Week 48 20.11.2011

Tendring Topics.......on line

'All Hope Abandon......'

           As 2011 draws towards its end, the thoughts of old folk like me inevitably go back to Christmases and New Years of the past.  I don’t ever before recall the year’s end being ‘celebrated’ in quite such an atmosphere of gloom and foreboding as it will be this year.

            I suppose that my life was at its very lowest ebb as 1942 came to an end.  I had been a PoW for six months and was in a large PoW camp in northern Italy.  We were cold. We were hungry.  Prolonged hunger showed in our faces, which were gaunt and hollow-cheeked!  Almost every week there was a death from hunger-related causes.  We were louse-infested.  We were dispirited and bored out of our minds. We never lost hope though.  We were all of us sure that Britain and its allies would win the war, and that we would be liberated. By the end of 1943 (though by then transported to a working camp in Germany) – and particularly by the end of 1944, when the thunder of gunfire from the ever-approaching eastern front daily became louder - that hope had become a certainty.  We would soon be home again, and so we were.

            The immediate post-war years are often depicted by historians (how extraordinary that a past that seems so close to me should now be ‘history’!) as a time of privation and hardship with continued shortages and rationing. Many of our towns (and those of most of mainland Europe) were in ruins. We had a housing shortage that makes today’s housing difficulties seem Lilliputian and, having had most of the population engaged in non-productive war activities for the previous six years, we must surely have had a gargantuan national debt.

Heather, the ‘Essex girl’ who had waited for me, and I, never saw it in that light.  To us, the final years of the 1940s were a time of hope and expectancy.  We were proud of the new Labour (not of course New-Labour!) government that we had helped to bring to power and we really believed that we were entering a new age of peace and prosperity shared by all.  How naïve and innocent we were!

We had no worries about the future and were married just days after my discharge from the army in 1946.  Heather’s wedding dress was made by a friend of her mother, and she carried a splendid bouquet of real flowers.  The sports jacket and slacks that I had been given on my discharge from the army didn’t seem quite right for a wedding, so I wore my khaki uniform.  I had had the jacket of my battle dress tailored so that I could wear the top open, with a collar and tie.   A couple of days before the wedding I strode into a posh men’s  outfitters in Ipswich and bought a silk khaki shirt and tie clearly labelled ‘For sale only to officers of HM Forces’.  I was 24 years old and, with seven years army service behind me, I reckoned that I was as good as any officer – and that my bride-to-be was a lot better than any officer’s ‘lady’ I had ever met!

The wedding was at Gant’s Hill Methodist Church, Ilford, and the reception - well attended by both Heather’s and my friends and relatives – was in the church hall.  My best friend, whom I would have liked to have been my best man, was still serving in India.  I asked a former colleague and former fellow POW to do the honours.  I knew that he was a member of the Salvation Army and unlikely to embarrass me at a teetotal wedding reception!  I don’t know how much it all cost but it couldn’t have been very much because neither we, nor our parents had very much to spend.

We were married for sixty years and we faced and survived most of the problems that beset all married couples and one or two (prolonged separation by illness for example) that most avoid.  In all our time together though, I don’t recall a single New Year that we entered without at least a shred of hope of better things to come.

As 2011 comes toward its end I have a warm and comfortable home. I have an income sufficient for my needs.  I have a mobility scooter that prevents my being housebound, loving friends and relatives and, thanks to modern technology, the means of keeping in touch with all of them.

One thing that I lack is hope for the future; Not for my own future (there is unlikely to be very much of that!) but for the future of my sons and grandchildren and, indeed, for our country as a whole.  For the first time ever I don’t feel that there is a reasonable chance that next year will be better for us all than the one coming to an end.  Nor can I see a future has any possible ‘happy ending’.  I don’t think that either our present coalition government or the Labour opposition has a true understanding of, let alone a solution to, our present woes – and I am quite sure that neither UKIP nor the BNP has! 

I hope that I am wrong and that my pessimism is just a product of old age.  St Paul told us that when all else fails Faith, Hope and Love remain, and that the greatest of these is Love.  Quite so, but Hope and Faith are not optional extras.  We can’t live for long without them.  Dante got it right when, at the entrance to Hell, he imagined a posted warning, 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here!'

Some later thoughts

          I wrote the above before the Chancellor of the Exchequer made his ‘Autumn Statement’ and I had wondered if it might contain anything that would persuade me to change it.  It didn’t.  It is clear that the outlook is every bit as bleak as it had appeared to be and that for those in the public service it is even worse. There are to be more job losses, and pay rises capped at one percent when the current wage freeze ends. 

            There is room for argument about who was responsible for the current economic situation.  The Government insists that it was all the fault of the previous Labour Government (but then they would, wouldn’t they?)   The Governor of the Bank of England, who really should know and has no axe to grind, has told us – and reiterated – that the greed and incompetence of the bankers was to blame. 

            I think it likely that both are right.  The bankers were directly to blame but the New-Labour Government was guilty of failing to curb them (but then I doubt very much if any possible alternative government would have done differently). Nobody suggests for one moment that teachers, doctors, nurses, refuse collectors and other public servants were in any way to blame.  Yet it is they who are being punished while the bankers continue to walk away with telephone number salaries and bonuses.

It should be remembered that with inflation at 5 percent, a wage freeze is in effect a 5 percent wage cut – and a pay increase of one percent is just a slightly smaller cut. Thousands of public servants are losing their jobs. Those who keep theirs are to suffer continuing pay cuts, and are expected to work longer and pay more for a smaller pension!   Public servants are overwhelmingly not soul-less bureaucrats who spend their days sending each other memos.  They provide the foundation on which profit-making private enterprise can function; the personal and public health services, the highways, the fire and police services, the social services safety net and, come to that, the armed forces. We neglect them at our peril.  Yes – had I still been in the public service as I was for over forty years, I would, however reluctantly, have certainly joined the strikers last Wednesday.

