Week 4 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Prime Minister’s Choice

          In last week’s blog I said that the Prime Minister’s reaction to the increasingly clear evidence of global catastrophe resulting from accelerating world-wide climate change would tell us whether he really was a far-sighted statesman determined to pull his country, and lead the world, back from the abyss – or whether he is just another  politician whose vision doesn’t extend beyond the next general election..

            I fully expected to have to wait a few weeks for the answer – but it was made clear even before my blog had been posted on the internet!   No – the Prime Minister isn’t going to redouble efforts to reduce our national dependence on the fossil fuels that are producing catastrophic weather conditions across the globe, and to set an example to other industrialised nations to do the same.  On the contrary, he is proposing to bribe local authorities into permitting ‘fracking’ in their areas, and is telling us that these operations will result in the creation of thousands of jobs, cheaper gas and oil and less dependence on our  obtaining these fuels from the world’s political  trouble spots.

            Those local authorities that accept the bribe won’t have to cut their budgets as severely as they had expected and we can, so the Prime Minister claims, all hope for less expensive fuel and a marked further reduction in the number of unemployed.   That should be worth a few thousand votes in the next election.  When Mr Cameron decided to opt for the political alternative he certainly did so in style!

            Will fracking threaten our water supplies and produce the mini-earthquakes that its opponents prophecy?  Possibly not, if the operators carefully follow every recommended safety precaution.  However  since the products of successful fracking are fossil fuels, one thing that their use certainly will do is increase the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and thus accelerate even further the climatic change that is threatening us all.

            A feature of the fracking operation about which I heard for the first time on the tv news this (13^th January) evening is that profitable production from a ‘fracking well’ lasts only four years.   It then becomes necessary to sink another well elsewhere.  That no doubt accounts for the fact that I have seen aerial photographs of considerable areas of the USA reduced to an industrial desert by fracking operations.  That – as well as the possibility of cheap fuel, a reduction in the unemployment figures, and increasingly extreme weather – is something to which we can look forward in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’.   That’s the kind of prospect that makes me feel quite glad that my ninety-third birthday approaches!

Gove’s War

          I have to confess that Michael Gove is one member of the government for whom I have, on occasion, felt just a little sympathy.  I think, as he evidently does, that there is something wrong with our educational system and it seems to me that some of his ideas, although they are greeted with derision by most of the teaching profession, have merit in them. 

            However I have often been glad that Mr Gove is not concerned with foreign affairs or with the armed forces.   He must surely be one of the few people in the UK/in Europe/in the world, who can look at the Middle East and still believe that the invasion of Iraq (for which the infamous Bush/Blair axis secured parliamentary approval only by deception) was a ‘good thing’ and has resulted in a better and more peaceful world.   Tell that to any member of Iraq’s Christian community. They were tolerated and influential in Saddam Hussein’s time, but now, like most Christians in Muslim-majority countries, they are living constantly under threat and seeking refuge elsewhere when they can.  Tell that too, to Shia Muslims living in Sunni areas and vice versa.  El Qaida, which prior to our ill-conceived and illegal invasion, scarcely had a foothold in Iraq, now flourishes!

This war memorial, to the fallen of the American ‘Rainbow Division’ catches something of the pathos and tragedy of World War I    

Now, during the centenary year of the outbreak of World War I, Michael Gove urges us to ‘celebrate’ what used to be called ‘the Great War’ and to ignore the ‘left wing intellectuals’ who claim that it was a flagrant and appalling squandering of human life engineered by scheming politicians and made worse by incompetent military commanders driving (but never leading!) masses of unwilling soldiery like sheep to the slaughter.  One doesn’t have to be left-wing or particularly intellectual to accept the remembered testimony of those, now no longer with us, who fought in and survived that war – and the evidence of the World War I cemeteries and war memorials in northern France  and Flanders.

            Probably the most famous war memorial in mainland Europe is the Menin Gate outside Ypres, the only Belgian town that was never under German control during World War I, where some of the bloodiest battles of that war were fought.  Completed in 1927 the Memorial was intended to bear the names of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were known to have been killed in those battles but whose bodies had  never been found. There were 55,000 such soldiers and, huge as the Menin Gate memorial is, there was found to be insufficient space for 55,000 names. Consequently the Menin Gate has the names of only some 35,000 names and the others are memorialised elsewhere!

