Rotherham

Published today, the the Casey Report on Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) in the Yorkshire town of Rotherham, where around 1,400 vulnerable youngsters were subject to years of abuse by members of the Pakistani Heritage Community (PHC), makes for grim but essential reading.

The following appears at the end of a scathing and frequently heartbreaking account (in admirably clear language) of a Borough Council that was farcically dysfunctional, profoundly incompetent  and characterised by a bullying, sexist and (odd as it seems) 'politically correct' culture, a catalogue of failures compounded by shit-for-brains senior management. The impact of the Council's disgraceful and catastrophic lack of an appropriate response to the whole ghastly situation - their sole acknowledgement of the problem was simply to shut down Risky Business, a taxpayer-funded agency dedicated to tackling the issue of child grooming and sexual exploitation - has been horribly compounded by a culture of deceit and denial and back-biting by a bunch of public figures who are a disgrace to the community.

It was when I got to the deadpan note preceding 'Annex B' the list of the Council's 'achievements' that I started to splutter with a mixture of disbelief and contempt. Here it is in full:

Annex B

List of Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council achievements

In their correspondence with the Inspection Team, the former Leader and Chief Executive each wished to highlight some of the council’s achievements in Rotherham during their tenure. These included:

• Assisting Government through the Homes and Communities Agency to deliver on its housing programme in a town which has substantial housing need.
  
• Revitalising its town centre which was commended by Mary Portas through the Government’s Portas Pilot programme. This increased footfall and saw a number of independent retailers open new businesses.
  
• Building new town centre purpose built offices at Riverside House for better public access to the council. Introducing its shared services hub at Riverside House, delivering activity for other public sector partners whilst reducing overhead costs and driving cash releasing efficiencies.
  
• Restoring the Town Hall.
  
• Brokering Rotherham United to move into a new purpose built stadium in the town
  
• Maintaining the Rugby Union club in the borough.
  
• Supporting the Government’s Troubled Families initiative through its Families for Change programme
  
• Supporting sector led improvement and development relating to the adult social
  care
  
• Achieving gold standard for Investors in People as well as its Equalities standards.
  
• Introducing the Imagination Library to Rotherham (a book a month to every under 5 in the town).
  
• Establishing the Ministry of Food in Rotherham.
  
• Successfully managing to retain jobs and services in the face of continued budget reductions, including stimulating the local economy.
  
• Both also pointed to improvements in aspects of the council’s performance.
  

Now I'm all for ambitious public sector housing projects, and 'revitalising' town centres, but after a promising start (and it's not hard to figure out why the disgraced leaders of the Council began with such proud achievements) what do we get? We get multi-million pound offices for the Council, a refurbished Town Hall, and football, and Rugby Union and (God help us) a 'gold standard for Investors in People' and the hideous sounding 'Imagination' (which I expect replaced a boring old library) As for the Ministry of Food - an 'initiative' linked to the celebrity telly chef Jamie Oliver - see here. That these achievements - by no means all of them negligible - were presented in the genuine belief that they in some way mitigated the Council's reckless irresponsibility when it came to preventing the systematic rape of minors is enough to make a cat sick. You'll note, by the way, how many of their 'achievements' involve buzzy, fizzy gerunds: Assisting, Revitalising, Restoring, Brokering, Supporting, Achieving, Establishing . . . and so on, and on. Try reading them aloud with a complacent Yorkshire accent. "Brokering Rotherham United to move into a new purpose built stadium in the town." You have to admire that 'purpose built'. I mean, you can't expect Rotherham United to play in, say, a cement works or a shipyard, can you? 

Most dispiritingly, the overwhelming majority of Councillors were members of the Labour party. Does this matter? Yes - it matters in the same sense that practically all the CSE perpetrators are members of the Pakistani Heritage Community. The damage, you see, leaks into the wider world. Crudely put it's guilt by association. The Labour leaders of Rotherham may be unrepresentative (and one hopes so) of Labour councillors generally but they serve to confirm our worst fears of autocratic lefties and unaccountable trough-swilling apparatchiks.  

To be sure not all Labour councillors are boorish and bullying sexist incompetents; just as not all members of the Pakistani Hertitage Community in Rotherham are Child Sexual Exploiters (although if they also happen to be licensed taxi drivers there's a dramatic spike in the demographic, or was). But I expect more, much more, from Labour councils and Labour councillors. I expect the kind of moral integrity that you expect to  find . . . well, where else can you find it?

