Campaigners criticise ‘rule bound’ World Conker Championships
The long running Campaign for Real Conkers has again distanced itself from the World Conker Championships to be held in Southwick, Northants on Sunday.
The campaigners say the Championships obsession with rules and conkers as a spectator sport is seriously damaging the future of the game.
The Campaign for Real Conkers continues to believe that conkers is something to be played, not watched, and above all is a game that is free for all and can be played anywhere without the need for rules
Campaign organiser Keith Flett said, we know the Championships raises money for charity and is good fun but the focus on it is damaging conkers. It promotes an image of conkers as a game for people of a certain age, while conkers lay uncollected and unused by younger generations.
Liz Truss is in Australia and has shared an interview with right-wing Australian politician Tony Abbott, probably best known for eating raw onions.
Both Truss and Abbott went to Oxford University. Abbott was a UK trade envoy under the Tory Government but has now been dropped by Labour.
One of the interesting things about Truss is her capacity to innovation when it comes to new ‘threats’ from the left she makes up. In the interview with Abbott Truss talked about the need to combat the ‘creeping agenda of the left’ which suggests Truss may not like spiders.
She also deployed a new catch phrase talking of the need to oppose the ‘net zero mind virus’. Its not clear exactly what this might be but in the week of Hurricane Milton it was of course hugely insensitive and by the same standard also hugely Truss.
I imagine many readers are still vaguely mystified about how I became the Prime Minister. What possessed the Tory Party to choose me. Remember-the prune lipped Pharisees of the British Establishment I was the guy from some satirical TV show (Have I Got News For You)
I was the gaffe-prone scandal-magnet who should long since have been excised..from the body politic
A summary of his response is because the Tories ran out of other options
A by way of radical history but an interesting one..
Mid-October is reportedly a chance to see a Comet that has not appeared visible from Earth for 80,000 years.
In 2024 there is detailed scientific understanding of what comets are, how they arise and where, what they consist of and what they do.
Suffice to say this post is not about the science-quite the reverse.
In Medieval times the appearance of comets were not understood except in superstitious terms. Wiki has the following:
Fear of comets as acts of God and signs of impending doom was highest in Europe from AD 1200 to 1650.[136] The year after the Great Comet of 1618, for example, Gotthard Arthusius published a pamphlet stating that it was a sign that the Day of Judgment was near.[137] He listed ten pages of comet-related disasters, including “earthquakes, floods, changes in river courses, hail storms, hot and dry weather, poor harvests, epidemics, war and treason and high prices”
By the nineteenth century there was a much better understanding that bad things happened for many reasons, but comets was not one of them.
However the comet analogy had a brief political usage around the time of Peterloo and just after.
In 1819 Shorter published a radical paper the Theological Comet which anticipated the overthrow of priests and Kings. It was subtitled the Free Thinking Englishman
E P Thompson references it in the Making of the English Working Class noting that it was the kind of publication and ideas that London ultra radicals supported in the period after the Peterloo Massacre in August 1819.
In particular Thistlewood, who was a key organiser of the Cato St Conspiracy in February 1820 may have been influenced.
Cato St, a reaction to Peterloo, was a plot to behead the Cabinet while they were at a dinner in central London. The plotters were infiltrated by Government spies who in fact may well have been the real originators of the plot, and executed.
Further political comet analogies are not to hand…
The (mainly right-wing) media is full of assessments of Labour’s first 100 days in Office which falls on 12th October. The 100 days focus dates back to US President Roosevelt in 1933. He did indeed do a lot in his first 100 days as he was grappling with the Great Depression.
The world has grown more complex and as the New Labour Manifesto noted in 1997 it was unrealistic to expect significant change in 100 days. Judging by the demands of the Minister Without Portfolio, Peter Mandelson (National Archives, Cabinet Papers PREM49)nor was the running of Downing St going any better than in 2024. He required Ministers to send him plans (grids) of what they were up to.
In the era of social media and a 24 hour news cycle however trivia is never far behind, so some details of what Starmer is doing with his life at No.10 are available.
He remains a Pescatarian so he has resumed eating Pret tuna baguettes for lunch. He is drinking strong tea (brand as yet undiscovered) and aims to get up to the Downing St flat and join the family at 8pm. Sky TV has been installed and that’s when the football starts…(source Guardian feature on the first 100 days, 12th October 2024)
Monday 21st October 5.30pm Fabrice Bensimon, The Chartist Meeting at Kennington Common, 10th April 1848. The daguerreotypes, the crowd and the coachman. In person, Room 301, Institute of Historical Research.
