Week 22 2014

Tendring Topics…..on line

A Personal Story

            Those who regularly read this blog hoping to find a solution to the World’s problems, the problems of the United Kingdom, or even those just of Clacton-on-Sea, will do so today in vain.  This week’s blog is a personal story that began in Germany during the closing months of World War II.  Last Saturday, 17^th May,  the Bowling Green pub/restaurant a few miles outside Clacton-on-Sea saw the latest, perhaps its final, chapter.

            I spent the last eighteen months of the war in a ‘working camp’ (Arbeitskommando) of British other-rank PoWs in the small German town of Zittau.  It has about 30,000 inhabitants and is now the Federal Republic of Germany’s most easterly town, just on the German side of the point at which the frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic coincide.  There were only thirty of us PoWs.  Our accommodation (a dormitory and barrack room within what was left of the town theatre that had been badly damaged by fire) was luxurious by PoW standards.  These rooms were on the first floor and the guards lived immediately below us on the ground floor.   The guards were neither the sadistic bullies nor mindless morons of popular fiction.  They were, in fact, remarkably like us.  Most had seen active service on the Eastern Front and had been wounded and/or badly frost bitten.  Their sole ambition was to keep their heads down and survive the war.  Ours was the same! Our rations were better than they had been in the concentration camp in which we had been incarcerated  in Italy. The Red Cross food parcels arrived regularly – and we were often working with food, in railway trucks, warehouses and wholesalers’ premises.  We rarely went hungry.  I have spoken to many other ex-PoWs about their experiences and ours were far better than most!

            Our work, which was heavy, for up to ten hours a day and with only one ‘rest day’ in three weeks nearly killed us at first after idleness, boredom and semi-starvation in Italy. We soon got used to it though – and it did make the time pass quickly. The work was mostly loading and unloading trucks on railway sidings in and around Zittau.  We also did any other manual work that was needed – digging graves in the cemetery, sweeping the streets, moving furniture, delivering coal, potatoes and other vegetables from wholesaler to retailer and so on.  We worked in parties of two to six, sometimes with a guard but often with an unarmed civilian with an arm band denoting that he was in charge.  We quickly picked up enough basic and very ungrammatical German to make it possible for us to chat with German civilians and other POWs and forced-workers mostly from Russia and Ukraine, who worked with us.  We really had an astonishing amount of freedom while we were working. It would have been easy to escape – but where to?  Take a look at a map of central Europe!

            One day in mid February 1945 a few days after the fire-bombing of Dresden by the RAF and US airforce on 13^th and 14^th of that month (in my opinion a war crime if there ever was one) we were sent with a guard to Zittau civic museum.  I remember that the incessant thunder of gunfire from the east was getting louder every day as the eastern front moved inexorably nearer and nearer to Zittau.   It was obvious to our guards, the local civilians and foreign workers and to us that the Third Reich was collapsing and that within a few months – perhaps weeks – the war would be over.  Our job was to load large and heavy cases onto a lorry, climb onto the lorry and unload them at our destination.  This proved to be some ancient ruins near the summit of a mountain (Mount Oybin) a few miles from Zittau.  It was, in fact, a ruined monastery and we unloaded the lorry and put the cases in the crypt.  We were told that they contained ‘treasure’ from the museum and they were taken there for safety from the kind of air raids that had devastated Dresden – only some sixty miles away.  It was ‘just another job'.  It was sixty years before I gave it another thought!

            The war in Europe ended on 8^th May. A free man again, I walked through the front door of my home in Ipswich on 18^th May (by a happy coincidence my 24^th birthday!). How, in the turmoil at the end of World War II, I managed to get home from the Soviet occupied, most easterly part of Germany, in just ten days, is another story.

            Sixty years, almost a lifetime later, my wife and I had two adult sons and we were beginning to think about our diamond wedding celebration.  I was a freelance writer and had an article about some of my experiences as a POW published in The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal.  In the article I wrote positively of the time I spent in Zittau, although I thought it unlikely that any reader of ‘The Friend would have heard of the town.  I was wrong.  The family of Jasper Kay, a Quaker and Friend reader living at Cottenham near Cambridge, had originated in Zittau.  He was in regular correspondence with a Zittau family and would be paying his first visit to the town in a few weeks time.  Was there anything I would like brought back from there?

The Kulke family in 2008  Left to right – Ingrid, Maja (born 2006), Frau Ingrid Kulke, Kornelia (Konni), Andreas.  Tomas was not yet born but was imminently expected!

