Dateline

Westminster, London

Battle Looms Over EU Treaty

PA WIRE/PA PHOTOS

GORDON BROWN FACES the toughest struggle of his political career. Brown joined 26 other European leaders in Portugal endorsing the new Treaty of Lisbon and promising its ratification in Parliament after debate the first of the year. Thus far, he has defied calls to put the new treaty before the British voters in a referendum. The problem is that the Labour Party ran the last General Election on a promise to provide the voters a referendum on the proposed European Union constitution. Though the new document is called a “treaty” rather than a constitution, the distinction is rhetorical only.
Brown’s heavy-handed insistence that this is a matter for Parliament is not going down well even in his own party. A full-scale backbench revolt is in the offing, as 40 or more Labour MPs have already publicly called for the promised referendum.
This issue is not going to go away quickly. Three months have been allotted for debate in Parliament on the treaty. If Brown remains unmoved by popular sentiment, debate could extend on into the spring. At the heart of the matter is the new extended authority and control over domestic and international policy that are being ceded by its member countries to the central government of the EU, creating what objectors are calling a single European country.
With 70 percent of the British people calling for referendum on the treaty, Brown keenly knows that this is a vote he will lose. British voters just do not want the UK to surrender any more sovereignty to a greater Europeanstate. The new treaty must be similarly ratified by each of the EU member states before it would take effect in January 2009. In the meantime, the PM will be sweating political buckets.

Avebury, Wiltshire

A Thrill on Silbury Hill

MATT FABER/PA WIRE/PA PHOTOS

RECENT STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING work to stabilize Silbury Hill has given archaeologists another opportunity to look at how and why Europe’s tallest prehistoric mound was built. Medieval postholes and iron arrowheads found there suggest that it may have been a military building at Silbury in Saxon times. The oldest finds, though, are fragments of antlers, believed to have been used as picks in the quarrying of chalk during the hill’s construction. English Heritage began the 4,500-year-old mound’s conservation work in 2000, when an old excavation shaft left over from previous archaeological digs had begun to collapse.

And Just in Passing

WEIDER HISTORY ARCHIVE

LED ZEPPELIN STILL ROCKS

When the rock group Led Zeppelin announced that band members would be performing together for the first time in 19 years at London’s O2 Arena in November, 20 million fans attempted to get tickets for the comeback gig. Requests for tickets poured in to the arena’s ticket service at the rate of 80,000 per minute.

BRITAINONVIEW

WATCH THAT FLYING FLOWERPOT

Britain’s well-noted enthusiasm for gardening is not without its risks. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) reports that 300,000 people a year are hurt seriously enough in gardening accidents to require hospital treatment. Lawn mowers, flowerpots and hedge trimmers are the most common injury-inflicting implements.

THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK

JUST WILDE ABOUT EARNEST

A numbered, 1898 first edition of Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest was perhaps inadvertently donated to the Oxfam shop in Nantwich. Readers may remember that the eponymous hero of Wilde’s play is young Jack “Ernest” Worthing. The classic comedy’s deus ex machina involves the revelation that “Ernest” was a foundling babe discovered in a handbag in Victoria Station. Just so. The valuable book was discovered at the shop tucked into a handbag. The delighted Oxfam staff had the volume’s authenticity verified and put it on sale for £650.

DANA HUNTLEY

“NEW” CHESTER WALL UNSAFE

A section of Chester’s justly famous city wall unhappily had to be temporarily closed when engineers determined that it was structurally unstable. Ironically, the fault is not in the “old” section of the Roman wall, which dates back as far as AD 120. The Roman section of the two-mile circuit is fine.

In Film Forever

Good Night, Sweet Deborah

20TH CENTURY FOX/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

THE RECENT PASSING of Deborah Kerr, 89, has brought an outpouring of quiet affection for the lady regarded as the actress who most quintessentially exported her Britishness to Hollywood. A film agent spotted the young Scottishborn, English-reared actress doing walk-on parts at Regent Park’s Open Air Theatre while she was still a teen, and her years as a leading lady began. She appeared in nearly 50 films before returning primarily to the stage in 1960. Kerr received six Oscar nominations and was given an honorary Oscar in 1995 as an artist “whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance.”

‘It‘s what our society values in its history and architecture’

Al-l-l Over the Place

21st-Century Domesday Book

ENGLISH HERITAGE has created what it is calling a digital Domesday Book. Images of England’s greatest architectural treasures have been collected together online for the first time—creating an enormous library of 315,000 images available at a new Web site: www.imagesofengland.org.uk. It took seven years and an investment of $15 million to amass this extraordinary collection.

