The murder of Charles Walton at Lower Quinton in 1945

You can't beat the local by-election previews that Andrew Teale posts every week.

Yesterday there was an election in the Lib Dem held Quinton ward of Stratford-upon-Avon District Council. (Don't worry: we held it.) I wondered if Andrew would know about a notorious murder that took place there.

I needn't have worried. Andrew wrote in this week's preview:

The Quinton ward extends north-east from here to take in the village of Lower Quinton. This was the scene for the 1945 murder of Charles Walton, with local rumour having it that he had been ritually killed and that witchcraft was involved. 

Despite the involvement of the Metropolitan Police officer DS Robert Fabian of the Yard as chief investigating officer, no-one was ever prosecuted for Walton’s death and Warwickshire Constabulary class it as their oldest unsolved murder case.

My suspicion is that – as in many an Agatha Christie plot – what appeared to be an extraordinary killing was in fact an ordinary one with mundane financial motives. But, like poor Bella in the Wych Elm, this murder has gone down in West Midlands history.

For a short introduction of the case, you can try the relevant episode of Punt PI. But what I really recommend is the three-part investigation of it by Hypnogoria. I like its observation that it's common to come across, when researching your family history, to come across people who have left no mark on official records.

The case also inspired a new film called The Last Sacrifice. I've not seen it, but the trailer below plays up the idea that the murder of Charles Walton inspired the folk horror cinema that flourished two or three decades later.

I found the press cutting above in my folder of newspaper stories about Dennis O'Neill. The juxtaposition of the two stories is positively spooky, but that was the West Midlands in 1945.

The Standells: Try It

The first time I featured Patience and Prudence here they led me to a record about Prudence's other half – Signed D.C. by Love.

Patience also married a former member of Love, Johnny Fleck. He left Love after a fist fight with Albert Lee and later joined The Standells.

Fleck is playing bass on Try It, which for a few seconds sounds like it's going to be like something by Lou Reed, but quickly settles into a tone that reminds us that the permissive society came some years before women's liberation.

The song was banned from his stations by the American radio mogul Gordon McLendon. As an archived page about McLendon and his radio station KLIF says:

It could never be proven what The Standells were referring to when they encouraged their fans to "Try It". Was it sex, drugs, or something else? Whatever the case, the content was too much for McLendon and KLIF.

Johnny Fleck's full name was John Fleckenstein, and under that name he later became a Hollywood cinematographer. He has an impressive list of credits on IMDb. He died in 2017.

The Joy of Six 1431

"Nine of the groups are being run from Sri Lanka, three have admins in Nigeria, and the admins of six other groups appear to be located in Mexico, the US, Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Kosovo. The remaining eleven have hidden their locations, but conform to the same pattern of fake address – AI memes – gaming video creator, suggesting they are similarly moderated." Katherine Denkinson explains how foreign entrepreneurs are monetising the clicks of British racists.

Rebecca Hamer on the common thread that links abusers, from grooming gangs to Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.

"His speech on Monday was a sprawling grievance tour, hitting every GB news talking point: immigrants, net-zero, lefty lawyers; all responsible for our economic woes and declining living standards." Zoe Gruenwald deconstructs Nigel Farage's big speech.

"In July 1616, nine women from the small South Leicestershire village of Husbands Bosworth were hanged after being found guilty at the Leicester Assizes of bewitching the teenage son of the Lord of the Manor." Margaret Brecknell says the case of the so-called Witches of Husband Bosworth shines a spotlight on the atmosphere of fear and superstition sweeping the entire country during the reign of King James I.

Rob Goulding reports on disagreements over the restoration of the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire. This marvel of Victorian engineering lifts boats from the River Weaver to the Trent and Mersey Canal.

Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow show that Orson Welles notorious 1938 radio dramatisation of War of the Worlds did not cause hysteria across the US and ask why this legend persists.

Lurgi Strikes Britain: The Goon Show from November 1954

I grew up hearing how wonderful The Goon Show had been, yet when the BBC screened The Last Goon Show of All in 1972, I was hugely disappointed.

