Dateline: Britain

London & the World

Are You Free, Mr. Humphries?

ANGLO-EMI/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

TRIBUTES FROM around the world poured in following the death of John Inman in a London hospital at the age of 77. The veteran character actor became famous in the ’70s for his role as the effete Mr. Humphries in the BBC comedy series Are You Being Served? Inman made the simple line “I’m free” into one of the most recognizable catchphrases in British television. His former co-star Wendy Richard described Inman as “the funniest and most inventive actor” with whom she’s ever worked. Molly Sugden, who played the irrepressible Mrs. Slocum on the popular series said:“It’s a very sad day. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the end of an era.” While American audiences know Inman primarily as the clerk at Grace Brothers department store, the comic star went on to become one of England’s best and finest pantomime dames.

STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA ARCHIVE/PA PHOTOS

A-l-l-l Over

Big Brother Is Watching

BRITAIN HAS a reported 4.2 million security cameras in use, at least four of them pointed at the former London home of 1984 novelist George Orwell. Just as Orwell’s classic novel described Big Brother watching everyone’s lives, recent studies found that every British citizen is caught by a camera’s lens 300 times a day, The Mail on Sunday reported. There is one closed-circuit TV camera for every 14 people in Britain, the newspaper said. While most CCTV cameras are intended for security rather than indiscriminate surveillance, the prospects of abuse are ever present and much debated. Now, in public areas of several cities, CCTVs are equipped for voice. Big Brother actually tells miscreants to pick up their litter and admonishes them for anything considered antisocial behavior.

‘Now, in public areas of several cities, CCTVs are equipped for voice’

And Just in Passing

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THE CHELSEA FOOTBALL club has banned celery from their Stamford Bridge stadium and ordered fans to stop throwing the vegetable during matches. It seems in recent matches the enthusiastic home crowd has taken to pelting opposing players with salad. The Football Association is investigating.

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THE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN HEARD. The National Trust announced that it has dropped plans to convert Thomas Hardy’s birthplace into a holiday cottage. Some 15,000 people a year from all over the world visit the writer’s Dorset home between April and October. In fact, the popular furor has led the National Trust to consider extending the visitor season.

IN 1998 A 17TH-CENTURY MANOR house in Snowdonia, Pen y Bryn, just north of Bangor, was discovered to include a tower that was part of the lost palace of Prince Llywelyn, Garth Celyn. The Royal Commission of Ancient Monuments declared it “the most important site discovered in Wales in this century.” It seems the locals had always referred to the place as Twr Llywelyn, Llywelyn’s Tower. Ah, sometimes native lore proves wise beyond our knowledge.

AT CRESWELL CRAGS in Derbyshire a new museum and visitor center will be built where Britain’s only Ice Age cave art was discovered in 2003. Bison, birds and horses are among the 12,000-year-old engravings on the cave walls. Archeological finds at the site date back between 10,000 and 50,000 years and include flint and bone tools, indicating that Ice Age hunters came around to hunt reindeer and mammoth.

South of London

Ring-Necked Parakeets Flying Amok

FROM THE GREBES of the Norfolk Broads to the magnificent waterfowl that gather at Slimbridge and the puffin colonies of the Hebrides, Britain is rich in bird life. In the southern counties of Surrey and Kent, however, parakeets have become pests. Originally from India and sub-Saharan Africa, ring-necked parakeets by the thousands have colonized parks and gardens in London and southern England, challenging native birds for food and nesting space. One London ecologist notes: “They are very pretty and exotic, but they are having an impact on our woodland tree-crevice nesters. Something needs to be done but the options are complicated.” A Royal Society for the Protection of Birds spokesman acknowledged that shooting would be the sensible way to cull the parakeet populace, but admitted many people would be distressed to see the birds shot. It’s theorized that the parakeet invasion began with a flock that escaped from Shepperton Studios during the 1951 filming of The African Queen.

South Moulton, Devonshire

On a Discordant Note

DOWN IN DEVON, a concert grand piano worth &dollar;90,000 fell off a removal lorry while it was being delivered to the annual Two Moors Festival near South Moulton. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, who is the festival’s patron, chaired a two-year fundraising campaign to purchase the prized Bosendorfer instrument—which weighs half a ton and has 10,000 moving parts. The piano toppled eight feet off the truck and landed upside down on a grass bank. The damage was significant enough that organizers doubt they will get the piano back.

MICHAEL FOOP

The Dilemma of R-rated Cheese

YOU CAN’T BLAME cheesemakers in Britain for being apoplectic. Cheese has been banned as junk food from children’s television. Broadcast regulator, Ofcom, has adopted a nutritional profiling model set by the Food Standards Agency that bans junk food adverts from teatime programs, Saturday morning television and other youth programming.
Cheese, deemed to be high in fat and salt under the formula, has accordingly been relegated beyond the nutritional pale. Folks in the dairy industry overwhelmingly object. While the Government attempts to save the British people from cheese as well as terrorism, please pass the Stilton.

