Jason Bye -

Jason Bye -

Jason Bye -

Words by Jan Moir. Photograph by Jason Bye for the Daily Mail.

Today, Julia Budworth is in tweedy heather hues, a vision of genteel country living. Her good Spanish loafers march smartly across the pale green carpet in her drawing room, her good, thick hair is curled just so, the pearls at her neck gleam.

‘These?’ she says, giving them a rattle. ‘Oh they are just Woolworths. Nothing fancy, I assure you.’

Fancy pronounced fency. Mrs B’s voice has the cocktail piano rinkle-tinkle of a bygone age, her manners squeak with the varnish of money and breeding.

At the family estate in Suffolk, oils of her ancestors hang above a roaring log fire. On the mantelpiece, alongside a parade of Meissen china, there is a print of the Annigoni portrait of Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, her first cousin and great friend.

‘Oh Debo is furious, too,’ cries Mrs Budworth. ‘She thinks the whole thing is just ghastly.’

Over the last week Mrs Budworth, co-owner of Britain’s oldest women’s weekly, The Lady, has launched a sustained attack on the magazine’s high-profile editor, Rachel Johnson. She has called Rachel vain and snobbish, a self-promoting careerist who is obsessed with penises.

‘God knows where all the penises come from. She never stops, does she?’ cries Mrs B. ‘Penis this, penis that. It is simply extraordinary. Rachel cannot speak about any subjects, whether it is somebody on the moon or Trident, without bringing the conversation back to penises. What is the matter with the girl? Grow up.’

Mrs Budworth’s rage has been on a slow burn since Johnson, the sister of London mayor Boris, was appointed to stop sliding sales at The Lady a year ago.

Mrs Budworth and her son Ben, who is The Lady’s chief executive, chose Rachel from a parade of hopefuls, despite Johnson’s lack of editing experience. The son still supports the editor. The mother wants her out.

‘Recently she said to me, “Oh I know you really only chose me for editor because I came from a famous family.” She actually said that!’ says Mrs B, in a clipped shriek.

‘And I said, wait a moment. Famous family? Do you mind? If you want a famous family, you should try the Mitfords. The Johnsons? I mean, really. I told Debo this. I don’t know how pleased she was, but I was so rattled at the time.’

Debo, the last remaining Mitford sister, has close connections with the magazine. Her father, David Mitford, once worked there as a manager. Debo even recommended Rachel Johnson for The Lady job, a decision she has come to regret.

‘Eugh yes, I know. It’s all very sad,’ says Mrs B.

The magazine was launched in 1885 by Mrs Budworth’s grandfather, the journalist and Conservative politician Thomas Gibson ­Bowles, and has been in fragrant decline for the past 20 years.

Once the go-to publication for gentlewomen who needed a top-drawer nanny or some helpful hints about cob-nut ­collecting, its core market seems to have gone the same way as spats and bustles.

‘Well, they say that the Queen reads The Lady, but whether that is true or not, I don’t know. It does go to Buckingham Palace, of course,’ says Mrs B.

When sales dipped to below 28,000, Rachel Johnson’s brief was to stop the rot,
gently sex up the ­content, increase circulation and raise the profile.

And that’s when the trouble began. First, as part of a relentless publicity drive which seemed to promote Rachel above all else, there was a Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary, in which Johnson called The Lady ‘a piddling little magazine that no one reads’.

On camera, she had an argument with Ben; something mother did not approve of.

‘She was immeasurably rude to him. Blasting him down. She flew at him, saying: “Grow a pair of balls. No one wants to read your rubbish newspaper.” Something like that. Why he didn’t just open the door and say “Goodbye Miss Johnson”, I’ll never know.’

This week there was more bad news with the publication of Johnson’s book, A Diary Of The Lady — serialised in the Mail last month — chronicling her first year at the helm of the magazine.

Within the thickets of name drops and wily self-promotion that clot the pages, Rachel turns her guns on Mrs Budworth. There is much mockery of the proprietor’s fears that the button eyes on a teddy bear featured in the magazine could fall off and harm children.

Johnson also writes of an incident when the ‘formidable’ Mrs Budworth ‘stormed’ into her office ‘bellowing’ that she wanted to murder her.

‘When I went in to murder Rachel, it was a joke for heaven’s sake. I wasn’t really planning any injury,’ says Mrs Budworth, who feels aggrieved at being sidelined and ­ridiculed by her brash new editor.