I replied, telling him where I had lived and where I had worked while I was a PoW there.  I would very much appreciate post cards or photos of the town.  Thus began my friendship with the remarkable Kulke family.  Daughter Ingrid had a knowledge of English.  She had been Jasper’s correspondent and became mine too.  She translated my original article and my letter into German for her family.  Her mother, another Ingrid, and her brother Andreas, cycled round Zittau and district taking photos of all the places I had remembered.  Frau Kulke also obtained for me a facsimile of the local newspaper Der Zittauer Nachrichten, for 18^th May 1944 – my 23^rd birthday that I had spent in the town.  My wife and I felt that we had become members of the Kulke family.  When Andreas married Kornelia (Konni) we were told all about it – and I received an excited card when their first child, a little girl whom they christened Maja, was born.  During the course of my email correspondence with Ingrid I mentioned that one of the more unusual jobs that I had done while I was working in her home town had been to help transport those heavy boxes of ‘treasure’ from Zittau Museum to the crypt of the ruined monastery on Mount Oybin. To my astonishment this caused great excitement.  It seemed that I had, quite accidentally and inadvertently, played a minor role in the 550 year history of the Zittau Great Lenten Veil (or ‘Fastentuch’) an enormous textile artefact that was, and is, the town’s pride and joy.

                                                     Zittau’s Great Lenten Veil on       display    

During the Middle Ages it had been the practice to screen off the sanctuary and choir of churches with a linen veil during the season of Lent – to impose a spiritual as well as a material fast on the congregation.   Zittau’s Great Lenten Veil was unique in that it had 90 pictures, 45 of scenes from the Old Testament and 45 from the New, painted upon it.  When the war ended it was found to be missing from its home in the Zittau Museum.  Months later it was discovered on Mount Oybin where it had been found by Russian soldiers, cut into four pieces and used to line the walls of an improvised sauna!  It was rescued and, after German reunification, lovingly restored and returned to its home in Zittau.  It is now permanently on display in a controlled atmosphere and lighting in the redundant church of the Holy Cross.  Here it attracts thousands of visitors every year.  No-one in post-war Zittau had known how or when the town’s famous artefact had been transported from the town museum to Oybin – until I sent that email to Ingrid!

Meanwhile my wife had become increasingly reliant upon me and, for two years, I could think of little except her care.  Sadly, on 12^th July 2006, just three months after we had celebrated our Diamond (60 years) Wedding Anniversary, her life came to an end.  It left a gaping and aching space in my life that even today, nearly eight years later, has not wholly healed.

 My interest in Zittau helped to fill that gap. I managed, with the support of my family, to visit Zittau four times between 2006 and 2011. I met Frau Kulke and her family.  Little Maja acquired a young brother Tomas.  They are my ‘honorary niece and nephew’ and I try never to forget them at Christmas and on their birthdays!  I met Dr Volker Dudeck who had been Direktor of Zittau Town Museum. Now retired, he devoted his life to the care and publicising of the Great Lenten Veil.  I visited Mount Oybin and saw the crypt to which I had helped take those cases in 1945.  My last visit (and it will be my final visit I feel sure) was on the occasion of my 90^th birthday (18^th May 2011) and I was accompanied by members of my immediate family.  There were nine of us in all.  We were given a champagne welcome and reception in the Town Hall by Mayor Herr Voigt, there was a special VIP showing of the famous Great Lenten Veil in its permanent home, and a ‘command performance’ by a local piano-accordion orchestra beginning with ‘When the saints come marching in’ as they marched in, followed by the European Anthem Schiller's Ode to Joy, and other folk and light classical music, and concluding with Happy Birthday to you’ performed with great gusto and enthusiasm.  On our last evening in Zittau I hosted a dinner party for the members of my family and all my German friends including Dr Dudeck and his wife and the Mayor of Zittau and his.  It was a birthday never to be forgotten.

            And the event at the Bowling Green on 17^th May this year?   Well, I had had a  birthday celebration lunch last year but I had left it rather late and several folk both in England and in Germany who would have liked to be present  had prior commitments.  I could also feel that my body and mind were wearing out (I can’t think of a better way of putting it!).  It wasn’t being morbid or pessimistic, but just realistic to feel that this year I might have my last opportunity to see some of my friends, particularly those from Germany.

 

Left to right - Frau Julia Dudeck, Dr. Volker Dudeck, me, Maja Kulke

In the end twenty-two of us sat down to that birthday celebration lunch on 17^th May.  I was particularly pleased, and humbled, by the fact that Dr Volker Dudeck of Zittau, a distinguished historian and a ‘cultural senator’ of the Federal State of Saxony had, with his wife Julia, driven 1000 Km. from the most easterly town in Germany to be with me.   I had four totally unexpected guests.  I hadn’t invited them because I hadn’t for one moment thought they’d be able to come – but I was delighted when they did!  They were my ‘honorary nephew and niece’, Tom and Maja, now five and seven respectively, but shortly to be six and eight!  With them were their mum and dad, Konni and Andreas.  Their presence made the event perfect.  There were seven Germans (all originally from Zittau), two Austrians (Ingrid’s god-daughter Jenny and her boy-friend Sebastian), one Belgian (my grandson’s partner Romy) and the rest of us were Brits.  Most, but not all, of the German speakers also spoke English but we were extremely fortunate in having a waitress who could understand and speak German!

