The Rest Is History - 211. London: People

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Welcome to the third episode in our new mini-series: LONDON WEEK. From Monday to Friday we're releasing an episode daily. Monday's 'Londinium' and Thursday's 'Haunted London' are live episodes we recorded on location earlier this year. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday we're releasing episodes on 'Places', 'People', and 'Moments' from London's past. To get ALL episodes right now, become a member of The Rest Is History Club - you'll also get ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. London: People Henry Fielding and C.L.R. James - two figures who are part of the furniture in London's history. Tom and Dominic debate and discuss their lives and legacy in the latest episode of London Week.  *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. hello welcome to the rest is history's london week so we've had um on monday we had a tour around roman london yesterday we were looking at uh two london places and today dominic we are looking at two figures who have lived in london who are part of the fabric of London's history. And you are kicking us off, aren't you? So who have you chosen? Well, the thing about Londoners, Tom,

is that most Londoners, or lots of Londoners, weren't born in London, were they? Is your Londoner... I don't want you to give away who your Londoner is. No, my Londoner was definitely not born in London. Wasn't even born in Britain, Dominic. Well, that's exciting. That is tantalising.

So my London figure was actually born in Somerset in a place called Sharpham. I don't know where Sharpham is. Have you been to Sharpham, Somerset? No, if I have, I don't remember it. Very small village. And he was born in 1707, and his name is Henry Fielding. So he is the son of an officer, a military officer called colonel edmund fielding who had

fought under the duke of marlborough in the wars of the spanish succession and so on and um henry it's a quite well-off family uh henry grows up in somerset uh disaster strikes when he is 11 his mother dies and his father edmund the, the military man, is generally regarded as feckless. He's charming but feckless. So extraordinarily, Henry's grandmother sues his father for custody after the death of Henry's mum. And the grandmother wins. And Henry is taken away from his father

and given to his grandmother, who sends him to Eton. So that's what happens to young Henry. And at Eton, he becomes best friends or great pals with the future Pit the Elder, which is nice. So he's going up in the world. I mean, he doesn't know that Pit the Elder is going to be Pit the Elder. He just thinks of him as William, just some Billy Pitt or something, who loves the war game. to be Pitt the Elder. He just thinks of him as William, just some Billy Pitt or something, who loves the war game.

And his tails. Yeah, exactly. They're having a tremendous time talking about Latin and playing obscure sports. Anyway, Henry Fielding's life takes an unexpected turn when he is about 18. He's obviously a sort of rambunctious young man. He has become infatuated with his cousin,

who's called Sarah. And one day when she's on her way to church he tries to kidnap her and run off with her and sarah's family are outraged by this behavior so henry has to flee abroad for a time um to escape prosecution so that sort of tells you something a bit about his personality so to give you a sense of um of him tom he is he's a huge man he's more than six feet tall which is very tall by the standards of the early 18th century um one of his friends says quote he was not a handsome man so um yeah you can draw your own conclusions um he's said to have joked with his friends about his nose and his chin. What was the joke?

I think the joke was they were quite large. They're over large. But he's a very warm and sociable sort of man. Well, he's a very funny man as well, isn't he? Yeah. One of his friends said of him, he had more wit and humour than Swift, Pope and the other wits of his time put together. Because did he end up writing a very famous novel that then became... He did. I'm going to come to that because he's a man of great

appetites and passions. So he loves food, he loves drink, he loves snuff. He's a great snuff addict and he loves the pleasures of the bedroom. So he's lusty. He's a lusty 18th century fellow. And he starts off, he decides he wants to be a writer. So he's lusty. He's a lusty 18th century fellow.

And he starts off, he decides he wants to be a writer. So he comes to London, sort of hanging around London with other wits and coffeehouse people and stuff. Rub Street. Exactly. He writes plays which satirise Walpole, who's the first prime minister. Jonathan Wilde, isn't it?

Is that right? Exactly. The big cheese of the day. So Jonathan Wilde is about a thief taker, isn't it? Is that right? Exactly. The big cheese of the day. So Jonathan Wilde is about a thief taker, isn't it? And Jonathan Wilde is a kind of metaphor for Walpole in this. So his plays are sort of censored and he's slightly frowned upon.

He ends up he moves into books because he writes, the big book of the day is a book called Pamela. Sort of a pistolry novel. One of the first, if not the first, novels in English. Samuel Richardson. Samuel Richardson.

