All it took was a bag of frozen peas left on the end of the checkout conveyor belt, my public spiritedness and up went the balloon. And it was high drama at the local supermarket.
1 August 2023 ~ Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is No Woke
I had just arrived at the local supermarket checkout with my week’s shopping ~ six bottles of beer, a can of cheap beans and a pound of liver, which I will need to replace mine if I carry on drinking like this ~ when I espied a lonely bag of frozen peas beached on the metallic rim at the end of the conveyor belt.
There was only one person in the queue in front of me, an elderly black lady.
“Are these yours?” I politely asked her, nodding towards the peas.
“No,” she replied, in a strong Jamaican accent, then, whistling through her teeth, asked “Why do people do such things?”
“A sign of the times,” I replied.
I began to unload my purchases from the basket to the conveyor belt, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
A lady, unusually large for the time of year, one of those scarred for life by the coronavirus Plandemic who cannot escape from her facemask, was asking me: “Are these your frozen peas?”
“No,” I answered. “I asked the lady in front of me the same question.”
A public-spirited person, ie me, then sought to bring the lonesome bag of peas to the attention of the foreign gentleman manning the checkout (‘manning’, we are not supposed to say that, are we?’).
“It’s OK,” he said, in a strong foreign accent, “Lady has gone to get something.”
That told me. But hardly had he finished speaking than he began to take a peculiar interest in something at the checkout opposite. He continued to look in that direction, calling as he did so, “Lady, lady, your things here!”
I looked where he was looking. The ‘lady’ to whom his comments were addressed, presumably she who had left the frozen peas, was standing in the opposite queue. She was big and black with a face resembling something that Buffalo Bill Cody would have been familiar with. Just then we, the elderly black lady who had spoken to me earlier and who was in the process of paying for her goods, glanced at each other. A second earlier she had turned her head to look at the culprit who had abandonned her frozen peas. The elderly lady seemed embarrassed. Hurriedly stuffing her last purchase into her bag, she scurried off, leaving me to mull over her question, “Why do they do it?” Why, indeed?
The foreign white gentleman manning the checkout was still appealing to the foreign black lady’s responsibilities, trying to get her to take the frozen peas back to the refrigerator, but whilst the peas were rapidly thawing, she was frozen within her ignorance.
“They [the peas] will defrozen,” called the checkout man, “defrozen, and then we will have to throw them in the bin.”
At long last, the ‘lady found her voice: “I don’t see it like that,” she retorted.
Now there’s an answer for you!
Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is No Woke
It was evident by now that the checkout man was flogging a dead horse, buffalo or something. He got up, strode down to the end of his conveyor belt, grabbed the peas and headed towards the fridge.
“It’s all happening at Fiddles today,” said I. “Such drama!”
The mask-wearing woman looked the other way, just in case her mask was not as foolproof as they had made her believe. The little middle-class lady standing behind her ~ and you don’t get a lot of them in Fiddles, come to think of it, you don’t see many of them in Bedford town centre ~ sniggered but did not utter a word.
The white checkout man from who knows what country strode back, resumed his seat and staring into the middle distance said, with an expression of incredulity, “Lady got same products but leave these, why?”
“Cuh,” I chimed, “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
And it didn’t, particularly as he was white and the frozen-pea leaver was black.
I half expected her to suddenly burst into a tirade of, “Yu wacist! Yu wacist, yu are!” and dash from the shop.
She would then complain online to her friends, who would then alert the authorities, who would then contact Fiddles’ management and demand an apology. The Guardinistan and the BBC would get wind of the situation and commence a campaign on the black woman’s behalf, reporting that she had been so terribly traumatised by the outrageous request to return the peas to the fridge that it had caused her to lose her self-esteem, not to mention her self-respect, and that, as a result, she could no longer go to the supermarket unless she was accompanied either by her grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews or nieces, preferably all of them together, which is why they are currently bobbing about in an inflatable dinghy on the English Channel, soon to dock at Dover from whence they will be V.I.P. driven to a nice five-star hotel, providing there are any left that are not already full.
