Kmflett's Blog

This (enhanced) picture shows the Rolling Stones at Glengeagles golf course in June 1965

It seems unlikely that obsessive golfer Donald Trump is impressed but he does own Scottish golf courses…

Eric Hobsbawm on the rise of the working class holiday in the 1880s & the Easter Holiday

In his book Worlds of Labour Eric Hobsbawm has a chapter on the  making of the working class 1870-1914, an echo of E P Thompson’s book on the Making of the English Working Class which covered a period up to the later 1830s. Hobsbawm’s point is that the working class was made not in the 1830s but the 1880s.

Hobsbawm identifies the 1880s as the decade which saw the rise of distinctive working class leisure. One example was football matches, and the professionalisation and proletarianization of the game exemplified by Blackburn beating the Old Etonians (1883 FA Cup Final 2-1).

Another indicator was the rise of the working class holiday. Hobsbawm quotes Herapath’s Railway Journal of 1884 which looked at holiday traffic:

Year by Year the holiday traffic at Easter, Whitsun and August is growing in importance. Its dimensions have not yet swelled so far as to seriously effect dividends, but it is easy to forsee a time when this will this will be the case.. We may never turn Easter into a carnival, but our toiling masses seem determined to turn it to account as a substantial holiday

Hobsbawm cites the example of Blackpool where the Winter Gardens were started in 1878 and the Tower was in place by 1889.

London Drinker April/May 2010

2025 marks the 15th anniversary of the re-appearance of brewing in Tottenham North London, with Redemption. The article from CAMRA’s London Drinker marked it at the time.

The brewery continues to produce excellent beer. It has moved on the same site and now has a good tap room and runs the nearby community pub the Antwerp Arms.

Tottenham has seen indy beer come and go in the past 15 years. Ora unfortunately closed recently while Beavertown stand as a reminder that Big Beer is never far away. Brewed at Tottenham Hale from 2014 its now owned by Heineken and based at Ponders End.

Pressure Drop however remains on the same industrial estate and has a beer festival this weekend.

I note this because its Indy Beer Week promoted by SIBA and running to 20th April. Its focus is on getting people to check whether their favourite beer is really independent or a ‘craft’ beer owned by a global brewer.

CAMRA’s conference in Torquay last weekend backed the idea

Third of young people now recognise the Indie Beer campaign – as inaugural UK-wide Indie Beer Week begins

Hot Cross Buns: from Cromwell to capitalism. Official bans to Victorian London street food

The tradition of Hot Cross Buns comes from a positive Good Friday tradition of baking bread or biscuits on the day which was meant to bring good luck.

This became eventually the Hot Cross Bun. Production in bakeries was banned during the Elizabethan era for reasons of religious doctrine and during the Commonwealth from 1649-1660 because of dislike of the doctrine. Private home baking of them no doubt continued.

Like all the best traditions with the rise of market capitalism the production of Hot Cross Buns was commercialised for profit and by the 1820s they were being street sold in London.

Things that won’t be televised. Revolution & Genocide

You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag
And skip out for beer during commercials, because
The revolution will not be televised

The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts
Without commercial interruptions
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle
And leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams, and Spiro Agnew
To eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary
The revolution will not be televised

The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre
And will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because
The revolution will not be televised, brother

There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mays

Pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run
Or trying to slide that color TV into a stolen ambulance
NBC will not be able to predict the winner
At 8:32 on report from 29 districts
The revolution will not be televised

There will be no pictures of pigs
Shooting down brothers on the instant replay
There will be no pictures of pigs
Shooting down brothers on the instant replay
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young
Being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand-new process
There will be no slow-motion or still lifes of Roy Wilkins
Strolling through Watts in a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit
That he has been saving for just the proper occasion

Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction
Will no longer be so damn relevant
And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane
On Search for Tomorrow, because black people will be in the street
Looking for a brighter day
The revolution will not be televised

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
And no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists
And Jackie Onassis blowing her nose
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Keys
Nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash
Engelbert Humperdinck, or The Rare Earth
The revolution will not be televised

The revolution will not be right back after a message
About a white tornado, white lightning, or white people
You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom
The tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat

The revolution will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised

Will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live

Gil Scott Heron 1974

Michael Rosen 2025

Michael Rosen has reworked Gil Scott Heron’s words to remind us powerfully that the genocide in Gaza is not televised. Israel bars all media and has murdered over 100 journalists.

