ATTENTION! ROBBERY IN PROGRESS!

August 13, 2014, 3:24 am

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THE FINAL FIGHT FOR OUR NHS

 

Partly due to all the adverse publicity MPs and politicians have received in recent years, among the public, political apathy has increased. There’s that old saying, ‘no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in’. Some things, however, are above and beyond politics. No matter what your political leanings, left, right, liberal or UKIP, for the past 66 years we have all been beneficiaries of one of the finest organisations in Europe; the National Health Service. Even an American think-tank, the Commonwealth Fund, when examining health provision in 11 countries rated our NHS as first for care, access and efficiency. Our health spending is the second lowest of all the countries surveyed. That’s something we can all take pride in. Who came bottom of the list? The USA.  Yet back in the political world, there are those beavering away to dismantle our NHS and replace it with the American model.

"MMmm ... So you haven't managed to locate his Visa card, then?"

At a packed public meeting on August 5 at Pleasley Miners’ Welfare Club with Sir Alan Meale, MP, the public learned some stark frightening facts. 50,000 people demonstrated in support of the NHS at this year’s Conservative Party Conference, yet not one national newspaper or broadcaster reported it. However, day by day the NHS is subject to a constant stream of bad stories about its performance. Yet the story behind this stays buried. 10% of all A&E units have been closed, along with a third of walk-in centres. Half of our 600 ambulance stations are slated for closure. Stressed out GPs are facing the prospect of closing surgeries. 5,000 nurses have been sacked. Since April 2013, billions of pounds of NHS services have been put on the market. 70% of all health contracts given out by our government have gone to the private sector. Richard Branson’s Virgin Health is already operating in some hospitals, and MacDonalds have even been bidding to supply hospital food. Perhaps, if you’re young, fit and healthy, or well off, none of this bothers you. Yet one day you may be ill, and you will certainly grow old. Without the NHS, will you be financially able to cope?

Key positions in the NHS are being filled by executives with a great interest in private health care. The Chief Executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, has a previous career with the USA’s health insurance giant, United Health. Private health providers, however, can decide not to treat patients they deem ‘unprofitable’.

THIS IS ABOVE POLITICS: THIS IS YOUR FIGHT, TOO.

On Wednesday August 27^th The People’s March for the NHS, 300 miles from Jarrow to London, will arrive in Mansfield. It will be led by women, many of them health workers. These are not raving Trotskyists but ordinary working women who have taken the words of the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevin, to heart; “'The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.' We should welcome them when they arrive in our town with open arms.

Our NHS is not about politics, left or right. No one should profit from illness. Health care is about  being human.   As Bevin also said “No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means”.

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A NATION STAINED FOREVER

September 1, 2014, 12:38 pm

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Stained Nation

 

the curse of graffiti: A BEAUTIFUL BODY, PERMANENTLY RUINED.

I am very nervous writing this. The reason?  I am commenting upon a new religion. Many of you are no doubt disciples. This makes me a heretic, but here goes. 

    In the early 1960s, whilst serving in the Merchant Navy, one drunken night, I found myself sitting in a chair in a Tattoo parlour in Valetta, Malta. I had decided that, as a mariner, I ought to at least have a Popeye anchor on my forearm. Then I saw the equally sozzled occupants of the other two chairs. Two huge U.S. Navy sailors, stripped to the waist, were waiting a fresh ‘inking’. Their bodies were already covered in splodgy blue-green tattoos. Panthers, crucifixes, snakes, rosebuds, hearts, the US flag, unidentifiable wildlife. It made me feel nauseous. I got up and left. I had changed by mind.

Half a century later, I’m so glad I did.

   I grew up with tattoos. My father, who served over 20 years in the Army, mostly in India, was the original illustrated man. Flags of the Empire on his back, a tiger and a lion across his chest, spears, crossed rifles, his regimental badge, snakes coiling down his arms, their heads destined to forever poke from his shirt cuffs. As a kid this fascinated me. But tattoos back then were, in the main, the choice of sailors, soldiers, and criminals. As for women being tattooed, most men regarded that as a strong visual hint of prostitution. Today tattoos have a mystique which emanates from the underworld. The Russian Mafia identify their status with their tattooed icons. Mexican and Columbian drug cartels have their own ‘inkings’. Criminals on Death Row in the USA love their tattoos. In the South Pacific, among such nations as the Maoris, tattoos were a tribal badge.  Strange, then, that Britain is now the most ‘inked’ nation in Europe.

    Undoubtedly, many tattoo artists (my nephew, for instance) are very talented.  Yet it

seems sad that the skin nature gave us no longer seems enough; it has to be scribbled on. Celtic crosses, swallows, Chinese characters. We British have them all. Perhaps an ‘inking’ makes one feel windswept and interesting, an expression of ‘individuality’. But as the well-illustrated Ozzy Osborne commented; “If you want to be different, don’t have a tattoo.” A recent report by the British Sociological Association suggests tattoos can hinder you getting a job. Another suggested that tattooed women were viewed as "less physically attractive, more sexually promiscuous and heavier drinkers".

    As a somewhat ugly, overweight old man I envy athletes with natural bodies like David Beckham. If I had been born that lucky, would I have had all that magnificent muscle tone covered in indecipherable foreign script and dull green graffiti? I think not. I’m sure Cheryl Cole’s derriere was once a pleasant sight. Pity she’s turned it into

a page from a garden centre catalogue. There are many reasons given for being ‘inked’. To honour a loved one. To express your ‘uniqueness’. I know how utterly alone I stand with this view, but to me, the 21st century tattoo represents  the sad decline of culture. It brands people as thick, self-centred, and at the same time, desperate for attention. Skilled the tattoo artists may be, and well paid (Ms. Cole's arse inking cost more than the price of a new car). However, in a few decades, today’s tattooed generation could well be looking at their wrinkled, ink-blotched aged skin and asking “What was I thinking?” To paraphrase that RSPCA warning, ‘a dog isn’t just for Christmas’ - but a tattoo is for life.  

BORING OLD FARTS

September 15, 2014, 5:18 am

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IN THE PRIME OF SENILITY

 

Our lovely late daughter, Sarah, used to say frequently that she had no desire to reach old age. Perhaps this was the inevitable influence of her working life; for

30 years she had worked in the NHS caring for geriatrics. She saw life at its withering end, every day. Leaving us at 46, she had her way. She never grew to be an ‘old lady’, so perhaps those last few smiles she gave us on December 23 2012 signified something. She’d had a good, full life and enjoyed herself. We can’t ask for much more than that.

Those of us left behind, who have ‘grown old’  see life through a different lens. I used to look at retired people when I was still out driving my weekly 1,000 miles up and down the country, making a fraught living, and envy them. No more being ruled by the alarm clock. No bosses telling you what to do. Your days, open-ended; golden hours to fill as you wish. In many ways, yes, this is how it is. Living as we do in England, where we have a pension, a roof over our heads and we don’t starve, we’re some of the luckiest people on the planet. Being old and retired? What’s not to like?

There are things about getting old that they don’t tell you about. That’s because most folk under the age of 60 have no idea what they are. These things come as part of a package along with your pension. Firstly, because of what we call the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’, once we hang up our working clothes the rhythm of life changes. Earning one’s daily bread, keeping the mortgage paid, feeding and clothing the kids, this was the perpetual motion engine which made us function. Leisure time therefore was compressed into the spaces in between, and made precious by the fact. When the machine shuts down, something remains; a sense of guilt. I should be doing something. I’m luckier than most because I fill my time writing, turning my thoughts and interests into words. But I suffer the same external tribulations as my fellow retirees. Prominent among these is that post-65, we enter what I call the ‘season of funerals’. Your friends and relatives, those in this age group, have an inconvenient habit of dying. This inevitably engenders your own personal gloom. How long will I last?  Now that I’m 71, each day another name is flagged up, another death. We’ve had four funerals in the past year. On top of this your whole physique begins to let you down. Aches and pains abound. Bending down to pick up a piece of dropped cutlery becomes a small challenge accompanied by a grunt. I used to sleep well. Now, I hate going to bed. I read until the early hours, and once we do nod off, sleep is wrenched from us by the demands of the bladder. And throughout the day, the outside world, brimming with youthful activity, becomes a more complex and incomprehensible place.

    Being old, we feel like part of another ‘tribe’. We are constantly puzzled. Why are all those people wandering around clutching their I-phones, why do they disfigure themselves with tattoos, why do they throw their  discarded packaging to the pavement? What the hell is the attraction of Rap and Hip-Hop? Why can’t these people take an active interest in politics and social affairs and sort this bloody awful world out?

The fact is, none of this really matters because this confusion is simply another element of the old age package. We all remember, discovering our pop music in our teens, that voice shouting up the stairs - “Turn that bloody racket down!”  It seems that once we stop work at 65, our minds are frozen in aspic and every external movement becomes a threatening conundrum. In the final analysis, my old friends, there is a consolation here. No-one is immune to these afflictions. Yes, once Cheryl Cole’s over-tattooed arse becomes a wrinkled 70 year old approximation of a crocodile handbag, once Dappy from N-Dubs ‘grows up’ (some chance) and sees his various headgear as a clown’s haberdashery, and when Michael McIntyre retires, rich yet in the realisation that he wasn’t 1% as funny as Billy Connolly or Eric Morecambe,  then they too will look in the mirror and text their friends with WTF?

I like being retired for the freedom it gives me to spend time writing down my thoughts. I like the open-ended days. I love the wide landscape of potential creativity. What I don’t like is the unfairness of it all. Fifty years of work, struggle and discipline externally imposed, and what do we get at the end? Ten years of ‘freedom’ if we’re lucky. So in the end biology defeats us. Here endeth this rant.

