I came across the story last year when I found a folder of press cuttings I had saved back in the Nineties - think of them as pre-internet bookmarks. Today's news comes from the gofundme page set up to raise money for a new memorial.
As I once wrote:
I love Milton Jones's comedy. He doesn't just use puns and word play. If that was all he did, he's be Tim Vine.
It's because every funny line of his creates an alternative world. And that world exists for a second or two on stage with him until its bubble bursts and it is no more.
Here Jones talks to the always likeable Rob Brydon about his career and approach to comedy.
The party's autumn conference is in Bournemouth this year. I doubt I'll have the self-control to resist stealing Jones's joke about the Japanese attack on Poole Harbour for Lord Bonkers.
Robert Key, who died last year, was the Conservative MP for Salisbury between 1983 and 2010. On 17 March 2010 he gave his last Commons speech, and it was one of the most remarkable ever given there.
It was on the second reading of the Gordon Brown government's Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill, which passed into law before the general election of that year.
Early in Key's speech, he said:
The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) referred to the question of far-off lands, saying that if mines exploded around our shores or in our country there would be immediate public outrage and very swift action indeed. Well, I can tell the House that that has happened in our land. I was there, and I want to pass on, for those who will be here long after I have gone, what happens in those circumstances.
And that is just what he did:
On Friday 13 May 1955, when I was 10 years old, I was on Swanage beach in Dorset with some 20 other children of about the same age. We were doing what children on a beach on a Friday afternoon in May do-building sandcastles, digging holes in the sand, making dams and so on. I was building my castle with a chap called Richard Dunstan: five of my friends were digging holes, and then one of them found a tin. He thought that it was Spam, or something really exotic-yes, Spam was exotic in 1955. He was wrestling to move it, because it was lodged between two rocks. He got out a shoehorn but could not break the tin open. The boys stood back, and were seen throwing things at it.
My friend and I got bored. We turned round. We had our backs to our friends, and were about the same distance from them as I am from you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, when there was a huge explosion. We were blown into the sea, and lived. Five of my friends died. Five British children were blown up by a British mine on a British beach, within my living memory, and the living memory of many other people. It was an extraordinary thing. It happened in the middle of the 1955 general election. The front page of the following day's edition of The Daily Telegraph carried a story with the headline, "4 Boys Die, One Missing in Explosion". Below that, smaller headlines stated, "Big Crater Torn in Beach" and "Wartime Mine Theory".
There was not much theory involved for the five who were killed, or for the two of us who were the luckiest people alive. I still think that I am the luckiest person alive in this House. Of course, my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Milton Keynes has deliberately put himself in harm's way, and I salute him for it, but I was there as a child and got tangled up in what happened by mistake. So what was the response in Britain when a mine exploded around our shores? Many years later, I was a Minister in the Department of National Heritage, and the Imperial War Museum was one of my responsibilities. One day, I asked the staff there whether they had any records of something happening on Swanage beach on 13 May 1955. A couple of weeks later, a large box arrived, full of all the documentation relating to that horrible event.
I have here in my hand copies of the Dorset police documents entitled "Report to Coroner Concerning Death". They detail how, on 13 May at about 4.20 pm, four boys were reported dead. I also have a copy of the report from the police constable who found them, but the strange thing is that the fifth boy was never found. Within a day or two, a plimsoll that he had been wearing was found. Another was found a few days later. That meant that the then Home Secretary had to issue a document giving authority to the coroner to investigate the matter. The coroner simply declared that there was no conclusion to reach other than that the fifth boy had been a victim of the same mine explosion.
In the inquest, the coroner called for evidence from the officer responsible for de-mining the beach, who had issued a class IIA certificate in January 1950. The officer said:
"I am convinced that this mine had been in the sea and from evidence of marine growth I consider the mine had been washed ashore.
What the boys were seen to have been doing was quite sufficient to have exploded the mine...As an expert I would have allowed boys to walk across the beach."
I have read the mine clearance officer's reports, and have with me a copy of the plan of the mines that were laid on Swanage beach in 1940. A clearance operation was undertaken in 1945, which was repeated in 1947 and again 1949. Eventually, a clearance certificate was issued on 17 February 1950. The documents reveal that 117 mines had been laid, of which five were lifted in clearance. They also show that, although there was some evidence of the existence of 54 others, the remaining 58 are still unaccounted for. That was what I found so horrendous when I discovered all this as a Minister of the Crown so many years later.