Yes, the listed buildings, public and private, stately homes, castles and cathedrals are all there, as are the railway stations, telephone kiosks, bandstands, lampposts and other iconic man-made constructions that make England herself. “The intention was to capture for ever a snapshot record of how England looks at the start of the 21st century,” said English Heritage’s chief executive Simon Thurley. “It’s a Domesday Book for our time, a digital history of England that captures at one moment what our society values in its history and its architecture.”

Trafalger Square, London

Feed the Birds, £500 a Bag?

IAN NICHOLSON/PA ARCHIVE/PA PHOTOS

SINCE 2003 it has been illegal to feed the famous pigeons in Trafalgar Square. The sensible Westminster City Council somehow decided that their droppings created a mess and that the long-standing tradition of feeding the urban avians only encouraged them. This fall, the council secured a bylaw extending the ban to the north terrace in front of the National Gallery and promising a £500 fine for those miscreants caught feeding pigeons.
Now, the Pigeon Action Group has demonstrated in the square protesting such heavy-handed government intervention. It is complaining that the 400 or so birds who still make their home in Trafalgar Square are starving to death, and the organization is lobbying for a designated feeding area.
The Westminster council’s cabinet member for street environment insists the ban will stand, saying, “They are resourceful creatures and go where there is food.” Meantime, folk still feed the birds.

‘Since the 18th century, folk have explored the High Tor rakes’

Matlock Bath, Derbyshire

No Go in the High Tor Rakes

THE OLDEST TOURIST ATTRACTION in the Derbyshire Peak District remains closed for safety reasons. Since the 18th century at least, folk have traveled to the Peaks to explore the High Tor rakes, a series of natural caves webbing through the soft limestone mountains. The High Tor caves were closed this past spring for major renovation, and may remain permanently closed to the public.
“Unfortunately, the district council is unable to re-open the lead rakes,” a spokesman confirmed, “due to the level of engineering work that would be required to ensure the public’s safety, and the compromising effect that this would have on their Scheduled Ancient Monument status.” While casual spelunking may be a thing of the past, the Peak District remains one of England’s most dramatic landscapes.

© KEVYN BURNS/ALAMY

RHIANNON BEACHAM/PA WIRE/PA PHOTOS

A TWIN IN TIMBUKTU

Visitors to Britain are well-accustomed to those signs entering towns of any size announcing twinning arrangements with one or more international municipalities, most often from other EU countries. The famed Welsh “book town” of Hay-on-Wye, however, beat 52 other challengers to win a twinning agreement with the fabled West African city of Timbuktu. Delegates, including the mayor of Timbuktu, Said Ould Mahmoud, have been feted not only in the small Welsh village of Hay, but at receptions in Westminster and Cardiff. The unlikely arrangement has been termed “a modern partnership between two ancient cultures.”

BNP SCORES ON THE WEB

Flying under the radar of mainstream British politics, the British National Party has a larger Internet presence than any other UK political party. In fact, its Web site reportedly receives more hits than all other parties combined—seven times as many as Labour’s site and almost three times that of the Conservatives.

TAKING ST. FAGANS RIGHT BACK

To the Iron Age, that is. The Welsh National History Museum at St. Fagans (see “St. Fagans,” September 2007), is to have its site expanded backwards. The award-winning outdoor air museum has gathered buildings and artifacts from all over Wales from medieval times to the present. Now, to interpret and illustrate Wales’ early history, the staff has undertaken a 10-year project to bring older, pre-Norman structures and monuments to the museum site near Cardiff. The museum gets more than 700,000 visitors a year.

DANA HUNTLEY

A TOMBSTONE IN INVERESK

A Roman tombstone has been found at the edge of a field near Inveresk—the first such Roman tombstone to be turned up in Scotland in more than 170 years. It belonged to one Crescens, a bodyguard for the British provincial Roman governor. The National Museum of Scotland describes the rare find as evidence that Inveresk was an important Roman military site in northern Britain.