Frozen Peas in Bedford
Shortly, a solicitor, one of those who specialises in just these sorts of cases, would volunteer to represent her. Her case would go to court. Naturally, the LLJUK (Liberal Left Judiciary UK) would award her compensation ~ a frozen packet of Fiddles’ peas for life to be delivered every week by hand by Fiddles’ CEO and in addition, and just for good measure, a handout of two million quid.
As for the white foreign gentleman, who had been totally out of order for calling the woman’s attention to the bag of peas she had ditched, he would be sacked forthwith, and his bank, The Cashless Globalist Inc., would immediately close his account Nigel Farrage-style, and wouldn’t that serve him white! What would he do? Where would he go? No lifetime’s guarantee of frozen peas for him. How would he survive in an overpriced country dominated by profiteering supermarkets, greedy utility companies, extorting financial institutions and totally in-the-pocket-of-George-Sorryarse MPs? There would be nothing for it but to turn gay, join the British Army, sue them for being beastly to him, or perhaps not beastly enough (pass the mascot, ‘Woof!’), and leave the service with his own compensation.
May this fair land we love so well in dignity and freedom dwell
28 May 2023 ~ It’s that man in the Russian hat in Bedford!
Great news! That is, great news if you are a dinosauric socialist or a politically challenged liberal: the results of the UK local elections suggest that Labour are back on track to break into Number 10 next year. It is rumoured that when this catastrophe happens, the first item on Queer Stammer’s agenda will not be to reverse rampant crime on our streets or stem the terrorist threat but to reverse Brexit in all but name. A politician, who wishes to remain Anonymous, as he hasn’t had a sex change, has disclosed that a bill will be produced (abracadabra!) that will ensure that whilst officially the UK is no longer a vassal state of the Evil bully-boy Union, the bureaucrats in Brussels will be firmly back in the driving seat.
Beyond rumour is the sure certainty that the UK’s immigration crisis, that is the one the Conservatives are powerless to prevent because, and I quote, of ‘legal challenges’ ~ time for Sorryarse’s UK legal-system to be investigated and overruled ~ is about to go from bad to worse.
The lefties have always been advocates of open-door immigration. After all, it was introduced by Mr Blair and his cronies as a pre-emptive measure to shore up the loss, which they rightly anticipated, of the white-working-class vote when the old grassroots socialists finally cottoned on, which eventually they did but only after it was much too late, that under Mr Blair’s stewardship New Labour had ceased to be the party of whippets, flat hats and pigeons, and that they and their tired old Marxist policies had been well and truly shafted. No one, not even the Neanderthal socialists, asked for multiculturism, and yet many just went along with it because since their grandads voted Labour they hadn’t the gump to ask themselves why they should do the same.
Neither did we ask for a free-for-all immigration fiasco. In fact, the majority voted Brexit to call for a halt to immigration, and what did we get in return? The net result under Tory rule is that immigration has soared to hitherto inconceivable heights. We also voted Brexit to loosen the pseudo-liberal stranglehold on every law that governs our land, particularly countercultural laws that originate from and are weaponised by the European Convention of Human Rights, the sole-serving purpose of which are to pave the way for mass immigration, a move that Britons pay dearly for, always in cash, often with lives. This, we are told, is social enrichment, when all that is enriched by uncontrolled third-world migration are the symbiotic coffers of the UK’s legal profession, the political mannequins on the end of the strings and the shadowy globalist figures whose hands control the strings that make those mannequins dance to their tune.
We will greet them on the beaches!
Sir Winston Chapelcliff
The proof is in the political pudding: You can vote as much as you like in Britain, but you’ll never get what you voted for. Other democracies around the world are routinely dismissed in Britain by its media and its political class, who refer to them as ‘managed democracies’, the implication being that we should think ourselves jolly lucky that the democracy in which we live is perfectly mismanaged.
