Week 30.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

The Covers are off!

The plastic covers and the scaffolding that for months have masked the façade of the converted building in Jackson Road that is to become Clacton’s Travelodge Hotel have been removed. We can now see what the hotel will look like from the outside. No doubt internal work has been simultaneously carried out and, as promised, Clacton’s latest hotel will be open and ready for business by the end of July, less than a fortnight from the posting of this blog.

The new Travelodge Hotel, opposite the ‘Clacton Gazette’ office in Clacton’s Jackson Road is nearing completion.

Everyone knows that it is what happens in August, during the school holidays, that really determines whether or not our holiday trade has a good season. The augurs are promising. While the weather has so far been a bit mixed, we have certainly already had more warm and sunny days than we had in either 2007 or 2008. We have had rain and thunderstorms but, as usual, rather less than practically anywhere else. Even when the skies have been cloudy, it has usually been warm.

Visitor numbers during those three successive spring public holidays suggest that many may be on the way, and that we may have more than the usual number of overseas visitors taking advantage of the weakness of the pound. Despite all the criticism in the correspondence columns of the Clacton Gazette, I believe that most visitors will be attracted by our town’s newly laid-out centre and will be encouraged to come again. I have been telling my German friends (who live nearly 700 miles from their nearest seaside beach!) about the Essex holiday coast’s low rainfall, welcoming piers, colourful public gardens, and miles of tide-washed sandy beaches, not to mention the proximity of historic Colchester and the lovely Stour Valley; just as I tell my English friends about the mountains and lakes, the hotels and pubs, the ancient towns and villages and the low prices, of the three-country-corner land where the frontiers (which happily no longer exist!) of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic come together.

‘Some corner of a foreign field…….’

Nowadays, the bodies of soldiers killed in action are brought home for burial and thus do not become, as claimed in Rupert Brooke’s poem 'The Soldier', ‘some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England’. Plenty of British blood has watered Afghan furrows though, from our two disastrous adventures there in the 19th century. It has, no doubt, mingled with the Russian blood that was shed there just a few short years before our own latest campaign began.

I am writing these words on Tuesday 14th July, the day that eight bodies were flown home together, after one of the worst weeks for the British army since the Falklands War. I sometimes wonder how many British and American, not to mention Russian and Afghan, lives might have been spared had our politicians refrained from encouraging and giving covert support to those to whom we then referred as ‘the gallant Mojihadin’ but who are now the fanatical insurgents exacting a bloody daily toll from among our young soldiers. It is quite possible that British or American agents taught them how to make those simple roadside bombs currently causing so much death and destruction.

Can the present war be won? Top British and American politicians insist that it must be – but then I have little doubt that British politicians said much the same thing in 1850 and 1882, and that the same claim was made in Moscow just a few years ago. Events proved otherwise then and I very much fear that they will do the same this time….after even more lives have been lost.
I have no doubt that NATO Forces (what on earth has Afghanistan to do with the North Atlantic?) can subdue the Taliban and its allies, possibly even succeeding in eliminating all their strongholds and hiding places. But ideas (even thoroughly bad ones!) can’t be destroyed by force. I don’t believe that we can establish an Afghan government with either the inclination or the strength to eliminate in Afghanistan the pernicious doctrines of the Taliban – opposition to democracy and to freedom of speech and religion; opposition to girls receiving any education beyond religious instruction, and relegation of women to the status of personal property; slavish adherence to the most intolerant and restrictive interpretation of the Islamic Faith – the equivalent of that of the Christian iconoclasts, witch-hunters and heretic-burners of past centuries.

Opinion polls suggest that almost half of British people feel that we should pull our forces out of Afghanistan. My own instinctive feeling is the same, but I realize that that too could have disastrous consequences. After the Soviet withdrawal (‘Afghanistan is free again!’, our newspapers and politicians proclaimed) there was a not-widely-publicised bloodbath in Kabul and other Afghan cities. Those who had co-operated with the Soviet-approved regime were hunted down and slaughtered and Afghan women and girls (who had enjoyed more freedom under the Soviets than they had ever before known!) were again reduced to the status of chattels and house slaves.

Does anyone imagine that the situation would be any different if we were to withdraw our troops? Red, and Red-White-and-Blue flags look remarkably similar to Taliban zealots. They believe that both are flown by Godless infidels intent on attacking their religion and destroying their centuries old customs and culture. The conviction that God is on their side can inspire men and women to great heights of heroism – but it can also license deeds of almost unbelievable cruelty and inhumanity.

We cannot with clear consciences withdraw our forces from Afghanistan before we have found a way protecting, or evacuating, those Afghans who have embraced the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-government towards which we have urged them.