            Poet, author and war hero Siegfried Sassoon* (he was awarded the M.C. Military Cross* for his conspicuous gallantry) wrote of the Menin Gate,

Well may the dead, who struggled in the slime,

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

            I reckon that if Siegfried Sassoon were alive today he would say much the same about the  ‘celebration’ of the centenary of the outbreak of World War I.  I and other ex-servicemen survived World War II because military commanders in that war were less careless of human life than their predecessors had been just over two decades earlier.

           

I hope that we will remember the outbreak of World War I with repentance for human folly and wickedness and determination never again to be deceived by scheming politicians into the wholesale slaughter of our fellow men and women. As for Michael Gove – a Biggles Omnibus and a few ancient copies of The Boys own Paper should keep him happy.   Let us hope that he is never in a position to realize his dreams of military glory.

            *Siegfried Sassoon was a volunteer infantry officer who became aware of the criminal waste of human life in World War I and subsequently became a peace campaigner.  His paternal ancestors had been Iraqi Jews and he owed his German Christian name to his gentile mother’s love of Wagner’s music. He was undoubtedly recklessly courageous and was known as ‘Mad Jack’ as a result.  It has been said that OBE sometimes stands for ‘Other B………. Efforts’.  No-one has ever been awarded an M.C. for any efforts other than his or her own.

           

Calling all (or any!) local blog readers

            Such are the wonders of modern technology that I can be pretty confident that there are over 2,000 regular readers of this blog world-wide.  I know that I have many readers in the USA and in Russia as well as in the UK, readers in Germany, Poland, Bosnia and the Ukraine and even a few in India, in mainland China and Vietnam. What I don’t know is whether I have many local readers, from southern East Anglia – in particular from north-east Essex and southern Suffolk.

            I know that I have one or two because they have contacted me – but perhaps that’s the lot.  We have it on the very best of authority that a prophet it less likely to be honoured in his own neighbourhood and among his own people than further afield!  This particular item is especially for all – or any – local blog readers.

            On Sunday 12^th January, BBC tv’s Countryfile programme invited viewers to contact them if they felt that a Countryfile programme might possibly be made in their particular area.  These programmes cover local farming but also most other rural activities and interests – particularly where there is local controversy,  such as the tourist development of Dedham Vale for instance.

Bridge Cottage, Flatford Mill         

I have emailed them suggesting the Suffolk/Essex border area; the countryside that inspired Constable and Gainsborough, from Sudbury through Dedham, Flatford Mill and Manningtree to historic Harwich, home of the Mayflower.  Then there’s the rich agricultural land of the almost-an-island Tendring Peninsula, with Walton Backwaters – scene of one of Arthur Ransome’s children’s novels and, on the outskirts, Colchester, England’s oldest recorded town as well as, on the Essex 'sunshine coast', no less than five coastal holiday resorts, each with its own character but all having safe, clean, sandy beaches, ‘all the fun of the fair’ for those who want it and the lowest average annual rainfall in the British Isles;  all easily accessible from London!

                                   The home of the Master of the Mayflower in Harwich        

  I am quite sure that a visit from the Countryfile team and a programme featuring the Essex/Suffolk border would enhance the economy of the whole area and bring us welcome holiday visitors.  Why not respond to the Countryfile appeal and suggest a visit to our region?  Emails should go to countryfile@bbc.co.uk   If you have any photographs of the area send them as attachments.   To my own email I attached a photo of Bridge Cottage, Flatford Mill, and one of the Harwich home of the Master of the Mayflower. Here they are!

           

           

Week 42 2012

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Global Market

            It was I suppose obvious, but it still came as something of a shock when I heard David Cameron’s final rallying speech at the Conservative Party Conference.  We have, he said, to compete on the global market with emerging economies like China, India and Brazil if we are to survive and prosper as a nation.  That is, of course, the logical result of the free global market that most, if not all, our national politicians are so keen on.

