This is a short video I made about three years ago, and some of you will remember having seen it already.  Apologies for the slurred-soppy-stern voiceover: at the time, I was pretty poor at intonation and pacing myself, and it’s hard to make out the sense of what I’m saying some of the time. Still, it ends with one of the great Humphrey Jennings passages – one still not on Youtube etc. –  and I had the sense not to talk over too much of that at least.

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Whatever else might be said about “Will Rubbish” remember this: he created a superb group blog that had Terry Glavin and George Szirtes on board, real luminaries of whom you have heard, to say nothing of a substantial chunk of the real left-wing blogging talent. Peter, Shuggy, Eric, Hak, Spirit, Bagrec..

If things went downhill after that, well – British blogging as a whole has been in pretty obvious decline for the last 3 years. But if there was a blog that you didn’t expect just to blink out without warning, this was the one. Will’s readers, like Philip Larkin’s, will have to excuse the absence of the usual valediction.

In comments yesterday, George Szirtes enquired rhetorically about why Bobby Robson was so loved, and he answers his own question magnificently here.

“The right sort of sportsman”, in other words.

Most of the great football clubs of England were founded by firms or by churches to provide godly uplifting activity and entertainment to men in what were supposedly the morally-dangerous surroundings of the urban industrial north. Not so Chelsea, who exploded into life in 1905 with a 150,000 capacity stadium at Stamford Bridge and a place in Division Two. (In fact, commentators in the Chelsea News deplored its arrival – in the space of thirty years, the moral saviour of the industrial masses had revealed its lowering, sensationalist, corrupting side, and now all that was set to poison the good folk of Sands End, Chelsea Reach and Fulham).

But the Chelsea News needn’t have worried. The best kind of chaps were in charge. This from the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times of September 9th, 1905:

The right sort of sportsmen are connected with its management too. The Earl of Cadogan and Mr. C.B. Fry are the Presidents; and the Directorate include Mr. H. A. Mears and Mr. G. Thomas. Mr. Mears owns the ground, and he is practically superintending its making. He is a keen sportsmen, and he is as well known in racing circles as in connection with football. In Mr. G. Thomas, of Southampton, he has a worthy colleague, for there is no more enthusiastic supporter of the winter pastime than the Sotonian. He is proprietor of the Southampton Club’s ground, accompanies the men to most of their matches, and an international match would not seem itself if he, and Mrs. Thomas, were not among the spectators.

The raffish, Borisian, condescending tone of this unattractive group was completed by the “hon. financial secretary”, Mr. Fred W. Parker, who

is one of our best-known handicappers. He is fond of sport in all its forms, and occupies the position of secretary of the London Athletic Club.

The Penny Illustrated Paper was no great cultural institution itself. Its attitude is telling. In a manner that Alice Miller would recognise immediately, one set of humans – those with position, money and influence, are to have their existence, desires and thinking respected, and the other set – everyone else – don’t exist quite as strongly, aren’t quite as real, and can therefore be treated as an amusing band of performing chimps who don’t matter.  Let’s take the goalie:

W. Foulkes (captain and goalkeeper) comes from Sheffield United. He has kept goal for England. He is the bulkiest football player living, and is such a mountain of flesh between the posts that opposing forwards are said to have complained that they had not sufficient of the goal to shoot at. As a compromise it was suggested that marks should be drawn on Foulkes. If the ball hit him between the marks it was a save, but if outside the shot should count as a goal.

It could be argued that changing attitudes towards football and towards footballers correlate well with the move away, during the twentieth century, from the atrocious relationships that existed between men from different backgrounds in the Edwardian period. Now, they stop the clocks for a Bobby Robson, and rightly. Not so for the Edwardian Robsons. Unless, of course, they were Frys.

Foulkes had ten years to live: cirrhosis of the liver carried him off in 1916. He outlived Cadogan, who paid for Holy Trinity Church in Sloane Street,  by a year.  C.B. Fry suffered a mental breakdown in the 1920s, became first a racist, then a fascist, pulled himself together after the War and died full of honours in 1956.

(Fry had played for Southampton. Chelsea’s first player-manager and one of their first squad forwards were poached from Southampton. Add those three to good old G. Thomas, and you have the makings of a conspiracy..)

