{"id":4176,"date":"2019-04-01T15:56:55","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T14:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodvale.com\/?p=4176"},"modified":"2019-04-01T15:56:55","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T14:56:55","slug":"upfront-04-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/upfront-04-19\/","title":{"rendered":"UpFront 04\/19"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve always looked forward to April. There is a general feeling of anticipation and hope\u2014winter is behind us, and we can look forward to growth again. But I\u2019m not sure about this April. We live in such confusion that it\u2019s hard to anticipate the general atmosphere after March 29th. However, my brother reminded me of a story from April 1934 that briefly side-lined that question. It is about an event in my Grandfather\u2019s life. Back in the early thirties, my Grandfather was a local County Councillor during a time when farmers were refusing to pay controversial land annuities that had dated back to the 1800s. When refusing to pay, some farmers had their livestock confiscated to be auctioned off to pay the fine. On this particular day, five head of seized cattle were due to be auctioned to pay the fine levied on a local farmer. However, due to the presence of protesting farmers supporting the man whose animals had been seized, the sale was aborted\u2014there were no bids. With yelps of delight, some of the protesters then broke the cattle out of the pens, and, pursued by the local constabulary, drove them down the side streets of the town. The bemused animals were soon joined by an excited crowd cheering them on. It was all a great laugh until they turned a corner to face a line of police with batons drawn. Even the cattle participated in the ensuing standoff, and, concerned that things might get nasty, the police asked my Grandfather\u2014a man described as a, \u2018very influential man in the county\u2019\u2014to calm the crowd. This he did, stressing the fact that the police were, as he put it, \u2018the custodians of the public peace, and should not be molested\u2019. The crowd dispersed and no doubt many of them made their way to nearby hostelries to discuss the day\u2019s events, and maybe even the price of cattle. The story might have ended there, except the following week; in a dawn raid that might have looked more at home in an episode of <em>Line of Duty<\/em>, my Grandfather, along with eight other members of the community, was arrested and thrown in jail for public order offences. The constabulary\u2019s case was eventually thrown out but not before hysterical testimony that included descriptions of the crowd as \u2018possessed with hysteria\u2019 and \u2018maddened and infuriated\u2019 and even a suggestion that men were \u2018frothing at the mouth\u2019. This was, of course, all cobblers, as the barrister for the defence was later to prove. But I couldn\u2019t help thinking that the descriptions might easily have applied to recent activity in Westminster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve always looked forward to April. There is a general feeling of anticipation and hope\u2014winter is behind us, and we can look forward to growth again. But I\u2019m not sure about this April. We live in such confusion that it\u2019s hard to anticipate the general atmosphere after March 29th. However, my brother reminded me of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-4176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorials","tag-fergus-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}