Maja and Tom with their mum, Konni Kulke

The lunch, with friendly conversation, a delightful short speech by Jenny and Sebastian and a brief display of folk dancing by Ingrid and her English partner Ray, lasted till 4.30. Then I said farewell to my guests and was driven home for a much-needed rest, while the younger of my guests made their way to the sea front to sample the delights of Clacton’s sandy beaches and lively pier.  It was the first time that Maja and Tom had seen the sea and I’m told that they really enjoyed it. 

 That celebration lunch was, I think, my swan-song.  Even if I survive until this time next year, I will certainly not be capable, physically or mentally, of hosting another similar event. It was a wonderful way to celebrate my 93^rd birthday and I like to think that the friendship that has developed between members of my family and people of Zittau has been a tiny step towards Anglo-German friendship and thus towards world peace

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Tendring Topics......on Line

‘Securicor’ to G4S

            In the distant days of the late 1940s, World War II was an all-too-recent memory. My wife and I had married in 1946 and  had not yet started our family. Tony Blair was unborn and New Labour undreamt of.  In politics Left was Left and Right was Right, and Kingsley Martin was Editor of The New Statesman, the leading journal of the ‘intellectual left’.  I was one of its avid readers, on one occasion winning first prize (I think it was all of £5!) in the weekly literary competition.  It was a proud moment.

            The content of one article that I read in the NS at that time has stuck in my memory.  It warned of the danger of private armies growing, competing with, and possibly supplanting, the country’s armed forces and police forces,  ‘Securicor’ was mentioned, a firm of which, at that time, I had never heard.

            I wonder what the author of that article would have said had anyone told him that some sixty years later, Securicor (then providing uniformed protection for cash transfers from banks and similar security operations) would have evolved into G4S an enormous international organisation with its base in Britain but its tentacles world-wide.

              Most people in Britain today probably know of G4S only as the private security firm that signally failed to fulfil a £300 million contact with the government (that actually means with us, the tax payers!) to provide security cover for the London Olympics. They admitted their inability to honour their promises when it was too late to set things right except by dragging soldiers, on leave and war-weary from Afghanistan, and police officers from off their beats, to take their place.   They then had the nerve to demand a £57 million  management fee!

            That is what everybody knows.  What I have learned quite recently, largely from an article by Clare Sambrook in the Friend, a Quaker weekly journal (though I have since confirmed the accuracy of its content on the internet), is that G4S is an international organisation based in the UK now employing 657,000 people in 125 countries!

 ‘Company employees protect oil, gas and mining companies all over the world.   They have served the Israeli prisons service and businesses in the Occupied Territories. For G4S the Arab Spring’s popular uprisings seemed more about business opportunity than democracy.  Last year their executives told shareholders that civil unrest had sparked a rising demand for private security services. In Egypt and Bahrain G4S gained visibility among government heads of security and built the brand.  In Saudi Arabia the company’s support for the regime during popular protests earned local staff, by royal decree, a two-month bonus’.

Clare Sambrook writes that here in the UK, where G4S is based, the company is a leading beneficiary of outsourcing – the transfer of government functions and service provision to the private sector.  Its success is helped by an ability to nurture cosy relationships with ministers and civil servants.  In this year alone G4S will receive more than £1 billion in long-term contracts with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Work and Pensions and local Police Authorities!

In Britain G4S activities include building and managing prisons, running children’s homes, monitoring tagged offenders, training magistrates and reclassifying benefits claimants.  Lincolnshire is the scene of one of G4S’ most comprehensive outsourcing triumphs.  In that county, they are managing custody suites for the police, dealing with both routine and emergency phone calls and are in charge of firearms licensing and court protection.  They have been commissioned to build and run Britain’s first for-profit police station and they stamp their corporate logo on police staff uniforms!

Simon Reed, vice-chairman of the Police Federation says of ‘out-sourcing’ what I have said over and over again in this blog:  The bottom line is that the priority for private companies will always be shareholders and profit margins.   That is why we have voiced real concerns about the future negative impact of public safety if the government’s drive to privatise mass swathes of policing comes into fruition………..it is very clear that these private contracts are built upon an expectation that the public sector will step in to pick up the pieces if private industry fails to deliver.

When that prophetic New Statesman journalist in the late 1940s warned about Securicor and similar organisations ultimately rivalling and coming into conflict with the police he could hardly have imagined that nearly seventy years later Securicor’s successor would be slowly taking over not only the police but large amounts of Britain’s other vital public services.  Nor that they would be doing so with the connivance of a government blinded by its obsession that private enterprise is always better than public service – a proposition that has been demonstrated time and time again to be untrue.

