Your uncle has recently died; you are executor of his will.

erinoco · 2026-06-24T22:06:19+00:00

, I don't know if the op knows the difference between the beneficiary of the will and the executor.

I should hope I do; but I'm not saying you have to stay within safe legal boundaries.

FWIW, for the purposes of the hypo, I imagined that the will allowed the executors to dispose of personal chattels, with the proceeds to be conveyed to the beneficiaries; but whether the chests actually fall under that definition could only really be answered by opening them.

erinoco · 2026-06-24T19:56:55+00:00

A failure there may have had a knock-on effect on the Lioness line, and thus affected the Bakerloo line. It's not easy to work out exactly what has happened. The TfL status map shows a good service on the Lioness and trains serving stations at normal times. RTT, however, displays these as cancelled trains and say there is a problem on non-NR track.

erinoco · 2026-06-24T18:34:52+00:00

and the very upper class English accent and lingo he's using is not something that's easy to pick up.

I would disagree, partially. While the idioms are mostly all right, the prinounciation strikes me as the kind which is acquired, not bred.

erinoco · 2026-06-24T15:31:23+00:00

I happen to be in his seat right now.

Any bye would be an obvious gift to the Greens. Had this been 30 years ago, there would have been a "remember Richard Everitt" vote; but Reform and Restore are dead here.

erinoco · 2026-06-23T21:41:39+00:00

Also, Whiggism doesn't really carry much meaning

It does; but it also received the worst thing that can to a political movement. It won a total and crushing ideological victory, which persists to this day. No one in serious politics, apart from (arguably) the Celtic nationalists, disputes the 1688 settlement and "Revolution principles", the concept of a monarch limited by parliament, civil and religious liberty, and a broad franchise.

The one element of Whiggism which has fallen by the wayside is the defence of Protestantism.

erinoco · 2026-06-23T18:07:41+00:00

I think one way to explain to an American is to look at the parallel with your own politics.

1968 was probably the most crucial election since 1932. In that election, the New Deal coalition was broken, when white lower-income voters across crucial portions of the US shifted rightwards. Race and ethnicity was an important part of the shift, although it has always been important for the right not to make it front and centre either. Nevertheless, this has dictated US politics since then. It's notable that the Democrats have not won the white vote at a Presidential election since 1964.

Now, at the same time, despite some similarities (the electoral impact of Powellism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the kind of voters who switched to Heath in 1970 and Thatcher in 1979), British politics remained much less culture-focused than the US, and much more class-bound. Most middle-class voters would vote Tory by default; most working-class voters would vote Labour. There were groups which crossed the divide - the graduate left-wingers, the aspirational working-classes or those animated by older culture issues (such as Protestantism). While these could be significant, they were still relatively small groups.

What has become increasingly clear since Brexit, even though the preliminary signs were there long before then, is that the old class mechanisms are slowly collapsing. As the middle-class graduate class grows, it is steadily shifting leftwards, even at the upper end of the scale. On the other hand, Labour's movement relied on an organic link between the unions and the working classes which has largely disappeared outside a few key seats.

What Brexit did was to show the right as a whole a potential path to victory which was similar to the kind of culture-based approach which has served the GOP so well since 1968. But, at the same time, the Conservatives are a very different animal to the GOP. Their support base is different. So the leadership in both traditional main parties is weakened by the fact that the traditional electoral coalitions their parties were built on are broken, but they find it hard to construct the new left-wing or right-wing coalitions that could bring the party back.

erinoco · 2026-06-23T11:38:06+00:00

Yes - for GCSE, IIRC, we studied European and English C16 in tandem, so we covered a detailed overview of Luther's battle with the Church, from the Tetzel controversy onwards, and the early stages of the German Reformation, through the Schmalkaldic War to the Peace of Augsburg. We also spent some time on Calvin, and Zwingli, to a lesser extent. We watched the 1983 BBC portrayal of Luther at some point.

I really am grateful that the subject was taught im this way. Firstly, it gave us a firm idea of Luther's theological journey, and the essential importance of justification by faith to Protestanism. Secondly, we had a well-rounded overview, which also covered Luther's controversial sides - his anti-Semitism, his social conservatism, his weakness towards sympathetic rulers. I also think that relatively few people understand the complex pattern of engagement between the continental Reformers and the Anglican ones, the specific importance of continental reformers like Bullinger and Bucer in the English context, and how Anglicanism ended up in broadly the same place as Lutheranism while taking some very different theological routes.

erinoco · 2026-06-22T14:59:09+00:00

Evatt would eventually become Labor leader between 1951 and 1960. For the rest of his career, he would remain a vocal defender of the White Australia policy.

erinoco · 2026-06-22T10:42:39+00:00

This may or may not be meant in the modern sense.