However, looking at the wider world, all these words I have written here are sheer luxury. As I write this some poor woman in Africa, with a life expectancy of 50, is walking 5 miles every morning to get 5 gallons of muddy water in a jerry can. Children in Iraq and Syria watch as the stark madness of ‘religion’ engulfs and destroys their family as murderous psychopaths, hell-bent on dragging us back to the 12^thcentury, hack innocent people’s heads off whilst telling us that ‘Allah is merciful’. Hundreds of tiny children have died around the globe whilst I’ve been sitting in obese safety and comfort carping on about what a ‘bum deal’ we old English folk have.

Thus I balance it all by telling myself: Quit the crap, abandon the bullshit and face facts. There are degrees of misery in this world and, based on a scale of 1 - 10 mine is a 1. So although navel-gazing is good every now and then, we ought to look down and be thankful that our navel is still there. Time for a pot of tea and a sandwich now, and a cold reality check.

 

DIVE! DIVE! DIVE!

October 4, 2014, 7:00 am

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Up Periscope!

Go here: http://www.constablerobinson.com

Well, it’s taken a long time but finally the re-issue of Honoured By Strangers, my biography of legendary submariner Captain Francis Newton Allen Cromie CB DSO RN (1882-1918) as an e-book finally sees publication on October 9 by Little, Brown Ltd. through their subsidiary, Constable & Robinson. Honoured By Strangers has its faults; I had no idea how to go about writing a biography when I took this on 13 years ago. It was a learning curve but one which has served me well in the ensuing years. Perhaps I ought to have up-dated the book in some way, yet reading through it again recently, and looking at some of the positive reviews it received, I’m pleased I left it in its original state, warts and all. As to what chance it has sales-wise as an e-book is anyone’s guess, because one aspect of having such a launch would have been reliability on its appearance on Amazon.com. However, trust my luck - the one company to fall out with Amazon over terms and profits just happens to be the enormous global publishing behemoth, Hachette, the parent company of Little, Brown Ltd. So, I’m wondering if the Hachette/Amazon dispute will seriously damage sales on Amazon. Hachette do have valid issues about the way Amazon tends to hoover up every creative work and sell it on, often diminishing the benefit t both authors and publishers. But that’s capitalism for you. It has triumphed over all notions of fairness and community, and operates with just two driving motives; maximum corporate profits and the care and nurture of faceless shareholders. We in the creative sector are just wild flowers in an artistic meadow - stoop down, pick a free handful and sell them on to a public who don’t give a jot about the creative process which produces their daily entertainment.

Now I’m in my seventies, I’m just bordering on lucky that I have any literary product available for sale at all. If I was three decades younger, with a longer calendar ahead, then I would be manning some kind of barricade. All I can do is offer support from the side-lines for art’s angry campaigners, powered by the embers of my socialist outrage which still keep me railing against a world run by, and exclusively for, the super-rich.

Strange in the end, that this long-dead man who, alongside my passion for Crazy Horse, ends up as one of my heroes, should be the subject of my favourite bit of work. Strange, because if I could travel back in time to meet Cromie, we would have little in common. Me, an excessively over-romantic Trotskyist, him a dyed-in-the-wool Imperialist prepared to give his life for that most vacuous of notions, 'King and Country'.  Yet they were different times, different attitudes, different men.  What appealed to me about this somewhat naïve yet brave man was his sense of honour, his compassionate determination, and his hope of salvaging something from the crumbling, changing world he found around him. So, from across the divide on the political battleground, Francis, I salute you, despite our differences. You were that rare thing - a Good Man.

   

Russell Brand - Muddled Messiah?

October 30, 2014, 9:41 am

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LET’S HEAR IT - THE PEASANTS ARE REVOLTING!

You'll look fine on a poster, Russell, but what's your SOLUTION?

I’m a peasant. I live in a nice house, I have a state pension and a car, two TV sets, and I earn a few extra quid from writing. But I’m a peasant, because I come from a long working class heritage and since leaving school in 1959, I’ve done just about every manual job a modern peasant might be expected to do. Labouring, farm work, hospital porter, factory foreman, sewage worker, milkman, bread delivery man, sailor, driver, printer, shop manager, salesman … then, in 1997, finally, writer. All my family have worked with their hands. My brother is a brilliant carpenter, as was his dad (who was my fine step father), and my patriarchal bloodline in Barnsley were all coal miners. My Mother was a maid and a cook and a cleaner. Thankfully, we were able to break this chain with our son, Martin, who managed to get a BA and PhD and can now be referred to as ‘Doctor’. Our much missed and beloved late daughter, Sarah, spent 30 years of her life in the NHS nursing the elderly.  But we’re still peasants.

     It’s silly to say this makes us ‘proud’. That’s as daft as patriotism. You are born wherever your mother has you, and into what social class she occupied. It’s facile to say I’m ‘proud’ of being English or a peasant any more than David Cameron would proclaim his pride in social inequality and capitalism. But Capitalists, by virtue of their wealth, have choices. Their wealth protects them from ‘the peasantry’ and they have a handy firewall between the disenchanted and the money. This protective barrier, Whitehall, MI5, GCHQ, the Police, Parliament and the House of Lords is made up of people who sit in the bearable comfort zone of middle to higher income. Anyone below them, unions, for example, who wish to challenge the status quo and release the imprisoned genie of equality from its well-sealed bottle, will immediately set off Capitalism’s burglar alarm and the firewall will clamp down around us like a massive steel barrier.

India today - Britain tomorrow? The Bullingdon Boys would love this ...

     But looking at the way things are, something has to give. We’ve had pointless, expensive foreign wars. Wages are deliberately kept down. The poor shoulder the blame for everything, innocent though they are. Anything owned by and run by the people is immediately stolen by rapacious capital, which sees the notion of ‘profit’ as the only exchange permissible between human beings. Our politicians only serve themselves. People are feeling powerless, currently forced into a corner to defend our last great possession, the NHS. Now, sadly, they are turning to the vacuous side-show of a phoney politics, a blatant diversionary façade erected by Ukip. Deny it as they may, but Ukip’s constantly expanding xenophobia is every bit as toxic as that developed by Hitler and Goebbels in the 1930s. Ukip are a dangerous distraction, and if people think that the world will be a better place with Farage in power, they should look more carefully at what he stands for.

A NEW PEASANT'S REVOLT?

  

The Peasants’ Revolt of June 1381 was a medieval result of just the same set of inequalities. A violent system of punishments for offenders prevented peasants from causing trouble. Most areas in England had well-garrisoned castles, the equivalent of our GCHQ and MI5, and the serving soldiers were usually enough to guarantee reasonable behaviour among medieval peasants. Taxes were high, wages low. Barons and Royalty became greedier by the day and lived in luxury. In 1380, Richard II had introduced a new tax called the Poll Tax. This made everyone who was on the tax register pay 5p. It was the third time in four years that such a tax had been used. By 1381, the peasants had had enough. 5p was an impossible commitment then. If you could not pay in cash, you paid in kind, with your seeds, tools etc., the very things peasants needed to survive in the coming year. Pointless foreign wars drained the coffers, and, as ever, the poor were stamped upon until they could take no more punishment, and in place of today’s Ebola fear-mongering, they had the real threat of the Black Death.

    Sounds familiar? So what do we do? Occupy a few concourses outside banks, wave banners, express our anger and dismay, then go home. But the peasants of 1381 did something no-one had done before or since - they captured the Tower of London. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the King’s Treasurer were killed. The peasants were supported by the Nigel Farage of their day, a priest called John Ball from Kent. The king, Richard II, was only 14 at the time but despite his youth, he agreed to meet the peasants at a place called Mile End. There, the peasant’s angry and aggressive leader, Wat Tyler, who had marched to London, destroyed tax records and tax registers, imagined that the King’s agreement to the peasant’s demands would be honoured. But as with the ‘promises’ we’ve all heard, such as  ‘no university fees’ or ‘no top-down re-organisation of the NHS’, what could Tyler and John Ball have expected from those who lived in luxury, who turned out in their regal finery to meet this ragtag army of ordinary folk?  Honour? Unbroken promises? On June 15th, the King and his entourage, including London’s Mayor,  Sir William Walworthe, met the rebels at Smithfield outside of the city’s walls. At this meeting, the Lord Mayor killed Wat Tyler. John Ball was hanged, as were many other peasant leaders. Richard did not keep any of his promises, claiming that they were made under threat and were therefore not valid in law.

The murder of Wat Tyler

   That duplicity of the powers-that-be is now the standard of 21^st century capitalism. As Hitler said, make the lies big enough and tell them enough times and the people will believe you. David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Hunt and Iain Duncan Smith are all today’s King Richards and Barons, and Boris Johnson is our very own Sir William Walworthe.

    So who can we, the people, turn to? Capitalism has ground the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky into the ground. The Labour Party, once the champion of the working man, offers nothing more than the limp manifesto of the spineless Nick Clegg. They all dance around the witches’ cauldron of Europe and Immigration, oblivious to the legacy of WW1 and the Third Reich.

