Military homes row heads to court

Guy Hands files legal claim against MoD to block renationalisation of £7.6bn housing portfolio

By Helen Cahill – Daily Telegraph – Tuesday 15 March 2022

GUY HANDS’ housing firm has launched legal proceedings against the Government to block the renationalisation of its portfolio of thousands of military homes.

Hands’ company Annington Homes has begun legal action in two courts after talks with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) over the renationalisation broke down. Annington offered to contribute £105m to maintain the homes but was rebuffed by the MoD.

Anningtorn has now launched a judicial review as well as a High Court claim challenging the ‘MoD’s plans. Defence chiefs are trying to use leasehold rights to reclaim homes that were first sold off by John Major’s administration in 1996.

Hands brokered the privatisation deal while he was head of the Principal Financial Group at Nomura. He later purchased the properties through his private equity firm Terra Firma. The portfolio is now valued at £7.6bn.

The MoD sold off 57,400 homes for £1.7bn and then rented them back on a 200-year lease.

The Government has since been criticised for failing to properly value the homes in the original auction. The National Audit Office has complained officials were too cautious with their assumptions for house prices, and missed out on vast capital growth in the portfolio. Its report found taxpayers have lost as much as £4.2bn.

The Government is also on the hook for hundreds of millions each year in rent and maintenance payments on the properties. Lord Admiral West, the former first sea lord, has described the deal as a “dream money-making scheme for the private sector”.

Annington said the Government could still avert a lengthy legal dispute if it takes up the company’s offer to contribute £105m towards maintenance. The company has warned legal proceedings could take up to five years.

A spokesman for Annington Homes said: “We can confirm that Annington has begun legal proceedings against the UK Government.

”We continue to be open to discuss with the Government to find a solution that avoids a long and expensive legal dispute.”

Hands was hoping to sell the portfolio in a private auction before hearing of the MOD’s attempt to reclaim the properties. Reports suggested he could have made more than £1.5bn from the sale.

The MoD has so far trialled its scheme on two individual properties. The so-called ‘enfranchisement’ scheme would allow the government to purchase freeholds en masse at a price agreed by a court.

Annington has argued that the scheme is not appropriate for use on a large number of homes and that making thousands of applications will block up the court system. But the MoD is confident it would be able to use test cases to establish valuations for a wider group of properties.

Mr Hands has embarked upon lengthy legal battles in the past. His ill-fated takeover of music group EMI sparked a legal dispute with Citigroup that lasted seven years. Citi lent Terra Firma £2.5bn to fund the deal.

Mr Hands later chased the bank through the courts, both in New York and London over allegations of fraud but he abandoned the £1.5bn case in 2016.

The MoD declined to comment.

National Trust rewilding projects leave tenants feeling pushed out

https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/business-management/tenancies-rents/national-trust-rewilding-projects-leaves-tenants-feel-pushed-out

Several farming tenants and the Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) are concerned by what they see as the over-zealous way in which the National Trust is taking productive agricultural land back in-hand for rewilding.

Farmers Weekly talks to some tenants who have lost the land they have farmed for years.

See also: Why farm tenants are criticising National Trust landlords

Devon farmer leaves after 28 years

Patrick Greed, who farms on the Killerton Estate in Devon, feels he has betrayed agriculture after accepting an incentive from the National Trust to give up his Agricultural Holdings Act (AHA) tenancy after 28 years.

As well as the main 160ha holding he farmed, he had another 60ha of river meadow grazing on a Farm Business Tenancy (FBT).

The National Trust kept renewing it every five or 10 years, depending upon what environmental stewardship schemes we were in, he says.

Most recently, we had been in Higher Level Stewardship and once that ended, they decided to take it back for tree planting, scrapes and rewilding.

Loss of this land meant 61-year-old Mr Greed had to reduce his Limousin suckler herd. We had 550 head (cows and followers) before we lost the river meadows. Now we have 340.

Mr Greeds pedigree limousin Patrick Greed

With it becoming increasingly difficult to farm the land productively, alongside TB risks and greater public use of the land, Mr Greed accepted the incentive to quit and will leave the farm next year.

But he is uneasy about the direction the National Trust is taking.

It is not reletting it as a farm. It plans to do a lot of tree planting on the main holding. But just over 120ha of it is Grade 1 and 2 arable land.

It [the National Trust] even wants to plant trees on some of the permanent pasture. It is wrong. Farmers ought to be producing as much food as possible from this land.

Mr Greed is not alone. Land agent Kevin Bateman, director of Bateman Hosegood, has come across numerous cases, particularly in the past two years, where the National Trust has taken back tenanted land for rewilding and tree planting.

It feels like re-enactment of the Highland clearances a land grab, he says.

Typically, tenants are finding that their FBTs, which have been historically renewed, are being taken back in-hand, which is significantly affecting the viability of some businesses.

And some tenants with AHA tenancies are being offered cash incentives to give them up too, says Mr Bateman.

The policy feels like it is financially driven, with the trust targeting big grants for landscape-scale nature recovery at the expense of its tenanted farms.

It sees this as a way of creating significant income for itself. However, it does not understand the implications for the farming businesses and family homes that it is effectively destroying, he explains.

The way it is doing this suggests that it has complete contempt for the farmers who have farmed the land for generations.

Cornwall farmer feels destroyed

When Tom Hasson, 42, and his partner Becki Prouse, 37, took on the 220ha mixed farm FBT in Stowe Barton, Cornwall seven years ago having farmed 60-80ha of it for 14 years they fully expected to continue.

Tom Hasson and family Tom Hasson

When we took it on, the National Trust said it wanted to let it to a young farming family like us. In June last year, we went with a proposal to renew our Mid-Tier stewardship and tenancy, says Mr Hasson.

So it came as a bombshell when the trust said it had different plans for the premises. It wanted to take all the land back and create a nature reserve with agricultural production as a by-product rather than the main aim.

At their last meeting, the National Trust suggested running 50 head of cattle over 220ha on a year-to-year grazing licence.

But there would be no security and how could we get an income when they would be taking the payments? Our plans are up in the air, says Mr Hasson.

It has totally destroyed us and upset the kids. Ms Prouse agrees: There is no recognition of what we have done. I feel empty.

Devon farm goes to public access

Echoing this sentiment is Tim Jankins, who came out of his 180ha mixed farm FBT on the South Devon Estate, near Plymouth, in November last year.

Tim Jakins Moostones

We were there for 25 years. The National Trust approached us in 2018 when our tenancy was up for renewal and said we couldnt renew it on the previous terms, he says.

It wanted a large amount of public access, and to rewild some of it.

My gut reaction told me to get out. Id put a lifetimes savings into it and I didnt want to be there when it reverted back to whatever it was supposed to be reverting back to.

He has since heard that the farmhouse is empty and that there are many weeds on the farm. It is good, productive land, he adds.

We used to supply a good amount of beef and lamb, with grain going to local feed mills. This now has to be brought in from further away, which doesnt help the carbon footprint.

TFA: Wrong-headed policy

Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) chief executive George Dunn says that what is happening to some tenants is devastating.

They have put their heart and soul into a place, hoping to get some sort of tenancy renewal and are told this is not going to happen.

People are bringing up families on these farms, they are involved in local communities and go to local schools.

While he is aware of conversations on other National Trust estates, Mr Dunn says the situation is most potent in the South West, particularly affecting coastal properties.

The Trust is focusing attention on what it considers is needed for biodiversity net gain and carbon reduction. It doesnt see these farms as particularly important from an agricultural perspective.

The TFA thinks the policy is entirely wrong-headed. It is a vanity project driven by the current media frenzy around rewilding, which in our view is not based on sound science, says Mr Dunn.

The TFA is also challenging Defra over spending public money on such projects.

The governments objective is to maintain the landlord/tenant system in agriculture.

If a landlord like the National Trust decides to bring someones occupation of a farm to an end, it shouldnt have access to public funding for planting trees and rewilding, Mr Dunn suggests.

He advises tenants who have been approached about giving up their tenancy not to go quietly and to speak up for what they believe to be right.

Contact the TFA, he adds. We are building a database to help lobby the National Trust on a joint basis the more cases we have, the better.

National Trust insists it values its tenants

The National Trust says it wants to make its land better for nature, to help tackle the nature and climate crisis.

We want to create and restore 25,000ha for nature on our land by 2025 work started in 2017. This means we may retain land in-hand, often temporarily, to reset the management model, says a spokesman.

Any payments made as incentives to surrender tenancies are from National Trust funds, and each case is considered in its local context.

The trust denies taking land back so it can claim future Landscape Recovery or other environmental grants.

If we hold land in-hand, it is with a view to taking some time to plan its future use and management, the spokesman explains.

When we decide to make changes to our land, we look at the different options available to support any capital investments needed and to secure appropriate long-term management.

We anticipate future funding will come from a variety of sources and that rental income will continue to be part of that mix.