And it's a very improving, sort of morally serious kind of book, as all Richardson's books are. So Henry Fielding writes a spoof of it, a parody called Shamala, and that's very successful. So he writes more books. He does one about supposedly her cousin, doesn't he? Joseph Andrews. Yeah, exactly.

And then at the end, it starts in the 1740s, and then the end of the decade ends with him writing his masterpiece, Tom Jones. So Tom Jones is, for people who don't know, that is a book that everybody should read, an absolutely uproarious, rambustious, really fun book, brilliantly written, sort of picaresque. Tom Jones has all these adventures across the country.

Who's the squire? Squire Weston. Squire Weston. Very like you. Like me. Grumpy. Miserable. Yeah, but he's a kind of honest man. Lives in the country. Has no time for London. Yeah, that's right. Writes columns for the Daily Mail. All that kind of stuff.

I thought of myself as Tom Jones in that. I'm afraid not, Dominic. I'm afraid not. And then there's a sinister schoolmaster, isn't there, called Thwackham? That's it, exactly. Yes. I think it is Mr. Thwackham, isn't it?

Tom Jones is always, he basically travels across the country falling in and out of people's beds, leaping out of the windows of inns. Eating oranges. Yeah. In a lasci Eating oranges. Yeah. In a lascivious way. Exactly. And this was made into a film in the 1960s,

1963, I think, with Albert Finney. Absolutely tremendous sort of 60s film. I mean, it looks quite dated now because it uses all sort of 60s gimmicks. Technicolor. Yeah. Anyway, he goes into the law. So he's involved with the law

and this comes about because he's a fanatical anti-Jacobite so he's a very staunch Anglican supporting the Hanoverians supporting the Hanoverians so when you have the 45

the sort of Bonnie Prince Charlie uprising he writes loads of stuff for the government saying Bonnie Prince Charlie is a terrible fellow, hurrah for the Hanoverians, all this. And as a result of this, he is appointed as basically London's chief magistrate. And this is really his claim to fame, specifically as a Londoner. Because London in the 18th century has expanded colossally um so loads of sort of what were previously sort of the rural fringes of london have been filled in and are now absolutely teeming with people with crime with poverty it's a place like covent garden is the sort of classic example um Gin Lane is the Hogarth cartoon.

Yeah, so Gin Lane, if you think of Hogarth's cartoons, are sort of people falling out of windows and, you know... Dropping their babies down. Exactly, on the streets. The sort of fear of the London mob and all of that sort of stuff. So this is partly what Fielding's job is to kind of deal with. And one reason that it's been very difficult to deal with this is London obviously has no

police force. So it basically has a system of volunteer constables who are completely useless. But it also has a system of, you mentioned Jonathan Wilde, of thief-takers. So the thief-takers are utterly corrupt. They basically will solve, if you're the victim of

petty crime, the thief-takers will solve it for a fee. So you pay them, basically. Like bounty hunters. They are, exactly. But they're in league often. I mean, often some of the big thief-takers, I mean, they're actually the heads of criminal gangs themselves.

So they're basically prophets in every conceivable way. They'll rob you, and then they charge you to get your stuff back. It's intensely corrupt. So Henry Fielding, his office, the magistrate's court, they charge you to get your stuff back it's it's intensely corrupt yeah uh so henry fielding he his office the magistrate's court he's become the chief magistrate and his office is in bow street at number four bow street which is in the bedford estate near covent garden so this is quite a notorious red light district in the mid 18th century he's in the heart of it and he wants to um he wants to sort of sort it out now he's very forward thinking

because at the beginning of the 1750s he writes a sort of blueprint called a proposal for making an effectual provision for the poor and he says basically what we should do is we should get thousands of poor londoners we should build a massive workhouse for them and that sounds grim but but wait for it in which we'll they'll be decently housed we'll teach them a trade um they'll get wages they'll pay them a little bit as they learn the trade and they'll be you know have lessons and they'll have religious services and all this stuff and they'll basically be rehabilitated and then we'll turn them out of the workhouse as useful citizens so it's basically a sort of Scandinavian prison. And obviously nobody listens. People think it's absolutely demented.

