Tendring Topics…….on Line
‘Fifty-three
quid a week!’
I can remember a time when £53 a week would
have seemed to me to be wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. In the circles in which I moved in the 1930s
anyone with an income of £5 a week or more was reckoned to be ‘well to do’.
My dad supported my mum and I on much less than a fiver a week, even
counting in the weekly pension payment he received for his twenty-one years
army service.
Over
eighty years later though, things have changed. Such has been the progress of
inflation that nowadays £53 a week is roughly the amount that someone who is
unemployed can expect to get from the state in ‘benefit’. In contrast I’d be
very surprised if the take-home pay of Mr Ian Duncan-Smith, Work and Pensions
Minister is less than £150,000 a year or £2,800 a week - rather more each week
than an unemployed man gets in a year!
He says though that he could live on £53 a week if compelled to do so –
and has been challenged by his critics to prove it.
I
think it probable that he could manage it, almost certainly for a week and
possibly for several weeks. It wouldn’t
be a fair test though because all the time Mr Duncan-Smith would be well aware
that the discomfort and deprivation – even hunger – that he’d be
feeling, was only temporary. He would
know that in a week or two things would be back to normal. He’d be back to his comfortable home and life-style
and his no-doubt ample and well-balanced diet.
What’s more, he would have proved to his own satisfaction, if to no-one
else, that he could endure without complaint exactly the same hardships as
those constantly moaning plebs.
I have never
tried to live on the equivalent of £53 a week.
I think though that during the winter of 1942/1943 in a large
concentration camp for other-rank PoWs in northern Italy (Campo Concentramento
Prigioneri di Guerra No. 73) I did experience and survive conditions that were as bad as any poverty experienced in this country, at least in the 20th
and present century. We were
ill-clad. We were cold. We were louse-infested. We were constantly
hungry. We had a small maize-flour loaf
(scarcely larger than a bread roll) between two of us each day, plus about a
pint of a thin rice or macaroni soup in which there would sometimes be shreds
of an unidentifiable meat. The Red Cross
Parcels sent from England ,
whose contents (powdered milk, tin of spam, butter, biscuits, coffee or tea)
kept us alive, turned up only spasmodically.
There were
5,000 of us in the camp. Rarely a week
passed by without one of us dying of a
hunger-related illness. A mate and I had the opportunity of having our photos
taken and sent home to our parents. My
mother glanced at mine and tore it up.
She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow I had become.
Most of us
survived because we had one thing that many of today’s benefit claimants lack and
that Mr Ian Duncan-Smith would have in abundance if he ever did put his boast
to the test. That was the hope of
better things to come. Most of us PoWs,
certainly all those who lived to go home, had the firm conviction that the war would end – that year, the next year,
perhaps the year after – and that we would go home again to England to be with those we loved. We even dared to hope that when the war was over we’d play a part
in creating a fairer, peaceful, more equal United Kingdom that would set an
example to a war-weary world.
Our hopes
sustained us and half our hopes were realized.
The war did end and we did get home again. We have
though conspicuously failed ‘to build Jerusalem in England
‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’, insisted
poet Alexander Pope. According to St Paul , Hope, Faith and Love, are the qualities that endure
when everything else has failed. Sadly,
in the United Kingdom
today, hope appears to be fighting a losing battle against despair.
Postscript
It
seems that if, as I suggested above, Government Minister Ian Duncan-Smith does
have an income of ‘only’ £150,000 a year, he is pretty poorly paid by ‘top
people’ standards.
You’ll
remember that in the general banking collapse that triggered our current economic
crisis and age of austerity (yes, as the Governor of the Bank of England has
told us again and again, it was the
banks that dug the hole in which we find ourselves!) one of the first to fall and one that fell
the furthest, was HBOS (Halifax/Bank of Scotland ). Thousands of share-holders (including me,
though fortunately on only a small scale!) saw the value of their shares tumble -
and the government bailed the bank out with millions of pounds of our money.
