Week 16 2013

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 20^th 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’s green and pleasant land’.  In 1944 not even the most incorrigible pessimist among us would have imagined that nearly seventy years later there would be wars and rumours of wars worldwide, and that in our own country there would be hunger, homelessness and unemployment, with the poor and disadvantaged depending on soup runs and food banks for survival.

‘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’ (11^th 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 67^th 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, Christmas 1941

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 21^st 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 25^th 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 67^th!   The copy of the poster printed above gives details.

                                                                                     

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Week 19 2012

Tendring Topics.........on Line

 ‘Deja vu’

             As I get older and older I find that practically everything that happens around me reminds me of an incident in the distant past. ‘There is nothing new under the sun’, as the author of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes remarks.  A few weeks ago the government’s crass handling of a possible petrol shortage included the potentially lethal advice to motorists to have a jerrican or two of petrol stored in the garage.  This triggered a memory of the coining of the word ‘jerrycan’ during the winter of 1941/1942 to refer to portable steel petrol containers captured from the German Army in the Libyan Desert.

            The current heavy rain and flooding in the midst of a serious drought might have been thought to be a unique occurrence.  It again took me back in memory to the Libyan desert; this time a few months after the naming of the jerrycan.  There can be few places on earth more arid and barren than the Libyan desert in the area of Tobruk.  A wilderness of rock and sand extends for mile after desolate mile.  Through it,  from the barren desert in the south to the sea in the north, run a number of deep valleys or ‘wadies’, carved out centuries earlier by now-dried-up rivers at a time when Libya’s climate was very different from that today.

            In one such wadi the 231^st Medium Battery RA was stationed in the spring of 1942 to oppose the advance into Egypt of General Rommel’s re-equipped and reinvigorated Afrikakorps.  Our eight 6in howitzers, pointing westwards, were in protective gunpits dug into the valley floor.  Round them were the bivvy tents of the crew, erected over widened slit trenches that afforded a measure of protection from bombardment and made them relatively comfortable sleeping quarters. From time to time one or other of the two troops of four guns would be ordered out into no-mans-land (officially it was called ‘the operational area’) for a day, to shell and exchange fire with unseen enemy gun positions or troop concentrations a few miles to our west.   Both sides were testing the other’s strengths and weaknesses in preparation for a major offensive.

A flooded gunpit near Gazala, Libya, March 1942. The gun barrel is almost concealed by camouflage netting swathing the whole gunpit.           

We were sure that it never rained in the Libyan desert. Very occasionally though, it does! One night, I think it must have been in March, black storm clouds blew in from the Mediterranean.  Amid flashing lightning and the crash and rumble of thunder the heavens opened and rain bucketed down, perhaps for a couple of hours, perhaps longer.   It was long enough to transform our wadi from a long-dried-up river bed, to an active fast-flowing river.  The gunpits quickly filled with water which rose to above the wheel axles of the guns.  The trenches over which our bivvy tents were erected were inundated, soaking our bedding and spare clothing. 

            Had Rommel attacked that night there would have been little resistance. The weather though is non-partisan.   Rommel’s troops were rendered impotent by that same storm.  The Afrikakorps was as incapable of attacking as we were of defending.

            That morning there was not the usual, ‘Stand to on the guns!  at first light, with every gun crew ready for action.  Dawn broke.   The rain stopped, the flood subsided, draining away into the desert sand.  The guns, our bivvies and – eventually – our clothes and bedding, dried out in hot North African sunshine.

            By sunset we were more-or-less back to normal.  The evening ‘Stand to!’ took place without incident.  Much worse things than that were to happen to us before we saw England again. It was just an unexpected incident, with no harm done.   It was an incident that has been brought to the forefront of my memory by recent floods on our own thirsty land.

Legacies!

          Spokesmen for the Coalition Government complain ad nauseum about the terrible financial legacy left them by their predecessors.   It’s true that they took over at a time of financial crisis; thugh it was not one created by the previous Government, but by the greed and incompetence of the bankers.  I remember that in the last months of the Labour Government, Britain’s economy was showing signs of the green shoots of economic recovery. We were beginning to pull out of recession. I wouldn’t suggest that that Government deserved any special credit for those signs of recovery – but their successors certainly bear some responsibility for destroying them with their blindly applied brake on public expenditure.

            I wonder if the members of today’s government ever give thought to the legacy that they will leave their successors.    They hope that they will have reduced substantially the national deficit, the gap between government expenditure and government income from taxation. Whether they will succeed is uncertain – I think it unlikely until the seriously wealthy can be persuaded (or coerced) into carrying their fair share of the burden.

