Dear Readers,
Good afternoon once again and welcome to Off The Fence number we-think-we’ve-lost-count, somewhere in the hundreds anyway. If this is your first newsletter from us then thank you for signing up – this is our weekly mailout of tips, gossip, links, featurettes, and anything else that our editorial team wants to share with you.
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Right, let’s oil up and get right to it. On the docket this week we have the velvet tones of Paul Robeson, the interior life of Titania McGrath, and an undeniable burn from a controversial Fence fan. But first, an investigation.
He Groomed a School
Last week, we published the most rigorous and explosive investigation we have ever run – Mark Blacklock, long-time contributor and superlative sleuth, spent five years on the trail of Queen Ethelburga’s College in North Yorkshire, and the predatory paedophile who moved the school to his own private grounds in order to target vulnerable children. The resulting piece is astonishing, exposing not only the behaviour and mentality of Brian Martin, but the myriad networks inside and outside of the school that have enabled nearly four decades of his abuse.
Given the extent of failures that allowed Brian Martin’s activities to go unchecked, Queen Ethelburga’s ought to be a national scandal – we’re hopeful that the story will not wither on the vine, and that an enterprising reporter will pick up the baton and continue to ask uncomfortable questions of the institutions involved.
We also hope that you, the reader, value our investigations, as they’re enormously important to our vision for the magazine. From Francis Martin’s exposé on the Tories’ favourite state school, to James Waddell’s demolition of the Institute of Art and Ideas, to Michael Gillard uncovering the sadomasochistic blackmailing of a British nuclear expert, they are often the stories that we’re proudest to run, and we would love to run more.
If you want to see more investigative journalism in the British media, then we’d encourage you to sign up to the print magazine, so we can keep supporting our writers with constant legal and editorial guidance. And if you’ve got a story that you think needs to be told, then reply to this email and get in touch – we’ll back you all the way.
Lager Lout
Clive Martin relays the story of a masterful clapback from Michael Gove, who parried a shout of ‘Tory Wanker’ from a member of the public with a pitch-perfect retort.
Now, as long-time readers know, the Secretary of State for Levelling-Up is an avid consumer of this newsletter. So. Mr Gove: Can you tell us your side of the story? Feel free to reach us via the usual channels.
Mr Doyle Will See You Now
Andrew Doyle has had an unlikely career path –a man of Irish republican stock with a doctorate in early Renaissance poetry from the University of Oxford; now he is a presenter on GB News, having created the fictional ‘anti-woke’ character, Titania McGrath, and helped write for Jonathan Pie, the Grey Lady’s most irritating columnist (in what is a very crowded field).
Many of you will be familiar with his rise to power, but few of you will know that he was a teacher for almost a decade. He taught English at two private schools, firstly at the Royal Hospital School in Suffolk, and then at Merchant Taylors’ in London. We have spoken to pupils and parents at both institutions to find out what it was like to be taught your Key Stage 2 by Titania McGrath.
At the Royal Hospital School, a school still inexorably connected with the British Navy and its traditions, Doyle stuck out. ‘He was much cleverer than the other teachers,’ one former pupil tells us, as many of Doyle’s fellow staff members were retired military staff.
But like his colleagues, Doyle was a stickler for order and ceremony. ‘He was very keen to remind everyone that he had gone to Oxford. He always brought that up. And he got very annoyed if you called him Mr Doyle. He insisted on being addressed as Dr Doyle.’
As one parent corroborates, ‘He was very pleased with himself.’
But what about his teaching methods? Interestingly, Doyle, the self-styled free speech advocate, took no prisoners in the classroom. ‘He would send you out for any reason. He sent out one of my friends because he disagreed with him about the use of metaphorical language in Of Mice and Men.’
The same source directs us to this video of Andrew Doyle dealing with hecklers at one of his comedy shows – ‘It’s eerily similar, he would send people out in exactly the same way.’ What a charming young man.
