Great British Railway Journeys - Series 3

The exciting things

I always want to be fascinated, amused, amazed and sometimes surprised by things I see, hear, read or experience, I am, I hope a sponge for knowledge and insight about things, whatever they might be.

History resonates with me, the way one can glean knowledge from all sorts of things like this afternoon, I found myself watching Michael Portillo’s presentation of the Great British Railway Journeys now on repeat on BBC 2, is just good tonic for the brain.

He was travelling from Great Yarmouth down the eastern seaboard of Anglia through Essex to London and in the process showing the linkages between his experiences and historical events using George Bradshaw’s Railway Companion published in the Victorian times as his travel guide.

History, geography and politics

In the third series filmed in 2012, the episodes 1 to 4 now available in BBC iPlayer, the history of the founding of the railways linked up with grave robbing [On YouTube] in Great Yarmouth along with a law - The Anatomy Act 1832 - that passed to allow the corpses of paupers to be used for anatomical research, then to the lost city of Dunwich which was at one time as large as London and the capital of the East Angles but all lost to sea - dubbed our own Atlantis.

He comes face-to-face with the skull of Simon de Sudbury – Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor who introduced the Poll Tax in the 14^th Century and was beheaded for it by the Peasants' Revolt, a lesson of history that Margaret Thatcher did not seem to have learnt when she got Micheal Portillo to introduce the Poll Tax in the 1990s almost bringing down the government because of the Poll Tax Riots that followed the implementation.

History will repeat itself if we fail to learn the lessons it teaches studiously, thoroughly and with proper attention to situation and circumstance.

Places and events

Really fascinating stuff like visiting Waltham Cross which apparently derives its name from being one of the 12 night-time resting places of the body of Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I when she was borne from Lincoln to London at Charing Cross – the king erected lavish stone crosses in all these towns in memory of her.

This all culminated in Hackney where we are told of the first railway murder – a city banker, Thomas Briggs was killed by Franz Muller, a German tailor – that did fill people with fear about travelling on trains.

Great and beautiful Britain and Northern Ireland

This was compelling stuff, I cannot wait to see the other episodes as they come online and I have seen many other episodes over the years that just give you the idea that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are such beautiful and wonderful places to visit as you tease out snippets of history, legends and yarns from city, town and village alike, of people, industry, events and change – I love this stuff.

The official website for the Great British Railway Journeys can be found here – If you can playback BBC iPlayer content, then if you are as curious as I am, that would have been time well spent.

Cricket World Cup 2007 - lbw - Ligature Butchers Woolmer

Making up the numbers

It is an open secret that cricket hardly has the demographic following to truly be a world sport. Beyond the seemingly shared colonial heritage shared with England, we have India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri-Lanka, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and West Indies - political interference in Zimbabwe cricket left it on the verge of dropping out of the elite - six minnow teams are needed to create a world event.

What is even interesting is that once cannot get a worthy representation from Scotland, Wales or Ireland, I take that back, Ireland has caused ructions in the current World Cup event taking place in the geographical expanse of hop-scotch islands that make up the West Indies.

The Netherlands prepared for the World Cup in the cold winter of the Northern Hemisphere made up of amateurs who probably just like English tea and have graduated to having cucumber sandwiches as a sign of anglophilia demonstrated by swinging a bat must have envied the elite teams that crowded down to the Southern Hemisphere for summer tans and practice where England dumped the ashes back in Australia with a whitewash.

Obfuscating cricket

For many, the rules of cricket are as inscrutable as the rules of American football which rarely sees the foot near the ball; and really, when the scores are toted up, who is Extras and when did he bat and I did not see him run?

However, the danger of the Cricket World Cup 2007 tournament coming and going as a non-event has passed with the death of the English Pakistani coach who was found unconscious on the floor of his hotel room in Jamaica after Pakistan was dumped out of the World Cup by Ireland the previous day.

The passion for cricket in the sub-continent cannot be overstated as effigies of the players were burnt by fans back home, disappointed by the performance of their team, but the death of Bob Woolmer has overshadowed the whole episode.

An English Murder Mystery

Now, the World Cup might just be remembered for being the one in which the coach of a team was asphyxiated by strangulation, though no other person implicated or ligature has yet been found - we have a murder mystery, one that would be a difficult one to solve.

All we now need to complete the Englishness of a game that probably can only be understood in English language is a Miss Marple or the nuisance of an Hetty Wainthropp, whilst a budding novelist might just be penning the first lines of a life as the new Agatha Christie with the Hercule Poirot of 2007 putting clues together for Sherlock Holmes and Dr John H. Watson to unravel.

Who cares about wickets, bowling, googlies, creases, fours, sixes or boundaries when the plot thickens to solve a Murder, most horrid?

Seriously, there is a serious crime to be solved about a nice man who has been tragically murdered for reasons we might yet never know, leaving a family behind in South Africa and a game that would miss a much loved man.