The coroner concluded his remarkable summing up-in those days, of course, everything was handwritten, and I have a copy of his notes-by saying:
"I think the bomb was in all probability washed ashore.
I do not think any blame can be attached to any living persons in this matter. The boys were all playing among the rocks in a perfectly normal way so far as"the master in charge
"could see and I do not consider he has any reason to reproach himself, and after the explosion he could not have done more nor acted more resolutely than he did."I certainly concur with that. He was my favourite master. He was my French master, and a remarkable and good man. I think that he must have been through hell ever since.
One can imagine how horrified the staff at the school were by what had happened. They, too, were remarkable in the way in which they handled the incident, the enormity of which was overwhelming. The headmaster, John Strange, who was a wonderful man, managed to hold the whole community together. The retired headmaster, the Rev. Chadwick, also played his part. The master who had been at the heart of the incident and who had been taking his charges on the beach was wonderful.
The school could not have done more to look after the children, but the fact remained that the mine clearances had not been completed satisfactorily. The mine clearance officers had, in fact, refused a certificate of clearance on one occasion, but had been overruled.
In the final certificate of removal of dangerous military defence works, the officer concerned-who, ironically, was operating out of Southern Command in Salisbury in my constituency-stated:
"The whole area has been swept with a detector and those portions of the area which have been subject to disturbances have been explored thoroughly to the apparent depth of that disturbance".
Bulldozers were brought in, and the beach was removed down to the rock and put back again. The officer continued:
"Though no guarantee can be given the area may be considered safe except for the possibility of mines being washed up from other fields",and that is what happened.
This is a horrendous story, and I repeat it to the House to point out that on the issue of mine clearance, whether it is cluster bombs, cluster munitions or mines of any kind, the impact is the same on a child of 10 at play, whether in Beirut or in Swanage. Personally, I would like to see the mystery of the missing mines of Swanage bay cleared up. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood), who also knows more about military matters than most of us, and who has first-hand experience in his military service, might be interested.
After the event, the coastguard swept the whole coast from St. Aldhelm's head right round past Poole harbour all the way to the Isle of Wight for any traces of that missing body. None were found.
More significant now is the fact that we have the technology to detect those mines. I would like to see minehunters of the Sandown class or equivalent brought in, perhaps in training, to sweep Swanage beach and the coast right round Bournemouth. We have the evidence in the 1950 statements of the officer who did the clearance and also from the 1955 inquest that the bomb which killed those children had probably been swept inshore by a gale. There is an opportunity for the Ministry of Defence, in the course of training our Royal Navy operatives, to have another go. That would be an opportunity worth taking.
I support the Bill - of course I do, after what I have been through in my life. I still think I am the luckiest Member to be alive. It motivated me in my politics, and it motivated me to be interested in defence once I came to the House. I have done that for 27 years.
I hope the lessons of Swanage beach will not be forgotten. I hope the Bill will be but one step on the road to realising that although war may have to be fought, we should always strive to do it honourably, morally, with integrity, and always and everywhere with the minimum impact on a civilian population that has not put itself in harm's way. That is my wish, and that is why I support the Bill.
I am blogging about this story today because I found an interview with Robert Key that he gave just after making the speech, in the folder of press cuttings I turned up the other day.
In it he gave some details of the boys' deaths which he didn't mention in the Commons (and which I shan't repeat here), and talked about the effect on him:
"I had just started making friends in my new school when the land mine went off. My mother came to see me, and my father prayed with the other parents, but I was desperately homesick and miserable. My back was badly injured. My friend was taking shrapnel out for years.
"We hated having to go back to the beach every Friday. The Army said they hadn't found any other mines. But we heard the explosions in our classroom, everyone went white. It was very stiff upper lip, pretending not to notice the spaces in the dormitory."
Reading the contemporary news reports of this tragedy and the inquest into it, I get the impression that the authorities seized too readily upon the explanation that the mine responsible had drifted ashore, because it meant that no one need be held responsible. That seems to be what Robert Key believed too.