            It is a subject on which I had my damascene moment about a year ago when I bought a padded envelope at the post office to send a small gift to a very young friend of mine in Germany.  The packet had ROYAL MAIL in big bold letters at the top.  At the bottom, in much smaller letters, were the words Made in China.  It dawned on me that thousands of miles away on the other side of the world there was a firm that could manufacture those packets, intended solely for the British market, transport them half way round the world, and offer them for sale in Britain at a lower price than any British or European manufacturer, despite the fact that those manufacturers were virtually on-the-spot!  Market forces, whose gods are cost effectiveness and profitability, then dictated that the Royal Mail purchased them in preference to any locally manufactured product.

            To compete with those emerging economies we have either to undercut their prices or produce better quality products.  There was a time when we could confidently predict our ability to do the latter – but that time has gone.  Those other nations with emerging economies, whom Kipling dismissed a century and half ago as ‘lesser breeds without the law’ are as good at quality control as we are and, particularly in China, have a thirst for technical – and general – education that now seems to be lacking in Britain.

            If we are going to undercut their prices we have to create ‘a level playing field’ which would mean that our working men and women would have to accept the same wages as workers in those countries.  We would have to accept the same or worse living conditions than they do, tolerate the same slums, the same level of public services, and the same health and welfare services.  Have you seen the film ‘Slum-dog millionaire’?  In India’s cities in real life there are thousands of slum-dogs for every millionaire!

            Well, we haven’t got there yet, but if the present government pursues with even more vigour its present policies of slashing public services, freezing council tax, cutting grants to local authorities, freeing employers of the restraints that protect the safety and livelihood of working people, and cutting the benefits of the old, the sick, the disabled and those who cannot find work, they’ll get there in the end!  Think of that.  Thanks to David Cameron and his millionaire-friendly government, we may one day be able to make padded envelopes with large inscriptions in Chinese, Urdu or Portuguese printed upon them (and smaller inscriptions saying Made in the UK) and sell them to the postal authorities in China, India and Brazil!

‘Well might the Dead, who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre to crime’

          So wrote 1^st World War poet, war hero and, from 1917 onwards, fervent opponent of the war, Siegfried Sassoon CBE, MC.   He was referring to the Menin Gate, perhaps World War 1’s best-known memorial, on which are inscribed the names of 90,000 men killed in the third battle of Ypres, often known as the Battle of Passchendaele, whose bodies were never found!   I think it likely that were Sassoon living today, he would say much the same about David Cameron’s idea of a day of special remembrance on 4^th August 2014, the 100^th anniversary of the declaration of war between Britain and the Commonwealth, and the Kaiser’s Germany.

Probably most of the dead of the two World Wars would express similar sentiments.  They know that no memorial to their memory or ceremony of remembrance can ever give them back their stolen lives nor ever begin to compensate for their loss.  To pretend that  they do justice to their memory is just a joke in bad taste.

 A memorial to the Rainbow Division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, that captures something of the tragedy of war.  (Photo by my younger son Andy)    

However that memorial at Ypres, and the memorial events proposed by David Cameron, are not really for them.   They are not for the dead but for the living.  Those 90,000 names carved on the Menin Gate must surely bring to even the most frivolous visitor a sense of the enormity and horror of World War 1, of the appalling loss of human life, and of the deep and inconsolable sorrow of bereaved widows and girl friends, of parents and of young sons and daughters.

               I can just remember Remembrance Day (Armistice Day we called it then) memorial parades and church services in the late 1920s, when World War I was still a dreadful memory in the lives of most people.  There were ex-servicemen, some blinded, some with missing arms or legs. There were widows and girl-friends, some still wearing mourning black.  There were elderly mums and dads fighting the tears as they remembered their own sons whose lives had held so much promise, but who were now among the ‘heroic dead’.  Those scenes were replicated all over the world in lands of former allies and former enemies alike.  Death, love and sorrow hold no passports and know no national boundaries.