Kind of woke Tosh. Woke Tosh. So that's ignored. But what is not ignored is his idea for police. So he has this idea of employing, instead of people

employing kind of private thief takers, he, as the magistrate, will employ a team of six highly skilled, trained men, crack men, who will work for him. He will send them out to raid robbers and highwaymen, to raid gaming houses, to charge off and apprehend villains and get people's property. So the six of them at first, they are each given handcuffs, a pistol, and a stick. They are given a guinea a week.

And basically, if they catch criminals, they get commission on top of that. And they're answerable to him. Does that not encourage them to, you know, fabricate evidence, say? No, they're absolutely unimpeachable. That is woke to us. Does that not encourage them to fabricate evidence, say? No, they're absolutely unimpeachable, Tom. That is woke to us, from you. I'm sorry to cast a spell on the Bay Street rumours. Yeah, why do you hate Britain, Tom?

I'm sorry. Maybe it does. I haven't come across it, but maybe if there are Bow Street runners, aficionados out there who know street runner truthers yes exactly so there's only six of them but this is a tremendous innovation i mean i know six doesn't sound like many but it does expand over time and what's the population of london at this point about a million yeah so i mean how many do you need

so it's kind of like marvel comics well within within 50 years or so tom there are 68 of them i mean come on yeah i mean that's loads so what's the difference between them and and what peel does that's a very good question i think they're just much less they're much less regulated they're quite informal they're answerable to the magistrate and they don't wear those kind of blue top hats they don't have any uniform at first. They wear their own clothes. So they're plain clothes. But the other thing that's really interesting

is that his brother, so he has a brother called John. And John was blinded at the age of 19 in a naval accident, the details of which he never divulged to the public. So he's been blinded mysteriously on a ship. We don't know why. Andged to the public. So he's been blinded mysteriously on a ship.

We don't know why. And John has the idea. He says, why don't we issue a sort of gazette, a police gazette that will have descriptions of criminals? And this is the first time they do it. So they basically send out, you know, wanted Tom Holland. Wearing a wig. Right.

You can't miss him. Yeah. All 18th century men look the same. So do you want to know what this was called? It was called The Quarterly Pursuit, the name of this gazette. But they decided that was a terrible name. So they renamed it, I think. I don't know whether this is a worse name or a better name.

They renamed it The Public Hue and Cry. That's a great name. So the Public Hue and Cry, you would buy that. It would have all the details about the latest theft. Horrible murders. Horrible murders, wanted suspects. High women. Yeah.

Do you know, how come no one has made a kind of... A rollicking series? You shouldn't have given it away, Tom, because we now can't... Yeah, we can. We can. Do you think? Yes. We could do the rest is history productions.

Yeah. So if you're listening, if you're some sort of TV producer with horrible glasses... They don't have to wear horrible glasses. But they do, though. They do. No, they don't. We both know that they do. No.

I think you're showing your age. I don't think they wear horrible glasses anymore. Don't they? No, you've been stuck in the Cotswolds too long. What do they wear? They don't wear glasses. They wear contact lenses. I don't think... Whatever.

What Dominic is saying is that... It's ours. We own this franchise. If you are listening and you're maybe working for Netflix, you've got an enormous amount of cash and you would like to commission us to produce The Public Hue and Cry, a scintillating tale of crime and detection in 18th century London,

you can just email us or something. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Tom. I'm going to give away the end of season one. So at the end of season one, so Henry Fielding, who's been the star of the first season, there's been a few flashbacks to him trying to kidnap the heiress to him being witty his early life sometimes he talks about tom jones in kind of you know the more reflective scenes uh but towards the end of season one tragically as we reach the early 1750s so he hasn't actually been magistrate that long but the bow Bow Street Runners are dashing,

you know, all six of them around the metropolis. Henry Fielding gets dropsy. This is awful. So dropsy is a sort of apparently a cirrhosis of the liver. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, it says his skin was jaundiced, his body emaciated, his abdomen grotesquely bloated with water

that had to be tapped at frequent intervals. So, I think Netflix... That would be a shocking development. But it would provide great scope for a good actor. A very good actor. Yeah, Liam Neeson. Liam Neeson. Yes. He'd look good with

Dropsy. He would. He'd act it well. So do you know what he does when he gets Dropsy and he knows that the game is up he doesn't get cured he doesn't get cured he goes to Portugal doesn't he so the final scenes there's location filming involved so that's the Christmas special so he ends up in Portugal and he dies in Lisbon in 1754.

