Kmflett's Blog

The Ambridge Socialist

21^st June

Justin’s Family Tree research stalls as he finds slave trader link

This week in a bid to get Justin out of the kitchen, where has been experimenting prior to launching Ambridge’s first street food market, Lilian has persuaded him to review his family tree. Officially this stalled when he investigated a relative who had gone bankrupt but the Ambridge Socialist understands that the real issue was that he ‘discovered’ how easy it was for him (or anyone else) to find out his historic family links to slave traders and hence where his wealth really came from.

Kate does Yoga

The menopause is a serious issue for many which fortunately in 2020 is increasingly taken seriously. But then we have Kate… Her updated on-line version of yoga seems to have got Lilian interested albeit she clearly, and prudently, required a G&T to help matters along.

In Other News

Roy Tucker (Ian Pepperill) underlined on Friday’s Dum-Tee-Dum Zoom meeting that he is in effect the permanent ‘everyman’ of Ambridge, always there as a steadying influence. But where will the long march of everyman lead?

Ambridge statues

There are no statues to take down in Ambridge but one could be erected on the village green.

Joe Grundy

Lynda Snell

The unknown badger

Freda Fry

Nigel Pargetter, being pushed off Lower Loxley roof

UK Hop Industry faces crisis due to pub closures. Time for a national hop growing plan?

The Financial Times (19^th June)reports that the UK hop industry faces a crisis due to the three month long closure of pubs (at least for on-trade) and subsequent fall in demand for hops.

The issue is that since many brewers haven’t been brewing or are brewing less their stocks of hops remain high. Hence orders for 2021 amount to only 40% of potential production.

That means that fewer hops may get planted in the first place for next year.  The British Hop Association are quoted as saying that if the situation is not resolved by the autumn acreage under hops will be reduced or wiped out.

The FT suggests this might put the future of classic UK hops like Fuggles and Goldings under threat. While some craft beer drinkers and even a veteran CAMRA member like myself might fleetingly wonder if this might not be the end of the world, the thought should be swiftly dismissed. Both Fuggles and Goldings can produce excellent beers. The problem comes when brewers wave a hop or two at a brew and the balance between malt and hops tips heavily to the former.

There is a call for Government aid and that seems to me reasonable. After all it was the Government which required pubs to shut (albeit later than they should have).

However that does raise a wider question. Beer is the UK’s national drink. Should there not be a national plan for hop growing designed to secure and promote the future of UK hops, drawing in hop growers, brewers, SIBA and consumer groups like CAMRA?

Beard Liberation Front

A SUMMER SOLSTICE BEARD WILL FLOURISH SAY CAMPAIGNERS

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that a beard started on Midsummer’s Day, Monday in the traditional Calendar will flourish according to folk tradition

The campaigners say that based on Shakespeare’s play a Midsummer Night’s Dream a beard started on the summer solstice can have magic properties that will allow it to grow unimpeded.

In the play Bottom urges ‘good strings to your beards, new ribbons to your pumps..’

The line refers to the need to find fastenings for the false beards the actors, notably Bottom himself, are to wear for the play they are presenting.

However the campaigners say that while organic knitted beards to celebrate the longest day are fine in reality growing a real beard, where appropriate, is an excellent way to mark midsummer.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said the Solstice is one of the best times of year to start growing a beard coming as it does towards the end of national Beard Week 2024.

Beard Liberation Front

19^th June

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

French PM’s gravitas adding beard shows Boris Johnson how COVID-19 could have been handled

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s beard, praised for adding gravitas to his pronouncements, shows perpetually clean-shaven Boris Johnson one way in which he could have addressed the shambles of his handling of COVID-19.

Philippe’s beard has a distinctive white patch due to a medical condition, which however he has stated is not of a serious nature in his respect.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, As the Guardian report indicates the French PM’s beard has added an element of gravitas and reassurance to his handling of the current crisis. This is something that the French President Emmanuel Macron, as clean shaven as Boris Johnson, has lacked. Ahead of National Beard Week on 22^nd June Edouard Philippe is a good example of the positive public image hirsuteness can bring, even if some of his policies remain contested.