The National Trust says it is acutely aware of the impact on tenants when tenancies are not renewed. We work hard to support our tenants with the challenges they face as a result of this, it insists.

How a great English city sold itself to Abu Dhabi’s elite – and not even for a good price

Manchester’s Labour council let Sheikh Mansour buy up acres of public land for seemingly a fraction of its worth – how was this allowed?

Aditya Chakrabortty – The Guardian – Thu 21 Jul 2022

London is one giant pantomime this summer. Just look to the politicians and journalists, hot-breathed with excitement, horse-trading and haggling over who gets to be the Tories’ next head prefect. But if you want the truth about how power and money operate in the UK today then ditch Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, and head to Manchester. Yes, Manchester: the comeback city that traded cotton mills for skyscrapers, and is now cheered by the Financial Times and George Osborne. The metropolis that taught the world so much about industrial capitalism 200 years ago now offers another harsh lesson about its 21st-century, financialised version.

Go a few minutes east of the city centre, and walk from New Islington into Ancoats. Block follows block of newly built and freshly converted flats and houses, many lining a lovely marina that glistens in the July sun. You can rent or buy these places right now, as long as you don’t mind how much some look like pile-em-high student boxes and that they all cost a packet. This is what post-industrial regeneration looks like, right? Redbrick in tooth and claw. But note something: almost 1,500 of these homes come from just one developer, and in that lies an entire sobering story.

Launched in 2014, Manchester Life was hailed as a “£1bn deal” between the city council and the Abu Dhabi-based owner of Manchester City football club. The local authority had swaths of brownfield and Sheikh Mansour, the club’s owner, ranked among the richest men on the planet. Working together, the result would be homes for people who desperately needed them and pots of cash. The council’s then leader, Richard Leese, promised “a world-class exemplar of regeneration”.

Meanwhile, human rights groups warned Manchester council about its powerful new business partner. The Abu Dhabi United Group investment fund is formally separate from the kingdom, but its owner, Sheikh Mansour, is the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and brother of Abu Dhabi’s ruling crown prince. In April, journalists at Der Spiegel magazine published documents suggesting that the state of Abu Dhabi had facilitated payments to Manchester City. At the very least, the investment fund is closely linked to what Amnesty International has described as “one of the most brutal police states in the Middle East”. To dissent in the UAE is to rot in jail, in a regime with proportionately more political prisoners than anywhere else in the world. Low-paid migrant nannies or builders are, Human Rights Watch says, “forced labour”. Yet such facts did not deter the council’s Labour leadership from going ahead.

It was a huge advance for Sheikh Mansour who had, only half a decade earlier in 2008, bought a struggling football club. Now his investment fund was entering a joint venture with the British state (albeit at local level), getting its hands on prime real estate and shaping the city’s very geography. Those of Vladimir Putin’s oligarchs who trousered chunks of London could never dream of such a glittering prize.

As one of the rulers of an autocratic kingdom that has an appalling reputation for repression and an addiction to oil revenues, Sheikh Mansour stood to gain so much from this partnership. It was the council that held almost all the cards: the hectares of publicly owned land, the planning regime, the public subsidies. Yet somehow, according to new research shared exclusively today with the Guardian and authored by academics at Sheffield University, it was Sheikh Mansour who pocketed almost all the winnings. The report says that nine sites were sold to the sheikh at a fraction of their value, and well below what other plots nearby fetched (the council says it used independent experts using standard valuations, although it won’t give any more details). They were on leases lasting 999 years, well beyond the norm. And the fund shifted what had been public assets to companies registered in Jersey.

That walk along the water from New Islington into Ancoats now passes blocks of privatised land owned in an offshore tax haven, which yields millions upon millions for a key member of the wealthy elite running a surveillance state halfway across the globe. One of the greatest cities in the world has sold itself to a senior figure in a brutal autocracy – and not even for a good price.

This is the devastating implication in the first thorough study of the Manchester Life scheme, which is a product of months poring over company accounts and planning applications. The city council is sometimes keener to criticise its critics than to hear what they have to say: Leese, its leader for 25 years until 2021, once responded to those calling for more affordable housing as “middle class tosspots and I hate them”. So let us knock on the head any personal attacks: the experts have all lived in the city for decades, I am one of the independent and unpaid advisers on the advisory panel, and this is a report issued squarely in the public interest.

Among a political establishment still scratching its head over how to level up, Manchester is celebrated as a pioneer. Its Labour leadership has been praised by Conservative administrations, while Osborne called its chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, “the star of British local government”.

Bernstein ran the council for nearly two decades until 2017, and sat on the board of Manchester Life. Yet its success has come at a high price for the little people who just happen to live in the city. Not only have the assets they owned been sold cheap, they have got little back. The nine developed sites have no social or affordable housing, which the council’s planning officers justified with statements such as: “There is already a high level of affordable housing in the immediate area.” The same council admitted earlier this year that nearly 4,000 of the city’s children sleep each night in temporary accommodation.

At the Manchester Life developments, a two-bed flat is considered a bargain if it goes for £369,000 – a price that puts it off limits to couples working full-time on an average salary. As for tax, the sums paid to the Exchequer seem risible. One of its main subsidiaries earned more than £26m in the five years to 2021, but, the researchers found, paid less than £10,000 in tax – an effective rate of just 4p on each £100 of revenue. Manchester Life told me that its subsidiaries “pay all UK corporation or income tax due on rental income and profits”. It would not, however, disclose how much tax it pays or on how much revenue.

It is right to say that New Islington and Ancoats are vastly more pleasant areas than they were even five years ago – but the big question is who has won from redevelopment and who has lost. Putting hard numbers on that is tricky when so much of the information about Manchester Life – a venture using public assets and public subsidy with a public authority – is kept strictly private.

I asked the report’s authors to calculate how much the council could have earned from this deal. Looking at examples of other land deals and other local councils, their conservative estimate is £33m, plus up to £1.7m a year in rent. Both the council and the joint venture described that sum as “speculative”. The council also said it expected more money to come through an overage or profit-share arrangement, although it did not provide any details of this agreement nor are they on public record. But for comparison, that £33m would more than cover what the city pays in a year to put up families in temporary housing.

Sheikh Mansour will presumably know exactly how much Manchester Life is netting him – and can look forward to 10 centuries of rental income from the land in this great city. He seems content with the arrangement. A few months after Bernstein retired from the council, he was appointed as the senior strategic adviser for City Football Group, owned by Sheikh Mansour. I asked the council what procedures it followed on Bernstein’s subsequent appointment with such an important business partner. It could not tell me.

Perhaps the nicest of the Manchester Life developments is Murrays’ Mill, a conversion of one of the world’s first steam-powered cotton mills into flats. It stands in the heart of Ancoats, alongside Bengal Street. My family is originally from Bengal, a region that once wove the best textiles in the world, muslins so fine that the French sighed over their perfection. It was the East India Company’s entry point into the riches of south Asia.

To look at such names carved on to brick is to remember how Manchester came to its industrial wealth and Britain to global pre-eminence, from cotton picked by enslaved people and through destroying foreign industrial competition, even criminalising the sale of Indian textiles. But today it symbolises something else: a country celebrating its receipt of capital from other states under the shabbiest of terms as a triumph. The difference is that Indians were under no illusions about what had befallen them.

Prince Charles honoured tycoon Lord Brownlow who bailed out his failed eco-village

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/prince-charles-honoured-tycoon-lord-brownlow-who-bailed-out-his-eco-village-z2l9cx2mk?shareToken=fce657019d1d0091db4a2ac2145e2f1b

Heir to the throne ignored aides advice against close ties with Tory peer

Gabriel Pogrund Saturday July 02 2022, The Sunday Times

The Prince of Wales gave an honour to a controversial Tory peer who spent 1.7 million bailing out his failed eco-village in a string of secretive deals being investigated by the charity watchdog.Prince Charles presented Lord Brownlow with the award during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace after accepting millions of pounds in donations from him.

His flagship charity also opened up Dumfries House, his 18th-century country estate in Scotland, for Brownlow’s 50th birthday a black-tie event involving fireworks, bagpipes and a performance by a celebrity magician and awarded the businessman’s company a 1.2 million construction contract.

Lord Brownlow was made a Commander of the Victorian Order (CVO), an elite honour approved by the Queen

Brownlow, a recruitment tycoon, is best known for his role in funding the refurbishment of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat and was also recently reported to have been considered as a potential donor to pay 150,000 for a treehouse for the prime ministers son.

Charles became close with the peer, whose fortune has been estimated at 271 million by The Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, after ignoring the advice of one of his most senior courtiers. The palace insider was concerned Brownlow, 58, was using Charles to burnish his reputation, felt he had myriad conflicts of interest and believed his judgment was wayward. They shared their views with the prince.