            What is certain is that we shall have become a nation of debtors, with every university graduate carrying a lifelong burden.  Joining them, from the other end of the social scale, will be the former council tenants persuaded to take out mortgages in pursuit of the dream of ‘home ownership for all’ and to ensure that, with council tenancies being now on a temporary basis only, they secure for themselves a home for life..   

 Already evident is the creation of a disillusioned and disheartened population, including a vast army of young, bored and impoverished unemployed people, rapidly becoming unemployable and completely alienated from society. Their only legal hope of escape from a life of poverty is the very remote possibility of ‘coming up on the lottery!’  It will need only the spark of unjustified police violence for them to explode into the kind of rioting that we experienced last year.

            Other legacies will be a run-down public service with depleted and embittered staff, shabby and neglected public buildings, parks and gardens, council housing estates degenerating into slums, vandalised properties, graffiti polluted walls and badly policed town centres resulting in a wave of petty, and not-so-petty crime. The neglect of our roads and footpaths is an example of the public squalor that is already making itself  apparent.

            I have referred before to Clacton-on-Sea’s potholed roads and broken and dangerous pavements.  Last week in the Clacton Gazette there were two angry readers’ letters on the same subject.

            One drew attention to a ‘very large and deep pothole’ in the middle of the road at Clacton’s busy St. John’s roundabout. The writer says that if a motorcyclist, unaware of its existence rode over it, the rider would be thrown into the road and into the path of oncoming traffic.  The letter-writer reported the pothole on the County Council’s website on 11^th April and received an automatic acknowledgement – but there’s no sign of action.  The other letter was from a St Osyth motorist warning of an unexpected pothole that took his car off the road and into a telegraph pole. He was not seriously injured but his car was a write-off.  The telegraph pole has since been replaced – but the pothole is still there!  Tendring District isn’t unique.  Similar circumstances must exist nation-wide

            Highways are, of course, a county council, not a central government responsibility.   But central government has cut grants to local authorities, demanded that they make economies and urged them not to raise council tax.  I’d like to see more money spent on highways but I am well aware that, if it is, there will be less to spend on the care of the elderly or of the very young.   

            Oh – to be absolutely fair to the government it must be added that a tiny minority really have benefited from their policies.  While most of us have become poorer the seriously wealthy have become even wealthier!

            It takes only two or three years for communities to degenerate into lawless slums.  It could take decades to get them back onto their feet again and to restore their civic pride.  I don’t envy the government, whatever its political complexion that has the task of dealing with the legacy likely to be left by the ‘arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk’

‘If you want to know the time – ask a policeman’

          Thus advised a popular Edwardian Music Hall song, adding in explanation, ‘every member of the force has a watch and chain of course, so, if you want to know the time – ask a policeman’.  Nowadays most of us wear wristwatches day and night, taking them off only in the shower.  At work if we aren’t wearing a watch someone else within shouting distance certainly will be.  There’s at least an even chance that there will be a radio-controlled watch or clock available giving accurate time to the second.

This apparently is not so in County Hall, Chelmsford.  Perhaps I was over-generous to Essex County Council in suggesting above that they might only be able to give our roads and pavements the maintenance they need by cutting down on other vital services.  According to the daily Gazette a Freedom of Information request has revealed that between April 2011 and January 2012 county council employees dialled the Speaking Clock 1,349 times, clocking up a bill of £566! This was not a vast sum of money compared with those that, a few years ago during the reign of Council Leader Lord Hanningfield, some county councillors were claiming in unaudited expenses, but it was surely completely unjustified. In over thirty years in the local government service I certainly never dialled the Speaking Clock myself, nor do I recall anyone else ever doing so.

            Possibly more justifiable was the sum spent on calling directory enquiries. During that same period there were 5,705 calls made to ‘118 numbers’ (a few would have been reasonable enough – but nearly 6,000?). The cost of these – with the £566 for time enquiries – came to a total of £22,768!  I reckon that would have paid for filling in several potholes!   A ‘council spokesman’ is reported as saying, ‘We strive to keep all costs at a minimum and do not endorse the use of the talking clock, and we actively encourage our staff not to use it’.  So that’s all right then.

Last week’s local elections

          Last week’s local elections (in which our own Tendring District was not involved) confirmed my belief that more people vote to keep one or other of the candidates out than to get their own preferred candidate in.  The strong Labour vote was, I think, the result of disillusionment with the coalition government rather than a conviction that Labour can cure all the nation’s ills.

