Week 13.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘The Year’s at the Spring….

…………and the day’s at the morn.
The lark’s on the wing, and the snail’s on the thorn.
Morning’s at seven, the hillside’s dew-pearled.
God’s in his Heaven; all’s right with the World’

So sang Pippa, in Browning’s poem ‘Pippa Passes’, on a very similar morning and at much the same time as that on which I am typing these words. It would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that all is right with today’s world, and I hope and believe that God isn’t confined to ‘his Heaven’ but is also present and active in his Creation.

Otherwise, I fully endorse Pippa’s sentiments. Even a world-weary old man like me feels a lift in his heart on such a morning, especially when looking out of the kitchen window I see the daffodils, golden in the early sunshine, blooming round the apple tree in my garden. Mind you the scene also brings back memories of the many, many similar spring mornings on which I looked out of that window at those same golden daffodils with Heather, my wife for sixty years, who is sadly no longer with me.

Wind-farm Progress

On recent visits to Clacton both my sons and daughters-in-law have driven along the sea front to see any signs of the developing wind-farm. There hasn’t really been a great deal to be seen. Some kind of structure was just visible and one or more craft near it were the only evidence that anything was taking place.

All that is due to change within the next few weeks. The Danish construction company’s heavy lift ship Titan 2 is getting ready for service at Harwich and will very shortly sail out to the Gunfleet Sands to erect the first turbine. Six of these have already arrived from Denmark and are to be erected on the foundations that have been prepared for them during the past six months.

The turbines will be commissioned in phases as they are erected and the electric cables between each turbine and the off-shore substation laid. It is expected that the first group will be fully operational before the end of the summer. The work of installation will continue until its completion some time next year. When the wind-farm is complete it is expected that it will generate 172 megawatts, enough electricity to meet the needs of 120,000 homes ….the equivalent of 90 percent of the homes in Colchester and the Tendring District.

Solar Heating Progress

It is good to see a ‘green’ project being pursued with vigour and, despite the vagaries of wind and weather, adhering to a timetable laid down many months ago.

I wish that I could feel quite the same of progress toward the installation of a solar powered water heating system for my bungalow, which should reduce markedly my own dependence upon gas for water heating (but see Late News on the Solar Front at the end of this item) It got off to a splendid start. Little more than a week after I had made my first tentative enquiry Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems’ surveyor had inspected my bungalow, made notes of my bungalow’s requirements and had confirmed my own belief that the solar heating installation would prove to be a pretty straight-forward job. Scarcely more than a week after that I had a phone call to inform me that the next day would see the fitting of the solar heating panels on my roof. This would be followed by a date on which the internal plumbing alterations and the connection of the solar heating system to the existing hot water supply system would take place.

Exactly as promised two very pleasant young men arrived with their van and did the necessary work on the roof of my bungalow quickly and efficiently. They fitted two solar panels, together with two much smaller panels one on each side of them. The purpose of these (photo-electric cells?) is to drive the pump that will circulate the antifreeze solution through the two solar panels and thence through my hot water system. The system will thus operate independently of the bungalow’s electricity supply.

The solar panels go up on my roof

The two young men told me that the remainder of the operation was usually carried out about a week after their visit. They advised me to phone Sunmaster Solar Energy Systems if I hadn’t heard from them by that time.

The roof job completed. To the left of the solar panels you can see the photo-electric cell operating the pump. My mobility scooter ('iron horse') complete with all-weather canopy, is in the foreground.

I didn’t hear from them and on 17th March I phoned as advised and asked when the job would be completed. The reply was unsettling. There was a component needed for my particular hot water system that they hadn’t yet been able to get hold of. They weren’t yet able to tell me when they’d be able to complete the job. Yes, they thought that it would be before Easter ….but couldn’t give a firm promise.

The claim that my system needed some unique component didn’t accord either with the assurance of the firm’s own surveyor that it would be a perfectly straightforward job, or with my own assessment of the situation.

It is a week later, and I have just phoned the firm again. This time I did at least learn which component it is that they're waiting for...........and it now makes sense. When the system is in operation water will be heated by the sun's radiation in a series of copper tubes within the glass-fronted solar panels on the roof. These will be connected to heat exchanging tubes within a heavily insulated copper cylinder in my roof space, thus heating the water in that cylinder.

The cold water supply to the hot water system will be connected to this cylinder instead of to the main storage cylinder below and a connecting pipe from the upper cylinder to the main one below will take its place. Thus all water flowing into the main storage cylinder will be pre-heated from the upper solar heated cylinder. In the winter it will supplement the boiler as a source of heat for hot water supply. In the summer it may well replace it altogether.

The missing component is, in fact, the special upper cylinder to be heated by the solar panels.

This is, of course, absolutely vital to the system and I am persuaded that the installers are doing their best to expedite its delivery. I shall just have to be patient. Sadly, I fear that those who know me best would not include patience among my most conspicuous characteristics!

Late News on the Solar Front!

I won't need to exercise my limited supply of patience after all. I wrote the above this morning (24th March) and at 3.45 p.m. this afternoon I received a phone call to say that the special cylinder had now arrived and that they would be calling on me tomorrow morning between 9.00 a.m. and 11.00 a.m., to complete the installation! I am more than pleased and hope that next week I'll be able to give you a glowing report of the system's installation and early functioning.

Golden (and diamond-studded!) Handshakes

When I referred a few weeks to Sir Fred Goodwin’s walking away from the ruins of the Royal Bank of Scotland, at the age of fifty, with a pension of nearly three quarters of a million pounds a year I really didn’t think that that was the last we would hear of the matter. Surely, I thought, either he will see the reason for the public outrage and relinquish at least part of that enormous pension, or the government will find some way of relieving him of it.

Well, I was right about our not having heard the last of the matter but quite wrong about Sir Fred losing any part of his pension either compulsorily or voluntarily. The latest news that we have heard about this sorry affair is that in addition to his almost three quarters of a million a year pension (well over £1,500 a day!!), he has received a lump sum payment of £3 million!

It certainly pays to be a top person! I have little doubt that if the irresponsibility or incompetence of any junior or middle ranking employees of the RBS had cost the bank even a few thousand pounds, they wouldn’t have been encouraged, urged or even bullied into resigning or taking early retirement. They’d have been summarily sacked!

Town Hall Jargon

I was both interested and pleased to see that the Local Government Association is campaigning to ban the use of ‘Town Hall jargon’ by local government officials. I hate it myself and hope that I never used it when I was a local government official. Words and phrases guaranteed to set my teeth on edge were ‘monies’ (instead of money), ‘human resources’ (instead of employees), ‘interface’, ‘multidisciplinary’, ‘scenario’ and ‘proactive’.

I also disliked people being asked on official forms not for their ‘sex’ but their ‘gender’. These days sexually explicit words that a generation or two ago would have resulted in the user being barred from any reputable pub, are heard daily on tv. Can we at the same time possibly have reached a stage in which ‘sex’ in its proper sense, ‘that which differentiates males from females’, has become a rude three-letter word that mustn’t on any account be used on official forms?

Among the Local Government Association’s pet hates are ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘can do culture’, ‘performance network’ and ‘lowlights’. Like me, they also include ‘interface’ among their dislikes.
‘Lowlights’, I have to say, is a word that I had never previously encountered. As the opposite of ‘highlights’ I can see that it could be quite effective. I can imagine myself using it sometime. Of the other phrases I share the LGA’s feelings but, like many of my own dislikes, I don’t think of them as being exclusively Town Hall jargon. Apart from ‘interface’ I heard none of them during my local government career and think that council officials who use them are imitating the go-ahead young men of the private sector. I can imagine them being part of the small-talk in an advertising agency, an insurance office or among ambitious young salesmen.