In 2013 Charles, 73, appointed Brownlow as a trustee of the Princes Foundation, which manages Dumfries House.

Charles had bought the mansion from the Marquess of Bute by taking out a 20 million loan six years earlier.

He also acquired a nearby piece of farmland, Knockroon, at a cut-price rate. Charles saw the construction and sale of faux-Georgian homes there as an ideal way of repaying the Dumfries House debt. The development was also supposed to bring jobs and homes to a depressed former mining community and exhibit his values of traditional and sustainable architecture in practice.

There was a severe shortfall in demand: just 31 of 770 homes were built and its value was written down from 15 million to 700,000. By 2015 Hope Homes, the princes developer, had withdrawn from the project and a leading Scottish architect, Professor Alan Dunlop, described the princes vision as an imported pastiche and a curious mix of relatively expensive homes dropped into a rural setting that should have never been built.

Today plans to complete Knockroon have been abandoned. Residents complain it is a ghost town that Charles rarely visits despite routinely spending weekends entertaining donors and relaxing and unwinding at his nearby estate.

Brownlow incorporated his own property company, Havisham Properties, and started buying homes at Knockroon from a subsidiary of the Princes Foundation. Between 2012 and 2017 he spent 1.7 million purchasing 11 properties and converting them into buy-to-lets and a cafe according to official documents. The charity did not declare any of the purchases as related party transactions. This is a standard measure used to guard against perceived conflicts of interest and to demonstrate that trustees knew that money was going to someone who had existing ties to the charity.

It is unclear whether Brownlow paid for the use of the estate for his birthday in 2013

During this period the foundation also awarded Brownlows company a series of contracts. In 2015 it gave him an estimated 1.2 million worth of work to build three properties on the estate, which a source said were cottages for staff. In the same year the charity seconded charitable staff to run Da Vincis, his companys cafe housed in what was supposed to be Knockroon visitor centre. It also purchased an item of home furnishing on behalf of Mr Brownlow which he later repaid, and paid him 8,590 in rent. The following year, accounts state that his company received 715,668 for building the staff homes. The foundation would not say if there was an open competition or tender exercise to award the contracts.

As a trustee, Brownlow had oversight of the sale of properties and awarded contracts to his own company. Trustees retain ultimate responsibility for all expenditure by a charity and have a legal duty to ensure payments offer value for money and further the charitys goals.

The inquiry by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator has confirmed for the first time that it is investigating Brownlows decision to buy up unwanted properties at Knockroon. We can confirm that the work of Havisham Group [Brownlows company] and property transactions relating to the Knockroon development in Ayrshire forms part of our overall investigation, work on which is ongoing, a spokesman said.

In September 2013, months after he started bailing out Knockroon, Brownlow hosted his 50th birthday party at Dumfries House, which is only partially open to the public through 60-minute paid tours during the summer. Some of the house is available for private hire, but only when the prince is not using the premises. It is unclear whether Brownlow paid for the use of the estate and, if so, whether he was charged at the normal commercial rate. There were performances by Dynamo, the celebrity magician, Alfie Boe, the prominent English tenor, and Cirque du Soleil acrobatic fire-dancers.

Lord Brownlow with the Prince of Wales, the Queen and Prince Harry at the Chelsea Flower Show

Shortly after Brownlow completed his purchase of the properties and quit as a trustee, in 2018, the prince personally gave him a royal honour at Buckingham Palace. He was made a Commander of the Victorian Order (CVO), an elite honour approved by the Queen.

The investiture in which Brownlow was made a CVO was apparently not disclosed on the court circular, the official list of royal engagements. The entry for that date states: The Prince of Wales this afternoon attended an Accounting for Sustainability Forum at St Jamess Palace and afterwards held a reception at Clarence House. The honour means Brownlows formal title now ends with the initials CVO. He uses the style on his parliamentary and business websites.

The CVO is conferred for extraordinary, important or personal services to the royal family and is one of the awards bestowed at the sole discretion of the monarchy rather than one the advice of politicians. Brownlow was appointed to the order as part of the Queens Birthday honours list in 2018, with the official notice describing him as the former chairman of Charless foundation. The following year, Brownlow was knighted and Theresa May nominated him to the House of Lords in 2019.

The disclosures come a week after The Sunday Times revealed that Charles accepted a suitcase of cash from the former prime minister of Qatar.

They pose fresh questions of the princes judgment. Charles had welcomed Brownlow into his circle of trust even after an adviser expressed reservations about his motivations. Brownlow was very influential, but it was felt that he was not an entirely benign influence on the prince, a palace insider said. Of Brownlow, who was a trustee, donor and commercial partner of the charity at once, the source said: He had myriad conflicts of interest. His judgment was wayward. This certainly came up in conversation with the prince.

According to the royal source, Charles was expressly told that Brownlow seemed more interested in the psychic reward of being close to the prince and being invited to dinners at Dumfries House. I think it just sort of gave him a kick that he could talk to his friends and say, I just had another dinner with the Prince of Wales. I mean, I think more about that [than money], to be honest, the source said.

Charles first became involved with Brownlow through his Foundation for Integrated Health, a controversial body that championed alternative medicine and lobbied for pseudoscientific treatments to be made available on the NHS. Brownlow chaired the body briefly but it was closed after the conviction of an official for stealing from the organisation in 2010. A year later he was invited to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton and received a prime seat at Westminster Abbey.

Brownlow attended the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011

Brownlow is not the first Dumfries House donor to get an honour from Charles during a private event at the Queens home. Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire, who had given 1.5 million to Charles’ causes including the estate, was appointed CBE. That honour is the subject of a Metropolitan Police investigation under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.

A Princes Foundation spokeswoman said: Lord Brownlow was appointed CVO in 2018 in recognition of his role of chair of the charity The Princes Foundation for Building Community.

Brownlow was made a CVO as part of the Queens Birthday honours list in 2018

Asked if Brownlow paid to use the estate and, if so, how much she said: Dumfries House is a beautiful country estate which has for many years been available to members of the public to hire for special events. She added: The proceeds are ploughed back into the princes foundation to support its charitable work.

A Clarence House spokesman said: Chairpersons of charities closely associated with the royal family are often appointed to the Royal Victorian Order to thank them for their public service, on completion of their tenure.

Brownlow did not respond to a request for comment.

Jack Hargreaves Preserved On Film Extinguished Country Crafts We Will All Need To Survive The Economic Collapse
We will need his country crafts long into the future, so who really was the man with a pipe in the shed who refused to read from a script, Jack Hargreaves?

https://www.southwestfarmer.co.uk/news/1010441.really-jack-hargreaves/  8th November 2006

The long running television series ‘Out of Town’ made Jack Hargreaves a broadcasting legend. With his unique trademarks of battered hat, pipe, whiskers and an old Barbour jacket he cast off, virtually single-handed, the notion that a television presenter had to wear a bow tie and a morning suit.

He was the first man to be filmed catching a fish on television in the late 1950s in the programme Gone Fishing and went on to expand the format to all matters rural in the programme’s eventual replacement, Out of Town, which started as a fifteen minute local broadcast in the Southern Region but grew eventually to be a truly national phenomenon as it was taken up by all the regional franchises in the 1960s and ’70s. The programme was honoured in the 1970s when the National Film archive chose to preserve two episodes for posterity, saying that ‘when they finally cover Britain with concrete, they will have something to remind them of what it was all about.’ Rewriting the rule book The programme was an innovation in broadcasting as Jack Hargreaves rewrote the rule book and made the programmes with a simple team of two people; himself and cameraman Stan Bréhaut, a man described by Jack as ‘the finest outdoor cameraman in England.’ Sadly Stan died in 2005 but the 1000 Out of Town programmes he filmed remain as a tribute to his unique abilities. A producer was allocated to the project in the early days but he realised he was just getting in the way of a perfect team so the two were simply left to get on with it. This created a true feeling of intimacy where each viewer was inevitably left with the feeling that Jack was doing the programme solely for his benefit.

The programme’s real heyday was in the 1970s when it was a true family viewing requirement spanning across the generations as Jack, with the assistance of experts such as Ollie Kite, showed us the techniques and traditions of everything from field sports to dying crafts. It is a testament to the quality of these programmes that the DVDs of the series are still proving great sellers with a new generation of fans being introduced to the legend as video gives way to a digital format. Somehow Jack’s shed seems timeless, its probable contents making us all feel like the proverbial kid in the sweetshop.

The programme ran for twenty two years, ending in 1982 but was revived by Channel Four as The Old Country for a further three series which could still attract one and a quarter million viewers each week in spite of competition from an entertainment industry obsessed with Star Wars and big budget special effects.

So what made Jack Hargreaves special?

He never boasted that he was the world’s greatest angler or the finest shot. He did, however, pride himself on being a true all rounder. As he fished he could furnish you with tales of the rodent scurrying down the bank on the other side of the river or tell you about the life cycle of the swallow overhead. His knowledge was complete, as was his appreciation of rural life. It is this unique and far reaching understanding which always made him the perfect raconteur rather than a didactic teacher.