            I was glad that the Green Party did relatively well, their candidate coming third in the London Mayoralty election, in front of the Liberal Democrat candidate. I am delighted that the British National Party was virtually wiped off the political map, but am sorry to see UKIP flourishing.  I am sorrier that Boris Johnson won than I am that Ken Livingstone lost.   It seems that Boris has ambitions to be Party Leader and made a not-too-heavily-veiled criticism of David Cameron in his victory speech.

            I was unreservedly glad that seven out of the eight local authorities that had a referendum on whether or not they wanted a Mayor, rejected the idea decisively.  They will continue with their ‘cabinet style’ administration.  I am only sorry that members of the public were never offered a referendum on the central government’s decision to insist that all local authorities should either have an all-powerful Mayor or adopt ‘cabinet government’, copying Westminster in having policy decided by a tiny clique of the ruling majority party, to which all party member on the Council are expected to give their unqualified support. I believe that if public opinion had been tested in referendums, a substantial majority would have opted for a continuation of the old ‘committee’ based local administration, in which every issue was discussed openly in committee before being presented to the Council for further debate and a decision.

            The old system may have been more cumbersome and time consuming – but it certainly came closer to expressing the will of the electorate.

           

           

Week 11. 2011 15.3.11

TENDRING TOPICS…….on line

‘Well bungled Sir!’

Was there ever such an SAS venture quite as inept as the recent one carried out ‘in friendly territory’ in Libya? ‘Like thieves in the night’, a party of SAS men, armed to the teeth, arrived by air and landed ‘somewhere in the desert’ in the vicinity of Benghazi, where they were met by unnamed British agents. It was fortunate perhaps that they were arrested before they had been able to do further harm to Britain’s reputation! What on earth was their purpose? Had they landed in the vicinity of Tripoli, in a government controlled area, it might have been understandable. They could have been on a top-secret death-or-glory mission to kidnap Gaddafi and bring him to justice.

If, as it is suggested, they were there to further the cause of the freedom and liberty, then why not ring the front door bell and seek admission as friends, rather than metaphorically creep round the back and try to break in at a window? I don’t understand it, and neither did the Libyan insurgents. Why on earth should the Libyans have instantly accepted Britons as their friends? We have, until recently, been supplying weaponry to Colonel Gaddafi’s government and to similar governments in the region. Even while the insurgency was taking place and gathering momentum, our Prime Minister, with an entourage including arms dealers, was paying friendly calls on autocratic Middle Eastern regimes with rulers not unlike those that were being toppled by people-power in North Africa. These included Saudi Arabia, arguably neck and neck with North Korea as the country in the world with the least regard for what we regard as inalienable human rights. Characteristically (and without a word of disapproval from ‘the west’) Saudi Arabia’s ruler has threatened to put down even the most peaceful protest against his regime with utmost force.

In view of our Governments’ (both the present one and New-Labour) record of supporting oppressive regimes in the Middle East, I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised that since the beginning of the current insurgency, Britain’s words and actions have been distinguished by muddle, uncertainty and indecisiveness. Remember, in the early days of the Libyan uprising, William Hague our Foreign Minister suggesting that Colonel Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela to seek shelter with ‘his friend’, President Chavez? Wherever did he get that idea? Perhaps Gaddafi and Chavez were friends – but I recall seeing pictures of our former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, embracing Colonel Gaddafi in a way that suggested they were the very closest of good pals!

Then there were the bungled and delayed early attempts to rescue Brits stranded in strife-torn Libya. Remember how the first plane (there was just one!) belatedly chartered by the government, failed to start? How useful the now-scrapped Ark Royal, or any similar large aircraft carrier, could have been in that situation! Those enormously expensive but sacrosanct, nuclear submarines weren’t much use in that – or any other likely – emergency.

There has also been dithering over whether or not we should support the idea of establishing and enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya – blowing hot one day, and cold the next. It is a pity there wasn’t similar hesitation, and the same insistence upon international agreement, before embarking on the illegal invasion of Iraq! My guess is that there will be a no-fly zone but that it will be imposed only after hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent Libyan lives have been lost. We shall, very cleverly, succeed in getting the worst of two worlds!

We often hear how this, that or the other politician was ‘the best Prime Minister that we never had’. I reckon that William Hague, our Foreign Minister, could well be the worst Prime Minister from whom we luckily escaped!

Late news

As I prepare to post this blog on the internet it seems that my worst fears about Libya’s future are likely to be realized. An undisciplined, untrained force equipped only with small arms and a few captured light anti-aircraft guns could never hope to stand up against a disciplined army with tanks, heavy artillery and aircraft at their disposal, no matter how numerous and enthusiastic the rebels might be. The insurgents never had a chance unless complete units of the government’s army defected, with their arms and equipment (including armoured vehicles and artillery), to swell their ranks, or they had substantial overseas aid before they were overwhelmed.

