listened to the elders of my tribe telling stories of the old days. Amongst the tales they related to me were those of wars fought by our ancestors in defence of the fatherland. The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle. This is what has motivated me in all that I have done in relation to the charges made against me in this case. 

Having said this, I must deal immediately and at some length with the question of violence. Some of the things so far told to the Court are true and some are untrue. I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the Whites. ... 

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Mandela's release from prison in 1990, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall they year before, marked the dawn of a hopeful decade in politics. Suddenly the good guys were winning.

That spirit did not survive 9/11, but that has more to do with the inadequacy of the West's leaders than it does with the objective threat from terrorism.

We must hope that South Africa's leaders will be up to maintaining Mandela's legacy.

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"Terminally ill patients who are mentally competent ought surely to be able to get medical help to end their lives. Unless they are absolutely desperate, refusing medication or ceasing to eat or drink are not to be contemplated. A relative of mine who died in a care home not long ago used to say every time I visited her that she wished she could die, but it never occurred to her to do either." Eric Avebury makes the case for assisted dying on Liberal Democrat Voice.

"The Occupy movements dramatised questions about public space — who owns it? who can use it? — and provided some surprising answers." Richard Sennett writes on British Politics and Policy at LSE

Times Higher Education has an interview with Albie Sachs.

Ten ideas for social change in East London are presented on New Start by Claire Golf. And they may have far wider application.

adambaseyfood from Melton Mowbray calls on us to shop local.

"I guess that’s why cats seem the more popular companion for writers. They’re happy to sit on the desk beside you and be stroked now and again; they’re rarely in a hurry, whereas a dog wants you to take it on a walk and throw things for it." Lesism - by Les Floyd examines our curious relationship with cats.