But who was Jack Hargreaves the man?

He certainly did not appear ready formed as the man we all welcomed in to our homes each week. In fact the development of Jack Hargreaves the man is certainly a tale at least equal to the story of the Out of Town Programme.

John Herbert Hargreaves, the second of three sons, was born in London in 1914. At the time his father was described on the birth certificate as a commercial traveller although he eventually bought his former employer to become a wool manufacturer in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. Although financially well off, Jack’s childhood was not always happy and it was as a last resort that he was sent to spend time on the farm of a family friend. Suddenly he had found his own vocation as he was introduced to the responsibilities and privileges of farm life by Victor Pargeter of Burston Hill Farm.

Jack went on to study veterinary science in the 1930s but had to curtail his studies due to his father’s bankruptcy, the result of a downturn in the wool industry and fierce competition. Between this sudden change in fortunes and his eventual fame as a broadcaster his CV took him on a veritable roller coaster of jobs. These included writing copy for Spratt’s Dog Biscuits, designing the tableaux for the stationary naked women at the Windmill Theatre, producing up to eighty hours of popular programmes each week for independent radio, running a PR campaign for the Tory Party in the 1950s, running the PR department at the NFU and working as a director of programmes at Southern Television. And that’s not to mention his role in the eventual popularity of the song Lily Marlene during the Second World War, his role in changing the format of children’s TV programmes forever with the wonderful and innovative How and making yachts affordable for people who earned rather less than movie stars.

The fascinating and often surprising life of Jack Hargreaves is detailed in a new book, Jack Hargreaves – A Portrait, by journalist and author Paul Peacock who has spent the last year and a half talking extensively to members of the family and friends. The result is a wonderful insight into one man’s innovation and resilience and how these qualities enabled him to become the character we all recall so fondly. The book is published by Farming Books and Videos Ltd. and is available from the 27th June 2006 priced £20.00. All nine DVDs are also available from the same source, each one comprising of three complete episodes from the 1970s. To learn more please visit www.farmingbooksandvideos.com or telephone on 01772 652693.

The ‘Bankrupt Brewer of Huntingdon’, and Solomon’s Temple: an untold story of the English Civil War, by Tony Gosling

BRISTOL [final revision] 10Aug22 – Certain facts about the origins of the 1642-49 English Civil war have been established by historians and University departments over the centuries. Central are the grievances over Charles’s arbitrary rule and ‘three monopolies’ of church, printing and trade, that so stifled enterprise and free thought.

But what if there were a ‘third factor’, carefully concealed by wealthy merchants who were on the cusp of exploiting the New World? ‘Dark forces’ with a hidden agenda sniffed at by establishment historians then and now, because to raise it might threaten their reputations, their careers? Just such a possibility has in fact been creeping out, ‘given legs’ since WWII, in the works of Christopher Hill, Henry Brailsford, Pauline Gregg, John Robinson, Stephen Knight and Martin Short.

These writers represent two new perspectives on the seventeenth century battle between the feudal and merchant classes in England that was to have enormous repercussions across the world, not least of which was laying the foundations for the acquisition of the biggest empire the world has ever seen.

Brailsford and Hill, writing and researching in the 1950s and 1970s represent the post-war socialist culture finding its feet and reinterpreting social history, much research from original writings being made public for the first time. Their books tease out the social struggles and aspirations of the vast majority of England’s illiterate poor who had no voice yet were seeing their rights to land and livelihood and freedom of worship being corralled as they were made destitute by eviction and rabid anti-Catholicism.

In the 1970s and 80s insiders were saying Freemasonry was becoming less Christian, more sinister. Darker leaders were allegedly creeping in, and whistleblowers began to speak out. These disclosures fell on fertile soil because publishing and broadcasting was in the middle of taboo-breaking couple of decades. Stephen Knight and Martin Short were writing in the 1980s about Freemasonry, complex deceptions and links into all aspects of power, at the highest offices of state and the criminal justice system were exposed.

Before tackling Freemasonry head on, Knight’s 1976 book ‘Jack the Ripper the Final Solution’ suggested prostitutes deaths had been ordered by the royal family after they received blackmail threats. The eldest son of king Edward VII, heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor, had been experimenting with prostitutes as a teenager, given one a child and married her under a pseudonym.

Due to the Masonic nature of the cover-up, Knight became a focus for 1970/80s Masons, disgruntled over more recent injustices within the craft. In 1984 the product of that research ‘The Brotherhood’ was published but Stephen Knight died shortly afterwards in 1985 aged 34. Journalist Martin Short was handed several boxes of unread correspondence Knight had received from readers and published his own, bigger, sequel ‘Inside The Brotherhood, Further Secrets of the Freemasons’ in 1989.

Freemasonry being a re-branding of the banned medieval Knights Templar cult is probably best detailed in John Robinson’s book ‘Born In Blood’ (1989). During the same period of relative press freedom Christian converts from secret black and white witch covens reported identical wording in the oaths of Masonic initiation rituals: promises of secrecy on pain of death, even methods of execution of ‘offenders’.

In his acclaimed 1819 novel, Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott zooms in on this centuries-long struggle between dark forces that hijack the state justice system and military, through religion, to control England for their own private gain, and those that want to live comfortably, of course, but want to see genuine Christian love-thy-neighbour values and social justice prevail.

Between the extinguishing of the Templars in 1312, the eerily similar Garter Knights origin in 1348, and the sixteenth century Reformation, came the too-little studied nor understood Wars of the Roses. A battle for succession between the houses of York and Lancaster it can also be seen as the ultimately fruitless attempt to crush the Lancastrian power of these ever more confident Garter Knights. It was only with the coming of the 1485 Battle of Bosworth that this argument was finally settled in the Garter Knights favour. Sporadic bands of Lancastrian-sponsored brigands that had been roaming a lawless country for nearly a century were apprehended, and the English countryside returned to a reasonably peaceful existence.

Forty years later The Vatican’s inability, or unwillingness, to try accusations of witchcraft had been one of the many reformation grievances. Henry VIII wrenched English Christendom away from Rome in December 1533, over his marriage to Anne Boleyn and the English church began a popularisation and freeing-up of Christian doctrine as the Bible was opened in English. Would the Church of England, as promised, deal more directly with accusations and evidence of witchcraft?

Over the century or so between the reformation and English civil war a spiritual battle had been unleashed, which heated up with the 1611 publication of the King James Bible, to deal with actual divination and actual sorcery, clearly outlawed, which the Vatican had been sweeping under the carpet. The extension of the crown’s judicial powers into what had been church law also provided ‘cover’ for Thomas Cromwell’s hostile takeover of the monasteries. Several abbots to which the crown owed vast sums of money, including Glastonbury’s Richard Whiting, were crudely executed.

So the reformation cancelled much of the debt the crown and gentry had built up during the Wars of the Roses, and Hundred Years War in France. Like a dream come true there was also much confiscated monastic land and property which could be sold off to raise funds and much of the national debt had simply disappeared with the institutions it was owed to. This is the heady Elizabethan court into which John Dee whispered dreams of empire. He unveiled secrets of vast heathen continents loaded with resources as well as a plans to force England’s rural poor to work in factories. So to ‘rule the waves’ and make the new colonial adventurers very rich.

Under Henry and Elizabeth, John Dee’s secret plan was safe, but after the Catholic-leaning Stuart line took to the throne in 1603, awkward questions began to be asked about foreign policy and the increasing numbers of rural destitute falling victim to enclosure. For all but the gentry Henry had made possession of Coverdale’s newly published English Bible a crime, but James was having none of that. He determined that to thwart fallacious churchmen and for the nation to thrive the common man must have direct access to the scriptures.

Adam Smith said ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends up in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ Opposition to the inconvenient concerns of the Church of England and the monarchy was growing. It accelerated rapidly in the 1630s as Charles tried to assert his authority by fining the evictors of the rural poor. Once Charles had dismissed parliament the empire faction of the City of London and merchant classes met secretly at the Providence Island Company and after war broke out the conspiracy was focussed at what became Cromwell’s Army Council and Council of State.

The Empire conspiracy was also becoming free to operate through secret societies where necessary, in a kind of spiritual battle behind the scenes for legislative influence which will benefit them, running up to the power to hire and fire the monarch. Although the restoration was a temporary blow, the Stuarts were probably sounded out and still not considered by the empire builders safe to be ‘in the loop’ so plans were put in place for the 1688 William III coup who, like Henry and Elizabeth before, would put personal gain and national prestige before the welfare of the people. The Jacobites then, who rightly never accepted William and his successors as legitimate, can be compared to the original Christian Socialist Labour party, or today’s anti-capitalist, social justice, protest movements. The Jacobites, however, ran out of steam in 1745 after a great march to attack London by the Highlanders and their allies which, probably wisely, was abandoned in Derby and returned home.