But Lurgi Strikes Britain, which was first broadcast in November 1954, is more like it. Not only does it have new resonance after the Covid pandemic, the phrase "the dreaded lurgy" has entered the language.

I also notice that the Goons hit upon the idea of dragging their BBC announcer into the programme long before Round the Horne did.

Vampire Weekend: Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

I heard this in 2008 on Radio 3's Late Junction, and thought I had discovered an obscure new band I rather liked. 

On further investigation, Vampire Weekend turned out to be about the trendiest band in the world just then. Their detractors called their music "Upper West Side Soweto" and "trust fund frat rock".

Anne Scott-James in Picture Post, a man's suit and 1941

Embed from Getty Images

Anne Scott-James was the women's editor of Picture Post during most of the second world war. This photograph of her dates from 1941 and was published as part of a feature with the headline Should Women Wear Trousers? 

I don't know if this was a serious piece on wartime clothes rationing or just a bit of fun, but  it's a wonderful photo.

Throughout my boyhood Anne Scott-James was, together with Dilys Powell, Frank Muir and Denis Norden, one of the regular panellists on the BBC Radio 4 quiz show My Word.

She was the daughter of the Liberal journalist Rolfe Scott-James and the mother of another journalist, Max Hastings.

Jimmy Young: Chain Gang

Yes, it's that Jimmy Young. The Fifties crooner, turned Sixties DJ. turned public affairs broadcaster, whose Radio 2 show lasted 30 years and attracted an audience of five million.

Chain Gang was released as a single in March 1956, before Heartbreak Hotel reached the UK. And I think it's rather wonderful.

Thanks to Andy Lewis, who played Chain Gang on his Soho Radio show last Sunday, for posting about this record on Bluesky. He said it's "a contender for the first proper British rock & roll record".

Manfred Mann's Earth Band: Joybringer

After the success of his band Manfred Mann in the Sixties, the man Manfred Mann himself went on to form Manfred Mann's Earth Band in the Seventies. Still with me?

Joybringer, which borrows two melodies from the Jupiter movement of Gustav Holst's suite The Planets, reached no. 9 in the UK singles chart in 1973. I would have heard it under the bedclothes on Radio Luxemburg, where it was probably sandwiched between Nutbush City Limits and My Coo-Ca-Choo.

I can remember liking it then, and today the way that the song makes Holst sound totally at home, even exciting, in his new setting reminds me how talented Manfred Mann has always been.

Manfred Mann's Earth Band is still touring - the only original member now is Mann himself. Meanwhile, The Manfreds – which is a sort of tribute band comprised of former members of the Sixties band Manfred Mann, including both Paul Jones and Mike d'Abo – are touring too.

The singer and guitarist on Joybringer is Mick Rogers, who went on to play with Frank Zappa.

Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf and fame in the social media age

Naomi Klein, an unimpeachably radical writer whose first book No Logo I enjoyed back in the year 2000 or thereabouts, has a problem. A writer called Naomi Wolf, who used to tackle similar political subjects from a similar standpoint, has become a darling of the MAGA crowd. You name an absurd Trumpian theory, she believes in it wholeheartedly.

In the the introduction to her latest book, Doppelganger, Klein explains how she has been mistaken for the "other Naomi" and chronically confused with her for over a decade. "I have been confused with Other Naomi for so long and so frequently that I have often felt that she was following me."

She also has a lot of illuminating things to say about fame in the social media age:

People ask me variations on this question often: What drove her over the edge? What made her lose it so thoroughly? They want a diagnosis but I, unlike her, am uncomfortable playing doctor. 

I could offer a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like: Narcissism(Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown. And there would be some truth to that bit of math.

The more I learn about her recent activities, however, the less I am able to accept the premise of these questions. They imply that when she went over the edge, she crashed to the ground. 

A more accurate description is that Wolf marched over the edge and was promptly caught in the arms of millions of people who accept every one of her extraordinary theories without question and who appear to adore her. So, while she clearly has lost what I may define as "it," she has found a great deal more – she has found a whole new world. 