‘I am not the dragon she is portraying me to be. I’m just sticking up for myself a little bit,’ she says.

The two very different worlds of these women collided at Johnson’s book launch, held at The Lady’s pink Georgian offices in central London on Thursday night.

In extraordinary scenes, Mrs ­Budworth held an impromptu press conference in a cupboard under the stairs, briefing journalists against her own editor, while the party roared around her.

Among the smart metropolitan crowd, the publishers of Johnson’s book joked that plastic penises would be packed into the party bags. The Johnson family were there en masse — including father Stanley and brothers Boris and MP Jo — their big white Johnson fists clasped around the free drinks, their big Johnson laughs booming off the Georgian walls.

How galling it must have been for Mrs Budworth, considering that she probably paid for it all: the canapés, the wines — certainly the Johnson’s salary, reputed to be just south of a six-figure sum for a four-day week.

‘That’s about right. And all of it my money. That makes me not very happy. And she can hardly speak to me on the phone; she is always too busy — it’s just these little things. One does feel completely sidelined and trampled over. And I wouldn’t mind if I thought she was doing The Lady a lot of good, but she isn’t.’

Well, I venture, Rachel’s book did make me want to go out and buy a copy of The Lady, an impulse hitherto resisted. And Johnson has got sales up 7 per cent and people talking about the magazine.

‘Yes, she has, but they talk in a derogatory way! It’s about clever Rachel battling with fuddy duddy old me. It’s all about the heroine, Ms Johnson, struggling away with the dreadful Mrs Budworth. Bah.

‘I sent her book back to her unread. I would slit my throat before I would buy a copy of it, and my friends feel the same. Would it kill her to be polite instead of rude?’

Well what did the Budworths expect? The Johnsons (family motto Grabitus Freebie Firstus) are notoriously opportunistic and exploitative, with hides thicker than bison pelts. At the buffet table of life, you certainly would never want to be in the queue behind them, unless you were partial to fresh air and crumbs.

As Rachel reports in her book, my Daily Mail colleague Ann Leslie once wrote that the Johnsons are ‘like Hungarians — they enter a revolving door behind you but always come out in front’.

Certainly, the intelligent, amusing, seventy-something woman I have tea with strikes me as a very different person from the bellowing monster Rachel Johnson has portrayed.

‘Oh, you look like a young Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon),’ she says to our photographer, full of twinkling mischief.

And despite the wealth, she has had her share of tragedy. In 1974, her husband was killed in an air crash; leaving her with five sons aged between 20 and eight to bring up.

Ten years later, her eldest son was drowned in a ‘ghastly accident’. Today, two sons are barristers, one works in security and helicopter pilot Ben is running The Lady.

The boys all went to public schools, which, she says, was a terrible drain on the family finances.

‘The two eldest went to Wellington and Gordonstoun, the three youngest went to Harrow.

‘No school was better than another, they were all pretty awful. By the time they got to Harrow, a frightful old drunk was the ­headmaster. That was quite an expensive do.’

Did she never ­consider sending them to state schools instead?

‘Eeurk?’ Mrs Bedworth makes a noise like a strangled pheasant. ‘I don’t think so. At the end of the day there is the old boys’ network, and I think it helps. State schools are a bit up and down.’

The family fortune was left between Julia (two-sevenths) and her brother Tom (five-sevenths). She claims that he’s the real villain of The Lady, a recluse who lives at the top of The Lady building and has been ‘living off’ the money for years, while letting the magazine run down.

He only recently relinquished his hold on the family business, allowing Mrs Budworth — who has been ‘itching’ to get to grips with The Lady for years — to stick her oar in.

And look what happens!

Ironically, Julia and Rachel are both women who have struggled to make their mark in male-dominated families; if only they could understand that they have more in common than they realise.

‘The thing about Rachel is that she has made such a Horlicks of so much that my faith in her is shaken,’ says Mrs B, throwing another log on the fire. ‘It has been quite a year.’

Indeed it has. Can it only be 12 months ago that Rachel Johnson, the 45-year-old author and journalist, was appointed editor of this hitherto unremarkable publication?

‘More hip, less hip replacement,’ she said at the time, nicking a line of Emma Soames’s when she took over Saga magazine. Six months into her editorship, Rachel writes of a lunch with Soames who tells her that The Lady will not be the last thing Rachel edits, just ‘a starter-mag for self’.

A few months later, according to her diary, she is sending in pitches for television shows starring that same self. The message is clear; for Rachel Johnson the mag is a stepping stone.