This just hasn’t happened. There were too few defectors and overseas support has, so far, been limited to hot air. Soon, I fear, the insurgency will be over and the secret police and killing squads will move in to exact a bloody retribution.

While NATO, the UNITED NATIONS and the EU wring their hands and argue about what to do next; to prevent similar future fiascos it might be worth enquiring about the source of Colonel Gaddafi’s tanks, armoured cars and heavy artillery, his fighter and bomber aircraft. It would surprise me if many – if any in fact – have ‘made in Libya’, stamped or engraved upon them. They have been manufactured and supplied by us; by the Americans and the Europeans (including we Brits) who are now so outraged and horrified. It was surely obvious that Gaddafi wasn’t going to waste the money that Libya’s oil had brought him on hospitals, schools and old people’s homes! He wanted his war toys – and now he is playing with them!

When will the world learn that the Arms Trade is every bit as immoral, and does every bit as much harm to mankind, as the Slave Trade? Let’s stamp it out!

‘Got a fag mate?’

That question, which translates into polite English as, ‘Could you spare me a cigarette friend?’ would have been clearly understood by anyone – certainly any adult male – in the late 1930s. The chances are that it would have been answered positively. The penniless and proud, who would never have dreamed of begging for money, had no hesitation in asking complete strangers for a cigarette. And even those who had little enough themselves, would usually find a battered packet of Woodbines in their pocket, and offer one of those precious, tobacco filled paper cylinders to whoever asked.

Tobacco was regarded as an essential of human life! Top people usually smoked cigars, the professional and middle classes puffed on their pipes, while members of the working class had their ‘packets of fags’! During World War I, one of the best loved army padres was the Rev. Studdert Kennedy, Anglican priest and popular poet, who was affectionately known as ‘Woodbine Willy’ because of the generosity with which he distributed Woodbines to common soldiers in the trenches and to the wounded in military hospitals.

PoWs in Italy and Germany during World War II were regularly sent supplies of British cigarettes by the British Red Cross. We were the envy of our guards and of the prisoners of war and the conscripted civilian ‘slave workers’ of our allies with whom we worked. A Russian phrase that has stuck in my memory for the nearly seventy years that have elapsed since that time is ‘Davai s’cooreet Tovarisch?’ which, very loosely translated, is ‘Got a fag mate?’ Why, I wonder, have I remembered that phrase from 1944, while nowadays I regularly forget the names of people I have known for years!

Even our captors recognised tobacco as being one of life’s essentials. The Italians very occasionally gave us some of their Nazionali cigarettes. They were awful – but not quite so dreadful as the captured Russian Mahorkas that the Germans occasionally handed out. They were paper cylinders, about an inch long, filled with black tobacco ‘dust’, mounted on the end of a cardboard cylinder perhaps just over two inches long. Put the end of the cardboard cylinder in your mouth, light the end of the paper cylinder and puff away – but not too enthusiastically. Inhale too vigorously and you would find yourself breathing smouldering tobacco dust! Still, to those of us who were hooked on tobacco they were better than nothing.

All of which illustrates the fact that smoking is among the many things to which official and, to a somewhat less extent, public attitudes have changed dramatically during the past fifty or sixty years. No one, other perhaps than athletes, then thought of tobacco as being anything but beneficial. ‘A woman’s only a woman’, wrote Rudyard Kipling in a verse for which he would probably be lynched today, ‘but a good cigar’s a smoke!’ ‘For your throat’s sake – smoke Craven A’, urged the manufacturers of one popular brand of cigarette.

By the ‘60s it became generally accepted that smoking caused lung cancer. Gradually other human ills were laid at its door; asthma, heart disease, chromic bronchitis and so on. Most of us heavy smokers simply carried on. We all knew folk who had smoked like chimneys and lived till they were ninety. It was other people, not us, who got lung cancer – and some people who didn’t smoke got it too. Who better than the tobacco manufacturers to lay smoke screens round the subject? There were, in those days, still to be found a few medical authorities questioning whether smoking was harmful. Now this is universally accepted. Remaining debate is about the extent the state should interfere to prevent its citizens from harming themselves.

Smoking tobacco is addictive and very difficult to give up, as any ex-smoker will confirm. I gave up smoking in the mid-‘60s, when I was about forty-five. I didn’t lose the craving ‘for a fag’ though. I used sometimes to dream that I was smoking again! Ten years later, when I had become Clacton’s Housing Manager, someone offered me a cigarette in a moment of stress – and I accepted it. Within five minutes I was right back to where I had been a decade earlier!