And he's buried there in the English cemetery in Lisbon. So later, I mean, this probably won't be in the Netflix series, in a Kingsley Amis novel, the plot slightly revolves around the fact that the character, a thinly veiled version of Kingsley Amis, has been invited to Lisbon to deliver some sort of Henry Fielding lecture. But in season two, Tom, we move to John Fielding, his brother, who you may remember. The blind one. Yes.

Whose nickname is the Blind Beak. The series writes itself. And he has a superpower. He's also a tremendous man. He founds an orphan for uh an orphan he founds an asylum for orphan girls in lambeth in your neck of the woods south london and he ends up being

knighted for it so he's an absolutely tremendous fellow but his power is that although he's blind he can recognize he can recognize three thousand criminals by the sound of their voices. That's amazing. That is a superpower. Because, you see, in my mind, rather like 18th century Londoners all looking the same, they all sound the same. Well, how do you think they sound?

Oh, Mr. Fielding. I don't know. How does that? God bless you. That's Victorian. A Bow Street runner. Oh, the runners are after me, Tom. The Bow Street runners.

Cue and cry. Yeah. Anyway, this is going to be a great series. So series season one is Public Cue and Cry. And then the series season two is public hue and cry and then the um the series season two is the blind yeah yeah um well that's i think i think future series well there's two seasons in it definitely yeah there's emery fielding then there's the blind beak i think i don't know do we we need to have to be chained to what actually happened no i mean it mean, it's kind of Peaky Blinders, wasn't it?

Exactly. So I think by the time you get to season three, it's a generational change. Charles James Fox is maybe a character because he'd be solving crimes with Pitt the Younger. That'd be great, wouldn't it? Yeah. I mean, the 18th century is really, it's absent from our screen.

Dr. Johnson is solving crimes. You know what it is, Tom? We've had a previous episode about Dr. Johnson dealing with ghosts. Yes. Remember? Yeah, so he's ghostbusting. Ghostbusting. Yeah.

Fabulous. Johnson and Boswell are ghostbusting. I mean, there's so much to play with here. So much to play with. It's unbelievable. We haven't had an offer. So TV producers, please don't be offended by Dominic characterising you as wearing ludicrous glasses. Scrub that. Focus on the gold that is this rich seam of his documentary series.

You make this series, you can buy enough glasses to last you a lifetime. Okay, that's brilliant, Dominic. Great choice. Let's go to a break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. Let's go to a break. free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. So this probably, Tom, will be one of the last Rest Is History episodes we record because after this we will be leaving podcasting to concentrate on the blind but in the meantime to leave listeners um leave them something to remember us by

by telling us about your top Londoner well so I may have mentioned this before Dominic I live in Brixton yeah in South London so I wanted to choose someone who lives in Brixton. So Brixton's actually had quite a lot of famous people who've lived in it. So David Bowie, of course. Yep. John Major. Two very different men. Ken Livingston. Yeah.

Clive Dunn, who was Corporal Jones in Dad's Army. Most of these people mean absolutely nothing to our overseas listeners. Well, David Bowie would. I'm sure most people have heard of John Major. And everyone's heard of John Major. Prime Minister. Yeah.

Top Brixton-born Prime Minister. So in London, there's this thing where you have blue plaques, which mark the houses of where famous people lived. And there are three blue plaques in Brixton. So one of them is Dan Lino, who's a musical artist. Yes, musical. Very famous. lino who's a musical artist yes musical very famous uh who um peter sellers believed was communicating with him sort of psychically ether psychically he would occasionally when people

would offer peter sellers a part they join a play inspector cluso again he would turn and he would mutter over his shoulder and he said what do you think think, Dan? Do you think I should do it? So Dan Enos is still with us. And Peter Aykroyd wrote a novel. And the Lion House Golem. Yeah. So there's obviously a kind of faint hint of the supernatural around him. That's exciting. And then there's Havelock Ellis, who lived on a house up Brixton Hill, which is where I

live, who was a sexologist. I was just about to say he was a sexologist, but I don't know anything about him other than that word. Well, he was a pioneering sexologist i was just about to say sexologist but i don't know anything about him other than that word well he was he was a pioneering sexologist what did he do no i'm a sexologist well there's another netflix series tom yeah we're absolutely on fire today okay yeah so he was Okay. So he was a pioneering sexologist. And then the third one is the man that I have chosen,