The daguerreotypes of the Chartist meeting on Kennington Common in London on 10 April 1848, often considered as the first crowd photographs, are among the most reproduced photos of the Victorian era. But they have not yet yielded all their secrets. This paper discusses the old question of the number of people attending the meeting. Re-examining the daguerreotypes in the light of other sources, it additionally addresses issues relating to the depiction of labour. It looks at what the daguerreotypes tell us about the relationship between the Chartist movement and London’s working class. It attempts to identify places and objects. Finally, it focuses on the place of individuals in the images of this anonymous, faceless, and voiceless crowd. It suggests the name and identity of a little-studied Chartist figure who can be seen on a photo, the coachman, carpenter and builder Henry Cullingham (1791–1873), and considers what we may derive from that.
Fabrice Bensimon: ‘Kennington Common, 10 April 1848: The Photographs, the Chartist Crowd, and the Coachman’, published in the Journal of Victorian Culture.
Notes (Keith Flett)
Below are my notes (only!)
Understanding what the dageurrotypes of the Chartist meeting on Kennington Common 10th April 1848 mean
The pictures in themselves don’t tell us that much without interpretation
There were three not two photos. One is missing but the drawing in the Illustrated London News is based on that.
We can’t get an understanding of the noise, music, speeches that were central to the occasion
A long standing issue is how many people were at the meeting. The press and Government promoted a figure of 10-15000 people, the Chartists 100,000 or above. The photos suggest towards the former but it depends when they were taken. If it was before the 12.30pm peak then the full number is not captured. If, another possibility, it was as the petition was being loaded on to cabs to go to Westminster much of the meeting had dispersed.
The photos are good enough to make out some individuals and some faces. One person who has been identified is Henry Bellingham who built the coaches seen at the Common. ‘The coachman’ had them constructed at the Chartist land settlement at Snigs End near Gloucester.
Understanding who was in the Chartist crowd on the Common is so far little explored.
Four face off in Beard of Autumn Final Beard Off vote
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers has said that after two Close Shave voting rounds the final shortlist for the coveted Beard of Autumn Award has been decided
It’s the last of four quarterly awards before the annual Beard of the Year in December.
There were two preliminary rounds of voting with a final Beard Off with a winner announced on 13th October
In the first Close Shave Round Craig Revel Horwood & Gary Lineker shaved the opposition while Moeen Ali and William Dalrymple triumphed in the second Close Shave
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, the Beard Off Final has a diverse range of beard from a Strictly judge to a cricketer, historian and football pundit. The criteria remains though, whose beard has made the most positive impact in the public eye
Keir Starmer’s Government marks its first 100 days in Office on 12th October. It has been an interesting period one aspect of which has been some apparent dysfunction in Downing St with the departure of Sue Gray and the appointment of Morgan McSweeney as Chief of Staff.
For contrast I had look (National Archives) at what New Labour was doing in its first hundred days in 1997.
Above is one snapshot.
Peter Mandelson as Minister without Portofolio is coordinating via a grid. Departmental themes and messages and rebranding are mentioned. The extract is from Chris Smith then Minister for Culture, Media and Sport.
As we know 27 years on this was all about presentation rather than, in many cases, things actually happening. However Starmer may reflect that presentation is at least a start (and he should not bring back Peter Mandelson more than he already has)
Marstons sold its interest in the Carlsberg Marston Brewing Co in June, leaving the Danish brewer as the sole owner. It has continued its brewing tour of destruction with plans to close the 150 year old Banks’s brewery in Wolverhampton announced.
Marstons is now a pub Company owning 1,339 pubs. Its latest results (Times 10th October) reveal good trading which has allowed debt to be reduced to £855m, still however around 4 times the market value of the Company. That is noteworthy but not a huge immediate issue while Marstons continues as a going concern.
Food sales in the last 13 weeks went ‘exceptionally well’ and like for like sales in the pubs overall were up 4.8% in the year to the end of September 2024, outperforming the wider market. The Times reports that the results put Marstons in a ‘strong position to drive value for shareholders’.
Those of us who are primarily here for the good beer may wonder about the priorites here..
The Government’s Employment Relations Bill was published on 10th October. Its 150 pages long with 28 measures- all welcome, although there is always scope to go further.
One ‘secret’ clause covers the important issue of cat relations in Downing St. Since become Prime Minister Keir Starmer has brought two cats to the centre of Government, one pre-existing and one new. This has raised the issue of relations with a key Downing St employee Larry, the Chief Mouser and the possibility of a demarcation dispute.
The ‘secret’ clause already provisionally implemented allows for Larry to be Senior Downing St cat with a symbolic red carpet to underline his status. A pragmatic way forward, although Larry may have other demands…