It should not come as a great surprise that formal secret groups, possibly alongside Freemasonry might be lurking behind machinations before, during and after the English Civil War since the idea was prominent in some seventeenth and eighteenth century accounts and illustrations. But this aspect is almost nowhere today, partly because the post-1980s press, and media more generally, has been ever more closed, consolidated into fewer and fewer hands, but also mainstream historians tell us Freemasonry only emerged in England in 1717.

‘Emerged’ is the word, because ‘philanthropist’ Elias Ashmole proudly records his own 1646 initiation into freemasonry at Warrington in his memoirs. So we know ‘the craft’ was active underground from at least the civil war period in England. Was the 1717 deception an attempt to conceal some role Freemasonry’s hidden networks of power had in the overthrow of Charles I, and the later usurping of James Stuart’s throne in 1688 by ‘puritan’ William of Orange?

Templar timeline

• 1118 – The Vatican founds the Knights Templar after the First Crusade
• 1154 – The Great Schism as rival pontiffs from the Roman and Orthodox churches split
• 1204 – Brutal sacking of Orthodox Constantinople led by Knights Templar of the Vatican’s Fourth Crusade
• Friday 13th October 1307 – French King Philip the Fair orders arrest of the Templars for denying Christ, homosexuality, worshipping idols plus other blasphemies and heresies.
• 1312 – Templar Order is extinguished by the Vatican and banning decrees issued by European kings. Property is transferred to the Knights Hospitaller, today known as the Knights of Malta. Templars now have to go underground, under false names staying in secret network of ‘safe houses’ known as ‘lodges’.
• 1348 – Order of the Garter is created by Edward III at Woodstock, Oxfordshire with 26 knights. Legend is the motto ‘Shame on anyone who thinks this is evil’, originated when the Countess of Salisbury, dancing with the king, dropped her garter and he gallantly picked it up. However in her 1921 anthropological study of witchcraft Margaret Murray says the garter is a hidden emblem of a witchcraft high priestess, indicating control of a coven of 13, and that the king may have been demonstrating his support for her.1381 – Peasant’s Revolt believed to have been orchestrated by the underground Templars to threaten the boy-King Richard II and regain or destroy property lost seventy years previously when they were extinguished.
• 1411 – Foundation of London’s Guildhall, bringing medieval guilds together, leading to increased insularity and profiteering through shared monopolistic practices. Guilds had been getting more formalised and secretive over the previous 200 years or so with oaths of initiation to protect the secrets of their craft. Livery Companies began to dominate the political and economic life of the City of London through monopolistic practices and controlling apprenticeships. In the 21st Century there remain 84 City companies, the ‘Great Twelve’ Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant-Taylors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners, Clothworkers and 72 minor companies.1446 – Rosslyn Chapel is built in Midlothian, Southeast of ex-Templar Port Edinburgh by Sir William St Clair. Architecture hints at Templar influences and pillars depict plants only known in the Americas, which weren’t supposed to have been discovered until fifty years afterwards.1455-1487 – Wars of the Roses dynastic battles over thirty years tied up with England losing control of French territories with sides symbolised by the white Lancastrian and red Yorkshire five-pointed roses, sometimes depicted as white within red as the Tudor Rose. Because the five-petalled rose is a form of hexagram some have suggested that it represents the merging of Lancastrian and Yorkist covens. Wars culminate both dynastically, in the 1486 marriage of Henry VII to Elisabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV, and militarily in the 1487 Battle of Bosworth where Henry Tudor’s Yorkist rival Richard III is killed.1489 – Depopulation Act ‘Against Pulling Down Of Towns’ under Henry VII1492-97 – So-called discovery of South America and Caribbean by Christopher Columbus who sailed from Palos de la Frontera in Spain and North America by John Cabot sailing out of Bristol. There is much evidence that the ancient Phoenicians traded across the Atlantic, that some Europeans were aware of the ‘New World’ and that these voyages may have simply made public what elites already knew, to prepare Europeans for coming centuries of colonisation.1509- 1547 – Reign of King Henry VIII1515 – Royal Proclamation ‘Against Engrossing Of Farms’ under Henry VIII1516 – Depopulation Act1516, 1518 and 1519 – Royal Anti-Enclosure Commissions

  1534 – Sheep Farming Restraining Act

  1535 – Translator of much of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles into English William Tyndale, is executed in Hapsburg Holland by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.  Concurrently, in Antwerp and working almost exclusively with Luther and Tyndall’s texts, Miles Coverdale publishes the first complete Bible in English.

  1536 – Two Depopulation Acts

  1536 – 1541 – The English Reformation is beginning in earnest with an attack on the commercial operations of the church. Dissolution of the Monasteries by Oliver Cromwell’s great-great grandfather and Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell – 900 religious business institutions are ‘nationalised’ and sold off. 12,000 in religious orders are sacked as the debt the crown owes to the great monastic institutions, tens of billions of pounds in 2020 money, is cancelled. With Luther and Calvin’s wider ‘Reformation’ comes a tacit encouragement of Freemason lodges, as secret ‘speak-easies’ until emerging officially into public view 180 years or so later. The new ‘protestant’ religion is taking on a distinctly bourgeois, mercantile flavour.

  1542 – Henry VIII passes England’s first capital Witchcraft Act removing jurisdiction from the Vatican’s church courts to the crown courts and assizes.

  1543-1547 – ‘Act for the Advancement of the True Religion’ in force, making it a crime for the ‘lower sort’ to possess, read or study the Bible in English. It stated that, ‘no women nor artificers, journeymen, serving men of the degree of yeomen or under husbandmen nor labourers’, could read the Bible, ‘privately or openly’.

  1545 – Henry VIII signs Usury Act into law permitting interest up to 10% on loans, thereby breaking the medieval Catholic church’s ban on usury. This act was revoked in 1552, but re-enacted under Elizabeth, in 1571. Subsequent Parliaments reduced that rate: to 8% in 1624, to 6% in 1651 and to 5% in 1713.  More bourgeois, mercantile changes under the cloak of ‘Protestantism’.

  1547-1553 – Reign of King Edward VI

  1549, Jul-Aug – Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk over enclosure. East Anglia ruled for seven weeks from under an oak tree by Robert Kett and 16,000 peasants. Enclosers locked up in Norwich jail for ‘stealing the land’. King Edward VI’s army is twice turned back by the rebels, is then reinforced and defeats them.

  1552 and 1555 Depopulation Acts

  1553-1558 – Reign of Queen Mary I

  1558-1603 – Reign of Queen Elizabeth I

  1563 – Depopulation Act repeals all four 1526, 1552 and 1555 Acts as ineffective. Acknowledged or not, this was probably because the administration of all previous acts and commissions since 1489 were in the hands of the landed classes who were profiting personally from enclosure.

  1563 – Post-Reformation ‘Witchcraft Act’, passed in Scotland, makes witchcraft, or consulting with witches, a capital crime.

  1563 – Elizabeth I’s Witchcraft Act reduces penalties for witchcraft except it remains a capital offence for those proven also to have caused harm.

  1577 – John Dee privately publishes his clandestine vision for the ascendancy of a projected British Empire, advised by Christopher Hatton and Robert Dudley, for Elizabeth I in ‘General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation’. Though part of Dee’s plan, Elizabeth claims privateers Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and John Hawkins are not working for the crown. [FFI see articles by Alex Grover, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich]

  Dec 1577-Sept 1580 – ‘Unofficial’ privateer Francis Drake sails off in The Pelican to plunder Spanish vessels off South America. Being too nervous to return Drake decides to round Cape Horn, renames his ship The Golden Hind and sails up the West coast of the Americas. As the first Englishman to then circumnavigates the world he returns home to a hero’s welcome with so much Spanish gold he pays of the national debt for Elizabeth and receives a knighthood

  1581-1795 – Calvinist ‘Dutch Republic’, where Catholics are persecuted. It is to play a major role in providing finance and military expertise to Cromwell during the English civil war. Following the 1660 restoration of Charles II the Dutch republic resumes harrying England’s Catholic kings with the 1665 Monmouth rebellion and much better funded 1688 ‘Glorious revolution’ which finally deposes the Stuart line and imposes a violently anti-Catholic regime.

  1590-92 –  North Berwick witch trials in which Agnes Sampson, Geillis Duncan and schoolmaster Dr John Fian were accused of being members of a coven at St Andrews’ Auld Kirk. Around 100 people were accused including Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell and other gentry. It’s unclear how many the juries found guilty or were executed.

  1593 – Two final Depopulation Acts passed

  1597 – James VI of Scotland publishes his ‘Daemonologie’ purporting to detail practices and enable identification of witches.