    As for the belated capital expenditure on the infrastructure that it is hoped will create jobs and lift us out of recession, it is too little, too late.  Much of it is simply trying to put right things that the government got wrong in the first instance!

  In our region, for instance, much is being made of road widening on the A14 – a project that obviously makes sense, generating jobs in construction and facilitating the transport of goods from the Midlands to Felixstowe for export.

  A blog reader points out that there is nothing ‘new’ about this initiative. Together with, for instance, the School Building Programme, this had been agreed by the previous government, but was one of the first to be dropped by the new Coalition Government when it came to power.  Roads Minister Mike Penning said that the scheme was unaffordable and no longer offered acceptable value for money.

            My correspondent asks, ‘How many construction jobs might have been saved, and how many manufacturing companies would by now have had their exports streamlined if the scheme hadn’t been cancelled in the first place?’  

              

‘Sing, Choirs of Angels!’

    When, three weeks ago, under the above heading I wrote about choir-master Gareth Malone’s success in creating a community choir from the residents of what I described as a ‘New Town’ near London, I little thought that a fortnight later we would be watching on BBC2 his revisit there after two years – with lots of highlights from his earlier success.

   I was glad to discover that my memory of the original programmes hadn’t been too faulty.   I hadn’t remembered the name of the ‘New Town’.  It was, in fact, South Oxhey in Hertfordshire, less a ‘new town’ than an enormous and soul-less housing estate – until Gareth’s genius turned it into a living community!   As I wrote in my blog, he had brought his South Oxhey Community Choir up to a standard at which its members were able to sing very professionally the Agnus Dei (O Lamb of God) prayer, in Latin, to an appreciative audience in St Alban’s Cathedral!

   That wasn’t the whole story.  During the nine months that Gareth spent in South Oxhey he created not just one but three choirs – the original community choir, a children’s choir from local schools, including one school for children with special educational needs, and a ‘male voice choir’ from regulars of local pubs whose previous choral experience had been limited to Karaoke after having had a pint or two to dull their inhibitions!

   The climax of his visit had been an open-air concert on a football field given by the three massed choirs to an audience that must surely have consisted of most of the population of South Oxhey!

  That was in 2009.  On his revisit earlier this year Gareth Malone received an enthusiastic welcome from his friends in South Oxhey and was delighted to find that the Community Choir was still flourishing, with another enthusiastic choirmaster.  It was still giving much-acclaimed performances before large audiences and was still making its contribution to binding the inhabitants of South Oxhey into a living community!

   I was reminded how, in my childhood and long before the advent of television, church socials had been one of the highlights of our lives.  My dad, who could play any stringed instrument, and two or three of his friends, had formed a small band for these occasions which always included a spell of ‘community singing’. We sang ‘Clementine’, ‘Cockles and Mussels’, ‘There’s a Tavern in the Town’ and ‘Jerusalem’ with gusto (I remember their words to this day!) and a few songs both from World War I, of which many present still had sad memories, and of other earlier conflicts;  Keep the Home Fires Burning!’  ‘There’s a long, long trail a’winding……’ and ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching’ (a prisoner of war song from the American Civil War) were particularly popular.  I little guessed how prophetic of my own future the last of these was to be!

 There was a community spirit in those pre-television days that doesn’t exist today.  Perhaps community singing had something to do with it.  It would have been nice to have had a Gareth Malone to encourage us to keep it up!

'A damp squib?'

    David Cameron is surely an authority on damp squibs.  He has had plenty of experience of them.

However, when he uses that expression to describe a general strike of  two million workers from every walk of life, which closed a majority of our schools and affected every one of us in one way or another, it makes me hope that we will never encounter a dry one!

               

Week 47 2011 29.11.2011

Tendring Topics……on line

'What goes around, comes around'

            There was a time – I remember it well – when the maximum loan for house purchase that Building Society and Bank Managers would approve for house purchase depended upon the income of the main wage earner in the applicant’s family.  That was in the days before it was assumed that both members of the marriage or other partnership would continue in full-time work even after a baby or babies arrived.   Then, provided one of the couple, usually the male, had a steady job they could buy their new home with a twenty or twenty-five years mortgage and a deposit of ten percent of the total cost.  If the local authority were prepared to act as guarantor and the applicant’s job seemed very secure, then a five percent deposit might be acceptable.

            When, way back it 1956, my wife Heather and I bought our bungalow in Clacton (the one in which I am writing these words) we had thought we could manage the monthly mortgage payments on the kind of home that we needed (I had just been appointed Additional Public Health Inspector by Clacton Urban District Council).  Raising the deposit though was a major obstacle.  We had been married for ten years but during that time Heather had suffered a life-threatening illness and had had a crippling operation.  We had two young children, and a loan to repay on the car I needed for my work.  My pay had been adequate but we had virtually no savings.   The Council was prepared to act as guarantor and we had only to raise five percent of the value of the bungalow.  It seems a totally piffling sum now but we were able to raise it only by selling Heather’s solitaire diamond engagement ring that I had bought eleven years earlier with a considerable proportion of the army back pay I had accumulated as a prisoner of war.

            There came a housing shortage.  It was destined to be made much worse by Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation that, within a short space of time, markedly reduced the amount of social housing available for letting.  With rents prohibitively high in the private sector, young couples yearned to get their feet on the first rung of the home ownership ladder.