     And into this dark melee steps a leather-trousered comedian, Russell Brand. Is he the new Wat Tyler, the new John Ball? Does he seriously think we can bring some sort of fairness and equality to our sorry world by avoiding the ballot box? It’s hard to say. But at least he’s raising his head above the parapet and making people think about all this. He writes brilliantly, and has a lion’s courage. But he has no solutions. The only trouble is, in the zoo which governs us, lions don’t count. It’s that big, dumb boa constrictor, Nigel Farage, and his army of stinging tarantulas who are calling the tune. Maybe, then, we should let Ukip have their way. Once they come out in their true fascist colours and we’ve suffered even more inequality, then perhaps a new peasant’s revolt might be on the cards at last. But this time, we’ll not be meeting the king and the mayor. We’ll be giving them a manual job, a tool box and a council house, and showing them that there’s another life out here, one which they’ve preferred to ignore for far too long.  

 

A Shaky Memoir

November 29, 2014, 11:44 am

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 Unreliable Memoirs

Sometimes, and that means much of my time these days, a writer writes simply to get the words out of his heart and soul and onto the page lest they die when he does. I suppose a lot of this is to do with ego; we feel that what we carry around in our mental rucksack is worthy of sharing with the world, and we’ll not know if that was the case until someone reads it all and passes judgment.

For years, over long hours of eating, drinking and smoking, I’ve been regaling anyone who’ll listen with stories about childhood and the formative years until marriage in 1966. The first volume I completed, Crazy Horse and The Coalman, has gone out to a limited circle of family and friends and, in general, was well received. It told the story from birth to my teens, with a narrative which ran simultaneously with the true story of my all-time hero, Tsunke Witco, a.k.a. the great Lakota Sioux Chief  Crazy Horse. It was a fun book to write, because I managed to recall much about childhood, all the innocent joy, those open-ended days when the world truly is ours and none of the grisly challenges of living have yet come into play. Yet now I’ve completed volume 2, which takes me from 1959 to 1966, and although I imagined it would be easy remembering everything that happened between the ages 15 to 23, I was totally wrong. Perhaps when we leave childhood our perception widens. There’s much more to take in and memorise.  Starting work means having to get things right, having to worry, look at the clock, take on responsibilities. All these restrictions, which one never had at school, create a dense fog over everything, and out memory is blurred. I have a rough chronology of important events, but they fade in and out like a radio signal fighting against static.

   So All Aboard The Calaboose seems roughly the way things were, now that I’ve finally finished it, but many of the characters, minor events and locations seem fuzzy. All I could do is subtitle it ‘A Shaky Memoir’. I would have loved to call it ‘Unreliable’, but the great Clive James beat me to that several decades ago. After all, the story does begin in 1958 and when we get past 70 perhaps a little confusion is allowed. They do say that our geriatric brain cells are dying at a rate of knots, and that’s not a suggestion I shall argue with.  So, with this book, all 400+ pages of it, the first edition is for family and friends and, anyone who knows me, reading this blog, who fancies trying their luck, can e-mail me and express an interest at roybainton@hotmail.com . This is a story of a young life which seemed to be going wrong from the start. Yet from my current vantage point, gazing back down the decades, I realise that without those adventures sailing around the world, and the failed forays into rock’n’roll, then the life I’ve enjoyed (and fortunately, still do) may well have been much more mundane. All Aboard The Calabooseis certainly not for the prudish or the faint-hearted. But if you want to sidestep the callous present and take a stride back into a vanished world of hope and youthful adventure, and you like to laugh, you’ll enjoy it. I think. I hope. As for publishers, I can’t imagine anyone worth submitting this to who would give it a deal. But what the hell. I’ve written it, and that’s all that matters. It’s out of my head and onto the page.

GRIEF

December 18, 2014, 12:46 pm

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Grief: Take it or Leave it.

Every generation

Blames the one before

And all of their frustrations

Come beating on your door

As the poet Longfellow remarked, ‘there is no grief like the grief that does not speak.’ Who is interested in another person’s grief? We see their tears, we see sadness, exasperation, but it is not ours. We comfort ourselves with the salving thought that ‘they’, i.e., the grieving, will ‘get over it’. We lean on old aphorisms such as ‘time is a healer’ but until we are plunged into the real territory of our own deep grief, such attitudes are simply conscience-serving window dressing.

    To speak about one’s grief, to expose and reveal it, is not a very English thing to do. But bringing it out into the open can be a mild form of catharsis. To write about it like this and show it to the world need not be shameful. Those who see this and perhaps absorb it can dispose of it as they wish.  Share my thoughts or dismiss them. I do not care; yet I am a writer and words flow from my brain and onto a page.

     The opening lines of this post are by a rock band, Mike and The Mechanics. The Living Years is a song about the singer’s father and the many things he wished he had said to him before he died. I first heard it on BBC Radio 2 in the early 1990s, and the idea of expressing one’s grief in such a way was described by Dieter Meier, of the Swiss electro-funk band Yello, as ‘disgusting and self-indulgent’. For a while, until recently, I think I shared Dieter Meier’s view. But not now.

      When my daughter Sarah died at 11.10 pm on December 23 2012,  a whole chapter of my life was torn from me and shredded. Sarah was the reason for so many things. The reason for love, the reason for marriage, the reason for me taking life’s responsibilities seriously. As I held her hand as she breathed her last on that hospital bed, I kissed her on the forehead and, like a drowning man, 46 years of being a father ran through my conscience like an epic movie. Sarah loved me and her mother deeply, and that love was reciprocated day in, day out.

     And among all the flickering memories, my shame reared its head. Where was I on October 2^nd 1966 when she was born, as her 19 year old mother, Wendy, went through the first agonies of  childbirth? Was I at the bedside to see her emerge into the world? No. I was celebrating in the Olde Blue Bell pub in Hull.

     I did, however, give her all my time and my love when she was a little girl. She was the cutest infant a father could ever wish for. She never complained, rarely cried, loved my stories and made us laugh. In fact she made us smile right to the end.

I shall always remember the glorious Autumn day in 1987 when she realised that living in Grimsby with her then boyfriend Kevin had been a bad mistake. She packed her bags, I picked her up and drove her here to Mansfield to live with us again. We stopped at a pub on the way and sat outside in the sunshine drinking and smoking, planning her future. And she would never be out of work. She did her job well; geriatric care and nursing. From the age of 16 right until the cancer struck her down, she served the NHS with hardly ever taking time off for illness. And her colleagues loved her. Why wouldn’t they? She was lovely.  

 

      Yet where was I at many of the crucial moments in her final two years of struggle with her cancer? Sure, I took her for her regular chemotherapy sessions to Nottingham, and her daily radiotherapy, but was I there with her on the day she finally lost the power of her legs and became unable to walk? No. I simply heard about it on the phone. Could I have spent much more time with her during those dark days when she could no longer get up the stairs to the bathroom? No. I left her daily care to her long-suffering husband, Ivan, and simply turned up occasionally to take her out to lunch with her wheelchair. Could I have been of much more help to Ivan, who faced changing her dressings every morning before going to work, until he had to surrender the task to the District Nurse? Yes. I should have been there, I should have done more, and offered my services. But although Sarah only lived ten minutes away, her cancer seemed to be happening at a distance. Perhaps, I hoped, she would be cured. Maybe she would get better. I placed my trust in medicine and science. Sarah was my lovely, lively, bubbly daughter and surely, fate could not remove her from our presence. Could it? Would it? But that’s what fate did.

     And so this week every December these guilty thoughts will re-surface, punctuating the 46 years of love we shared. I look now at your smiling face on the wall above this computer and grieve. I grieve because I will not hear your footsteps coming down the path on a summer afternoon to sit and drink beer with me at a barbecue. I grieve that you will not bounce laughing and joking into my life on Boxing Day, I grieve that on New Year’s Eve you will not be there in your chair at the end of our table laughing and drinking, ready to bring in another year. And I grieve on Christmas Eve as I sit by the fire reminiscing about all the wonderful Yuletides we spent together, especially when you were our firstborn child.

     Is there anything good in all this? Yes; your brother Martin is still with us. I know this time of year hurts him as it does us. Yet at the end, from your hospital bed, you asked me why I was so unhappy and I could not find the words. But you told me not to worry because everything was fine, because you knew the end was coming and you’d faced bravely up to it.

     Is there an afterlife, darling? God, (whoever you are, with your warped sense of cruelty) I hope so. Will we meet again? I hope so too. We still have much to discuss, and there are still things I would like to say to you. Grief: do we get ‘over it’? No. Never. Rest in peace, dear girl. I love you.

THE PURPOSE OF HEAVEN

(For Sarah: October 2 1966 - December 23  2014)

Last night I had a golden dream

Real and perfect, so it seemed

In that cerebral sleeping world

You re-appeared, my much-missed girl.

Your smile and laughter, warm embrace

Your lilting voice and smiling face

Seemed to offer me a choice

That hope might dare to raise its voice.

An option from on-going grief

An alternative, a new belief … but;

Still reaching out, holding your hand,

The dream dispersed, as grains of sand.

Decades of life, I now have seven

Yet hardly dared believe in heaven

Perhaps this was my soul’s defeat

Maybe heaven’s where the dream’s complete.

Although our grief will still persist

Heaven’s a thought I can’t resist

Because last night you came to me

Through a door into eternity.

And we shall laugh, embrace again

Beyond this life of strife and strain

Dreams incomplete, unkindly ended

In heaven are fulfilled and mended.

Christmas Day

December 26, 2014, 5:06 am

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CHRISTMAS DAY

Was it ever like this?

Reduced to a parched oasis

In Capital’s cultural desert

Tomorrow a promise of true mayhem

Some shops will open at 5 am

An allowance for the need

To satisfy rapacious greed

Happy now to sell and buy us

With their transatlantic virus

their flipside of austerity

highlighting inequality

as X-Box kids still sit and play

Banking barons, miles away

Pull crackers on their sun kissed yachts

Counting dividends on new laptops

Opulent children, rich mothers, dads,

On their state-of-art I-pads.

