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Many thanks to the rather wonderful research team at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas for kindly sending me a facsmile of the handwritten article by Graham Greene from 1969 which was published in the UK The Spectator magazine on 8th November 1969.
It is a typically brilliant piece of waspish journalism by Greene who, at that time, was usually working on two books every day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and writing journalism in the evening.
The piece is called “Regina vs Sir James Barrie” and takes the form of an imagined judicial summary by the prosecution in a fictional case of obscenity, resting on Barrie’s now little-known 1902 novel, The Little White Bird. This novel was the first occasion for the appearance of the character Peter Pan, and the Peter of this novel is a markedly different and considerably more complex character to the one we were later shown on the stage.
Greene’s case for obscenity rests largely on the fairly stomach-churning scenes laid out in one chapter entitled “The Interloper”, in which the male narrator describes a night spent in the company of a little boy whom he has befriended in the Kensington Gardens.
Greene has much fun with comparisons with the 1960 obscenity case against Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which it was stated that “The book is deemed to be obscene if its effect…if taken as a whole…is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt.”
Greene claims that the fictional defence in his Barrie trial — led, amusingly, by the Bishop of Porchester — uses this as a means of forgiving The Little White Bird, since the depravity is only situated in the one chapter. He states: “I hope I have shown you in this case that the mind which perpetrated this loathsome chapter is the same mind which composed the book as a whole, even though elsewhere the obscenity is a little modified.”
Greene wants us to ask ourselves: how could readers of the early 1900s have allowed these passages in The Little White Bird to pass unnoticed? The novel was widely praised at the time with not a single person expressing any discomfort about this nighttime scene.
Greene’s article — which you can still read at the Spectator archive here https://lnkd.in/eXxqPX3u — is a wonderful example of how to combine wit, erudition and style to make a serious point in a journalistic context.

A long time ago, I interviewed a remarkable man called Sir Richard Acland. A baronet, he formed the very left wing political party Common Wealth in 1942 and won three by-elections during the Second World War.

The party stood for the public ownership of land and industry and in those war years, when many people dreamed of a fairer world after the torment of war, it attracted a lot of interest.

The arrival of the 1945 Labour government under Clement Attlee triggered the slow decline of Common Wealth and it eventually folded.

Acland went on to become a teacher and when I met him, in the late 1980s, he was still living in a cottage on the estate of Killerton in Devon. The house at Killerton had been in the Acland family forever but Acland gave it over to the nascent National Trust as a gift to the nation.

I remember him as a lovely, generous and intelligent man. He’d been to Marks and Sparks earlier in the day to buy sandwiches for us both. He spoke to me for a couple of hours about the failure of post-war politics, how his beliefs had not varied over time, and how he was convinced one day he would be proved right.

I wrote a novel, English Arcadia, which was based on his life: https://lnkd.in/ec4_kdYd

There has never been, however, a biography of him and occasionally, there is a day when I think I should attempt it.

Today is one of those days.

I wrote in praise of the 19th century enduring Mutual Societies for Idler magazine in the March/April 2025 edition, mentioning amongst others The Wine Society and The Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society.

You can purchase copies of the Idler from these stockists: https://www.idler.co.uk/idler-stockists/

Here’s the essay:

Mutual Friends

What would you do if you found a few wooden vats of Portuguese red wine in the basement? Yes, well thankfully, back in 1874, Major General Henry Scott was a little more scrupulous than some of us and instead of knocking it all back, he did a rather remarkable thing.

            The barrels of wine were found in the cellars of the Royal Albert Hall at the end of the Great Exhibition of 1874. The public spectacle was focussed particularly on food and wine, and samples of both were sent by governments all over the world to be showcased at the glittering event. Much to the chagrin of the Portuguese, the organisers forgot to bring their wine out of the cellar to be tasted by the public and a minor diplomatic incident occurred with Portuguese diplomats making a formal complaint to the Foreign Office about this slight to their beloved Douros and Vinho Verdes.

            Enter Major General Scott. As the original architect of the Albert Hall, he felt a little embarrassed at this faux pas, and so volunteered to give some separate tastings to likely quaffers who might be encouraged to buy the wine. Over a series of lunchtime tastings, all the barrels were sold off, the Portuguese pride was satisfied and all might have ended there. But on 4th August, the “Committee of Gentlemen” who had tasted and then bought the wine decided, under Scott’s prompting, to form a “co-operative company” to purchase wines for their future enjoyment.

            One hundred and fifty years later, The Wine Society (whose legal name remains The International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society Limited) is celebrating its special anniversary with a whole range of offers for its 240,000 members who, the previous year, spent almost £150 million buying wine. The organisation remains true to Scott’s delightful decision to be structured as a “mutual company”, defined by HMRC as an “organisation owned by, and run for, the benefit of its members, who are actively and directly involved in the business – whether its employees, suppliers, or the community or consumers it serves, rather than being owned and controlled by outside investors.”