As the years passed I made attempt after attempt to give up, failing every time – usually after about three weeks! I was over 65 (25 years ago!) before I finally succeeded. I haven’t touched a cigarette, cigar or a pipe since. I had tried the lot! I doubt very much if I would have reached my present age had I continued to puff away!

I welcome every initiative by the present government and its predecessors to reduce the number of smokers. I was pleased when smoking was banned in offices and other work places (when I had been Tendring’s Public Relations Officer people had approached me through a haze of cigar smoke!) on public transport and in pubs ancd restaurants. I never dreamed that any government would have the courage to ban smoking in pubs, but New-Labour did (and I must unwontedly praise them for that!). What’s more, the law was enforced. Pubs are now smoke-free.

I welcome the present government’s ideas of requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain packets and kept out of sight. They wouldn’t prevent the sales of cigarettes but they would reduce them, and reduce the chances of young people buying and becoming addicted. As Tesco, a major purveyor of tobacco products, claims in quite a different context, ‘Every Little Helps!’

I look forward to the day when smokers are regarded by the general public as being sufferers from a dangerous addiction leading to self-inflicted illness and disability; weak-willed folk who should be pitied and helped rather than blamed.

Yes, I am well aware that I was once myself a ‘fully paid up member’ of the Smoking Brigade!

The Japanese Catastrophe!

It is difficult to find words with which to comment on the disaster – the earthquake and the consequent Tsunami – that struck Japan just a few days ago. I don’t believe that in my lifetime of now nearly 90 years, that there has been a comparable natural catastrophe. Whole communities were swept away, acre after acre rendered barren and lifeless, littered with shattered cars, tree trunks and other deposited debris. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of dead, and as I write, the possibility of a natural disaster being made even worse by the effects of the quake and tsunami on at least three nuclear power plant. How puny are humankind’s powers – even our powers of destruction – compared with those of nature!

For God’s sake – and I mean that prayerfully not blasphemously – let us start
working together to prevent where we can, and mitigate where we can’t, the effects of the natural disasters with which, during this past year in particular, humanity has been plagued! Why can't Mutually Assured Co-operation replace the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD!) of nuclear ‘defence’?

Week 7 15.02.11

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Another trip through Space and Time!

A few weeks ago I published in this column some photographs taken in North Africa in 1942 that had transported me in mind and memory across a continent and an ocean to the Egyptian/Libyan border area of nearly seventy years ago! There was a picture of one of the 6in howitzers with which I had served as a gunner in action – and also semi-submerged in a flooded gun-pit after a tropical storm. There was a group picture of a gun-crew which could have been – but wasn’t – the one of which I had been a member.

I have now received from the same source a picture that I am finding even more evocative. It is again a photograph of a gun-crew standing round the ‘trail’ of a 6in howitzer during the winter (despite the sunshine we all have jackets on!) of 1941/’42. This time though it really is the gun crew of which I was a member. It was nearly seventy years ago and I have, and have always had, a bad memory or faces. However I can recognise and name five (including myself) of those on the picture. Sgt. Peter Harris and Lance Sgt. ‘Busty’ Taylor are the first two on the left. Fifth from the left is Lance Bombardier Alfie Bloomfield, sadly destined to die of diphtheria in a POW Camp in Benghazi later that year. I am the one, seventh from the left, wearing a woolly hat. Behind me, to the left of me in the picture, is a Gunner Fletcher who, in his early thirties, was some ten years older than most of us, while at the very end is Dick Pulford, former manager of a seed store in Woodbridge, with whom I shared a ‘bivvy-tent’

On the picture, though I can’t positively identify him, must also be Jim Palmer, a former Ipswich milkman. He and I remained together while prisoners of war and arrived back together in Ipswich on 18th May 1945, ten days after VE Day. It was my twenty-fourth birthday!

Also there, must be ‘Ferret’ Hawes, a fisherman from Orford. He and I were good mates. I have a picture of myself with him in a rickshaw in Durban, where we enjoyed a brief ‘shore leave’ on our outward voyage to Egypt in August 1941.

‘Ferret’ Hawes (left) and myself in Durban. The rickshaw man never pulled that rickshaw. He just stood around smoking (you can see a fag between the fingers of his left hand) until British soldiers came along wanting to be photographed with him. There must have been hundreds of similar photos taken!

I can’t say that I ‘enjoyed’ either the time I spent in the army or as a prisoner of war. Both though were experiences that, looking back over my life, I am glad to have had.