We ‘ignorant pensioners’?

Is the ‘Tendring Pensioner’ destined to replace the ‘Essex girl’ as an iconic symbol of human ignorance? It seems that the Tendring District is an area of ‘low educational achievement’ with 22 percent (about 9,500 people) having no qualifications, compared with a mere 12.5 percent across the East of England.

It’s OK though. It isn’t the up-and-coming young and middle-aged who’re ignorant. The survey has been ‘skewed’ by the large number of over-65s living in the district and, of course, they didn’t have the educational advantages that the young enjoy today! The Clacton Gazette tries, in its understanding-the-elderly way, to be helpful. ‘It is never too late for learning’ announces its ‘Comment’ column. It assures us that, ‘for those that do commit to learning later in life, they are much the richer for it and education is one of the few things in the world which, if it were universally available and availed of, can be seen as a panacea for most of the ills that infect us at home or abroad. If, at eighty-eight, I wanted to express such patronising rubbish I would certainly manage to do so rather more succinctly and literately than that!

Doesn’t it occur to whoever conducted the survey, and to those who pontificate in the columns of the press, that lack of ‘paper qualifications’ could simply mean that education authorities of fifty, sixty or (in my case) over seventy years ago didn’t distribute these qualifications quite as freely as they do today?

A class of nine-year old boys at Springfield Council School, Kitchener Road, Ipswich in 1930. I am the anxious looking little boy with glasses sitting just by the knee of the Headmaster (A Mr Offord , ‘old Pip Offord’ to us kids – behind his back, of course). I was admitted to the Northgate Grammar School a year later.

In the 1930s I was one of a minority who attended a secondary school and stayed on at school until I was sixteen. The vast majority of my contemporaries received only a primary (we called it an elementary) education and left school at 14. For them there was no ‘school leaving certificate’ but that did not mean that they were totally ignorant. Very few boys and girls in those days left school at 14 unable to read, write and do as much arithmetic as they were likely to need in later life. They also had a sketchy idea of Britain’s history and of the geography of the world, and at least some acquaintance with English classical poetry and prose including, of course, the Bible. Today’s sixteen-year-old school leavers who knew as much would certainly get some kind of a certificate.

At my secondary school we studied for the London University ‘General Schools Certificate’ which, for those who obtained high enough marks, conferred exemption from the Matriculation (minimum entrance requirement) of London University. For that reason the exam was often known simply as ‘the Matric’. To obtain the certificate we had to study and reach the pass standard in at least five subjects including English (language and literature), Mathematics (arithmetic including logarithms and stocks and-shares, algebra, geometry and trigonometry), a foreign language (at my school only French was on offer), a science, and at least one, of either history, geography or another science (general physics, chemistry, biology and, I think, a more advanced physics, were on offer). To obtain matric. exemption you had to achieve ‘credit’ level in all of those five subjects.

It will be obvious that many pupils who took the exam failed in just one or two subjects and left school without any kind of certificate. It would be absurd though to claim that, because of that, they were less well-educated than someone who left school last year with a couple of mediocre GCSEs.

I sat the exam in English, Maths, French, history, geography and ‘general physics’ (guaranteed to be about principles only, with no mathematical questions!) and passed with Matric Exemption, though only because the examiners were allowed a little latitude. They considered that my ‘Distinction’ in English outweighed my ‘lower than Credit standard’ in French! I didn’t, of course, go to London University. In 1937 that wasn’t really an option for working class pupils, but the Matric did help me to get a better job!

Oh yes, along the way to eighty-eighty I have picked up two or three other professional qualifications, including a certificate qualifying me to teach in one of those adult educational colleges so warmly recommended to us poor ignorant old pensioners by the Clacton Gazette!

Swine ‘Flu

Swine ‘Flu is in the news again. It is spreading rapidly…..and there have been some deaths. These are obviously a tragedy for the relatives and friends of the victims. For most people though, Swine ‘Flu remains a mild affliction, less serious than the ‘seasonal ‘flu’ that occurs every winter and which also always claims some deaths.

Generally with epidemics it is the very young and the very old who are most at risk. This time, although the very young are in danger the very old, like me, appear to be immune. This is, I suppose, most likely to be for the rather boring reason that we have already encountered and beaten off every possible mutation of the ‘flu virus.

I prefer to think though that on this, Charles Darwin’s anniversary year, we are being given a demonstration that ‘survival of the fittest’ is not a universal rule. We oldies, with no possible evolutionary justification for our continued existence, manage to resist swine ‘flu better than our still-young, active and virile contemporaries!

Week 7 09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Candlemas…and after!

