Welsh rugby legend -and one of the best rugby players I have ever seen – Barry John, died last week. Despite only winning twenty-five caps (and five more test appearances as a British and Irish Lion) his status as one of the best rugby players of all time is secure. He seemed to be able to glide past opponents as if they weren’t there and was also able to kick accurately from either foot.

Sadly the attention he gained from his fame laid on his mind and he retired from rugby aged only 27.

This film clip contains footage of John in action:-

Barry John: 6/1/1945 – 4/2/2024. So it goes.

Hard on the heels of the news of John’s death came the announcement that the last surviving major cast member of the incomparable BBC comedy series Dad’s Army, Ian Lavender, had also passed away.

Though he made many other film and TV appearances he will be mainly remembered for playing the “stupid boy,” Private Pike, a role which probably overshadowed the rest of his acting career. This sequence contains probably the best joke in the whole run of Dad’s Army. It captured superbly both Pike’s naive exuberance and Captain Mainwaring’s unthinking bumptiousness.

Lavender also had a part in the 2016 film of Dad’s Army as Brigadier Pritchard, a very different character to Private Pike.

Arthur Ian Lavender: 16/2/1946 – 2/2/2024. So it goes

We were motoring more or less up the west coast of mainland Orkney after visiting Skara Brae and Skaill House (of which more later) when I saw an imposing tower on a hill top overlooking the sea. Then I spotted a brown (site of interest) signpost saying “Kitchener Memorial” pointing off the road towards it. I immediately turned onto the one-track road indicated.

Kitchener made his name at the Battle of Omdurman – machine guns against spears; not an equal contest – during the punitive expedition against the Mahdi after his followers (Dad’s Army‘s “fuzzy-wuzzies”) killed General Gordon at Khartoum. He later took over the conduct of the South African War (the Second Boer War) instituting the measures that made sure the Boers could not live off the land, by taking their supporters/suppliers into the original concentration camps, before becoming head of the army and featuring on the famous Great War recruiting poster.

I knew Kitchener had been drowned at sea when the ship carrying him on a mission to Russia, HMS Hampshire, hit a mine recently laid by a German submarine but hadn’t realised it had been so close to Orkney. I also hadn’t known the memorial was there so this was a serendipitous discovery.

We managed to squeeze into a space at the very small car park and contemplated the long walk up to the memorial. I discovered later that the memorial lies on Marwick Head, the westernmost point of mainland Orkney. This Vickers pattern 31b Recoil Mk 2 gun salvaged from the deck of HMS Hampshire lay at the beginning of the path:-

Memorial from path at top of cliff:-

Memorial close:-

Kitchener Memorial Plaque:-

Much more recently a memorial wall to those who died on HMS Hampshire has been erected on the site. This shows its proximity to the Kitchener Memorial:-

Unfortunately the memorialised names do not stand out well in this photo:-

The HMS Hampshire memorial wall also commemorates the HM Drifter Laurel Crown lost off Marwick Head in June 1916:-

Mr Irresponsible, aka Call me Dave, otherwise known as the Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron Esquire, has a lot of idiocies to his name. But surely the largest of these is his utterly obtuse decision to give in to the bullying of his Conservative cohorts and the threat of UKIP to his voting base by first promising and then granting them a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.

Instead of lancing the boil (he warned his party not to continue to bang on about Europe) his indulgence of their obsession has now unleashed a tide of xenophobia and intolerance, egged on by those who knowingly encourage a false belief that the troubles experienced by various communities up and down the UK are as a result of external forces (the EU,) so-called lack of control (again the EU) or immigrants (supposedly the EU but there are more migrants into the UK from outwith the EU than from inside it – and many Britons living and working in the countries of the EU) rather than the banking crash and the policies his Government has followed ever since its election in 2010. (I know its first five years were in coalition but really it was a Conservative Government in all but name.)

This tide has been growing for years – stoked up by spurious newspaper stories of EU “impositions” and “red tape” and the simplicities of people who claim that the country’s problems have one solution – and has now taken the form of a vicious and intemperate “Vote Leave” campaign which has peddled all sorts of what may be politely called inaccuracies but are in fact downright lies and often strayed close to, if not over, the border of racism.

I know the “Remain” campaign has also given apocalyptic warnings of the consequences of a leave vote, but it has not been whipping up fear of others, nor blatantly arousing expectations which will not (cannot) be fulfilled. Against whom will the anger the “Leave” campaigners have stoked be directed when things do not get better? (Either “in” or “out”, ditching austerity is not on their or David Cameron’s agenda.)

Had I been in any doubt about which way I would vote in Thursday’s referendum the “Vote Leave” television broadcast claiming that the £350 million pounds a week of the UK’s contribution to the EU budget (a large part of which promptly gets sent back anyway) would – in a leave future – be spent on the NHS instead would have made my mind up. These guys have no intention of spending money on the NHS; they want rid of it. They want to privatise everything that moves (and everything that doesn’t.) The worse thing, though, was the highlighting of five Balkan countries said to be on the point of entry into the EU (none of which actually are any time soon) plus Turkey: Turkey! which has been moving ever further away from meeting accession criteria under its present government) and then a series of arrows, leaping, Dad’s Army style, over to Britain. As if every inhabitant of those countries would immediately up sticks and come to the UK as soon as they were given the opportunity. Some may, most will not.