who is C.L.R. James. Oh, that's a good choice. C.L.R. James. Well, you'd like him because he's a Marxist. Of course. He's actually a Trotskyist. He's a big, big fan of Trotsky. But the reason I like him is that he obsessed about cricket and wrote a book called Beyond the Boundary,

which is widely held to be not just the best book on cricket, but one of the best books on sport ever written. And he ended up in Brixton. He lived there for the last years of his life. But he was actually born in Trinidad. He lived most of his life outside London. But I don't think that that makes him any less legitimate as a choice for a Londoner. Because what you were talking about with Fielding coming from Somerset. Yeah. London has always been a place that attracts people who live outside London. And actually, you know, for most of London's history, it was that that inevitably fueled its growth because more people would die you know it was such a kind of lethal place that you needed people to arrive to keep

the population stable let alone grow that that wasn't the case obviously by the 20th century but but London I guess for people growing up in the Caribbean I mean as we know from the wind rush um people and and lots of people um lots of people coming to London from the Windrush, and lots of people coming to London from the Caribbean, they'd be processed in Clapham, and Brixton was the nearest area to Clapham where there was affordable housing. Yeah, because Brixton was slightly run down, wasn't it? Down a hill.

And that's why cheap housing. So that's why in the years after the Second World War. So Brixton was a place that was associated with musical. And that's why Dan Lino lived there. and that's actually why john major's father lived there because john major's father operate lived in um in brixton um and because they were actors musicians all that kind of stuff they tended to live in in fairly grotty housing because they didn't get much money um and so that's why people from the caribbean were able to move in there so john major has a history of cricket. He does.

It's very good. It's very good. And he's also written a history of the musical. And at the beginning of his history of the musical, there's a bit where his dad is. So John Major's father was quite old when he had him. And John Major's describing his father in sort of post-war Britain, I don't know, in the 50s, 60s or something. He's dying basically in some boarding house,

in some upstairs room in a boarding house. John Major says, this succession of very old and very strange people trooping up the stairs. And they were all people who had been acrobats, conjurers and stuff in the 1890s or something, coming up to say their farewells to John Major's father. Extraordinary scene.

Well, Brixton's still got that, you know, it's still a place full of clubs and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So it's still, it's still very much an entertainment center. But James is actually born quite a long time before people start coming, before the wind rush, before people start coming to London from,

from the Caribbean. So he's born in 1901 in Trinidad. He is kind of lower middle class, but very, very bright. So he wins a scholarship to Queen's Royal College, which is a very good school. He's highly intellectual, but he's also very, very good at sport. So he is he actually holds the the record for the high jump in Trinidad. I think to this day, two or I think to this day two or three years no two or three years but I mean he is a record breaker um but cricket is his main sport absolutely

loves it um and he's he's almost good enough to kind of break into the into you know first class cricket but not quite but he's very good friends with a cricketer who is a man called Leary Constantine who um great west indies great west indies cricketer and who gets um an offer to go and play in the lancashire leagues and the lancashire leagues kind of very very tough cricket um professional so he goes to um to live in a place called nelson in lancashire and james goes with him um and james by this point is very very um very very into marxism very into cricket so he sets up as a a cricket correspondent stroke marxist which is you know there have been many of those um so he takes a lot a lot of boxes um so he covers cricket in the summer and he hangs out with Marxist circles, Trotskyite circles.

And he ends up writing a book that's still very, very famous, incredibly readable, called The Black Jacobins. So that's about Toussaint Louverture, isn't it? And Haiti, and the revolution in Haiti. And that's sort of the definitive, or for many, for decades, it was the absolutely definitive account of the Haitian Revolution and of the sort of, yeah, that Toussaint Louverture and all that sort of stuff.

Well, it's a brilliant work of scholarship. It obviously comes from a position of it has a kind of real moral force, kind of real blaze of intellectual fire to it uh but it's just incredibly readable really readable um and actually um james had written a play on the same theme um in which uh paul robeson was in it paul robeson starred oh so i didn't know that so it was a theme he was very interested in for obvious reasons and then in 1938 he leaves britain he goes on a kind of speaking tour around the united states and while he's in the united states he pops over the border to mexico where he meets trotsky so he hangs out with trotsky and he also meets

diego rivera and frida carlo so he's kind of hanging out in you know in these circles he's surely not talking to them about cricket. Well, I always wondered, did he talk to Trotsky about cricket? It's such a kind of tantalising idea. You should write a play about it or something. That'd be good, wouldn't it? A kind of Tom Stoppard type play. Or indeed a Netflix serial.

