Week 27.10

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Dedham Vale Hopper

The Dedham Vale Hopper sounds as though it might be a seriously endangered species, found only on the Suffolk/Essex border. In fact though it is a new, very promising, development that could indirectly benefit the whole of our area. I have long thought that our Tendring Holiday Coast, historic Colchester, and the lovely Constable country of Dedham Vale complement each other as a holiday and touring destination and that what benefits one will ultimately be to the advantage of the other two.

The Hopper is a sight-seeing bus that, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays throughout the summer, is running on a circuit from Manningtree railway station through Flatford, East Bergholt, Stratford St. Mary, Dedham, lawford and back to Manningtree. It sets off hourly from Manningtree station from 9.40 a.m., the final tour of the day starting at 5.25 p.m.

















Left - Bridge Cottage, Flatford. Right - Flatford Mill

This service began on Saturday 3rd July and will continue until Sunday 26th September. It has been designed to connect with rail services from Liverpool Street Station to Manningtree and is also accessible by rail from Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester and Harwich.

As an added incentive it is to be free for the first four weeks of its operation. That, I think, takes us to the end of July. From then on it will cost just £2 for a day ticket that will allow passengers to hop on or off the bus (hence the ‘Hopper’!) anywhere along the route.

Of special interest to American visitors is Sherman House, Dedham, ancestral home of General Sherman of ‘Marching through Georgia’ fame in the American Civil War.

The project is being funded by the National Lottery, the National Trust, and the Dedham Vale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the Stour Valley Countryside Project. It is being run by the Hadleigh community bus service and funding is assured until 2012. Adrian Clarke of the National Trust, is quoted as saying; ‘We are delighted to be supporting the Hopper Bus service. We want to encourage people to visit this beautiful area in a sustainable, environmentally-friendly way’.


I wish the Dedham Vale Hopper project the success that it deserves. The auspices are good. A pilot scheme undertake in 2005 proved very successful.


I hesitate to mention the weather in this blog because the last time I did so the wind promptly swung round to the north and the temperature dropped ten degrees!

The Cathedral-like interior of Dedham’s parish church.


However, as I write it does seem possible that we may expect a summer with plenty of warm, sunny weather, interspersed with heavy, perhaps thundery, showers. It could be – in fact has been – a lot worse!

Professional Politicians

A month or so ago I forecast in this column the future development of a breed of professional local politicians, managing to acquire a comfortable income by serving as elected members on local authorities and other public bodies. I hardly expected confirmation of this forecast to present itself either quite so quickly or quite so near to home.

It seems that local husband and wife team Neil Stock and Sarah Candy net total allowances of £91,000 a year for their roles on Tendring District Council, the Essex County Council and the North East Essex NHS. That, of course, is just their spare-time voluntary work. Their ‘day job’ is running a very successful mail-order fashion and haberdashery enterprise from their Little Bromley home, with customers world-wide.

Mrs Candy is the biggest contributor to this successful husband-and-wife partnership. Last year she earned more than £46,000 from Essex County Council as Cabinet Member for children’s services plus £15,500 for her position as Cabinet member for Planning with Tendring District Council and more than £5,000 as a non-executive director at North East Essex Primary Care Trust. I hope that the meeting times of these three bodies never coincide! Mr Stock meanwhile, collects £25,000 as Leader of Tendring District Council.

Mr Stock is reported as saying, ‘We are both incredibly busy people who do an incredible amount of work. It might not even equate to the minimum wage, the number of hours we put in’. The ‘incredible’ was of course his word, not that of the Gazette interviewer. If they really are doing so much work that their income doesn’t equate to the minimum wage they are both heading for a serious breakdown and I feel very sorry for them.

With another comment made by Mr Stock I whole-heartedly agree. He said that there should be a national debate over whether councillors needed to become full-time professionals because of the workload, which he blamed on the Labour Government, for introducing cabinet-style local government. One thing is certain. I am sure that a local authorities don’t need top officials on salaries in the region of £200,000 a year and council members on ‘allowances’ amounting to tens of thousands.

During my time as Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I helped to entertain a journalist from Virginia, USA, who was studying public administration in the UK. He admired practically everything he saw. I showed him over Clacton’s Percy King Council Housing Estate (I had fairly recently bade it farewell as Housing Manager). It was at that time virtually vandal-free and well kept and he was full of praise. It was, he assured me, very different from public housing in the States.

His particular admiration though was for our elected councillors who, at that time, were only refunded out-of-pocket expenses for their services. I sat with him in the Public Gallery through one or two pretty boring Committee Meetings. He was astonished at the service they rendered for no personal reward and for nothing more than a desire to serve the public. In the States, he told me, people serve on public bodies only to advance themselves or to further their family’s interests.

I reckon that if he came back now he’d feel more at home!

Penal Reform

I have always entertained a warm feeling for now-Justice-Minister Ken Clarke. He is a colourful, larger-than-life character who, unlike most top politicians, would probably be a welcome and entertaining companion on a long train journey. I don’t agree with many of his ideas but he does have in my opinion very sound view on European integration and has, so it now appears, astonishingly progressive views on Penal Reform.