For Mrs Budworth, it is a lifeline. Rachel wants The Lady to be more like a feminised Spectator — the right-wing polemical magazine — featuring all her smart, metropolitan chums. Mrs Budworth wants it to be a little more like Country Life.

‘Perhaps with some lovely wild flowers on the cover?’ she suggests, more in hope than expectation. She gazes out the drawing room window, her view taking in the rich folds of Suffolk countryside, ­Budworth land as far as the eye can see. The grounds were designed and landscaped by Mrs B herself, and feature a lake she had built where a lone swan now glides across the surface. Back and forth it goes, unperturbed and serene.

In front of the Palladian mansion stand a pair of handsome chestnut trees, while next to the front door Mrs Budworth has planted a ­buddleia to attract butterflies. However, it wasn’t always this perfect. When the Budworth family moved here 42 years ago, there was a ­hideous turquoise swimming pool blocking the bucolic view.

‘Oh it was vile. Vile. Utterly viiiiiiiiiiile,’ says Mrs B, with a shudder. So she got rid of it. ‘I said to ­everyone, “Just leave it to me”,’ she says, ‘and off it went to the rubbish tip.’

Now something else is spoiling her view. Something, or should that be a certain someone else, is blocking out the Budworth ­sunshine, raining on Julie ­Budworth’s parade. How long, I wonder, before the family wrecking ball is called into action once more?

This article originally appeared in the Daily Mail on 3rd October 2010 and can be seen online at:

Julia Budworth hits back: After Boris’s sister boasts of sexing up the most genteel magazine, the owner accuses her of being obsessed with (ahem!) male appendages | Mail Online

Jason Bye -

Words by Louis De Bernieres. Photograph by Jason Bye for the Daily Mail.

The Surrey village where I grew up seemed to breed eccentrics. My boyhood memories are peopled by a parade of them.

We had a neighbour who kept a menagerie in her house and drove round the country lanes with a piebald goat on the back seat of her antique car – a 1927 Swift convertible with a leaking hood, which had lost its wooden dashboard, exposing all the wiring.

Then there was the elderly retired general who, after the death of his wife, abandoned the bothersome habit of wearing clothes and walked around stark naked. I remember, too, a formidable old girl who’d once played cricket for the England women’s team.

Her customary mode of dress was tweed plus fours; she also, if my memory does not deceive me, wore a monocle and smoked a pipe.

She was the sort of woman a decent chap could rub along with; none of that damned female nonsense about headaches and manicures.

She also had a disconcerting habit of shooting squirrels in the woods with a 12 bore shotgun when you were out walking the dog. The shot filtered down through the leaves, pattering like rain.

So many years later, these characters still loom large in my memory when I recall the childhood I spent from the late Fifties to the Seventies in a wonderful, rambling half-tiled house with a large garden and orchard in the village of Hambledon.

I lived there with my father, a leading figure in a children’s charity, my mother and my two sisters.

These days, of course, my former neighbours’ wildly idiosyncratic behaviour would be less tolerated. Our liberties are being eroded by panic and paranoia; our freedoms curtailed by fear that we’ll endanger ourselves or others.

That lady would not be permitted to carry her livestock in the passenger seat; neither would her car be considered roadworthy enough to pass an MoT.

Today, the general would doubtless be forcibly dressed, heavily sedated and incarcerated in an old folks’ home in case he scared the children or harmed himself. And as for the lady cricketer, she would probably get a visit from the firearms officer.

In many ways, this is a shame. I regret the fact that our rural communities have been tidied up, sanitised and made safe. I’m sorry that people aren’t really allowed to behave oddly any more.

The landscape is also more tame and orderly than it was when I was a child. I mourn the passing of cottage gardens, rampant with weeds and colourful perennials.

I miss the towering verges dotted with wild flowers and bright with crimson rosehips, which used to flank every country lane.

Now the hedges are vigorously clipped and pruned, often at the wrong time of year, so the birds don’t have a chance to snaffle the berries that grow in them before they are cut back. They need those berries to get through the winter.

The common at Hambledon used to be covered in waist-high bracken in which we children made dens. Now it’s been planted with heather, which apparently is more ecologically sound, but which is of no use to den builders at all.

When I was a boy, some of the cottages in our village were pretty filthy, chaotic places. Today’s health visitors would have been appalled by their outside lavatories, I’d imagine.

As children, of course, we loved the opportunities we had for traipsing around in the mire, prodding at things with sticks and generally getting filthy.