            I hope that the centenary of the beginning of World War I will be observed in sorrow and with repentance……certainly not in an orgy of self congratulation and triumphal nationalism.  World War I was declared to be a war to end wars.   It didn’t.  World War II was fought to defeat for ever the forces of Nazism and Fascism and to establish a new world order of peace, tolerance and prosperity.  It didn’t. Two Gulf Wars disposed of Saddam Hussein but have failed to make Iraq a safer, happier place in which to live.  Whatever may be the outcome of the current bloody civil war in Syria the one  prediction that I can make with total confidence is that we shall end with a Syria having less tolerance and freedom than it had before the conflict started. 

Peaceful negotiations do not always obtain their objective.  Warfare and violence never do.  The very best memorial that we can give those 90,000 lost soldiers who perished as they ‘struggled in the slime’ of Passchendaele and whose bodies were never found, and the millions of others of every nation who were slaughtered in two Word Wars, is an end to the international arms trade and real progress towards a lasting peace such as Tennyson prophesied nearly two centuries ago in a world where:

The war drum throbs no more and the battle flags are furled,

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

The Time Traveller

I have in the past written in this blog that I sometimes think of myself as a time traveller; a mid-twentieth century man who has managed to stray into the twenty-first century and isn’t completely comfortable there.  Last week I travelled back in time, at least in my memory, some eighty years – and found that I was even less comfortable there!

 My new gas-fired boiler with automatic control was installed in July.  As  I am an early riser I have set the automatic controls so as to ensure that by six a.m. when I usually get up, my bungalow is warm and comfortable and there is plenty of hot water for my wash, shave and shower.  The boiler is set to switch off at 6.30 am. However I can, and do, switch the central heating and/or the water heating on manually at any time during the day when the need arises.

Last Thursday (11^th October) I was out during the morning and returned home at about 11.00 am.  It was, as Clacton blog-readers may remember, a chilly, cheerless and overcast day with occasional light rain.  I decided to switch on the central heating.  I pressed the appropriate button.  Nothing happened.  The boiler obstinately refused to respond.   I phoned the installer (the system was well within its guarantee) and was promised that an engineer would call and sort out my problem early the next day.  That was the most I could have hoped for.  The installer could hardly have been expected to get one of his men to down tools instantly in order to sort out my problem.

In the meantime I had to face the next twenty-four hours with no hot water on tap and no central heating.  Thursday was one of those relatively rare days on which there had been no sign of the sun – and therefore no heating of the water in my storage cylinder from the solar panel on the roof!   My mind shot back eighty years to my childhood.       

I was back in my mind to that small and draughty jerry-built terraced house in Ipswich where I spent most of my childhood. It was no longer 2012 but 1932 and I was eleven years old.  I climbed the stairs to my unheated bedroom, a lighted candle in a candle-stick in my hand, undressed, climbed into my pyjamas, and crept shivering between the icy cold sheets.  When I had warmed up a little I would blow out the candle on the bedside chest of drawers, and try to go to sleep.

In the morning I would hear my parents get up before 7.00 am.   I would do so at about 7.30, when I could hear the kindling crackling on the coal fire that my dad would have lit in the living room.  In the winter I would relight that candle before stepping out of bed with bare feet onto icy lino and hurriedly dragging on my clothes.  There might well be a film of ice formed from the condensation on the inside of the bedroom window. By the time I got downstairs the gas light hanging in the middle of the room would have been lit and, with any luck, the fire would be burning merrily.

My Mum and Dad would have finished their ablutions and Mum would be busying herself preparing breakfast.  The kettle, with water for my wash, would have been singing on the gas stove.  We washed in a bowl in the kitchen sink of course. We had a bathroom but it was a tiny room with space only for a small bath with one cold water tap, and a gas fired ‘copper’, in which on Saturday nights, we heated our bath water.   The loo was outside.      

No, my present predicament was really nothing like that, and it was even less like my experiences in the army and as a PoW (but I preferred not even to think of them!).  My bungalow is double-glazed, with cavity walls infilled and roof space thoroughly insulated.  My bedroom is carpeted. My bed, with its duvet, is warm and welcoming and there is a bedside electric lamp.   I had a portable electric fire to take the chill off the room as I dressed.

