The Spectator

Barometer | 19 March 2011

This week's Barometer

issue 19 March 2011

Midsomer and Soham

The producer of ITV’s murder-mystery series Midsomer Murders was suspended after saying he didn’t want black characters on the show because it was ‘the last bastion of Englishness’. While many English villages still reflect Midsomer in their colour, it is over 200 years since a black man first settled in the English countryside.

— Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian-born slave who managed to buy his freedom, married in 1792 in the village of Soham, Cambridgeshire — now best known nationally for the murder of two school girls by Ian Huntley in 2002.

— Equiano wrote an autobiography and died in 1797. His daughter Joanna married a clergyman with whom she ran a Congregational chapel in Clavering, Essex, before the couple moved to Stoke Newington, then still a village just outside London.

A British tsunami?

Britain is not close to a major earthquake zone and a tsunami of 10 metres, as in Japan, is not feasible.

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