The late Sir John Betjeman lampooned this ‘new-speak’ in his poem The Executive, which clearly wasn’t referring to a Council official:

You ask me what it is I do. Well actually, you know
I’m partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
Essentially I integrate the current export drive
And basically I’m viable from ten o’clock till five

For vital off-the-record work (that’s talking transport-wise)
I’ve a scarlet Aston-Martin …and does she go? She flies!…….

……..and so on, in Sir John’s own special style.

A leading article in the Daily Gazette (recently the Coast Gazette and earlier the Evening Gazette) applauds the Local Government Association’s campaign. Dwellers in glass houses really should think twice though before throwing stones. It isn’t for nothing that sloppy, inaccurate and exaggerated writing is called journalese!

Post Office Local Banks?

‘What do Post Offices know about banking?’ asked a Radio 4 listener scornfully, at the suggestion that Post Offices might serve a useful role as local banks. ‘Quite a lot’, would have been my answer.

My current account has, for over half a century, been with the Co-op Bank. The nearest branch is in Colchester. However from my local (or any) Post Office I can with my debit card, draw up to £200 cash from my account at any time. I can also pay cheques into my account there and, when paying a visit to mainland Europe, can change my pounds sterling into Euros. Unspent Euros can be changed back again into pounds on my return.

Last year when I made such a trip I returned with forty Polish Zlotys and sixty Czech Krone in my wallet. My local post office couldn’t help but Clacton’s main post office in High Street instantly changed them back into pounds and pence.

The Post Office also manages savings accounts and insurances. Those, with the others I have mentioned, are I think something like three quarters of the services that ordinary people expect from a bank.

If some or all of the other services that we may seek in commercial banks were available from Post Offices, I would be very surprised if they failed to provide them at least as efficiently (and probably a lot less expensively!) than did those who have landed us in our current economic crisis.

‘A host of golden daffodils!’

These daffodils, possibly because they are on the north side of the church, are less advanced than those shown at the beginning of this blog. But this enormous host of ‘Easter Lilies’ will be a spectacular sight by the time the members of the congregation of St. James’ Church, Clacton gather for worship and thanksgiving on Easter morning! ‘Fluttering and dancing in the breeze,’ they will surely rival those in the Lake District that delighted and inspired William Wordsworth some two hundred years ago.

Week 12.09

Tendring Topics……on Line

A Second Career

My elder grandson Chris whom, a month or two ago, I announced with some pride had been designated ‘Teacher of the Year’ in Taipei, Taiwan, had never intended to be a teacher. He was an art graduate and had studied his subject in Boston, USA, and in London. After graduation he had hoped to obtain a post as an editorial illustrator. These were few and far between and he decided to fill in time and to see a bit more of the world by teaching English, first in main-land China and subsequently in Taiwan. It was just a ‘fill-in’ job; he didn’t for a moment expect that he would enjoy doing it.

But he did. And he found that he was very good at it. Before leaving England he had had a Taiwanese girl friend and had learnt a little Mandarin. He built on that and within a few months was speaking it fluently and making progress with the incredibly difficult Chinese written language. He teaches both little children (four years old upwards) and mature students and finds both groups responsive and eager to learn. He likes living in Taiwan, has a pleasant apartment, a very attractive girlfriend, and satisfaction in his work. How many people in their late twenties can say as much?

He hasn’t forgotten his art though and uses his skills as a teaching aid. After the death of my wife Heather, nearly three years ago now, I gathered together short passages of verse and prose that she had written down in half a dozen notebooks throughout the greater part of her adult lifetime, and had them printed and published as Heather’s Treasure. I needed a picture to go on the first page and asked him if he would prepare for me a line drawing of his Grandma, using a photo of her in her mid-sixties as a reference. He was happy to do so……see below:
I was very pleased indeed with it and used it as planned. Remembering how pleased I had been, he gave me, as a surprise present the following Christmas, another drawing that he had made of his Grandma as the fifteen year old schoolgirl she had been when I first met her on 3rd September 1939.

Once again he had used an old photograph as a reference and I found the result emotionally overwhelming. His drawing brought memories flooding back to me in a way that the photograph could never have done. Both the original drawings (A4 size) are now framed and proudly on display.

Three or four months ago, during the course of an email correspondence, I asked him if he might possibly find the time to do a companion drawing of myself to accompany them. I suggested as a reference a photo that had been taken in Wenceslas Square, Prague on my visit there with his Dad and brother the previous year.

Knowing how busy Chris always is I then pushed the matter to the back of my mind. I was therefore both surprised and delighted when, a fortnight ago at the family get-together in Brussels, he handed me the finished drawing. I can’t say how pleased I am with it. I’m no art expert (you probably knew that already from my comments about ‘modern art’!) but I feel that, if anything, his techniques have improved over the three drawings and that the last one is even better than its predecessors.

Perhaps in Chris’ experience there is a lesson for other graduates who are finding it difficult to get the job they want in the current economic climate. Don’t be too proud, or too diffident, to take work in another field if you can get it. You’ll gain experience and other skills. You may find that you’re enjoying the ‘stand-in’ job……..and you may still get opportunities to use your university studies to advantage.

A ‘Mayflower’ Replica for Harwich?

Would a full-size (110ft long and 25ft tall) replica of ‘The Mayflower’, that transported ‘the Pilgrim Fathers’ to North America in the early 17th Century attract sufficient visitors to Harwich to justify its estimated cost of £4 million (give or take a few hundred thousand!) A consortium of local businessmen thinks that it would. They are actively pursuing funding for the project that would, it is estimated, take between eighteen months and three years to complete. It would, they believe, bring throngs of visitors to the town and be good both for trade and for tourism.

My first thoughts were almost equally enthusiastic. In my mind I pictured the cloned ‘Mayflower’ moored in Harwich Harbour, looking just as the original vessel did when she took those 17th century emigrants across the Atlantic. Visitors would be invited to inspect the cramped living and sleeping quarters of the passengers and crew, and imagine themselves on board during a mid-Atlantic storm!

Access could be through a well-planned ‘visitors’ centre’ on the quay (I’m sure that room could be found for it) which would have a colourful display relating to the voyage of the ‘Mayflower’ and its passengers, and information about the other places of historical and cultural interest in Harwich and in the Stour Valley. Visitors from the USA’s northern states, for example, would have their attention drawn to Dedham, with its close links with Dedham Mass. and its splendid Sherman House, ancestral home of the celebrated Civil War general. Tickets of admission to the Mayflower, souvenirs, memorabilia and literature would, of course, be available for sale.

Second thoughts though have introduced doubts into my mind. Would it, in fact, attract throngs of visitors? It would certainly be of great interest to citizens of the USA and to many folk from other parts of Britain. I doubt though if many visitors from mainland Europe, from China or Japan or, indeed, from Latin America, would be very interested. While on holiday on the Continent would you go out of your way to visit the replica of a ship that took early Spanish emigrants to Mexico, Portuguese settlers to Brazil or French colonists to Canada? I hardly think so.

I wonder what percentage of visitors to Harwich does come from the USA? The replica of the ‘Mayflower’ would certainly increase that percentage but I wonder if the increase would be sufficient to justify the production of a replica. Other magnets for Trans-Atlantic tourists are Stratford-on-Avon and Plymouth, the latter being more closely associated in the public mind with the Pilgrim Fathers than Harwich is. Sadly, from a London base, Harwich is in the opposite direction!