            It was a time of low unemployment and relative prosperity.  Married women, including young mothers, carried on working, leaving their children in day care.    Banks relaxed their rules and made loans based on the total income of the applicants – not just that of the highest earner.  Many more became eligible for mortgages.  But, of course, there was no commensurate increase in the number of homes available for purchase.  The price of houses began to rise, and rise – and rocket!   The housing boom had begun.  Soon house price inflation soared well above general rise in prices.

             Banks competed with each-other in making tempting offers to would-be buyers.  Ninety-five percent mortgages became commonplace.  Soon there were one hundred percent, and eventually one hundred and ten percent loans to help prospective house buyers with their legal costs and their removal and furnishing expenses!

            It couldn’t, and didn’t last.  The bubble burst.  Home buyers (they had imagined they were ‘home owners’ but they weren’t!) or their partners lost their jobs and half their incomes.  They couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments and either sold their homes at a loss, or were dispossessed by the Bank. House prices plummeted. The homes thus recovered by the Banks were often worth only a fraction of the sums originally loaned on them.  Some Banks would have been declared bankrupt had they not been bailed out by us taxpayers.     

            Right now we have stagnation.  Few new houses are being built.  Skilled and experienced building workers – bricklayers, plumbers, electricians – are unemployed.  Many people are homeless or inadequately housed. There is an acute housing shortage and there is nothing like sufficient social housing available for rent.

            There is, of course, an obvious solution – repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation and encourage local authorities and Housing Associations to build housing for letting, fund them adequately and leave them to solve the housing problem in their own areas – as they did successfully for a century before the advent of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatism and its pale-pink New Labour shadow.  That would have been true ‘localism’.

            Is that what the Coalition Government is going to do?   Not likely; they are going to encourage remaining council tenants to buy their own homes with discounts as high as 50 percent (well, it isn’t their money they’re giving away!) and guarantee,  with taxpayers’ money, part of the mortgage on  homes newly built for sale at affordable prices.    This, it is hoped, will encourage Banks to reduce the level of that difficult deposit and bring home-purchase within the scope of ordinary people again. This, so they declare, will stimulate the building trade and thus get the general economy moving.  I hope that it will!  It seems to me though to be offering to bail out the banks before they are even in trouble, and bringing us back to a situation similar to that at the beginning of the house price boom.

‘Ere the winter storms begin’

          The harvest hymn tells us that, ‘All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin’.   And so it should be – but those of us who live in towns know that bringing in the harvest is not the only task that needs to be performed before the winter storms, the ice and perhaps the snow are with us again. Among them are repair of the damage done to our roads and footpaths by the last two hard winters.

Well, here are a couple of local examples of road and footpath disrepair that need urgent attention.  They are by no means the only examples of highway neglect in Clacton and they are almost certainly not the worst, but they are examples that I see regularly.  The footpath is beside Old Road and is regularly used by pedestrians (and mobility scooterists) on their way to Morrison’ supermarket.  It is a positive danger to those unsteady on their feet or with impaired sight, and a source of bone-shaking discomfort to scooterists.  I speak from personal experience!

            The pothole is in Beaconsfield Road, near its junction with Skelmersdale Road.  If it doesn’t receive attention it will get much worse, and more dangerous, in the coming winter.  Unspectacular work like this is far more worth-while than, for instance, the wholesale reconstruction of the seaward end of Pier Avenue last winter – when the dust had scarcely settled on the precious reconstruction!

The ever widening incomes gap!

          At last – the gaping chasm between the incomes of the poorest and the wealthiest of us has received the attention of an official investigation and is being brought to the attention of the government.  It seems that the average income of the staff of a top FTSE100 company is £20,000 a year (for many people even that is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice!) while the incomes of Directors and Chief Executives of these companies is – wait for it! – more than three and a half million pounds a year.

            A CBI spokesman explained to us on TV this morning why nothing could – or should – be done about this.  It’s all because of that wonderful Global Market. Profit-making enterprises throughout the world need the very best brains to make them even more profitable.  They are prepared to pay the best salaries, bonuses and other perks, to get them.   If we lesser mortals were to attempt to limit the number of millions our top people receive (I can’t bring myself to write ‘earn’) they would simply up sticks and move elsewhere.  How very convenient, for some, it is to have an economic system that demands that the pay of workers gets ever lower so that we can be competitive in the global market, while that of their bosses has to get ever higher, for exactly the same reason!

Despite the obvious absurdity of this situation and world wide protests about its manifest unfairness and injustice, the Global Market is welcomed by all three of our main political parties!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

            The government’s policy of cuts in public services and benefits, and of tax increases (in VAT and similar indirect or ‘stealth’ taxes) that particularly affect the less-well-off are really beginning to bite.  The provident, who have ‘nest eggs’ in savings accounts with banks and building societies are worse hit than the extravagant.  Their savings decrease in value as inflation outstrips the meagre interest that they earn.  Some  have lost their homes, many more have lost their jobs and practically all of us are beginning to lose hope.

            There would be one very simple and straightforward way of restoring our faith in the Coalition Government’s handling of the economic crisis and persuading us that the sacrifices we all (except the seriously wealthy) are having to make, have been worthwhile. Why not – perhaps quarterly or half-yearly – reveal by how many (surely millions) of pounds the deficit has been reduced during that period?  Then we would know whether or not the gain had been worth the pain.  As a former public relations officer I am astonished that this isn’t already happening.  Could it be that there has been no decrease?  Perhaps there has even been  an increase in that worrying deficit; one that even the most accomplished spin doctor would have difficulty in attributing to the previous Labour Government, or to ‘Brussels’, or to whom or whatever is the latest popular scapegoat.   