How to feel about this? How to express those feelings? 'A book a month to every under 5 in town.' Jesus. 

Virginia Woolf, advertising mogul

I'm not making this up. In my local branch of Marks & Spencer there are shopping bags for sale in M&S branded colours bearing, in florid 'artistic' writing the following phrase:

                    One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

The line comes from A Room of One's Own and is duly attributed to the author on the bag. But - and this is what made me do a mild double-take - she is described thus: 

                                    Virginia Woolf, Author & Publicist (1882-1941)

Publicist? Publisher, certainly, and a distinguished one, at the Hogarth Press. But 'publicist'? Could it be that whoever had the idea that M&S 'bags for life'  should bear the words of a great modernist writer simply confused 'publisher' as 'publicist'? He or she presumably signed off the oddly-punctuated and randomly capitalised text, as well as nodding through 'publicist'

Writers tend to be rubbish at advertising, as I've blogged about before.

As for the choice of author - M&S marketing specialists are presumably unconcerned by Woolf's snobbism and anti-semitism, nor troubled by the inanity of the quotation. One can think, love and even sleep well without scoffing a Marks and Sparks deep-filled chicken pie with shortcrust pastry lid.  I'm with Hemingway. In A Moveable Feast, his unreliable and hugely entertaining memoir of Paris in the 1920s, he recalls foregoing lunch to look at paintings by Gauguin. You should look at such pictures when hungry, Hemingway writes, because the artist was hungry when he painted them. Not because of poverty but because he was so completely absorbed in the act of creation that he forgot to eat. 

Sonofabook

Here's a reason to be cheerful. The new literary magazine Sonofabook is launched today and will appear twice a year, each issue under the auspices of a different editor. The first is the publisher himself, Charles Boyle. 

Before going on I should make a Declaration of Interest, as I have a piece in the debut number about Herman Melville and the elusive hyphen in Moby-Dick, the title of the book in which Moby Dick (without a hyphen) occasionally surfaces. I'm delighted and honoured to appear in Sonofabook, and even more delighted and honoured that CB editions will, later this year, publish About a Girl, my monograph on Eimear McBride. Having said all of which I'd be writing what follows regardless of any connection to the firm, because CB editions is unquestionably a Very Good Thing.

 I first met the publisher (who runs the outfit single-handedly, or does so much of the time) at the Poetry Book Fair in 2013, and we fell into conversation about Dai Vaughan, who had recently died and whose posthumous slim volume of poems Charles had published, along with a novel, Sister of the Artist. 

I happened at the time to be writing Vaughan's entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He wrote my single favourite book about cinema, Portrait of an Invisible Man. This is a biography - but much more than a biography - of the film editor Stewart McAllister, a troubled genius who worked with the great Humphrey Jennings on a handful of wartime documentaries including, famously, Listen to Britain. It's an extraordinarily moving and beautifully written meditation on the nature and art of editing, was published in by the BFI many years ago and should be republished and remain in print forever. There's no better book on the strange and enduring allure of film.

Following that meeting I started to read many of the books published by CB editions and soon realised that it was the most exciting and unpredictable list of authors I'd come across since my discovery of Calder Books back in the 1970s (and some of you reading this will know what I mean). Poetry is a particular strength of CB editions - J. O. Morgan. Andrew Elliott, Dan O'Brien and others -  but there's also startling prose from David Markson, Will Eaves, May-Lan Tan (whose debut Things to Make and Break I reviewed for the TLS) and the great, very great Agata Kristof. If you haven't read Kristof's The Notebook you're in for a beneficial shock. Few books have made a more enduring impression on my waking hours, and my dreams.

What links all these and other writers living and dead - including Apollinaire and Francis Ponge, two French favourites in wonderful bilingual editions - is the terrific taste of the publisher, which is wide-ranging, generous and admirably, bracingly, refreshingly, breathtakingly non-commercial. He takes risks, does not pander to some notional common reader, doesn't have a clueless marketing team to win over but backs his own judgement. He caters for serious people who want to read serious books, and who don't want to shell out hardback prices for glossy ephemeral paperbacks. His books are beautifully produced and the cover designs (done, as is everything else, by the publisher) are simple without being austere, and are instantly recognisable - just take a look at them here. Then spend some time on the website, then spend some money on the books. And if you subscribe to Sonofabook now you'll be entitled to a free copy of (for example) the forthcoming Kristofs. Another reason to be cheerful.