Prophetic Topics

A month or so ago, when I learned that the Government, were ‘taking on’ the bankers whose activities triggered the current financial crisis, who had been rescued from bankruptcy with millions of pounds of our money and who were once again proposing to hand themselves astronomical salaries and bonuses, I suggested in this blog that it was a conflict between the representatives of the British people and the High Priests of Mammon. Furthermore I predicted that whatever smooth words and phrases might be used to make a defeat sound like a victory, it would ultimately be Mammon’s servants who would come out on top.

And so, it has proved – including the attempt to make defeat sound like a victory. What was the outcome of weeks of negotiation? The top moneylenders (that is what bankers actually do isn’t it?) will still get their million pound salaries and their million pound-plus bonuses, but they have promised to make a few billion pounds more available for loans to businesses, and there’s to be more ‘transparency’ about the salaries and bonuses that are paid. Making a few billion pounds available for loans doesn’t mean that more loans will actually be made. The bankers will still be able to withhold funds from those businesses that are not considered to be ‘a good risk’. It is they who will do the ‘considering’, and they who will set the interest rates and terms of repayment. As for transparency, I don’t particularly want to know who gets those multi-million salaries and bonuses. I don’t think that anyone should get them.

Top people in the public service (any public service) with a large salary are immediately pilloried for getting ‘more money than the Prime Minister’. Quite right too! But I have never heard of anyone working out how many Prime Ministers could be bought with the total remuneration of the Chief Executive of any major bank?

‘Of all the local councils, in all the Town Halls, of all the counties, towns and districts of the UK………’

(Apologies to the late, but unforgettable, Humphrey Bogart)…our District Council of Tendring has to be the one to pick up the gauntlet that the city of Liverpool tried and found didn’t fit. They have applied for and have accepted the ‘Big Society’ partnership challenge of the Coalition Government.

It seems that Tendring got in on the act at an early stage by including a Big Society fund of £500,000 in this year’s budget and by organising a meeting of all local voluntary bodies (or as many as cared to be represented) at the Jaywick Community Centre on 31st January. I am not sure what, if anything, was decided at that Meeting, but I was interested to learn that the representative of one local charity commented that there had been a recent change in the character of their volunteer helpers. They used, at one time, to be the ‘recently retired’ but were now increasingly younger and from among the unemployed.

The main purpose of‘ ‘The Big Society’ idea seems to me to find unpaid volunteers to do tasks (in parks and gardens, in hospitals and care homes, as gardeners care assistants, circular deliverers and so on) previously performed by paid labour. Success in doing this will certainly ensure an ever-increasing pool of unemployed from which to find suitable volunteers! And, as the government has promised that folk ‘on benefit’ will never be better off than those in employment, the incentive to seek non-existent jobs will remain, and quite a lot of money will be saved!

Meanwhile Tendring has been accorded the government’s highest accolade – description as a ‘can-do council!’ Communities Minister Eric Pickles is quoted as saying, ‘Can-do Councils like Tendring show what can be achieved by local government working tirelessly with and for their communities’. Mr Stock, leader of Tendring Council, said, ‘To be working with the Government in this way is a significant coup for the council and the district. We have shown ourselves to be ahead of the game in coming up with our Big Society fund and it has been recognised on a national level’. He added that he looked forward to further details being revealed.

And so do I!


The New Levellers

Towards the end of our Civil War in the 17th Century there was a movement (it never really did become a political party) called The Levellers. There was even a Levellers Manifesto advocating popular sovereignty, an extension of the suffrage (not, of course, going so far as suggesting that all adult men and women should be allowed to vote!) equality for all before the law, and universal religious tolerance. These very modest aims, which we take for granted today, were too much for either King Charles I or Oliver Cromwell. Levellers were persecuted, thrown into prison and executed. Eventually they disappeared from the scene.

If I were fifty years younger (if only!) I would seriously consider founding – or, more likely, trying unsuccessfully to found - a new Political Party, The New Levellers. Its main objective would be to narrow the currently enormous gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest in our country, which (rather than 'Europe', 'the last Labour Government' or even 'the bankers') surely lies at the root of our current ills. This could be achieved only slowly and over a number of years but I believe that when the benefits began to reveal themselves, the pace of change would accelerate.

Already there are at least tentative moves in the right direction, if only in the public sector. It has been suggested that the highest paid employee of any public body should not earn more than twenty times the lowest paid. I have heard it said that while that might be possible in the public sector it would be quite unacceptable in private enterprise – in stock broking or banking for example.

Why should it be? The current minimum wage is £5.93 an hour. That gives a weekly wage of £237 for a forty-hour week or an annual income of about £12,000. Twenty times that amounts to £240,000 – not far short of a quarter of a million pounds. That is, as they say, more than the salary of the Prime Minister and should surely be more than adequate for anyone’s needs. I certainly don’t think that any public employee should get a higher salary than that and – unless it is considered that gambling on the stock exchange or large-scale money-lending is of greater value to the nation than the duties of the Prime Minister, or of any public servant, I don’t see why incomes higher than that should be tolerated in the private sector either.