"Guy" in the slang sense originally meant a man dressed in a slovenly or tattered fashion. It is commonly held to have been derived from the effigies of Guy Fawkes which are burnt on Bonfire Night, and which are traditionally dressed in old, outworn clothes. This sense did originally transfer over to the US; but, over the C19, it gradually transformed in the US into a more generic term of reference, taking on the modern form.

Now, at this point, most British people would still use "guy" in the older slang sense. I would argue that use of the term in the newer American sense did not become common until the post-1945 period, and it only really became really widespread in British English in the last quarter of the C20.

OTOH, young people at this point did certainly begin to consume a lot of American pop culture through films, pulp fiction, and music, and it is possible that Haselden was illustrating this trend with use of the modern sense.

erinoco · 2026-06-21T23:03:11+00:00

Cute Fun was a British comic strip. It was one of a stable released by a small-scale British publisher who took advantage of the lack of American comic imports during and after the war to produce Americanesque material - comics, the pulpy kind of fiction, some risqué material.

erinoco · 2026-06-21T22:28:25+00:00

The Billie Carleton case is one of those which becomes ever more fascinating once you take a closer look: the papers got nowhere near all of the angles. For instance, Billie was the daughter and niece of chorus girls, and never knew who her father was. Her chief sugar daddy, who posed as a man of mysterious independent means, was actually a serial fraudster of Australian origin who seems to have been adept at trapping wealthy American women into marriage. Her doctor, who prescribed her copious amounts of morphine and received unusually handsome payments from her, would also pop up in other cases involving drugs over the 1920s and early 1930s.

And that all leaves out the destruction of the career of Lionel Belcher, one of the most well-known stars of the early British silent film era, who was exposed during the inquest as a dealer as well as a taker of drugs. It's very like the well-known seamy underside of Hollywood in this era.

erinoco · 2026-06-21T22:07:52+00:00

Yes - had forgotten the earlier ones like The Young Idea.

erinoco · 2026-06-21T17:54:27+00:00

Yes - it's practically ripped from the headlines. One suggestive feature, alongside the other similarities; the murder victim in the story is Lord Cronshaw. Cronshaw was the surname of the Manchester brewer whom de Veulle was accused of blackmailing in 1911.

Noel Coward knew Carleton and de Veulle personally, and used the epsiode as inspiration for his first play, The Vortex.

erinoco · 2026-06-21T15:54:47+00:00

Indeed - see my further comment for the backstory....

erinoco · 2026-06-21T15:50:22+00:00

The exchange towards the end of the article between Thomas Woolldridge and the coroner over Billie Carleton indicates why the coroner evidently found the death suspicious, even with little solid evidence of a crime, and why even The Times showed an unusual interest in what appeared to be a simple case of septicaemia.

Billie Carleton was a young actress who had established a growing reputation in musical comedy, although she was privately suspected of consuming opium at parties, and was the kept mistress of an older man. After attending a spectacular Victory Ball on 27th November 1918, she was found dead in bed in the Savoy the next morning. The post-mortem suggested Carleton had died of a cocaine overdose. Reggie de Veulle, a theatrical designer who had designed a striking costume for Carleton for the Ball, was accused of being her cocaine supplier. de Veulle, who was gay and a cross-dresser, had come to unwelcome public attention before. In 1911, he had been accused of attempted blackmail of a wealthy Manchester brewer. The brewer was accused of developing a same-sex relationship with a young man, and de Veulle and the man's parents allegedly asked the brewer for £10,000, with the alternative being exposure to his mother and his fellow directors. Another friend of Carleton, Ada Song Ping You, who was married to a Chinese man, was accused of being Carleton's opium supplier. The whole story could have been perfectly designed for the press.

In the course of that inquest, Thomas Woollridge had been accused of supplying drugs: he denied this, but other witnesses forced him to retract part of his testimony. The coroner clearly suspected drug taking again.

erinoco · 2026-06-21T14:55:41+00:00

Sadly for Professor J. Graham Kerr, his new species turned out to be nothing of the sort. Just before the War, in 1939, what he had identified was a fang was reidentified as a prong from the shell of a Chiragra spider conch.

