Tendring Topics – on line
White Elephant into Silk Purse?
Last week I recorded the transformation in our area of the 'sows ears' of refuse tips into the 'silk purses' of recreation grounds, country parks and industrial estates. Is it just possible that a similar miracle can transform a local 'white elephant' into a job-creating, regeneration-inducing 'silk purse' for Clacton?
That is what is promised with the projected transformation by the Ascott Group, of the former Woolwich call centre in Jackson Road, Clacton into a 57 room Travelodge Hotel, plus flats, a restaurant, a bar, and shops. The total proposed investment is said to be in the region of £13 million and would be expected to result in the creation of nearly 50 jobs as well as revitalising that particular corner of Clacton's town centre
It all sounds too good to be true – and I can only hope that it isn't!
The trouble is that Clacton has seen too many similarly splendid schemes that have foundered after getting past the 'Our artist's impression' stage. Do you remember the redevelopment that was going to transform the High Street, the High Street Car Park and the western side of Carnarvon Road between the Public Library and the High Street traffic lights? It was considered so certain that for several years an artist's impression of the transformed area was included in Clacton Council's and later Tendring District Council's holiday guide.
In 1973, the year before Clacton was to be merged into the new Tendring District, I was Clacton's Housing Manager. I urged that the new Council's Housing Department should be allowed to remain at Westleigh House in Carnarvon Road where Clacton Council tenants knew they could pay their rents and both tenants and applicants for housing knew they could call to make enquiries. 'Impossible', I was told. Westleigh House was destined to be demolished under the redevelopment scheme.
I notice that Westleigh House is still there and is still used as Council Offices (though not by the Housing Department) and that the artist's impression of the new development has long since been banished from the Holiday Guide.
Then, of course, there was the wonderful Theme Park that was to be built on the former site of Butlin's Holiday Camp. For a short while local councillors of all parties vied with each other in their claims that it was they who had persuaded the developers to come to Clacton. I had retired from the Council by that time and was a full-time freelance writer including, among other things, writing advertising features for Essex County Newspapers. In this connection I interviewed the management of the new 'Theme Park' and I now blush to think of the glowing report about it that I made!
It was, in fact, hopelessly under-capitalised and rapidly degenerated into a rather expensive amusement park before folding altogether.
Then again, for decades hotels all along Clacton's sea front have been closing and being replaced by flats. Is there any reason to suppose that a new hotel, situated away from the sea front in arguably a less attractive position, will fare any differently? Perhaps there is. I certainly hope so.
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Two Centenaries
Five Bob a Week!
Two centenaries occur this year that are of interest to me. The first is the anniversary of the introduction of 'Old Age Pensions' in August 1908.
Did you know that, prior to 1908, people without savings (which meant virtually all 'working class' people) had two options when they became too old and feeble to work. They might be supported by the generosity of their families – or they could spend their final years in the workhouse – and in those days conditions in workhouses were a good deal more unpleasant than in today's prisons!
No wonder they had large families in the first few years of the twentieth century! The more children you had the better was the chance that one or two of them would be able to spare a shilling or two a week to help Mum and or Dad in their old age. My mother, for instance, born in an agricultural cottage in 1888, had five brothers and four sisters. It was very noticeable that not one of them had a large family and several of their offspring – including myself – were 'only children'.
In 1908 the situation changed for ever. A non-contributory pension of five shillings (25p) a week at 70 became the right of every man or woman who needed it. Yes, it was means tested but, as Cliff Horne of the Eastern Region North Pensioners' Association points out in an article in the East Anglian Daily Times it established that the state had a responsibility for providing a pension in old age. What's more, five shillings a week, believe it or not, represented about 25 percent of average earnings at that time whereas today's state pension is worth only 14.70 percent of average earnings.
Yes, it does seem incredible but there has been quite a lot of inflation since 1908. If you have ever read Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford (as distinct from watching the tv series) you'll also know that wages – particularly agricultural wages (and there were many more agricultural workers in those days than there are today) at the beginning of the 20th Century were abysmally low.