            That is very possible.  The cynical may see it as a reason why no such disclosure has been made.  A blog reader points out that the government, in formulating its financial strategy must have been expecting the national economy to show modest (perhaps 2 percent) growth.   This would have been expected to bring a reduction in the number of benefit claimants, together with increased revenue from corporation tax, income tax and VAT.  In fact the government’s austerity policy has killed economic growth, increased unemployment and suppressed demand.

            It is an unfortunate fact that we have to rely on their political opponent’s estimates of the effects that their policies, and those of their rivals, would have on the deficit.

            The Conservatives claim that Labour’s policy of reversing ‘the cuts’ to stimulate the economy, would increase the deficit by £85 billion a year by the end of the present Parliament.  They may well be quite right.

            Labour has considered Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts from November 2010 together with the latest estimates from independent forecasters, They predict that the coalition government’s borrowing could rise by £11 billion more than planned this year, £22 billion next year, £34 billion in 2013 – ’14, and £42 billion in 2014-’15.

            Voters at the next election will, it seems, have a clear choice.  Vote Conservative, cut even deeper, and increase the deficit, or Vote Labour, reverse the cuts and – though in a slightly different way – do the same thing!

            Well, it isn’t all that likely that I shall still be around for the next General Election to have to make a decision! 

An Affront – or a Lucky Escape?

          A couple of weeks ago members of Tendring Council, together with the local press, were full of indignation at the fact that Tendring was the one district in Essex through which the Olympic Torch  would not be carried next year as it makes its tortuous journey to the Olympic Stadium at Stratford.

            Now I learn that the passage of the torch through Colchester on July 6^th   is expected to cost the district council £30,000 in road closures, crowd control and street cleaning.  Our omission from the route may have been a blow to our local pride but I reckon that in every other respect it was a lucky escape!

Week 46 2011 22.11.2011

Tendring Topics…….on line


‘Sing, Choirs of Angels’

Have you watched that extraordinary choirmaster Gareth Malone on tv, creating award-winning choirs from the most unpromising material? We first saw him produce a choir  from a very ordinary comprehensive school that proved itself capable of competing internationally in Beijing,. Then came a choir from a tough rugger-playing school where pupils and staff were convinced that singing was a leisure occupation for girls only. He persuaded not only the pupils but the very macho sports master, to take part. The climax was a performance at the Albert Hall!

Next he produced a choir from the residents in a new town on London’s outskirts populated by folk from London’s East End. I am quite sure that not one of his choristers had previously had even a passing acquaintance with Latin or Greek.. Yet the climax of Gareth’s efforts saw them singing the Agnus Dei (O Lamb of God) prayer extremely creditably in Latin at St. Alban’s (I think) Cathedral.

His latest exploit has been to produce a choir in a small garrison town from the wives and girlfriends left behind there while the troops were doing a six months stint in Afghanistan. Once again he worked a miracle and created a choir that performed in the open air in Plymouth for Armed Forces Day and at the Albert Hall for the British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance. While doing so he managed to weld these waiting-and-worrying women into a close self-supportive community.

Those programmes, transmitted over the Remembrance Day period, brought vividly to my mind the anxiety that mothers, wives and girlfriends must have experienced during World War II. We temporary soldiers went overseas, not for a fixed period of six months but ‘for the duration’. There was no home leave from North Africa or the Far East. Separated wives today know where their husbands are serving and roughly what they are doing. There is postal and internet communication and there are regular phone calls. Our wives, mothers and girlfriends didn’t even know for sure in which country we were serving. Our mail was addressed to Middle East Forces. When I was captured with the fall of Tobruk to the Germans, my mother was simply informed that I was ‘missing’. She imagined the worst (I realize that I am very like her in some respects!) and it was several weeks before she learned from a friendly Roman Catholic neighbour that my name had been among those broadcast over the Vatican Radio as being a Prisoner of War in Italy.

Our wives and girlfriends weren’t able just to wait and worry. They were part of the conflict. My girlfriend Heather Gilbert worked in central London (near the British Museum) in the office of a printer. One morning she arrived at the office to find that it had disappeared. There had been a overnight air raid and it was now just a pile of rubble. Nor did Ilford, where she lived with her parents, escape the Luftwaffe’s attention. She lived through the blitz, the pilotless ‘doodlebugs’ and the V2 rocket attacks. Her life in the early 1940s was scarcely less perilous than my own.

 

I once again thought how extremely fortunate I had been, not only to return home safely in 1945 (one in seven of the young men who volunteered with me in 1939 never came home) but in finding my girlfriend there, waiting for me. We were not married nor were we even engaged, but she had waited patiently for a reunion that might never have taken place. This photograph, taken when she was nineteen and sent to me in Germany while I was a PoW there, makes it obvious that she would have had no problem in finding a different boyfriend with a more predictable future had she wished to do so. I was particularly pleased to note that she was wearing the miniature Royal Artillery badge brooch that I had given her when we had said goodbye!

After my return to England I had to spend almost another year in the Army. We were married just four days after I had shed my khaki uniform for good!

That was another big difference between us and the soldiers and their wives of today. They are professional soldiers, who chose the life and everything that goes with it. We were citizen soldiers, civilians in uniform, who had volunteered for the army because our country was threatened by Nazism and Fascism, evils that we believed could only be eradicated by force of arms. We were not prepared stand by and let others get on with it. When it was over though, we couldn’t wait to get back into civvies!

