Week 15/'08

                             Tendring Topics – on line

 

Dovercourt's Fryatt Hospital – Again!

 

            Steven Henderson, Chairman of Harwich Town Council, says that many local residents have been feeling let down by the failure of the local Primary Care Trust with regard to the Fryatt Hospital and Mayflower Medical Centre in Main Road, Dovercourt.  These facilities were opened in September 2006. They had been long-awaited but were now falling far short of hopes and expectations.

 

            Mr Henderson said, 'As soon as the hospital was built the floors started to bubble up everywhere and now need to be replaced.  They also built a kitchen that's not fit for service, so meals have to be transferred from Colchester to Harwich'.

 

            Oh dear!  If only Councillor Henderson had been a reader of 'Tendring Topics – on line' he'd have known (see blog posted on 2.2.08) that the Tendring Primary Care Trust was not responsible for the construction of the Fryatt Hospital. Nor are they responsible for its maintenance.  The 'construction and management of new facilities for the delivery of health care' throughout the Tendring and Colchester Districts are now, thanks to the Government's LIFT (Local Improvement Finance Trust) initiative, the responsibility of a Limited Company called Realise Health Ltd in which the Colchester and Tendring PCTs are partners (I suspect junior partners!), with the Mill Group and Partnerships for Health.

 

            LIFT and the not-dissimilar PFI (private finance initiative) schemes are intended to bring the rigours of the market place and the hard realities of private enterprise and private finance into public service areas previously dominated by 'fuddy-duddy public servants, well-meaning amateurs and woolly minded do-gooders'.

 

            At Harwich's Fryatt Hospital, completed and officially opened less than two years ago, the results of this bold effort to drag public services into the 21st century can be seen by all!   I notice that Realise Health Ltd., prominent enough at the time of the official opening, is currently keeping well in the background now that chickens are coming home to roost!  It was a PCT spokeswoman who announced that the Trust was working 'with Realise Health' to replace 30 to 40 percent of the flooring.  It might have been imagined that 'Realise Health' were independent consultants with no responsibility whatsoever for the hospital's present state.

 

            'Once a timetable has been agreed we expect it to be completed and the hospital fully operational within three to six months' she said. Then, perhaps as an afterthought, she added, 'Kitchens at the Fryatt Hospital also need work to bring them up to standard, and we are planning to do this once the flooring issues have been resolved. In the meantime, food will continue to be brought in from Colchester General Hospital, which is a perfectly acceptable process and does not affect the quality of food the patients receive'.  Well, that's reassuring.  It almost, but not quite, makes you wonder if there was any need to provide the Fryatt with a kitchen at all!

 

 It would also have been nice if the spokesperson had told us who had been responsible for laying floors that, according to Councillor Henderson, failed almost immediately, and who had planned and supervised the installation of a kitchen that was incapable of fulfilling its purpose.

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                            Ultra-violet Light – and Ozone.

 

            Further official warnings about the dangers of 'acquiring a tan' by means of a sun-bed, remind me that very different attitudes from those that prevail today existed 'between-the-wars' towards a great many matters concerning personal health.

 

            In those days exposure to sunshine was reckoned to be an unreservedly good and healthy thing.  Folk applied sun cream before sunbathing, not because the sun's rays were considered to be in any way dangerous but simply to avoid painful burns. 

 

Ultra-violet light was regarded as especially beneficial.  Ipswich's Northgate Secondary Schools for boys and girls, of which I was among the first intake, were completed and opened in 1931. At the time they were at the very cutting edge of modern school architecture, with enormous windows on the sunny side of each classroom with, so it was said, special glass that let the life-giving ultra violet rays through.  I am inclined to think that perfectly ordinary glass was, in fact, used.  The windows certainly let the sunlight pour in though – making schoolwork all but impossible on sunny days.

 

            I left school in 1937 to work in Ipswich Corporation's Public Health Department.  Among the health services provided at the Department's Elm Street headquarters was artificial sunray treatment for young children.  I remember one day having to take a message to the nurse in charge of this operation.  I opened the door of the treatment room to be temporarily blinded by the dazzling light of an enormous sunlamp under which about twenty scantily clad but goggle-wearing toddlers were disporting themselves.

