Week 2 2013

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Half the Human Race.

          The appalling gang-rape and murder of a young woman medical student, travelling with her fiancé on a public bus in India’s capital has produced both local and international protest. While this outrage was taking place the bus is said to have passed several police check-points.  Subsequent events suggest that the Delhi Police show much more enthusiasm for restraining public demonstrations at this atrocity than for preventing such incidents from taking place

            The blatant way in which this young woman was attacked, tortured, violated and then thrown naked from the bus onto the highway, ensured that it made the headlines world-wide.  Many similar, if less public, outrages against women occur in India and other parts of the world daily and are too common to attract more than local media interest. Only last week the Clacton Gazette reported an attack on a young woman and her attempted rape less than half a mile from my home and outside the primary school attended many years ago by my two sons.  Nor are such attacks on women and girls necessarily of a directly sexual nature.  Only weeks earlier an attempt was made, again on a bus but in Pakistan, to murder a girl in her mid teens for her courageous campaigning for the right of girls to enjoy the same educational opportunities as boys. Fortunately, and almost miraculously, this young lady survived the attack and has been discharged from hospital, though she will have to return for further major surgery.  She lives to fight another day for the right of members of her sex to a proper education.

            There is little doubt that a great many such offences against women and girls spring from a conviction, particularly prevalent in the Middle East, that women are an inferior sex created for no other purpose than the service and entertainment of men.  I once heard a supporter of this attitude explaining on tv that it was quite wrong for westerners to suggest that he and many of his compatriots and co-religionists held women in low regard.   On the contrary, he insisted, the women of their households were regarded as their most precious possessions and – like all precious possessions – were kept away from prying eyes and potential danger.  He was quite unable to see that to regard any fellow human as a possession, however highly prized, was in itself deeply offensive.

             Well-meaning people may hesitate to criticise or condemn such an attitude for fear of showing disrespect for a centuries-old culture and its traditions.  Respect has to be earned.   Past English culture and tradition  included burning heretics alive, bear-baiting and cock-fighting, hanging or transporting people to the colonies for trivial offences, torturing and hanging old women denounced as witches, and husbands  beating their wives, provided that they did so with a stick no thicker than a thumb! ! Although our country can’t yet claim to be completely free of bigotry, prejudice and the myth of male superiority, we may thank God that there were those of both sexes who showed no respect whatsoever for those old cultural traditions and who were prepared to oppose and eventually abolish them. 
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           An extreme example of the effects of an uncompromisingly male-dominated society is illustrated by recently published statistics relating to the position of women in Afghanistan.   87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate, one in every eleven Afghan women dies in childbirth and 70 percent are forced into arranged marriages.   I have no doubt at all that those disgraceful figures will become even worse in the next couple of years following the complete withdrawal of NATO troops.  My advice to Afghan women who have embraced western values is to get out while they are still able to do so!

Towards Anglo-German Understanding

            On my return to Clacton from celebrating my 90^th birthday with my family in Zittau Last year, I revised my previous self-published memoirs ‘Zittau…and I’, corrected a couple of errors and added a section about my birthday visit to the town and the warm welcome that my family and I had received there.   In January 2012 I self-published the result as ‘Zittau…..and I’ (2^nd Edition).  I gave copies to all my British friends and relations and sent copies to the new friends that I had made in Germany.

             Among my German friends ‘Zittau….and I’ proved gratifyingly popular.  The scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck is a distinguished historian, a Cultural Senator of the Federal State of Saxony and the former Direktor (Curator) of Zittau’s town museum.  He now devotes his retirement to the conservation and display of the Zittau Grossen Fastentuch  (Great Lenten Veil).  He was particularly enthusiastic.   He arranged for my booklet to be translated into German, secured the interest and support of the Mayor, (Oberbürgermeister Arnd Voight) and of other members of the Council, and members of the Fellowship of the Zittau Lenten Veils (of which I was made an Honorary Member in 2011), and arranged for the German version to be printed and published for sale in aid of the continued preservation and display of the Great Lenten Veil.

As a result, Meine Begegnungen mit Zittau  (I was told that the English title made no sense when translated word for word into German)  was printed and published as a slim hard-back in December 2012.  I was delighted to receive copies just a week or so before Christmas; a very welcome Christmas Present!  It is printed on high quality paper with an introductory preface by Dr Dudeck. There are two black-and-white illustrations included within the text and. fourteen colour photographs illustrating my recent visits to Zittau form a supplement at the back.   These include a full-page picture of my welcome by Oberbürgermeister Arnd Voight on the occasion of my 90^th birthday!