  1600 – Incorporation of the East India Company which began controlling trade for empire in Bengal, India and the far east.

  1603, 24 March – James I ascends to the throne of England  having been James VI of Scotland for 36 years, uniting the two monarchies and reigning until 1625.

  1604 – James I passes a stricter Witchcraft Act reversing Elizabeth I’s leniency. It is enforced by self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins.

  1604-1607 active enclosure revolts in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Warwickshire, culminating in 1607 in armed revolt under a leader with the pseudonym ‘Captain Pouch’. Forty or fifty rebels out of a rag-tag-army of about a thousand peasants are shot dead at Newton by a ‘body of mounted gentlemen with their servants’, while several others are hanged and quartered.

  1605, 05 November – Gunpowder plot orchestrated by Lord Salisbury to test James I and justify persecution of Catholics

  1607 – the term ‘Leveller’ is heard for the first time as organised anti-enclosure gangs emerge and ‘riots’ spread around the counties of Northamptonshire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire.

  1607 – 1636 the governments of James I and Charles I set themselves against John Dee’s covert empire-building by pursuing an active anti-enclosure policy.

  1611 – Publication of King James’ Authorised Version of The Bible, commissioned in 1604 and still recognised as one of the most accurate..

  1612, 18-19 August – Pendle witch trials culminating in nine hangings for Maleficium (causing injury by divination) of some self-confessed coven-members on 20th August.

  1620 – Voyage of The Mayflower from Plymouth to Cape Cod setting up the first official North American colony.

  1625, 27 March – Charles I ascends the British throne on death of James I and reigns until he is executed in 1649.

  1626 June – Parliament impeaches Charles I’s friend and adviser George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham so Charles quickly dissolves Parliament.

  1629-1640 – ‘Eleven years Tyranny’ as Charles I attempts to rule without Parliament

  1629-1640 – The Providence Island Company, with John Pym MP as treasurer,  becomes the organisational base for mercantile Puritan opposition to the king and his attempts to rule without parliament. Supposedly set up to open trade with Spanish in Latin America the company becomes a centre for domestic legal, political and military opposition to Charles I. Located 150 miles east of Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast Providence island is ostensibly a model Puritan colony but is used by English Privateers as a base from which to attack Spanish shipping. The Phoenicians (2500-500BC)  had also used offshore islands to manage trade and as a base to operate against territories they wished to control.

  1630 – Justices of five midland counties are ordered to remove all enclosures made in the previous two years

  1632, 1635 and 1636 – Three Royal Anti-Enclosure Commissions levy huge compositions, or fines, on those who have enclosed land in  contravention of Depopulation Acts. Charles I levies total of £50,000 ‘compositions’, or fines, as a penalty for depopulation and evictions from 1633 to 1638, some of which are retrospective. Equivalent in 2020 of around £2.2 billion.

  1635 – Supposedly converted to Christianity Portuguese-Jewish merchant Antonio Fernandez Carvajal moves to London’s Leadenhall Street as the first endenizened, or naturalised, English Jew for nearly 200 years. His ships trade to the East and West Indies, Brazil, and Levant in gunpowder, wine, hides, pictures, cochineal and corn. Plus he has lucrative government contracts to supply the army with corn and an additional £100,000 annual turnover of silver. Carvajal also brings with him a vast intelligence network of paid informers, of use to any army.

  1635 – Charles imposes Ship Money tax to finance the Royal Navy on inland towns and cities which had previously levied only on ports.

  13 April – 5 May 1640 – ‘Short Parliament’ summoned by Charles I which insisted on grievances against the king being addressed before voting him any money. Charles then promptly dissolved it.

  November 1640 – December 1648 – ‘Long Parliament’ elected. Earl of Strafford (d. May 1641), Cottington, Sir John Finch (escaped to Holland) and Archbishop Laud (d. 1645), who have been running the country for the king, are impeached and either executed or escaped into exile until the restoration.

  November 1641 – Parliament states its demands that the king strictly purge the church of England of all ‘Roman Catholic tenancies’ in the ‘Grand Remonstrance’ drafted by Puritan John Pym.

  On 4th January 1642 king Charles attempts to arrest the ‘five members’ John Pym, John Hampden, Arthur Hesilrige, Denzil Holles and William Strode for treason. Charles had first gone to the House of Lords demanding they arrest the MPs for him. After a short debate the Lords refused and so Charles and his accompanying guard of soldiers had to go into the Commons themselves to make the arrests. Charles utters the opening line of the English Civil War, “All the birds are flown” and humiliated, leaves London. We now know the five members were already safely hidden in the City of London, which had probably been tipped off by a spy at court.

  10 June 1642 – Charles I is forced to leave London for Oxford, establishing his rule in other parts of the country with a virtual line of his support running roughly from Southampton up to Hull. Roughly 1/3 of MPs and the majority of Lords support the king.

  22nd August 1642 – Charles raises his standard at Nottingham hoping loyal aristocracy will support him against Parliament. Later in the month Parliament orders al theatres closed.

  23rd October 1642 – Battle of Edge Hill between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire proves indecisive with around 15,000 troops on each side.

  20 September 1643 – First Battle of Newbury in Berkshire again proves indecisive as the King tries and fails to stop Essex returning to London from Gloucester.

  2nd July 1644 – Battle of Marston Moor is a decisive Parliamentary victory near York. Prince Rupert, for the King, took on Cromwell and Fairfax with Edward Manchester in command of the parliamentary army. Confusion reigned on both sides that day but Manchester grabbed the initiative, routing the royalist army inflicting crippling losses, with 4,000 of Charles’ fighting men killed and 1,500 captured. Manchester’s decisive performance as a general that day led to conflict with Cromwell later that year over the conduct of the war. Manchester was dismissed, eventually opposing the trial of Charles I from sidelines.

  February 1645: Sums of money which prove to be decisive are spent over the winter refashioning the parliamentary army for what proved to be the decisive 1645 fighting season. Parliament’s New Model Army of 20,000 soldiers is better equipped, disciplined and trained.

  14 June 1645 – Battle of Naseby, South of Market Harborough, is the final decisive defeat of the English Civil War. Charles I joined Prince Rupert to command 7,500 cavaliers, who faced around 14,000 New Model Army Roundheads led by Cromwell and Fairfax. 5,000 royalist soldiers are captured leaving Charles’ forces in the midlands decimated and the cities of Leicester, Chester and Winchester all saw the writing on the wall, surrendering to parliament.

  10th July 1645 Langport in Somerset saw the Royalists’ final strategic military defeat. Soldiers of Charles’ supporters in the South West were defeated by Fairfax and his well-organised, City of London resourced, army. Bristol merchants had been independent royalists, and remained so until the following September when, under siege, they surrendered England’s second city to the roundheads. So furious was Cromwell with Bristol for holding an independent line against his merchant forces, he had his engineers level the city’s historic castle with explosives after the war.

  July 1645: Leveller pamphleteer Lt. Col. John Lilburne is arrested

  Elizabeth Lilburne women’s petition to parliament

  1646 – in his memoirs Elias Ashmole records his initiation into freemasonry at Warrington sixty years before Freemasonry is supposed to exist in England

  12 November 1646 – Charles I loses the battle of Newark and is taken into custody by the Scottish army

  January 1647 – Scots deliver Charles over to parliament for the sum of £100,000

  June 1647 – trouble at’ mill – Cromwell settles with army agitators

  June and July 1647 – letters pass between Oliver Cromwell and Amsterdam’s Mulheim Synagogue financier Ebenezer Pratt about Jews being readmitted to England in exchange for his financial support and advice.

  11 November 1647 – Charles is deliberately allowed to escape from Hampton Court for pro-Cromwell dramatic effect and makes his way to the Isle Of Wight, from where he plans to escape to France. IoW governor Colonel Robert Hammond is not so sympathetic as Charles had hoped and he is re-imprisoned in Carisbrooke castle.

  August 1648 King Charles I is taken prisoner.

