Week 46 2012

Tendring Topic.....on line

‘They shall not grow old………..’

A Lifetime ago ……….. The last voyage of the SS Scillin

            The SS Scillin was an Italian cargo ship, built in 1903, of some 1,600 tons.  Just seventy years ago, on 13^th November 1942, she was in Tripoli Harbour being loaded with a living cargo of allied prisoners of war to be transported from camps in Libya across the Mediterranean to Italy.  814 prisoners were ordered into her hold which is reported as having been suitable for no more than 300.   There would have been a further 195 but for the vehement protests about the severe overcrowding and insanitary conditions of the prisoners’ accommodation, made by Captain Gilbert a British medical officer

Among the 814 were 50 members of my own regiment, the 67^th Medium Regiment RA. Most of them, like me, were from Ipswich or East Suffolk, were in their early twenties, and had volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939.    We had been in action in the Egyptian/Libyan border area since the previous November.  By the end of 1941 we had been involved in a number of successful assaults against German and Italian garrisons in Bardia, Sollum and Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass). In the spring and early summer of 1942 we found ourselves in defensive actions in the desert south and west of Tobruk.  Finally we became part of the Tobruk garrison and were overwhelmed and taken prisoner by Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21^st June.  My own transportation to POW camps in Italy had been from Benghazi in July on the SS Ravello.  The voyage across the Med. to Taranto had been uneventful and the fact that, after 70 years, I can remember little about it suggests that it can’t have been too awful an experience.

            That of my 50 former comrades in the Scillin was vastly different.  What happened to them, and to all but a handful of the rest of the 814 prisoners crammed into its noisome hold, remained a secret for more than half a century. It was not until 1996 that persistent enquiries by historians and by relatives (among them friends of mine in Ipswich researching the lives of their fathers who had been in my regiment) forced a full revelation from the Ministry of Defence. 

            It transpired that during the night of 14^th November the Scillin was intercepted by the British submarine HMS Sahib.  The submarine surfaced and fired 12 rounds from its 3in deck gun at this unarmed Italian merchant vessel. Ten of these rounds found their target and brought the Scillin to a standstill.   The Sahib then closed to within 750 yards and fired a torpedo at the Scillin’s engine room.  The torpedo did, in fact, explode in the hold and the Scillin sank almost immediately. Only 27 of those 814 prisoners, plus the Scillin’s captain and crew, survived and were picked up by the Sahib.

            At an enquiry the Sahib’s commander (Lt. John Bromage) was cleared of culpability.  He claimed that the Scillin had no lights, had not responded to his initial shelling and had appeared to be heading for Africa.  He had believed it to be carrying Italian troops.

Nor was the Scillin the only Italian vessel to be similarly attacked.  Five other vessels carrying PoWs were attacked by British submarines during 1941 and 1942. These attacks resulted in the deaths from ‘friendly fire’ of a total of 2,000 British and allied PoWs.  It was particularly in  memory of those forgotten 2,000, fifty of whom had been from my regiment and some of whom had been my friends, that I wore my scarlet Flanders poppy on Remembrance Sunday.

A Triumph for Democracy?

          It is said that a somewhat taciturn Scotsman, who had just attended a service at a local church that had a new Minister, was asked what the sermon had been about.  ‘Sin’, he replied.  ‘And what did the Minister have to say about it?’   ‘He was agin it!’

            I feel somewhat like that questioner with regard to the six candidates for the post of Police and Crime Commissioner to the Essex Constabulary, for whom we are all invited to cast our vote on 15^th November. I have already received my ballot paper as I vote by post. I assume that all six applicants are ‘agin’ crime or they’d hardly be standing.   I know their names.  I know that four of them are standing as representatives of political parties (Conservative, Labour, UK Independence Party and English Democrats) and two are Independents.   Apart from what appears to be a political party slogan ‘More Police – Catching Criminals’* after the name of the political party (English Democrats) that candidate Robin  Tilbrook is representing, we know nothing about the candidates other than what we may have seen in the press or on the internet.