I still very much like the idea of a replica ‘Mayflower’ being permanently on display in Harwich and wish the project all success. I am just a little doubtful though as to whether or not it could prove to be a commercial success.

Charitable Giving

If I had responded positively to every appeal from thoroughly deserving charities that I have received during the past few months, either my largesse would have had to have been spread so thinly that it would have hardly covered the postage costs of sending me each appeal, or I would have been so impoverished that I would now need to send out begging letters myself!
No, these nine appeals, all from thoroughly deserving charities, didn't all arrive on my doormat at the same time. They were delivered over a period of ten days. There's no delivery on Sunday so that was an average of one appeal a day!

I am sure that I am not alone in being unable to respond to every appeal that comes through my post box. I do give regularly, and as generously as I can, to three or four national and local charities. I also have a ‘Quaker Peace and Service' collecting box into which I put a few coins from time to time. They add up to a worthwhile sum by the end of the year.

Charities have been hit even harder than the rest of us by the current economic depression and seem to have redoubled their appeals in recent weeks. Some of them employ tactics that antagonise and may, I think, in the long run do them more harm than good.

I don’t like the ones that try to hold our attention by including a somewhat spurious questionnaire with their appeal, together with a ball-point pen for its completion. Worse are those who include a small gift; a bracelet, a few greetings cards, address labels, or a shopping bag; sprats aimed at catching mackerel!

These gifts I either use or pass on to a friend, feeling a little guilty as I do so. Very occasionally, when it seems to be for a particularly worthy cause, their sprat does net a very small mackerel from me, even though I know that this will result in my receiving regular heart-rending appeals from that charity for evermore!

Then there are the Charities which tape two or three small coins to their letters of appeal, calculating that even the most Scrooge-like of us would feel guilty about pocketing a few coppers from an obviously hard-up charity. They’re quite right too. I couldn’t do it. However I don’t feel any guilt about putting those few coins into my Quaker Peace and Service collection box, telling myself as I do so, that it is just a case of one very worthy charity helping out another equally worthy one!

Week 11.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Yet another Supermarket




I would have thought that Clacton was pretty well served with Supermarkets. There is what is now Sainsbury’s in the High Street, Morrison’s in the Waterglade Business Park off Old Road and Lidl just a few hundred yards away from Morrison’s, extending between Old Road and St. Osyth Road. Further from the centre is the Co-op Fiveways Supermarket at the end of Oxford Road, and Somerfield’s in North Road, Great Clacton. Further out still is the new Tesco off the Little Clacton bypass and another Morrison’s on the edge of the village.

Now it seems likely that we shall have an Aldi Supermarket on what is currently the outdoor market site off the landward end of Pier Avenue. Aldi have purchased the site and will be submitting their plans to the council shortly. Reported remarks by influential councillors suggest that their application will be successful. In the current economic climate I have little doubt that any financial investment in the town is likely to be welcomed. Clacton's present out-door market, off Old Road

I am less surprised at the advent of another supermarket than at its proposed position. Is there really customer demand for another similar retailer within a few hundred yards of both Morrisons and Lidl? It doesn’t seem likely, but who can tell? No doubt ‘market forces’ (the economic equivalent of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest') will decide that for us. I don’t really share the fears of a correspondent to the Clacton Gazette that yet another town centre supermarket will strike a deathblow to small traders in the area. That deathblow has already been struck. The only independent traders left are those whose activities are outside the supermarkets’ range, and ‘convenience stores’ surviving on the custom of those unable or unwilling to make more than a very short journey to purchase their household needs.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago (to me at any rate!) that Clacton’s only supermarket was what now seems to have been that ridiculously small Tesco store in Station Road. It didn’t even have car-parking facilities!

Existing market traders seem resigned to losing their site to Aldi. Apparently sales have slumped in recent months and they are looking for another site. A possible solution both to that problem, and to the problem of a huge gap in Clacton’s town centre, was suggested by my former colleague Bob Young in the readers’ letters page of the Clacton Gazette of 26th February. He pointed out that at the same time that market traders were looking for a new venue for their market, Woolworths, in Clacton’s busiest holiday and shopping area, was looking for a new occupier. Why not use the Woolworth site as an indoor market?

The more that I think about it, the more attractive the idea becomes. It would be an ideal situation, within easy walking distance of the pier and the busiest part of the beach. It is on a bus route and there is access from both Pier Avenue and West Avenue. Many pedestrians would be inclined to use it as a short cut from one highway to the other and would have the opportunity to look at the stalls as they did so. Holiday makers and day trippers driven from the beach by a sudden (and we hope brief) shower, would find it a convenient spot to take shelter and, once again, would find the stalls of interest. It would be ‘something different’ in the centre of our town.

The only disadvantage that I can see about the idea is that the site wouldn’t be suitable for the car-boot sales that also currently take place on the market site. I think though that an alternative suitable site could be found for these and they are, in any case, of less importance than the market.


Essex jobs for Essex Men and Women?

A few weeks ago Lord Hanningfield, Essex County Council’s leader, was telling us about his determination that all County Council contracts should go to Essex firms. While I questioned the legality of this I could not do other than applaud his Lordship’s intentions.

He must surely have had a change of heart though. Essex County Council would now, it seems, be quite happy to award contracts for running virtually all its local government services (for a period of eight years and for up to £5.4 billion) not only to non-Essex firms but to non-British ones!

Lord Hanningfied is reported to have pursued this idea while chatting to representatives of the Mumbai based Tata Group when he visited India last year ‘on a trade mission’*. Tata was one of the companies short-listed for those council contracts but they have since been eliminated. Among others still on the list though is New York based IBM, London based Trillium, and Vertex from near Liverpool.



The winners of the contracts are to be announced at a full council meeting on April 21st; a pity the announcement can’t be brought forward a few weeks. 1st April might have been a more appropriate date!

UNISON (of which, thanks to the lifetime NALGO membership given me by my colleagues on retirement, I am a life member) is campaigning against this privatisation and is considering litigation to stop it. They point out the Audit Commission’s finding that between 60 and 70 percent of similar outsourcing processes end in failure. Remember what happened when an enormous American enterprise was entrusted with the relatively straightforward task of marking GCSE exam papers. Remember too the all-too-recent failure of the privately owned Banks and Financial Institutions in a field in which private enterprise might have been expected to have reigned supreme

I have just received my Council Tax Demand from Tendring District Council. The total annual charge for my modest bungalow is £1,103.67. I pay by direct debit and my monthly payments (for ten months of the year) will go up by about £2, not a shattering amount The £105.48 of this that goes to Tendring District Council, I pay willingly, as I do the much smaller amounts that go to the Essex Fire and Police Authorities.



I wish that I could feel equally confident about the prudent spending of the much larger sum of £829.50 of my money that is entrusted to the care of Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues at Chelmsford.

* in its commendable attempts to economise on the spending of our money has the County Council considered limiting its members' jaunts overseas?

Donkeys to return to Clacton’s seafront!

Donkey rides on the sands and motor-boat trips ‘round the bay. are as traditional to the English seaside holiday as Punch and Judy shows. We used to have all three in Clacton.

I think that motorboat trips from Clacton beach (remember the ‘Viking Saga’?) were discontinued sometime in the 1950s or ‘60s, and donkey rides on the greensward near Butlins ended in the early 1990s when Mrs Norah Cleghorn, owner of the donkeys retired after having provided a much-loved service for over 40 years.

