24.01.08

 

 

Homelessness won't go away!

 

            In my earlier article 'Homeless and Hopeless?' I remarked that homelessness was a problem that wouldn't just go away.  I suggested that no political party had the will to take steps that might lead to the eradication of this social scourge. Feeding 'Homelessness in the Tendring District' into the Google search engine produces a mass of statistics from which can be extracted a few facts that thoroughly justify those claims.

 

            It appears that, during the latest period for which figures are available, the Municipal Year 2002/2003, 1,203 applicants for housing accommodation within the Tendring District claimed to be homeless.  Only 33 percent of these were accepted as legitimate claimants – however it is a pretty safe bet that none of the rejected 67 percent were very satisfactorily housed.

 

            Those described as 'eligible, unintentionally homeless and in priority need' may surely be regarded as having a desperately urgent need for a home.  That number  almost doubled in the six years between 1996 and 2003, from 212 in 1996/1997 to 312 in 1999/2000, to 403 in 2002/2003.  What has it been during the Municipal Year soon coming to an end?  If increases have continued at a similar rate it is probably over 700!

 

            A blog reader who is involved in housing administration in the London area endorses my claims about the effects of the 'Right to Buy' legislation but adds another effect that I have to confess hadn't occurred to me.

 

            Some former council houses that have been sold off at bargain-basement prices to former tenants are not now being resold but made available for letting. Why not - if that is what their new owners wish to do with them? And, of course, it adds to the number homes available to let, surely a very desirable outcome.

 

            Quite so – but, in the nature of things, some of those new tenants will be of diminished means and eligible for housing benefit.  This means that the local authority will be required to subsidise payment of the full market rental for homes that they have been compelled to sell off on the cheap!

 

            A well-known politician remarked at the time, that Right to Buy would lead to 'the sale of the century'.  And so it did – but it was the taxpayer and voter who were being sold a pup, and the homeless who were to suffer as a result!

 

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Churches Together

 

            This week (18^th to 25^th January) has been the week of prayer for Christian Unity during which Christians of all denominations and traditions remember that what unites them is much more important than the differences that divide them, and to pray that, as it says in the Book of Common Prayer, 'all who profess and call themselves Christian', may realize and appreciate their essential unity.

           

To this end there was an ecumenical service last Sunday evening to which all were invited, at St. John the Baptist's Church (Clacton's mother church) in Great Clacton, and there have been, throughout the week, services of prayer for unity at 10.00 a.m. in various constituent churches of 'Churches Together in Clacton', the body which represents our town's principal Christian traditions.

 

            We oldies tend to go on – and on – about how much better people were 'before the war' (we always mean 'our war', World War II when we say that!)

than they are now.

 

            Well, in some ways they were – but where ecumenism is concerned, there is no doubt about it, we are far, far better today.  It is difficult nowadays, when we are all threatened by a tsunami of 'evangelising secularism', to believe the suspicion, distrust and fear that existed between the various Christian traditions in the 1920s and '30s.

 

            My parents, and I of course, were members of what I suppose would be described as a very moderately 'high' Anglican Church on the outskirts of Ipswich.

Our principal service on Sundays was a Choral Eucharist at 11.00 a.m. at which at least some members of the congregation would genuflect and cross themselves at appropriate places.  We also had an 8.00 a.m. non-choral Holy Communion (or 'mass') at 8.00 a.m. on Sundays and midweek, plus – of course – a well-attended Evensong at 6.30 p.m. every Sunday.  I was first a choirboy and then a server until my call-up with the Territorial Army in 1939.

 

            The priest in charge was a Scotsman, Rev. Donald Rae, who rather liked to be addressed as 'Father Rae' and wore a cassock and biretta when walking between his home and the church.

 

            All of this was sufficient to attract the attention and condemnation of the Protestant Truth Society who, on at least two occasions that I can recall, mounted demonstrations at the church gate after evensong denouncing our 'Romish practices' and handing out leaflets telling members of the congregation where, in Ipswich, they

would find 'true Protestant' services.

 

            It would be nice to be able to say that we offered a splendid example of tolerance and moderation, but it wouldn't really be true.  We didn't hold demonstrations outside other churches, but I can remember, during a period of adolescent Anglo-Catholic fervour, referring to the Roman Catholic scathingly as 'the Italian mission' and dismissing all nonconformists as 'those narrow-minded chapel folk'!  Quakers (and I have now been one for over half a century) hardly even entered my thoughts but I would, I am quite sure, have regarded them as beyond the pale!