Report

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/19/how-french-pms-beard-became-symbol-of-coronavirus-crisis?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Bob Dylan on George Floyd

“It sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” he said. “It was beyond ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.”

The above words and the paragraph below comes from an interview Dylan did with the New York Times to mark the release of his 39^th record on 19^th June

In the 1960s and 1970s, following the work of black leaders of the civil rights movement, Dylan also worked to expose the arrogance of white privilege and the viciousness of racial hatred in America through songs like “George Jackson,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” One of his most fierce lines about policing and race came in his 1976 ballad “Hurricane”: “In Paterson that’s just the way things go/If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street/Unless you want to draw the heat.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/arts/music/bob-dylan-rough-and-rowdy-ways.html

Cato St, The Making of the English Working Class and English Exceptionalism

February 23^rd was the 200^th anniversary of the Cato St Conspiracy and it sparked the publication of a volume of new research on it*, which endeavours to rescue the conspiracy from the enormous condescension of posterity.

The phrase is appropriate because it reminds us that E P Thompson in his still benchmark Making of the English Working Class does write about Cato St but sees it very much as in the shadow of Peterloo.

For Thompson it was the mass peaceful protest of Manchester on 16^th August 1819 rather than the attempt at armed revolt of London on 23^rd February 1820 that set the framework for how the working class political tradition developed.

Thompson may well have been right but that doesn’t mean that the tradition of Cato St didn’t exist.

The Making is a book specifically about the English working class as the title says. There were good reasons for this. Thompson was meant to be writing a history that covered the period 1760 to 1960 and the Making, weighing in at around 1,000 pages in the print edition, was the first chapter. Secondly Thompson’s research was focused on England, the West Riding and London in particular.

Thompson made the point specifically in the Preface where he apologises to Scottish and Welsh readers and notes that he has dealt with the Irish only immigrants to England. Focusing specifically on Scotland he argues that ‘it is possible, at least until the 1820s, to regard the English and Scottish experiences as distinct, since trade union and political links were impermanent and immature’

Even if we allow this it remains, with the benefit of further historical research, a weakness and one that has become more evident in the 50 plus years since the book was published.

Thompson was no expert in the different but strongly related histories of the Scottish, Irish and Welsh working classes.

However without adding in that history the importance of an event like Cato St cannot properly be understood. Thompson does write briefly about the Scottish Rising of early 1820 that was very clearly related to Cato St. He doesn’t provide detail on the various West Riding attempts at risings in March and April 1820 and doesn’t cover at all the far from insignificant impact of events in Ireland and the revolutionary tradition that had developed there from the 1790s.

We can say then, as perhaps we always should, that Thompson’s book impressive though it was represents work in progress and work that should still be in progress.

*The Cato St Conspiracy, Plotting, counter-intelligence and the revolutionary tradition in Britain and Ireland, Edited by Professor Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy (MUP 2019)

After a lengthy campaign given new impetus by the Black Lives Matter movement there is progress at last on taking down the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College Oxford. Its now down yet though.

It has raised a wider question about Rhodes Scholarships but the impact of the cult of Cecil Rhodes goes much wider than that.

My thanks to those who have reminded me that the school I attended in Muswell Hill, Alexandra Park School Comprehensive had,up to 1964/5 been Cecil Rhodes Secondary. Of course AP was not the same school not least because it was comprehensive with a new sixth form building with the intention, a correct one,that numbers of students would henceforth go on to University.

That aside though the buildings,location and most of the teachers were the same. Of all this Rhodes Avenue and an associated Primary School remain. The date (probably) from the mid-1930s. Cecil Rhodes died in 1902 so the assumption of some is that the connection is with the wider Rhodes family who owned much of the area in earlier centuries.

Quite possibly but keep in mind that this was the period when the cult of Cecil Rhodes was in full swing. He was remembered not as a vicious imperialist but as a great Empire builder, one of those who had made Britain Great..

