Kmflett's Blog

Beard Liberation Front

Media Release

10^th August

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

London Beard Week: Harry Kane shaves Jeremy Corbyn in vote for Best London Beard

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that Spurs and England footballer Harry Kane has shaved Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 vote for the Best London Beard.

Kane got 15.93% of the votes compared to Corbyn’s 10.62%. Socialist and designer William Morris came third

The vote was part of the third London Beard Week which concludes on 10^th August

The week is a celebration of London, now one of the most beard friendly Capital cities in the world, and of London’s great hirsute heritage from Charles Dickens to Karl Marx.

The week coincides with CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival at Olympia and wider beer related events associated with it as well as the London Craft Beer Festival at Tobacco Dock. The campaigners say that a rise in the interest in craft beer in London, there are now over 100 breweries within the M25, has led to a massive increase in beard wearing.

As part of the week the BLF is ran a poll to find the most impactful and impressive figure with a beard who is or has been associated with London.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Jeremy Corbyn’s beard is of course omnipresent but perhaps Harry Kane’s victory is a good omen for Spurs as they kick off their Premiership season today

The best ever London Beard

Sigmund Freud, d Hampstead

Darcus Howe, anti-racist campaigner

Bernie Grant, Tottenham MP

Charles Dickens, author

Karl Marx, philosopher and activist

WG Grace, cricketer d Mottingham

Michael Rosen, broadcaster

William Morris, socialist & designer

Harry Kane, footballer b Walthamstow

William Cuffay, Leader of London Chartism

Keir Hardie, London Labour MP

Richard Thompson, singer & composer

Charles Darwin, naturalist, buried Westminster Abbey

Jeremy Corbyn, London Labour MP

Attempts to underestimate the crowd at Peterloo still persist

Dave Steele, an historian at Warwick, has claimed the crowd at Peterloo on Monday 16^th August 1819 could have been no more than 32,000. He comes to this conclusion by looking at the area occupied by the Peterloo protesters and arguing how many could have fitted into a particular space.

I don’t know whether Mr Steele ever goes to demonstrations but if he does he must surely reflect that the number of people who can fit into a particular space does not conform on these occasions to a risk assessment.

As Robert Poole and Jacqueline Riding both historians of Peterloo note the 32,000 figure rather than the 60,000 usually accepted, might well be right and would still be a very large crowd given people had no coaches or trains to get them there but had to walk.

The issue is with Steele’s ‘workings’.

It is the same method that has been used by those with quite other agendas than he has to under estimate the size of crowds going back to the Chartists at Kennington Common on April 10^th 1848.

The commonly accepted figure there is 100,000 plus but the authorities were determined to claim it was 20,000. On what basis did they do this? By claiming that no more than that could possibly have fitted into the space available. But of course they could and did.

Link to Peterloo crowd discussion

https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/peterloo-massacre-numbers-deaths-injuries-how-many-people-bicentenary-anniversary/

Chartists on 10^th April 1848

https://kmflett.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/the-size-of-the-crowd-the-chartists-on-10th-april-1848/

SDF Meeting Hasting Beach July 1908 (Hastings Museum)

Socialists, meeting places & free speech

The current political climate, perhaps enhanced a little by social media is raising some issues about where the left is able to meet and put across points that may be controversial to some.

The situation is not new, although the present conjuncture provides a particular focus. Anyone who has organised events for the left or the labour movement will know that there are some venues that are relaxed about allowing meetings and some that just wont entertain the idea.

What is less usual are venues that will accept bookings from the left and labour movement cancelling because of threats from individuals hostile to the left. Traditionally, though I think it must be accepted that this is not a better alternative, they would have tried to break the meeting up, often violently.

However there is a long history of the authorities trying to frustrate the left’s right to meet and speak out.

Perhaps one of the best known examples is in pre=1914 Hastings when the Social Democratic Federation (formed 1881) was banned from holding meetings in the town and had to resort to holding them on the beach. On occasion speakers had to use a boat just offshore to address crowds on the beach to avoid arrest.