At the end of the day, and every day, the cronies that govern our country, whichever party to which they belong, happily and arrogantly ride roughshod over all we believe in and all that we hold dear. Even now, as Enoch Powell’s predictions of ‘Rivers of Blood’ flow from cerebral to credible, the British media continues to praise the heinous game of migration chess foisted on us by a man whom it egregiously applauds as a ‘philanthropic billionaire and champion of human rights. They over egg the diversity soufflé whilst putting down the culinary critics who see it for what it is, as sickly as sick can be, by labelling them as conspiracy theorists and disciples of the far right. And should everything else in their bag of tricks fail, leaving nothing to dissemble with, they fall back on their second-rate act, drop Putin’s name into the mix and blame it all on the Russians.
Hats enough of hat!
You have just read the preface of two seemingly disconnected but actually interdependent actions: the singing of a song entitled There Always Was an England and an overwhelmingly strong compulsion to put on my Russian hat.
Look, it’s that man in the Russian hat!
Earlier this month I took my autocratic Russian hat for a test drive in the English countryside. On a date not to be disclosed for fear that they might travel back in time and attempt to rewrite history (the lefties are always at it), I plonked my hat upon my head and went for a stroll around Bedford.
Now, at any other time in the glorious history of our sovereign country, this would have posed no problem, but today, with almost every English town and city looking, sounding and feeling like the asylum version of Noah’s Ark, keeping a firm hand on one’s tiller is a crucial prerequisite for navigating dangerous urban waters.
This, as it happens (Jimmy Saville was fond of this phrase) is a convenient water-related metaphor, because the first place that my Russian hat took me was along the side of Bedford’s Embankment, next to the River Great Ouse.
Noah is not an English name, so there is a very good chance that he was one among a group of men idling near the water’s edge looking as though they had landed from Eastern Europe. Perhaps Noah himself had brought them?
You could tell that they belonged to the Tracksuit Bottom Club, because all were wearing tracksuit bottoms. They were gathered in a circle, and one of the men, the one with the most superior bottoms, was addressing the rest in earnest, or possibly Lithuanian, or it might have been Ukrainian (do they have a language?). The group was listening so attentively that its leader must have been giving them tips on how to work the benefit system, which was fortunate for me, as I glided past them in my hat like something hypersonic and, undetected by enemy radar, arrived at Bedford’s Suspension Bridge without comment, let or hinderance.
A thing of beauty!
It was a lovely day to be standing above the River Great Ouse wearing a Russian hat. A couple of swans went by, who must have been working for border security because they took as much notice of me loitering in my Russian hat as they would a flotilla of boat people cruising into Dover.
A bus pulled up outside the Embankment Hotel, and from it alighted a gaggle of shadowy personages who went inside the building. Was it one of those freebee buses paid for by the government? Sorry, I mean paid for out of the British taxpayers’ pocket? “Don’t go to the Embankment bar,” whispered a prophetic voice. It was the same voice that long ago had advised me quite correctly to “Avoid the BBC licence fee as one would avoid the plague!” Yet again, I thought it prudent to act on its advice. As an Englishman in England, I had to watch my step! I watched them all the way back to Bedford Town Bridge.
Where did you get that hat?
If there is one thing in life that never ceases to amaze me, and I assure you it’s not the Labour party, it is just how useful bridges are when you want to cross from one side to the other, and Bedford Town Bridge is no exception. Built in 1813 and expanded in 1938, the bridge insisted I stand upon it and have a photo taken wearing my Russian hat!
You can tell it is not a selfie, for, if it was, I would have been pouting and looking like a ten-year old thanks to the camera’s filter. Not having any tats, well, not that I can show you, and without a ring stuck through my snout or a bolt thrust through my lip, the risk of doing something like that, taking a selfie that is, was slim to say the least.
I had my photo taken and then pressed on, passing numerous people young and old alike, who didn’t even see me let alone my Russian hat because every zombie one of them was twiddling on their mobile phones as if they’d sold their soul to Bill Gates, which in effect they had.
Within less time than it takes to invent a pandemic and cash in on those fatal jabs, I came at last to the High Street, which was busy, busy, busy. As I had not been asked to produce my passport, I assumed I was still in England. It’s just not that easy to tell anymore.