Celebrate their avarice

Yet some of us still ask;

Can you remember this?

A tangerine, some sweets and nuts

Tin trains and Dinky toys

Dolls for undemanding girls

Popguns for the boys

Plum duffs with hidden silver coins

Paper chains for bright-eyed striplings

Homemade mince pies,

Not Mr. Kipling’s.

Sad but now so very true

That simple Yuletide we once knew

Social  innocence, hi-jacked

A frail memory which sadly lacks

The Milk of Human Kindness

When we were all as one

Capitalism’s triumph

Our childhood’s dreams

All gone.

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January 4, 2015, 11:42 am

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Vote Kipper?

January 18, 2015, 6:33 am

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Can you smell Kippers?

Who said this?: “Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.” In the light of the Rochester and Strood by-election success, in case any of our elected local politicians are thinking of defecting to UKIP, we should pause before putting our cross against a ‘Kipper’ candidate’s name without asking - who are UKIP, and what do they really stand for? Leaving the EEC is a tough decision which deserves informed, meticulous debate. What kind of Britain does UKIP want? Paul Nuttall MEP, the vice-chair of UKIP, posted on his website: 'I would argue that the very existence of the NHS stifles competition.' So that’s the NHS gone. Kippers love privatisation, don’t like the Public Sector, hate the Unions, want to cut benefits even further, and although their leader is a descendant of immigrants and is married to a German, they persist in their epic xenophobia.

UKIP’s pint and a fag poster boy, Nigel Farage, ticks all the boxes for those who seek a mythical Britain which never existed. His policies remain fuzzy, but he’s only UKIP’s leader. The man pulling the strings is a shadowy figure, ex-Liberal Democrat Steve Crowther, UKIP’s chairman. Controversial Kipper Godfrey Bloom, famous for referring to women as ‘sluts’ and his comments about ‘bong-bongo land’ recently resigned from the party, referring to Crowther as  a “svengali-like” figure and a “man of mystery”, whilst warning recent Tory defectors to look out for a knife in their backs.

Much of the misery Britain has suffered in the past decade is down to rogue Bankers. Mr. Farage knows all about banking. After leaving Public School he went to work for investment banks and brokerages Credit Lyonnais Rouse, Natexis Metals and Refco Inc. Farage’s boss at Refco Inc. was Cambridge-educated Briton, Phillip Roger Bennett. In 2005, it was revealed that Bennett had hidden roughly $430 million of bad debt from the company's auditors and investors. In 2008, he was sentenced to 16 years in jail for financial fraud.

Addressing the European Parliament Farage declared that we have a “common enemy: rich people and successful companies avoiding tax.” But whilst campaigning against tax avoidance, Mr Farage set up an off-shore trust fund on the Isle of Man to avoid inheritance tax. When Channel 4 news challenged him, Nigel asked “Isle of Man, is that off-shore?”  When told that it is, Farage’s geography seemed shaky, replying “Well, it’s difficult to define whether it’s off-shore or not.”

Then there’s that other prominent Kipper, ex-Tory Minister Neil ‘cash in brown envelopes’ Hamilton, once keen to invite Fascists Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator’s grand-daughter, and French National Front Leader, racist Holocaust denier Jean Marie le Pen to the 1992 Tory Conference.  But if you’re ready to vote for a party which trades in the language of fear and division, place your cross. We still live in a democracy - for the time being. And whose words opened this column? Dr. Josef Goebbels, (1897-1945) Germany’s propaganda minister.

What 'Big Society'?

January 18, 2015, 6:44 am

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2015: Still ‘In it Together’?

In May, we face the most contentious General Election in modern times.

    There’s an old adage, “No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in”. This inspires Russell Brand’s ‘don’t vote’ policy. His book, Revolution, topped the best seller lists. Sadly, in modern Britain no-one can expect any sort of revolution if they don’t vote. Russell Brand is no Lenin, and despite his hair and beard, he couldn’t kiss Che Guevara’s boots. If young people are complaining that politicians don’t listen to them, they’ll be ignored even more if they avoid the ballot box.

    May’s election is one of serious issues. Paramount among these is the NHS. Its decline began when Tony Blair encouraged PFI (Private Finance Initiatives). This allows the private sector to build hospitals, and we repay the ‘favour’ at ten times the cost, whilst still not owning the building. In the North East of England alone, hospital building cost £1.34bn yet the total repayment to private investors is £10.32bn. Would you buy a £300 TV set and then agree to pay £3,000 for it? This loan shark system has been continued by the Coalition, who promised us ‘no top-down re-organisation of the NHS’, and then, with Andrew Lansley’s secretive Health and Social Care Act, they did exactly that - pulling the rug from under our doctors and nurses. So as we read daily about the ‘failing NHS’, we should look behind the headlines and ask who created this mess, and for what purpose - the introduction of a US-style private insurance system, where the rich get the best treatment and the rest of us would be scared to even visit the surgery. This is another ‘PFI’ - Profit from Illness.

   

     Before voting, we should ask - who can we trust? Little England’s ale and ciggies superhero, ex-banker Nigel Farage and his U-Kippers? Apart from the Kippers’ xenophobia for immigrants and Europe what are their policies? If asked, Farage says the NHS is great, but UKIP's deputy chairman, disgraced ex-Tory MP Neil ‘Cash for questions’ Hamilton, insults our doctors and nurses in The Daily Express calling the NHS "diseased", saying it’s "a more effective killing machine than the Taliban", and a "Soviet-style nationalised monolith …  a substitute for religion". The rising Green Party say they’ll “Maintain a publicly funded, publicly provided NHS, oppose NHS privatisation and treating healthcare as a market.” Labour suggest they’ll achieve this by raising £1bn from tax avoidance, tax houses worth over £2m and raise revenue from the tobacco companies. As for the Coalition, the floundering Lib Dems pledge an extra £1bn a year on the NHS – over and above David Cameron’s promise; “The next Conservative government will protect the NHS budget and continue to invest more.”

   

     The May election is a social crossroads. We cannot afford to remain indifferent. Britain has become a bastion of inequality. The ranks of the super-rich expand daily as the poor are demonised. Whilst our nurses beg for a 1% pay rise, George Osborne gives his Chief of Staff, Rupert Harrison, a 17% salary increase to £90,000. May 2015 may well answer the question - are we still ‘all in it together’?

A MYSTERY SOLVED!

January 24, 2015, 7:59 am

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EVEN OLD SAILORS 

GET EGG ON THEIR FACES.

The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena by Roy Bainton is published by Constable & Robinson (UK) and in the USA by Running Press Inc.

For almost 20 years I’ve been the ‘go to’ source, research-wise, for one of the strangest unsolved maritime mysteries, the bizarre story of the Ourang Medan. So here’s the story as I have usually told it. This version has graced the pages of several magazines, including the Fortean Times,  Saga and is scattered across the internet on dozens of paranormal web sites. Turn out the lights, now light a candle, pour yourself a double rum and read on …

Death Ship:

The Curious Case of the Ourang Medan

This strange yarn began as an obscure, bizarre footnote in nautical history. The story of the Ourang Medan was one of those chilling fo'c'sle tales told by old hands over a few beers on long voyages. As with the Mary Celeste, a modicum of determined digging can usually strip away the romance and often leave us with the bare, demystified facts.

Not so with the Ourang Medan. The more one digs, the more fragments, hints and nuances appear. I first heard the story on board the old Port Line ship, Port Halifax, when crossing the Pacific in 1961. It was then included in Vincent Gaddis’s Invisible Horizons (1966) and years later in various other works such as Damon Wilson's Big Book of The Unexplained (1998). The oldest source I could track down was an article by Robert V Hulse in Fate magazine in 1953, yet Hulse, like all the others, only had the bare bones of the yarn.

This is a story with a secret; a secret buried somewhere in the guarded records of maritime officialdom. Turn down the lamp, cue the creepy music...

In February 1948 (or June 1947, depending on which source one consults) a series of distress calls were sent out by the Dutch freighter Ourang Medan in the Straits of Malacca between Sumatra and Indonesia.

      ‘All officers including captain dead, lying in chartroom and on bridge, probably whole crew dead... ‘ This chilling message, accompanied by a spate of desperate SOS calls, was followed by indecipherable Morse code... then a final message just two stark words ‘I die.’

Boarding parties found the dead radio operator, his hand on the Morse key, eyes wide open. The entire crew even the ship's dog were discovered in the same terrified posture, all dead.

According to a supposed document, the first mention being by Vincent Gaddis called The Proceedings of the Merchant Marine Council, the crew were found ‘teeth bared, with their upturned faces to the sun, staring, as if in fear...’ Later researchers claim that this document was issued by the US Coastguard Service – although why they would issue a report of something happening in the Malacca Straits is another puzzle.

Following the grim discovery of the fear-frozen cadavers, a fire broke out in the ship's hold.

The boarding parties were forced to abandon her. Shortly after, a violent explosion described in some accounts as so violent the vessel ‘lifted herself from the water’ after which she quickly sank.

So, there you have it. It's a great yarn; but is it just an old seadog's tale? Or perhaps, as some have suggested, a 50-year old April Fool joke, composed by some bored tabloid hack?

The trouble is, it refuses to go away. If these men did die in such a bizarre fashion, What killed them? I started with Lloyd's Shipping registers. There was no mention of the case. Then that standby of all maritime researchers, The Dictionary of Disasters at Sea, 1824-1962. Everything else was in there - even the Mary Celeste but no  Ourang Medan. I contacted Britain's best magazine for old sailors, Sea Breezes, and discussed the case with their late editor, Captain Andrew Douglas, a retired skipper with decades of service on the oceans of the world. He was fascinated, but knew nothing although he did place a plea for information in the next issue.