My little sister and I have fond memories of losing our wellies in a dung-heap that just seemed to suck them off our feet.

Hens pecked, rabbits bred and pigs still occasionally foraged in people’s back gardens. Now coops, sties, hutches and all their attendant muck have been swept away.

They have been replaced by decking, slate chips and potted box-trees beloved of in-coming city dwellers, who are ousting the real country folk from their village homes without even meaning to.

The indigenous rural people can’t afford to live in the communities where they were raised any more: the houses are too expensive and there simply aren’t any jobs.

In the vicinity of the Hambledon of my boyhood, there was a walking stick factory, brickworks and brewery, all with proud traditions of employing locals. Sadly, they have long gone.

So, too, have many of the farms that provided jobs on the land for armies of agricultural workers. Small farms get swallowed up by big ones, and the work is done by contractors.

What’s more, whenever some enterprising soul suggests setting up a business in the countryside, there’s a self-righteous furore on the part of the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) brigade.

Of course, we don’t want our lovely rural vistas besmirched by sprawling industrial sites, but if we thought hard about where we were putting them, what would be so wrong with building the odd factory to provide jobs for local people?

The countryside is the ideal location for light industry, and can provide employment for young people who would otherwise migrate to towns. So many of our villages have become dormitories for commuting townies who play no part in country life.

I have a suspicion many of them don’t even like the countryside much. Even as a child, I remember being outraged when a family from London moved into our village and complained about the noise of the cockerels.

We all thought: ‘What the hell are you doing here, then?’

er I left university in London, I travelled widely before settling in the capital. But ten years ago, after my novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin had been made into a film, I moved out of the city – where I’d always felt like a visitor rather than a native – and back to the country, my natural milieu.

My home is a Georgian rectory in a Norfolk village and I try to give my two children – Robin, six, and Sophie, two – the sort of upbringing I enjoyed.

I want them to grow up to love their village as much as I loved mine and to enjoy the same freedom and pleasure I got from roaming around unfettered, losing my wellies in those dung-heaps and building dens in the bracken.

I am desperately anxious to give them a training in having fun outside. We go out for walks together – fresh air and sunlight are infallible cures for unhappiness – and search for bugs and identify wild flowers. (Robin already knows that ladybirds have exoskeletons and a combined thorax and abdomen).

I’d like the children to learn about the practicalities of rural life, too, so I am trying to get them interested in the idea of working with their hands. Sophie bangs nails into bits of wood with a tiny hammer.

Robin bangs nails into a piece of wood with a slightly bigger hammer, and is just old enough to begin to be helpful with such things as putting up fences. I feel guilty when they bang their thumbs, but you have to start somewhere.

I’m guilty of letting Sophie jump into my arms from the nappy changing table, which doubtless would appal the health-and-safety brigade, but she is a confident little thing who already knows how to do a forward roll, and it never goes wrong.

I hate it that so much is prohibited. I detest signs on village greens that say ‘No Fishing’ in the pond or ‘Keep off the Grass’.

I deplore the culture of litigation that has put paid to harmless rural pleasures, such as cheese rolling (has anyone ever been injured by a runaway round of cheddar?). One Hampshire village banned a procession of floats in its annual carnival – participants had to walk – because they were frightened that someone would sue the organisers if they fell off.

I’d love to think that we could keep alive such country customs as dwile flonking. It differs in every village, but near us it was a game in which a rag (the dwile) was soaked in beer and passed round a circle, with everyone saying ‘Flonk’ as they received it.

Someone had to drink a whole chamber pot of beer before it got back to the beginning, and if they didn’t, the rest of the beer was poured over their head.

In another place, it might be a mad, messy and utterly pointless game in which two teams take turns to dance round each other while attempting to avoid a beer-soaked cloth thrown by the non-dancing team. I admire anyone barmy enough to take part in it, and am glad that I don’t have to.

I think we should pay more attention to enjoying and passing on our national folk dances and tales and I think our children should take part, as was once customary in old rural communities. I also approve of singing in pubs.

I love English fiddle music, it’s just as good as Scots or Welsh or Irish, but we’re shamefully unpatriotic and uneducated in our own culture. We never celebrate it, so it’s in danger of being forgotten.

I confess that I like tragic ballads with 22 verses sung without microphones, which is why I abhor the fact that pub landlords have to apply for licences if they want live music.