 

            My own 'conversion' to ecumenism began with the acquisition of a Methodist girl-friend  (later to be my wife) on the day World War II broke out. It culminated a few months ago when I revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England and 'came out' as being in dual membership of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and of the Anglican Church – a circumstance unusual even nowadays, but by no means unique.

 

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Tendring Topics

                    Homeless and Helpless?

 

A Correction

 

            The broadsheet that I most often read frequently publishes a list of corrections of typographical and factual mistakes made in recent issues.  They can be quite amusing at times.

 

            Mine are not – and I am shocked at finding myself having to follow my newspaper's example quite so early in the life of on-line 'Tendring Topics'.  In my 'Homeless and Helpless?' article below I twice referred to the Quaker organisation supporting the homeless as Quaker Housing Action.  That was incorrect.  The correct name of the organisation that I generally know simply as QHA is Quaker Homeless Action, a title which much more accurately reflects its activities.

 

            No, don't 'put it down to his age'!  It was simple carelessness and I apologise.

 

            I have just realized that one advantage that an on-line article has over a printed one is that – provided the error is spotted early enough – readers will see the correction before they see the error!

Tendring Topics

                                                                                                                      20.01.08

 

                             Tendring Topics

 

                       Homeless and Hopeless?

 

            Memories of Christmas are fast beginning to fade – but I hope that all readers of this blog had as happy and fulfilled a Christmas as I did, wanting for nothing, surrounded by friendship and love, and with my family all around me.

 

            Nowadays, in many people's minds, Christmas is, primarily a festival for children.  Yet, according to the campaigning Christian homelessness charity, Housing Justice, over 150,000 British children will have spent the holiday in temporary accommodation and can therefore have been expected to have had a less-than-happy time. 

 

Homelessness is a problem that just won't go away – and the current increase in the number of possession orders for non-payment of mortgages suggests that next Christmas the number of homeless, temporarily accommodated, and unsatisfactorily housed families will be even higher.

 

Next Sunday (27^th January) has been designated Homelessness Sunday. Homelessness, in all its forms, will be the subject of thought and prayer at over 2,000 churches of every Christian tradition, throughout England, Scotland and Wales.  I hope that as we pray for the homeless, we will remember Saint Theresa's contention that in this world God has no hands but ours to do his work, no feet but ours to run his errands.  I am inclined to think that if St Theresa were living today, she would have added – and no bank accounts but ours to fund his purposes!

 

We Clacton Quakers, at our annual Meeting for Carols and by after-meeting collections every Sunday in December, raised over £150 for the residents of Derek Crosfield House in St. Paul's Road, Clacton, which provides temporary accommodation with help and support for inexperienced young mothers and their babies.  In other areas there are no doubt similar local charities that can be supported.

 

Then there are national charities aimed at helping the homeless.  Housing Justice  I have already mentioned.   Another, that for obvious reasons, comes instantly to my mind is Quaker Housing Action. This is a charity that Clacton Quakers have supported for many years and has been of special interest to my family.

 

   My two sons and I have all been involved as local government officers with the problems of homelessness.  What's more, throughout our sixty years of marriage, Heather and I retained vivid memories of having trudged round the streets of Battersea and Clapham, after my demob from the army in 1946, seeking furnished rooms in which to live while I attended a government course for ex-service personnel at what was then Battersea Polytechnic.

 

Housing Justice urges the Government to take urgent action to build more affordable family housing.   I'm just a little hesitant about urging political action because all too often Government action produces effects quite different from those that we must assume had been intended.  When the 'right to buy' legislation was first enacted to compel local authorities to sell off their housing stock at knock-down prices to sitting tenants, a cynical friend of mine remarked that it was a brilliant wheeze to buy votes with other people's money!

 

Be that as it may, I cannot believe that the government's intention was to ensure that less-than-wealthy young couples in rural areas would for ever be unable to find a home in villages in which their families had lived for generations; that local councils  (who still had a duty to house the homeless!) would be left without the means of doing so; that former tenants now owner-occupiers, or beneficiaries under their wills, whose homes had been bought at bargain-basement prices, would be able to resell them after a few years for the spiralling value that they quickly achieved;  and that the consequent shortage of affordable housing accommodation for letting would be a significant factor in producing runaway inflation of house prices.