I crossed over the zebra crossing, well why not? That, like bridges, is what they are there for, and continued in the same direction in which I had been going. All of a sudden, a strange looking fellow dressed in a pea-green T-shirt clutching a first-prize trophy that had been given to him gratuitously by the world’s most apolitical club ~ it ironically goes by the name of Eurovision ~ turned tail and ran. Had he seen my hat? The last I saw of this funny little man, he was heading towards the offices of the Government in Exile located on Britain’s ‘Take Anyone Street’. Man, that’s an awfully crowded street ~ innit!
I was now standing in one of Bedford’s most populated thoroughfares, next to Debenhams, that has closed, not far from Beales, which has closed, just around the corner from Eurovision Stores, many of which, like borders, are open (A round of applause from the Liebour party!). So far only two people had noticed my hat. I don’t know how they did it, as both have silly great faces of metal and all they do all day long is stand and stare at each another. These ‘statues’ in the centre of Bedford are worth every penny that you, the taxpayer, paid for them: trust me, I’m a politician.
From here it was all downhill to Ethnic Street, or Midland Road as it is sometimes known. Surely someone here would be a specialist in spotting Russian hats? But no, so off we went to Wetherspoons. It being at this juncture not just as good a place to stop as any but the place where stopping is most desirable, and that’s an unarguable fact! — you wouldn’t want to walk further, believe me you really wouldn’t.
Over a thoughtful pint in Wetherspoons we, my camera crew and I, considered chancing our hat in Bidenham, er sorry I meant to say Biddenham, the home of the Ukrainian flag, but came to the conclusion that as the virtue-signalling folk who live there exhibit obvious limitations in independent thinking, the likelihood of any one of them understanding Cyrillic was much less in their favour as was looking silly in the eyes of the world.
Perhaps I should start a beginner’s course in reading Russian hats at Bedford College. We could follow the immigration paradigm: First come, all served! Discounted fees for the naive, especially those voting Green or Labour. But hurry, as places and brain cells are limited! Just quote the password dorac!!
Published: 22 November 2022 ~ Bedford more to like than not
Rumours that I haven’t posted much to my blog recently have invoked theories ranging from a nasty reaction to not-working sanctions to being fitted up by the British unjudicial system for saying things that are not allowed. But that wasn’t me. Clue: Marvin Gaye, he ‘Heard it through the Grape Vine’. Whatever the rumours, they are greatly exaggerated.
Alas, the explanation is far more mundane: I’ve been on holiday in the UK.
“A likely story,” says someone who accuses everyone else of conspiracy theories. “I suppose you will be telling us next that you had no access to the internet!”
Well, as it happens, where I was staying, no.
Travelling package-style by Hart’s Tours, which would have been a successful company had it not been inaugurated on the eve of the coronavirus experiment, the exclusive hotel in which I would be staying is renowned for containing more antiques than Britain’s got migrants (er, possibly not), but what it has not got is the internet. No point in taking my laptop, thought I; just extra weight to carry.
Verily, no internet connection and also no TV is an excellent way of detoxifying yourself from the insurgency of cyberspace and the brain-numbing mumbo jumbo thrust wilfully up you by mainstream media. If you are one of those, or even just one of those, who have become enslaved to your iPhone and are concerned about being controlled and tracked on a daily basis by the slippery Silicon Valley Mob, I recommend when visiting England that you opt for Towlson Towers. As a no frills hotel, complete with a host of truly irritating inconveniences, such as 40 watt bulbs where 100 watts should be, cold and cold running water, as many steps in unusual places as one could ever want to trip up, over and down and an invigorating absence of any form of heating (a luxury extra at this establishment even before Britain’s energy crisis took hold), TTs is the place.
My return to the UK did not take me to London: “Love the history, Fawlty, can’t stand the Woke!” No, I was headed to Bedford, a market town in Bedfordshire, of which C.F. Farrar wrote in his excellent book Old Bedford nothing happened for five hundred years. A lot did happen in the many years preceding the five hundred when nothing happened and a lot has happened since, but nothing for the better. Bedford town centre, like every other town and city in the UK, is a sad and sorry reminder of just how radically and irreparably our liberal masters have dismantled and infected what once, without a shadow of a doubt, was one of the greatest countries, if not the greatest country, the world has ever known.