No, I think it's more kind of a Stoppard play at the National. It is. It's at the Royal Court. Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Trotsky and CLR James. And it's all themed around cricket that'd be good anyway so he's so he's in America but he is obviously um not the kind of guy that in post-war America the authorities are particularly keen on yeah um and so they managed

to expel him on a charge that he's kind of you know visa problems that kind of thing so james uh he comes back to london uh then he goes to trinidad gets it back home uh and that's where he writes beyond a boundary his great masterpiece so beyond a boundary which i've never read tell me what's so great about beyond the boundary because it is seen as one of the absolutely great books about sport so it's a book about cricket, but it has the theme, what do they cricket know? Who only cricket know? Yeah.

Um, so it is also very much about the relationship of the Caribbean to Britain. It's about, um, the way that empire works. It's, it's essentially, I mean,

it's, it's one of the great works of, um, post-colonial literature. And James is to Britain what Frantz Fanon is to France. I remember when I read it when I was kind of 15 or something and was terribly struck about how Marxist it was and how edgy and daring. Then I read it again a few years ago. And what struck me was how incredibly conservative it is, actually, especially compared to Fanon. I mean, Fanon still seems unbelievably radical, whereas James is all about WG Grace and how much he loves Trollope and things like that.

So it's kind of interesting. I mean, James was a genuine, you know, he was genuinely radical. He was a Trotskyite. Of course he was. One of the things I think that makes Beyond the Boundary great as a work of literature is that it's not just agitprop. There's a real tension there. There's so much about the British Empire that he hates, but he also kind of loves it. He loves the great literature.

And he loves England. loves england and he you know he he is the one who really enshrines grace as a a distinctively victorian hero one who who's not who's idolized by the victorians but who also challenges a lot about what we would think conventionally the victorian age is about so it's a very very rich book very complex book very very subtle book and and very um fascinating as a self-portrait as well because james is not a modest man. It's fair to say. I mean, he has a very, very kind of robust sense of his own worth.

And that's also part of the kind of the drama of what he's writing about. And he writes about Constantine as well, because Constantine went, you know, goes on to become, he serves in the British government during the war. He gets a peerage. I think he becomes the first,

he's the first black peer. So James is, you know, I mean, he's the first black peer um so so james is you know i mean he's he's at the heart of quite seismic events yeah and so james is he in brixton at this point when he's no so he's in trend but he gets expelled in fact briefly he gets imprisoned and then he gets expelled so he comes back to london now where's he going to go so by this point brixton has become the kind of the capital of black brit. And one of the guys who is kind of the leading figure in kind of intellectual circles in Brixton is C.L.R. James's nephew, who's a man I'm sure you've heard of, Darkus Howe. Of course, Darkus Howe. Very, very kind of impressive man.

And he was still, when I moved to Brixton, you'd see him occasionally on the tube. He was a very impressive looking man and kind of incredible baritone voice. Very, very smart. And he got his uncle to come and live in Brixton. And Darkest How is in Brixton because he is the editor of a magazine called Race Today, which had been founded in the 70s. And I think originally it had been in Notting Hill and originally had been very much focused on decolonization in Africa. So particularly concerned with apartheid in South Africa and things like that. But then increasingly through the 70s had become interested in the way

that immigrants from the the commonwealth in britain so not just from the caribbean but from india and pakistan and so on how they were what what how they were settling into britain and what their what their relationship to britain should be and could be um and darkest how becomes the editor of this magazine and he moves it to brixton and he moves it to 165 railton road and railton road in the 1981 riots which erupt um black people in brixton against the police yeah and it's the totemic riot of 1981 whole of brixton goes up in flames front line isn't it the front and railton road is is called the front line yes so it's the kind of the center of the rioting so 165 railton road you know it's it's a potent place for a magazine devoted to issues of of race and uh questioning the fabrics of the british state and

all that kind of stuff and clr james comes and he he loves it um he he gives a lecture in in brixton just after the riots. And he finds it an exciting place to be. And so he says, could he stay? He's looking for somewhere to live. And so he moves in. He's in his 80s at this point. He moves into the very small flat directly above the offices of Race Today on Relton Road.