I doubt if it will be long after the completion of our off-shore wind farm that some enterprising Clactonian will reintroduce motor boat trips ‘round the wind farm’ from one or other of Clacton’s beaches, or perhaps from the pier. As for donkey rides, it is hoped that these will be reinstated this coming season.

Mrs Jayne Johns of Rayleigh owns four very sociable donkeys. Tendring Council have given her a licence to operate rides from Martello Beach, again quite near the former site of Butlins Holiday Camp, and now one of Clacton-on-Sea’s most popular beaches. She hopes to bring her donkeys from Rayleigh every Sunday from 5th April (that’s the Sunday before Easter), and more often than that during the school holidays. The charge will be £2 a ride that I think most people will consider to be pretty reasonable.

I have a distinct memory of at least one of my two sons having a ride on one of Mrs Cleghorn’s donkeys in their 1950s’ infancy but I have searched in vain through my very considerable collection of old photographs for a pictorial record of the event. The best that I have been able to come up with is this picture of a little girl, about seven years old, astride not a donkey but a pony and on the sands, not of Clacton-on-Sea but of Dovercourt. The photo dates from 1930 or ’31. The little girl was Heather Gilbert of Manor Park, spending the summer holiday with her Dovercourt cousins. She was destined, some fifteen years later, to become Heather Hall!

Take a closer look at the snap-shot and you’ll see that seven year old Heather isn’t wearing any kind of protective headgear or clothing, or indeed anything at all, even on her feet, except for what was known in those long-ago days as ‘a bathing costume’. What is more, there is neither a safety harness nor a responsible adult holding the pony’s bridle in case it should suddenly buck, rear or bolt.

What carefree, unrestrained, and adventurous lives we children enjoyed in the 1920s and ‘30s! Perhaps in those days there were dreadful accidents that could have been avoided. Perhaps little children were molested, abducted and murdered. I can only say that I never heard of any.

I wish Mrs Johns every success with her venture and very much hope that today’s obsession with ‘Health and Safety’ won’t take all the fun out of donkey riding.

Week 10.09

Tendring Topics………….on Line

The Financial Crisis

Being a prophet of doom, as I have tended to be throughout the past year is a pretty thankless role. Either you’re discredited because your warnings of disaster have proved to be false alarms, or your prophecies have turned out to be all too true and you yourself may well be caught up in the disasters that you have foreseen.

As I had suggested was likely, 40,000 families, who had imagined that they were ‘home owners’,were dispossessed last year, and the number of unemployed is about 2 million and rising. This time too, the unemployed seem to include many people at lower and middle management level, much where I had been during my years of local government service, rather than largely unskilled manual workers. I haven’t yet been seriously affected but I take no pleasure in other people’s misfortunes. I can imagine all too well how awful it must be to be without a job. To lose a home as well, on which all your future hopes had been pinned and on which you had already spent every bit as much as (perhaps rather more than!) you could afford, must surely be the final straw!

I feel particularly sorry for some folk who hadn’t attempted to get on the home ownership ladder but had been content to rent their homes and had paid their rent regularly when it became due. To their dismay they find themselves having to get out because their landlords were not actually owners but tenants or investment-home-buyers themselves who had failed to keep up their payments! I hadn’t even thought of that happening.

Way back in 1956 Heather and I did manage to take our first step towards home ownership. With a guarantee from Clacton Urban District Council we succeeded in getting a ninety-five percent mortgage to buy our bungalow in Dudley Road. One hundred percent mortgages were unheard of in those days and raising that last five percent (plus the inevitable expenses of moving into a new unfurnished home!) was a real struggle. We had been married for ten years and, although we had no debts, neither had we any worthwhile savings. In the end we sold Heather’s engagement ring to make up the sum. It was a single diamond in a square setting that I had bought with a substantial chunk of my saved-up army pay when I returned from German captivity in 1945.

I find it less than inspiring when I hear spokesmen for the New Labour Government and for the Conservative Opposition being wise after the event and urging ‘responsible’ lending on the banks and the end of mortgages of one hundred percent or more. They were the very people who vied with each other to remove restrictions on borrowing and free capitalist entrepreneurs for the ‘courageous risk taking’ that would make themselves and the nation wealthy. Nobody mentioned that it was with our money, not their own, that they were taking those risks!

How can the crisis be ended?

Your answer to this question is probably as good as mine, and mine is almost certainly as good as that of the financial experts who are responsible for the present situation. I wasn’t particularly surprised to find that one of the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisers on dealing with the financial crisis had been among the top executives of HBOS. They, of course, have been revealed as among the most irresponsible of a group of financial institutions remarkable for their irresponsibility!

Measures taken by the government don’t seem to have had a great deal of effect so far. We are told that it may be months, or even a year or so, before they take effect. That long-term view is of little interest to those who lost their jobs last week and who, with their families, are facing eviction next week from what they had fondly imagined was their home.

Can the wheels of industry and commerce really be made to turn again only by lubricating them with public money…our money? If so, how should this lubricant be applied? Not, I think, by pouring it into the bottomless pit of the banks; nor is it by handing vast sums to the motor manufacturers to enable them to continue producing even more cars that no one wants to buy.

In the 1930s President Roosevelt began to pull the USA out of its slump with his ‘New Deal’; spending vast sums of money on badly needed public works. President Obama now seems to be following a very similar course. That may well be our way forward too. Here in Britain there is an obvious need for lots of affordable housing. Let’s build those houses and the infrastructure that is need for their support, not in the vain pursuit of the chimera of home ownership for all, but for letting at affordable rents by Local Authorities and Housing Associations.

Then again, we should direct large sums towards the production of clean and renewable energy, and research into new and improved ways of exploiting wind, wave, tidal and solar power. Bring the insulation and draught proofing of our homes up to the best North European standards. Improve our woeful public transport systems. All these measures would provide employment both directly and in ancillary industries and services.

Finally, the government must find some way of reducing the enormous gap in wealth that that exists between Britain’s poor and our super-rich. It is difficult to believe that the plight of the unemployed and the homeless is being taken seriously in a society in which professional footballers are bought and sold (don’t they find that a demeaning process?) for millions of pounds; where the head of a bank whose spectacular failure makes other banks’ losses look like mislaid petty cash, has retired at fifty on an annual pension of nearly three quarters of a million pounds* (his victims, of course, struggle along on job seekers’ allowance!); and where leading members both of the government and of the opposition are prepared to be guests on the luxury yacht of a multi-billionaire. What actually happened while they were on that yacht is less important than the fact that they had accepted its owner’s lavish hospitality. Those who sup with the Devil (or with Mammon) need a very long spoon indeed. There is, as we are frequently being told, ‘no such thing as a free lunch’.

The suggested measures might not only bring the present economic depression to an end but could also lay the foundations of a truly ‘great’ Britain that could proudly lead a politically and economically united Europe along the road to prosperity. Yes, it would result in a national debt that future generations would have to pay….but it should at least ensure that they have a future in which to pay it!

*The government, realizing the extent of public anger at this particular incident is currently making desperate efforts to persuade the gentleman in question to forgo at least part of his enormous pension. They haven’t, so far, succeeded!

A welcome break!

Everyone needs an occasional break from the daily routine…. and I had a wonderful one last weekend, from 26th February to 1st March. My elder grandson Chris, living and working in Taiwan, had decided to spend a week with his younger brother Nick, living and working in Brussels!