The Olympic Legacy

          The United Kingdom’s summer of almost unbelievable sporting success is over.  It began with the winning by a British cyclist (for the first time ever) of the Tour de France!   Hot on its heels came the Olympics, which began with an opening ceremony that was acclaimed world-wide, and continued with day after day of successful and extremely watchable, athletic and sporting events from which Great Britain harvested an unprecedented crop of medals.  Although we came third in the ‘medals table’, if we take populations of the leading countries into consideration, we were ahead of both the USA and China!

A vey special Paralympian.  Unable to use his legs from birth, David Weir MBE, has won a total of six gold medals at the Paralympics of 2008 and 2012 and has also won the London Marathon on six occasions! This was surely a triumph of courage and determination over adversity that is an example to us all. David Weir won for Great Britain the very last gold medal for the very last event of the 2012 Olympics

           

The Paralympics that followed were, in their own way, even more successful.  They too had a universally acclaimed opening ceremony.   They were, I believe, watched much more widely than ever before and the spectators’ seats in the Olympics Park and at the other venues were full day after day.  It was perhaps unfortunate that they were available for viewers only on Channel 4 television, where viewers had to endure regular ‘commercial breaks’ for adverts!   Those on the spot cheered with enthusiasm athletes who ran, jumped, swam, rode or manoeuvred their wheelchairs, with disabilities that would have anchored most of the rest of us to our armchairs, if not our beds.

            And then, when it was all over, there was that wonderful ‘Victory Parade’ through the streets of central London before a million cheering spectators.  Among that multitude were my elder son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene who found a vantage point in Trafalgar Square from which they managed to get ‘close-ups’ of some of the athletes we had been cheering on during the games.

            Even that wasn’t quite the end.   As a postprandial treat after a very satisfying meal, we had Andy Murray, who had already achieved a gold medal in the games, win the American Open Tennis Championship – the first Brit to have done so since I was a schoolboy (and that was a long time ago!)   What a wonderful few weeks – even the weather cheered up and smiled on the athletes!  

And after the Games were over?   The example of the athletes and of all those who had striven to make them a success (in particular perhaps the thousands of volunteers who, without hope of either financial reward or Olympic glory, had welcomed visitors, directed, helped and supported them) was supposed to instil us with patriotism, an enthusiasm for personal participation in sports and games, and a new respect for and appreciation of our disabled fellow-citizens.

I think that it has inspired a sense of national pride that revelled in the prowess of our own athletes, but honoured and applauded too the successes of those from other lands.  It was wonderful to see those thousands of red, white and blue flags displayed by Brits of all skin colours and ethnic origin.  They demonstrated that our national flag is not, as it has sometimes seemed in the past, the exclusive property of the White Anglo-Saxon far right!  Perhaps an enthusiasm to follow those Olympians’ example will emerge in due course, but I have seen little evidence of increased respect and understanding of the disabled.  I was shocked to read a headline on one national newspaper announcing that there had actually been an increase in the number of ‘hate crime’ attacks on disabled people.

The government isn’t setting a very good example. They want to encourage public participation in outdoor sports and games – yet all over the country government cuts are doing the reverse.  Cash-strapped local authorities are closing public swimming pools and fitness centres and removing tennis courts from municipal parks and recreation grounds. In Colchester OTT (Opportunities through Technology) is a thoroughly worth-while charity that through the use of technology, helps disabled people to lead independent lives and to find work.   The Gazette records that, ‘as well as finding equipment suitable for each individual’s disability such as specially designed keyboards or computer programmes that read text for blind people, the charity’s technical team have also developed new kit to meet users’ varying physical needs’. All this threatens to end before Christmas unless OTT can find funding to replace the grant of £25,000 a year that has been withdrawn as a result of government cuts.

Then, of course, the government is ending the Disability Living Allowance that enables many disabled people to survive.  Existing recipients of this allowance will be re-assessed (by a foreign corporation to whom the task has been ‘outsourced’!) and may or may not become entitled to a new PIP (Personal Independence Payment).  Small wonder that when Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne had the temerity to visit the Paralympics he was greeted with boos and derision!   

As my son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene followed the Olympics from start to finish and supplied the photographic illustrations to this blog, perhaps Pete should have the last word:

                It occurred to me that we have witnessed talented MPs /ex MPs from both sides of the Commons working together to put on a really excellent show for the whole world, and now we come back to earth and have to witness incompetent amateurs fighting it out for the right to wreck the Economy. I would put Seb Coe and Tessa Jowell in charge of the economy rather than have them bother with the “Legacy”!