Robert Millhouse (1788–1839)

I've mentioned the Nottingham poet Robert Millhouse before, and my attention is drawn back to him by a comment Jim Silver made to my post about Millhouse's grave here. A reference to Millhouse's home in Mole Court, Milton Street, Nottingham, is in the Gentleman's Magazine 92 (April 1822) – and includes a poem – here.

The plaque above is outside Nottingham Castle.

Jim Loach's Oranges and Sunshine

Ken Loach is a major British director, and his movies have frequently been strong attacks on social problems often perceived as stemming from governmental policies, from the television Play for Today Cathy Come Home (homelessness) through Kes (state education in a working-class community), Family Life (conventional psychiatry), Ladybird, Ladybird (the Social Services), and The Navigators (New Labour's privatization of the public sector). Now, Ken Loach's son Jim has made his first feature film, which involves abuse by British governments in the recent past.

Oranges and Sunshine is the ironic title of this partly fictionalized story, and alludes to a 'promise' made to British children in home care that the British government deported, often to be abused sexually and by other violent physical means. Over a large number of years, perhaps as many as 150,000 of these children were deported to different Commonwealth countries as a source of labour, although the movie concentrates on Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphrey's discovery of a number of children sent to live permanently in Australia between the 1940s and 1970.

Initially an Austalian woman approached Humphreys (played remarkably well by Emily Watson) because she was seeking to find out about her parents. The movie charts the rapid increase in Humphreys's knowledge as she is given the two-year task of unearthing the facts about this abuse. A particularly poignant moment is when Len (played by David Wenham - a brilliant foil to Watson) shows Margaret the Christian Brothers' Keaney College in Bindoon, which he (along with other children) had built brick by brick, and where many were otherwise abused. Much time is spent in detective work trying to track down the parents of a number of children.

The former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a public apology for past governmental abuse in February 2011.

One thing I hated about the movie: the Cat Stevens song. Perhaps Humphreys would have been unaware of Stevens's (or rather Yusuf Islam's) comments on the Rushdie fatwa, but many of us are aware of them.

(Some scenes take place in Nottingham, and the streets of Sneinton to the south-east of Sneinton Boulevard, the former Sneinton Market buildings, and William Reid Dick's Welcome statue inside the Council House are clearly recognizable.)

William Booth in Sneinton, Nottingham, England

We always forget the most obvious things, as I discovered recently when I was walking(!) into the center of Nottingham, and remembered, immediately after the William Booth Community Centre and old people's home on Sneinton Road, the three preserved terraced houses at the back in Notintone Place, number 12 being Booth's birthplace.

The prominent statue shows the founder of the Salvation Army in preaching pose. Booth (1829-1912) left school at 13 because of his father's bankrupcy, and began work at a pawnbroker's.

But Booth's conversion to Methodism came a few years later.

There are two plaques on the house, the older being a Holbrook Bequest, which reads:

'IN THIS HOUSE WAS BORN

ON 10TH APRIL 1829

WILLIAM BOOTH

FOUNDER AND GENERAL

OF THE

SALVATION ARMY.'

The wording on the newer plaque is identical, although at the top it says: 'RESTORED 1971'. The museum is only open occasionally, but it's still slightly odd that I've not gotten round to visiting it.

There is another plaque - this time a profile of Booth's head and shoulders, about half a mile away in Broad Street, Nottingham, on one of the pillars at the entrance to what is now the Broadway movie theater. It reads:

'IN THIS BUILDING

FORMERLY THE

BROAD STREET WESLEY CHAPEL

WILLIAM BOOTH

FOUNDER AND FIRST GENERAL OF THE SALVATION ARMY

GAVE HIS HEART AND LIFE TO GOD IN HIS FIFTEENTH YEAR

1844'

Who knows, I may even take photos of the windmill once owned by George Green, the reluctant miller but very important mathematician - it's (literally) only a stone's throw from Booth's birthplace.

A link to my post on the graves of William and his son Bramwell is below, plus a later one mainly inside the birthplace museum: 

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William Booth in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington

William Booth Birthplace Museum, Sneinton, Nottingham