Their Dad my son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene, invited me to accompany them on a weekend visit to Brussels so that, for a couple of days, we could all be together. Needless to say I was delighted to accept their invitation.

We took Zoe (their elderly boxer dog who now has her own ‘pet passport’) with us and crossed the Channel via the Tunnel’s shuttle service. This was another new experience for me. Cars are driven, nose to tail, onto the shuttle that consists of a series of open-ended freight wagons linked closely together to produce, in effect, a very long mobile garage. Drivers and passengers stay with their vehicles throughout the journey, which in our case was totally uneventful and lasted just half an hour. It is certainly the quickest and simplest way of taking a car to the Continent but, of course, there are no sea views or refreshing breezes. Nor, of course, is there any risk of being sea-sick.

Chris and Zoe the dog renew their friendship in Nick's Brussels' apartment

We spent the afternoon companionably in Nick’s Brussels apartment catching up with family news, and went out to a restaurant for an evening meal.

Dining out in Brussels. Clockwise, grandsons Nick and Chris,myself, Arlene and Pete

Brussels is a city with a multitude of restaurants and they seem always to be well filled. Eating out is taken very seriously indeed and is a leisurely activity about as far removed as you can get from sandwiches in front of the telly, or a ‘burger and fries’ at a MacDonalds! Me? I prefer something somewhere between the two extremes.

Here I am relaxing in my apartment in the Raddison Hotel

Pete, Arlene and I spent two nights at Brussels’ Raddison Hotel where I really discovered how the other half live! My luxurious suite (with comprehensively appointed en suite bathroom) had, among other amenities, a huge ‘built in’ tv set, the screen of which carried a message of personal welcome to me as I entered!

On the Saturday we drove into the Ardennes mountains, the starting point for the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ at the end of 1944 when the German army made its last desperate counter-offensive against the allies. We lunched in a picturesque village high in the mountains and then went on into Luxembourg. In the Grand Duchy’s capital we met and dined with a former colleague and business associate of Nick, and her boy-friend. Once again I was very favourably impressed with the absence of frontiers in today’s mainland Europe. We had no idea when we were in Belgium and when in Luxembourg though, in past times, the defence of those frontiers had cost untold numbers of young lives.

We were reminded of this on the following day when we visited the battlefield of Waterloo, just a few miles outside Brussels. This was an excursion that should be on the programme of everyone visiting Belgium’s capital. It can be enjoyed as much by those with a serious interest in history as by those who have been enthralled by the exploits of Richard (Rifleman to Colonel!) Sharpe on tv, or who have enjoyed Bernard Cornwell’s novels of the fictional hero on which the tv dramas were based!

A unique feature of this battlefield is that it has been strictly conserved by the Belgian government’s veto on any new development within the area. This means that visitors, travelling round the field of battle in a tourist bus are able to see it much as it was on that fateful day in late June 1815; the points from which Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington endeavoured to direct the course of the battle; the area where defensive ‘British squares’ withstood attack after attack of French cavalry, the 'sunken roads' in which the infantry awaited the order to attack, and the woods from which the Prussian army under Marshal Blucher advanced to engage the French flank late in the day. A commentary in English and French is accompanied by the realistic ‘noises off’ of bugle calls, the roar of artillery fire, the thunder of horses hooves and the shouts of their riders and – of course, the screams and moans of the wounded and dying.

Dozens of visitors of all nationalities throng the tourist centre. There were British, French, German and, of course, Belgians. There were film shows and presentations and dozens of books and souvenirs, all relating to the Battle of Waterloo. I bought a facsimile of the edition of ‘The Times’ newspaper which carried a report of ‘Our Glorious Victory over the tyrant Bonaparte!’

I found myself wondering what on earth was the purpose of all the carnage. Was Napoleon really such a cruel tyrant compared with some we have seen more recently? In any case, were the regimes of the nations allied against Napoleon any better? Russia in particular was a cruel autocracy of which a considerable proportion of the population were serfs (in effect slaves, bound to the estate on which they were born). In Britain, offenders, including young children, could be hanged for crimes that today would be considered trivial, and it was to be decades before there was even the pretence of democratic rule. Austria and Prussia were certainly no better. I was reminded of some lines from G.K.Chesterton’s poem The Rolling English Road:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte (and plenty of the Squire!)
And for to kill the Frenchmen I did not much aspire,
But I did bash their bayonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the rolling road an English drunkard made!

The visit reinforced my conviction that warfare, in the early nineteenth century as in the twentieth and the twenty-first, produced no winners.…….only some who lose more than others.

Week 9.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

Relative Risks

I was delighted to discover that Magnox Electric, the nuclear power organisation, is to pay a massive £400,000 in a fine and costs, for having allowed there to be a leak of radio-active waste from one of their sumps at the Bradwell Nuclear Power Plant over a period of fourteen years! The leakage was discovered only when a member of their staff, during a tea break, noticed that the level of liquid in the sump was just a little lower than it had been.

A spokesman for Magnox, interviewed on tv, made much of the fact that there had never been any risk to the public from this leakage. He clearly couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. If there has been no risk to the public this has obviously been simply due to good luck and was in no way to the credit of Magnox. The evidence produced in this case of negligence and disregard for public safety doesn’t give the public a great deal of confidence in the care that is taken when handling and storing highly dangerous radioactive materials.

Magnox should be getting used to this kind of thing. On 1st June 2001 they were fined £100,000 and ordered to pay £28,000 in costs after pleading guilty to six offences relating to unauthorised discharges of radioactive waste from their nuclear power stations at Bradwell and at Bridgewater in Devon.

Now we are told that there are proposals to reactivate the nuclear power stations at both Bradwell and Sizewell, just a few miles to the north of us on the Suffolk coast. I am astonished that a proposal to construct half a dozen totally innocuous wind turbines almost a mile from residential properties should have produced so much public outrage, and the construction of a potentially highly dangerous (remember Chernolbyl?) nuclear energy plant a few miles to the windward of the Essex holiday Coast and its many residents and visitors, so little.

I suppose that it is a case of out of sight (though across the Colne estuary from Jaywick, Bradwell Power Station is clearly in view) out of mind.

More Power to Local People

I am always pleased, if a little sceptical, when I hear politicians proposing to give ‘local communities’ more power and make them less dependent on instructions from Whitehall. It is, I have observed, the kind of promise that is much more often made by politicians in opposition than by those actually in power.

Perhaps this time the Conservative Party has a whole raft of proposals that will achieve this very desirable aim. I can’t say though that I am deeply impressed with the two proposals that have caught the attention of the news media.

One is that larger authorities at least should, like London, have directly elected mayors with considerable executive power. I don’t quite see how putting more power into the hands of one man can possibly be giving ‘more power to the community’ than giving it to an elected council representing every shade of political opinion in the area. It may well produce a more efficient authority, perhaps (since only one person will need to be persuaded) an authority more compliant with the will of the national government. It will certainly be less democratic though, just as the present administration in London is less democratic than the previous Greater London Council or the old London County Council.

If the government, or the opposition, really wants to put more power into the hands of local people they could try restoring to local authorities some of the powers that they once had and that have been taken away from them. One such measure might be to repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation* and permit local councils (every bit as democratically elected as members of the House of Commons) to decide whether or not to sell their council houses to sitting tenants. ‘Right to buy’ with its false promise of ‘home ownership for all’, bears at least some responsibility for the feverish rush to get onto the property ladder that triggered the present economic crisis.