A Long Weekend?
The other centenary? Oh yes, it was that of the Territoral Army. My own military career was totally undistinguished (after seven years I was discharged from the army with the same rank that I had on enlistment; gunner!), and I have long since embraced the Quaker testimony against all war and violence.
However, I did hear the centenary discussed on the BBC tv's Breakfast programme on 15th April. There was, I discovered, still enough of the 'old soldier' left in me for my hackles to rise when, during the course of an interview with a member of today's TA – just back from a few months in Afghanistan (I wouldn't for one moment suggest that that was anything other than very unpleasant and very dangerous) – I heard members of the old Territorial Army patronisingly referred to as 'weekend warriors'.
I volunteered for the TA, in a flush of patriotic and anti-Nazi fervour, in the early months of 1939 at the age of 17. I joined a local Artillery Regiment for no other reason than that their drill nights didn't coincide with my 'night-school' (evening classes we'd call them today) nights. I was called up for full-time service on 2nd September 1939, the day before Britain declared war on Germany. My regiment served as part of Britain's anti-invasion defences until July 1941 when we embarked on a troopship bound for the Middle East.
Throughout the winter, spring and early summer of 1941/1942 we were in almost continuous action in what was then referred to in the News Bulletins as 'the Western Desert' – the area extending westwards into Libya from the Egyptian frontier. Among our successes were the capture of Bardia and of the strongly defended Wadi Halfaya ('Hellfire Pass'). We were however part of the garrison of Tobruk when it was overwhelmed by Rommel's Afrikakorps on 21st June 1942. I spent the remainder of the war in Europe as a POW first in Italy and later in Germany
I freed myself (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Army!) on 8th May 1945 and arrived back home in Ipswich just ten days later – on my 24th birthday! I was however destined to spend another eleven months in the army before eventual discharge on 23rd April 1946.
It was a long time ago. I have since spent happy holidays in Italy and Germany and have German friends whose friendship I value no less than my English ones.
However it still irks me to hear my comrades of the 67th Medium Regiment RA (TA) – about 100 (out of 700 to 800) of whom never returned to England – patronisingly referred to as 'weekend warriors'. September 1939 till April 1946 was quite a long weekend!
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Privatisation by Stealth?
Yesterday I read in the daily Coast Gazette that Colchester Liberal Democrat MP Bob Russell had strongly opposed plans for a private medical treatment centre to be provided within a new Community Hospital to be built in Rayne Road, Braintree. I'm glad that at least one Essex MP has had the common sense and courage to protest at what he described as a 'direct attack' on the NHS.
This morning (17th April) I heard a New-Labour Health Minister again extolling the virtues of the multi-purpose medical centres – packed with consultants and provided with all the latest space-age equipment – that he believes are destined to replace those old-fashioned medical practices. Some of these, he mentioned in passing, may well be owned and managed by private firms.
All of which, like the PFI and LIFT schemes that are nowadays providing and managing our hospitals and clinics, can only be seen as further attempts to give private enterprise control of the National Health service.
We have seen some of the effects of that policy in the structural and design problems revealed at Dovercourt's Fryatt Memorial Hospital after less than two years of operation – and in the intended site of the Super Health Centre with which private enterprise proposed to replace the existing medical provision in Great Clacton and Holland-on-Sea.
I understand that the new Norwich University Hospital – built under the PFI (private finance initiative) – hasn't been without its 'teething problems' either!
I wonder how many Labour Party members realized that in getting rid of 'Clause 4' of the Labour Party's constitution they were not just voting out the ridiculous idea that all Britain's economic problems could be solved by public ownership of every human activity. They were also voting in the at least equally absurd idea that every public service would function better if it were owned and managed by private companies governed by market forces.
Discussing this privatisation by stealth in an earlier blog I said that I thought that Keir Hardie and George Lansbury, pioneers of the Labour Movement must be turning in their graves. I wonder what Liberal Lord Beveridge, who first envisaged the Welfare State and Socialist Nye Bevan, creator of the NHS, would have thought of it all?
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