We served the guns and did our duty as soldiers but most of us detested the spit-and-polish, the parades, the rifle drill and the barked orders that are an inescapable part of army life. We had a word for it that I prefer not to repeat in this blog.

Those of ‘The fallen’ whom I knew best shared my distaste. It is for that reason that I have reservations about attending British Legion ceremonies of remembrance. I don’t care for the quasi military berets worn by many Legionnaires, the clipped words of command, the ceremonial raising and lowering of the flags. I do appreciate the two minutes shared silence though and – irrationally perhaps – I am always deeply moved by the sounding of the Last Post before the silence and of Reveille with its message of hope, at its end.

The Murdoch Empire

Hardly had the enquiry into the dubious activities of our national press opened than there were fresh revelations. Phone hacking was by no means limited to the News of the World. It would have been astonishing if it had been. I confidently expect to hear more scandalous revelations – phone hacking, surveillance of celebrities to the point of harassment, bribery of the police and threats to whistle-blowers.

What concerns me most will probably not even get a mention. It is certainly not illegal and I really don’t see any way in which it could easily be made so. Yet it surely poses a real threat to our national sovereignty; a far more dangerous threat than that posed by ‘Brussels’, the pet hate of the Europhobes!

It is the way in which millionaire newspaper owners can influence and bend our political leaders to their will. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron all made a point of friendship with Rupert Murdoch, head of News International. I have no doubt at all that Tony Blair created ‘New Labour’ to obtain the approval of the News International Empire and thus to gain the support of the Sun. Thus he could, and did, make his ‘reformed’ Party ‘electable’ – though, in my opinion, not worth electing! I have no idea to what extent the other Prime Ministers may have changed their Party’s policies to bring them in line with Mr Murdoch’s ideas – but I am sure that they certainly wouldn’t have taken any steps that they knew might antagonise him. It is worth noting that the takeover of the whole of BSkyB by News International was destined to be approved on the nod – until the phone hacking story broke.

If we are to have a truly free press then we must somehow deprive wealthy and powerful men and women of their power to influence the will of the electorate. There is nothing new about this malign influence. Who can say how much damage to our preparedness to resist Hitler was done by the confident Daily Express headline in 1938 and early 1939, ‘There will be no war this year – or next year either!’ I was reminded of this a week or so ago when I watched on tv a wartime cinema classic, 'In which we Serve'.   As a British vessel sank under submarine attack, a copy of the Daily Express with that infamous headline came floating by!
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In particular, I believe that we must never allow the British press, a powerful moulder of public opinion, to be controlled by those who are not British citizens and owe no loyalty to our country. This, I believe, should apply to American billionaires as much as to Russian oligarchs!

Black Clouds and Silver Linings!

Very often in my life, circumstances that have seemed to be totally disastrous have turned out instead to be well-disguised blessings. As a POW in Italy in 1943 I well remember my dismay and dejection when, after the collapse of the Italian Fascist government and the surrender of its successor to the Allies, German tanks surrounded our POW camp. We found ourselves locked into cattle trucks (just like the transports to the death camps!) on our way to further captivity in Germany.

To my surprise I found that at a small working camp in Germany conditions were far better than they had been in a large PoW camp in Italy. That was not everyone’s experience but it was mine. What is more, my quite unknowing and involuntary role as a PoW, in the ‘rescue’ of a nearly six centuries old priceless linen artefact (Zittau’s ‘Lenten Veil’) has assured me a welcome in the town where I was once a prisoner, and has provided me with an interest and a purpose in my old age.

I was bitterly disappointed when, as Clacton’s Housing Manager, I failed to secure the post of Director of Housing to the new Tendring District after 1974’s local government reorganisation. However, because of my experience as a spare-time writer and public speaker, I was appointed as the new authority’s first Public Relations Officer – an even more satisfying, though less well paid, job. I was again very apprehensive when, after seven years service as PRO, an internal reorganisation introduced by the Council’s new Chief Executive, meant that if I were to retain my self-respect I had no option but to seek early retirement. I knew that my wife and I would have had to struggle to survive on my far from gold-plated pension, and at 59 I was too old to find other congenial employment. My early  retirement though, led to a far more satisfying second career as a freelance author and journalist, a profession that I was to follow for over twenty more years!

Nationally, sad to say, we seem to have lately been experiencing a reverse effect – directly a promised silver lining appears on the horizon a big black cloud pops up in front of it! That Royal Wedding for instance at the end of April; it was supposed to be going to bring us wealth from visitors to Britain eager to share in the pomp and ceremony of the occasion, and extra economic activity from the sale of souvenirs and the like. To untutored minds like mine that all sounded very reasonable. Ultimately though, the Royal Wedding was one of the causes put forward by the government as a reason for a disappointing economic performance during that period. Could it have been because it involved an extra public holiday when those fortunate enough to have jobs stopped their feverish ‘wealth creation’ for an extra twenty-four hours? Next year’s Olympic Games were also supposed to be bringing a great influx of visitors eager to spend their money in Britain. Perhaps they will – eventually. Right now though, 2012’s bookings for holiday and tourist accommodation are fewer than those for previous years. Potential visitors prefer to avoid the Olympics crush!

Locally, Tendring Council’s ‘Tourism boss’ (Councillor Mayzes) seems determined to wreck Tendring District’s development as a leading holiday resort area.

