A setting for a story

(I made this up in my head one morning, when I had awoken much too early to get up)

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Three men and two women are stuck in a broken-down lift in a busy hotel. We'll call them Bill, Fred, Andy, Mavis and Jane.

   Bill and Fred were bitter enemies several years ago (a love affair? a business that failed? a crime?) but had not encountered each other since. Now Bill recognises Fred, but Fred doesn't recognise Bill. (Is this meeting merely coincidental, or has Bill set it up? and if so, why?)

Andy is nervous, because he is carrying a bag containing something illegal (drugs? a gun?) The longer they are stuck in the lift together, the more likely it is that the others will remember his face and be able to identify him subsequently.

Mavis is middle-aged and has the appearance and manner of someone official. (a detective on her way to interviewing someone? a priest going to hear a confession?) She is increasingly impatient

Jane is the observer: we see the whole scene through her eyes. She doesn't know any of the background stories (and neither, at this stage, of course, do the readers), but she sees how Bill throws a series of savage glances at Fred, and wonders why. She also notices how Mavis keeps tapping her foot with impatience, and is puzzled that Andy seems to be trying to hide in a corner, with his back to the rest of the passengers.

There are several potential developments here. Is the setting in Britain, or somewhere else? Is it set in the present, or in an eaarlier decade? It would make a better story if they were somehow interconnected; but how? Is Jane merely an observer, or does she play a more active part? And, most importantly, what sort of a story will it be? A thriller, perhaps, with at least one murder?

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At this point, I throw the story open to the readers .

    

Cricket: Danni Wyatt-Hodge's year, 2025-6

 Around June-July 2025, Danni Wyatt-Hodge must have feared that her career as an England cricketer was coming to an end. She had experienced a succession of failures that summer, including two succesive first-ball disnissals, and was lucky that an injury to Nat Sciver-Brunt enabled her to keep her place for the third T20 match against India.

  As it was, she opened the batting with her close friend Sophia Dunkley. She looked out-of-touch and not once but twice offered up easy catches that were dropped by the Indian fielders! Given this extraordinary slice of luck, she steadily grew in confidence, began to play good shots again, and eventually reached a half-century while contributing to a century opening partnership with Dunkley. England won the match in a very tight finish. 

After this, Danni's place in the team was secure for the rest of the tournament. The third and final match was her 300th appearance for England: she was awarded a special shirt, scored another half-century to mark the occasion, and she and Sophia Dunkley once again compiled a century opening stand, enabling England to sneak a win on the last ball of the 20th over.

It was on the strength of this that Danni was named in the England squad for the ODI worl cup in India that autumn. She was clearly meant to be a reserve, and was not selected for any of the early games, but the England middle order performed poorly, and she was brought in to bat at number 6 in the semifinal against South Africa. As it happened, England were slaughtered, but Danni at least made a respectable contribution, scoring 37 and only being dismissed when the match had been lost beyond recall.

Next came Women's Big Bash League in Australia. Danni signed for Hobart Hurricanes, formed a powerful opening partnership with Lizelle Lee and was voted their player of the tournament. Two other English women. Linsey Smith and Nat Sciver-Brunt, also performed excellently for Hurricanes, who in consequence won the tournament for the very first time!

In the New Year these three, plus Lauren Bell, headed for India to play in the Women's Premier League. Danni had signed for Gudjerat Giants, but as it happened she was only intended as a reserve, and only played one match. By contrast, Lauren Bell not only had great success with the ball, but attracted an enormous following on Indian social media! 

Danni began the 2026 summer in imperious style, smashing a century for Surrey Women against Warwickshire Women at Edgbaston (when I was there to watch!) and soon followed it up with an innings of 96 and then another century, 

but she then took a month out of cricket, because her partner, Georgie, had given birth to a baby girl!

Danni adored little Daisy, spoke of how much the birth had changed her outlook on life, and was soon bringing her to matches to show to her friends.

Returning to cricket, Danni did not score many runs in the warmups to the T20 world cup, and once again must have wondered if her place in the team was in jeopardy, but once again Charlotte Edwards's faith in her proved justified, when she scored a magnificent century in the opening match against Sri Lanka, which England won with ease. Danni celebrated with motions of rocking a cradle in her arms.

Next came a half-century against the West Indies, and then a splendid 89 not out against New Zealand, sharing in a winning unbroken century partnership with Sophia Dunkley. 