            Scott and his chums weren’t the only people in the 19th century to consider the “mutual” approach. The Nationwide Building Society (founded 1884) is run for the benefit of its members and indeed, the whole building society movement was a response to what many Victorians saw as the excesses of the capitalist model — much like George Bailey’s Building and Loan in the film It’s A Wonderful Life, supporting poor renters against the evil property magnate Henry Potter.

            The Rochdale Pioneers too were hugely influential in the 19th century. A group of 28 working-class men, they founded the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844. Most of them were weavers and artisans who were struggling with the harsh economic conditions of the time, and with what seems now to be a remarkable spirit of both independence and bravery, they set up a cooperative store on December 21, 1844, selling basic goods like butter, sugar, flour, and oatmeal. Their sole objective was to provide high-quality, affordable goods to their members.

            Although they acted as one body with no formal leaders, the Pioneers established what are now known as the Rochdale Principles under the guidance of Charles Howarth and James Smithies. The Principles became the foundation for cooperatives worldwide and included democratic control (one member, one vote), open membership, limited interest on capital, distribution of surplus according to patronage, and education of members. What is so striking is that the aims of the working-class Pioneers were in many ways no different to those of the far more affluent founders of the International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society. Both sought just outcomes over profiteering.

            Civilised Victorians saw the “mutual” model as a way of ensuring that essential services could be accessed by all at a fair price. Take UIA Insurance, set up in 1890 to provide insurance products to members of the trade union movement and other not-for-profit operations. By 2020, UIA Mutual had almost 100,000 members and assets of over £60 million. The Craft Guild of Chefs was formed in 1892 to encourage young men and women to enter the catering trade, and continues as a mutual to this day to that end. William Morris set up the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) in 1877 to protect Britain’s built heritage from the ravages of Victorian industrial architects.

            So can we learn lessons from the mutual movement today? Wine Society Chief Executive Steve Finlan thinks we can.

            “Our business purpose is to champion the joy of good wine and everything follows from that. We don’t pay bonuses to anyone in the organisation, we don’t pay dividends, we don’t have investors. The heat on my collar is not about growth for growth’s sake. We’re not a not-for-profit, we have to make a profit, but the trick is to make just enough, which is actually a surprisingly difficult thing to do.”

            In other words, on a turnover of £150 million, he needs to make sure the money is spread around the business with one sole purpose: to allow the Society’s 240,000 members to buy the best wine at the best price.

            “Last year,” he says, “the government chose to make the biggest ever duty rise in fifty years which has had a devastating effect on the industry. Most of our commercial competitors were forced to pass that increased duty onto consumers. We decided not to, and held our prices.”

            What’s particularly interesting about the ebullient Finlan’s obvious pleasure in his work is that he was recruited five years ago after a very successful career in red-in-tooth-and-claw commercial retailers including Marks & Spencer and Clarks Shoes. He admits:

            “It probably took me almost twelve months to unlearn many of the ways of thinking from my career. To be fair, it probably took my new colleagues in the Society the same amount of time to accept some of the commercial principles I had to bring with me.”

            So could that model be applied elsewhere? The model in which only the satisfaction of the members of the mutual matters? Let’s have a think: how about the water industry?

            Finlan laughs.

            “Without question, the mutual model should be looked at more seriously across the board. It’s just a very grown up model, it gives you a much more holistic way of looking at and running a business. The primary difficulty in that is that investment is getting more and more expensive, access to investment is very difficult. So it’s difficult for an organisation like a water company, which may have failed to invest adequately for 20 or 30 years, to suddenly change direction. But it does feel as though business generally needs some kind of reset.”

            A cautionary note can be found in the story of another mutual, The Royal Arsenal Co-Operative Society, founded in 1868 in order to ensure that the families of employees of the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich could buy food at a reasonable price. Initially, it began with just twenty workers; by 1975, its membership had reached a staggering 500,000 and the services it provided ranged from food and milk to pharmaceuticals, shoes and even undertaking. Its turnover was over £60 million, yet its “mutual” principles remained the same, the same as the Wine Society holds to today.

            Throughout the bulk of the twentieth century, The Royal Arsenal Co-Operative was one of the most important suppliers of goods to working people in the south east of England. What caused its collapse? By the late 1970s, commercial supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s were expanding aggressively and bringing with them new techniques of buying, selling and supplier management. The Co-Operative didn’t have the capital or the commercial acumen to compete and, in 1985, it transferred all its activities to the national Co-operative Wholesale Society. The dream was over.