The other proposal that has received the attention of the media? That’s the idea that local residents who decide that their council tax demand is too high should be empowered to hold a referendum on the subject, the result of which would, presumably be binding on the local authority.

Goodness me! Don’t we all always think that the Council Tax (not to mention VAT, fuel, alcohol and tobacco duties and income tax) is too high? This idea would lead to a referendum at the beginning of every financial year and to municipal services reducing year by year until they disappeared altogether! Perhaps that is precisely what some national politicians would like.

Mind you, the idea of a referendum on unnecessary or undesirable public spending has its attractions. Could we perhaps have one on whether we really need to spend millions of pounds keeping nuclear powered and nuclear-armed submarines prowling the world’s oceans?

* I am glad to see that Bob Russell, Colchester’s Lib.Dem. MP is currently calling for the repeal of ‘Right to Buy’ legislation and the restoration of local authorities’ right to build houses for letting. I had thought that I was a lone voice crying in a wilderness created by the Conservatives and perpetuated by New Labour.

Custodians of our Money.

I am not ashamed of the fact that since I first started writing Tendring Topics…in print in 1980, I have changed my mind radically on several major issues. Twenty-nine years ago I was a great believer in ‘first-past-the-post’ parliamentary and local elections. They ensured a strong government I thought. Now I’m an enthusiast for proportional representation. It may not produce such a strong government but it does produce one that is more representative of the electorate. Having lived through a couple of strong governments (of different political complexions!) I no longer believe that strength in a government is quite as desirable as I had once imagined?

Similarly, believing as I did then, that the Commonwealth could be welded into some kind of political and economic unit, I was a convinced Euro-sceptic. Now, I have no doubt at all that the United Kingdom’s best future is within a Europe that is closely united, both politically and economically.

Of one thing though I feel even more strongly convinced today than I did nearly three decades ago; that is that imprudent lending and borrowing is a path to both personal and public disaster. I have made this abundantly clear on many occasions in Tendring Topics both on line an in print. Today I have no doubt at all that it was irresponsible borrowing, only made possible by even more irresponsible lending, that has led to the current financial crisis.

The Clacton-on-Sea Branch of HBOS, in the town's Station Road. It was here that Heather and I obtained a mortgage in 1956 to purchase our bungalow in Dudley Road. Thanks to my spare-time freelance writing, it was paid off by 1971, only fifteen years later.

That being so, it came as something of a shock to find that HBOS (Halifax, Bank of Scotland) had been one of the most imprudent of those imprudent lenders. It was from what was then the Halifax Building Society that in 1956 Heather and I obtained a mortgage to purchase our home. I currently hold a few hundred shares in HBOS (my only stock-holding) and it is to an HBOS savings account that my savings ‘against a rainy day’ are entrusted. I therefore have made a tiny contribution to the stupid and irresponsible behaviour that precipitated the circumstances from which we are all suffering today.

HBOS is now, of course, part of the Lloyds TSB Group, the culmination of a series of mergers that make nonsense of the claims of politicians that we have a greater freedom of choice than ever before. Just a few years ago, those seeking a mortgage or a safe investment could choose between the rival claims of The Halifax Building Society, the Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank and the Trustee Savings Bank; four then-thoroughly-dependable financial institutions. Now they are all just one, and one that is surviving only thanks to Government help!

Practising what I preach!

Another enthusiasm which I have held since the 1980s and to which I have returned again and again in Tendring Topics both in print and on line has been for clean and renewable sources of energy to reduce and ultimately replace our reliance on coal, oil and gas. I don’t think that nuclear energy, with its lethal and indestructible residues, provides a safe and satisfactory answer and have always felt that our salvation lies in wind, wave, tidal and solar power.

The only one of which most of us as individuals can conveniently take advantage is solar power. I have always been heartened when, as in Clacton’s Old Road for instance, I have spotted one or two houses with solar panels on their roofs. These catch the sun’s energy and use it to heat the domestic hot water supply, reducing an otherwise steadily increasing annual expense, and making a small contribution towards ‘saving the planet’. It is, I am convinced, only by millions of such small contributions, as well as the large ones that can only be made regionally or nationally, that our planet can be saved from the effects of global warming.

I have been pleased to see others have solar water heating installations in their homes ……but have never done anything about it myself. ‘It’s still experimental’, I said, and, ‘If I were only twenty years younger, but at my age I could never hope to make sufficient annual saving to repay the cost of installation’.

Now I am taking the plunge. A few decades ago solar was still experimental in this country, but now it has been tried, tested and found effective and economical. It was the financial crisis that really made me change my mind though. It’s true that, at 87, I’ll never recover, from reduced fuel bills, the cost of installation. However, that reduction will certainly amount to more than the pitiful amount that this cost would have currently earned me in interest, and it will, I hope, be adding to the value of my home.

Last Monday morning (16th February) I phoned SunMaster Solar Energy Systems Ltd of Braintree, an Essex firm (that would please Lord Hanningfield!) with branches in Norwich and Kent. That very day their representative called to see me, largely I think to make sure that I was a serious enquirer and not a time-waster. Today (19th February), their surveyor made a thorough inspection and prepared a specification. He confirmed my own opinion (I am, after all, author of several books on domestic plumbing, hot water supply and drainage) that it would be a perfectly straightforward job. Installation will take two days, and I can expect the job to be done to my complete satisfaction some time in the next three or four weeks.

My bungalow in Clacton's Dudley Road. The right hand slope of the roof faces almost due south. It is there, just below the chimney stacks, that the two solar panel are to be sited.

I have been very impressed with the speed and efficiency with which SunMaster dealt with my enquiry and the technical survey. I hope that that augurs well for the future. You’ll be able to judge for yourselves. I intend to record progress and results on this blog.

Week 8. 09

Tendring Topics……on line

Primitive Art

My elder son and daughter-in-law, taking a short break in the Caribbean from Britain’s climatic and economic winter have sent me this photo from St. Kitts. It is a centuries old rock drawing by a Carib Indian, one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island most of whom were exterminated between the 16th and 19th centuries by English and/or French settlers in a practical demonstration of the ‘unfettered natural selection’ that I referred to in last week’s blog.

The drawing seems to me to have similarities in style to examples of Australian aboriginal art that I have seen reproduced, and even to that of the 3,000 year old Uffington White Horse, carved into the turf of the Berkshire Downs. Perhaps it is due to my own age that I much prefer it to some of the examples of modern ‘art’ with which we have become familiar.

What does it represent? To me, it suggests a St.Kitts cricket enthusiast who has taken his daughter to a local derby, perhaps between St. Kitts and nearby Nevis. The captain of the home team has just hit the ball for six and completed the first century of the match! Of course I know that it couldn’t possibly have been that ……perhaps some equivalent local contest? I hope that it wasn’t a bloodthirsty one!

Whatever its origins, it is an artwork that has been an object of curiosity, interest and amusement for many generations of passers-by. How many people do you suppose considered Jaywick's £40,000 piece of modern art (now, I believe dismantled) worth even a second glance?

Pictures - above left, rock drawing on St. Kitts.
Right - £40,000 worth of modern art in Jaywick.

Care Homes…..like Prisons? Why not like Hotels?