It was time to get  'official'. I wrote to the Admiralty, the Registrar of Shipping and Seamen, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. They all told me the same thing; if the Ourang Medan was a Dutch vessel, I would have to go to Amsterdam.

Searching the Dutch Shipping records in Amsterdam seemed only to deepen the mystery. There was no mention of the ship at all. There was a Medan, but she had been scrapped before World War II. And my enquiries to the Maritime Authority in Singapore, which may have been able to help with a Malacca Straits incident, drew a blank. I was facing the distinct possibility that this was simply a hoary old fo'c'sle yarn… until Professor Theodor Siersdorfer of Essen, Germany entered the frame. Siersdorfer was a respected marine architect with a long career as a lecturer in all things nautical. He had read the plea in Sea Breezes and I suddenly discovered that I was not alone; Siersdorfer had been on the case for 45 years.

An intriguing parcel of information from Germany opened up new avenues, the most exciting of which was the identity of the two vessels which received the Ourang Medan's SOS calls. One was the City of Baltimore; the second was the Silver Star, owned by Grace Lines of New York, whose crew allegedly actually boarded the stricken Dutchman.

Here the enigma deepens again. Most of the details of the Silver Star's voyage are contained in a strange, 32 page German booklet written in 1954 by one Otto Mielke, (now deceased), entitled Das Totenschiff in der Südsee (Death Ship in the South Sea). Mielke seemed to know a lot about the Ourang Medan's possible route and cargo but fails to give further detailed sources; this is a strange omission because his details, right down to the tonnage, engine power and Captain's name, of the Silver Star, are thoroughly referenced. Professor Siersdorfer also mentioned another marine detective, Alvar Mastin (also searching for the departed Dutch ship), a German who lived in my home town of Hull, in England, in the 1950s. I could not track him down, but apparently Mastin had repeatedly attempted to get details from Grace Lines in New York of the Silver Star crew list and log book - yet was met with a stony silence.

Thus the possible fact remains that the Silver Star crew did really board the Ourang Medan in (as Mielke has it in June, 1947), this was the route via which the story entered nautical legend. I made several unsuccessful attempts to see if there were still members of that crew alive. But there is still confusion; the Germans cite the Silver Star as being the vessel boarding the Orang Medan, yet Lloyd's Registers show that, at the time, the Silver Star had changed owners and had another name... Santa Cecilia.

What follows is pure speculation, but there is a tantalising, possible explanation as to her crew's demise and her disappearance from the records. Mielke mentions a mixed, lethal cargo on the Dutchman 'Zyankali' (potassium cyanide) and nitroglycerine. How this mixture could have gone unrecorded is a mystery, as the controls on such lethal cargoes, even 50 years ago, would have ensured reams of paperwork.

The Geneva Protocol of 1925 ratified by 33 nations outlawed all chemical weapons. As history has shown, the Nazis made horrific use of the extermination gas 'Zyklon B' but, according to Albert Speer in his book Inside the Third Reich (1995), they also had stockpiled a secret gas called Tabun and, as late as 1944, were manufacturing 1,000 tons of this deadly substance each month. According to Speer: ‘It could penetrate the filters of all known gas masks and contact with even small lingering quantities had fatal effects...’

Apart from the Nazis, only one other nation used gas; Japan.  The Japanese used gas in China during World War II. In 1935, the brilliant Japanese bacteriologist Shiro Ishi set up the Japanese Army Unit 731 in a remote village in occupied Manchuria. Unit 731's brief was to find a chemical, gas or biological weapon to win the war. Hideous, inhumane experiments were carried out on helpless Australian, American, Russian, Chinese and British prisoners some of the worst war crimes ever committed. Was there a Nuremberg type trial for these doctors of death? Far from it. The biochemists' hideous research was too 'good' to waste; they pulled off a mysterious secret deal with their erstwhile enemies and appear to have done a deal with General Douglas McArthur's forces. The criminals went free and prospered, leaving the possibility that the Japanese may have stored quantities of nerve gas in Singapore.

To try and explain the obstinate absence of the ill-fated Ourang Medan from official records, we must look at the political turmoil which existed throughout Indonesia in the immediate post-war years. Before the war, Java and Sumatra were part of the Dutch empire. In 1945 the Dutch returned, expecting to carry on their rule as before, but found the newly established republics of Southeast Asia had gained wide local support. A bitter, dirty war for control broke out, and in 1947-48 the Dutch carried out major 'police actions' in area. After World War II, there was a brisk trade in nerve gas and biological agents with repressive governments everywhere.

It was okay to make and sell this vile stuff - as long as you didn't use it. But somebody did, that's for sure. Death has always had its currency. So how was this deadly cargo moved around the South China Sea and through the Straits of Malacca during this troubled period? Not by air; the prospect of a cargo plane crashing with several tons of deadly gas on board was too horrendous to consider. No, you hired an insignificant old tramp steamer, preferably with a low paid foreign crew, stowed the cargo in disguised oil drums and, like all serious smugglers, hoped for the best, and a blind eye from authority.

I first heard the Ourang Medan story in 1961 within 15 years of its origin. If we accept, due to the nature of her crew's deaths, that she was carrying deadly gas or chemicals and if indeed she was a Dutch vessel, had this news broken it would have been a major embarrassment for any government involved, especially in the light of the restrictions imposed by the Geneva Convention. Hence the dead ends faced by any researcher. The story exists because, like the gases, it escaped.

But here's another mystery; if a gas leak killed the crew, was the final explosion another accident or an officially ordered scuttling? The crew of the Silver Star would have told the tale from that day on in every mess room on every ship they sailed in. Eventually, in a mess room on the British tramp steamer Port Halifax, it reached me. Aficionados of The X Files have had a field day with this tragedy, blaming UFOs, sea monsters, etc., but the possible reality is no less ominous.

The field of the unexplained is littered with red herrings, hoaxes and outright fakery. But if the story of this ship of death is an invention, why manufacture it and who was responsible? What made this common currency in the mess rooms of the old vessels I sailed in the 1960’s and, why were other ships real ships involved in the yarn? Any marine researcher will tell you that even the mighty tomes of Lloyd's Shipping Registers can throw up more questions than answers, especially when ships have their names changed frequently

I then received a letter from the Dutch Royal Navy which asked me for information on the Ourang Medan case. Why? I could tell them nothing.

In the UK, the Ministry of Defence have irresponsibly destroyed all records of poison gas dumps that are over 25 Years old. Over 100,000 tons of deadly Tabun and Sarin nerve gases were deliberately loaded onto ships at the end of World War II and sunk in the North Sea, the Baltic and Atlantic. In 1998, a Swedish fishing vessel landed an unusual catch a net full of mustard gas canisters; the crew spent a long time in hospital with serious burns. Professor Siersdorfer sent me copies of photographs taken by a German Captain from Hamburg. I was the first person to see these in 50 years. They revealed a terrifying story. Shortly after the end of World War 2, a number of commandeered elderly German merchant vessels were used by the Royal Navy in conjunction with the Merchant service. These captured ships were loaded with thousands of tons of canisters and shells of Nazi poison gas, sailed out into the North Sea, where explosive charges were set. The ancient hulks, bursting with contamination, were then blown up and sunk.

It's a nice, creepy Fortean thought that the hapless sailors of the mythical Ourang Medan were visited by a UFO or a giant squid which was so scary it literally ‘frightened them to death'. That may have been a fine prognosis in the nutty, sci-fi Fifties. Yet humanity is capable of far more sinister behaviour than any intergalactic visitor to Roswell. Whatever solution which could reveal what killed the crew on that sinister Dutch ship lies somewhere at the bottom of the Malacca Straits.

So there you have the version of this yarn which I’ve been innocently peddling for all these years. But limbering up for an appearance this weekend on US radio (Coast to Coast AM) I decided to have one more trawls of the internet to see if anyone had proceeded further with this. Well, to my relief (mixed, from a writers’ standpoint, with a little chagrin), it becomes obvious that behind the blank wall I had finished at lies more. So praise goes to this diligent researcher, on ALEX BUTZIGER,

ALEX BUTZIGER

on his excellent web site Bermuda Triangle Central. He’s also put his research into a book for Kindle on Amazon; The Ourang Medan, Conjuring A Ghost Ship. I’m sure Alex )who I have congratulated already) won’t mind me re-producing some of his research here. You can stop shivering your timbers now. Over to you, Alex.

World's Greatest Sea Mystery Solved

An Enigma Older than You May Think

Exposed as a Nazi Plot 

Ourang Medan, November 13, 1939 (or earlier).

Today, for a change, a sea mystery from outside the Bermuda Triangle, in fact, from

the other side of the globe. For six decades, the ghost ship Ourang Medan has been regarded among the greatest mysteries of the sea, right up there with the Mary Celeste and the Carroll A. Deering. Now, I may be able to present you the solution. Yet, through a simple search on eBay, I found a copy of the Vichy French magazine Sept-Jours (#45, September 7, 1941) that had the more or less complete story of the Ourang Medan in it (p. 9, "Après Vingt Mois — Le Mystère de l''Ourang-Medan' Est Éclairci," i.e., "After Twenty Months, the Mystery of the Ourang Medan Is Solved"). It predates the earliest commonly known version by eleven years.