If you buy into or simply pay lip service, because you are told to do so, so you think you must, to the political mantras about ‘enrichment’ and ‘vibrancy’ and all the other embarrassing slogans attached to the back of multiculturalism, which are rattled out like an old tin can tied to a frightened cat’s tail, then go ahead and love it! But for the majority, there is no doubt that there is more to be avoided in modern British society than there is to be enjoyed.
But this is not to single Bedford out. Many white British who live in the surrounding villages are very quick to assert, and are adamant with it, that they ‘never go into the towns!’ wherever those towns may be.
Acknowledging, therefore, the relevance of the old song lyrics, ‘Things ‘aint what they used to be’, let’s briefly escape from the modern-day tragedy of Bedford, representative as it is of the plight and prescient social upheaval that awaits the UK in the not-too-distant future, and dip a little into its past ~ into the real English beginnings and their making of the character of the place.
Bedford more to like than not
Bedford is a market town and the historic county town of Bedfordshire. Its name is said to derive from an amalgamation of the name of a Saxon chief called Beda and a ford that crossed the River Great Ouse. Offa of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon king, was buried in Bedford in 796 but is probably no longer there, as his tomb on the banks of the Great River Ouse most likely ensured that he upped and floated away.
Bedford had a castle, which was constructed under the auspices of Hugh de Beauchamp, within 20 years of the Norman Conquest in 1066. “This was the time when it all went wrong!” a friend of mine is fond of saying. He is not necessarily or at least exclusively referring to Bedford itself, of which a lot went wrong in more recent times. He means to imply that it all went wrong with England. “It’s the fault of those bloody Normans!” he likes to cry, whenever we see a rabbit or driving along through country lanes espy a church with a Norman tower.
For Bedford Castle, it all went wrong when a robber baron, Sir Fulke de Breauté (there were a lot of robber barons about in those days), fatally overestimated not only his own importance and invincibility but the impregnability of his castle.
He believed that by kidnapping a judge (as you do) and incarcerating him within his castle, he would prevent the Crown from taking the castle away from him. Instead, he succeeded in getting the castle sieged, bombarded, breached and blown up and a number of people killed, before he was eventually brought to ground himself and exiled to a terrible place where nobody wanted to go, not even in the middle-ages, across the Channel to France!
Today, all that remains of what reputedly was a redoubtable fortification, Bedford Castle, is a large grassy mound. “A great place to sit and eat chips,” someone wrote in a tourist review. I would add to that, “a great place to sit and eat chips whilst pondering British history.”
Bedford’s Castle Mound is still worth visiting as it is situated in what is easily the most attractive quarter of the town, The Embankment. Getting to it from the town centre enables you to say hello to the town bridge and opposite the Swan Hotel, a classic 18th century edifice built by the Duke of Bedford in 1794-1796, that is to say that the Duke of Bedford commissioned it to be built. I am not suggesting that he was out there at the end of the 18th century with a trowel in one hand and a stone in the other.
The Swan Hotel As hotels go, you are not going to get anything as quintessentially 18th century than this outside of Oundle or Stamford! The current Swan Hotel ~ there was an earlier one ~ had the Duke of Bedford commission the well-known London architect Henry Holland to design and build it between 1794~1796. If you stand on the forecourt, you will notice, I know you will, that contrary to Georgian architectural paradigms, the hotel is asymmetrical. The right-hand gate is missing. It was sacrificed in the 1880s to make way for the The Embankment road, which dissected the hotel’s gardens. Inside the hotel is a curious mix of old Georgian and modern swank.
Had you arrived in Bedford before the 1970s, after appreciating the regality of the Swan you would next have been delighted by the magnificent sight of a large and impressive building of neo-Gothic persuasion. The Town and Country Club, as once had been its function and by which it had been known, was, alas, swept away with numerous other buildings of exemplary historical importance, as former Bedford historian Richard Wildman agonises, during a time in which town planning in Britain was the vandalistic equivalent of social engineering today.