            The Wine Society is fortunate in that it has its own capital reserves in the form of tens of millions of pounds’ worth of en primeur wine stored in its cellars. These have been built up ever since Major General Scott first sipped from the Portuguese barrel. But, as a mutual, it also doesn’t have to orchestrate a flight of capital to some obscure pension fund the other side of the world every time it makes a surplus. Instead, Finlan and his team look at ways of improving the services to members, holding prices, supporting struggling growers in regions where the weather hasn’t been kind. It does all this, while consistently winning Decanter magazine’s Wine Retailer of the Year award against commercial competition.

            We should all drink to that. And if you’re wondering where to do that, you could do much worse than pop down to the Peckham Liberal Club in south London, a mutual founded in 1899, whose beautiful wood-lined interior will welcome you seven days a week in an atmosphere of civilised and sociable comfort.

Imagine a world where football clubs, regional water companies, pharmaceutical businesses and all the other strange late capitalist phenomena took the first tentative steps towards mutuality. Pace John Lennon, it may not be easy, but it might be worth trying.

I was commissioned by London charity London Plus to research and write a report on the role of the volunteer and community sector during lockdown in London. The report, Tales of Covid, has just been published by London Plus, and you can read it here: https://londonplus.org/case-studies/tales-of-covid. It was a genuine privilege to be able to report on the quite extraordinary work carried out by heroic individuals all over the city, without whose dedication the city would have ground to a frightening halt in 2020.

I wrote a post for The Ghostwriters Agency, of which I’m proud to be a member: https://www.theghostwritersagency.com/news/6yvtc2qmx3ke9y06pg1w4o9lwncgqb

My first grandchild is six months’ old. Despite the fact that this new life is of overwhelming interest to me, I won’t show you a photo of him because I realise that’s very dull. I didn’t understand that a few months ago and thought my friends were just under the weather when I thrust my IPhone into their faces.

         “Look!” I exclaimed and, to be fair, they did. Then they tried to change the subject.

         I was wondering how this was all going to turn out. The first time round the block, when my son was born almost thirty four years ago, his mother and I were so petrified of the responsibility we had no time to take photos. Now, I find myself lying in bed casually speculating about how I’ll teach little Jesse the front crawl. It’s unlikely I’ll be given carte blanche on this — when both my kids were still tiny, I took them on a caravan holiday to Britanny and hired a pedalo which I managed to capsize. I told the kids this was a new game and that the person who held on to the upside-down boat for the longest in the turbulent sea would get a prize. When we finally got back to shore, I said:

         “That was fun, wasn’t it? Probably no actual need to tell your mother about it, though.”

         My daughter immediately rang her mother and excitedly told her about the brilliant game Dad had invented and how we were all in the sea for absolutely ages.

         So it probably won’t be just me and the kid on the beach next summer. Jesse’s mum, my daughter, is pretty strict even without her knowledge of my parenting skills, so I have to watch my step. When I’m out in Twickenham with them, I point at other babies in the park.

         “Look at that one!” I say, obviously too loudly. “It’s got such a fat head.”

         “Shhh,” she frowns at me.

         What I’d really like to do is chuck Jesse up in the air and then pretend not to catch him until the last second, causing him to chortle merrily at my antics. I don’t do that. Instead, I hide my own fat head behind my hands then reveal it with a wide-eyed grin which, when she does it, makes him chortle merrily. When I do it, he starts crying.

         I did spot him the other day though, eyeing me with what was obviously intelligent curiosity when he thought I wasn’t staring slavishly at him. It’s remarkable how you can tell your own grandson has a higher-that-average IQ.

         I’ve learned to keep all advice to myself. When my son was a baby, we had supper with my parents at their house and during the meal, the baby alarm in his bedroom started broadcasting his pathetic cries. His mum started to get up to go and comfort him. My mother said, with a metallic glint in her eye:

         “Why not just turn that wretched speaker off?”

         I have started secretly singing Bob Dylan songs to Jesse. That didn’t seem to do my kids much harm. When my son was two, he said one day:

         “Dad, I’ve got a new Bob Dylan song to sing you.”

         “Great! Go ahead.”

         He looked at me pityingly and then started to chant:

         “Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan…”

         It’s OK, Jesse hasn’t split on me yet about the singing, partly because he can’t talk yet. I know he likes it though. When he’s supposed to be going to sleep he keeps his eyes open for as long as he can so that he can still hear my lovely voice intoning Desolation Row. Then my daughter turns up.

         “Why is he still awake?” she demands.

         I’m looking forward to taking him to the GTech stadium to watch Brentford with his Dad, my son-in-law. Last season, I ended up next to the Leeds away fans one Saturday and could almost taste the furious spittle on their enraged faces. He’ll enjoy that, but I may just have to remind him there’s no need to tell his mother.

