Week 23 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

 ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream..........'

            During the past few weeks two events have conspired to give me salutary reminders (as though I need them!) of my advancing years.

There was my ninety-first birthday on 18^th May.   Obviously it was never going to be as exciting as my ninetieth when the whole immediate family, eight of us altogether, travelled to Zittau to join my German friends in celebration.  I was very glad of that because I am increasingly conscious of the fact that I am a year older, a little feebler, a little less steady on my feet, a little more forgetful and a little more easily tired than I was then.  

We didn’t have a family photo this year but here we all are celebrating my 90^th Birthday in Zittau last year.  Younger son Andy isn’t in the picture – he was behind the camera

         

This year all the family, except grandson Chris in Taiwan, joined me for a celebratory meal and exchange of family news at The Bowling Green at Weeley. The following day Ingrid my longest standing German friend, who had been unable to be with us the previous year, came to see me with a friend.  We again lunched at The Bowling Green and came back for a chat to my home in Dudley Road afterwards.  I was pleased to learn that her family are all well and that her nephew and niece (my ‘honorary’ nephew and niece!) two year old Tom and his six year old sister Maja, are thriving.

     In addition I received 35 posted birthday cards plus email and text greetings from friends and relatives in England and Germany (and one in Australia!). 

With Ingrid on 20^th May – I think I look very tired (which I was!)             

 Then, of course, another reminder of my age came with the Queen’s Jubilee and the realisation that, despite the fact that she has been our Queen for sixty years, I have actually seen the reign of no less than three other British monarchs!  During my childhood there was George V.   He seemed very grand, very distant and very worthy, deserving our respect and loyalty but hardly our affection.  That was until, years later, I learned what are said to have been his last words (no, not the official ones – I never did believe that he said How goes the Empire?)  before dying. When I learned what he really said I realized that he had been very human and ‘one of us’, after all.

  His successor Edward VIII had a very short reign.  He abdicated to marry twice-divorced American socialite Mrs Wallis Simpson. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Cosmo Lang and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin were strongly criticised at the time for forcing the abdication. I really think that they were right though.  It had been difficult to imagine a Queen Wallis! Quite apart from her earlier broken marriages she had been much too friendly with some of Germany’s top Nazis. Not everyone took the situation desperately seriously and there was a lot of back-street humour at the situation.  One printable witticism was, ‘He could have been Admiral of the Fleet but chose to be third mate to a Yankee drifter.’

            I was in the fifth form of Ipswich’s Northgate School for Boys at the time of the abdication crisis.  In Ipswich we had something of a grandstand view of the crisis as the divorce making the royal marriage legally (if not ecclesiastically) possible was granted in an Ipswich Court. After the abdication, we fifth formers were given a couple of hours off school and encouraged to cycle down to Ipswich’s Cornhill to hear the proclamation of the accession of the new king – George VI – publicly made by the Mayor on the steps of the Town Hall.

            When, over two years later, I volunteered for the Territorial Army it was to King George VI ‘and all his lawful heirs and successors’ that I swore my allegiance and loyalty.  I have known quite a few avowed republicans in my time but have never heard a word of personal criticism either of King George or of his consort the Queen Elizabeth.  She is best remembered today as the indomitable Queen Mother with a passion for race horses and salmon fishing.   People of my generation  remember when she and the king were a youngish middle-aged couple with two endearing little girls, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. They stayed in London throughout the blitz, though they could have easily gone to Canada for safety.  Viewers of ‘The King’s Speech’ will know of the struggle the King had with his speech impediment.  I heard on ‘the wireless’ (that’s what we called the radio in those days!) the speech – the climax of the film – that the King made on the outbreak of World War II, and remember thinking that the King’s impediment was not nearly as bad as the popular press had suggested.  I now realize what an ordeal making that speech must have been.

            I remember being told of King George VI’s death.  I was Housing Manager to Gipping Rural District in Suffolk at the time and someone told me the news as I visited a Council House in the village of Haughley.  It came as a complete surprise.  I hadn’t even known that he was ill.  I think that it must have come as a surprise to our top politicians and to members of the Royal family as well.  Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would surely never have embarked on a Commonwealth tour had they imagined for a moment that the King’s death was imminent.

            The accession of our new young Queen in 1952 was hailed as the beginning of a New Elizabethan Age in which our country would recapture some of the splendour of the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth.  It hasn’t worked out quite like that.  Few of us then could have imagined that during the course of the next 60 years we would see the systematic denigration and dismantling of the Welfare State  created by the generation that had won World War II; that in the first decade of the new millennium a spectacular failure of the capitalist free market economy world-wide had meant that Britain’s public services, of which we had been so proud, would be run down, that all of us (except the very rich) would be facing years of hardship; that more young British lives would have been lost and were still being lost in warfare, and that in the  Diamond Jubilee year the gap between rich and poor would have become wider than it had ever been.