            I’m not really blaming the candidates for this.  I daren’t think what delivering an election address to every household in Essex would cost – and the candidates have already had to find £5,000 deposit!  No doubt the government, always ready to save money, declined to go to the expense of a free mail-shot for each candidate!

            To pretend that this election is an exercise in democracy, much less an exercise in the ‘localism’ for which the government claims to be so enthusiastic, is quite ridiculous.  How can one man, or one woman, possibly be able to respond to the needs of residents of a Police Authority Area as large, as populous, and as diverse as Essex?   How can the election of just one person in charge of its police force be, in any sense of the word, ‘democratic’?

            No doubt the old Police Authorities were less than perfect, though I don’t recall hearing very many complaints about them.  There were surely better ways of replacing them than with a single all-powerful individual.  

There was a simple, democratic solution to their replacement that would have empowered local people while saving the government the very considerable expense of this ridiculous election.  Police Authority boundaries coincide with those of County or Unitary Authority.  Why not make the existing democratically elected local authority the Police Authority?  It could perhaps be stipulated that the authority should appoint a Police and Crime Committee of say ten members, representative not of the political parties comprising the council but of the geographical parts of the council’s area?   Then, all voters would have their own member of the Police Committee whom they could contact with regard to policing problems.  Such a system would also have facilitated co-operation between the police and other local authority activities – education and social services for instance.

But we are afflicted with a government convinced that what is best for those living on the other side of the Atlantic must necessarily be best for us. Possibilities other than that of having a single elected commissioner overseeing each constabulary had not, as far as I know, even been considered.  All of this presented me with a dilemma.  If I voted in the election would I be giving support to a process that I believed to be a ridiculously expensive and unnecessary waste of time and money; a cynical negation of the principle of representative democratic control of our Police Services?

 

  My first inclination was to ignore it – or perhaps deliberately spoil my voting paper before posting it back.  Then I realized that although I didn’t know much about the individual candidates, I did know something about the parties that four of them stood for.  Was it just possible that my failure to vote would allow the UKIP candidate, representative of a Party with policies to which I am strongly opposed, to head our Essex Police Force?

            That possibility made me decide that I must vote!  My first choice will be Linda Belgrove, Independent.  She lives in Alresford and is therefore more-or-less local. She was vice-chairman of the Essex Police Authority that is being replaced, so she at least knows what the job is all about.   She has worked for solicitors and has served on the parish council so she is acquainted with the workings of the law and of problems in our area.  She is not the representative of any political party and (this was probably the deciding factor!) on the photographs that I have seen of her in the local press, she has a friendly smile!  I don’t suppose for a moment that she’ll get elected, but I wish her well. 

And my other vote, my second choice in case whoever gets most votes doesn’t get a clear overall majority? I haven’t yet decided.  Perhaps I won’t use it……. or perhaps I will.  I’ll make up my mind just before I slip my voting paper into the envelope provided and post it.

* I'm rather surprised that that was permitted.

Making the most of the Sunshine

            I have no doubt at all that Britain’s best interests lie in developing alternative renewable sources of energy to reduce, and ultimately replace, our reliance on such fossil fuels as coal, gas and oil.  I believe, and the recent great storm affecting North America has strengthened that belief, that neither Middle East terrorism nor ‘the deficit’ but steadily accelerating climate change, is the biggest and most urgent threat to Britain and to the rest of the world of the 21^st century.  The use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, increases that threat.  What’s more, our oil and gas supplies come from notoriously unstable parts of the world and are, in any case, finite.  They will one day – perhaps a few decades, perhaps a century or more ahead – begin to run out and as they do so their price will escalate.

            The production of nuclear energy, although favoured by the government, is – as we have seen in at Chernobyl and, more recently, in Japan – potentially dangerous. Moreover it produces a waste product that remains lethal for centuries, and for which no-one has yet discovered a safe and permanent means of either disposal or storage.