Our Coastal Academy School Governors were astute enough, during the school holiday period, to secure the interest of the Caravan and Camping Club of Great Britain, the largest and most prestigious holiday leisure club in the UK. For the first time ever, their members held a brief rally on the school’s spacious playing fields, patronising local businesses and clearing up the site meticulously on their departure. Was Councillor Mayzes delighted? Not a bit of it. He was furious that caravans should violate ‘a school playground’ (some playground!) and sought to invoke the planning laws to prevent it happening! Then again, after a largely disappointing summer season, we had a couple of weeks of ‘Indian summer’ towards the end of September and into October. Our holiday coast enjoyed a belated boom as visitors poured in from Colchester, Ipswich and London to enjoy the last of the late summer sunshine. What did they find? No safety patrols on the beaches and Tourist Enquiry offices closed. Tendring’s ‘Tourism Boss’ had decided that the summer season had ended on 31 August and (no doubt congratulating himself of having saved the council a few pounds) had closed these facilities down.

Christmas is coming – a time when many retail businesses in Clacton hope to make sufficient profit to help them through to the holiday season again. Don’t tell me that the Government is going to blame the Christmas and New Year holidays if there is disappointing economic activity in that period!

The Government has already blamed their predecessors for our financial predicament. They have blamed the EU and, in particular, the Eurozone. They have blamed ‘Public Sector’ pensions and they have blamed ‘benefit cheats’. Could they be about to add Santa Claus to the list?

Week 45 2011 15.11.2011

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘The road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions!’

A well-meaning piece of advice given on the BBC tv’s breakfast programme this (7th November) morning threatens to upset the equilibrium of scores of  old people this Christmas and lead to many doctors’ phone-lines being jammed by anxious well-meaning callers in the New Year.

It seems that the early symptoms of dementia in the elderly are being missed and a great many of them are failing to get treatment and support that could help them endure their affliction and slow down (but not halt or reverse!) its progress. It was suggested that those who are seeing an elderly friend or relative this Christmas should look out for these symptoms and get in touch with his or her doctor to let them know.

The symptoms to look for are loss of short-term memory, anxiety, occasional confusion, and personality changes. It is, so we were told, all too easy to put these symptoms down to ‘old age’ when there may well be a more sinister reason. Well, I suppose that there could be, but I reckon that old age does have similar indications of its own for which there may be no other cause

None of us lasts for ever. Our bodies and our brains experience wear and tear as we get older. The results of this show themselves as ‘symptoms’ of what I believe is probably a natural progression for which the only remedy is to die young! There are, of course, lots of things that – with the help of medical science and possibly social services – enable us to make the best of it.

I no longer describe myself ageing or elderly. I am unequivocally old. No other member of my family has, as far as I know, ever made it to 90. I am in a position to confirm that old age is not ‘all beer and skittles. I am glad to say though that it isn’t either– at least isn’t yet – the extreme old age referred to by Shakespeare as ‘Last age of all is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’*. Mind you, without modern dentures, two cataract operations and two pairs of spectacles, hearing aids, on line access to my friends and relatives, and an electric mobility scooter to give me independent mobility, my condition might be approaching that. Much as we oldies sometimes complain about aspects of life in the 21st century, there’s no doubt that modern technology has made old age and disability a great deal more tolerable!

Yes – I do have an increasingly failing short-term memory (though I can remember, word for word, poems and short pieces of prose learned long ago!). I am absent minded, and any deviation from normality does make me anxious. I don’t think that my personality has changed much but perhaps I am not the best person to judge that!

I shall be visiting friends and relatives over Christmas. I know them all well enough to be confident that no one will be writing in a little note-book that ‘the poor old chap was anxious about leaving his bungalow empty for a couple of days’ and ‘He forgot to bring his reading glasses, fell asleep in his chair after Christmas Dinner and told us a story that I’m sure I’ve heard half a dozen times before’, all ready to be reported to my doctor in the New Year!

*From Jacques’ ‘all the world’s a stage…..’ speech in ‘As you like it’.

Age and Income Inequality

The fact that we are all living longer and those lucky enough to have a job are expected to work longer, has given extra urgency to the world wide demand for a more equal distribution of the world’s wealth.

A recent article in the Financial Times comments on a report by Sir Michael Marmot, professor of University College, London and former Chairman of the British Medical Association. Sir Michael forecasts that due to the inequality of health standards between rich and poor, two thirds of today’s population will not reach the new retirement age of 68 without chronic and debilitating illness. His report, based on the 2001 census reveals that the average difference in ‘disability-free life expectancy’ between people living in rich areas and those in poor areas is 17 years!

A blog reader points out that throughout Europe and North America we don’t have enough jobs for young people. We in the UK have 20 percent youth unemployment while in Spain no less than half of its young people are unemployed. Meanwhile the compulsory retirement age in Britain is being raised from 65 to 68 and old people are expected to work longer.

The reader asks, ‘How can it possibly be better for our economy to leave the strongest, fittest, child-rearing generation out of work while older people, many of whom are overweight, arthritic and suffering from mental exhaustion, are forced to carry on working?’ It is true that I was working – and earning – till I reached my eighties, but it was at freelance writing that I enjoyed, and from which I could take a break whenever I chose.

Have we already forgotten that a very high proportion of the rioters and arsonists of last August were unemployed young people. Satan will find mischief still for idle hands to do!

Signs of the times

There have been three items of news during the past few weeks that I have found profoundly depressing. They seem to me to exemplify everything that is wrong with Britain today. The first was the news that in a time of cuts in public services mainly affecting the poor, growing unemployment in both the public and private sectors and frozen or reduced salaries or wages for most people, the directors and chief executives of Britain’s most profitable enterprises have been awarding themselves salary increases of up to 50% - and 50% of a salary already nudging a million a year is a very large sum indeed!