There are ways of circumventing this stupid law: we should all just get up and stage impromptu singsongs round the piano in the bar – if we’re still lucky enough to live in a village with a pub.

So many have gone the way of village shops and post offices, but if I had my way, every rural community would have two pubs: one a spit-and-sawdust selling warm beer and lousy food and another featuring good food and wine, so that all tastes are catered for.

TV is so bad these days, and computer screens have so lobotomised us, that it might be time to start going out again.

Not enough villages these days are proper communities with a real sense of fellowship and neighbourliness.

Families are scattered and fragmented, there’s little sense of ‘belonging’ and the elderly – who were once cared for by relatives who’d never moved beyond their native village – are shipped off to care homes.

Fortunately for me, my own village has a group of public-spirited residents who organise the social events that keep communities such as ours alive.

When I was a child, we accepted that maypole dancing, flower shows, fetes and harvest suppers were perennial fixtures of the village calendar because everyone shared an enthusiasm for preserving them.

Now there is less continuity, less sense of one generation succeeding the previous one, and less sense that we have a duty to preserve time-honoured country traditions and, just as importantly, invent new ones to pass on. So the village life of my boyhood has all but vanished.

For many people in the past, life was extremely hard, but I am often tempted to look back on it as an idyll. Just as the rural dialects that added linguistic richness to our language have been weathered away by Estuary English, I feel that the countryside has suffered a kind of erosion.

There are still great characters, but fewer of them, and we have become tamer. Everything is more orderly and clean, but we seem to be more dull and predictable.

How wonderful it would be if our grandchildren could look back on us and say that we were quirky eccentrics in the good old traditional style, but I fear they won’t.

Jason Bye -

Flowing, thrilling and subversive — the Sixteen sing Tudor choral music as it should be sung – as a labour of love

Words by  Hugh Canning. Photograph by Jason Bye

Back in the year 2000, two of Britain’s leading specialist chamber choirs embarked on ambitious millennial concert tours. John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage with the Monteverdi Choir programmed all 200 of Bach’s church cantatas, mostly in churches around Britain, Europe and New York. It almost bankrupted the company and led to the conductor’s rift with his then label, Deutsche Grammophon, which had planned to record all the concerts, but withdrew as costs spiralled (the mostly excellent musical results are now emerging on Gardiner’s in-house label, SDG).

Harry Christophers and the Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage of great British cathedrals and churches may have been more modest in scale, but it has proved a popular fixture on the country’s concert calender. Now celebrating its 10th year, the pilgrimage started in February and runs to October, making 26 stops in the most magnificent ecclesiastical buildings — the cathedrals of Winchester, Norwich, Peterborough, Wells and Durham, the minsters of York and Southwell, Oxford’s University Church, the chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge, Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk and Tewkesbury Abbey — with a programme drawn from the golden age of English polyphony, Ceremony and Devotion: Music for the Tudors, by John Sheppard, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

This week, BBC Four will broadcast the final episode of a second series of Sacred Music, performed by Christophers and the Sixteen, and fronted by the music-loving actor — and former choral scholar — Simon Russell Beale. The first four episodes — The Gothic Revolution; Palestrina and the Popes; Tallis, Byrd and the Tudors;

Bach and the Lutheran Legacy — have just been issued on DVD, and concerts of the music from the television programmes will form part of the Easter weekend celebrations at the Southbank Centre. In September, the music will reach an even wider audience when the entire series is repeated on BBC2, a clear indicator of its success.

Locating suitable venues for the music has evidently been a labour of love, and has resulted in several surprises. Brahms and Bruckner — featured in the second series — was recorded at Douai Abbey, near Newbury, while Fauré and Poulenc went to Arundel Cathedral — “the closest we’ve got to a French gothic building”, Christophers says. “The Italian church in Clerkenwell, modelled on Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome, was the setting for Palestrina and the Popes, Waltham Abbey for the Tudors.”

“My happiest discovery,” he continues, “was the little Lutheran chapel for the Bach programme in Aldgate East, built by the German community — sugar merchants — about 40 years after Bach’s death. It’s not in use now, and the acoustic was not ideal, but visually it was perfect. The look of the programmes, thanks to the architecture, is gorgeous.”

It’s the music, and Russell Beale’s and Christophers’s enthusiasm for it, which has made the series so beguiling. The Sixteen may be known best as a specialist choir, but its repertoire ranges widely, from medieval to the baroque, then a big leap, bypassing most of the Romantics, to the 20th century.