One of the SDF’s activists in Hastings at the time was Robert Tressell (Noonan) who was working as a painter while writing the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

The SDF had been part of the 1900 meeting which set up the Labour Representation Committee, which led to the formation of the Labour Party but continued to operate independently. It split over the issue of support or otherwise for the First World War and some anti-war members joined the Communist Party from 1920. It had a specific focus on free speech for the left which reflected its own approach to politics. That is for another post though.

Below is a report from the Hastings Observer about a modern recreation of one of the beach meetings

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Celebrating 100 years since Tressell began writing his hugely influential novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, speakers in authentic outfits mounted a makeshift ‘soapbox’ and argued the case for many of the democratic rights we now take for granted.

Cllr Jeremy Birch held court with an impassioned plea to give women the vote and begin a redistribution of wealth in Britain.

Ion Castro, a committee member of the Robert Tressell Festival committee, said: “A hundred years ago, the Socialist Democratic Federation – one of the forerunners of the Labour Party – used to meet on the beach at Hastings to make their views known.

“If they had spoken in public in the town they would have been arrested by the police, but they couldn’t touch them on the beach.

“Every year we do an re-enactment of these speakers who helped shape the democratic society we now live in.”

https://www.hastingsobserver.co.uk/news/socialists-re-enactment-at-tressell-festival-1-1440774

Beard Liberation Front

9th August 2017

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

Ahead of National Sideburns Day poll to determine the best sideburns ever

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that with National Sideburns Day on Sunday it is running a snap poll to judge the best sideburns ever.

The seventh National Sideburns Day is on 11th August, reflecting the growing popularity of a range of facial hair styles.

National Sideburns Day was originally held to mark Bradley Wiggins Olympic victory in 2012

The campaigners say that sideburns, sometimes known as mutton chops, and named after US Civil War General Ambrose Burnside were often worn by Victorian politicians

Bradley Wiggins reinvented the post-1945 tradition of sideburns from Elvis Presley to Noddy Holder and the late Lemmy and Alvin Stardust, turned them into something no self-respecting hipster would be without

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, this year National Sideburns Day will underline the resilience of the style over centuries of changing facial hair fashions

The poll closes at 3pm on 11th August

Best Sideburns ever poll 2019

Noddy Holder (musician)

Lemmy (musician)

General Burnside

Alvin Stardust (singer)

Bradley Wiggins (sportsman)

Glen Campbell (singer)

Isaac Asimov (author)

Elvis Presley (singer)

Jack Nicholson (actor)

Tom Jones (singer)

Joe Strummer (musician)

Henry Winkler (The Fonz)

Brian Hibbard (Flying Pickets)

Amos Brearly (Emmerdale)

Merv Hughes (cricketer)

Ray Dorset (Mungo Jerry)

Trevor Bolder (musician)

Beards, beer and the Great British Beer Festival

I was at the Great British Beer Festival on Tuesday (it runs until Saturday at Olympia) and it was an enjoyable experience.

https://gbbf.org.uk/

My brief thoughts are here:

https://kmflett.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/the-great-british-beer-festival-things-have-changed-at-last/

In past years media coverage of the event has tended to focus on pictures of large men with beards drinking pints of beer. Fortunately that has changed thanks to the efforts of CAMRA:

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/aug/07/camra-calls-time-on-sexist-names-at-great-british-beer-festival

I’m the organiser of the Beard Liberation Front, which campaigns against irrational prejudice against those with facial hair.

To be clear however the BLF welcomes CAMRA’s policy of not promoting beers with sexist names, pump clips or imagery.

Wearing a beard or not wearing one is all about the right to a diversity of appearance and sexist beer clips stand for the reverse.

Furthermore images of men with beards necking pints (no doubt some do) do not promote a positive image of the hirsute but rather a stereotype of the hirsute as beer monsters.

Let’s hope the example of the Great British Beer Festival this week influences further positive change

Beard Liberation Front

The objections to a National Government remain as they were in 1931

I posted the piece below on July 12^th 2017 not long after Theresa May had taken the Tories to a narrow victory over Labour in the June 2017 General Election.

Even then over two years ago there was speculation as to whether a Tory Government could last in Office and if it couldn’t what could be done to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister and challenging the austerity agenda.