Bedford’s Town & Country Club. One of many historic Bedford buildings destroyed in the 60s and 70s
Bedford is by no means the only town in the British Isles that bears the scars of the 1960s’ anti-heritage culture, but, as a leaf through any of Richard Wildman’s pictorial history books show, it has the dubious distinction of listing among the legions of the architecturally damned and demolished more than its fair share of victims.
Bedford more to like than not
So, we pass swiftly on and, as we do, we cannot help admiring the beautifully landscaped and typically English character of the scene as it unfolds. The Great River Ouse meandering calmly away from the city centre, leaving behind lack-lustre Kempston and no-go Queen’s Park, transports you to one of those timeless English vistas replete with sleepy meadows, avenues of trees, formal gardens with floral Victorian beddings, posh rowing clubs, happy swans and geese and some of the finest examples of Gothic Revivalist architecture that you could ever wish to behold in the residential category.
The wealth, prosperity, order, security and dignity all of which was once England presents itself in the large, often vast, red-brick houses and imposing villas that sweep along the Embankment and radiate into the streets beyond. Built in the Gothic Revivalist style at the end of the 19th century, these infinitely desirable properties, with their impressive facades of carved stone, half-timbered gables and deep bay windows, are deceptively more extensive than even the grand scale of their stately frontages suggests. I won’t gild the lily by saying that they seem to go on forever, but some of them tend to go on considerably further than one might expect.
Above: The Embankment Hotel Unmissable, thanks to its wonderful and evocative medieval-style half-timbered façade, the Embankment Hotel and Restaurant occupies a prime place overlooking Bedford’s Embankment Promenade and the River Great Ouse. The 1891-built hotel boasts that it has no ‘stuffy resident’s bar’, which is all well and good, but what it does have, especially on a Friday and Saturday night, is a very noisy public bar, which does tend to dilute the otherwise genteel image. In its defence, however, try finding a pub in Bedford on a Friday or Saturday night that does not resemble a cattle market! Go there in the week!
The following photographs were taken on a bright, late October morning in 2022. We perambulated with the best of them along the Embankment Prom and then crossed over to the meadows on the other side of the river via the landmark Victorian Suspension Bridge.
One barks the other bites!Happiness is obviously an arse that fits!Bedford Suspension Bridge
Suspension Bridge Bedford Suspension Bridge, a landmark architectural feature, was constructed in 1888. It provides access from The Embankment to Mill Meadows. The bridge was designed by John James Webster, the remit being to allow the passage of sailing boats.
View from the Suspension Bridge towards the town centreButterfly Bridge
Butterfly Bridge And please, don’t ask why do they call it Butterfly Bridge?! It opened in 1997 and was designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects, reputedly as a late 20th century/early 21st century equivalent to Webster’s 1888 Suspension Bridge, each bridge landmarking the end and beginning of their respective centuries.
Unless you live in a vacuum, believing that this is how it is, how it was and always will be, me and my mobile phone, it should not be incredibly difficult to imagine what scenes of elegance were once to be found as the Edwardian upper classes strutted their decorous stuff along the walk at Bedford Embankment. And if you cannot imagine, use it as an excuse to call in at the Three Cups public house on Newnham Street, where not only will you find an exciting, changing range of delicious British real ales but also framed black and white photographs of Bedford Embankment as it looked at the turn of the 20th century.
The Three Cups, Newnham Street, Bedford. Real Ales & Atmosphere!
Above: A rare sight. The locals of the Three Cups looking more normal than usual on Halloween
Check out the style of the chaps in their striped blazers and boater hats (I am referring now to the pictures on the walls!) and the ladies of quality in their crisp, light dresses or perfectly turned-out dress suits, nipped in at the waist, embellished with lace and other feminine attributes. Yes, there really was a time when the people of the British Isles were not as they are today, less better dressed than a boat load of Navy-escorted grinning migrants.
Bedford, it’s not a bad place. Put it on your visiting list.
More about Bedford
The Embankment War Memorial The War Memorial on Bedford’s Riverside Walk was sculpted by Charles S Jagger and is situated opposite Rothsay Road. Made from Portland Stone and marble, it commemorates the fallen in three wars: the First World War, Second World War and Korean War.