The bathroom was chilly but, in any case, I had no option but to miss my usual morning shower.  Hot water for my wash and shave was supplied from an electric kettle.  In my home in the ‘20s and early ‘30s there was no electricity. That was provided, for lights only, in the mid-1930s. In 1932 my mum and dad and I would have considered that my living conditions today, even without running hot water and central heating, were luxurious beyond their wildest dreams!

Be that as it may, I breathed a deep sigh of relief when the heating engineer turned up, brought my boiler back into service (I hope I remember his advice on the prevention of a recurrence!) and restored my home to the comfort and convenience that we expect today.  Despite my occasional nonagenarian despair at aspects of 21^st Century life, I really wouldn’t want to revisit the daily discomforts that we took for granted just eighty years ago,

           

           

           

Week No 29 26.7.11

Tendring Topics……..on line


‘The Big Society’ - in Uniform

Until now Big Society emphasis has been on local affairs such as finding volunteers to man libraries, pick up litter and weed municipal gardens when those who previously did these jobs had been sacked. Could it perhaps also have a national application?

The government is, as we all know, desperately keen to reduce that deficit! They can’t resort to the obvious solution of reforming the income tax system so that all members of Society contribute towards this aim in proportion to their ability to do so. This measure, however fair and sensible, would alienate some of their most loyal supporters.

They would like to cut defence expenditure. The vastly expensive and eminently dispensable Trident submarine programme is for some inexplicable reason sacrosanct. They have already sold off our sole Aircraft Carrier and have reduced the size of the army. They would like to make further reductions to the fighting forces but that is a little difficult as those forces have been busy for the past twenty years with wars in Iraq (twice!), Afghanistan (a war to which there seems to be no end!) and now in Libya.

Can Mr Cameron’s Big Society come to the rescue? Its whole purpose is to find volunteers who will do the work of professionals - but less expensively. They already have the nucleus of just such a group of volunteers in the Territorial Army! The Territorial Army, ‘weekend soldiers’ as we (yes, I was once one of them!) used to be called, consists of volunteers who are required to do just 27 days full-time training a year, part of which is usually a fortnight’s working camp in some appropriate training area. While undergoing fulltime training they receive the same pay as regular professional soldiers.

Originally intended to defend England while only professionals (regulars) were drafted abroad, that changed in two World Wars. In September 1939 the TA was embodied into the regular army to serve wherever required. That doesn’t happen today but TA members can and do volunteer to serve for a fixed time (usually a year) in the army overseas. Territorial volunteers have been in the fighting, and among the casualties, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Legislation ensures that their jobs are kept open for their return to ‘civvy street’.

I volunteered early in 1939 and joined a local Territorial Royal Artillery Regiment. I went to only one TA training camp. It was at Roedean (on land in front of the posh girls’ school!) on the outskirts of Brighton, in August. A fortnight after our return to civilian life we were all called up again on the outbreak of World War II. That was the last I saw of civilian life until my discharge nearly seven years later on 23rd April 1946.
August 1939, the 67th Medium Regt. RA (TA) at Roedean, nr. Brighton. The guns are ancient iron tyred 6in howitzers that may well have seen service in the Boer War! The thoroughly unsoldierly way in which we are climbing over them and lounging round them suggests that we, and they, had only just arrived

January 1942 – transformed into real soldiers! No 4 gun of ‘B’ Troop, 231st Battery, 67 Medium Regiment RA, clustered round our (rather more modern) gun on the Egyptian/Libyan border. I am fourth from the right, wearing a woolly hat! We had just taken part in the successful siege and capture of Wadi Halfaya (‘Hellfire Pass’) and Sollum, taking some 4,000 German and Italian prisoners. We little imagined that six months later we ourselves would be PoWs, captured by Rommel’s Afrikakorps at Tobruk