• September 1648 – In his pamphlet ‘Les Francs-Maçons Écrasés’ (1774) French Catholic priest Abbé Larudan alleges Cromwell, realising his own life will be forfeit if negotiations for peace with Charles proceed, forms a witchcraft cell to push through the execution Charles, under Masonic guise. The inauguration takes place at a location in King’s Street, St. James, London over two evening meetings four days apart. Named as present are Oliver Cromwell, his son-in-law Henry Ireton, Algernon Sidney, a Mr. Newell, Martin Wildeman, James Harrington (colonel of the London trained bands), George Monck Parliamentary commander-in-chief Thomas Fairfax along with many others. The ‘holy spirit’ is said to have visited Cromwell during the intervening days to affirm god’s support for him and his group. The ostensible aim is the rebuilding of ‘proper Christian order’ and once they have been inducted at their second meeting a painting of Solomon’s ruined Temple is presented to initiates in a neighbouring room, illustrating the ‘task in hand’. A master, two wardens, a secretary and speaker are all appointed as this newly formed cult’s officers which consists of all factions in Parliament, church and army. It proceeds to spy on MPs to assess their views on negotiation with or trial of Charles I in preparation for Pride’s purge three months later. So, did Cromwell ‘do a deal with the devil’? Exactly a decade later Cromwell is dead. Rumours survive about Cromwell ‘selling his soul to the devil’ at the 1651 battle of Worcester.20 November 1648 – Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton’s Remonstrance is presented to Parliament calling for the trial of Charles I for treason.2 December 1648 Charles I is held in Hurst CastleOn 1st December, the House of Commons resists Ireton’s calls to proceed to try the king, voting by 129 to 83, a majority of 46 votes, to accept the King’s terms for his restoration to power.The following day the New Model Army occupies London and arrests 41 MPs who had most actively supported the king, hoping that this will send a clear message to the others, if just a few of those remaining who support the king change their mind no further action by the army will be necessary.6 December 1648 – The Rump Parliament is created with Pride’s Purge. Acting on orders from Cromwell’s son-in-law General Henry Ireton, and apparently unknown to army chief General Fairfax, Colonel Thomas Pride surrounds parliament with troops and ‘purges’ Parliament of a further 140 or so MPs who had voted for the negotiated settlement with Charles. This leaves only 71 out of the originally elected 489 MPs still sitting, the so-called ‘Rump Parliament’. Around two hundred of the Long Parliament’s original MPs are now in prison and around the same number in fear of the army, afraid to speak out. Ninety MPs, the majority of those who voted the previous day to negotiate with the king, are purged from parliament along with 45 who resisted arrest detained for several days. Those considered most dangerous to Cromwell’s cause. Sir William Waller, Sir John Clotworthy and Lionel Copley are imprisoned in the tower without charge for many years. Denzil Holles, Colonel Massey and Major-General Browne escape to the continent.4th January 1649 a motion is but before parliament proposing the king be tried for treason. Only 46 of the Rump’s 71 MPs turn up to vote and 26 vote in favour, a majority of six is enough. The following day the Lords vote overwhelmingly against the same motion, but the vote is set aside by the then government, Cromwell’s Council of State. General Henry Ireton’s demand that Charles be put on trial is now voted through. In public Oliver Cromwell said he had his doubts about the purges and at the end of December he tells the House of Commons “the providence of God hath cast this upon us”. Once the decision had been made Cromwell “threw himself into it with the vigour he always showed when his mind was made up, when God had spoken”.
• 20 January 1649 – a court is convened in Westminster Hall and Charles I is charged with “waging war on Parliament.” It was claimed that he was responsible for “all the murders, burnings, damages and mischiefs to the nation” in the English Civil War. The jury included remaining members of Parliament, army officers and large landowners. Some of the 135 jurors did not turn up for the trial. For example. General Thomas Fairfax, the leader of the Parliamentary Army, did not appear. When his name was called, his masked wife, Lady Anne Fairfax, shouted out, “He has more wit than to be here,” and was whisked out of the public gallery before she could be arrested. After the court had been sworn in Charles demanded to know by what authority he had been brought to trial. President of the court John Bradshaw replied ‘In the name of Parliament assembled and all the good people of England’. Lady Fairfax who had quietly returned sprang up again ‘It is a lie! Not a half – nay, not a quarter of the people of England’ and she was once more spirited away.30 January 1649 – Outside the old Palace of Whitehall Charles I is executed. Immediately afterwards, to the consternation of the regicides, his memoir ‘Eikon Basiliske’ (Portrait of the King, his sacred majesty’s solitude and sufferings) is published. Sold amongst the silent crowds, and after more than twenty editions, it went on to become one of England’s all time bestsellers. England is now a military dictatorship run by Cromwell and his Council Of State’ appointees.1649-1660 – Elected by The Rump Parliament after the House of Lords has been abolished the Council of State assumes virtually sole executive powers during the interregnum.Wednesday 28th March 1649 – Early morning arrest of Leveller pamphleteers John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Richard Overton and Thomas Prince – Cromwell launches ‘project fear’ on the Council Of State ‘…if you do not break them they will break you, yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads and shoulders…’ – proposes all four prisoners are committed to the tower and wins by one vote. From the king’s execution to Charles II’s 1660 restoration Cromwell’s Council of State runs the country as a military dictatorship with various purged, ineffective parliaments.1 and 18 April 1649 – two separate 10,000 signature Petitions for Levellers’ release23 April 1649 – Women’s 10,000 signature petition to Parliament served, demanding release of the four Leveller captives and an end to arbitrary rule which is bringing famine to the land
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• 1 May 1649 – The Agreement of the People published – Leveller manifesto
• May 1649 – Wages unpaid and refusing to fight in Ireland, hundreds of parliamentary Leveller soldiers sack their officers at Burford, Oxfordshire. Cromwell arrests them in a midnight raid and next day three soldiers are executed for mutiny. Commemorated in Burford at the annual ‘Levellers Day’ with music, speeches, and a march from the parish church where soldiers and their horses were imprisoned.
• 1650-1720 – the ‘golden age’ of piracy. The British secret state’s sponsorship of pirates is denied, just as Elizabeth denied she’d supported privateers Drake, Raleigh etc. The Royal Navy ‘state within a state’ works hard to fulfil John Dee’s vision for Britain’s dominance of the high seas as the empire is established
• 3 September 1651- Battle of Worcester – final battle of the English Civil war with Charles II leading a Scottish army. Parliamentarian soldiers outnumber Royalists roughly 2:1 – Royalist casualties of c. 3,000 are roughly five times that of the Parliamentary army and 10,000 royalist soldiers are captured – a resounding defeat for Charles II
• 3 September – Wednesday 15 October 1651 – Charles II goes ‘on the run’ for an exciting six weeks days after losing the battle of Worcester. Disguised as an ostler he heads down the West side of England to Charmouth in Dorset where Captain Limbry fails to smuggle him to France. Charles eventually makes it across the channel from Shoreham, Sussex in Captain Tattersall’s coal freighter ‘The Surprise’ with his adventure being recorded in ‘The Flight Of The King’ by Allan Fea.(1908). Charles then resides in Paris, near Charles I’s exiled queen consort Henrietta Maria, later moving his court to Cologne.
• 4th July to 12 December 1653 – ‘Barebones Parliament’ of 140 Cromwell appointees replaces the Rump Parliament who are ejected by Cromwell’s soldiers.
• 16th December 1653 – 25 May 1659 –  ‘The Protectorate’. After Barebones is dissolved the ‘Instrument of Government’ creates the office of Lord Protector for Cromwell who chairs the Council Of State now as sole military rulers.
• March 1655 – Uprising in Wiltshire against Cromwell’s military rule led by Colonel John Penruddock who led his followers into Salisbury and declared Charles II king. The rebellion was crushed, its leaders executed and English military rule suppressing all gatherings and pastimes was formalised into 11 districts each run by a major-general for the next two years.
• December 14, 1655 – After much lobbying by founder of Holland’s first Hebrew printing press Menasseh Ben Israel, Jews are allowed back into England for the first time since they were expelled in 1290.
• 25 may 1657 – Humble Petition and Advice offers Cromwell the title of King which he rejects.
• 3 September 1658 – Cromwell dies aged 59.
• 14 April – 29 December 1660 – Convention Parliament elected.
• 1660 – Restoration of Charles II to the English throne after his exile in France and the death of Oliver Cromwell – known as a time of great literary and cultural freedom: comedies by Dryden, Wycherley, Ertheridge, Sedley, Buckhurst etc, after previous grim decade of puritan rule.
• June-July 1685 – Exiled after the 1683 Rye House Plot, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, launched the Protestant Monmouth Rebellion on 11th June 1685 landing with at Lyme Regis in a failed attempt to depose James II. On 6th July Battle of Sedgemoor near Bridgwater, Somerset, finishes off this rather insufficient attempt by Protestants to cut off the Catholic Stuart line.
• 5th November 1688 – William of Orange lands at Torbay with 14,000 soldiers and 5,000 horses. Coup d’état or ‘Glorious Revolution’ follows as James II is forced into exile in Ireland while Protestant, William III, ‘King Billy’ takes the English throne. This also begins the Catholic ‘Jacobite’ movement committed to restoring the Stuart line. Jacobite areas tend to be Scotland, Northern England and the South-West, the old royalist regions of the English Civil War.
• 1707 – Great Britain comes into being after the passage of the Treaty of Union with Scotland.
• 27 August 1715 –  Jacobite rising by the ‘Old Pretender’ James Edward Stuart, son of deposed King James II, to regain the crown of England, Scotland and Ireland. On 14th November his army surrendered at Preston and the rebellion was over.
• 1717 – Official establishment of Freemasonry in London, a religious cult which has similar initiation rituals to witchcraft and had been operating for around a century.
• 1737 – Andrew Ramsay reveals the 33 degrees of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, so named because no decree had ever been issued by Scottish Monarchs banning the Knights Templar.
• 1745 – Bonnie Prince Charlie leads abortive Jacobite rebel march on London
• 1951 – The Fraudulent Mediums Act makes witchcraft legal in Britain for the first time since 1542.