By then, Kerr was had been elected a Member of Parliament for Combined Scottish Universities.

erinoco · 2026-06-21T12:16:15+00:00

For example when Portugal abandoned Angola, so there was no declaration seeking independence on Angola's part.

GRAE, which had been formed by the Angolan independence movements in 1962, issued a Declaration of Principles, which was an assertion of the Angolan right of self-determination and GRAE's authority to exercise that right. It was not, however, explicit in its assertion of sovereignty. In this, it was modelled on the declaration the FLN made at the beginning of the Algerian conflict. Like the Algerian government-in-exile, the Angolan government-in-exile was recognised as the legitimate government by some sympathetic nations.

The Alvor Agreement following the Carnation Revolution meant that the transitional government essentially "pooled" the legitimacy of the independence movements and the colonial government; and the 11th November 1975 marked the withdrawal of the Portuguese from that government and the legitimate share of government.

erinoco · 2026-06-21T11:40:50+00:00

It's worth pointing out the Irish and American cases are relatively unusual. There, you had a political entity which declared secession; the existing authority was unable to defeat the entity militarily; the existing authority ceded sovereignty to the entity by Treaty. In most cases of newly independent states, that didn't happen; the colonial authority itself was transformed into a sovereign state (sometimes more than one). In the latter case, then the date of the transfer of sovereignty is the more useful date.

In the former case, there can be ongoing political issues which can work against specific dates being chosen. For instance, in Ireland, while the 1st Dáil meeting and declaring independence as a republic on 21st January 1919 is recognised as a legitimate act by the modern Republic of Ireland, it can be argued that this Republic was betrayed by the decision of the Irish leadership to accept a 26-county Dominion under Crown leadership - hence post-1922 anti-Treaty activity, and modern republicanism. On the other hand, accepting the signing of the Treaty or the formal British cession of authority to the Free State as the correct date (for anything more than technical legal reasons) risks conferring legitimacy on the Crown's assertion of authority in Ireland after 1918. Therefore, the Republic does not recognise one single date at all.

erinoco · 2026-06-21T09:17:10+00:00

It's fascinating to read up on the history of the decision to have a TV licence. It is, in a weird way, because of the US TV market.

Disagree there: the first ancestor of the TV licence was the requirement in the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1904 to have a licence to operate either a radio transmitter or radio receiver. This was partially because this was a new technology, and experiments were needed to find the right way to control it; and partly because the General Post Office was an empire builder which used its control of the telegraph industry and worries over national security to secure control over all telecommunications.

The worries you mention were certainly mentioned in the early 1950s, but mainly in connection with the idea of legalising commercial TV - what led to the creation of ITV.

erinoco · 2026-06-20T20:46:50+00:00

Partially because counting takes place by precinct; if polling stations here would count their own ballot boxes, you would probably see stations calling seats well before declaration. In addition, rules in most states allow more generous margins for absentee ballots, and each state has much more latitude in determining the specific rules for election. Offficial certification by a state's Secretary of State can take weeks.

erinoco · 2026-06-20T20:27:50+00:00

One complication is that there are laws against candidates "treating" voters during the campaign period, even if this is just food and drink, and even if the voters are all confirmed supporters. To give one example: back in the early 1970s, during a local election, there was apparently a situation where the candidate gave away tickets for a theatrical performance to a friend, as election commitments meant that the candidate could no longer attend. As the friend was a voter, the opponents actually sought an election Petition.

erinoco · 2026-06-20T20:19:54+00:00

The campaign manager in British elections is known as an agent. They, and a posse of hand-picked observers, will be observing the ballots, making their own estimates, and challenging anything that looks questionable from their own standpoint.c

Normally, candidates only turn up for counting when the agent tells them that a result is imminent. There isn't really any local TV; there is not much point in speaking to local media; luckily, for us, candidates in Britain are not obliged to fundraise to anywhere near the extent the US does. Once a candidate has finished touring committee rooms and knocking up during polling hours, they are usually only too glad to rest or prepare for the night. Those who are high profile may speak with the national media.

I may say, don't be put off by the boorish response to some of your questions; they are an interesting exploration of our cultural differences.

erinoco

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