The genocide will not be televised

They will keep out cameras

they will keep out those who sympathise

they will keep out those with eyes

The genocide will not be televised

The screens will be full of game shows

reality TV shows, comedy shows

quiz shows, nice-up-your home shows

cookery shows, chat shows

The genocide will not be televised

The genocide will not be televised

journalists will cluster on the outside

they won’t be let inside

they will accuse some of being spies

they will challenge numbers of those who died

The genocide will not be televised

The genocide will not be televised

they will keep saying that it’s a humane war

they keep saying that they want more

they know full well what they’re fighting for

The sea to the river, they want it all

The genocide will not be televised…

Attendance numbers at Short & Very Short Form Cricket. Every Stat tells a story

Reports that ticket sales for the T20 Blast cricket (May & June 2025) allow a comparison with aggregated attendance for the T20 and the Hundred, which is a similar competition but now franchised. It’s not clear if the figures comprise mens and womens games although since the Hundred is often both the figures there likely do

The T20 Blast 800,000 (including Finals Day). Has been 950,000

The Hundred 550,000 averaged out over 2021-2024

The Blast remains on a straight comparison more popular than the Hundred. As ever with statistics there is nuance. The Blast is played at a lot more venues, most of which have lower capacity than grounds where the Hundred is played. The Hundred as the (engineered) advantage of being played in August during school holidays in England and Wales

The Hundred of course is heavily promoted and shown on TV by Sky with some free to air matches on the BBC. Sky does show some Blast games

Conclusion: The Blast is well rooted in cricket across the country and uses the predominate format (20 overs) used for short form cricket globally. The Hundred, that’s entertainment (for some)…

(Source for the statistics, The Times 17^th April 2025)

The Lord Southampton pub in Kentish Town re-opened recently and noted that a previous regular was Karl Marx who lived very close in Grafton Terrace and Maitland Park Rd. Good news that the pub has reopened but I can find, despite a search of Marx’s correspondence, no specific evidence that he drank in there. As I note below that does not mean he didn’t

Marx liked a beer (preferably pilsner which was available in later Victorian London) and also wine (when gifted by Engels). However he did not document where he drank the beer in his correspondence with others, which runs to a number of volumes. Engels who was also keen on beer (and after he retired often had a morning pilsner) did document some of where he drank and his frequent search for good beer.

There is a well documented instance of a pub crawl involving Marx and Engels in Tottenham Court Rd and a pub in Salford they are known to have drunk in but otherwise its more a question of Marx’s liking for beer and the proximity of licensed premises to where he was residing.

Of course there is always the possibility of more evidence coming to light

We can of course make an educated guess:

1 Any pub on Tottenham Ct Rd(see above). There are fewer than in Marx’s day and not all those in 2025 were then, but the experience will be fairly authentic, albeit with more tourists than in Marx’s time

2 Lord Southampton, Kentish Town (see above)

3 The Spaniards, Hampstead. Marx is reputed to have drunk in here. Its proximity to Hampstead Heath where he took exercise makes this likely

4 Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead, as with the Spaniards

Speaking at a Working Mens Club in County Durham on 15th April Nigel Farage declared that the leader of the National Education Union Daniel Kebede is a ‘self declared Marxist’. I wasn’t aware that there was any other kind, although in 1882 (2-3 November) Engels writing to Edouard Bernstein noted that Marx had found the activities of a self proclaimed group of French Marxists as not something he would recognise. Marx had proclaimed to Paul Lafargue ‘Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne
suis pas Marxiste.’

However I don’t think Farage has read any of the 50 volumes of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels so his views on Marxism are of questionable value

The Birmingham refuse dispute has its complexities but the bottom line is that refuse workers are being asked to take a pay cut for reasons which are nothing to do with anything they have or have not done. It’s a microcosm of how modern Britain works, or does not. If there is a problem its those at the bottom who must pay not those at the top.

Step forward Wapping union buster Rupert Murdoch. He owns the Times which was once (before he owned it) regarded as the paper of record. On 16^th April it published an Editorial on the dispute and some of the lines may seem familiar to those who have watched the right-wing media over the decades.

Unite the Union is attacked as is the Labour Government, all quite routine. Next stop another Times favourite, criticism of Labour plans to extend employment laws.

Finally however there is a new twist- right-wing populism. The Times has generally been critical of Reform, until now. On 15^th April Farage wrote a column in the Sun, which Murdoch also owns (and whose journalistic operations and obsessions mostly coincide with the Times). It also ran a poll suggesting that most people think Britain is Broken. Hardly surprising after the 2010-24 Governments (which the Times supported). The Times quotes the poll and goes on to suggest that Reform may do well in the May 1^st local elections.

The tectonic plates are shifting it seems and the Times is moving away from its long held support for the Tories and moving even further right. As a reflection of ‘ruling class’ opinion its worth keeping a close watch on (and opposing of course)