            Don’t blame the Queen – blame the politicians and the financiers!  The Queen too has had cause for sadness.  Those sixty years have seen the Empire disappear and the Commonwealth shrink.  She has seen one of her most historic homes – Windsor Castle – threatened with destruction by fire.  She has seen the first marriages of three of her four children end in divorce.  She has said farewell to her Royal Yacht.  Yet she has remained apparently serene, a worthy representative of all her people.  She is just four years younger than I am and I have seen her, in the press and on tv, develop from engaging child to outwardly imperturbable matriarch.  My late wife and I appreciated the card of congratulation that was sent us on her behalf on the occasion of our own Diamond Wedding Anniversary six years ago. 

Heather and I, with our extended family, celebrating our Diamond Wedding Anniversary in Clacton's Quaker Meeting House in April 2006.  Three months after that happy event, Heather’s life came to an end.     

I offer her every good wish, and hope that her lawful heirs and successors, to whom I swore allegiance and loyalty in 1939, profit from her example.  I have been asked how I reconcile my belief that a constitutional monarchy is best for our country with my fervent desire that our country should become a more ‘equal’ society.  There really is no contradiction.  Norway, Sweden and Denmark are all constitutional monarchies.   The USA is a republic.  Yet, I don’t think that anyone would question the assertion that the USA is a far less equal society than every one of those three Scandinavian countries.  In the British Utopia of which I sometimes dream, the principal source of government revenue would be the Citizenship Tax, levied proportionately as the first charge, without exception, on the income of every single citizen, from the wealthiest and most powerful to the very poorest.  The monarch and members of his or her family would be subject to that tax in the same way as the humblest citizen. That, I think, would level off society far more effectively than toppling the monarchy and replacing our hereditary ‘head of state’ with an elected president.

            May God save the Queen and, as the never-used-nowadays second verse of the National Anthem puts it in its final line, may God save us all!’

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…….’

            That’s how, in the silent movies of my childhood, the scene shifted from the menfolk gallantly combating marauding rustlers or Indian warbands, to the ranch-house where the dastardly villain (you could tell him by his twirly moustache and –‘city slicker’ clothes) was threatening the virtue of the rancher’s beautiful daughter.

            At the end of May 2012, as Britain prepared for a four-day Jubilee holiday weekend, life was going on, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan – and at the Leveson Enquiry.

            Tony Blair, not one of my favourite people, was disarmingly honest when he explained that politicians simply couldn’t afford to get on the wrong side of powerful press magnates.  That’s why he had pursued Rupert Murdoch half-way across the world to get into his good books.  No, of course there was no kind of formal agreement between himself and the American (formerly Australian) multi-millionaire.  There didn’t need to be.  Mr Blair was well aware of Murdoch’s policy preferences.

            If there is one thing that is worse than a government-controlled press, it’s a press-controlled government!

            The theme continued with the long awaited appearance before the enquiry of Jeremy Hunt, Culture Minister, who had been given the responsibility of deciding whether or not News International (the Murdoch media empire) should have total control of BSkyB tv.  Mr Hunt explained that he had held, and did hold, a personal view favouring News International’s case but, in the quasi-judicial role to which he had been appointed, he had put his personal views on one side and had acted strictly ‘according to the book’.  He had done nothing wrong.  Why on earth should he resign? 

            I am quite sure that he had done nothing wrong.  He had consulted all the right people and had been able to put affirming ticks in all the right boxes.  When the time came he would be in a position to make his own quasi-judicial decision – and who could possibly doubt what that decision would have been? However Mr Murdoch, evidently more shaken by the phone hacking and police bribing scandal than Mr Hunt had been, withdrew his application for full control of BSkyB.  Mr Hunt, who had done nothing wrong, was off the quasi-judicial hook.

            Prime Minister David Cameron is to appear before Lord Leveson in the near future.  I look forward to hearing his explanation of his sacking Vince Cable from the post of adjudicator for having been tricked into declaring his personal opposition to the BSkyB takeover, and on the same day, appointing Jeremy Hunt, who had equally emphatically declared his support for the takeover, to the same post.  Email evidence suggests that Chancellor George Osborne had also been involved in those decisions. Those two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk (both of whom had close contacts with the Murdoch Empire) had been at it again!

           

           

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