 

I believe that any government that seriously wishes to solve the problem of homelessness must first admit  (whether or not political and economic theory suggests otherwise) that private enterprise and voluntary housing associations simply cannot fill the gap left by the local authorities. It was, after all they who had cleared the slums and kept homelessness at bay for a century.  Then the 'right to buy' (I prefer to think of it as 'compel to sell') legislation would have to be repealed or drastically amended to permit local authorities to build and manage homes for letting.  They themselves would have the right to sell, or not to sell them to tenants, depending on what was best for the communities that they had been democratically elected to serve.  What may be right for Walton-on-Thames could well be quite wrong for Walton-on-the-Naze.

 

No – it isn't going to happen.  Which is why I shall save my energies for trying to raise funds for such organisations as Quaker Housing Action which devote their funds to trying, in small ways, to facilitate the housing of the homeless, and to make the lives of those they cannot help in this way a little less miserable than they would otherwise have been.

 

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Thirty days hath September……….

 

I note that 2008 is a leap year and that consequently February has 29 days, something that I should have known without having to look at a calendar.  It happens whenever the last two numbers of the year, in this case 08, are divisible by four.  A somewhat legalistic colleague of mine used to complain, not entirely seriously, that on these years those of us who were paid an annual salary were expected to do 366 days work for 365 days pay!

 

Do you know, without thinking about it, how many days there are in any particular month of the year?   Some people, I know, work it out using the knuckles of their hands – a process that is easier to demonstrate than to describe!

 

When I really need to, I use the little rhyme that I learnt as a child.  Do children still learn it I wonder:

Thirty days hath September,

April, June and November.

All the rest have thirty-one,

Excepting February alone,

Which hath but 28 days clear –

With twenty-nine in each leap year.

 

If children do learn it, I expect that they are taught to say 'has' instead of 'hath', as with the prayers in modern prayer books.

 

Somehow, to my ancient ears, that doesn't have quite the same ring!

 

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ever-changing photos

                Those Ever-changing Photos

 

            If you'd like to see those ever-changing photos on the right of the page standing still – or if you'd like to know more about them – you'll find them on:

 

www.Flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea 

 

            They're mostly family photos but among them you'll see very rare pictures of Clacton's sea frozen over during the winter of 1962/1963, glimpses inside primary school classrooms (boys and girls – separate of course!) in the early '30s and a now unrepeatable photo, taken by me, of the beautiful old Turkish Bridge in Mostar, Bosnia just a year or so before it was destroyed in the savage and, to my mind, totally unjustified civil war that resulted in the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation.

 

Tendring Topics

                  The Tendring Talking Times

 

            One of the most valuable of the local charities in this area of north-east Essex is the 'Tendring Talking Times'.   This is a 'talking' newspaper (actually an audio tape) sent weekly free of charge to every blind or visually impaired person within the Tendring District.  It enables folk who are no longer able to read, to keep up with local news and local opinion.   One of its regular features is 'Thought for the Week' a kind of five-minute sermon supplied by a member of one or other of the Christian traditions within our area.

 

            I was at one time a regular contributor to the Tendring Talking Times but had to give it up three years ago when I became a full-time carer for my then-disabled wife.

 

            A month or two ago though, I was asked if I would again supply a 'Thought for the Week'.  In view of my reduced mobility, a tape recorder would be brought to my home for that purpose.  I agreed and duly made my recording, which was included in the following issue of the Tendring Talking Times. 

 

            It has now occurred to me that my message might well be of interest beyond the recipients of Tendring Talking Times and I am therefore including it as a Tendring Topic on this blog.  Here it is:

 

 

Somebody once said that no matter how long you lived, the longest half of your life was the first twenty years.  Certainly, now that I am in my mid-eighties, the first two decades of my life do seem to loom larger, and hold more deeply etched memories than any later period.

 

I was born in 1921 so you'll realize that my first eighteen years were spent in the 1920s and 1930s, that uneasy period after World War I and before World War II   made its violent impact on all our lives..  For some it was an era of peace and prosperity – for others it was a time of starvation wages, unemployment and grinding poverty.

 

One big difference between those days and ours was our attitude to morality, to what is right and what is wrong, to what is good and what is evil.

 

Some folk of my generation will simply say that there's no doubt about it – we were all better behaved in those days.  I don't think that it is quite as simple and straightforward as that.  We had different ideas about what was – and what was not – morally important.

 

By today's standards many of us in the 1920s and '30s were quite casually and unconsciously racist.  We didn't, like the Nazis in Germany, arrogantly go round proclaiming the fact, but we were quietly convinced that the English were superior to any other race in the world and that England was superior to any other country.  We were, of course, far superior to all our European neighbours – and we had done the world a great service by creating the British Empire.