Edinburgh

SNP Becomes Scotland’s Largest Parliamentary Party

SPRING REGIONAL ELECTIONS reflected the bellweather changes impacting British politics these days. Elections to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and English regional and district councils saw the disappearance of recent Labour Party hegemony at the polls. The Scottish National Party won a historic victory, outpolling Labour to take a single vote plurality in the Scottish legislature. Labour remains the largest party in Welsh Assembly, but lost three seats to Plaid Cymru. In England, council elections showed the Conservative Party gaining 870 council seats, increasing by 38 the councils over which they have overall control and drawing voters equally from Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Gordon Brown has his work cut out for him convincing the electorate to stay with Labour in the next general election.

DANA HUNTLEY

‘Elections showed the Conservative Party gaining 870 council seats’

Yorkshire

Score One for the Country Pub

AT 1,732 FEET, THE TAN HILL INN, deep in the Yorkshire Dales, is the highest pub in England. The desolate country pub, four miles from the nearest village, for years has run a popular Christmas menu item called the Family Feast. Fast-food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken got wind of the local promotion and threatened legal action. It seems the Tan Hill Inn and its landlady, Tracy Daly, were subject to suit on the grounds of trademark infringement. It’s hardly likely that Yorkshire locals will confuse the remote pub’s Guinness and Stilton pate, Yorkshire puddings and cheese and biscuits with a carton of fried chicken and its accouterments. Still, it took a fair amount of media fuss before the Colonel hollered “uncle.”

Cwmbran, Newport

Welsh Punter’s Parlay Par Excellence

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BOOKMAKERS LADBROKES call it the biggest payout they have ever made in Wales. A Cwmbran man successfully beat the odds of 350,000-to-1 on the horses. Archie Evans managed to pick six horse-race winners in a row on an accumulator bet at the Sandown Park meeting. In that bet, the winnings of each successive race become the ever-mounting stake in the race to follow. Evans £2 bet netted him winnings of £700,000. When asked his plans for the money, Evans replied, “I’ve not decided yet but I know I’m going to take my wife on a bloody good holiday.” Throughout Britain, husbands are using Evans’ story as a counterargument to their wives’ insistence that gambling doesn’t pay.

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A BRONZE SCULPTURE of former South African President Nelson Mandela will be raised in historic Parliament Square. After several years of discussion, it has been decided that the commemorative statue honoring the statesman will be appropriately placed in the square’s central garden. Mandela’s statue will join those of Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, David Lloyd George, George Canning and Benjamin Disraeli in the Westminster park across the street from the Houses of Parliament.

MICHAEL FOOP

VISITBRITAIN, THE NATIONAL TOURIST office for England, Scotland and Wales, has launched a user-friendly Web site, www.visitbritain.com/ancestry, which allows users a comprehensive way to travel back in time to uncover their ancestors as well as where they came from in Great Britain.

LONDON REMAINS the number one city destination in the world. Last year London welcomed 15.4 million overseas visitors, including 2.4 million Americans whose spending contributed £1.5 billion to the city’s economy.

THE PRINCE DIED A BRICKLAYER One of the great mysteries of British history is what happened to the socalled princes in the tower, the sons of Edward IV, who disappeared in 1483. The betting favorite of all theories is that they were murdered by their uncle, Richard III. Now David Baldwin, a historian at the University of Liecester, has proposed that while Edward, the elder Prince (12), died of natural causes, his brother, Richard (10), was spirited away after Richard III’s death at Bosworth Field. Baldwin contends that the prince was taken to St. John’s Abbey in Colchester, where he kept his identity secret and worked as a bricklayer until his death in 1550.

Fire on the Cutty Sark

[caption id="DatelineBritain_img17" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] British hearts sank when the venerable Cutty Sark burned in late May.[/caption]