Oliver’s origins

In his 1826 novel ‘Woodstock’ Sir Walter Scott recounts, ‘the bankrupt brewer of Huntingdon’, and other contemporary cavalier quips about Oliver Cromwell’s obscure pre-war life. The aggressive, failed manager mysteriously given a new role as an MP.

It should be clear by now that Charles was not simply dealing with an organised faction of merchants who wished to see the nation run more efficiently. No, behind these various plots was a conscious choice to sidestep Christianity, the moral code that had been keeping them in their place. As the joyless, pecuniary policies of the pseudo-Christian Puritans also implies. In taking on parliament and the City of London was Charles confronting John Dee’s well-organised criminal conspiracy? Dark forces at play with nothing less than the world as their prize?

Is it this stepping into the spiritual that makes so many historians baulk at addressing the wickedness of overthrowing the monarchy in the seventeenth century, to replace it with a system of glorious rule by Cromwell’s council of state? Where a secret cabal gets to hire and fire those on the panel and there is limited free speech. In 1649 Burford even parliamentary soldiers thought Cromwell might be worse than the king.

However wicked a king might be, and Henry VIII was one of the most despotic rulers since Herod, every once in a while the feudal system throws up a good sort. It did with Charles and there was nothing the oligarchy, organised crime, could do to unseat him except character assassination followed by kangaroo court and execution.

Reading list – in order of personal preference

Old Rowley, The Private Life Of Charles II by Dennis Wheatley (1933) – affectionate roller coaster ride through young Charles survival and resurgence after the war including easy to follow up detail on the cultural thrill of the restoration

The Levellers And The English Revolution by Henry H. Brailsford (1961) – takes us through the formation and attempted destruction of Cromwell’s key Leveller opponents, along with their offshoots. Though Brailsford is an internationalist he shows deep understanding for the spiritual and moral factions on both sides of the war

Edmund Ludlow And The English Civil War edited by Jane Shuter (1994) – fascinating account of a Parliamentary commander who finds himself slowly losing faith in the cause for which he has been fighting

Born In Blood, The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry by John J. Robinson (1989) – Extraordinary historical exploration of the previously hidden origins of eighteenth century Freemasonry in ancient and medieval secret societies.

The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill (1972) – Detailed analysis of seventeenth century counter-culture centred around the protestant reformation and agricultural reforms being imposed on England and the cataclysmic Civil War which followed.

The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Murray (1921) – A study of the underground persistence of secret Canaanite and Phoenician religious cults under the surface of gentile modern European society.

Who we are

The Land Is Ours was set up in 1995 by writer George Monbiot with the aim to echo in the UK land rights campaigns across the developing world, notably Brazil’s landless movement (MST). Also to take up the cause through non-violent direct action of forgotten Diggers, Chartists and Land Leaguers on our own islands. You can find us online at www.tlio.org.uk and join the Diggers list, set up in Easter 1999 when we occupied St George’s Hill,  Surrey for two weeks on the Diggers’ 350th anniversary, by sending a blank email to diggers350-subscribe@gn.apc.org

Land is a free gift to mankind so should never be considered private property like other things. ‘True Leveller’ Gerrard Winstanley said ‘The Earth is a Common Treasury for All, Without Respect of Persons’. Winstanley died a Quaker and the Bible puts it thus: The land is not to be sold permanently, for the Earth is mine, sayeth The Lord God, and you are but my tenants. Leviticus 25:25.

linked article

Dissolution of the Monasteries, Civil War, Thomas Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell and the founding of freemasonry and Zionism?

What drove Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira to risk their lives in the Amazon?

Rodrigo Pedroso – 17 June 2022

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/what-drove-dom-phillips-and-bruno-pereira-to-risk-their-lives-in-the-amazon/ar-AAYyrUz

Dom Phillips and Bruno Araujo Pereira, veterans of the Amazon, would have known the risks they faced when they set off for Atalaia do Norte in the Brazilian rainforests remote Javari Valley a trip that ended in tragedy, after Brazilian authorities said Friday they had identified the remains of Phillips.

On Wednesday, a suspect had confessed to killing the men, with police following their directions to human remains in the jungle. Investigations are continuing on the remains of the other body.

The pair, who were first reported missing on June 5, had received death threats prior to their departure, according to the Coordination of the Indigenous Organization, known as UNIVAJA. Each was well versed in the areas often-violent incursions by illegal miners, hunters, loggers and drug-traffickers but they were equally dedicated to exposing how such activity plagues Brazil’s protected wild areas, endangers its indigenous peoples, and accelerates deforestation.

Pereira, a 41-year-old father of three, spent much of his life in service of the country’s indigenous peoples since joining the Brazilian governments indigenous agency (FUNAI) in 2010. He told CNN that the agency’s Isolated and Newly Contacted Indigenous Coordination Office had made a major expedition to contact isolated indigenous people under his leadership in 2018, and that he had participated in multiple operations to expel illegal miners from protected lands.

Pereiras passion was evident in an interview with CNN last year. I cant stay away for too long from the parentes, he said, referring to the regions indigenous people with the affectionate term relatives.

Phillips, 57, a widely respected British journalist who had lived in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, brought environmental issues and the Amazon to the pages of the Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times and, principally, The Guardian. Pereira was on leave from FUNAI amid a broader shake-up of the agency when he joined Phillips to assist in research for a new book.

The planned book would be titled How to save the Amazon.

In a video filmed in May in an Ashaninka village in northwestern Acre state, and released by the Ashaninka association, Phillips can be heard explaining his endeavour: I came here () to learn with you, about your culture, how you see the forest, how you live here and how you deal with threats from invaders and gold diggers and everything else.

A dangerous undertaking

Home to thousands of indigenous people and more than a dozen uncontacted groups, Brazil’s vast Javari Valley is a patchwork of rivers and dense forest that makes access very difficult. Criminal activity there often passes under the radar, or is confronted only by indigenous patrols sometimes ending in bloody conflict.

In September 2019, indigenous affairs worker Maxciel Pereira dos Santos was murdered in the same area, according to Brazil’s Public Prosecutors Office. In a statement, a FUNAI union group cited evidence that dos Santos murder was retaliation for his efforts to combat illegal commercial extraction in the Javari Valley, Reuters reported at the time.

Across Brazil, standing up to illegal activity in the Amazon can be deadly, as CNN has previously reported. Between 2009 and 2019, more than 300 people were killed in Brazil amid land and resource conflicts in the Amazon, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), citing figures from the Catholic non-profit Pastoral Land Commission.

Critics have accused President Jair Bolsonaros administration of emboldening the criminal networks involved in illegal resource extraction. Since coming to power in 2019, Bolsonaro has weakened federal environmental agencies, demonized organizations working to preserve the rainforest, and rallied for economic growth on indigenous lands arguing that it is for indigenous groups own welfare with calls to develop, colonize, and integrate the Amazon.

Pereira last year lamented the diminished state of Brazil’s environmental and indigenous protection agencies under Bolsonaro’s presidency. But he also saw a bright side, telling CNN that he thought the shift would push the Javari Valleys indigenous peoples to overcome historical divisions and form alliances to protect their shared interests.

However, in another interview with CNN, later in the year, he was more circumspect about the dangers. Having just returned from a trip in the rainforest, his feet and legs covered with mosquito bites, Pereira described a backlash from criminal groups to indigenous territorial patrols.

[The patrols] took them by surprise, I think. They thought that since the government withdraw from operations, they would get a free pass on the region, Pereira said.

But neither Pereira nor Phillips were going to give a free pass to exploitation of the Amazon.

Dom knew the risks of going to the Javari Valley, but he thought that the story was important enough to take those risks, Jonathan Watts, global environmental editor for the Guardian told CNN.

We knew it was a dangerous place, but Dom believes it is possible to safeguard the nature and the livelihood of the indigenous people, said his sister, Sian Phillips, in a video last week urging the Bolsonaro government to intensify its search for the pair.

On Wednesday, Jaime Matses, another local indigenous leader in the Javari Valley, told CNN he had recently met with Pereira to discuss a new potential project monitoring illegal activity in his community’s territory.

He seemed happy, Matses recalled. He wasn’t afraid to do the right thing. We saw him as a warrior like us.

And if their disappearance was intended to instil fear among those who would follow in their footsteps, it has backfired, Kora Kamanari, another local leader, told CNN on Wednesday.

We are more united than before and will keep on fighting until the last indigenous is killed.

Julia Koch contributed reporting.