 

There was too, a great deal of taken-for-granted brutality and cruelty in those days.  Few people – none that I knew – questioned capital punishment or the flogging of adults and birching of juveniles for certain offences.   The cane was widely used in both primary and secondary schools and at home some parents punished their children, not with a bad-tempered slap in response to some particular naughtiness (I've done that myself!) but with systematic beating with a cane or strap.

 

There was casual cruelty to animals and birds too.  It seemed to occur to no-one that it was cruel to confine wild animals in small cages and teach them to do tricks. We small boys were avid collectors of birds' eggs.  It was OK, teachers at school assured us, provided that we left at least three eggs in the nest. Birds, so we were told, could only add up to three!

 

These attitudes have, for the most part, disappeared, and few will mourn their  passing.  However, in the '20s and '30s there were also very different attitudes towards certain other aspects of human behaviour.

 

It is nowadays considered quite normal – even wise – for a young couple to live together as man and wife before deciding to marry – or possibly deciding never to marry.   In the '20s and '30s that was anathema.  It was considered to be 'living in sin!' 

 

Today, teenage sex is taken for granted.  In my day 'getting a girl into trouble', as we called it, was about the most shameful thing that a young man could do. Today, sex education, including the best and most effective methods of contraception is part of the school curriculum and is taught in mixed classes.

 

In the '20s and '30s the very idea of this would have caused outrage and horror.  Yet I suspect that there are many more teenage pregnancies now than there ever were in those unenlightened days.

 

Clearly there has been a revolutionary change over the years in our society about what is right and what is wrong.  The situation is complicated by the fact that we now have in our midst a considerable number of adherents of religious faiths whose moral codes may differ from those to which we are accustomed.

 

Is there then, no absolute right and wrong?  Does good and evil depend  entirely upon majority opinion in any community at any given time?

 

Perhaps at different times and in different communities, it may be right to place greater or less emphasis on this or that aspect of morality.  I believe though that there is at least one moral imperative that is, always has been, and always will be, valid for all communities and adherents of every religious faith – and those who have no faith at all.

 

It is from Jesus Christ's Sermon on the Mount and is to be found in St. Matthew's Gospel Chapter 7 verse 12.   I generally prefer the old King James' Bible, with which I am familiar since childhood, to modern versions.  I have to say though that J. B. Phillips' translation, made in the 1950s, gives Our Lord's words greater clarity and emphasis.

 

Here they are:

 

Treat other people exactly as you would like to be treated by them – this is the essence of all true religion.

 

Perhaps I may add that, in my opinion, the converse is at least equally important.

 

Do not treat other people as you would hate them to treat you.

These words do not provide an easy answer to every problem of human behaviour but – my word – the world would be a happier place if more people heeded them more often!

  

 

 

 

                                                                                                           'Tendring Topics' Rides Again –

                                                                                                                                              well, after a fashion!

 

 

First – a bit about myself:

 

            My name is Ernest Hall and anyone from north-east Essex reading this blog, may remember me as being, for twenty-three years, the contributor of Tendring Topics, a chat-and-comment column, to a weekly free newspaper that was first called The Coastal Express, has had its name changed several times and is currently I believe (though it is no longer distributed in my street) The Tendring Weekly News.

 

Tendring Topics commented every week – often critically but always, I hope, positively – on local and occasionally national and international affairs.

 

I live, and have lived for the past fifty-two years in a modest bungalow in Dudley Road, Clacton-on-Sea. As well as being a freelance writer and author, I have been employed by the former Clacton Urban District Council as a Public Health Inspector and later as Housing Manager, and by the Tendring District Council as their  first Public Relations Officer.

 

            I was invited to contribute Tendring Topics shortly after my early retirement from the Council's service in 1980 and I continued to do so regularly until 2003 when I received a letter thanking me for my services and informing me that – with immediate effect – they would no longer be required.  As far as I know there has never been a successor to Tendring Topics in the free weekly newspaper.

 

Five years have elapsed since that date.  During those five years my most painful experience has been the loss of my wife Heather in July 2006 after sixty years of marriage.  She had inspired and encouraged my writing and, indeed, we did a great deal of work jointly.  I have somehow survived and managed to carry on thanks to the support of my family and good friends.

 

            Also, of course, during those years, I have grown five years older.   I have progressed from a car (it broke my heart to give it up after a half century of motoring) to a bicycle and then, when I found that was getting too much for me, to an electric mobility scooter.

 

            On the plus side, I can still handle a keyboard, most of the time manage a computer adequately and perform basic and elementary functions with a mobile phone and a digital camera.