And so that's where he stays. For the rest of the 80s? Because he died at the end of the 80s didn't he yeah he dies at the end of the 80s 89 yeah and and so and you know it's kind of and so i walk past it regularly and i look up and i see the name of this this great man up there and it's fantastic but the the other reason i just wanted to mention him was that um i think that there is also something rather rather wistful about it, certainly for me, because I I moved to Brixton in 92. And the year before that, I went to the Oval to see the West Indies against England. And this was the famous match where both them failed to get his leg over.

They precipitated Brian Johnson and Jonathan Agnew. They kind of corpsed. And that was the match where Viv Richards, the great West Indies batsman, played. He actually had a kind of a bearing and a sense of dignity rather like Darkers Howe, actually. And great bowlers

like Courtney Walsh, Kirtley Ambrose. So it was a very, very powerful team. England actually won that match, which maybe served as a kind of signal that West Indies cricket was, West Indies had been the great power in cricket throughout the 80s. And perhaps this was a kind of a presentiment

of the fact that cricket in the Caribbean was about to go into decline. But it was, the Oval was absolutely heaving with people who'd come up from brixton it was a kind of i should think about half england supporters half west indy supporters it was really really kind of exciting thrilling pollulating sporting occasion and it made me think brixton might be a kind of great place to live because you know loads of cricket fans so we moved there the next year but but since then, cricket in the Caribbean has really gone into decline.

And definitely cricket in Brixton is a dead thing now. You know, it's not really followed at all, partly because the only cricket ground in the whole of Lambeth, the borough of Lambeth, which Brixton is in, is the Oval. You know, there's no other cricket ground. The facilities are terrible. There are cricket nets in Brockwell Park, which are in a terrible state of disrepair.

There's just no, there are no facilities. I mean, it's not completely dead. So you've got Ebony Rainford-Brent, who's from Brixton, who played in the England women's team. So she's kind of very prominent voice in contemporary English cricket. But aside from that, it's really faded.

And so when I see C.L.R. James's name on that blue plaque, it does make me slightly sad and so uh when i see clr james's uh name on that blue plaque it does make me slightly sad and wistful as well so um so that's why i chose him okay well you've been listening to the rest is cricket with uh yeah sorry no no tom that's a good choice because clr james is absolutely um the fact that he's not born in l and he comes as an immigrant, as a Caribbean immigrant, is part of a wider story isn't it? But also he is probably the Titanic figure in that sort of tradition

of, it's a tradition of post-colonial writing but it's also that very, very, I mean in contrast with Fanon a French writer or a French influence writer probably wouldn't start look to to wrap it around

the subject of cricket would they they would start with some yeah well they wouldn't do a peton they would do it

with a series of abstract nouns about liberty or something Fanon is as French is French in the way that

the CLR James is British yeah I mean they they both absolutely bear the stamp of

the empires into which they were born. But I think that James's relationship to British culture is much more conflicted than Fanon's was, I think. Right. Okay. So we'll definitely be back tomorrow with another podcast about a walk, because we've done the walk, haven't we? It was a walk around Smithfield and about the history of kind of medieval early modern london very exciting walk that we did uh the point at which we were doing that walk my new shoes which were inappropriate so i was going to a function blood was spurting out through the leather i was in i was in absolute

agony so as tom i say come on yeah you'll hear tom talking a lot and you won't hear anything from me but the odd kind of muffled groan. But actually, Dominic, you mentioned Dr. Johnson investigating ghosts. We have the cock lane ghost, so we go past that. We will be talking about ghosts tomorrow. Yes. Now, there may be a podcast on Friday.

If there isn't, it's because we're working on the blind beak with Netflix. But if that doesn't work out, we will be back on Friday with a podcast about moments from London's history. In fact, pardon me, Tom, because our moments are so good.

I almost want the Netflix series not to work out. Well, maybe, who knows? There's a real element of tension and jeopardy in the next few days as you wait to discover whether the rest is history has come to an end and whether the blind beak has got the green light. And if it doesn't events we've chosen yeah and so we'll see you tomorrow bye-bye thanks for listening to the rest is history episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.