If the medical goes through. And, it should be taken as no insult to Stoke or Hull that the news comes as something of a relief. (More beneath the cut)

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606 was group therapy last night. Chelsea fan after Chelsea fan heard their own voices slurring under an unsuspected weight that, the future gone from them, they could suddenly feel.  There was a lot of anger spoken of unfelt. Tiredness and resignation masqueraded as rage. Lovejoy called for vengeance, but his “I want United to beat them into pulp” was said like it was read from a list and told you he no longer had the energy to care.

It was hard not to sympathise. But I would have to admit to the following: turning the radio off after the Chelsea goal; turning in early; turning the radio on again at about ten o’clock, hearing the news, and abruptly getting up again; running to turn the television on; dancing around the room. Not, I would agree, the actions of a patriot or of a passionate Londoner.

And Chelsea were robbed. There’s no doubt that the tie was theirs on balance. But consider what it would have meant had the football gods (and let’s hope it was just the football gods and not bribery or UEFA as well) not intervened in the dying moments of the game.

We’d have had last year’s final all over again. With all that entailed. Just imagine:

Three weeks of self-serving, self-pitying mockney bullshit from England’s captain John Terry. Tedious speculation about penalties. Replays from Moscow on Sky Sports every day. The hideous ramping-up of the pressure on Guus Hiddinck to stay. Poor Frank Lampard’s mother getting wheeled out for inspiration. Mourinho hassled about his legacy. And all that Triumph of the Will stuff about the manifest destiny of the blues. 

Instead, we get United v Barcelona, a game that might just interest some neutrals and be good to watch. Messi and Ronaldo in Rome. What a way to start the summer.

To be as fair as possible to Chelsea, they have rescued their season from what might have been much, much worse. But an FA Cup Final and third place in the league is about right. It’s still achievement, but there was a moment in April when they might have gone on a run to the treble, and that would have been unjust. Remember Liverpool, who look like winning nothing now.

 It’s interesting how a club carries its essential identity into different times. Chelsea were a cup side and many people’s second team of choice for many years. They were known on the one hand for fan violence and on the other for attractive football and a certain kind of London glamour. The ghost of all that has run on into the Abramovich era. The top’s not yet their home but Liverpool still carry so much momentum from their past, hard-won momentum, that they can feel quite comfortable in the late stages of the Champions League. Result: no league titles for Liverpool, but two Champions League finals in four years. 

I wonder now if Chelsea don’t have some of that colourful mediocrity left in their bones, still to be grown out of. I wonder if that didn’t have something to do with the last twelve months and what now looks like their Leeds 1975 season.

When Mourinho left, I predicted a slow, but definite, decline. There’s still time for a great manager to stop it, to begin rebuilding from a position of strength. But not much time. Some of us who have been watching all this from the beginning think that Chelsea have a portrait in the attic, and that portrait is one of Jody Morris, and if they don’t get the next appointment right, some of us can see that picture brought out and paraded down the Kings Road in front of everyone before 2010 is too old.

Iain Dale commented not long ago that British political blogging hadn’t “yet” made the inroads achieved by its counterparts in the United States. That left some of us muttering to ourselves about how that was because British political blogging wasn’t actually terribly good, and that the bloggers who did show any talent were already writers or journalists of one stripe or another.

For me, the whole value of British political blogging was in the refreshing exchanges it made possible. In the early days, 4-6 years ago, there weren’t that many of us around. Samizdata, Harry’s Place, Peter Cuthbertson, Matthew Turner, Ian at England’s Sword, and someone calling himself Junius. People of every political stripe turned up everywhere. What resulted was sometimes a dust-up, but more often refreshing and enlightening exchange.

It was only a matter of time before talkboard denizens wrecked it. The big driver here was the creation of Comment Is Free. I’ve been acquainted with one of the Graun staffers who set up CIF since he was an inquisitive schoolboy, and, without malice, there was never any possibility of their successfully importing the blog format into their online paper.

And Crooked Timber, and the rantbloggers, and then the steady division of the expanding blogosphere into party categories.

So I was delighted to hear that Blimpish had started blogging again. He’d been by far the best of the openly Tory bloggers, a wide reader and deep thinker who could write and who was willing to engage in a proper argument – if you were foolish enough to take him on, of course. It was as pointless as debating with Oliver Kamm; always that effortless outflanking, executed with grace and every proper expression of regret.