“We recorded all of Poulenc’s choral music for Virgin years ago,” the conductor says. “We’ve done Frank Martin and all of the Britten pieces, which we will repackage for the centenary of his birth in 2013. I’ve perhaps left out Brahms and Bruckner, but there is a financial consideration, because you need much larger forces.”

Recording is central to the Choral Pilgrimage project. Christophers makes no bones about the attraction of recording a programme, taking it around the country and selling it on disc. This is one of the realities of the classical record industry today. The multinationals insist on their artists touring their programmes, and the Sixteen, which has its own label, Coro, has made it a centrepiece of its marketing strategy.

The company gets no core funding for its everyday operations, but this year’s pilgrimage has an Arts Council grant of £25,000. (Last year, it was £50,000 for a Handel anniversary programme based on the Coronation Anthems, which require bigger numbers, including an orchestra.) The rest — including the company’s office space in Fleet Street, donated by Quadrant Chambers — comes from sponsorship and box-office income.

During the 10 years of the Sixteen’s pilgrimage, Christophers has presided over a huge surge in public enthusiasm for Tudor music, and he brings a passion and sensuality to the great Roman Catholic anthems and motets that some of his more austere rivals abjure.

“To do this type of music, you need special singers,” he says. “The way we do 16th-century music is, I hope, more adventurous than other specialist choirs. I don’t just strive for a beautiful sound — people expect that, of course, excellent tuning and ensemble, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of this music.”

The meaning of the texts, even when sung in Latin, is obviously of paramount importance to his interpretation of the music. “Often, it depends on the piece,” he says. “Something like Sheppard’s Media vita, where you’ve got long melismas [florid melodic sequences set to a single syllable], you have to put the effects across in the shape of the music.

“Back in the old days, when I was at Oxford, there was no bending of the tempo, but to me this music has to have ebb and flow and light and shade. It has to be interpreted just as much as, say, a Handel oratorio. Byrd is complex and quite dense, but the political messages that are going on in his music are fascinating.

“The other big piece we’re doing this year is his Infelix ego. It’s a setting of a paraphrase of the Miserere mei psalm, written by the visionary friar Savonarola in prison, shortly before he was burnt at the stake. One of the great things about the BBC’s Sacred Music series was performing Byrd’s four-part masses with only four singers at Ingatestone Hall [in Essex]. Byrd wrote them for secret Masses celebrated there, so the forces must have been minimal. Infelix ego would also have been sung one voice to a part, because it’s pretty political. There can’t have been much doubt about the subversive content of the text.”

Certainly, hearing Byrd’s great protest anthem in University Church, Oxford, where Archbishop Cranmer was tried and degraded before being taken to the stake, hammered home the relationship between music and the religious politics of the era in which it was written. Sheppard’s staggering 24-minute Media vita, probably written in memory of a deceased colleague at Magdalen College (where the composer was informator choristarum from the last four years of Henry VIII’s reign to the first of the Protestant Edward VI) sounded thrilling in this historic church, resonant with contemporary echoes.

Christophers believes that the current popular interest in the Tudors has fired an interest in the music of the period. “The guy who plays Tallis in the television series The Tudors looks exactly like him [more than can be said for Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Henry VIII]. Of course, Byrd and Tallis have been done in cathedrals for ages, but the dean and chapters aren’t going to allow choirs to sing pieces that last more than 15 minutes in services.

“What groups like ours have done is to bring some of the more obscure and larger pieces of the Tudor repertoire to life for contemporary audiences.”

This article originally appeared in the Sunday Times Culture Magazine on 28th March 2010 and can be seen online at:

Pilgrimage of the Sixteen – Times Online

Jason Bye -

Welcome to Leafy Suburbia: Skunk central

Words by DAMON SYSON pictures by JASON BYE

You’ll never guess what the neighbours have done now… Live joins the police as they raid a suburban semi and uncover a secret cannabis factory

Dawn has just broken as we snake along a quiet street in Peterborough, a long row of modest Thirties semis.

Inside, families are waking up and curtains being drawn. It’s almost a cliché of sleepy suburbia, and it’s hard to believe that a house here could be an outpost of a Far Eastern drugs syndicate.

At 7.20am, a convoy of police vehicles comes to a halt. Three uniformed policemen creep past the side door of the house and into the back garden ? with an operation like this, maintaining the element of surprise is vital.

Should anyone inside realise they are trapped, they might do something silly, such as arm themselves.