A
House of Commons Committee investigating the whole sorry business has
identified three top officials of HBOS as primarily responsible and suggested
that they should never again be allowed to hold a directorship in any
company. One of the culprits, Sir James
Crosby, the former Chief Executive of HBOS has bowed to public opinion and
has, as the newspapers put it, fallen on
his sword. He suggests that he
should be deprived of the knighthood bestowed on him by a once-grateful
government and agrees that he should relinquish about a quarter of his pension.
That
‘sword’ must surely have been one of those collapsing ones sometimes used in
costume dramas on stage or tv. The
pension on which he will have to struggle along after this generous act of
contrition will be a mere £400,000 a year!
That, I think, works out at over £76,923 a week, which makes Ian
Duncan-Smith’s estimated £2,800 a week income look pretty paltry! If a Chief Executive who admits
responsibility for the failure of a bank that cost taxpayers and shareholders
millions of pounds can walk away with a pension of £400,000 a year, what on
earth do the top people of successful banks
expect to get on retirement? ‘We’re all in this together!’ You must be joking.
‘What
did you do in the Great War, Daddy?’
This
was the caption on one of World War I’s most successful recruitment posters. It
portrayed an earnest little boy asking his still-young father, after the
war-to-end-wars had come to an end, what part he had played in it. He was clearly hoping to hear stories
of valour and heroism. My dad had been
a regular soldier and served throughout World War I in France , Egypt and Salonica. As a child, I took all that for granted and
asked very few questions about his military past. Among his campaign medals, that he brought
out and polished for each ‘Armistice Day’ (11th November), was a
French 'Medaille d’Honneur with crossed swords', accompanied by a splendid certificate signed by the
President of France. I now deeply
regret that I never asked him how he had earned that, surely unusual,
honour. For the benefit of my own sons
and grandchildren (and any great grandchildren I may one day have!) I have
written a fairly detailed account of my own totally undistinguished military
career from the beginning of World War II till April 1946, almost a year after
its end.
Some
seven years ago two Ipswich ladies – a Mrs
Diana Watts and a Mrs Jane Bradburn contacted me. They had learned that I had served in the
East Suffolk Territorial 67th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery. Their then-deceased dads had served as volunteers
in the same regiment and they were researching the regiment’s history and the
story of their fathers’ lives during the war years. I was happy to tell them
about the two years we had spent in this country preparing to repel the enemy
invasion that had then seemed inevitable. That immediate danger had receded and
I told them about our voyage to Egypt
in the New Zealand
liner Rangitiki in August 1941, and our part in actions against the
Germans and Italians in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier area from November of that
year.
The gun-crew of which I was a member,
with our 6in howitzer, near Hellfire
Pass
I am fourth from the right – wearing a
woolly hat!
We had had our
minor triumphs, taking part in the successful sieges and attacks on Bardia, Wadi Halfaya (‘Hellfire Pass ’),
Sollum and other German and Italian strong-points in the Libyan
desert . In mid-May 1942
the enemy forces, under General Irwin Rommel had launched a major attack. After several weeks of almost continuous
action we became part of the garrison of Tobruk – and were taken prisoner there
when the town fell to the German Afrikakorps on 21st June 1942.
After capture
we were all separated but, with the assistance of friends that I had later made in Germany , I was
able to help Diana Watts find and contact an Austrian family who had befriended
her father in the turmoil at the end of the war. Diana and Jane were indefatigable in their
pursuit of the regiment's somewhat brief history. They managed to track
down a number of survivors. They collected photographs and
memorabilia. They organised regimental
reunions, and a photographic exhibition at the Ipswich Public Library. They attracted the interest of the local
press. They welcomed some of the Regiment’s
survivors (including me) as visitors to their homes.
Sadly,
Diana has died but Jane has carried on with their work, amassing a very
considerable archive.
At the Suffolk Record Office in Ipswich on Saturday 25th
May at 2.30 pm she hopes to share the results of her and Diana’s research with
sons, daughters, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and friends interested in the
wartime story of the men of a Suffolk Artillery Regiment. Using first hand accounts from veterans and
written records, Jane, who is an experienced and entertaining speaker, will
tell their story. It is an occasion that shouldn’t be missed by anyone with a
relative or friend who served
in the 67th! The copy of the poster printed above gives details.
.
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