On James Joyce's birthday

James Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, at 6 o’clock on the morning of Thursday 2 February 1882. 

He was baptised on 5 February at St Joseph’s Church, Terenure Road East, when his godparents were his maternal grandmother Ellen McCann, and Philip McCann. His birth wasn’t registered until 20 March, when his name was mis-recorded as James Augusta Joyce (cf Leopold Paula Bloom).

He was the eldest, and clear favourite, of ten children: Stanislaus, Florence, Eileen, Margaret Alice, Eva May, George Alfred, May Kathleen, Charles Patrick, Mabel.

(Note to self: are these siblings anywhere embedded in Finnegans Wake?)

Ulysses was published on the author's fortieth birthday, in 1922.

The agreement with the publisher Sylvia Beach was for an edition of 1,000 copies, and Joyce would get a very generous royalty of 66 per cent of net profits. The original prospectus gave the publication date as 'the autumn of 1921' and offered details of the different versions: 100 on Dutch paper and signed by the author (350 francs); 150 on verge d'arches (250 francs); 750 on plain paper (150 francs).

A signed copy of the Dutch paper edition will today cost you around half a million dollars (plus post and packing) and will be too fragile to handle.

For around £50k you can get the Bodley Head edition from 1936 (one of 100 signed by Joyce, and with Eric Gill's Homeric bow adorning the cover), regarded by many as the most beautiful version. My humble (and unsigned) 1960 Bodley Head edition can be found for a few quid online. There's a Folio Society facsimile edition for a few hundred, if your tastes and budget tend that way.

I think it matters, when reading Ulysses, to have a decent edition, not a budget paperback with the kind of 'perfect binding' that splits and cracks - because (and somebody said this long before me) Ulysses isn't a book to read. It's a book to re-read, and constantly.

Saving Spiegelhalters - the story so far

Since setting up the campaign to secure the future of Spiegelhalter's, the East End landmark (currently under threat from developers) I have been cheered by the amount of support (well over 2,000 signatures already), the overwhelmingly positive response from locals during our leaflet campaign and the consistently positive media coverage.

This has been extensive, and this seems a good time to gather together the most significant  here.

BBC Television News

News report presented by Jean Mackenzie (01 Feb 2015)

BBC Radio London

The Breakfast Show 16 Jan 2015 (interview at 02:49:30)

The Robert Elms Show 20 Jan 2015 (interview at 01:21:00)

Newspapers, magazines etc

Architects Journal  15 Jan 2015 

The Financial Times  17 Jan 2015

The Independent  16 Jan 2015

The Londonist 14 Jan 2015

The Observer  25 Jan 2015

Private Eye see the Nooks and Corners column in issues 1365, 1383 and 1384 (not currently available online)

Spitalfields Life (A brilliant blog by 'the gentle author') 14 Jan 2015

The Save Spiegelhalters campaign is supported by:

The Twentieth Century Society

The Victorian Society

There's no space here to include the hundreds of tweets, emails of support and so on. I hope to blog selected supporter's comments from the campaign website (many of which are local memories of the Spiegelhalters) but until then can only say thank you, thank you, to everyone who, in one way of another, has supported this campaign.

On Spiegelhalter's (5)

The campaign to SAVE SPIEGELHALTERS in the Mile End Road has now been running for three weeks. We have more than 1,800 supporters and have been featured prominently in the national press - the Financial Times, The Independent and The Observer - as well as online and on BBC Radio London. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, the comments posted online by turns movie and inspiring. Matt Yeoman, the man behind the scheme has delivered a defence to the Architects Journal. It's all been great fun.

Another online campaign began last work, to preserve the murals by Eduardo Poalozzi that decorate Tottenham Court Road underground station. Around 5% of these are likely to be destroyed during CrossRail construction work. These murals are, we awe told, "one of London's most loved pieces of public art since they were erected in 1984."

I've blogged aboout Paolozzi's work before and I have to admit I'm no fan. I bracket him with writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, but don't ask ne to explain why. 

To my surprise the Paolozzi campaign has, within just a few days, attracted more than double the number of signatures of the Save Spiegelhalters petition, even though in our case we're fighting to preserve an historic landmark from complete obliteration. These forty-year-old murals seem to have caught the public affection and imagination. I've signed the petition because although I don't like the murals I'm opposed to the gratuitous destruction of anything just to save a few bob, and because I recognise that for many people the murals mean something special, and even improve the otherwise ghastly experience of using the station.