One of the uniformed officers picks up a red one-man battering ram ? a 2ft, 40lb cylinder of epoxy-steel with two handles ? and smashes the door in with three hefty blows.

The team charges into the house shouting “Police!”, their black boots crunching the mothballs left strewn on the floor of the entrance hall to mask the smell of cannabis.

They move swiftly from room to room.

The whole thing has happened so quickly that the officer in charge, Detective Constable Shanie Nayar, is still only just getting out of her car.

“I told you to knock first!” she shouts, running towards the front door.

“Just be careful of people jumping out of wardrobes,” she adds.

As we rush forward, an officer calls to Nayar: “It’s a positive. It’s a cannabis factory.”

“Thank f*** for that,” she mutters under her breath.

A few minutes later another officer emerges, informing Nayar that the house is clear.

“Have you got anybody?” she asks.

“No ? but there’s a small forest in there.”

Television cop shows may lead us to believe that an operation like this is minutely planned and painstakingly choreographed.

The reality is that few of the team know anything about it until 20 minutes before they go in, when we gather at 7am in the operations room of Peterborough’s Bridge Street Police Station.

DC Nayar briefs the officers: they’ve had a tip-off that a house is a cannabis factory.

She instructs the 16-strong team of officers ? half in plain clothes, half wearing uniform and bulky stab vests ? to proceed with caution.

“If interior doors are locked, don’t go mad,” says Nayar. “There’s no point breaking the door down. We’re talking about cannabis plants here ? they can’t flush them down the toilet or eat them.”

She adds that they should be extra-vigilant about booby-traps.

As well as the police officers, there are two electricians from EDF Energy in our party.

They are here for two reasons: to check the electrics in the house, which are invariably tampered with and may pose a threat of fire; but also to check that the door has not been electrified.

It is increasingly common for gangs to booby-trap these properties, wiring up doors and windows to the mains.

One such factory in London was found to have sharp spikes on all the window ledges, disguised with cardboard.

“They don’t use booby-traps to harm the police,” Nayar explains.

“It’s to protect the stash from rival gangs or local lads who might consider stealing it.”

Once the property is deemed to be clear, the tension disappears.

The police officers stand in the front yard, cracking jokes (“I thought I said knock”?

“he did knock ? with a big red thing”) and discussing their appearances on various reality TV programmes (“I was on RailCops the other week”).

Meanwhile, the two men from EDF head inside to make the property safe.

A few seconds later, one of them emerges.

“Er, sorry to bother you,” he says.

“But there’s someone hiding behind the bathroom door.”

Three officers run inside to investigate the embarrassing oversight. A few minutes later they return leading a young Vietnamese man in handcuffs. He’s about 5ft 4in tall and wears faded jeans, a grubby T-shirt and a denim jacket.

“Poor little fella,” says the man from EDF.

“He looked petrified. He was cowering behind the door, shivering.”

Once the EDF men have confirmed that the property is safe, I’m allowed to enter, though Nayar warns me that the plants are at the stage of their growth cycle when they can irritate your lungs.

She hands out disposable face masks.

What we find inside is indeed a little forest.

There’s an overpowering damp smell but no telltale pungent odour of skunk, the highly potent strain of cannabis that many argue causes a higher incidence of schizophrenia among those using it.

Although from the outside everything looks normal, with net curtains visible from the street, inside every window has been taped up using bin liners and there are heavy curtains, backed with plastic, on every doorway.

Each room is filled to capacity with plants.

Above them hang rows of powerful 600-watt sodium lights with reflector panels. There are thermometers in every room and large fans to keep the plants cool.

Part of the ceiling has been cut away to accommodate a silver extractor pipe fitted with a carbon filter at the outlet to prevent passers-by smelling the cannabis.

The Vietnamese do not employ hydroponic cultivation systems, where plants are grown in gravel, but use soil.

How they shift that volume of compost into a house without attracting neighbours’ attention is anyone’s guess.

As always, the gang has bypassed the electricity meter and tapped straight into the mains.

In some cases, this causes fires.

For this reason, as soon as police receive a tip-off they have no option but to act immediately.

“You can’t leave it,” says Nayar, “because you know they’re bypassing the electricity and if it caught fire and somebody died you’d be negligent.”

The EDF men survey the rows of fuse boxes crudely bolted to the walls.

It looks like a deathtrap.

One of them shrugs. “Actually, the electrics are pretty good. They obviously know what they’re doing.”