He is surely the very last person likely to be accused of being a head-in-the-clouds, woolly minded, bleeding-heart do-gooder. Yet, in direct contradiction to one of his predecessors, Michael Howard, who evoked a standing ovation at a Tory Conference by proclaiming that ‘Prison works!’ Ken Clarke declares unequivocally that it doesn’t.

Britain’s grossly overcrowded prisons are, he says, wastefully expensive human warehouses from which well over half the inmates offend again within months of their release. We must, he says, reduce the prison population, concentrating on reform and rehabilitation rather than punishment. There should be fewer custodial sentences and more sentences to service in the community. Firms and charitable organisations should be offered cash incentives to help with the rehabilitation of discharged prisoners.

I wish him every success in his endeavours. It will probably earn him insults from The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express and rather more measured disapproval from The Daily Telegraph. However his views on Europe have no doubt already accustomed him to that.

Dire warnings!

The River Gipping at Sproughton Mill – in the 1930s an ideal spot for angling, and for swimming!

Directly we have a spell of warm weather we have dire warnings from Health and Safety experts, about the perils of bathing in rivers and lakes, no matter how inviting the water may look on a very hot day. The water will be colder and deeper than you think and there may well be hidden obstacles that endanger life and limb. Even if you are a strong swimmer, confine your activities to public baths or swimming pools. Such warnings always revive memories of my childhood and youth spent on the outskirts of Ipswich, where my friends and I received no such warnings – and probably wouldn’t have heeded them if we had!

My home was within easy walk, and even easier cycle ride, of the River Gipping, not one of England’s greatest waterways but one of which I have many fond memories. Along its banks I spent many happy leisure hours as a boy. From about the age of fifteen I was a keen angler, the terror of the roach, perch and pike that lurked in its depths. From an even earlier age (I was a competent swimmer before I was ten) my friends and I would enjoy a swim in its waters on hot summer days. Ipswich was well provided with municipal swimming pools but our parents had to watch every penny and could ill afford frequent requests for the 'threepence or sixpence' entrance charge. The river was free, and much more fun. Possibly because we learned from the experience of other older kids of the potential dangers, I don’t recall any serious accidents and certainly no drownings. Perhaps we were just lucky.

Heather and I in September 1939

It was by the Gipping’s tree-shaded stream that I did my ‘courting’ during the first fortnight of World War II. Pupils from Wanstead County High School had been evacuated to Ipswich. They were, I think, sent there by mistake as they remained only two weeks. Among those evacuees was fifth-former Heather Gilbert, then not quite sixteen. I was a just-eighteen-year old soldier, newly called up with the Territorials. Heather and I met, were attracted to each other and enjoyed a few precious days and evenings together. It was the very beginning of a relationship that ended only with Heather’s death in 2006, sixty-seven years later and after sixty happy years of marriage.

Cheer up. It ny never happen!

As I write these words the immdiate future of this blog is in doubt. My broadband internet service is provided by BT. Currently there is an industrial dispute and I understand that there could be a strike, threatening my email and www service, as soon as next Monday (12th July).

I would, I hope, continue to write these blogs (at my age I don't like to make firm promises!) but would be unable to post them onto the internet until the strike was over.

Pious Victorians used to add the letters DV (the initials of the Latin for 'God willing') to any written promise. Perhaps I should do the same to my assurance that Normal Service would be resumed as soon as possible!

Still, as we used to say in the Army, 'Cheer up. It may never happen!'

Week 16.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

The Easter Holiday

As so often happens, in London at least (and I doubt if it was very different in Clacton!) Easter was overcast, drizzly and chilly until the afternoon of Bank Holiday Monday when, just for a few hours, we basked in warm spring sunshine.

However I had a very enjoyable and active break. My grandson Nick was home from Brussels for Easter, and granddaughter Jo was also home from Sheffield with my younger son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn. They live just a mile or two from my elder son and daughter-in-law, with whom I was staying. It was therefore an opportunity for a family get-together.

On Sunday morning Pete drove Arlene and myself to Southwark Cathedral where we attended and took part in an Easter Choral Eucharist. It was a really special occasion as it was televised live for BBC 1. Every seat in the Cathedral was occupied and there were over forty in the choir! If you watched it on tv you’ll know that it was a very splendid and a very happy event.

Afterwards we watched the service on BBC i-player. Arlene and I were able to spot ourselves in the congregation, but we did of course, know where to look.

Left -Magnolia in Bloom in the gardens at Wisley

Then, on Bank Holiday Monday, Pete drove us to the Royal Horticultural Society’s HQ and gardens at Wisley in Surrey. The sun came out while we were there and it was lovely to see the spring flowers and the blossoming trees and shrubs in the spring sunshine. There was a fascinating selection of plants in the enormous glass house where, thanks to clever design, plants from dry and temperate parts of the world are able to live and flourish under the same glass roof as those from tropical rain forests.