This article, in turn, refers to an earlier article on the Ourang Medan in an earlier issue of the same magazine (#13, December 29, 1940). According to Sept-Jours, the Ourang Medan incident took place on November 13, 1939, predating the earliest traditional date for the incident by about eight years.

In the 1941 article, the ship that finds the Ourang Medan is not the Silver Star, but an unnamed American destroyer (or torpedo boat, torpilleur in the original; the French don't seem to make much of a distinction). That should come as no surprise, as the Silver Star was built only in 1942 (as the Santa Cecilia, 6,507 tons; 1946 to United States Maritime Commission, renamed Silver Star; 1947 reverted to Grace Line, renamed Santa Juana; scrapped 1971).

According to the article, Ourang Medan means "black man" in Malay. What's more, the story is set in mid-Pacific, not in Indonesia.

It claims the Ourang Medan was notorious in the South Sea for transporting convicts from Australia to penal islands. When she was too decrepit even for that, the Australian government sold her to a millionaire pirate, a suspected smuggler, drug dealer, and white slaver (that's at least what I think négociant de chair humaine means), who had eluded the police forces and navies of four or five countries.

One day, Sir Harry Charles Luke, the British governor of Fiji, heard that among a tribe on the main island of Viti Levu there lived a man who had arrived in a boat bearing the name Ourang Medan. The governor had that man dragged into the government offices in Suva and interrogated. The mysterious stranger told the story of the last voyage of the Ourang Medan.

Only the captain (cum owner, cum pirate) and the officers of the Ourang Medan were Europeans. The sailors were Malays or Polynesians, poor, poorly treated, and almost rightless.

In October, in Singapore, the Ourang Medan loaded 2,500 carefully sealed boxes. Then she headed for Sydney. But after several days at sea, the captain suddenly changed his mind and announced that they would go to Panama.

That meant a trip all the way across the Pacific, potentially dangerous, given the state of the ship. The men were frightened. But the captain stated that he had enough provisions on board and promised them a big bonus upon arrival.

On November 7, a sailor unscrewed the cover of a wind scoop. He collapsed, and the others thought he had fainted. But he was dead.

Shrugging it off as a heart attack, the captain had the corpse quite unceremoniously dumped overboard. Over the next couple days, more men died, and the rats jumped overboard, a sure sign the ship was doomed.

The sailors mutinied, demanding that the captain take them back to Singapore. That was when the radio operator sent the distress call. The survivors fled in two lifeboats, but only one boat with our sole survivor made it to Viti Levu.

The report was wired to Singapore, the authorities there investigated, and the truth was revealed. The Ourang Medan had been carrying nitroglycerine, potassium cyanide, and sulfuric acid, which had not been properly stowed. The containers broke, the chemicals reacted, and hydrogen cyanide poison gas filled the holds and the ventilation system. The explosion that destroyed the ship was caused by overheated nitroglycerin that spontaneously ignited when the ventilation fan stopped working.

That, lassies and lads, was the (presumably) original story of the Ourang Medan. It was on fucking eBay (I paid 3 euros plus shipping from France), and it was too hard to find for all those triangular researchers of the last six decades, Gaddis, Edwards, Winer, and the whole bunch of sensationalists.

So we have nonsense, nonsense, and more nonsense. What, then, is the origin of the tale of the Ourang Medan? Nazi propaganda, that's what.

Just like the nazis' 1943 version of the Titanic movie. Both tales depict Western, capitalist, Allied society as breeding grounds for evil, capitalist pirates who sacrifice their crews on their coffin ships.

While obviously less costly to produce than a movie, the Ourang Medan article series goes even further propagandistically: The nameless captain (Nemo, huh?) of the Ourang Medan is a drug dealer and a white slaver. Thus, the story appeals to primeval fears among the stupid, the cowardly, and the weak, fears of drugs and rape, fears any authoritarian, fascist government exploits, fears only a strong, fascist government can supposedly protect you from.

The poor treatment of the native sailors? To put into perspective the poor treatment by the German occupiers. The hydrogen cyanide gas? Maybe to distract from any rumors already spreading that the nazis were using it for mass murder?

Of course, aimed at the Western Allies, this propaganda would have been pointless. Anyone in the free world could have called or written to Australia, Singapore (not yet occupied by the Japanese), or Fiji, asked if anything about the Ourang Medan was known there, and upon being told no, concluded that the story was bogus.

But the people the propaganda was aimed at, the people of occupied and Vichy France, didn't have that luxury. They couldn't freely communicate with Allied countries and thus couldn't check the story.

It is of course not likely that this silly story was a major propaganda operation like Titanic. Hitler and Goebbels probably never heard of any Ourang Medan.

More likely, it was the homegrown product of Sept-Jours, in the spirit of collaboration. Just like Belgian cartoonist Hergé drew the anti-Semitic, anti-American Tintin comic book The Shooting Star to ingratiate himself with the Nazi occupiers. Those collaborators told themselves, "This is just what is demanded now, and if we do it, hopefully the Nazis will leave us alone."

 Or was it homegrown? Or maybe rather heimgewachsen?

The Sept-Jours article matches almost blow by blow the account in the 1954 German pamphlet Dampfer "Ourang Medan"— Das Totenschiff in der Südsee (Steamer "Ourang Medan"— The Death Ship in the South Sea) by one Otto Mielke. This pamphlet was in fact the first issue of Anker Hefte (Anchor Pamphlets), a pulp magazine featuring fictionalized accounts of true sea adventures. Both versions are set in the South Sea instead of in Indonesia, both share some details like the rats abandoning the ship, and both have the poison gas solution related by a sole survivor, although the German version is set in 1947 and stars the Silver Star.

What's more, the Mielke account gives the position of the Ourang Medan as 20°S 179°W — which is consistent with the Sept-Jours version, but inconsistent with the Mielke account itself! This position is near Fiji, where Sept-Jours has the survivor land. Yet Mielke has his survivor make landfall at Taongi in the Marshall Islands, much farther north. If you look at a map, you'll see it's almost impossible to get from that position to the Marshall Islands without hitting Fiji first. So Mielke must have known the Sept-Jours version and rewritten it, but forgotten to change the position of the wreck when he changed the alleged landfall of the survivor.

What Mielke did during the war is not certain, but apparently he was a war correspondent with the Nazi navy, the Kriegsmarine. So maybe the tale of the Ourang Medan originated with Mielke? Maybe as a war correspondent he wrote propaganda to be fed to papers in occupied countries as international news?

Maybe Mielke happened to read the scuttlebutt version of his own propaganda tale in the Coast Guard magazine after the war? Maybe he decided to kick off his pulp magazine with a fictionalized version of a fictional sea adventure, because it was more sensational? After all, it had been legitimized by the Coast Guard. Maybe he rewrote his own old canard with a postwar setting and the real-life Silver Star?

As Churchill allegedly had it, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." And a silly bit of Vichy or nazi propaganda may resurface like a U-boat to become the greatest postwar sea mystery.

RIP, Ourang Medan. You belong to the realm of Tales of the Gold Monkey, not to reality.

These are only short extracts but they serve to demonstrate just how important diligence and determination are when it comes to research. I had given up on the story a couple of years ago, and as a purveyor of spooky maritime yarns I dropped the ball. Thankfully, there are much younger men out there like Alex Butziger with the energy and patience required to keep digging. He’s set me an example. The story is still fascinating, but for a whole new set of reasons, and it puts the other old yarn of the ‘Haunted U-Boat’, UB65, in a totally new light. More power to your elbow, Alex! And it's still spooky out there at sea. I know. I've felt it.

Empire of Thieves

January 25, 2015, 6:45 am

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DID HIMMLER LIVE?

First time I've really made the effort to put a book out on Amazon.com, but here's the result. Anyone with an interest in WW2 and the fate of missing artworks could (I hope) find this novel entertaining. Some years ago, I interviewed Rudolf Hess's Doctor at Spandau Prison in Berlin, the eminent surgeon Dr. Hugh Thomas. Thomas wrote some interesting, best-selling books, such as The Murder of Rudolf Hess and SS-1: The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler. Dr. Thomas hints that Spandau's last, lone prisoner, Hess, my not have been

 Hess at all, but a double. He said to Hess "Who are you? You can tell me now - Himmler is dead," to which Hess responded

"Is he? Are you sure about that?"

That remark gave me the idea for this book. Supposing Himmler didn't die as a suicide at Luneberg in May 1945. And the Himmler file at the Public Records Office (National Archives) is embargoed until 2045. Why? Was 'Himmler' another hapless double? Maybe one day we'll know. In the meantime, I've had a bit of  imaginative fun here speculating on how his life might have panned out in South America, and how his son could have succeeded in Franco's Spain.
I find the history of the Third Reich fascinating for many reasons. One is it that happened in my lifetime. Another reason is the sheer mystery it provokes; How could a 'civilised' nation, Germany, which had given us Beethoven, Bach, Goethe and Schiller descend into 13 years of book-burning madness and mass murder?  And it produced numerous calm, calculating monsters such as Himmler, a man who imagined nothing criminal in his behaviour, who still thought in April 1945 that he could 'negotiate' with Eisenhower and Churchill. These are the elements which led me to writing this bit of speculative fantasy. I suppose I'll not live until 2045. Pity; I'd love to know the truth. In the meantime, this will have to do.
You can download the book on Amazon for Kindle, or send for the paperback. 

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January 30, 2015, 10:09 am

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Coast To Coast AM - January 24, 2015 Something In The Woods

February 2, 2015, 7:07 am

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Bitter Lake Adam Curtis Part 1

February 2, 2015, 7:11 am

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56 Years Ago Today

February 2, 2015, 12:02 pm

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REMEMBERING THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED. 