Last year at this time (yes, I have been writing Tendring Topics….on Line for over a
Year!) I quoted an old rhyme about Candlemas which I have found usually provides a pretty reliable long-range weather forecast:

If Candlemas be clear and bright, winter will have another flight.
If Candlemas be dull with rain, winter has gone and will not come again!

Neither forecast fits this year’s Candlemas (Monday 2nd February) which, you’ll recall, was overcast all day and gave us the heaviest and most severe snowstorms that we had experienced for decades. As usually happens, our Essex coast escaped much more lightly than most. I doubt if Clacton had more than about half an inch of snow. Elsewhere though, the country was brought to a standstill, with closed schools, no bus services whatsoever in London and not much better elsewhere, and rail and air services either cancelled altogether or severely disrupted.

Perhaps there needs to be a third line of folklore verse. How about?

If Candlemas be snowy day, winter is here……and here to stay!

The photograph on the left shows my back garden early on 2nd February this year with snow lying, but not very deeply. The one on the right is of the road in which my younger son lives in Enfield, taken on the same day and at about the same time……and there were many places that had much more snow than Enfield.

Darwin’s Other Legacy

I am very sorry that Sir David Attenborough should have received hate mail in connection with his exposition of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the agnosticism that he believes follows naturally from that theory. I am particularly sorry that this hate mail should appear to have come from those who ‘profess and call themselves Christian’.

Surely we who hold the Christian faith should attempt, however imperfectly, to live in the imitation of Christ. Since none of us is perfect we shall certainly fail in this attempt. I hope though that very few would fail so sadly as to imagine that Jesus would or could ever send a message of hate to any of his fellow men or women; certainly not to someone who, whether or not he realizes it, has devoted much of his adult life to revealing the wonder of God’s creation. Whatever are his personal beliefs, few can have done more than Sir David to invoke among the rest of us ‘the fear (or awe) of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom’.

I’m certainly not one of those ‘creationists’ who believe that a ‘ready for instant use’ world was created by God during the course of six days in the late summer of 4004 BC. Does anyone really still believe that? On the other hand, neither do I believe that the universe came into being by blind chance as a result of the accidental juxtaposition of just the right atoms billions of years ago, that life arose as a result of a similarly accidental combination of atoms and natural forces, and that evolutionary theory explains everything that has happened since. That would demand from me an act of faith far greater than that required for acceptance of, for instance, the Nicene Creed.

I am sure that many people believe, as I do, that God is fulfilling his purpose through evolution, as part of a creative process that began in the infinitely distant past, is taking place today, and will continue into the infinitely distant future. As a Quaker Christian I believe that something of God’s essential nature, his ‘inward light’, is the heritage of every single human, whatever his or her race, colour or creed, and that that ‘inward light’ was personified in Jesus Christ some 2,000 years ago. It is this instinct within ourselves that urges us towards truth, love, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation; all the things that we know instinctively are good. We may stifle it, ignore it or deny its existence but we cannot utterly destroy it. ‘The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overwhelm it’.

Godless interpretations of Darwinism assume that human life has no spiritual dimension whatsoever. The material world that we can see and touch is, it proclaims, all that there is. What we call ‘love’ is just a bio-chemical reaction in the brain that has evolved to ensure the reproduction of the species and encourage its survival. This is the sole purpose of life, including our own. The hope of eternal life is a delusion that has evolved to prevent our being diverted from our evolutionary purpose by the fear of personal extinction.

Acts that we would describe as being of heroism and self-sacrifice are simply those of individuals whose instinct for the survival of the species has evolved more strongly than the instinct for self-preservation. The work of Shakespeare and Milton, of Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, of Archimedes, Galileo, Isaac Newton and Einstein are just the result of evolution having induced fortuitous electro-chemical reactions in their brains.

This kind of Darwinism, reduced to its lowest common denominator of ‘Survival of the Fittest’, justifies the subjugation and genocide of ‘inferior’ humans by those who consider themselves to be ‘superior’. It provided a justification for the Nazi death camps. The Nazis believed that they were fulfilling their evolutionary destiny as a master-race by enslaving and eliminating what they considered to be inferior human stock. Fundamentalist Darwinism has no time for those of us who clearly have no evolutionary purpose …… octogenarians (like myself!) for instance, the mentally or physically disabled, the weak, the drop-outs and the miss-fits. As for the preservation of endangered species and threatened human ethnic groups, extinction is their evolutionary destiny. It would be wrong to interfere.