I think that levelling should be at both ends of the income spectrum – raising the incomes of the lowest paid and reducing those of the highest. A variety of means could be employed to do this – the minimum wage; a reformed and progressive income tax; more services and industries being carried out by local authorities, by co-operatives and by employee partnerships like John Lewis; splitting up the big banks and giant business corporations to provide real competition.

Progress would be slow but sure. Neither Socialism nor unfettered Capitalism can, in itself, provide a solution. The important thing would be to persuade the general public that greater economic equality would be to everyone’s benefit, and to work towards that objective.

Utopian? Pie-in-the-sky? Revolutionary nonsense? Perhaps, but that is what was said of the objectives of the 17th Century Levellers and of the Chartists two hundred years later. All of those aims have now been achieved!

Week 2. 2011 11th Jan. 2011

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘Old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago’
Wm Wordsworth ‘The Solitary Reaper’

A few weeks before Christmas, I had a phone call that took me back into the distant past. It was from someone in Derby who had been a member of the 67th Medium Regiment RA in which I had served during World War II. He had not only been in the same regiment but in the same battery (the 231st) and the same four-gun troop (B Troop) as myself. I had known him, though only slightly; he having been a sergeant and I a lowly gunner and a member of a different gun team. He had learned, goodness knows how, that I was one of the survivors of the regiment and he was keen to make contact.

We didn’t have a great deal in common either then or now – and I have never been all that enthusiastic about this ‘old comrades’ business. However we had a friendly chat about our common experiences in Egypt and Libya and our very different experiences as prisoners of war. He wanted information about the regiment’s casualties, particularly those who were killed by ‘friendly fire’ when the Italian steamer ‘SS Scillen’ was torpedoed by a British submarine while loaded with British PoWs being transported from Libya to Italy. I had a complete list of fatal casualties, one hundred in all (out of a regiment of some 700), together with the date, place of burial where applicable, and names of next of kin. It was on eleven A4 pages. I offered to scan them into my laptop and send them to him by email. He didn’t have internet access (that was something else that we didn’t have in common) but his son had.

He also had some photos that he thought would interest me. And they certainly did. I was amazed to learn that a spool, or possibly a cassette, of film had survived the detailed searches to which, as a PoW, I had been subjected, (but perhaps sergeants were treated differently!) and brought back to England at the end of the war to be developed.

His computer literate son forwarded them to me, but not in a form that made it possible for me to print them or reproduce them. Luckily my elder son and daughter-in-law are I.T. experts and when they brought me home to Clacton after Christmas they reproduced them for me in a manageable format. Here they are. The first is of one of our 6in diameter howitzers in action in the Libyan Desert early in 1942. It has just been fired and the angle of the barrel suggests to me that it was at a target at maximum range. It is in a dug-out gun-pit and has a camouflage net strung over it. On being fired it would have hurled a 100lb high-explosive shell up in the air to drop onto its target. This made howitzers ideal weapons against fortifications but almost totally useless in mobile warfare against enemy tanks. The ‘pole’ held upright by a crew member in the rear is, in fact, the ramrod with which the shell was rammed into the lower end of the gun barrel so that its encircling copper ‘driving band’ pressed tightly against the internal rifling of the gun barrel.

For some time in the spring of 1942 we were positioned in a dried-up river valley or wadi. One night we had a tropical rain-storm.

The heavens opened and within minutes, or so it seemed, the wadi was awash. The gun pits were flooded and so were the shallow trenches in which we slept under ‘bivvy tents’. If Rommel had attacked that night he would have encountered no resistance from us. But probably his forces, just a mile or two to our west, were suffering in the same way. In the North African Desert, nature (an arid featureless landscape, sand-storms blown up by Khamsin winds from the south - like an oven door opening! - and very occasional tropical deluges) was the common enemy of the opposing armies.

Flooded! Libya 1942

Anyway, someone had managed to keep his camera dry, and had captured on film one of our guns half submerged by the flood waters.

