I find it odd that my uncle John Raven who led a richly varied life as a classicist and Senior Tutor of King’s College, Cambridge is now chiefly remembered for a paper he wrote for Trinity College, Cambridge in 1948 demonstrating that plants which had been discovered on Rhum by John Heslop-Harrison, the Professor of Botany at Newcastle University, had been put there fraudulently.

The episode has already been the subject of a book, The Rum Affair, published in 1999, and was this morning the subject of a short programme (see below) on scientific hoaxes:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001ptb5?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I hadn’t remembered that he published that they couldn’t be natives in Nature without mentioning how they had got there, although it seems that the people in the local big house had already guessed.

I feel badly that I had not registered the local campaign to return the replica of Frank Dobson’ sculpture Woman and Fish (the original was first decapitated in 1979 and later destroyed in 2002) to its original location at the junction between Cambridge Heath Road and Cephas Street where its plinth still survives.

This morning I went to see where it is now at the bottom of Millwall Park – perfectly respectable and no doubt safer from vandalism, but not its intended location at the heart of the Cleveland Estate where it was placed in the high noon of civic idealism in 1963:-

Funds have apparently been allocated in the Tower Hamlets budget for it to be moved, but the Council is now dragging its feet.

Maybe it could be a New Year’s resolution to get it moved.