The books are to be sold in aid of the continued preservation and presentation of Zittau’s Great Lenten Veil which has played an important part in my life during the past six years. Now permanently displayed in Zittau’s Museum/Church of the Holy Cross, it attracts some 30,000 visitors a year!

A pencil drawing of my late wife by grandson Christopher. It is one of the illustrations in the text of Meine Begegnungen mit Zittau.

At about the same time as Meine Begegnungen mit Zittau was being printed I had other heartening news from my good friend Ingrid Zeibig, originally from Zittau but now living and working in Bayreuth in Bavaria, and from Joyce Hartung, born and brought up in Sunderland but now married to a German and also  living in Bayreuth.

            Both are members of the Bayreuth Anglo-German Society and Joyce runs an ‘Improve your English’ course for members.   They have been using both my ‘Zittau and I’  (English version of course) and ‘In the Beginning’, ten monologues written by my late wife and myself that purport to be by witnesses of Jesus Christ’s Nativity and its aftermath, as text books in their English classes. Ingrid and Joyce both tell me that members of the Anglo-German Society have thoroughly enjoyed reading them.

            I like to think that the publication of Meine Begegnungen mit Zittau and the use of my own and my wife’s publications by the Anglo-German Society in Bayreuth are small steps towards greater Anglo-German understanding and are thus tiny steps - the 'minute particulars' commended by William Blake perhaps - toward world peace.

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Week 41.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

An Atmosphere of Suspicion

There was a time, years ago, when if the Friend who normally took the Quaker Children’s Class at our Sunday morning Meeting for Worship was absent, other members would step in and take the half dozen or so children we had at that time, under their wing. After the first fifteen minutes of based-on-silence worship, they would take them through to the Children’s room for their ‘lesson’ for the forty-five or so minutes remaining. Fifteen minutes were reckoned to be as long as normal kids could be expected to remain still and silent!

I took my turn, and so long as it happened only very occasionally, I quite enjoyed it. I doubt if I ever taught them anything very useful, but they got to know me, and at the very least, it made sure that their parents could relax in Meeting in the knowledge that their offspring were safe and out of mischief.

When I was a Public Health Inspector, and again when I was the Council’s Public Relations Officer, I would occasionally be invited to visit one or other of the local schools to chat to the children about subjects as varied as food hygiene, road safety, their future civic responsibilities, vandalism, litter dropping and so on.

As I grew older I rejoiced in seeing young children enjoying themselves at play and might occasionally pause for a few moments to watch them.

The first two of those activities I could now undertake only after my past had been searched for criminal activities and it had been certified, not only that I had never been convicted of any paedophilic activities, but that I had never been suspected of them. Were I nowadays to engage in the third one, watching children at play, I have little doubt that there would soon be a police officer on the scene, at the best ordering me to ‘move on’ at once, but more likely inviting me to accompany him or her to the Police Station for interrogation.

Child abuse is a detestable crime. It also seems to be the one crime in which the accused are not only deemed to be guilty until they have proved their innocence, but even when they have successfully done so, are likely to remain under suspicion for the rest of their lives. I feel particularly sorry for schoolteachers, youth leaders and members of the clergy. How easy it must be for a spiteful or revenge-seeking child to ruin forever a reputation and a career by claiming that the teacher, or the vicar, or the new curate, or the scout master, ‘behaved inappropriately’, one of those wonderful 21st century euphemisms that can mean anything from violent sexual assault to laying a friendly arm across the shoulders in sympathy or encouragement.

The latest idiocy in this connection has been the case of the two women police officers, both with young children and with different working shifts, who agreed to look after each-others’ children while the other was on duty. An eminently sensible arrangement that has resulted in their being accused of breaking the law! Very obviously someone whose path they had crossed during the course of their duties had made a complaint. It will, I suppose, have to be pursued. The final result is likely to be that they will both be compelled to pay a stranger to look after their children, rather than have a close friend and colleague look after them for nothing! If that is the law, then the law really is an ass!

Ironically, at almost the same time, a ‘children’s nurse’ in a day nursery who had presumably been thoroughly vetted, was pleading guilty to a series of charges of horrific child abuse! That of course, was a dreadful exception. In the overwhelming majority of day nurseries children are perfectly safe and secure.

Similarly, it can’t be stressed too strongly that most people aren’t paedophiles. Most men are neither rapists nor wife-beaters, most women don’t neglect or physically abuse their kids, and most kids aren’t malevolent little hooligans. There must surely be some way of protecting children without creating the fog of suspicion that nowadays hangs over us all!