I reviewed Pandæmonium by Humphrey Jennings in the latest edition of Idler magazine. You can buy copies of Idler magazine at all good newsagents and other shops as listed here: https://www.idler.co.uk/idler-stockists/

Here’s the review:

Pandæmonium
Humphrey Jennings
André Deutsch, 1985

Humphrey Jennings was a filmmaker, poet, painter and intellectual who died in 1950 aged just 43, having fallen from a Greek clifftop while researching a new documentary on European healthcare. The director Lindsay Anderson (If, etc) said he was “the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced.” Along with Charles Madge, he founded the Mass Observation movement in 1936, helped arrange the infamous Surrealist Exhibition in London the same year attended by everyone from Salvador Dalí wearing a deep-sea diving suit to Dylan Thomas handing out eggcups filled with string, and he made several wartime documentaries including Listen To Britain and Fires Were Started.

Jennings was a magnetic personality. The wealthy arts philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim had a brief affair with him in Paris in the 1930s, and remembered him jumping up and down on the bed shouting: “Look at me…don’t you think I’m beautiful?” His wartime documentaries for the Crown Film Unit were masterpieces but he could be a fierce taskmaster.

His attention focussed increasingly on the way in which art could faithfully record and celebrate the innate qualities of “ordinary” life, and he began to collect writings which in his view illuminated what he saw as “the coming of the machine age” from the late 17th century to the late 19th century, an age which he increasingly believed “was destroying something in our life.” By the time of his death he had collected over a thousand pages of quotations and notes which were finally edited into publishable shape by his old colleague Charles Madge and published as Pandæmonium in 1985.

Pandæmonium was the capital of Hell described by Milton in Paradise Lost, built by the angels on the instruction of Mammon. Amongst his notes, Jennings had written: “Pandæmonium is the Palace of All the Devils. Its building began c.1660. It will never be finished. The building of Pandæmonium is the real history of Britain for the last three hundred years.” Elsewhere he wrote: “The poets are the guardians of the Animistic system, the scientists of the Materialist system.”

Jennings, with his filmmaker’s eye, referred to his collection of texts as “images” which “present the imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution.” The book is a dazzling collection, featuring famous names — Charlotte Brontë, Friedrich Engels, Edward Lear, Charles Darwin — alongside the forgotten and the obscure. Here’s an engineer named James Nasmyth writing in 1830 on the coalfields of Yorkshire:

Amidst these flaming, smoky, clanging works, I beheld the remains of what had once been happy farmhouses, now ruined and deserted…In some places I heard a sort of chirruping sound, as of some forlorn bird haunting the ruins of the old farmsteads. But no! the chirrup was a vile delusion. It proceeded from the shrill creaking of the coal-winding chains.

Or the priest and poet Charles Kingsley in 1848:

Beauty is God’s handwriting — a wayside sacrament…where [the townsman] may walk through green meadows, under cool mellow shades and overhanging rocks, by rushing brooks, where he watches and watches till he seems to hear the foam whisper, and to see the fishes leap.

Perhaps too sentimental for some — Jennings has over the years incurred the wrath of the furious Left for romanticising rural poverty — the texts which he collated in Pandæmonium compose a beautiful portrait of a far simpler world where meaning was to be found in the relation between man and nature. It is a romanticism which sits alongside Orwell’s vision of a Lost England or William Morris’s advocacy of traditional craft skills and vernacular art forms. To Jennings, this was animism: the secret heart of the individual’s relationship to the earth which the materialist machine age wished to stamp out. He put it this way:

At a certain period in human development the means of vision and the means of production were intimately connected…I refer to the Magical systems under which it was not possible to plow the ground without a prayer — to eat without a blessing, to hunt an animal without a magical formula. To build without a sense of glory.

After Jennings had died so unexpectedly on that Greek clifftop, he was found to have just one pound in his bank account. Most of his work, including his documentaries, he considered a necessary obligation, to enable him to continue to pay the rent and support his family, while he occupied his time in imagining. This collection, Pandæmonium, would take another thirty five years to see publication, thanks mostly to the persistence of his daughter, Mary Lou Jennings, and it remains a unique and vital witness to the changing character of the English nation. Beautifully arranged and edited by Charles Madge, it is perhaps now more than ever, a talisman to clutch close amid the clamour.

I have recorded an online course for Idler magazine to try and motivate more people to write their own life story. You can access the course here: https://www.idler.co.uk/course/how-to-write-your-life-story-with-simon-petherick/

Over the years I’ve worked professionally as a ghostwriter, it has struck me now and then that people are probably more capable of writing their own story than they imagine. This course has been designed to try and and encourage them.

There will always be a need for ghostwriters like me, particularly when it comes to books by celebrities or business people who maybe just don’t have the time to sit down and write. I talk about that here: https://simonpetherick.com/2022/11/21/ghostwriting-interview-with-michael-portillo/

I have an essay in The Guardian’s Long Read section on writing in the age of Thatcher: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/oct/25/my-doomed-stand-margaret-thatcher-war-truth-central-office-information