            Safe and infinitely renewable sources of power available to an island nation such as ours lie in the waves that break upon our shores, in the inexorable ebb and flow of the tides, in the wind and in the rays of the sun.  I believe that the power of the waves and of the tides has yet to be fully exploited, but that of the wind and of the sun is currently being harnessed and has infinite further potential for exploitation.

            I am delighted to see the still growing regiment of wind turbines off our north-east Essex coast and have little patience with those who complain they are spoiling the view.  Consider what climatic change, strengthened and accelerated by mankind’s profligate use of fossil fuels, has done for the view of the east coast of the USA!

            A proposal to build on-shore wind turbines never fails to produce local outrage.   They are, and will always be, either too near to people’s homes or alternatively, destroying hitherto unspoilt countryside and a threat to wild life. There was certainly a storm of protest about the proposed provision of wind turbines between Clacton and St Osyth.  Yet now that they are actually in position and operating we hear little about them.  Could it be that they haven’t proved to be quite the noisy, unsightly and health-threatening monsters that protesters had been led to expect?

            Then there’s sunshine – and this really is the Essex Sunshine Coast!   Solar panels have no moving parts so they can’t be noisy. They are effective.  My single solar panel, from which water heated by the sun is circulated in a sealed circuit through my hot water storage cylinder by a pump activated by two small photo-electric cells, supplies nearly all my hot water needs during the summer months.  Winter sunshine preheats the water in the cylinder before it is brought to the required temperature by my gas boiler, and therefore saves money all the year round.

            More ambitious schemes involve virtually covering the sun-side slope of the roof with solar panels that are, in fact, photo-electric cells and convert the sun’s light, rather than its heat, into electric power to be fed back into the national grid, making the householder an actual supplier of electricity.

            I was delighted when I learned that there are plans to provide no less than 40,000 power generating solar panels locally on fields at Chisbon Heath between Great Bentley and St Osyth, and 15,000 at Sladbury’s farm between Holland-on-Sea and Great Holland.  The south-facing solar panels would be no more than three metres off the ground and would be screened from public view by trees and bushes. Together they are expected to produce sufficient electricity to power 4,750 homes.

            There are similar plans further inland.  A £20 million pound solar scheme in Kelvedon will involve 60,000 solar panels and is expected to provide enough power for 7,200 homes.  Wind power we have and solar power is on its way.  If only some practical and economic way can be found to harness the power of the waves that crash on our beaches, Southern East Anglia could be among the leaders of the development of safe and carbon-free means of energy supply.  

Week 44.10 2nd November 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘In winter I get up at night, and dress by yellow candle light……
……..In summer, quite the other way. I have to go to bed by day’

So wrote Scottish poet and author Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his poems for children. Last Saturday evening (30th October) we put our clocks back an hour, giving us all an extra hour in bed, and bringing nightfall an hour earlier into the afternoon – a process that will continue inexorably until just before Christmas.

We can’t do anything about the period of daylight each day shortening in the winter and lengthening again with the spring and summer. We can though decide for ourselves how to alter our activities – ruled by our clocks – to make the most of what daylight there is. Is it more helpful to have the longer period of daylight in the afternoon and evening, or first thing in the morning? In the summer we have no doubt about it. Most of us don’t want broad daylight at 4.00 a.m. but we do appreciate the ability to work or enjoy outdoor leisure activities in the summer evenings, so we put our clocks forward an hour, bringing daylight an hour later in the morning and putting off dusk until between 9.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m. in May, June and July.

At the end of October we put those clocks back an hour to Greenwich Mean Time. Darkness, often enhanced by leaden overcast skies, advances into mid-afternoon.

During World War II every minute of daylight counted – especially for those working on the land. We put our clocks forward two hours in the summer (Double Summer Time) and brought them back just one hour to what we now call British Summer Time, in the winter. I remember when I returned from Germany in 1945 finding that it was still light at 10.30 p.m. in June!

