It’s been said that every tinker has their own way of dancing. And every thinker too, perhaps. The startling news that in the 1980s an English boy of 17 was a member of the Monday Club struck me as very peculiar.
One Monday in February 1960 British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, after a month of visiting British-ruled African territories made a speech to the South African Parliament, an independent Parliament within the Commonwealth. MacMillan stated that, like it or not, the Winds of Change were blowing through Africa.The implication that black and non-European Africans be enfranchised in South Africa was heard without enthusiasm by his hosts. The
implication that British ruled territories be handed over to their native populations was not accepted by many Britons, and within the Conservative Party
The Monday Club was founded in order to take Britain and Africa back into the Victorian era. By the early 1980s Britain had formally ceded power to all its former African holdings, but some unreconstructed imperialist old farts were yet to get the message. They might without injustice be regarded as oddfellows and oddballs, all of them in the Tory Party, some in Parliament and even in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet.
Amongst the oddballs was James Molyneux, Unionist MP. But not that odd really considering many of his brethren have never moved on from 1690. How a 17-year-old English youth could be marooned in such a time warp I cannot imagine. I know that Andrew Bonar Law once urged Sir Edward Carson to appeal to the young men of England, but I find the young man’s claims well nigh unbelievable. If every photograph I’ve seen of James
Molyneux has not been doctored I don’t know how he could have appealed to anybody.
But while idly surfing the net I came up with the Buggery Act of 1533 passed by England’s Parliament in the reign of England’s King Henry VIII, at the behest of Thomas Cromwell. Under it Buggery became a capital offence. Not because of any particular outbreak of the practice or scandal to public morals. It was a measure calculated at seizing Church land and amassing capital. Churchmen had many privileges. Even if one committed murder one could not be tried in the normal courts nor put to death if found guilty.
But under the Buggery Act clergy could be tried in the ordinary courts and hanged when found guilty by a packed jury and Church land forfeited to the Crown.The Buggery Act was de-activated by Queen Mary, but came back into force under Edward VI and Elizabeth and remained in force until 1861. The last two wretches wer hanged under it in 1835. They were not men of the cloth.
As I said, the Monday Club lives in a time warp. You never know what old tricks they could get up to next!
Could that 17 year old youth who was a member of the Monday Club have been ‘Chrissie’ who recently used a first year anniversary memoriam in the Newsletter to profess his lifetime love affair with Jim Molyneaux?
Buggery, by the way, is prevalent among the general population in Ireland.
We are buggered by the banks, our politicians and the British government, and we are finding it a real pain in the ass!
Sherdy. That was what got me thinking. But you seem to to know more about the phenomenon.Grab a manhole cover or ask for help from the Legion of the Rearguard.Or
refloat the Asgard!
Homophobic sneering. Bravo.