It was a lovely break and I enjoyed every moment of it. It's nice to be home in Clacton again though!

Right - a woodland path at Wisley

The Lovely Stour Valley

A new exhibition of John Constable’s work displaying his portraits rather than his already well-known landscapes*, a new biography ‘Constable in Love’, featuring his seven-year long courtship of Maria Bicknell, the girl he was to marry, and a National Trust Tour ‘Early Summer in the Stour Valley’** starting on Saturday 23rd May, brought back memories of my own of the lovely Stour Valley and, in particular, the ‘Constable country’ centred on Flatford and Dedham.

I was a keen fresh-water angler in my teenage years and sometimes on a Saturday or during the school holidays, I would seek a change from the familiar reaches of the River Gipping. I would get my mother to make me a packed lunch and carrying all my fishing gear on my bicycle, peddle my way along the London Road from Ipswich to East Bergholt and then on to Flatford for a day’s angling in pastures new.

Below - Bridge Cottage, once owned by John Constable’s father, and now a welcoming restaurant, is the first sight that the visiting motorist or cyclist sees in Flatford.

That was not my only experience of Flatford. Mr Alfred Morris, the headmaster of Ipswich’s Northgate Secondary School for Boys (there was a separate girls’ school) was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Accordingly, he had established a tradition that the day before the annual London University School Leaving Exam began, all the candidates would spend a day on the river.

We turned up at school as usual on our bikes (we were nearly all cyclists in those days) but bringing with us packed lunches. We then cycled en masse to Flatford. Here we clambered into skiffs hired by the school and spent an enjoyable day rowing (and some of us swimming) on the Stour between Flatford and Dedham. Those, of course, were the days before everybody became obsessed with ‘health and safety’!

By about 4.00 p.m. we all made our way up river to Dedham, where a lavish tea was provided for us in one of the village’s restaurants. The tea, like the hire of the skiffs, was paid for by the school. Replete, we rowed back to Flatford for the long cycle ride home. Many of us sat the exam the next day with aching backs and limbs and blistered hands but, on the whole, I think that our results justified the headmaster’s obsession.

I have been back to Flatford many times since and on one occasion hired a skiff and rowed some visiting American friends from Flatford to Dedham and back again. It still retains the charm that it exerted in the mid-1930s. Age however has brought a greater appreciation of Flatford and the River Stour as the inspiration and subject of Constable’s best-known works, together with the historical interest of Dedham’s cathedral-like parish church. Just opposite is Sherman House, the ancestral home of the Federal General who marched his victorious army through Georgia ‘from Atlanta to the sea’, during the American Civil War

Left -Sherman House, Dedham. Above Dedham Parish Church

It has been forecast that, thanks to the economic down-turn an extra £5 million will this year be spent on holidays in England. I certainly hope that our Essex Holiday Coast gets its fair share of it. The fact that we are little more than half an hour’s drive from the lovely Stour Valley, with its natural beauty and its artistic and historical associations, should attract the many discriminating visitors who want a little more from their holiday than sun, sea and sand.

*‘Constable Portraits; The Painter and his Circle’, National Portrait Gallery until 14 June.
** First tour begins at 10.30 a.m., cost £5 per person. For details phone 01206 298260

MPs’ Expenses

I have found the unfolding revelations about MPs’ expenses depressing rather than (or perhaps as well as) outrageous. I don’t find the continual excuse and justification that not a thing has been done that is against the rules, in the least reassuring. Yes, of course the rules need a thorough overhaul but somehow in my innocence I had imagined that MPs weren’t in the business for their personal profit but to serve their fellow men and women; ‘to make a difference’ as they say these days.

Surely that doesn’t include making a close study of the rule book to find out exactly how much money you can extract from the public purse in ‘expenses’ without risking expulsion from Parliament or having to ‘assist the Police with their enquiries’. Our parliamentary representatives continually refer to each other as ‘honourable members’. I would have thought that it was thoroughly dishonourable, even if not illegal, to claim for expenses that were unjustifiable or clearly need not have been incurred.

Could it be because our representatives are no longer conviction politicians with a cause that they find themselves compelled to promote at whatever personal cost? Nowadays are they simply men and women who have chosen politics as a career? Many would find it a very attractive one and it is one for which there is never a shortage of applicants. MPs enjoy a generous salary and (at the moment anyway) almost unlimited expenses, together with a certain local and possibly even national and international celebrity. Provided that they keep on the right side of the Party whips they can expect occasional luxurious ‘fact finding’ trips abroad at the national expense plus, if they can manage to get re-elected often enough, a very comfortable pension, and possibly a knighthood or a life peerage, at the end

I have, in the past, been highly suspicious of burning-eyed, honey-tongued (or vitriol tongued!) zealots, ‘who will not cease from mental fight, nor will their swords sleep in their hands’ till they have built their own particular version of New Jerusalem ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’. Experience suggests that they are every bit as likely to lead us to disaster. I have to say though that I can’t imagine Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Tony Benn or Eric Skinner considering, even for one moment, the possibility of ‘fiddling their expenses’.