Even allowing for the fact that Ramsay Macdonald opposed the First World War I’m no fan of his. At the same time he had been Prime Minister and was a not inconsiderable politician which is more I think than can be said for most and perhaps all of those mooted currently as leaders of a National Unity regime

I’m not a regular reader of the Daily Mail (in fact I rarely glance at it all, hopefully for obvious reasons). However when the cultural historian Dominic Sandbrook writes a piece I do look.

The Mail is no friend of Jeremy Corbyn and Sandbrook’s piece is predictably dismissive of the Labour leader (although it does express concern that he wont be friendly to Theresa May). By contrast Sandbrook thinks that May has the greatest sense of national political leadership of anyone since Baldwin. Unfortunately he notes ‘not even Mrs May’s greatest admirers (i.e. Sandbrook) would claim her past few months have been a triumph’.

Sandbrook’s solution is for there to be a 1931 style National Government, when the then Labour Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald split the Party and joined with Tory leader Baldwin to push through an austerity agenda.

Sandbrook argues that the National Government meant Britain ‘emerged from the worst economic crisis of modern times in remarkably good times’. Hmmm.

Many would argue that what really sorted out the 1930s economic crisis was gearing up for the Second World War. The 1945 Labour Government faced an economy that was more or less bankrupt and required significant economic help from the US. Even so it founded the NHS, nationalised coal and rail and built much public housing.

The 1930s National Government did none of these things.

The result of 1931 was to split Labour and leave it as a rump in the 1935 Election, only recovering in 1945.

What Sandbrook’s history hints at, questionable as it is, is a Tory Plan B. May called an Election to increase her majority but instead lost it as Labour gained ground.

Jeremy Corbyn will clearly not be playing the role of Ramsay Macdonald and uniting with Ms May (or much more likely some other Tory leader) in a National Government to pursue austerity.

That doesn’t mean to say though that there might not be a few Labour MPs who wouldn’t find this attractive (a few only are required on the Parliamentary arithmetic). The issue is who their leader on the Labour side, the new Ramsay Macdonald, might be. Sandbrook has no suggestions.

Furthermore, if, as in 1931 a General Election was called to cement a new National Government in Office, is it likely, based on the results of June 8th that austerity candidates would carry the day?

Interesting times and to be fair to Sandbrook, an interesting historical speculation.

Beard Liberation Front

8th August

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that on the 55th anniversary of the iconic picture of the Beatles crossing Abbey Rd, taken on 8th August 1969, it is important not to forget the central role of facial hair in the shot.

Paul McCartney is shown as wearing no shoes in the picture and this has often been taken as a sign that he had in fact died.

The campaigners say the reverse is true. McCartney is the only clean shaven Beatle in the shot and this meant that he planned to go on and on.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, the difficult clean shaven legacy of the Abbey Rd picture 55 years on is that Paul McCartney is still singing Hey Jude

Beard Liberation Front

8th August

The Beard Liberation Front has welcomed the publication today of a new and possibly definitive guide on beards and religion, Beard Theology by the Church Mouse*

The campaigners say that the modern link between beards and religion in a positive sense is not new however. The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams shared the Beard of the Year 2008 accolade with singer Tom Jones:

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/tom-jones-rowan-williams-tie-2136946

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, of course as Giles Fraser underlined on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day this week beards and religion can be a controversial subject but as the new book by the Church Mouse shows there is much of positive interest in the relationship too

*https://www.waterstones.com/book/beard-theology/the-church-mouse/dave-walker/9781529318630

Beard Liberation Front

Media Release 7th August

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

London Beard Week: which is the most hirsute area of the Capital?

The third London Beard Week runs from 6th-10th August and is designed to highlight the place of London as a leading world centre for beard wearers. A poll to find the best ever London beard currently has Karl Marx in the lead with W G Grace and Charles Dickens challenging.

Another key issue however is in which part of the Capital are you likely to see the most (and arguably) the best beards?

The Beard Liberation Front is running a London Beard Week poll to find out

Which is the most hirsute area of London?

Shoreditch

Dalston

Central Hackney

Tottenham

Stoke Newington

Crouch End

Streatham

Hackney Wick

Angel Islington

Camden High St

Clapham

Kennington