COURTESY OF NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SCOTLAND

Windsor, Royal Berkshire

Prince Philip’s Heart Health Revealed

ANDREW MILLIGAN/PA WIRE/PA PHOTOS

FOR 15 YEARS, PRINCE PHILIP has been taking heart medicine. The 86-year-old Duke of Edinburgh, who is patron of the British Heart Foundation, has apparently long lived with a heart condition, knowledge of which has been kept a carefully guarded secret.
The feisty Prince Philip continues to maintain a full calendar of public engagements, while aides have been instructed to watch him closely. When asked if he had been ordered to reduce his schedule, one courtier quipped: “Who is going to tell him? To be blunt, the Duke is not somebody you tell what to do.”

‘To be blunt, the Duke is not somebody you tell what to do’

Wigan, Lancashire

The Tudor Village of Kevin Duffy

MICHAEL FOOP

FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS former cotton mill worker Kevin Duffy, 62, has been spending his life’s work building a three-quarter-size mock-Tudor village at his garden center on an old allotment near Wigan. His ongoing work is what the folks in-the-know call “outsider art.”
In fact, whether it is art or not is the subject of some debate. Artistic, Duffy’s village certainly is. The labyrinth of cottages, curving walls and rendered pillars has been compared to Sir Clough Ellis-Williams’ fantasy village of Portmeirion.
Duffy’s vision of his Tudorinspired alternative reality is constantly expanding, as is the village. Since his wife’s death 13 years ago, more than 80 new buildings and sculptures have been added.
Duffy says that he will never stop building and that he expects to die with the work in progress.

Fleet Street, London

Wags and Their Wit

PA/PA WIRE/PA PHOTOS

BRITAIN HAS LONG HAD a well-deserved reputation for its aphorisms, puns, understatements and plays on words, as well as for the curmudgeons, eccentrics and misanthropes who give rise to them. Now, the Times has polled the populace to determine a top 10 list of Britain’s wittiest individuals.
Top billing went to Oscar Wilde, whose memorable sayings are legion. On his deathbed, Wilde quipped: “My wallpaper and I are having a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.”
In second place was comic Spike Milligan, who insisted that his tombstone carry the epitaph, “I told you I was ill.” Stephen Fry, Jeremy Clarkson and Sir Winston Churchill round out the top five.

Tate Britain, London

The Greatest Art Gift in Decades

© THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

IT IS BEING CALLED one of the most important bequests to the nation in 100 years. Simon Sainsbury, scion of the grocery store Sainsburys, has left to the National Gallery and the Tate an art collection valued in excess of £100 million. The 18 masterpieces include two Monets and three Lucian Freuds, as well as works by Gauguin, Degas, Gainsborough and Henri Rousseau.
Several of the works in Sainsbury’s significant collection have not been seen in public in many years. After being shown together for the first time at Tate Britain, the works will be added to the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, Tate Britain and National Gallery. Sainsbury, along with his two brothers, paid for the new Sainsbury wing at the National Gallery in the 1990s.

Sheffield,Yorkshire

Sheffield Celebrates Its 150th Birthday

SIMON GALLOWAY/EMPICS SPORTS/PA PHOTOS

STARS AND SUNDRY CELEBRITIES CONVERGED ON Sheffield this past autumn, as Sheffield FC celebrated its 150th anniversary with a thanksgiving service at Sheffield Cathedral and a gala civic dinner. FIFA officially recognizes Sheffield as the world’s oldest football club. When the Sheffield team organized in a potting shed in October 1857, it codified the rules of the game that have become standard today. In fact, the team is proud to have in its archives the handwritten minute book containing modern footballs’ first rules. The football world duly pays homage to Sheffield.

CORGIS TRIUMPH AT FILM AWARDS

Top honors at the first Fido Film Awards for canine cinematic excellence went to Poppy, Anna, Alice, Oliver and Megan. The five corgis appeared with Helen Mirren in The Queen. The ceremony was held at London’s South Bank Arts Centre, where the corgis were collectively named “best historical hounds.” Ms. Mirren was pleased, the corgis were pleased and, one can only assume, the Queen herself was likewise pleased.

MIRAMAX/THE KOBAL COLLECTIONS

LUDICROUS LAWS TO LIVE BY

UKTV recently polled nearly 4,000 people to determine the most ludicrous pieces of legislation still lost on the British statute books. By a wide margin, the people’s favorite is a littleknown law that makes it illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament. In second place falls the statute making it treason to use a postage stamp upside down (after all, it is the Queen). Bringing up third place is an ordinance stating that only a clerk in a tropical fish store may go topless in Liverpool, followed by the banning of eating mince pies on Christmas. After that, things just get silly.

PA/PAARCHIVE/PA PHOTOS