Would you wish to live in the ‘brave new world’ to which unfettered natural selection points us? I wouldn’t. Fortunately we don’t have to. We have been given (or have evolved) free will. We accept, welcome in fact, the idea of evolution but we do not have to become its helpless puppets. We are free to follow what our Quaker Advices and Queries refer to as ‘the promptings of love and truth in our hearts, and to trust them as the leadings of God’. They will ultimately I believe, bring us toward the fulfilment of part of the universal Christian prayer, ‘Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven.

Friday the Thirteenth

This coming Friday has a deep, and sad, significance for me. Not because it is the allegedly unlucky ‘Friday the thirteenth’ but because it marks the 64th anniversary of an event that, for the first time in my life, made me feel ashamed to be British.

It was February 1945. I was twenty-three years old and had been taken prisoner at Tobruk in North Africa on 21st June 1942. Since September 1943 I had been a member of a small Arbeitskommando (work camp) of British prisoners of war in Zittau, a small town in eastern Germany. Our main work was loading and unloading railway wagons but we also undertook any other manual task for which we might be needed.

The winter of 1944/’45 was a bitterly cold one in eastern Europe. There was deep snow and for weeks we endured subzero temperatures, day and night. However, any discomfort that this may have caused us was tempered by the conviction that our time of captivity was coming to an end.

Allied armies, after a temporary set-back with ‘the Battle of the Bulge’ at Christmas, were making steady progress on the western and southern fronts.

Meanwhile in Zittau, what had begun as a barely audible murmur from the east had grown louder and louder, and by February, had become a continuous rumble of gunfire as the Soviet Armies advanced through Poland and into Germany. Throughout that bitter winter a steadily swelling stream of refugees from the rapidly approaching Eastern Front had made its way westward through the town. There were old men (all the young ones had been called up), women and children……a few in broken down motor vehicles powered by Holzgas, a fuel produced from smouldering wood chippings, some with all their worldly goods loaded onto ox wagons (the army had seized all the horses). Many trudging through the snow pulling small and heavily laden hand-carts. They were not all German. Among them were allied prisoners of war from Stalags in Poland, Russian and Ukrainian ‘slave workers, and defeated fragments of the armies of Nazi Germany’s allies, Bulgarians, Romanians, volunteers from neutral but Fascist Spain and renegade Cossacks. People from Zittau, people we had known and worked with, had begun to join that westward flow.

Before and during World War II this building was the Zittau headquarters of Kurt Kramer, wholesale grocer. For several weeks, early in 1945, another POW and I worked here, pulling a large hand-cart and, with an elderly German civilian, delivering goods to retail grocers in the town. One day we returned after a delivery to find that one of the refugees, a young woman, had decided that her life was no longer worth living. She had climbed to the top-most storey and thrown herself down onto the cobbles below.


Neither they, nor we, nor our guards, nor the Germans with whom we worked had any doubt that the war would end within months, if not weeks. Few thought any longer of ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’. We all just wanted an end to the misery and carnage.

The refugees were heading for Dresden, some sixty miles west of Zittau, where they would be sorted out and distributed to those parts of Germany that were still considered to be relatively safe. By 13th February Dresden was crowded with refugees, as well as with its own population of German civilians, allied POWs and slave workers from allied countries.

That was the night on which the RAF struck. The American Air Force continued the attack on the following day. We British prisoners in Zittau, only some 60 miles from the target, spent the night in the cellar of the building in which we were housed. In Dresden itself 13 square miles of the beautiful and historic city were destroyed. Estimates of the, mostly civilian, dead vary widely but the true figure is generally accepted as being somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000, the majority burnt alive in the fire-storms produced by the raids. Bad news travels fast and we in Zittau learnt of the destruction and loss of life on the following morning, as the second onslaught by the American Air Force was in progress. It was the only time that I personally experienced hostility from German civilians

These raids, carried out just twelve weeks before the German surrender, were not, of course, comparable with the mass slaughter of the Holocaust. They do however put outrages like ‘nine-eleven’ and for instance, the shelling of Sarajevo by the Serbs during the Yugoslav civil war (reckoned to be a war crime) into perspective.

They changed my attitude to modern warfare and, just two or three years later, were a major factor in my wife Heather and I deciding to join the peaceful, and peace-making Quakers.
Within a few days of the bombing of Dresden it was decided to move 'treasures' from Zittau Town Museum to a place of safety. A party of us POWs had the task of loading a lorry with heavy cases, going with it to Mount Oybin, the spectacular mountain above, a few miles from the town, and unloading them into a ruined monastery at its summit. It is only during the last few years that I have learned that among these treasures was the seven centuries old Zittauer Fastentuch, an enormous piece of linen having painted on it 90 pictures illustrating events recorded in the Old and New Testaments. This ensured me a little local celebrity on recent visits to Zittau.