Feminists of my mother's generation find Wolf's willingness to align herself with the people waging war on women's freedom mystifying. And on one level it is. As recently as 2019 Wolfe described her ill-fated book Outrageous as a cautionary tale about what happens when the secular state gets the power to enter your bedroom. Now she is in league with the people who stacked the US supreme Court with wannabe theocrats whose actions are forcing preteens to carry babies against their will. 

Yet on another level her actions are a perfect distillation of the values of the attention economy which have trained so many of us to measure our worth using crude volume-based matrixes. How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Viewers? Did it trend? 

These do not measure whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, but simply how much volume, how much traffic, it generates in the ether. And if volume is the name of the game, these crossover stars who find new levels of celebratory on the right aren't lost – they are found.

The talk of "public humiliation" and her "ill-fated book Outrageous" is a reference to an appearance on BBC Radio's Free Thinking programme, where this blog's hero Matthew Sweet pointed out that a major theme of it was based on a misunderstanding of 19th-century British legal records.

Wooden bombs, The Goon Show and Dad's Army

There's a story about Word War II that surfaces regularly on social media. It involves the Germans taking an age to build a dummy wooden airfield, only for the RAF to fly over when it's finished and drop a single wooden bomb on it.

I thought of that story listening to a 1955 episode of The Goon Show, as one does, on the wartime career of Neddy Seagoon. In an attempt to be invalided out of the Army on medical grounds, he comes up with madder and madder ideas.

His problem was that these ideas were seized upon by his superiors, put into action and invariably turned out to be a brilliant success.

At one point, he advocated covering Salisbury Plain with cardboard tanks to fool the Luftwaffe. This was followed by a news bulletin:

"This is the BBC Home Service. Last night fleets of German bombers dropped cardboard bombs on Salisbury Plain."

The top brass were delighted with all the extra cardboard because they could use it to make more tanks. (It's The Goon Show: it doesn't have to make sense.)

So it's an old joke: the Snopes page about the wooden bomb story even traces it back to 1940. But is the story true?

Almost certainly not.

The Snopes page lists several reasons not to believe it. To me the clincher is that there is no earthly reason why you would want the enemy to know they have failed to deceive you. You'd want them to think their wooden airfield is a great success and to waste their time building dozens more.

And if you think you've seen such a wooden bomb in a museum, it was almost certainly an aircraft float light.

Back to my episode of The Goon Show.

At one point the following exchange takes place:

Which one of you two is Mr Crun?

I'm Miss Bannister.

Never mind who you are. Which one is Henry Crun.

Don't tell him, Henry.

Yes, it's more or less the "Don't tell him, Pike" joke long before Dad's Army. And I've heard the Pike joke in a more obscure radio comedy, older than Dad's Army, that BBC Radio 4 Extra repeated too.

The audience at The Goon Show enjoyed it - they were having a good time - but the Pike joke barely got a laugh in the obscure comedy.

Which tells that the reason "Don't tell him, Pike" has gained immortality is the characters involved. We know Captain Mainwaring, and that's just the sort of mistake he would make. And we know Pike, and that's just the way he would react.

And now, here's Max Geldray.

BBC Radio Leicester finds The Lost Gardens of Stonton Wyville

Stonton Wyville is a Leicestershire village so obscure that I don't have my own photographs of it, though I do remember having tea at Mill Farm there in the 1990s.

But BBC Radio Leicester has been there - click on the link to hear this short feature:

Stonton Wyville is officially recognised as a ‘shrunken medieval village’, as in the past it certainly must have been much larger.

Today, Stonton Wyville parish includes a church, a manor house, a rectory and a farm.

But if you know where to look, there are still the remnants of a banqueting house with its own moat and even its own extensive pleasure gardens.

BBC Leicester’s Ben Jackson went for a look around with historian Peter Liddle.

 Oh, and the Time Team once found an Anglo-Saxon settlement near the village.