 

            These skills have encouraged me to attempt to fill this blog regularly.  I propose to continue writing Tendring Topics though by no means limiting myself to things actually happening within the Tendring District.  This Tendring Topics , will, I have little doubt comment freely on national and international affairs and, probably too, on some of my own affairs!  I can, after all, only view the district and the world, through my own now-somewhat-failing eyes.

 

Here anyway, is a start:                                                                                                                                                                                       15.01.08

 

                     Tendring Topics                        

 

Clacton's Town Centre

 

            As Clactonians will be all too well aware, Clacton's Town Centre was in a state of turmoil throughout the last summer season – the holiday season.  The flow of traffic of the one-way system in Rosemary Road had already been reversed and the flow through Jackson Road was then also reversed. As might have been expected, for a week or so total chaos reigned, though motorists now seem to have become accustomed to the change.

 

            Footpaths along Pier Avenue and Station Road have been repaved and those in Pier Avenue substantially widened.  There is now no direct traffic access from Station Road through to the seafront via Pier Avenue.  An extremely controversial and expensive 'water feature' (jets of water shooting upwards from the paving) has been provided at the junction of Pier Avenue and Station Road on what was once referred to as 'Christmas Island'' The 'town centre' section of Pier Avenue has been somewhat half-heartedly pedestrianised.  Private cars are banned during the daytime but buses and, so it seems, delivery vehicles and taxis still drive freely along it.

 

            What do Clactonians think of it?  If the postbag page of the Clacton Gazette is to be believed – not a lot!  Hardly a week goes by without the publication of at least one angry letter condemning the scheme and the council for having wasted thousands of pounds of public money on 'a totally unnecessary scheme' the main effect of which will be to drive hard-working town centre traders out of business.  It will, writers to 'Postbag' insist, completely destroy the town centre while having not the least effect in attracting holiday visitors. 

 

            Perhaps so; however, when I was the Council's Public Relations Officer I discovered the hard way that members of the public pick up their pens to write to the press much more readily to blame than to praise.  Possibly the condemnation isn't quite as universal as letters to the press suggest.  I know too that my daughter-in-law from Enfield, while being driven with me to the sea front via the somewhat circuitous route of Pier Avenue, Jackson Road, West Avenue and back into the seaward end of Pier Avenue, commented on what a vast improvement had taken place in Clacton's town centre.

 

             I have come to the conclusion that what people think of the change depends, quite literally, on their viewpoint.

 

If I were still entering the town centre seated in the driving seat of a car, I am sure that I would hate the changes – though probably not to the extent of writing angry letters to the press about them.   I would hate the alterations to the one-way systems.  I would loathe the fact that it is impossible nowadays to drive from east to west through the town centre.  I would resent those new, wider pavements in the busiest part of Pier Avenue and being unable to park, or even drive, there.

 

            If I were still a cyclist I would feel less strongly about it all, but I would resent having sometimes to park my bike and take to my feet, further from my destination than I would once have.  I would envy – though not try to emulate – those, usually young, cyclists who are convinced that all pavements are, in fact, cycle tracks!

 

            However, now I'm a mobility scooterist I find myself wholeheartedly approving the changes.  It is a joy to ride on my 'iron horse' over those smooth, roomy pavements in Pier Avenue and Station Road – such a contrast to the pavements elsewhere in the town!  The reversal of the flow of traffic through Jackson Road has made crossing its entrance into Rosemary Road less hazardous than it was.  There are lots of dropped kerbs in strategic spots and, of course, with the wider footpaths, there is no problem about parking my scooter while popping into a shop.

 

What effect will the changes have on the town?  I think that visitors to the town will like the changes – though I doubt very much if there will be more of them as a result.  The summer weather (and last summer's was disastrous) has far more effect on visitor numbers than anything the council, or anyone else, can do.

 

            I don't think that the changes will hasten the destruction of small businesses in the town centre. Small businesses have been dying all over Clacton for years. Three once-flourishing enterprises in St Osyth Road - within a couple of hundred yards of my home – have died and been replaced by housing accommodation, during the past two years.  Their loss was certainly nothing to do with the town centre development.

 

            Were the changes worth the money that we spent on them?  Well, as Professor Joad used to say (Oh dear, that dates me doesn't it?) 'It depends what you mean by worth it'.  On my scale it was much more 'worth it' than, for instance, public money spent on the Greenwich Millennium Dome, the Millennium Footbridge over the Thames, or the Trident Missile system.  However it was much less 'worth it' than money wisely spent on education or health.

 

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