Intelligence, fine writing and polite discussion are to modern British political blogging what a wooden racquet is to modern men’s tennis. Blimpish will have to learn to swear, to post his stats, to list-post and obsess about libel. It might take him some time. But until he does, we’ll have someone to show the Americans.

There are so many bad decisions in the first two minutes of this clip that I really don’t know where to begin:

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I’d started school the previous January. My grandmother and her sisters had attended Clapham Road Lower School too, seventy years before. It had been brand new then; by the time I was there, it was clapped out. We came in week after week to find the windows broken. Sadly, the intruders never stole the milk, which we drank through the sharpest plastic straws the British Empire could provide.

Christmas was a matter of Gerry Cottle’s circus, then an early evening in Violet Black’s terraced house with cakes, buns, coca cola and then off to bed. At an hour so late only grown-ups could breathe its air, someone crept in and lay a pair of tights on my bed. Chocolate money; a red plastic watch with moveable hands; an india-rubber ball. It would never be so perfect again.

Night-time in 1974 was dark brown, warm and alive with safety and love. They left the landing light on for me, and from where I lay I could hear these friendly, reassuring men singing up the stairs:

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I’ve sat here for about ten minutes trying to come up with a New Year’s wish that isn’t either “Brace! Brace!” or “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Well, good luck everybody: see you on the other side. As it were.

Aged five, I’d be there on the brick floor of my gran’s scullery taking apart an old clock with a screwdriver. There were quite a few to choose from as one by one my mother’s half of the family died away and their priceless knick-knacks found their way to our terrace.

I still own one of them, a big-shouldered Edwardian job with a beautifully-tuned Westminster chime. It, and its smart 1930s brother that I picked up in an Oxford junkshop in 1991, both await the sort of better days that will allow me to get them fixed.

The Edwardian one went to Oxford with me, which must have come as a bit of a shock to the system after ninety years in Bedford’s Black Tom. But I propped a straw hat on it, gave it my loudest tie to wear, and it seemed to settle in.

Strangely enough, then, the old Clock gallery in the British Museum was a constant haunt of mine for years. It was a quiet, less frequented place with false walls and ceilings of brown carpet. Every fifteen minutes or so the inmates would erupt like a university town.

Then it closed. I waited and waited for the new refurbished gallery to open.  In September I moved to Edinburgh, and thought I’d never see it again.

But I spent last weekend in London, and, miracle of miracles, the new Clocks and Watches Gallery (in the Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly Gallery, rooms 38 and 39) was open and I could get back in among all my old friends.

The new gallery is a huge improvement, like most of the British Museum’s recent changes. You can trace the history of clockmaking at a glance now, and the watches have been pulled together into a single elegant case. More of the collection (of which the display is but a small proportion) is on display.

I was there at the weekend, which is the worst time to visit. On Saturdays, the Museum fills with people who are there purely because it’s on the tourist circuit. The new gallery was crowded with rubberneckers on their way to the swords and mummies. But the new layout deals with large numbers very much better than the old one: you could still see what you’d came for.

My sole gripe was with the (otherwise excellent and informative) captions. Time and time again, I was reminded that such-and-such a timepiece would have been seen only in the homes of the wealthy.

It’s true. But before comparatively recently – perhaps only since the reindustrialisation of Japan after World War II – just about every technological “early adopter” was rich and every horological innovation expensive. And these displays were all about innovation.

Even some of the most recent exhibits (I’m glad to see new acquisitions that bring the story up to date) come from the top end of the market.

The point is not about the wickedness of wealth, but about the arrival of mass-production, and I’m afraid the captions obscure the difference between the two. The sociology of time is a huge subject, not short on controversies (“Arab Time”, anyone?), and, with only this exception,  the gallery restricts itself wisely to the technological side of the story.

It’s a minor point. The collections are accompanied by the publication of two new books by the BM’s Curator of Horology, David Thompson. These are long overdue and excellent (Saul Peckman’s photographs are superb). I love clocks, but I’m no horologist, and both books, one covering clocks and the other watches, cater for intelligent outsiders such as myself very well.

All in all, a sensitive and difficult job has been carried out superbly by David Thompson and his team. To achieve so much in so little time is nothing short of remarkable. The Gallery is one more reason, and one of the strongest amongst many, to love London. I can’t wait to be back.