Clive Gregson and Christine Collister: I Specialise

When I was a district councillor in the 1980s, I served on the IBA committee which oversaw the commercial radio station Leicester Sound.

One of the programmes I got into the habit of listening to was John Shaw's Here Be Dragons on Sunday evenings. Shaw played a lot of folk and world music, and this is a record I remember from that time. Collister has a wonderful voice and the song's bleak sentiments appeal to me.

The Joy of Six 1365

Neal Lawson offers seven reasons the left keep losing.

Two British journalists have recently been taken off the air, apparently for questioning foreign politicians in a manner that displeased them. Ann Moody reports on the strange disappearance of Belle Donati and Sangita Myska.

Futurism on fears that AI may eat itself: "As CEOs trip over themselves to invest in artificial intelligence, there's a massive and growing elephant in the room: that any models trained on web data from after the advent of ChatGPT in 2022 are ingesting AI-generated data — an act of low-key cannibalism that may well be causing increasing technical issues that could come to threaten the entire industry."

"The city may be emptier than ever of children and families, but tables at sought-after restaurants are still booked up weeks in advance." Anna Minton says gentrification is emptying London's schools.

"One of our course participants summarised this point as follows: 'With philosophy, people care about what I think. Nobody listens when you’ve been in prison. Everything you think is wrong, rubbish, you’re nothing.' Another was even more direct: 'Hated school, dropped out at 11, can’t read, can’t write. But I can do this.'" Jim Chamberlain reflects on his experience of teaching philosophy in prisons.

The Gentle Author visits Dr Johnson's house in Gough Square, EC4.

Raymond Lefèvre and his Orchestra: Soul Coaxing

It's summer in the late Sixties and you're out for the day on a coach or in a car with plastic seats that children have to peel themselves off carefully at journey's end. This is playing on the radio and it tells you you're going to have a good time.

For this was an era when optimism was still the default register - Jonathan Meades once wrote that the future happened briefly in 1969. 

As I discovered long ago, Soul Coaxing is an orchestral arrangement of the song Âme Câline by Michel Polnareff. Lefèvre's skill here is to make you wait just long enough that you are hungry for the main theme each time it returns, but don't get impatient with the piece as a whole.

Soul Coaxing was everywhere once, and was used by Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg as a theme tune or to fill the airwaves while DJs changed over.

GUEST POST How a local radio station changed my life

Mark Howson owes a great deal to Harborough FM.

When Diane and I moved to Market Harborough in 2008 I had a low opinion of local radio, dismissing it out of hand as amateurish and thus never listening to it. I mostly listened to Krautrock and electronic music back then, so even my BBC consumption was limited to Radio 4 and occasionally 6Music.

One of my musical heroes at the time was a German fellow by the name of Manuel Göttsching, who was a legend of the Kosmische genre. One day, about a decade ago, I was perusing his website when I noticed a news item concerning an interview that was about to be broadcast "with Terry Hawke of Harborough FM". 

This stopped me in my tracks. Harborough FM? As in Market Harborough? Surely not. But I was flabbergasted to discover it was indeed the case. I tuned in at the appointed time and thoroughly enjoyed what I heard.

It turned out that Terry (sadly no longer with us) presented a show featuring new age, prog and similar music that often ran from late Saturday night through to almost dawn the next day. This was revelatory and I became a regular listener; soon also discovering other shows on the station. 

One of these was Adam Wilson’s Quiet Revolution, which is still on air and focusses on folk, world and Americana". I’d dipped my finger into these genres from time to time but knew next to nothing about them, but one song caught my attention early on – Nothing To Lose by the American artist Andrew Combs. I enjoyed the track so much I bought the album, but I continued to listen mainly to electronica.

About a year later something popped up on Facebook advertising a gig in Corby by the very same Andrew Combs. I couldn’t believe it. I contacted the promoter and offered to put up a poster for the event in the window of our shop in Great Easton.