The “gardener” ? often a minor brought into the UK illegally for this work ? inhabits one room in the house, the kitchen, leaving the maximum floorspace in the rest of the house devoted to horticulture.

He has no possessions or clothes.

There is just a bed with a bare mattress and a dirty duvet, a bookcase holding 20 packs of Marlboro Lights and a stack of pornographic DVDs.

The portable TV is currently being used for something else, though ? to show CCTV pictures relayed from a tiny camera trained on the front door and side passage.

Hence the fact that he was hiding ? he’d spotted the policemen in the back garden.

The only personal touch is a neatly kept Buddhist shrine with bowls of fresh satsumas, water, flowers and candles.

“There’s always a shrine in these places,” one of the police officers says. “It’s quite sad, really.”

The gardener has a detailed chart of instructions written in Vietnamese pinned to the bathroom wall.

They tell him when to water the plants and exactly how much fertiliser to use.

Police find tubs of fertiliser worth £100 each and a long hose leading from the downstairs bathroom up to the cultivation rooms. Although Nayar can’t confirm that this is skunk until it has been tested, she is 99 per cent certain it is.

The potency of this type of homegrown cannabis is a serious concern for the authorities.

British-produced skunk contains more THC ? the psychoactive component in cannabis ? than imported varieties. Some homegrown seizures tested have been found to contain THC levels as high as 20 per cent, compared to four per cent typically found in imported hashish.

But why Peterborough? The answer is simply that this unassuming Cambridgeshire town has plenty of affordable rented accommodation and a large transient population.

In the early hours, immigrant workers huddle in groups waiting to be taken to temporary jobs as agricultural labourers.

It’s the kind of place where nobody asks too many questions.

“This is a prime spot for this sort of thing,” explains Nayar.

“We’ve done about five or six in this area. We found out about this one because I put something in the local paper giving the public telltale signs to look out for.

“A neighbour mentioned to one of our community support officers that this particular house was being rented out to oriental people, the windows appeared to be taped up and there had been drilling at 3am.

All the hallmarks of a cannabis factory.”

Does she ever get it wrong?

“No more than four times in 18 years,” she says. “If I do, we have to pay for the door.”

With 193 plants, this seizure has a street value of £70,000.

Given that the growth cycle of the plants is around 12 weeks, despite paying the gardeners £500 a week and as many cigarettes as they can smoke, the whole operation is highly profitable.

Even though the electrical equipment they use is expensive, costing about £7,000, the gangs can afford to take a few hits.

“The Cambridgeshire police’s clampdown has had a quantifiable effect,” says Nayar.

“After last year’s raids, the street price of cannabis in Peterborough went up from £20 an eighth [of an ounce] to £25.”

Raids like this have become routine. This is the 40th such operation Peterborough police have carried out since May 2006.

All have been connected to Vietnamese gangs, probably based in Hackney, east London, and possibly with international links. The next raid occurs three days later, resulting in the seizure of 492 plants.

Left unchallenged, a factory of this size is capable of generating well over £750,000 a year.

Two weeks later, police have another bumper harvest, with five raids in one day.

They seize drugs with a potential street value of £700,000, entering one property with 550 plants and another with more than 600.

Typical sentences for those convicted of running cannabis factories are between three and four years.

It’s a scene which is being played out all around the country. A clampdown on their metropolitan operations is forcing drug syndicates, predominantly Vietnamese, to spread out to rent converted family homes in the home counties and further afield.

The Vietnamese have come up with an impressive business model for producing cannabis ? and the factories are spreading more quickly than Starbucks.

While big business goes global, the skunk trade is going local.

What is most extraordinary is that it has all happened in the past five years.

Ten years ago, only around ten per cent of cannabis sold was grown in the UK ? now it is over 60 per cent.

And the demand is certainly there ? the UK has two million regular cannabis users.

But with cannabis some way down the list of harmful substances, should police be directing their resources elsewhere?

“What we’ve seen in Canada is that if you’ve got a Vietnamese cannabis factory problem, you’re soon going to get a methamphetamine problem,” says Nayar.

“That’s why we take it so seriously and stamp down on them quickly. You need to nip it in the bud.”

The man arrested today has left a mobile phone.

The calls will be checked and enquiries made, which may lead investigators to the gang behind the factory.

In the meantime, scene of crime officers will turn up and photograph the plants as evidence.

Once that has happened, the plants will be loaded up on a van and taken away to be incinerated. I leave with the smell of cannabis still on my clothes.

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