No-one would accuse Lord Hanningfield, Essex County Council’s leader, of shrinking away from controversy. He thrives on it! There was the ‘Home Rule for Essex’ comment, that we were hastily assured was ‘only joking’. There were the promises to purchase failing post offices (one promise of which I thoroughly approved) and of ‘Essex contracts for Essex firms’. Then there were the ideas of the County Council updating the A12 if the government failed to do so, of financial relief for hard-up pensioners and for service-men and women’s families, and of a County Council Bank to help cash-strapped Essex firms. There was also the assurance that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he knew that a ‘silent majority’ wanted two Colchester schools to be closed and their pupils bussed elsewhere across the town. And, of course, we mustn’t forget the putting out to competitive tender of virtually the whole of the county council’s services.

Now he has ventured into another field, one in which, thanks to the date on my birth certificate, I have rather more experience than he has. Lord Hanningfield knows what old people want and, he says none of us, ‘want to go into a care home … it’s like prison. They want to stay in their own homes. As soon as we abolish care homes the better and people can stay in their own homes with care and support. We are not doing it to save money. It’s more expensive to keep them in their own homes, but it’s what people want. They want to remain in their own home with their own possessions’.

Many of us, probably most of us, certainly do want to stay in our own homes for as long as we can. I certainly do….but then I have a comfortable, relatively modern home, and have no serious financial worries. I have plenty of interests (this blog for instance!), a loving family, good friends and neighbours. My strength and mobility are increasingly limited but I can afford to have others do tasks, in the home and the garden for instance, that are now beyond me. As far as mobility is concerned I can walk but not far and not fast. However, for journeys in and about Clacton I have a mobility scooter. For longer journeys I can use public transport (free or at concessionary rates), hire a taxi or enjoy a lift from a friend or relative. Of course I want and fully intend to stay at home. I hope to end my days here.

November 1957. Heather and I with our two young sons outside our bungalow in Clacton's Dudley Road. We had moved in just over a year earlier and I am still living here. Heather's life ended in this bungalow in July 2006 and I hope that my life will end here too.

It wouldn’t need a very big change in my circumstances though to make me feel differently. Supposing my financial circumstances changed so that meeting regular bills became a constant worry, or my health or sight failed so that I could no longer pursue my interests or get out of the house. I don’t really think that I would then want to stay house-bound in this bungalow, relying on meals-on-wheels, regular visits from carers and occasional visits from neighbours, friends and relatives. The last of these would begin to dry up as, inevitably, I became more and more irritable, impatient and bad-tempered. Then I really would feel imprisoned…..and in solitary confinement!

In such a situation I might well crave to be free of responsibilities, and welcome the company of other people in a good care home. Certainly none of the measures on which the County Council is spending £4 million (which include alarms and health monitors or sensors which would detect a fall, fire or gas) would make me want to stay at home.

Perhaps it is true that more and more of us old people will want to remain in our own homes longer and will be able to do so. Even so, we may well still need at least as many care homes as we have now because, as we are constantly being told, there are more and more of us every year. There will certainly always be a demand for some care homes and these should be a lot less like prisons and much more like good residential hotels. It is toward that end that Lord Hanningfield should be devoting some of his unbounded energy and enthusiasm. Some part at least of that £4 million should be spent on bringing any of the care homes that that the County Council hasn’t yet sold off, up to hotel standard.

Incidentally, I wonder if when they sell off those homes to private enterprise, they mention to the purchasers that they are ‘like prisons’?

Juvenile Precocity!

Even case-hardened tv commentators seemed to have been shocked at the news that a thirteen year old boy and a fifteen year old girl had just become parents; the latest incident in the continuing saga that has already made ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe!

The totally predictable answer to this problem from ‘progressive’ educationalists is even more and even earlier sex-education………..despite the fact that, in the between-the-wars years, when schools offered no sex education whatsoever, a schoolgirl pregnancy was a very, very rare occurrence.

No, I wouldn’t really want to go back to those days. Nor can I pretend that I do know the answer to juvenile pregnancies. I am sure though that it doesn’t lie in more sex education.

‘Ah’, say the educationalists, ‘but we need to teach children about relationships, not just about the anatomy and physiology of sex’. That, I think, is something that just can’t be done. You can teach the practicalities of sex, warn of the dangers and instruct in the techniques of ‘safe sex’ and contraception. Curious and adventurous children will think it all sounds very interesting and exciting. Risky too; but then they have been warned about the dangers and how to avoid them. ‘At school they’re always telling us to find things out for ourselves. Let’s get on with it!’.

So much for the practicalities, but the nature of a loving relationship capable of lasting a lifetime has to be discovered by each individual – and it can only be discovered at the right age. I don’t believe that it can be taught to anyone, least of all to pre-teenage and early-teenage boys and girls. Their minds are most unlikely to have developed to a point at which they are capable of appreciating what it means.

It is, in fact, the kind of appreciation that continues to develop throughout life. A few lines from a pre-war song come to my mind. The first line was, I think; 'At seventeen, he falls in love quite madly, with eyes of the deepest blue' and the last lines, the most important ones, were 'But when he thinks he’s past love, it is then he meets his last love, and he loves her as he never loved before'. The really fortunate ones are those of us whose last love is the same as our first.

That is the kind of relationship of which Shakespeare wrote: 'Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bended sickle’s compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours or weeks, but sticks it out even to the edge of doom’.

I defy anyone to teach that kind of relationship.

As for what to do about teenage pregnancies, I think that we might try rediscovering moral values and stop blurring the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong. Some things that we are very much inclined to do (an earlier generation would have said ‘tempted’ to do) are not just foolish, irresponsible and dangerous but wrong. Among them are precocious sexual activity, promiscuity and what, in our old-fashioned mid-twentieth century way we used to describe as ‘getting a girl into trouble’!

Nowadays many people may contemptuously reject as childish superstition the idea that there is a God 'to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid', to whom we will one day have to answer for all that we have thought, said and done ...........but in an earlier and 'less enlightened' age it was certainly a thought that tended to modify adolescent behaviour!

Week 7 09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Candlemas…and after!

Last year at this time (yes, I have been writing Tendring Topics….on Line for over a
Year!) I quoted an old rhyme about Candlemas which I have found usually provides a pretty reliable long-range weather forecast:

If Candlemas be clear and bright, winter will have another flight.
If Candlemas be dull with rain, winter has gone and will not come again!

Neither forecast fits this year’s Candlemas (Monday 2nd February) which, you’ll recall, was overcast all day and gave us the heaviest and most severe snowstorms that we had experienced for decades. As usually happens, our Essex coast escaped much more lightly than most. I doubt if Clacton had more than about half an inch of snow. Elsewhere though, the country was brought to a standstill, with closed schools, no bus services whatsoever in London and not much better elsewhere, and rail and air services either cancelled altogether or severely disrupted.

Perhaps there needs to be a third line of folklore verse. How about?

If Candlemas be snowy day, winter is here……and here to stay!

The photograph on the left shows my back garden early on 2nd February this year with snow lying, but not very deeply. The one on the right is of the road in which my younger son lives in Enfield, taken on the same day and at about the same time……and there were many places that had much more snow than Enfield.

Darwin’s Other Legacy

I am very sorry that Sir David Attenborough should have received hate mail in connection with his exposition of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the agnosticism that he believes follows naturally from that theory. I am particularly sorry that this hate mail should appear to have come from those who ‘profess and call themselves Christian’.

Surely we who hold the Christian faith should attempt, however imperfectly, to live in the imitation of Christ. Since none of us is perfect we shall certainly fail in this attempt. I hope though that very few would fail so sadly as to imagine that Jesus would or could ever send a message of hate to any of his fellow men or women; certainly not to someone who, whether or not he realizes it, has devoted much of his adult life to revealing the wonder of God’s creation. Whatever are his personal beliefs, few can have done more than Sir David to invoke among the rest of us ‘the fear (or awe) of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom’.