Buddy Holly was our hero in 1959. We’d learned one style of guitar playing, simple end effective, from Lonnie Donegan. But when Buddy came along, he took that simplicity and polished it into a rhythmic diamond. The chords were still simple, but it was the way they hung together. Buddy had a beat unlike anyone else. Even now, as I approach 72, I sit down and strum along to Peggy Sue, Fool’s Paradise or Well Alright, and the thrill of seeing those black 45rpm Coral labels going round on my Collar0 record deck comes back. Buddy died as

I slept one dark cold night, February 3 1959, in the converted women’s prison of Gravesend Sea Training school. As we all assembled for breakfast that cold morning, there was a pall of teenage grief over us all. He meant that much to us avid rock'n'roll teens.

  So much achievement,  gone from us at age 22. How big would he be today? What musical advances would he have made? So thanks, Buddy. Thanks for making my teenage years so vibrant and so hopeful. You will never be forgotten.

THE HAUNTED U-BOAT

February 4, 2015, 9:00 am

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 THE HAUNTED UB-65: MARITIME GHOST STORY OR WARTIME PROPAGANDA?

In the annals of maritime mysteries, some yarns remain far more potent than others. Forget the Mary Celeste. Drifting vessel+ no crew= a century of wild speculation. The Flying Dutchman? Impervious to real research. Ditto the missing lighthouse men of Eilean Mor.

Of all the many bizarre stories I’ve collected, just two retain their original chill factor. One is the mystery of the Ourang Medan, (now solved) and the other is the ‘Haunted U-Boat’ -  UB-65. Up periscope; her come the ghosts.

In their excellent and informative book, Lost At Sea (1994), Michael Goss and George Behe devote over thirty analytical pages to what is arguably one of the most chilling ghost stories of the sea, a true classic because this is a multifaceted enigma covering not only the paranormal, but hints at espionage and propaganda, with a fascinating character in its sinister shadow pulling the strings. With the advent of the First World War, death at sea, always a grim possibility in peacetime, became far more likely when the conflict took to the ocean. There are several spooky submarine yarns from both world wars and later, but none are as celebrated or weird as the story of the ill-fated German submarine UB-65. According to the meticulous and reliable www.uboat.net her details are as follows.

She was built by Vulcan, Hamburg, launched 26 June 1917, commissioned 18 August 1917, and had just one commander during her short career from 18 August 1917–14 July 1918, Kapitanleutnant Martin Schelle. On her six patrols she sank seven allied ships and damaged a further six. She was one of a class of twenty-four submarines especially designed to operate out of the ports of occupied Belgium. It was during construction that bad fortune began to dog this particular boat.

If we are to accept the legend, then the crew of UB-65 were less terrified of confronting enemy forces at sea than they were of the ghost that haunted their ship. As with most of these yarns, this one has had its fair share of embellishment over the years. The initial “authority” who launched the spectre was one Hector Charles Bywater (1884–1940), a brilliant naval journalist and strategist, a multilingual spy whose ability to speak German passed him off as a native. Bywater is as much of a conundrum as UB-65itself. As will be seen, other writers have added layers of spurious “authenticity” to his original exposition. Bywater bases his telling of the saga on a pamphlet published after the war by “the distinguished psychologist Professor Dr Hecht”, and a “first-hand account” by an unnamed petty officer who was lucky enough to leave the boat before she sank.

The misfortunes of UB-65began whilst she was still on the slipway. A heavy metal girder slipped from the crane tackle as it was being lowered into position to be welded into the hull, instantly killing a German workman and injuring another, who died in hospital a few days later. Before launching, poisonous fumes in the engine room took the lives of three more workers. So before UB-65 had even put to sea, five men had died building her.

Once out at sea on her trial run, a sailor was sent forward on the deck to inspect the hatches. He was swept overboard and lost. Her first test dive was almost fatal. She should have levelled out at thirty feet (9 m), but a forward ballast tank ruptured and the sub plummeted to the seabed. She remained stuck there for twelve hours, and during this frightening period floodwater seeped into the batteries. The resulting toxic fumes spread among the crew. When, with some relief, the boat finally managed to surface, everyone was violently ill, so much so that two men died in hospital. Could things get worse? Without a doubt, and here the illegitimate elements of this oft-repeated story begin to rear up. Some writers relate that she was commissioned not in August but in February 1917, with the U-65placed under the command of Oberleutuant Karl Honig. Unfortunately, you will not find a commander of this name listed; the records show Kapitanleutnant Martin Schelle as sole commander during the boat’s brief life. But back to the story. While torpedoes were being loaded for UB-65’s first patrol, a warhead exploded, killing the Second Officer and eight seamen. Nine other sailors were seriously wounded. By this time anyone being assigned to this particular submarine would have something to worry about and, on top of it all, the first ghost makes an entry. As she was under tow back to dry dock for repair, a hysterical sailor reported that he had seen the ghost of the Second Officer, his arms folded, standing on the prow. The haunting had begun.

 Although Bywater was the first to bring all this to attention in his 1932 book, Their Secret Purposes, most of the crew names don’t crop up until an article on the sub written by Peter King in Fatemagazine in 1974. The story gathered more trimmings in Raymond Lamont Brown’s Phantoms of the Sea (1972) and a further Fate article by King in 1977. Bywater’s source is a “Professor Dr Hecht” and, from somewhere, King pulls a first name out of the bag – now he’s “Max” Hecht. This revelation is followed by a previously unidentified sailor who becomes “Petersen”, claiming that he also saw the ghost. Petersen wisely decides to jump ship the day before the U-65 was to embark on her first patrol. Several men on that initial patrol reported seeing the ghost of that Second Officer. One night the duty officer was found sobbing on the bridge, claiming to have seen the ghostly figure, arms folded, standing on the ship’s prow. A torpedo man named Eberhard goes berserk and rants about being pursued by the ghost. According to Bywater, he’s given a shot of morphine but, despite its relaxing qualities, eventually makes it up on to the deck where he promptly jumps overboard and sinks like a stone. Whilst under attack from depth charges, Lohmann, UB-65’s coxswain, is thrown to the deck, cracks three ribs and dies from internal injuries a week later. “Oberleutnant Karl Honig” was next on the hit list. After patrolling the Dover Straits in February 1918, UB-65docked in Bruges just as British aircraft began a bombing raid. Honig is said to have been decapitated by flying shrapnel as he stepped down the gangplank, his headless body propelled backwards on to the deck. His corpse was laid there for a while, covered with a canvas shroud, and that same night an officer and eight crewmen said they saw the Second Officer’s ghost again, standing by the cadaver. Now the entire crew of UB-65apply for a transfer. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

The German Navy is very concerned, and yet another new name enters the story; he is “a German Naval Lutheran minister, the Rev. Franz Weber”, who conducts an exorcism of the ship. A Commodore arrives and investigates. The anonymous chronicler, the petty officer, tells Max Hecht that he missed a trip on the boat due to rheumatism, and the day before she sails he is visited by another crewman called Wernicke, who bids him a somewhat ominous farewell. New names, including “Richter”, keep attaching themselves like limpets to this story and the 1974 Fatearticle identifies the Commodore as “Michelson” (Lamont Brown has him as “Admiral Schroeder”). We’ll examine the potential origins of these names later on.

By midsummer 1918, Germany was losing the war. U-boat losses were such that none could be unnecessarily laid up, so UB-65 was put back into service. On 30 June she set out on what was to be her last patrol. The story goes that while patrolling off the coast of Ireland, the US submarine L-2, operating as part of an American flotilla based at Bantry Bay, was travelling at periscope depth when she spotted UB-65. The American skipper, Lt Foster (or Forster) got into position and was about to fire torpedoes at the enemy ship. What followed adds another phenomenal twist to the story. Before L-2 could act, her Captain was amazed as U-65 blew up before their eyes and sank. The American submarine never fired a shot. Was that the end of it all? Not quite.

Goss and Behe offer a tantalizing follow-up, which I have unfortunately not been able to track down, but it adds a nice spooky coda. They tell us that on 10 July 1968, almost exactly fifty years to the day (give or take three days, depending on which report of UB-65’s death is accurate), a man from Baltimore called Sven Morgens-Larsen and his wife June were enjoying a cruise on their yacht Grey Seal off the Irish coast close to Cape Clear. In the late afternoon they were approaching Fastnet Rock. At 6.30 p.m. they heard a muffled explosion. The sea, a few hundred feet from them, churned and up popped a submarine’s conning tower. As the rest of the craft emerged from the foam, they saw the number “65” on her side . . . and a stationary figure standing on her prow. The whole apparition, submarine, figure, everything, then dissolved and was gone. Apparently Morgens-Larsen knew nothing of the legend until he’d returned to Baltimore where he looked up the story in the archives at Johns Hopkins University. Fact or premeditated fancy? Who cares? Those pesky U-boat men just won’t stay down.

Yet even this peculiar report has a precedent. The large American nuclear submarine USS Thresherwent down with all hands on a deep test-dive 220 miles (354 km) off Cape Cod on 9 April 1963. Her loss in peacetime, with 129 men, was a major maritime tragedy. Fast forward to the summer of 1967 when the Schulz family with their three children are enjoying a cruise on their yacht the Yorktown Clipper, again about 200 miles (322 km) off Cape Cod. Suddenly, to their amazement, to starboard, a massive submarine surfaces. She looks damaged, with a gash in her hull. There are two uniformed US Navy men, one standing on her walkway and one on her bows, staring back at the Yorktown Clipper through telescopes. This encounter lasted a few minutes, and climaxed dramatically as the sub reared up out of the water and broke apart amidships, then vanished beneath the waves. The two figures did not budge. As she went down, the Schulzes maintain that they saw the name “Thresher” on her side.