Swanage was not the only tragedy involving wartime mines. A Sunday Mirror article from 28 June 1959 warned:
Death Hides in the Sands!
Killers, silent, corroded, rusty, lurk where the holiday families play this summer - on beaches and moors, in woods and fields.
The tides, or children with spades, will uncover-some 40 beach mines on Britain’s East and South Coasts.
These are the deadliest of all, warns Lieutenant-Colonel N. Barker, who commands the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit at Horsham, Sussex.
They can kill at 100 yards, And they have done frequently since World War II ended - fourteen years ago.
And the report goes on to remind readers:
Killers all - that, only recently, killed four men near Harrogate and five boys at Swanage, Dorset... and maimed six children in Yorkshire.
I now wonder if the danger of mines was something that every holidaying family was once aware of. Certainly, I can remember being told before a family caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967 that I shouldn't pick up anything metal I found on the shore. At the end of this post you can a public information film that was issued after the Swanage tragedy.
The five boys are remembered by a tablet on a building erected in their memory at what was Forres school, the prep school they attended. Forres later merged with another school and its buildings at Swanage are now occupied by a special school, which means the tablet is not generally open to public view.
So money is being raised to provide a more accessible memorial to the boys and one that is near the place where the tragedy took place.
Michael Medwin is one of those actors who often turns up in old British films and always makes them better. He usually, but not always, played cockney characters.
He also went on to have an influential second career as film and theatre producer. He was the producer behind Lindsay Anderson's If.... and O Lucky Man! and behind the first production of Julian Mitchell's play Another Country, which helped establish the careers of Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Daniel Day-Lewis.
But I come from a generation that knew him as Don Satchley, the smooth boss of Radio West in Shoestring.
When Medwin died in 2020, the Guardian quoted Michael Caine in his obituary:
"I was amazed when I met him to discover that he had a very upper-crust accent. Cockney is a hard accent to do and he did it brilliantly."
Yes, Medwin went to a public school, but his childhood was far from conventional.
His family background was Dutch and Irish, and he was adopted from an orphanage by two elderly unmarried women, Dr Mary Jeremy and a Miss Clopton-Roberts.
I can't find anything about Clopton-Roberts online, but Mary Jeremy was a substantial figure - an early woman doctor who chaired the National Council for Women, which was an early feminist organisation. You can read a profile of her at the bottom of this page of the Poole's Health Record site.
She was also chaired the National Council for Women, an early feminist organisation that concerned itself with causes like equal pay.
And if you search for Michael Medwin on the British Newspaper Archive, the earliest story to come up is from the Western Gazette for 17 June 1932. It concerns a fete held to raise funds for the Hants and Dorset Babies' Home, Parkestone, at the garden of Meadowside, Colehill, the home of Dr Mary Jeremy:
Dr, Mary Jeremy was responsible for the serving of teas, and Mrs Kitching (Bournemouth) and little Miss Mary Medwin and Master Michael Medwin had change of stalls.
So it sounds as though we have discovered that he had, if not a sister, then at least an adoptive sister.
"Duncan came back to his foster home from college one day and found all his bags were packed. It hadn’t even been a week since he turned 18, and his foster carers were happy for him to stay. He’d been living with them since he was 11. But social services said it wasn’t an option. The police would be called if he didn’t go calmly." Greg Barradale reports on the Staying Put scheme, which is helping reduce homelessness among care leavers.
A year ago, the Independent Commission on Equity in Cricket published a bombshell report that exposed many of the game’s ills. Alan White asks why the sport decided to rip the shroud away from itself, and finds out what comes next.
Jeni Rizio on the many good reasons for learning Welsh.
Melina Spanoudi visits Nottingham's Five Leaves Bookshop: "The bookshop is not located on the high street, so events are key to get customers into the shop; the booksellers hold 100 or so a year. In the past weeks, these have included a talk on the history of lesbian fashion, a conversation between human rights activist and politician Shami Chakrabarti and biographer Rachel Holmes, a launch of poetry pamphlets and a discussion with Jonathan Coe and Graham Caveney."
"The sight of glow-worms lighting our way along the hedgerows of a country lane at the height of summer, with all the smells of hay and flowers, is delightful and often unexpected. They are a source of amazement, like seeing a shooting star." Steven Morris meets the glow-worm survey volunteers of Dorset.