She did not make runs in the final against Autralia, being brilliantly caught down the leg side by wicket-keeper Beth Mooney, and England lost the match. Even so, she had scored over 300 runs in the tournament, more than any woman had ever managed before, and was everyone's selection as a member of the "dream team" from the event.

  Then came the Hundred tournament. Danni had played for Southern Brave with great success for the previous five years, but now transferred to what was now called MIlondon, based at the Oval. It was not a strong squad, and suffered heavy defeats in their first two matches. Then in the third match, Danni, having scored yet another 50, needed to hit a boundary of the last ball to gain a victory; but she only managed to score 2, and the match was lost by 1 run! The worst part, however, was that she sustained an injury to her calf which ruled her out of the rest of the tournament and has not played since.

 So Danni's twelve months, having begun with a stroke of good luck ended with some bad luck. But she had had a splendid year, scoring not far short of a thousand runs altogether.

  Here is a charming recent photo of Danni with partner Georgie and baby Daisy

By the time the Australian team visits England next year, Danni will be 36, so quite possibly her international career is already at an end. But if so, she can look back on a magnificent record of achievements: 311 matches for England, almost 6,000 runs scored for her country, with five centuries, and the only woman ever to score 300 runs in a T20 tournament. Vet few cricketers could boast as much.     

Memories: My first job

I left the Queen Elizabeth grammar school in Penrith, Cumberland, in December 1964, having been offered a place at Queens' college Cambridge for the following September; and for the next six months I worked at the Cumberland county library in Carlisle. I served customers and also went on tours around the villages with the library van, and experience that I have desscribed in an earlier blog entry: 

https://petergshilstonsblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Memories%3A%20Library%20Van

The pay was about ten pounds a week, which sounds impossibly low nowdays, but a set lunch at the local Chinese restaurant cost only three shillings and sixpence (about 17 p.) and I was able to save money.

 I came across some odd people. There was a woman who had used a fish's backbone as a bookmark, and another who had had a book on architecture out for months, which she kept renewing. It transpired that this was because she had a table with a short leg, and the book was exactly thick enough to keep it level when placed underneath. The county librarian ordered her to return it. On the other hand, I could not but envy the son of the Earl of Carlisle who, filling in a membership form, crossed out all the boxes labelled surname, christian name and so forth, and instead wrote "Viscount Morpeth" with a flourish.

Old, unread and battered books were discarded from time to time, but in those days the library was not allowed to sell them, but had to send them for incineration. I thought this was a great shame, and asked if I might keep one or two. My collection soon grew to fill a cardboard box, and became the foundation of my own library.  

When I left, in the summer of 1965, the library staff presented me with a book token, which I used to buy a book about the works of James Gillray, the 18th century political cartoonist. It remains one of my favourite books. By this time, I had saved enough money buy myself a little Raleigh moped, and spent oart of the summer hitch-hiking round northern France witha schoolfriend before departing for Cambridge in September. 

I'm sure that today's students have far more adventurous gap years, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the county library.

Cricket: Women's T20 world cup team of the tournament

 

 Footnote: Since then, the four Australian women, plus Kapp, Prendergast and Carter, have remained in England to take part in the Hundred, and are dominating the tournament; but for the two English women who performed so well, Nat Sciver-Brunt has withdrawn from the Australian WBBL tournament because of injury and Danni Wyatt-Hodge is out of action because of a muscle tear. What a shame!

Politics: Ministerial changes

 The resignation of Keir Starmer has led to comments about the very high turnover of Prime Ministers over the past decade. The only comparable period in British history was almost 200 years ago, in the decade beginning 1827, which witnessed the following changes at the top:-

Lord Liverpool (Tory): retired through ill health, 1827

George Canning (Tory): died in office, 1827

Lord Goderich (Tory): not up to the job; resigned, 1828

Duke of Wellington (Tory): defeated in a Parliamentary vote and lost subsequent general election, 1830

Lord Grey (Whig): retired, 1834

Lord Melbourne (Whig): government disintegrated, 1835

Robert Peel (Tory): lost general election, 1835

Lord Melbourne (Whig): returned, till 1841

The main difference with today is that those years saw a number of crucial reforms enacted, which no-one ever contemplated reversing: Catholic emancipation in Ireland, the great Parliamentary Reform Act, the Municipal Corporations Act, the Poor Law Amendment Act, the abolition of slavery throughout the empire, and so forth; plus, at the same time, a gigantic economic revolution under way in the building of the first railways. The only major change in the past ten years has been Brexit, which around half the country now considers to have been a serious mistake! 