Perhaps in the watery hereafter, the spirits juggle around with earthbound officialdom because the real nuclear submarine would not have had her name written on her side, just her number, 593, from her official designation SSN-593. So, with the Threshertragedy still painfully fresh to a seagoing family just four years after it occurred, was this some psychic hallucination triggered by a collective memory? The Schulzes were in the area where the tragedy had occurred. If one person had reported this vision, it could be questionable, but a married couple and their three children? Would a family conspire to make things up? We don’t know – but there’s a distinct possibility that Hector C. Bywater may have done so with UB-65.

Goss and Behe suggest the story of the jinxed sub may have been part of a British destabilizing propaganda drive to unnerve German sailors. On the other hand, Bywater’s Their Secret Purposes (1932), which includes the haunted U-boat, is ample evidence that this inventive, talented man liked spinning a meaty yarn. Bywater was no stranger to intelligence work and had worked behind enemy lines in Germany. He is also famous for his 1925 “faction” book, The Great Pacific War, written whilst he was naval correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

It is a startling but true fact that Bywater prophesied in uncanny detail the Japanese Pacific campaign of the Second World War. He has been dubbed among some historians as “the man who invented Pearl Harbor”. His book opens with Japan’s seizure of Manchuria, Formosa and Korea. “But in thus pursuing a policy which aimed at the virtual enslavement of China, Japan had inevitably drawn upon herself the hostility of the Powers,” wrote Bywater. Much more so than Morgan Robertson’s eerie predictions in 1898 concerning the Titanic, Bywater’s book is replete with so many accurate predictions that it could well have been the handbook used for Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Imperial Navy. The Great Pacific War was published while Isoroku Yamamoto – the admiral who masterminded the Japanese naval strategy in the Second World War – was an attaché with the Japanese embassy in Washington, DC. It was featured in the New York Times’s popular book section in 1925, and although the Japanese embassy registered an official protest over the review, declaring it “provocative”, the book would have been essential reading for any Japanese naval officer. Yet despite all this, as a kind of Robert Harris of his day, Bywater was making it all up, but magnificently so, due to his thorough knowledge and grasp of naval affairs.

So, what about all those names mentioned in the UB-65 story? Let’s deal first with the very foundation of Bywater’s version – the mysterious “pamphlet” of “Professor Dr Hecht”. The pamphlet does not exist. Checking online I find that there was a Max Hecht. He was born in 1857 and is listed as a “psycho-semasiologist”. He dealt with semantics and the study of language, and doesn’t seem to fit the bill as a renowned, well-known psychologist. Lamont Brown however, refers to him as such, and states that his “unpublicized” report on UB-65 exists in the Staatsbibliothek der Stiftung Preussicher Kulturbesitz in Marburg. Goss and Behe went to much trouble to have this document and supposed others dug out from the relevant German archives, yet found that they did not exist. They are left only with speculation as to whom Bywater based his mysterious “Professor Dr Hecht” upon. They hint that he might have been based on the journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht (1894–1964), the first screenwriter to be awarded an Oscar. It seems unlikely. There was indeed a Submarine Commodore called Andreas Michelsen, who had commanded the light cruiser Rostock in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, and in June 1917 took over command of U-boats. With no crew list for UB-65 available, the names Lohmann and Eberhard evade us. Then we have the crewmen Petersen and Wernicke, the man who said goodbye to the unnamed petty officer. There’s nothing on Petersen, but there is a Fritz Wernicke (1885–1918), who commanded UB-42 and UB-66 (which is one number away from 65), but UB-66 went down with all hands, with Weinecke in command, on 18 January 1918 in the eastern Mediterranean. There are a couple of other names left hanging; some crewman called Richter and the exorcist, Lutheran Minister, Revd Franz Weber. These appear in versions of the story in the 1970s. Fate magazine became a magnet for these stories, and although in its later incarnation (prior to its demise in 2009), it wasn’t afraid debunking a subject, in earlier times many features didn’t have to be too academically inclined with sources and footnotes. We were also in the heyday of aliens and the UFO, subjects which could impregnate any other paranormal happening like a virus.

So who were Franz Weber and the mysterious Richter? If you were looking for some German names to slot into a U-boat story – how does Franz Weber-Richter sound? To discover who he was, we only have to look at an article in Der Spiegel dated 8 February 1961, entitled “Men from Another Planet”. He was Germany’s own George Adamski. Together with his interplanetary associate, Charles Mekis, Weber-Richter had managed to convince a growing army of followers that an invasion of earth by the Venusians was imminent. His leaflets and publications delivered an income, but living in South America provided an added opportunity to raise funds. It may have been tough convincing people that he had spent several months living with aliens on Mercury, but Franz Weber-Richter claimed to be Hitler’s son, an assertion just slightly more credible than “the Venusians are coming” but sufficient to gain sympathetic handouts from aging, fugitive Nazis. Der Führer would have been proud.

Whatever “the truth” is about the doomed UB-65, it doesn’t really matter, except for the fact that thirty-seven families in Germany lost their sons, husbands and fathers to an unimaginably horrible death. Time and our imagination have built this into an immortal story and we need such romance in our lives. The careful researchers at www.uboat.net mention nothing of her haunting. Her loss is reported thus: “14 Jul 1918 – Lost by accidental cause (marine casualty) off Padstow, Cornwall on or after July 14, 1918. 37 dead (all hands lost).” And she has now been found as the following report states on both Facebook and Wikipedia:

 

This feature is extracted from my book The Mammoth Book of Unexplaimed Phenomena (UK: Constable & Robinson, USA, Running Press Inc.)

An expedition mounted in 2004 as part of the Channel 4 Wreck Detectives underwater archaeological TV series to survey a previously unidentified U-boat wreck that had been located earlier at 50.611 °N 5.005 °W, during a routine survey by the Royal Navy, confirmed the identity of the boat as UB-65. Inspection of the wreck by nautical archaeologist Innes McCartney and U-boat historian Dr Axel Niestlé (through identification of design features such as the type of deck gun, and identification numbers that were stamped on one of her propellers) proved conclusively that the wreck was that of UB-65. A survey of the wreck showed no obvious indication of weapon attack being the cause of loss (although this could not be ruled out; shock damage from a depth charge attack could have caused loss through failure of internal seawater systems and hull penetrations that would not be obvious from an external examination). The aft hatches are open indicating a possible attempt by at least some of the crew to escape from the vessel. Consideration of the various observations of the wreck, along with historical observations regarding depth control and handling difficulties on diving experienced by other boats of the class, led to a conclusion that she was most likely lost through accidental causes on or after 14 July 1918, the date of the sinking of a Portuguese vessel in the Padstow area. All of her crew of 37 were listed as lost. Having been identified as UB-65 the wreck was given protected place status under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986 on 1 November 2006.

The Rich Rule: Official.

February 9, 2015, 12:02 pm

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HEDGING THEIR BETS.

Back when Henry Ford was building his automobile empire, he said

“It is well enough that people do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” 

Almost a century on, fortunately for today’s hedge fund managers, most people still don’t understand banking.

We may not be as badly off as the Greeks or the Spanish, but like us in the UK, they are being punished with austerity for financial misdemeanours they did not commit. The poorer we get, the richer the bankers become, and despite timid governmental attempts to make them behave, we have a big new scandal. Although knowing what it was doing was wrong, HSBC has been helping Britain’s richest evade tax on an unprecedented scale, using offshore accounts in Switzerland. A former employee has been sacked for speaking out after seeing that HSBC was still engaging in huge tax evasion schemes. For those of us ‘hard working tax payers’ who have just had to cough up their self-assessment tax bill by January 31^st, or be heavily fined for each overdue day, the immoral privileges of the super-rich make a stark contrast which goes right to the heart of what kind of country we live in.

Much of the austerity the hapless public is suffering was caused by a peculiar branch of banking called the Hedge Fund. A hedge fund is an investment partnership set up by a money manager. It can be a limited company or a limited partnership. So, if the company goes bankrupt, the creditors can't chase investors for more money than they've put into the hedge fund. Hedge fund managers have quite a nice pay arrangement. It’s called the 2 and 20 formula. This ensures hedge fund managers receive 2% of assets and 20% of profits each year. That means that even if they lose money, they are at least guaranteed the 2% return. £1 billion in investments might make the manager £20 million even if the company simply left the money parked in the bank.

   On February 9^ththe Conservative Party held its annual Black and White Ball in London’s glitzy Grosvenor House to raise £26m to fund their election campaign. One of the stars of the Hedge Fund world, Andrew Law, CEO of Caxton Associates, was there. Of course, whilst David Cameron will welcome whatever donation Law makes, it will be convenient to forget that Caxton is registered in the tax-free haven of Delaware. One of its managers earned £97.1m in 2013. It is estimated that the 500+ guests at the ball are worth collectively over £22 billion. So presumably, there’ll be no nurses, labourers, bus drivers or window cleaners present. They’ll all be too busy struggling to pay their tax bills.

    It becomes no exaggeration to say that the rich and corporate elite now ‘own’ what we thought was a democracy. They have built a world run solely for their benefit - the rest of us are merely ants in their golden dung hill. It’s time the people of Britain became angry enough to draw a line and say ‘no more’.

The Unthanks - King of Rome (2012 Folk Music Awards)

February 12, 2015, 7:34 am

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