The Boer War Monument The impressive and detailed monument that stands in front of the Swan Hotel, Bedford, surmounted by an infantryman in full battledress, pays tribute to the 237 Bedfordshire men who lost their lives in the Boer War, 1899-1902.
John Bunyan statue Every town is known for someone. In Bedford, it’s mainly John Bunyan, thanks to the large bronze statue of him that stands at the crossroads at the top of Bedford High Street. John Bunyan was about in the mid-to-late 17th century. He was an English Christian writer and dissenter, an occupation that saw him committed to Bedford County Gaol on two occasions. Apart from being locked up, Bunyan was, of course, famous for having authored the Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, most of which, it seems, was written during the two periods when he was languishing in gaol. The book was eventually published in 1678. This monumental work of literature, which has never been out of print and has been translated into more than 200 languages, influenced many a literary genius, among them Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Bunyan’s Bedford connections and life history are celebrated in the John Bunyan Museum in Beford. The statue is magnificent; the museum a source of serious historical reflection. {photo credit: Simon Speed}
Glenn Miller
Glenn Miller The legendary American big band leader, Glenn Miller, was billeted in Bedford, to be more precise in Bedfordshire in Milton Ernest Hall. He took his last fateful flight from Twinwood Airfield, now home to the biggest swing music festival in the UK. A bronze bust of Miller occupies pride of place in a niche in the wall of Bedford Corn Exchange, which was built and opened in 1874, still functions as a concert venue and plays host to the annual Bedford Beer Festival.
Bedford Corn Exchange
Cardington and the airships Just outside of Bedford lies the old Cardington airbase, what is left of it. Like every other square foot in the UK, it has been covered in concrete and bricks. Because that is what the UK needs: more houses for more people! Nevertheless, the Cardington Sheds still dominant the skyline; the massive hangars in which the great airships of the early 20th century were constructed. It was from these ‘sheds’ that the fated, experimental R101 was hauled out to make its maiden voyage to France, where it crashed killing 48 passengers and crew on board. The remains of the dead are buried in a mass grave in Cardington Cemetery. A monument in the church opposite provides a roll of honour, naming those who lost their lives in this historic misadventure.
John Howard Most people who are not as thick as two short planks (innit?) will know that the large bronze statue standing at the crossroads to Bedford High Street is John Bunyan. But who is that other chap overlooking the weekly market, holding his face in his right hand and staring pensively down at the ground? That’s Bedford’s second celebrity, the eighteenth-century philanthropist and prison-conditions reformer, John Howard, cast in bronze by the celebrated, if not occasionally controversial, sculptor, Sir Alfred Gilbert, creator of the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus, London. Whenever I look at the pose and expression of John Howard, I cannot help but think that having watched over the centre of Bedford since 1894, he has accumulated serious doubts as to whether his reformation work was after all a misappropriation of time and effort. He is most likely silently advocating, “Bring back the birch!”. He also has a statue in Ukraine ~ not many people know that!
The Higgins Art Gallery and Museum A short walk from Bedford Embankment in the area known as the Castle Quarter, The Higgins Art Gallery and Museum, known as The Higgins after Bedford’s prominent Higgin’s family and its connection with the museum site, is the culmination of a six-million-pound project that effectively united three cultural venues: Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford Museum and Bedford Gallery. Higgins, who was a brewer, so he must have been a good man, left detailed instructions in his will as to how the museum would be run and organised. Structurally, the museum is fascinating in itself. It links the old brewery buildings in Castle Lane with the Higgins’ family home and incorporates the Hexagonal Gallery, which was built in the early 19th century on the foundations of Bedford Castle. I like old breweries and social history, so both the industrial building and the Higgins’ family home are sources of wonder to me. The museum provides the opportunity to appreciate impressive collections of fine and decorative arts and highly accredited watercolours, so you can brush up on your knowledge of antiques whilst learning all you need to know about Bedford, its people and the history of the town. Website: https://www.thehigginsbedford.org.uk/Home.aspx