Chilling On a Villain
The BBC have really come up trumps with The Gold, a six-part fictionalisation of the Brink’s-Mat robbery. And because so much of the events remain shrouded in mystery, the showrunner, Neil Forsyth, has been able to embellish and invent at will – which has obviously upset some members of the police, and the victims of Kenneth Noye and John Palmer. But the show is real entertainment indeed, a strong recommendation from us. You can watch it all on iPlayer here (a quick aside: there is something particularly satisfying about seeing Dominic Cooper on the small screen, which is where he belongs).
Unfortunately, some of you prefer the ‘hard facts’. And allow us to be of assistance: there’s a very good 90s documentary on Noye here, as he escaped from the police having murdered a member of the public on the M25. And a few years back, the legendary Roger Cook came out of retirement to look at the life of John Palmer, who had melted all the gold at his West Country mansion, built an illicit timeshare fortune in Tenerife, and was then murdered in a case that is still yet to be solved.
But if you really want to get the feel of the Brink’s-Mat era, then there is the fourth episode of ITV’s infamous Flying Squad series, in which they follow the members of the Met team dedicated to tackling armed robbers. This episode has got some of the most unbelievable access in the history of British television, as the camera team film a shoot-out in which the police are wounded and one of the criminals killed, before finishing with a hospital interview with one of the robbers, Ronald Easterbrook, who was never released from prison again. They don’t make shows like this anymore (mainly because they can’t).
In Case You Missed It
Clive Martin (him again) wonders if you can ever truly escape London.
Ben Taub tells the insane story of Wirecard, the biggest fraud in German history. (Eagle-eyed readers may remember us spotlighting John Lanchester’s similarly riveting account of the story in slightly less detail for the LRB back in August).
For his unmissable newsletter, Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick works out how to game Elon’s janky new Twitter algorithm, and bears the consequences of virality.
The Washington Post visualises, with shocking clarity, the 366 school shootings to have taken place in America since Columbine.
Over on Dirt, our fine friends across the Atlantic, Amber Atherton bags the interview of the century with the co-founder of Club Penguin.
Nesrine Malik discusses austerity, ‘class cleansing’ and the dream of a Better Britain. Is she the best columnist in Britain? We think so.
And Finally
As the UK’s winter of discontent passes slowly into a spring of discontent, March is set to see much more industrial action taking place across the country, with school teachers, tube drivers, paramedics and junior doctors all expected to strike at some point in the coming month.
But there is still something of a media gap when it comes to the biggest suite of industrial action to have taken place since the 1980s, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it feel to the coverage any time Mick Lynch isn’t involved. Sky reports that polls consistently show the public to be behind the workers involved, which rather scuppers the government’s presumed plan of refusing terms – or banning strike action and protest through law – in the hopes that voters blame their feckless comrades and not the people refusing to pay them a living wage.
In the absence of such a spotlight, online enthusiasts have turned to former spotlights of British workers, not least this magnetic footage of Paul Robeson singing ‘Joe Hill’ to Scottish coal miners in 1949. Filmed near Edinburgh by veteran National Coal Board film director, Peter Pickering – who was then just 25 – it captures the gravitas of the singer’s bass-baritone, and the awe and admiration of his audience, like no concert film recorded since. One wonders which modern singer could command the same power for today’s downtrodden civil servants and underpaid gig workers. Answers on a postcard.
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That’s all, folks! For this week at least. We really hope you enjoyed this week’s edition, and if it stirred anything in you to reach out, to yell and scream, to surreptitiously sneak over, to lambast, to ask, to tell, to beg – ANYTHING AT ALL (including postage queries and address updates) – then reply to this email and we will receive it in unison. Oh, and if you’ve arrived at this little bit of text with a sigh and a smile and a ‘that was nice, I’d like more of that please’, then smash the button below and send us £30, and in return you will receive four incredible issues of the best thing going today. Catch you this time next week, most likely a Tuesday again, but also possibly a Monday.
All the best,
TF
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