But I'm very surprised to hear them described as 'most loved'. Perhaps it's because our public sculpture in general is so rotten there's little competition, even from Paolozzi himself. Perhaps because Paolozzi is hard to like as an artist - or, to be more precise, his work is hard to like. In West London, just behind Olympia, is a huge building that acts as a kind of lumber room for London's main museums, a colossal archive not open to the general public, that I use occasionally for research. The lobby has, on permanent display, a fraction of Paolozzi's private archive of mid-century pop culture stuff - games and toys, mechanical robots and ray guns and rubber monsters and so on. A huge amount of material, some of it quite covetable. One's feeling, though, is that he was less of a collector than a hoarder. Also that what he did with his sources, his works on paper and his sculptures (including mosaics) is less than persuasive - all gong and no dinner. 

The bigger truth is that I've always disliked Tottenham Court Road station, to such an extent that I've long gone out of my way to avoid using it. The Paolozzi murals were just part of an emphatically dispiriting and haphazard environment - decades worth of unfinished 'improvements' that left wires and cables dangling at head height, grubby and dented panelling, exposed concrete and, everywhere, a sense of neglect and dereliction and malaise. It was always crowded, poorly lit, confusing and depressing, although one might argue this worked well as a preparation for the equally miserable spectacle awaiting passengers outside - the horrible squalor of eastern Oxford Street. The Thatcherite 1980s hold little appeal for me either, and I associate (perhaps wrongly) the commissioning of the Paolozzi murals as a malign example of early management culture, of wrong priorities. At the time they seemed an unjustifiable extravagance for a cash-strapped organisation.

But you don't have to like something to support its preservation. The murals are now embedded in the popular imagination, thousands of people like and admire them and we can't allow CrossRail to smash up even more of the West End. You can sign the Paolozzi petition here. here.

On Spiegelhalters (4)

Richard Waite's article about the Save Spiegelhalter's campaign appeared last week on the website of the Architects Journal and is reproduced in full below with their kind permission. Copyright www.architectsjournal.co.uk

Photograph by Catherine Croft (November 2014)

Architects Journal  15 JANUARY, 2015  

BY RICHARD WAITE

The architect behind plans to flatten a ‘tatty shop front’, described by Ian Nairn as ‘one of the best visual jokes in London’, has hit back at critics of the proposals.

Buckley Gray Yeoman wants to pull down the remains of Spiegelhalter’s jewellers shop – a ‘holdout unit’ which splits the two Neoclassical wings of the former Wickhams department store in Mile End Road – as part of a new office-led redevelopment.

The Wickhams built the shop in the 1920s in the expectation that the Spiegelhalter family business of clockmakers would eventually sell up. But the Spiegelhalters refused, leaving the ‘plucky little structure’ as a ‘powerful and evocative symbol of East End indomitability’ for almost a century.

Now the Victorian Society and the Twentieth Century Society are urging the public to sign a petition urging Tower Hamlets Council to locally list the building and halt Resolution Properties’ plans for the site.

But Matt Yeoman of Buckley Gray Yeoman has defended the scheme, saying that the two ‘sculptural shards that would replace the two-storey shop front, creating a new entrance, would pay homage to the Spiegelhalters’ resistance.

He told the AJ: ‘The Spiegelhalter story is absolutely key to our design. We have totally embraced that David and Goliath stance which the building represents.

‘We want that void to be at the heart of our development. With this Cor-ten artwork we can be slightly more sophisticated in telling this story.’

He added: ‘Of course, the counterargument is that there is no better symbol of this battle than keeping the existing building. But we say it can be commemorated in a contemporary way.

‘And frankly there is nothing left of that building other than its front wall and four openings. It is empty behind – you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the street.’   

More than 1,300 people have already signed the petition against the scheme, which includes a 1,500m² extension on top of the existing 9,300m² block.

Victorian Society conservation adviser Sarah Caradec said: ‘Spiegelhalter’s is not in itself the most architecturally important building. However, in its context it is not only amusing but it tells an important story about Whitechapel’s development.

‘Tower Hamlets should add Spiegelhalter’s to its local list, and do everything in its power to ensure that this building continues to tell its story to future generations.’

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Spread the word - SAVE SPIEGELHALTERS!