Today’s Territorial Army is ready-made for Mr Cameron’s Big Society. Increase its numbers (there’s a big difference between paying some one for 27 days each year and paying them for 365!) and it should be possible to make big reductions in the number of professional soldiers. Finding volunteers to join the troops in Afghanistan (or wherever the next conflict takes place) for a fixed period, shouldn’t present a major problem. Nobody really thinks that he or she personally is going to be killed or maimed, and being ‘one of our heroes’ in the Middle East can seem an exciting escape from the boredom of an office desk or factory bench

How gratified they will all be at Westminster if the scheme lives up to their hopes. No need to upset wealthy supporters by getting them to help carry the burden of the Nation’s debt. No need to imperil the Trident nuclear weapon programme. Some of those volunteers will undoubtedly ‘make the ultimate sacrifice’. How proud of them all those safe-at-home politicians and retired generals will be!

Those Council Leader Expenses again

I am not surprised that members of Essex County Council are now coming under fire for having failed to report to the Police their suspicions of the validity of Lord Hanningfield’s claims for expenses as Council Leader. I have pointed out before in this blog that he was not alone. Those who condoned and took part in and encouraged his activities share his guilt.

County Councillor Julie Young of Colchester makes much the same point in a recent letter to the daily Gazette. ‘Did it not dawn on other councillors that taking all those trips to China, America and other countries might not be the best use of council resources or did they think the money for these trips dropped out of the sky? Did they complain? No, they didn’t, they picked up another bottle of sun tan lotion and packed a bag, on some occasions they even took their wives or husbands too……..I am on record as opposing these trips as reported in the local papers at the time. Did they listen? No, they didn’t, they merrily trotted off enjoying the trips’.

I have no idea what the legal position is, but morally I would have thought that benefiting from the fraudulent use of a debit card was much the same as receiving and using stolen goods.

Excuses, Excuses!

Recent episodes of the ‘Murdoch Empire Saga’ haven’t been wildly exciting.  The interviews of the three leading actors – Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks – with a Commons committee, established that all three had mastered what I think of as the essential skill of any top manager: the ability to accept praise graciously, and to pass blame further down the line. ‘I was too trusting. I was let down by those I had relied upon’; surely an eminently forgivable fault!  Well, it is - provided you're not one of those 'further down the line'

Rupert Murdoch was showing all the signs of old age (and I can certainly recognise them!). It was difficult to believe that this humbled old man was one whom Prime Ministers had had cause to fear. The only person to emerge from the interviews with any credit was surely Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng . She made a spirited attempt to defend her husband from the idiot who tried to push a shaving foam ‘custard pie’ onto his face and she supported him at every stage, with an encouraging – and some times dissuading - hand on his shoulder. I hope that she is appreciated.

Then there was David Cameron’s resolute refusal to answer whether or not in his cosy chats with Rupert Murdoch the proposed News International’s takeover of BskyB had been discussed This, he insisted, was irrelevant, as he had decided to take no part in making the decision on this matter.

Has he really forgotten that he had appointed, and has the power to dismiss from office, whoever was entrusted with that decision. They would be unlikely to take any action that would upset someone who was clearly a great friend of ’the boss’.

A War Memorial


One of the world’s best-known war memorials is the Menin Gate at Ypres – bearing the names of 54,889 British soldiers ‘missing believed dead’ in the Ypres salient in World War One whose graves are unknown. It was the subject of one of the bitterest poems of war hero (he earned the Military Cross) and anti-war poet, Siegfried Sassoon. It begins:

Who will remember, passing through this gate
The unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate -
Those dead, conscripted, unvictorious ones?


and ends:

Well might the dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

I don’t have the memories that made Siegfried Sassoon so bitter – but it is true that the only War Memorials that I can bear to look at twice are those that make it clear that warfare is not about acts of heroism, honour and glory, but about death and mutilation, sorrow and bereavement. I think that this newly created 10ft high memorial to the men of the US Rainbow Division (recruited from every state in the Union) and photographed by my younger son Andy while temporarily on display at the Royal Academy, falls into that category.

It commemorates those of the Rainbow Division who fell at Croix Rouge Farm in an engagement in the Marne/Aisne area of Belgium in July 1918, when World War I was drawing to its close. It is eventually to be placed at the site of the battle.

                                           I think that Siegfried Sassoon might have approved.