 

            Perhaps, at that time, that wasn't quite the silly and potentially dangerous idea that it seems to us today.  In the '20s and '30s many children in urban areas did suffer from sunlight deprivation as a result of the permanent fog of smoke from industrial processes and coal fires that then hung over most cities.  Sunray treatment undoubtedly played a part in the virtual elimination of childhood rickets during those years.  Also, of course, the natural light from the sun was probably rather less lethal than it is today.   It was before the serious depletion of the ozone layer, high in the stratosphere, which filters out much of the damaging ultra violet light.

 

            Which reminds me that in those days we regarded ozone very differently from the way we do today.  Most of us had an idea that ozone was a kind of 'super-charged' oxygen.  Oxygen, we knew, was essential to life so it followed that ozone had to be specially beneficial.  The air around the coast was supposed to be particularly rich in this life-giving stuff – a notion that seaside resorts did nothing to dispel!

 

            Strolling behind any holidaying or 'weekending' family walking from the railway station to the sea (remember, this was in the 'bad old days' before Beeching, when a railway network covered virtually the whole of England and there was a reliable train service even at weekends and during public holidays!) you would hear the father of the family say, 'Stop a moment and take a deep breath.  You can smell the ozone blowing in from the sea.  Isn't it wonderful?'

 

            It's true that we had a Science Master at school who assured us that ozone was an odourless but poisonous gas and that the smell that was noticeable as we approached the sea was that of decomposing seaweed.   No-one took any notice of him though!

 

            Perhaps this idea too, may not have been quite as silly as it now seems.   Whatever may have been the source of the distinctive seaside smell there is no doubt that breathing the clean, if sometimes chilly, air that blows in off the sea was and is beneficial to lungs that have grown accustomed to air polluted by vehicle exhaust fumes. I am told that in the immediate post-war years a publicity slogan used to attract visitors to Clacton was 'Champagne air – Rainfall rare!'   No-one in the late '40s and early '50s ever became drunk on that notionally intoxicating air.  Similarly there were no fatal casualties from the notionally 'ozone' charged air of the '20s and '30s!

 

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                            'Sow's Ear' into 'Silk Purse'?

 

            Landfill, once regarded as a cheap and simple means of refuse disposal, has fallen out of favour these days.  We are fast running out of both suitable and unsuitable sites and it is wasteful of potentially valuable salvageable resources.  Now, to encourage recycling and conserve the land, the Government imposes a charge on local authorities for every ton of rubbish disposed of in this way.  It is no longer economically viable.

 

It is worth remembering that in the past, especially where there were disused sand or gravel pits scarring the landscape, landfill – or as we then called it – 'controlled tipping' often served a very useful purpose.

 

When, over half a century ago, my family and I moved into the bungalow in Clacton's Dudley Road in which I still live today there was a pit of this kind just a few hundred yards away.  It was called 'Smith's pit' and was in the rear of dwellings on the southern side of St Osyth Road.  A German bomber had crashed into it during World War II.  Since then it had been very slowly accumulating fly-tipped rubbish - old mattresses, rusting metal water tanks, dead cats and the like.

           

            Clacton Council took it over and filled it by means of the controlled tipping of household waste - 6ft deep layers of refuse were compacted and covered with a 1ft layer of soil which was again compacted before a further layer of refuse was added.

Smith's Pit is now the site of Clacton's small but busy Ford Road Industrial Estate – named incidentally, not after the motor manufacturer, but after Ben Ford, a Clacton  Labour Councillor and later an M.P., who was almost-a-neighbour of mine in Dudley Road. 

 

            Then there was Rush Green Tip where, thanks to controlled tipping, there is now the Clacton Town Football Field, a recreation ground and the County Council's Civic Amenity recycling centre.

 

            Latest to join the ranks of the conversions of Rubbish Dump to Civic Amenity is the former Martin's Farm tip in St. Osyth (just off the 'back road' from Clacton to Colchester.)  For many years used for landfill waste disposal, this 60 acre site, with views over Brightlingsea and St. Osyth Creek, has been developed during the past eight years as a sanctuary for wildlife and is now nearing the completion of its transformation into the Tendring District's largest country park.  

 

            Essex County Council, owners of the site, are organising an open day there on Saturday 31^st May, between 10.30 a.m. and 4.00 p.m.  Community groups and organisations are invited to take part.  St Osyth Primary School and the Essex County Council's recycling publicity bus are already booked, and John White, St. Osyth Parish Council Chairman, invites any group wishing to take part to contact either the Parish or the County Council.  'It will be a good opportunity for people to show us their ideas for Martin's Farm and to let people know what is on offer.  This is the first country park in Tendring of this scale and size'.

 

            Who says, 'You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear'?

 

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