My wife turns 40 today. I’d like to have bought her a horse. But this one belongs to Westons, the cider people. And our flat’s on the first floor. 

Next year.

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Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles (1871-1956) was one of that lost British type, the cheery, never-take-no-for-an-answer, not-quite-eccentric-thankyou pioneer. Photographs of him show an open, confident man, whose face says “buy me a beer,” or would do had he not been a pioneer of health farms as well as photo-journalism. The raging beauty in the front row, second left, is his wife. Around her are German women in one of the very first German female hockey teams. They look like decent people. All long dead, and their descendants probably have tattoos.

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PK and wife brought golf to Germany too: this page is taken from Sport Im Bild, the magazine he founded, and it makes you appreciate Stefan Zweig’s contempt for the fashion in female wear before the 1914 war. Garden golf is about all you’ll manage when you’re dressed like a steam pudding.

Pitcairn-Knowles’ pictures are in an exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood until January, which isn’t much use to me as I’m in Edinburgh. But if you are similarly stranded in the sticks, there’s this excellent book from which this selection of his work is taken.

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Sports photography as we would recognise it had to wait for the late Victorian acceleration in shutter speeds, but when that acceleration came, it wasn’t sport that first showed its face, but humour: this is by PK but might as well be Lartigue’s.

PK’s heyday was the Edwardian era, and by then football had taken its long-term form as a working class ghetto cult. But other sports were still finding their shape: this couple appear to be winning some sort of drink-driving competition. The grand prix circuit that led to F1 was already in existence, but the way forward was far from clear.

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It was one of the lost beauties of amateurism: sports could evolve freely and without hindrance. Experimentation was possible. New things could be tried that weren’t drugs or Prozone.

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A lot of early sports journalism is mocking: the British wanted diversion from their games, and not all sporting experiments were serious. Laughter and absurdity were major themes. Your reaction to adversity was an uncomplaining one, which produced a culture capable of liking itself, enjoying itself, able to present an unburdened face to the world. Bertie Wooster called it “wearing the mask” and it’s why there wasn’t an Edwardian Pink Floyd.

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What about Hardy and Houseman, I hear you say, and in the case of the latter, who was a near-neighbour of John Cameron’s in Tottenham at this time, you have a point. But both of them had a tendency to place their troubles in the past: the furrowed brow would be Roman or, at the very least, pre-industrial. PK caught the last of the pre-industrial sports before they disappeared. Imagine all those lost country jobs and pointlessly slaughtered chickens when cockfighting was banned. Die-hards carried on for a while, substituting pound sacks of aniseed for their erstwhile Rhode Island Reds.

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Some readers will remember the old half-time snacks. When we had faces, too. The Amazonian tribes who fear that a photograph will steal their soul have some kind of a point, although, as Martin Amis says, these days one shot alone won’t do it. Repeated exposures are required… PK’s Edwardian emulsion was tricky to employ but had that Mephistophelean power. Daguerrotypes were a devil’s Victorian weapon of choice, but by nineteen-seven a lighter, if less immediately effective tool came into favour.

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Stay young and beautiful if you want to be loved is my advice, and here is a Low Countries gentleman who has listened. Haven’t skates changed? Did they ever really need that long medieval toe? Was it something to do with weight distribution on uncertain ice?

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Don’t believe it when people tell you that Edwardians didn’t smile in photographs. And don’t believe them when they say that when Edwardians weren’t smiling in photographs, it was because they had bad teeth. I don’t smile in photographs because I have bad teeth. But when faster shutter speeds came in, out went the absolute need to pose pictures. Daguerrotype victims had to sit still for hours while their souls were yanked from their bodies. But this PK shot here is spiritually Polaroid.

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Youth gazes off into the future. But these are Edwardian days: you don’t want to do that.. and by the time of the Great War, PK was choosing better horizons: he returned to England from Germany and opened a health farm. His grandson keeps the family way alive. I’m having this for lunch.

(If you can make it to the exhibition in London, do: there are a lot more where these came from, and they’re all good. Failing that, do buy the book and justify my using the images here: it’s a treasure (pick up the Taschen complete Camera Work while you’re at it and get the best of the more felt and sombre side of Edwardian photography.)