Then there was “Vote Leave”‘s pamphlet – delivered by post – which handily showed Turkey as having borders with Syria and Iraq. Are Syria and Iraq applying for EU membership? I don’t think so. What possible purpose can their inclusion on this map have? (Except to stoke up fears of people from there coming through Turkey – and riding the arrows to Britain.) Well, they’re doing that anyway, as “Leave” well knows and plays on. Yet in their circumstances so would I – and so would every leave campaigner.

The circumstances under which this vote is taking place, the Eurozone under strain, a refugee crisis, a war on Europe’s margins (two if you include Turkey in Europe which geographically part of it is,) render its timing more than unfortunate. It is potentially disastrous.

I really fear that a leave vote will see other countries (but emphatically not those who border Russia) seek to leave the EU. These may even include France if the Front National wins power.

In that case there will certainly be unresolved tensions between France and Germany – and we know where that has led in the past.

What the leave campaigners don’t seem to have grasped, or have deliberately ignored, is that the EU was set up (as the European Coal and Steel Community, then the Common Market) precisely so that France and Germany would never go to war again. That is emphatically in the UK’s national interest, and may be at risk. The writer of this letter to the Guardian knows what is at stake.

Whatever the result on Thursday the passions this referendum seems to have inflamed, at least in England – there has been almost no sign of it taking place at all in the way of posters and window stickers round where I live – will not be stilled easily.

You may have noticed on the clip from 1975 of The Sweet’s Action I posted a week or so back that at no 27 on the charts that week was a duo called Windsor Davies and Don Estelle.

The song concerned was Whispering Grass and since the act featured someone dressed up as a sergeant-major and a diminutive soldier in a solar topee it would seem to be one of the unlikelier hits of that – or any – year. The song, though, reached number one and stemmed of course from a TV show; the sitcom, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. Unlike Dad’s Army, with whom it shared the writing team of Jimmy Perry and David Croft, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum does not benefit from constant repeats but mention it to anyone who watched British television in the 1970s and they’ll be able to reel off the characters’ names instantly (or the major ones anyway.)

The show featured:-
Bearer Rangi Ram
Gunner (later Bombardier) Beaumont, aka Gloria.
Sergeant-major Williams, “Shuuuuut Uuuuup!”
Gunner Parkin, aka Parky. (“You’ve a fine pair of shoulders there, boy. Show ’em off. Show ’em off.”)
Mr Lah-di-dah Gunner Graham, aka Paderewski.
Gunner Sugden, aka Lofty.
Colonel Reynolds.
Captain Ashwood.
Char Wallah Mohammed.
Punkah Wallah Rumzan.
Gunner Mackintosh, aka Atlas.
Gunner Clark, aka Nobby.
Gunner Evans, aka Nosher.
And from the first few series, Bombardier Solomons, aka Solly.

It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum was an ensemble comedy on the usual Perry and Croft lines (not only Dad’s Army but also Hi-de-Hi and You Rang M’Lord; Croft also co-wrote ‘Allo ‘Allo) and featured the (mis)adventures of a Royal Artillery Concert Party in the Far East during the Second World War.

The casting of Michael Bates as Rangi was criticised even at the time as people felt an Indian actor would have been more appropriate. Yet Michael Bates was born in India – and spoke Hindi before he learned English – and was well versed in Indian culture. The paucity of Indian actors in Britain at the time is shown by the few who regularly turn up in bit parts: some actors playing several different characters over the show’s eight series.

That the show has not been repeated ad nauseam in the way that Dad’s Army has is perhaps due to the fact that it is now held to be racist, or at least non-pc. Indeed even as late as April of this year BBC bosses have decided that the show will never be re-run for that reason. Yet given its setting (Deolali, India, 1945, and later up the jungle in Burma) racist language or attitudes are hardly to be wondered at.

The 1940s were not pc. The Raj was not pc. Quite how this supposedly excessive racism can be squared with the fact that the British are uniformly ineffectual – the officers are idiots, the concert performers woeful except for the singing of Gunner Sugden, the sergeant-major is a bit thick and continually frustrated in his efforts to make his charges soldierly – while the Indians, especially Rangi and the Punkah Wallah, who has perhaps the best lines in the show (most contributed by Dino Shafeek who played the Char Wallah) are obviously more intelligent and frequently get the better of their colonial masters, is difficult to fathom.

An irony here is that one of the original performers of Whispering Grass was the group The Inkspots whose name is itself arguably racist from today’s perspective.

Another factor in the long, and now seemingly permanent, absence of the series from the small screen may be that sergeant-major Williams frequently refers to the concert party under his charge as “nancy boys” or “poofs,” mouthing this last in the closing sequence and, from series 3 on, even in the opening titles. Again, a sergeant-major in 1945 would undoubtedly have done this. To represent it is only being true to the historical record.

Confession time. The good lady and I ordered the full series set of DVDs of It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum as a Christmas present to ourselves and are steadily working our way through it. We’ve reached series 6. I have to say it’s still funny.

If you want to check them out various excerpts from the show are available on You Tube.

Anyway, here are the said Windsor Davies and Don Estelle from the Christmas Top of the Pops of 1975.

Sing, Lofty!

Windsor Davies and Don Estelle: Whispering Grass