I don’t know how they have the gall to accept it – but they have. I heard one of them interviewed on tv say that if an attempt were to be made to limit the salaries of top earners, they would all disappear to the USA or Asia. I’d say ‘Let them go – and the sooner the better!’ If, to stay afloat, Britain needs the support of those who have no interest in life beyond making money – then Britain deserves to sink.

Those who make such threats will be among the first to accuse public servants of holding the country to ransom when, very shortly, they go on strike because their jobs are imperil, their wages have been frozen, their savings are diminishing as inflation outstrips interest on savings accounts, and they are going to have to wait longer and pay more for their – in most cases – very modest pensions.

Then there were the pictures of long queues waiting up for hours to be the first to buy the very latest, most realistic and most violent and bloody video game on the market coupled with the news that creating the make-believe world of video games is one of Britain’s most successful industries. And to think that the writers of popular fiction used to be accused of encouraging ‘escapism’!

And the last item! It occurred on a day when the financial foundations of the world were shaking; on which we learned that an unknown number of terrorists may have entered the country because the Home Secretary had lost control of part of her Whitehall ‘empire’, and on which there appeared to be a real risk of the UK being dragged by its ‘special relationship’ into yet another Middle East conflict, this time against Iran. Not one of these matters was the lead story of BBC Breakfast, the first BBC News Bulletin of the day. Oh no – the first story was breathtaking news about who had actually administered the final lethal dose of a drug to an American Pop Star with a questionable life style who was already drugged up to the eyeballs. I had felt just a tiny amount of sympathy for the doctor who, it appears, was responsible – until I learned that he had been receiving a salary of 95,000 dollars a month as the pop-star’s medical attendant. That was in a country where, despite the efforts of its present President, millions live in poverty and thousands of the poor can afford no medical care of any kind!

A Damascene Moment!

This afternoon, as I was preparing a packet to send to send off to Germany by post, I had a vision of the future. Quite suddenly, I realized what global capitalism was all about, what was meant by preparing Britain to compete in a global market place – and the inevitable result of trying to do so.

My little ‘honorary’ German niece Maja had recently celebrated her fifth birthday. One of my British real nieces had thought that she would like to give the child a belated birthday present. She gave me a charming child’s shoulder and hand bag to send to her. I duly bought an appropriately sized padded envelope/bag at the Post Office and, with the help of Google Translate, wrote a suitable message in German to enclose with the present. I addressed it and took it to the Post Office for despatch.

It was as I sealed up the envelope that I had my epiphany (sorry about my Biblical vocabulary. It seems to go naturally with the nature of my vision). There was the envelope, bulging with its contents, with Royal Mail stamped proudly upon it, together with Maja’s address, an airmail label and – in small print in the corner - Made in China!

All became clear. Of course there are firms in Britain that could have manufactured and supplied comparable, perhaps better, padded envelopes. However, free competition and the global market insisted that even such a very British institution as the Royal Mail has to accept the lowest tender. A firm in China could manufacture them and transport them halfway round the world, just a little cheaper than any manufacturer in Britain, or in Europe, could manage to make them.

How then must Britain, or indeed any other European country, prepare itself to compete in the wonderful new Global Market, so beloved by both the Conservatives and New Labour? The only way that I can see is by reducing British wages to below the level of those of the factory workers of China and India, and increasing their hours of work, cutting public services, social housing and public transport to the level in those countries and by regarding the poor, the disabled and the homeless with the indifference that many in those countries regard them. ‘They’ve got families to support them haven’t they? Everybody knows that the poor breed like rabbits!’

Who knows, if we do it thoroughly enough we may one day be able to turn England’s green and pleasant land into a brave new world capable of obtaining contracts with the Chinese Mail Service to supply them with padded postal packets! Even then, of course, there’s still the chance that some country in Africa or South America will manage to undercut all of us.

It makes me wish that I were young enough and fit enough to join the protesters at St. Paul’s Cathedral!

Week 44 15.11.11

Tendring Topics……..on Line


‘We will remember them!’

Next Friday, 11th November, is what we once called call Armistice Day, the anniversary of the day on which at 11.00 a.m. (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) in 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent and the daily carnage on the Western Front ceased. Next Sunday will be Remembrance Day on which Remembrance Services and Parades will be held throughout the UK. The fallen of two world wars, of the Falklands, of Iraq and Afghanistan will be honoured with a two minutes silence, the sounding of the Last Post and the recitation of a verse from Laurence Binyon’s poem '’To the Fallen’:

                                                             They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them!............We will remember them!

In Clacton (and I have no doubt in many other towns and villages) the British Legion continues also to commemorate the war dead on that original Armistice anniversary, 11th November at 11.00 a.m. on the Town Square.

I too have war dead to remember – 100 out of an artillery regiment of about 700. Some were killed in battle, others died in PoW camps in Italy or Germany. Fifty young men of about my age were killed by ‘friendly fire’. They were drowned in November 1942 when the Italian steamer that was transporting them to a PoW Camp in Italy, was torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine. One other, whose death I personally remember, was a young man accidentally killed while working as a PoW on the railway sidings of Zittau. I was less than three feet away from him at the time. It could have been me. The fifty have no grave save the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The one who died on the railway sidings was given a German military funeral. We, his fellow PoWs, slow-marched to the cemetery, We threw sprigs of yew onto his coffin in the open grave. A firing squad from the local Wehrmacht barracks then smartly ‘presented arms’ and fired a volley over the grave. It was a salute from those who were no longer his enemies. I think that we all found it a very moving occasion.