I’m certainly not one of those ‘creationists’ who believe that a ‘ready for instant use’ world was created by God during the course of six days in the late summer of 4004 BC. Does anyone really still believe that? On the other hand, neither do I believe that the universe came into being by blind chance as a result of the accidental juxtaposition of just the right atoms billions of years ago, that life arose as a result of a similarly accidental combination of atoms and natural forces, and that evolutionary theory explains everything that has happened since. That would demand from me an act of faith far greater than that required for acceptance of, for instance, the Nicene Creed.

I am sure that many people believe, as I do, that God is fulfilling his purpose through evolution, as part of a creative process that began in the infinitely distant past, is taking place today, and will continue into the infinitely distant future. As a Quaker Christian I believe that something of God’s essential nature, his ‘inward light’, is the heritage of every single human, whatever his or her race, colour or creed, and that that ‘inward light’ was personified in Jesus Christ some 2,000 years ago. It is this instinct within ourselves that urges us towards truth, love, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation; all the things that we know instinctively are good. We may stifle it, ignore it or deny its existence but we cannot utterly destroy it. ‘The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overwhelm it’.

Godless interpretations of Darwinism assume that human life has no spiritual dimension whatsoever. The material world that we can see and touch is, it proclaims, all that there is. What we call ‘love’ is just a bio-chemical reaction in the brain that has evolved to ensure the reproduction of the species and encourage its survival. This is the sole purpose of life, including our own. The hope of eternal life is a delusion that has evolved to prevent our being diverted from our evolutionary purpose by the fear of personal extinction.

Acts that we would describe as being of heroism and self-sacrifice are simply those of individuals whose instinct for the survival of the species has evolved more strongly than the instinct for self-preservation. The work of Shakespeare and Milton, of Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, of Archimedes, Galileo, Isaac Newton and Einstein are just the result of evolution having induced fortuitous electro-chemical reactions in their brains.

This kind of Darwinism, reduced to its lowest common denominator of ‘Survival of the Fittest’, justifies the subjugation and genocide of ‘inferior’ humans by those who consider themselves to be ‘superior’. It provided a justification for the Nazi death camps. The Nazis believed that they were fulfilling their evolutionary destiny as a master-race by enslaving and eliminating what they considered to be inferior human stock. Fundamentalist Darwinism has no time for those of us who clearly have no evolutionary purpose …… octogenarians (like myself!) for instance, the mentally or physically disabled, the weak, the drop-outs and the miss-fits. As for the preservation of endangered species and threatened human ethnic groups, extinction is their evolutionary destiny. It would be wrong to interfere.

Would you wish to live in the ‘brave new world’ to which unfettered natural selection points us? I wouldn’t. Fortunately we don’t have to. We have been given (or have evolved) free will. We accept, welcome in fact, the idea of evolution but we do not have to become its helpless puppets. We are free to follow what our Quaker Advices and Queries refer to as ‘the promptings of love and truth in our hearts, and to trust them as the leadings of God’. They will ultimately I believe, bring us toward the fulfilment of part of the universal Christian prayer, ‘Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven.

Friday the Thirteenth

This coming Friday has a deep, and sad, significance for me. Not because it is the allegedly unlucky ‘Friday the thirteenth’ but because it marks the 64th anniversary of an event that, for the first time in my life, made me feel ashamed to be British.

It was February 1945. I was twenty-three years old and had been taken prisoner at Tobruk in North Africa on 21st June 1942. Since September 1943 I had been a member of a small Arbeitskommando (work camp) of British prisoners of war in Zittau, a small town in eastern Germany. Our main work was loading and unloading railway wagons but we also undertook any other manual task for which we might be needed.

The winter of 1944/’45 was a bitterly cold one in eastern Europe. There was deep snow and for weeks we endured subzero temperatures, day and night. However, any discomfort that this may have caused us was tempered by the conviction that our time of captivity was coming to an end.

Allied armies, after a temporary set-back with ‘the Battle of the Bulge’ at Christmas, were making steady progress on the western and southern fronts.

Meanwhile in Zittau, what had begun as a barely audible murmur from the east had grown louder and louder, and by February, had become a continuous rumble of gunfire as the Soviet Armies advanced through Poland and into Germany. Throughout that bitter winter a steadily swelling stream of refugees from the rapidly approaching Eastern Front had made its way westward through the town. There were old men (all the young ones had been called up), women and children……a few in broken down motor vehicles powered by Holzgas, a fuel produced from smouldering wood chippings, some with all their worldly goods loaded onto ox wagons (the army had seized all the horses). Many trudging through the snow pulling small and heavily laden hand-carts. They were not all German. Among them were allied prisoners of war from Stalags in Poland, Russian and Ukrainian ‘slave workers, and defeated fragments of the armies of Nazi Germany’s allies, Bulgarians, Romanians, volunteers from neutral but Fascist Spain and renegade Cossacks. People from Zittau, people we had known and worked with, had begun to join that westward flow.

Before and during World War II this building was the Zittau headquarters of Kurt Kramer, wholesale grocer. For several weeks, early in 1945, another POW and I worked here, pulling a large hand-cart and, with an elderly German civilian, delivering goods to retail grocers in the town. One day we returned after a delivery to find that one of the refugees, a young woman, had decided that her life was no longer worth living. She had climbed to the top-most storey and thrown herself down onto the cobbles below.


Neither they, nor we, nor our guards, nor the Germans with whom we worked had any doubt that the war would end within months, if not weeks. Few thought any longer of ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’. We all just wanted an end to the misery and carnage.

The refugees were heading for Dresden, some sixty miles west of Zittau, where they would be sorted out and distributed to those parts of Germany that were still considered to be relatively safe. By 13th February Dresden was crowded with refugees, as well as with its own population of German civilians, allied POWs and slave workers from allied countries.

That was the night on which the RAF struck. The American Air Force continued the attack on the following day. We British prisoners in Zittau, only some 60 miles from the target, spent the night in the cellar of the building in which we were housed. In Dresden itself 13 square miles of the beautiful and historic city were destroyed. Estimates of the, mostly civilian, dead vary widely but the true figure is generally accepted as being somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000, the majority burnt alive in the fire-storms produced by the raids. Bad news travels fast and we in Zittau learnt of the destruction and loss of life on the following morning, as the second onslaught by the American Air Force was in progress. It was the only time that I personally experienced hostility from German civilians

These raids, carried out just twelve weeks before the German surrender, were not, of course, comparable with the mass slaughter of the Holocaust. They do however put outrages like ‘nine-eleven’ and for instance, the shelling of Sarajevo by the Serbs during the Yugoslav civil war (reckoned to be a war crime) into perspective.

They changed my attitude to modern warfare and, just two or three years later, were a major factor in my wife Heather and I deciding to join the peaceful, and peace-making Quakers.
Within a few days of the bombing of Dresden it was decided to move 'treasures' from Zittau Town Museum to a place of safety. A party of us POWs had the task of loading a lorry with heavy cases, going with it to Mount Oybin, the spectacular mountain above, a few miles from the town, and unloading them into a ruined monastery at its summit. It is only during the last few years that I have learned that among these treasures was the seven centuries old Zittauer Fastentuch, an enormous piece of linen having painted on it 90 pictures illustrating events recorded in the Old and New Testaments. This ensured me a little local celebrity on recent visits to Zittau.