There was another picture of interest to me – nine men in less-than-smart battle dress (a gun crew I imagine) in a desert environment. It could have been, but wasn’t, the gun crew of which I was a member. In fact, although most of those faces are familiar to me, I can’t put a name to a single one of them! Well, it was a long time ago. The photo is dated January 1942 and my guess is that it was taken shortly after we had taken part in the capture of the German and Italian strongholds at Bardia and Wadi Halfaya (‘Hellfire Pass’). We were withdrawn to Sidi Barrani, well inside Egypt, and told that we were destined for Palestine. It sounded too good to be true – and so it was! Far away in Tripolitania, Rommel’s reinforced Afrikakorps had counter-attacked in strength. We had had heavy tank losses. Our regiment was ordered back to Gazala where, after some six months of more-or-less continuous action, we were overwhelmed and captured at Tobruk.

Those remarkable photographs transported me in memory across a continent, an ocean, and a time span of nearly seventy years to Wordsworth’s, ‘Old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago’.

Much ado about…….very little!

The Clacton Gazette’s headlines last week (5th January) could have been from the local newspaper at Hamelin before the Pied Piper put in an appearance. The Rat Pack - It’s ‘Christmas for vermin’ as rubbish uncollected for a fortnight piles up.

My word! Are rats running in packs in our streets? Ought we all to be vaccinated against Bubonic Plague? Hardly; it was simply because in those parts of our district that normally have a refuse and salvage collection on a Monday or Tuesday, one week’s collection was missed altogether and the following week the collection was a day later than usual. I live in an area that has a Tuesday collection so I know very well that there were extra filled black bags to deal with. I leave mine just inside my driveway but others are unable or unwilling to do that. Carelessly disposed black bags began to obstruct the pavements. Negotiating past them in a mobility scooter, or with a pram of wheelchair, became difficult.

But it was only for a few days. By 8.30 a.m. on Wednesday of the second week the piles of bags had vanished and the street and pavements were clear. There had been two public holidays on normal working days in Christmas week and one in the following week. I don’t think that either the council or the contractors should be criticised for the way that they dealt with the problem that those three ‘days off’ created.

They could have kept the collectors working, making the overtime payments to which they would have been entitled – but the council has been compelled by the government to save every penny and they would certainly have been told that those overtime payments weren’t essential. They could have put the collections back two days on the first week and back a further day on the second. That would have caused confusion. Few people would have known when their refuse and salvage would be collected. I think that in cutting out the collection completely for one week in part of the district (even though it is the part I live in!) was probably the right decision.

I was amused to see that, as I had forecast a week or so ago, a Government Minister of whom few people had previously heard, decided to take on the role of ‘a knight in shining armour’. He wrote to all local authorities (I wonder what that bit of self-publicity cost us?) urging them to adopt a ‘can do’ attitude and keep the wheels of the refuse vehicles turning. I wonder what he would have suggested – perhaps appealing for ‘big Society’ volunteers to clear the rubbish!

I think that Tendring Council, and their refuse collecting contractors, deserve our thanks and congratulations rather than hysterical criticism. The service kept going through the ice and snow, when collecting filled bags and carrying them across icy pavements must have been a hazardous business. Over Christmas and the New Year, no-one as far as I know, missed more than one weekly connection.

We should remember that, as a result of government spending cuts, a fortnightly refuse collection is a already a reality in many areas. Tendring Council has so far managed to avoid this. I hope they continue to do so. Waiting a fortnight for a collection, just once, and in the depth of winter is one thing. Having regularly to wait a fortnight in the heat of summer (imagine the piles of rubbish, the smells, the flies, the rats!) would really be something to grumble about!

Crisis? What Crisis?

I am not a great follower of either cricket or football. I’m mildly pleased when I note that Ipswich has won a football match (something that hasn’t happened recently!) and I found myself quite excited when the English Cricket Team retained ‘the ashes’ and won the recent test match series in Australia.

Making a contribution to this victory is said to have been the support of the ‘Barmy Army’ of between 15,000 and 20,000 British Cricket fans who religiously – one might almost say ‘obsessively’ – follow the test match team wherever it goes.

Good for them! But I find it difficult to believe that Britain can possibly be in such dire financial straits that public services have had to be cut, taxes like VAT that principally affect poorer people raised, and working people told that they’ll have to work harder for less money, when between 15.000 and 20,000 of us can spare the time and the money to travel half-way round the world to watch a series of cricket matches? I have been told that any fan who stayed in Australia for the six weeks of the test series could easily have spent £2,000 per week there!

Crisis? What Crisis? I reckon that for most of the Barmy Army the most serious crisis that they can envisage is one of England’s leading players twisting an ankle and being unfit to play!

A Happy Ending

I began this blog with pictures recalling ‘old, unhappy. far-off things and battles long ago’. Let me end it with a picture from happier times that I have just come across in a drawer. Taken in 1954, 12 years after those other pictures, it is of my late wife Heather with our first son, then a baby. Heather would have been 30 at the time and I would have been 32.

Those were happy days!