I am not a member of the British Legion but next Friday I intend to climb onto my mobility scooter (my iron horse) and make my way down to the Town Square where I shall stand in silence, observe the two minutes silence and listen, probably on the brink of tears, to the sounding of ‘The last Post’.

‘Wear your poppy with pride!’ says the British Legion. I shall wear mine with sorrow – and perhaps just a little bitterness – at the loss of young lives and good friends,

Is the Pope, ‘Some kind of a Commie’?

Surely not – but recent pronouncements from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and statements from the Pope himself have made right-wing American Republicans (supporters of Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Movement and the like) think that he, and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, may be heading in that direction.

Writing in the Church Times, Paul Vallely, associate editor of The Independent, says that the Pope’s opposition to abortion and gay marriage had made right wing Republicans imagine that the Pope, ‘was one of us’. To discover that he took a radical stance on economics came as an unpleasant shock.

The Pontifical Council, supporting the aims of the hundreds of thousands of people world-wide (not just the handful camped outside St Pauls Cathedral) protesting against the inequalities and injustices arising from unfettered Capitalism, called for a more ethical approach to finance, the redistribution of wealth, an end to rampant speculation, the establishment of a global central bank to which national banks would have to cede power. This statement, says, Paul Vallely has been branded quasi-Marxist on Wall Street! The Pope himself calls ‘for everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural moral values at the basis of social coexistence’.

Paul Vallely says that this call is valid and timely. He adds that those who say it is impossible to constrain a free market are as wrong as those who say that if we don’t sell our arms to oppressive regimes, someone else will. ‘The continued ruthless arrogance of the bankers, who with their effective state guarantee against failure, are still paying themselves obscene bonuses, shows that the system has learned nothing’.

I am reminded of a time (I can’t be sure whether it was in the 1930s before World War II or in the early 1950s after it) a number of prominent Anglican clergy were both very High Church and very left-wing. It was said of them as a jibe that the Church of England was The Conservative Party at Prayer – except, of course, for the Anglo-Catholics, who were the Communist Party at Mass!’

Nowadays, I think that throughout the Christian Church – Roman Catholic, Anglican, Non-conformist and Quaker, there is a growing realization of the evils of our current economic system (the Rule of Mammon) together with a firm rejection of Marxism as a possible remedy for them. A poster displayed by the St. Paul’s protesters reads WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY? I think it possible that he would say, as he said 2,000 years ago: 'Treat other people exactly as you would like them to treat you. This sums up the whole of the moral teaching of the Scriptures.

If we all, as individuals, as communities and as nations, really strove to obey that commandment, there would be no wars, no arms trade, no inequalities and injustices – and no budget deficit!


They’re at it again!


The more the Government insists that its aim is to divest central government of power and responsibility and to pass these over to ‘local communities’, the more its actions have the precise opposite effect. I wouldn’t suggest that this is necessarily always a bad thing. We are all keen on local people deciding local issues - until it affects us personally! However, when one street has a fortnightly refuse collection and the adjoining one, that happens to be within the area of a different local authority, has a weekly one, it is hardly surprising that the residents in the former street begin to complain about a ‘post-code lottery’!


The extent to which adults receiving social care are expected to contribute to its cost, is currently decided by the local welfare authority, usually the County Council or Unitary Authority where there is one. The Government is said to be considering making these charges uniform throughout the country and imposing a cap, possibly at about £30,000, on the total sum that recipients can be required to pay. Thus, folk needing expensive care who have to sell a home that they have bought with a lifetime of hard work and saving, would be able to retain at least a proportion of the fruit of their labours. It seems eminently sensible and humane that this should apply nationwide.


Very different, I think, is the government’s determination to dictate the conditions of the tenancy of Social Housing, the erosion of Local Authority control over primary and secondary education (nominally to give them more independence but actually they’ll be controlled by Whitehall, who will hold the purse-strings), and the weakening of local planning control leaving, as a correspondent to the Clacton Gazette put it, local communities with the power to say YES but not to say NO!


The latest field into which the Central Government’s ‘Nanny knows best dear’ policy has strayed, is that of Child Adoption. This, like adult social care, is currently the responsibility of the County Council or, where there is one, of the Unitary Authority. The Government believes that adopting a child should take no more than 12 months and has decided to name and shame authorities who consistently take a good deal longer than that to arrange this.

Two authorities that have earned the government’s disapproval are the London Boroughs of Hackney and Brent. I know nothing about Brent but both my sons worked at one time in Hackney’s Housing Department and one of them lived in the Borough. I do know therefore, if only at second-hand, a little about that corner of London’s East End.

I know for instance that it probably has as thorough a racial, cultural and religious mix as any in England. The political correctness of social workers who block the adoption of a black or mixed race children by a loving all-white families has been much derided. It is, of course, absurd to refuse adoption simply on the grounds of skin colour. I could well understand though, objection to the adoption into a practising Christian family of a child of Muslim or Jewish parents. I would be sorry to see the adoption of a child from a Christian background (whatever might be the colour of the child’s skin) into a devout Muslim family or, for that matter, into a family of proselytising atheists – disciples of Professor Dawkins.

Ultimately, of course, adoption – or refusal – should be made in the interests of the child, not of the prospective parents, or of the local authority - or even of a government at Westminster eager to be able to claim credit for speeding things up. A wise decision cannot and should not be hurried.

‘A child is for Life – not just for Christmas!’ Rather than naming and shaming local authorities who take their time about making adoption decisions, they should name and shame those where, due to hasty action, there has been the greatest number of failed adoptions within five years of them taking place.