He took up my offer and also invited me to another of his gigs that was happening before the AC one; and so it was that I found myself in The Hut at Corby rugby club one Wednesday evening sitting entranced as Nashville’s Amelia White and Yorkshire’s Dan Webster performed a selection of their songs to an audience that sadly numbered less than a dozen.

I attended quite a few more of his gigs in Corby (including the Andrew Combs one at the Viking Club), but found it frustrating that this chap was putting on amazing artists from the USA and elsewhere while clearly finding it difficult to attract an audience in the town. 

Diane had been to a few of the gigs with me and had also enjoyed them, and we both came up with the same suggestion at the same time - why don’t we put on a gig in Great Easton? After all, we knew most people in the village through the shop and could surely persuade a few to come along.

The first one we put on was in March 2018 and featured Scottish band, Southern Tenant Folk Union, and we managed to sell out the village hall. We were very much flying by the seat of our pants and nearly fell before crossing the starting line when the person supplying the PA and lighting pulled out a few days before the gig. Fortunately, the band had their own kit and the evening was a great success.

As well as shows at the hall, we put on house concerts where artists literally play in people’s homes. Our house in Harborough is too small, but we are fortunate to have music enthusiasts in Great Easton who have sufficient space and are happy to host up to 40 people in their homes for an evening of musical entertainment, and such intimate events are often the most enjoyable. One artist who played a house concert in Great Easton, Amythyst Kiah, has since gone on to collaborate with artists such as Moby and Gregory Porter and has also been nominated for a Grammy.

We have just hosted our 40th gig and, while it’s tough selling tickets in the post-pandemic world, the feeling on the night is always amazing; and we intend to continue for some time yet. We have made great friends along the way - artists and audience members who we wouldn't have met had we not been doing this - and I watch more live music now (mostly Americana) than at any point in my life.

So Harborough FM changed my life in quite a profound way, and my opinion of local radio has completely changed. Whatever genre of music you like, you can be sure that somewhere out there there’s someone sitting in a small studio, or converted garage, playing the music they love on their local station and with only the intention of sharing that love; and thanks to the internet there's a very good chance that you can listen in too. May they live long and prosper.

Mark Howson promotes music under the banner of GEPOS Promotions.

The Joy of Six 1325

Amanda Litman argues that it's time for the ageing leadership of the US Democrats to stand down: "While their wisdom and experience have value, and while some can certainly still hold their own, the septuagenarian and octogenarian class of Democratic leaders - predominantly older white men—are by and large ill-equipped for this crisis we have found ourselves in."

How do radical ideas go mainstream? Alice Evans studies the women's magazines of the 1970s to help her understand the rise of feminism.

How well did Queen Elizabeth II get along with her prime ministers? Rebecca Cope has the answers: "It would be easy to think that as a Labour Party leader from a northern middle-class background, Harold Wilson would not have gotten on well with the Queen, but quite the opposite was true. A regular at Balmoral, he was frequently asked on picnics with the wider family, and reportedly enjoyed the informality of the occasion, mucking in to help clear up after the Duke of Edinburgh’s famous barbeques."

Ellie Robson on the philosopher Mary Midgley: "In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men."

Writing in Country Life of all places, Lewis Winks demolishes the case against allowing wild camping on Dartmoor.

Michael Wood goes to the movies and thinks about Brady Corbet’s films: "How brutal or damaging does your childhood have to be to make you a great dictator or a memorable pop star? Are the connecting words ‘because of’ or ‘in spite of’? Or is there no causality here at all, just a sort of baffling coexistence? Are the films in love with an ugly idea of chance? This possibility seems especially relevant to The Brutalist."

The Joy of Six 1319

"In recent years, the United Kingdom has seen a troubling increase in Holocaust denialism, fuelled by disinformation, a lack of historical education, and the actions of influential public figures." Jack Wilkin on a growing assault on truth.

Patrick McGuinness remembers the hounding of Christopher Jefferies: "The day after his arrest, one of my former classmates spoke to the Telegraph. The article was headlined 'Joanna Yeates Murder: Suspect Christopher Jefferies was eccentric with love of poetry' and my classmate was quoted as saying: 'He was particularly keen on French films.' If innocence can look this bad, who needs guilt? Jefferies became the nation’s High-Culture Hermit-Ogre.