Michael Mullaney, who was our candidate in Hinckley and Bosworth on Thursday, has tweeted a list of the Liberal Democrat near misses at this election. They form a handy list of targets for the next election.
The second column gives the number votes we were adrift of the winner, and the third the percentage swing needed to win it next time. It is this latter figure that determines a seat's ranking in the list.
All these seats are held by the Conservatives except Burnley, which is held by Labour.
%
Godalming and Ash 891 0.81
Farnham and Bordon 1349 1.27
Hampshire East 1275 1.27
Shropshire South 1624 1.57
Dorset North 1589 1.60
Romsey and Southampton North 2191 2.19
Cotswold North 3357 3.34
Torridge and Tavistock 3950 3.89
Burnley 3420 4.31
Hamble Valley 4802 4.35
Hertfordshire South West 4456 4.62
Salisbury 5285 5.27
Buckinghamshire Mid 5872 5.44
Sevenoaks 5440 5.45
Hinckley and Bosworth 5408 5.66
When I blogged about Gordon Birtwistle, who was our candidate in Burnley having been MP for the town between 2005 and 2010, I wondered about his claim that the contest was between him and Labour, But he turned out to be quite right.
Sir Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat leader, has claimed his party could unexpectedly win back a host of Conservative seats in its former South West heartlands, announcing a last-minute “Project A30” election offensive.
Davey told the Financial Times in an interview that some of the seats had previously been seen as “out of reach” but were now in range if the party managed to raise more money from donors for last-minute campaigning.
On a visit to Yeovil in Somerset, he declared: “The Liberal Democrats are back in the West Country.” The town lies on the A30 trunk road, linking London to Land’s End, with a host of Lib Dem targets on either side.
The seats Parker and Gross quote Ed Davey as mentioning are St Ives, North Cornwall, Honiton, Torbay, South Devon and West Dorset.
In Somerset, where Ed says we are "spoilt for choice", they list Yeovil and Taunton.
I suspect St Ives has always been seen as a good prospect, but it's good to see the party looking beyond the Home Counties now the campaign has passed the halfway point.
It quotes the party's leader, Ed Davey, on a visit to Dorset, where we took control of the council after gaining 13 wards from the Tories:
"This victory in Dorset is an historic and stunning result for the Liberal Democrats,” he said. “People here in Dorset and right across the country are fed up with this chaotic and out-of-touch Conservative government and they’re voting for change with the Liberal Democrats. ...
"After our victory in Somerset two years ago and our stunning successes in Devon last year, this win in Dorset confirms that the Liberal Democrats are back in the West Country and will be the main challengers to Conservative MPs here whenever the general election is called."
The Liberal Democrat party is stepping up campaigning in more than a dozen seats predominantly in the south of England following recent by-election wins, as it starts to broaden its ambitions ahead of the general election expected next year.
Dave McCobb, the director of field campaigns, presented a paper to members on Tuesday night that identified areas where support for the Lib Dems was growing, giving the party a good chance of pushing out the Conservatives at the next election.
Most of these constituencies are in the party’s former heartland in the south-west of England, including Taunton Deane and West Dorset, as well in Surrey in the south-east and the seat of Stratford-on-Avon in the West Midlands.
News from Dorset Live:
Walkers and beachgoers are being warned of the dangers of straying too close to cliff faces after a vast overnight landslip on the coast of Dorset. Many thousands of tonnes of material has collapsed onto the beach at Seatown.
The privately owned beach is a favourite with anglers, fossil hunters and walkers. The huge landslip occurred overnight and Dorset Fire and Rescue Service have urged visitors to the area to take extra care.
Meanwhile, over the county boundary in Somerset, Sarah Dyke won back Somerton and Frome for the Liberal Democrats. Congratulations to Sarah and all who were involved in the campaign.
Britain Elects has tweeted the figures:
These days Talking Pictures TV is the place to go for videos like this, but I used to post them quite regularly. So let's put a toe in the water again.
There's nothing spectacular here - no trains running along the quay at Weymouth, for instance - and the colour is washed out, but there are plenty of small points to enjoy. You may want to turn the music down though.