England: Ironbridge

 The famous Iron Bridge over the Severn, that now gives its name to the town at the northern end.

 It was constructed in 1778 from iron girders cast at the Coalbrookdale iron works of Abraham Darby II, a few miles away. My father, who was a civil engineer especially interested in bridges, commented that it was, in its design, a wooden bridge made of cast iron! Because it was the first of its kind in the world, this was inevitable!

  Nobody knows precisely how it was erected, since the Severn is particularly fast-flowing between steep banks at this point. It remains a miracle of engineering.

American Gangsters Footnotes: Stephanie St Clair; the Black lady gangster

 Gang leaders of the Prohibition era are ususally seen as being White males, mostly Sicilian; which is perhaps why Stephanie St. Clair, the Black female gangster of Harlem, has been largely forgotten. But in her time she was able to rank with some of the most notorious organised crime leaders of New York.

  Details of Stephanie St. Clair's early life are obscure: she seems to have been born in 1897 in Guadaloupe, a French-speaking island in the West Indies, and to have come to Harlem, the Black district of Manhatten, around 1911. She first became noticed in the Prohibition era after the First World War, when organised crime flourished throughout New York and other cities.

 The "Numbers" racket, a kind of illegal lottery, was especially popular in the New York Black community. But even when honestly conducted it was a very dangerous game, involving collecting and distributing money under constant threat from thieves, while the immense profits to be made inevitably attracted both of the men of violence and the deeply corrupt New York police. 

By the late 1920s, St. Clair had acquired sufficient money and power to set up her own "policy shop": that is, her own Numbers operation, and emerged as a major force in Harlem. She used Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson as her enforcer and right-hand man, and they built up a team that was prepared to take on any challengers on their home turf. She was described as "arrogant, educated, sophisticated, with a fiery temper", and she was also completely without fear; but she knew that more than the threat of violence was needed. She understood the importance of "image", so she always appeared in public dressed in the height of elegance, with expensive furs and jewellery, as she paraded with her bodyguards round the streets of Harlem. She was nicknamed "Madam Stephanie" or even "Queen Stephanie". She also used local newspapers to boost her role as a spokesperson for the Black community, denouncing police corruption and racism. When in 1929 she was arrested, she complained about the unfairness of the proceedings, saying that she had always been careful to pay off the police!

After the ending of Prohibition in 1933, the gangsters looked around for alternative sources of income, and St.Clair's success in Harlem, making around a quarter of a million dollars a year, attracted the attention of Dutch Schultz. "The beer baron of the Bronx", as he was styled, was exceptionally violent even by New York crime standards, and headed a much-feared gang of Jewish gunmen. Schultz had his own Numbers racket, and now tried to muscle in on St. Clair's territory. Soon all-out war erupted on the streets of Harlem, with shootings and firebombings in which over 40 people were killed. Stephanie St. Clair stood her ground. "What kind of man would desert a lady in a fight?" she challenged her friends. She spread the slogan "Buy Black!" in the Harlem press and launched attacks on White-owned stores that traded with Schultz. The war only ended when the leaders of the New York crime combine (Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Lepke Buchalter and others) decided that Schultz was a dangerous loose cannon who must be eliminated. In October 1935 Schultz and his gang were gunned down in a Newark restaurant by two Jewish hitmen. As Schultz lay dying in hospital, St. Clair sent him a telegram reading, "As you sow, so shall you reap." But soon after this, St. Clair handed her operation over to Bumpy Johnson and retired from the rackets.

The rest of her life was less successful. She had a disastrous marriage with Eugene Brown, a flamboyant but unreliable Black activist who called himself "Sufi Abdul Hamid" and was nicknamed "the Black Hitler" for his violent antisemitic rants. After three years of marriage, St. Clair was so enraged by his infidelities that she shot and wounded him, for which she was convicted and imprisoned. 

After the war she lived in obscurity, and was thought to be seriously short of money. She was reunited with Bumpy Johnson, who lived with her until his death in 1968, and she herself died next year, aged 72. So, as with most leading gangsters, Stephanie St. Clair's career at the top was brief, but, unlike most of them, she died peacefully of old age at home. 

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Footnote: Most of these details are taken from "The world of Stephanie St. Clair", by Shirley Stewart.

The aged Black madwoman in the film "Come back, Charleston Blue" is loosely based on Stephanie St. Clair after the  Second World War