After the war we experimented with British Summer Time throughout the year, from 1968 till 1971, but in 1972 reverted to British Summer Time in the summer months and Greenwich Mean Time in the winter. Attempts have been made to bring back the wartime Single and Double Summer Time but all have so far failed. This year though the idea has been revived and is thought to have a reasonable chance of success. We are again in crisis and once again we need every minute of daylight we can get both for work and leisure. In addition, it has been calculated that with lighter evenings, less energy will be used, and as there would be a lighter ‘rush-hour’ there would be fewer road accidents and fewer casualties. Children would be safer coming home in daylight throughout the year.

Strongest opposition comes from Scotland where it is pointed out that children would be going to school in darkness as it wouldn’t get light there till as late as 10.00 a.m. There’s nothing that can be done about the fact that the further north you are, the shorter is each winter’s day and, conversely, the longer each summer’s day. If the Scots prefer children to come home, rather than go to school, in darkness it would surely be possible to make Scottish school hours from 10.00 a.m. till 5.00 p.m. instead of 9.00 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. Could it be that last Saturday was the very last time that we shall have to put our clocks back to Greenwich Mean Time?

'Never mind the offender. Let’s punish the whistle-blower?’

Years ago, when I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, the usual initial response of any Council tenant about whom a complaint had been made, was not to deny or justify his or her activities but to demand indignantly ‘Who told you that?’

It seems that much more distinguished people react in precisely the same way when their actions, or their failure to take action, are revealed to the public gaze. Thousands of documents, leaked from British and American Forces operating in Iraq and recently published by Wikileaks, revealed that captured Iraqi insurgents had been handed over to their compatriots in the knowledge that they would be mistreated or tortured, and that on at least one occasion Iraqi insurgents trying to surrender had been gunned down by a US helicopter gunship. It has been upon Wikileaks, and upon the news media publishing the content of the leaked material, that the wrath of the Establishment, particularly in the USA, has been focussed (‘Arrest Wikileaks’ head and try him for treason!’ was the predictable demand of some right-wing Republicans).

Wikileaks is accused of being unpatriotic. Its revelations would assist El Quaida and similar organisations in their recruiting campaigns. I suppose that they might have done so had not the insurgents already been well aware of what was going on. Unless we really believe that not one of the victims of this misuse had ever been released or had escaped, the insurgents are sure to have known what was happening – and will have already used it in their recruiting campaigns. Had they told us about the abuse we would simply have denounced the revelation as lying propaganda.

It is those who committed these war crimes and those who failed to seek out and punish the perpetrators, who have endangered the lives of our troops. It is they who have encouraged recruitment to the insurgents and the terrorists. It is significant that, in all the thousands of words condemning the whistle blowers, there has not been a single suggestion that the accusations are untrue.

Although the focus of the press has been on the misuse of prisoners and the slaughter of insurgents trying to surrender, a very large number of cases of ‘friendly fire’ also feature in the leaked papers. Between 2004 and 2006 United States and other coalition forces mistakenly attacked British forces on at least eleven occasions. Attempting to overtake US vehicles appears to have been a particularly hazardous venture. Early in 2004 three British vehicles overtook some Czech trucks near the Kuwait border and found themselves held up by a slow-moving American convoy. Attempting to pull out and overtake they were threatened by a US soldier with a heavy machine gun! This happened three times despite the clearly visible British military number plates on their vehicles. Later in the same year British vehicles were fired on in the same area and under similar circumstances, on three occasions from American convoys and once from a Bulgarian one.

It seems that ‘our boys’ in Iraq learned to regard these attacks from their allies with true British phlegm. In February 2005 a report from a three-vehicle British convoy about being strafed by an American gunner, concluded laconically, ‘both convoys continued on their journeys without stopping’.

Friendly Fire!

The ‘friendly fire’ revealed by Wikileaks seems, thank goodness, to have been remarkably ineffective. Perhaps itchy trigger fingers tend to be on shaky hands! Sadly, not all friendly fire is like that. There have been far too many incidents – culminating in the recent death of the kidnapped Aid Worker killed in a bungled rescue attempt – in which soldiers and innocent civilians have been killed by bombs, shells or bullets from their ‘own side’. Nor is it purely a recent phenomenon.