Phil Edwards asks why the New Statesman keeps hyping up the threat posed by Nigel Farage.

No, the HS2 'bat tunnel' has not cost £300,000 per bat, and it will protect a lot of other mammals, birds and insects. Holy heritage, Jeff Ollerton.

"That's what made him such an ideal partner for Kenneth Williams: always unselfish and understated, he complemented rather than competed. While Williams concentrated on the broad brushstrokes, he was content to add the fine details. It was why Williams, who so often came to clash with his fellow performers, never had a bad word to say about Hugh Paddick." Graham McCann pays tribute to a skilled and understated performer.

John McEwen celebrates the books of Denys Watkins Pitchford ('BB'): "His most famous was The Little Grey Men, a children’s adventure story about some gnomes who went in search of their long-lost brother. It was inspired by his own incontrovertible sighting of a gnome at the age of four. He was a down-to-earth man and never budged on this issue; though latterly he felt that gnomes, like so much of the countryside, might have become extinct during his lifetime."

Geoffrey Boycott on Parkinson before the sticks of rhubarb

As far as I can make out, this interview was screened on 3 September 1977. This other guests on the programme were James Stewart and Elkie Brooks, though she may just have sung.

That summer Boycott had ended his self-imposed exile from test cricket, played three tests for England, scored 442 runs in 5 innings (at an average of 147.33, and helped us win back the Ashes. The man could play.

Here he is very serious, with no sticks of rhubarb or mothers' pinafores. This is the Boycott who was to become sought as a batting coach by teams all around the world.

I always found Jon Agnew's bating of Boycott on Test Match Special tedious beyond belief. Ed Smith, by contrast, new how to draw him out and get him talking about the technicalities of batting, which was really interesting.

At one time, incidentally, Sir Geoffrey and Michael Parkinson were rivals for an opening birth in the Barnsley first XI. The other opener was Dickie Bird.

A treat for the Feast of Stephen: Crisp and Even Brightly

Starring the late great Timothy West and first broadcast by the BBC in 1987, this radio play purports to tell the real story behind the legend of Good King Wenceslas.

The Joy of Six 1301

"The international community has failed to rise to the occasion. Western governments have largely confined their responses to handwringing statements of “concern” over the violence, and the introduction of travel restrictions on a few government officials. The EU’s hands have been tied by Hungary and Slovakia, who have threatened to veto any effort to introduce tougher measures, such as sanctions." Alexandra Hall Hall says the West will regret abandoning the Georgian people to the clutches of Russia.

Gilo dissects the culture that prevents Church of England bishops from speaking out on abuse in the Church of England.

Jonathan Liew finds that the brave new world of cricket is now so new after all: "All over the world, at differing rates, players are learning that cricket’s new dawn is really the oldest tale of all: a game that was always rigged against them. Where a few get rich, and the rest simply fight over the scraps."

New research reveals that Doggerland - a sunken swath of Europe connecting Britain to the mainland - was more than a simple thoroughfare. It was home, reports Tristan McConnell.

"'I loved that man,' Kenneth Williams wrote that night in his diary. 'His unselfish nature, his kindness, tolerance and gentleness were an example to everyone'. Barry Took, one of Horne's regular scriptwriters, was similarly moved, describing him as 'one of the few great men I have met, and his generosity of spirit and gesture have, in my experience, never been surpassed'." Graham McCann looks back on the career of the comedian Kenneth Horne.

Francis Young considers a seasonal theological dispute: "It does seem that in the minds of some clergy, Jesus Christ and Santa Claus exist in a kind of cosmic opposition, with belief in Santa representing a hindrance to faith in children because it keeps faith always at the level of childish fantasy. The trouble with this approach, however, is that it fundamentally fails to understand the nature of faith and belief - and speaks, in fact, to a deep lack of faith in those religious believers who feel threatened by myth and story."