FIREFIGHTERS THRONGED to Greenwich Pier in the predawn of a late May morning to fight flames ripping through one of London’s most popular tourist attractions. The 19th-century tea clipper Cutty Sark, one of the last remaining such ships in the world, has been closed since November, undergoing a £25 million renovation. Many of the ship’s original fittings—its teak decking, the main mast head, paneling and most of the ship’s historic treasures—had been removed from the vessel during the work.
Still, all three decks of Cutty Sark were destroyed in the fire. It took 40 firefighters and eight engines an hour and a half to quell the 20-foot flames that engulfed the drydocked ship.
British Heritage writer Sandra Lawrence lives in Greenwich. She was on the scene as soon as the fire was out: “What really got me was the odor of wet smoke and little flakes of ash on the cobblestones of Greenwich Market—and the air of silence there this morning—it was as though we’d lost a real person. It’s being likened to the Windsor fire in importance, and though I may be a little biased, I can’t help but agree. Reports of just how bad the damage is change with each bulletin. We can only wait and hope.”
The Cutty Sark Trust has mapped a plan of action to restore the damaged ship—once one of the fastest sail-powered ships in the world. Certainly the fire damage has added indeterminate millions to what will be its continued restoration. A fundraising Web page for the public to donate money to help the ship has been created at www.justgiving.com/cuttysarkfire.

Terrorism Trial Judge Illiterate

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IN A TRIAL OF THREE MEN accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet, Judge Peter Open-shaw admitted he could not understand basic internet terms like “Web site” and “forum.” “The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told the London court. The alleged Islamic militants were in the dock for a range of charges under Britain’s Terrorism Act, including inciting another person to commit an act of terrorism “wholly or partly” outside Britain, conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to defraud banks and credit card companies. Prosecutors told the jury at Woolwich Crown Court that the defendants kept car-bomb-making manuals and videos of how to wire suicide vests as part of a campaign to promote global jihad. What’s wrong with this picture?

Inverness

Memorializing the Battle of Culloden

THE ICONIC BATTLE took place on a windswept and barren moor at Culloden on April 16, 1746. This defining moment in Scottish history ended Jacobite hopes of restoring the exiled Stuart dynasty. In less than one bleak hour—the time it takes visitors today to walk around the battlefield—9,000 Hanoverian governmental forces led by the Duke of Cumberland roundly defeated the 5,000 troops of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
The brutal measures imposed after the battle signaled the end of the distinctive way of life and culture of the Highlands of Scotland. Highland villages were laid waste, livestock was confiscated and sold. Bagpipes were designated “weapons” and along with all other arms had to be surrendered. The wearing of tartans or kilts and the speaking of Gaelic was forbidden. Following the battle, many highlanders sought to begin new lives around the world. Some of them crossed the Atlantic and were among the first “Scots-Americans.”
A new world-class visitor center will open later this year for the more than 200,000 annual visitors to the Culloden site. The innovative center will tell the complex story in a balanced way and allow visitors to draw their own conclusions about the Jacobite uprising, the battle and its consequences.

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The National Trust for Scotland has launched an international appeal to raise &dollar;3.6 million to complete this project. It hopes that Americans and Canadians of Scottish ancestry will support this historic endeavor by purchasing a Culloden Stone, which can be engraved with a brief message or a name, to be laid in the approach to the new visitor center. For more information, visit www.ownthestone.com.

York & Dorking

A Centenary of Giants

Two of Britain’s greatest cultural icons of the 20th century are being remembered on the 100th anniversary of their births in 1907.

THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NY

THE WEIDER HISTORY GROUP ARCHIVE

W.H. Auden was born in York. From limericks to baroque elegies and sonnets, Auden was a technical master of verse. In more than 400 poems, five of them book-length, and as many articles of literary and social criticism, Auden turned a protean intellect on the themes of the 20th century—angst, personhood, faith, politics and love. Eccentric, generous and unselfconsciously controversial, Auden became something of the Dr. Johnson of his time and is regarded among the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century.

Laurence Olivier was born in Dorking. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Olivier acted in 120 stage roles, nearly 60 movies and 15 television productions. He was honored with a cupboard full of Emmys and Oscars and is widely regarded as the greatest English-speaking actor of the 20th century. His 1944 film version of Shakespeare’s Henry V, long considered one of the greatest of British film classics, is being digitally remastered and will be shown this year at the Cannes Film Festival.

COURTESY OF THE ZIMMER

ENTER THE ZIMMERS. They are something of a cult success already. The Zimmers are steaming up the British music charts with their first release—a cover of The Who’s “My Generation.” Made up of 40 senior citizens (including several centenarians), the elderly rockers make the Rolling Stones look like school kids. The video of their recording session at famous Abbey Road Studios has had millions of hits on YouTube.com. The Zimmers have attracted worldwide media interest and plan to travel in the States this summer.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

THE BBC REPORTED RECENTLY that Britain had gone “Carnegie crazy.” Sports teams and educational institutions up in Yorkshire have been adopting the name. Leeds rugby union team has been renamed the Leeds Carnegie. They compete for the Carnegie Challenge Cup. Last year Headingley Stadium was renamed Headingley Carnegie Stadium, all of this in honor of the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, who in the years between 1880 and his death in 1919, gave away the equivalent of &dollar;4.3 billion.