Another Time Traveller?

Who, you may well ask, is this aristocratic lady who looks as though she has just stepped out of a tv costume drama set in the 18th Century.

No, she is neither an actor nor a time-travelling visitor from an earlier century. She is, in fact, my good friend Ingrid Zeibig, well-loved aunt of little Maja and Tom Friedrich, whom I mentioned last week. Born and brought up in Zittau, the little German town where I was once a POW, she now lives in historic Bayreuth in Bavaria, home of the Wagner festival and a Mecca for all lovers of Wagner’s music. From time to time she volunteers to transform herself into the Margravine Wilhelmine*. Bewigged and suitably gowned, she graciously agrees to accompany and inform visitors as they stroll round her domain.

Ingrid doesn’t always look quite as regal as that. On my recent trip to Germany with grandson Nick, she made the long journey from Bayreuth in Bavaria to Zittau in the most easterly part of Saxony, to meet Nick and myself again and to act as interpreter and ‘honorary daughter’ to me during my stay in her country.

The picture below was taken at the ceremony to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the restoration of the 500 years old Great Fastentuch or Lenten Veil (in the history of which I am believed to have played a tiny role!) and its establishment in the Museum/Church of the Holy Cross. I had just been presented with copies of the illustrated booklet ‘Rückkehr nach Zittau’, the German version of my article ‘Return to Zittau’ which I had written after my first visit to Zittau as a free man, in 2007.

Ingrid and I are both clutching copies of the German translation of ‘Return to Zittau’.

The Great Fastentuch has, incidentally, recently had its 300,000th visitor since it was installed and exhibited in the Church of the Holy Cross ten years ago. He was an Englishman from Dorset!

*The Margravine Wilhelmine (1709 - 1758) was a daughter of the King of Prussia. Her grandfather, on her mother's side, was our King George I. She married Frederick, Margrave (Marquess) of Bayreuth in 1732. There, decades before the advent of Richard Wagner, she established and nurtured the town's musical and operatic traditions.

Speeding and Cutting the Cost of dealing with Vandals and Hooligans

Public officials’ expensive and time-wasting note taking, box ticking and report writing are a constant complaint both of the victims of anti-social behaviour and of the tax payers who have to pay for it to be tackled. Yet these activities have to be noted and recorded by those on the spot, and passed on to those who will deal with them.

A report in Inside Housing, the official journal of the Institute of Housing, reports the way that Scotland’s South Lanarkshire Council are using mobile technology to deal with this problem.
The local authority has given wardens a piece of technology that lets them enter the details of an incident into a mobile phone which wirelessly transfers the details of the incident directly to a data base in the council’s offices.

Before this technology, developed by software consultants HUB Solutions, had been introduced, wardens had to log the details in a notebook, rewrite them as a report and pass them onto a data entry clerk who entered the details on the database. All of this took forty-eight hours, was prone to backlogs and occupied two staff members. Now, transmission is instant, and some of the warden’s time and all of the clerk’s time is saved.

Peter Hall, Managing Director of Hub Solutions says that his firm has also developed a system, to be tested by Portsmouth Council, that will enable members of the public to report incidents of anti-social behaviour via the internet. Their Gateway System will replace the old method of giving incident diaries to affected members of the public and from these collating a list of events that have to be keyed into a database.

Inside Housing reports Mr Hall as saying that Gateway will reduce the time staff spend recording anti-social incidents by twenty percent and that an added advantage of the system will be that staff will be immediately notified of any incidents, so that they will be able to nip problems in the bud. How valuable such a system might have been to that distraught woman who recently killed herself and her disabled daughter rather than face further persecution from a gang of youths!
Pete and I on holiday in 2007. European travellers may recognise the backdrop, the skyline of Prague

Yes, as you may have guessed, I do have a personal interest in all of this. Peter Hall is my elder son. He rose through the ranks of the staff of Hackney’s Housing Department to the position of Assistant Director of Housing and was in fact, for several months Acting Director. Made redundant following one of the borough’s political and administrative upheavals, he launched HUB Solutions Ltd. a software consultancy specialising in finding solutions to the problems of public authorities. HUB Solutions now has clients throughout the United Kingdom (South Lanarkshire and Portsmouth are pretty distant from each other!) and, as well as an HQ in London, has a base in Glasgow from which to service the firm’s many Scottish clients. Viewers of Taggart on tv may be interested to know that among these is the Strathclyde Police Authority!