I cant find that much specific research on the cult of Rhodes in Britain but we do know it existed thanks to a 2005 book by a South African academic Paul Maylam, The Cult of Rhodes: Remembering an imperialist in Africa.

He notes how Rhodes was venerated.

In 1925 the Prince of Wales laid a wreath at his burial site while on the 25th anniversary of his death a service was held where the preacher described the site as a ‘second Westminster Abbey’.

By 1939 the England cricket team had stopped by to pay their respects and on 5th July 1953 on the 100th anniversary of Rhodes birth both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were amongst 3,000 people paying their respects.

The era of imperial veneration of Rhodes was drawing to a close by the early 1960s. At that stage even the Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had noticed the ‘winds of change’. Whether the current Cabinet have is another matter.

Keir Starmer the Continuity Arsenal Labour leader

Show Racism the Red Card Q&A. The Community Hub. Emirates Stadium, 10/5/16. Credit : Arsenal Football Club / David Price.

The former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn is a well-known Arsenal supporter.

Keir Starmer became the Continuity Arsenal fan Labour leader on 4th April 2020

He told Stephen Moss in the Guardian in 2009:

Starmer’s hobby is football, and as well as watching Arsenal he turns out twice a week for Homerton Academicals, who play not far from his home in north London

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/sep/21/keir-starmer-director-public-prosecutions

The Observer (5th April 2020 had an update)

He is a huge Arsenal fan,” says Patrick Stevens. “He goes with the same group of his mates to a pub off the Holloway Road before every match. Keir also organises five-a-side games every Sunday and Monday. He sends out the texts and collects the subs.” Asked about his playing abilities Stevens added: “He is a midfield general … with a silky left foot.”

Given that Starmer is a long-term fan one wonders if he developed his well-known forensic approach to politics from the theory and practice of former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, famous himself for his cautious and forensic approach.

The petition and campaign to rename Rhodes Avenue Primary School N22 in Muswell Hill which has come out of the Black Lives Matter movement has raised and addressed the issue of whether the school and indeed the road are named after Rhodes or other members of the Rhodes family who owned land in the area in earlier centuries.

Partly the answer is that the name is taking nowadays by many to refer to Cecil Rhodes whatever the original intention.

However the campaign has found interesting information about when the road name dates from. This appears to be 1935. Rhodes died in 1902 so surely by that time he was forgotten and its just the family name?

That however would be a mistaken view.

An article in the African Sociological Review (vol 6/1 2002) by Paul Maylam deals with the naming cult related to Rhodes. He argues that it ran for the first six decades of the twentieth century after which the anti-imperialist sentiment we are familiar with nowadays gained support.

Strikingly on the 100th anniversary of Rhodes birth in 1953 the Queen Mother opened a Centenary Exhibition in Bulawayo and 125,000 silver crowns carrying Rhodes head were struck by the Royal Mint.

It seems clear that the cult of Rhodes and naming things after him was still in full swing in the early 1950s. Indeed there is a block of flats in Camden in the 1940s that still has his name.

The petition to change the name of Rhodes Avenue Primary School (which has the support of local MP Catherine West) is here:

https://www.change.org/p/rhodes-avenue-school-haringey-rename-rhodes-avenue-school

A detail relating to the name of Rhodes Avenue from the campaign’s latest update

A map from 1912 shows the first time a road appears alongside the site however it was not named Rhodes Avenue at that time, but Hampton road. The next map, 1935, shows the school built and the road renamed. It looks most likely that the road
and school were named either at the same time or very close in succession. As was the naming of nearby Cecil Road. There are also other imperialist road names close by that we are looking into also.
The neighbouring school (that is now A.P.S) on the same complex as Rhodes Avenue was built in 1959 and called Cecil Rhodes secondary modern.
It seems likely that between 1925-1930, land developers would have known of the Rhodes link and wished to make the most of the imperial connection to Cecil Rhodes. By this time, Cecil Rhodes’ name was very much established and celebrated. Southern Rhodesia was named for him, and he had only recently died. It seems unlikely that a land developer would use the Rhodes name without the awareness of its link to Cecil.