Thursday of next week (11th November) is what we used to call ‘Armistice Day’ when, at eleven in the morning (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) in 1918, the guns of World War I were silenced and four years of unparalleled carnage came to an end. On the following Sunday (14th Nov.) at War Memorials and in places of worship throughout our land, we shall be remembering and honouring the memory of those in the forces who lost their lives in two world wars, and in the armed conflicts that have gone on and continue to go on, ever since. A verse from Laurence Binyon’s To the Fallen will be recited again, and again, and again, together with the sounding of The Last Post, a verse and a trumpet call that never fail to stir the emotions of any old soldier – including myself.

They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Well, I am one of those who were left. I have grown old, age has wearied me – and I do remember them.

There were between seven and eight hundred of us in the 67th Medium Regiment RA. We were all young men mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, from Ipswich and the coastal area of East Suffolk who – with patriotic fervour – had volunteered for the Territorial Army when war threatened. We had been called up for full-time service on 2nd September 1939, the day before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. One hundred of us were destined never to see Suffolk again.

On 21st June 1942, after six months almost continuous action in the Egypt/Libya border area, we were over-run in Tobruk by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrikakorps and ordered by our garrison commander to put our guns out of action, burn our vehicles and surrender to the Germans. I remember as we walked disconsolately along the desert track to the prisoner of war ‘cage’, a German soldier called out (a little enviously I thought!), ‘Hey Tommy, cheer up. For you zee war iss ovair’. Little did he, or we, know that we were all just entering the most perilous part of our army careers.

We had had battle casualties of course, but not very many considering how much action we had seen. By far the majority of those one hundred fatal casualties occurred after we had been taken prisoner. We lost a few in a diphtheria epidemic in a transit prison camp near Benghazi. We lost rather more of starvation related disease in vast prisoner of war concentration camps in Italy. One or two died in industrial accidents in working camps, at factories and on railway sidings in Germany, several, who had found themselves in POW camps in Poland, died of hunger and exposure as they were marched westward during the bitter winter of 1944/’45 to avoid their being liberated by the inexorably advancing Soviet Army.

No less than half of my regiment’s casualties though died as a result of ‘friendly fire’. In November 1942, as PoWs, they were loaded onto the Italian steamer SS Scillin in Tripoli Harbour, to be transported to prison camps in Italy. Halfway across the Mediterranean the Scillin was torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine! The fifty from the 67th Medium Regiment RA were by no means the only PoWs on board the ill-fated vessel. A very few were rescued by the submarine but some 680 British and South African prisoners were drowned by ‘friendly fire’ that day.

I survived all those perils and have lived to remember fallen comrades whose graves are to be found in North Africa, throughout Italy and Central Europe, and others who have no grave but the ocean. I have visited both Italy and Germany in peacetime and found friendship and hospitality in both. I now have good friends in Germany and I have a little German honorary nephew (aged 1) and niece (aged 4). It has been estimated that 50 million people – men, women and little children, combatants and civilians, of every country and every race – died directly or indirectly as a result of World War II. Is the world of 2010 so much better than that of 1938 as to have made all that human sacrifice worthwhile? Looking back over the years, I ask, ‘Was it all worth it? And could it ever happen again?

I recently read a ‘reader’s letter’ in the East Anglian Daily Times in which the writer (who I suspect was in his forties or fifties) claimed that the servicemen and women of World War II, had fought for a free and independent UK, and were being betrayed by those who were now urging ever-closer ties with the European mainland. Unlike that letter writer I had been one of those servicemen. I had thought that I was taking part in a world-wide struggle to end the petty nationalism of which Nazism and Fascism were extreme examples, and to create a new united Europe of co-operation, freedom and peace, a precursor of the day when, as Alfred Lord Tennyson had put it a century and a half earlier,

The war-drums throb no more and the battle flags are furled,

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’