Week21.08

                              Tendring Topics – on line

 

Blogspot into Web Site!

 

            There's no doubt about it. Members of my family have original ideas. It was  Grandson Nick, now living in Brussels who first created this blogspot on which I have posted Tendring Topics – on line every week since January.  Now, as an eighty-seventh birthday present, he has expanded that blogspot into a web site with the very simple address of www.ernesthall.net . 

 

  Tendring Topics – on line will continue to be available as before to those who prefer to access www.ernesthall.blogspot.com .  However, those who click onto the new website address will, as well as finding Tendring Topics on the first or home page, be able to access my gallery of photographs. There are over 200 of them – many of the family but others of general interest like the sea frozen over in Clacton, a glimpse into boys and girls primary school classrooms in the 1930s and now- unrepeatable pictures like the ancient Turkish bridge at Mostar in Croatia before it was destroyed in that bloody and, in my opinion, totally unjustified civil war.

 

            Other 'pages' that can be accessed with a click are About me, an introduction to me as I am now; My life which is autobiographical and possibly of interest both to my family and   to those with a historical interest in the twentieth century, particularly in World War II; and My sermons, the typescripts of sermons that I have preached at Christ Church URC Church in Clacton and elsewhere.  I included that final section with some hesitation but I shall refer to them from time to time to reinforce my own often-fragile faith (all those sermons were directed as much at myself as at the congregation!), and some of them may, just possibly, be of value to others.

 

            Apart from About me and My pictures, these 'pages' are still in their early stages.  They will be added to as I find time to unearth material from my computer files and elsewhere.

 

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Twenty-first Century Britain

 

            Soon after I had posted last week's Tendring Topics – on line I began to have misgivings about it.  Had I been unfair in unfavourably contrasting the behaviour of Britain's adults and young people with those on the European mainland?  I knew perfectly well that, for all England's imperfections, it was the homeland for which I had yearned during those three long years that I had been a prisoner of war, and where I was happy to live today.

 

            Much as I had felt 'at home' on the mainland, both last year and this, I had not the slightest desire to live permanently anywhere in Europe other than in the UK or, in fact, anywhere in the UK other than in Southern East Anglia!  Nor have I ever had the least wish to visit, much less live in, sunny California, hospitable New England or the Antipodes!

 

            While I was thinking about this and wondering if there was something that I should do to redress the balance, I received an email from my elder grandson Chris. Aged 26, he is just completing his second year as a teacher in Taiwan. It was very nice to learn that Tendring Topics – on line has at least one reader on the other side of the world!   It seemed too that the very two paragraphs in my last week's blog that had been causing me some concern had, as we Quakers say, 'spoken to his condition'.  Here are a few brief extracts from his email:

           

            I couldn't agree more with you.  Every day I wake up here I feel so lucky to live in a peaceful place and not in London. I find English culture so lacking in respect for older people, or for anyone for that matter. It has really made me feel sick when, in London, I have seen teenage yobs on the top deck of a bus, smoking, playing music from their cell phones and threatening, or showing lack of respect to those around them.

 

            Even the worst children here wouldn't dream of behaving like London kids in public.  They would be instantly scolded by every adult on the bus. No-one would tolerate it.  I don't know if it is because there is a low divorce rate, or mothers staying at home for their children, or greater importance put on having a functional family unit, but there is a stark culture difference in Taiwan toward treatment of children, and I am in no doubt which is the best.  I know for a fact that no kids are left at home for most of the night with keys, a tv remote control and a games console!

 

            As soon as I have a problem with a kid's behaviour and I think he or she needs reeling in, I have the full support of my director and the parents, and my judgement isn't questioned for a minute.

 

            The children and parents show a lot of respect for teachers here. The parents ask me about their children, value everything that I say and co-operate fully in their education. All quite different from England, where it seems that everyone tries hard to undermine teachers and make the job a total nightmare!

 

            It should be stressed that Chris is referring to behaviour that he has seen and experienced in London.  I am sure that things aren't as bad as that in our own Tendring Peninsula – but they are quite bad enough!      

 

            This morning I have seen a scare headline in one of the tabloids warning us that thousands of us Brits are emigrating because of the 'virtually uncontrolled inflow of foreign immigrants'.   I think it much more likely that they are getting out because of the yobbish behaviour of some of our own native-born fellow-countrymen and women!

 

            I didn't see very many obviously 'foreign' faces in those disgraceful scenes on tv news bulletins after last week's football match in Manchester!

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Post Script

 

            A few hours after I had typed the above, I picked up the Coast Gazette from my front door mat.  Its front page headline was YOUNG FACES OF EVIL over a news story of the sexual assault and brutal killing in Colchester of a young mother from Clacton by two boys, one 16 and the other 13 years old.

 

            Another, much less serious but nevertheless disturbing, news story this week was of the St. Osyth Parish Council meeting that had to be abandoned because of the behaviour of about twenty young people (mostly girls between 13 and 17 years old!) running amok round the village hall, shouting abuse and hurling stones.

 

            I know that I shouldn't condemn a whole generation because of just a handful of delinquent kids – but I have an uneasy feeling that for every one young person who gets into serious trouble with the police there are probably at least twenty whose behaviour is thoroughly antisocial but who manage either to evade the law or to stay precariously just within its limits.  

 

            Even multiplied by twenty, the number of offenders and potential offenders is probably a small minority of the young people in this country.  My word though; it is a minority capable of producing a great deal of fear, distress and misery among the rest of us!

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                                       Empire Day!

 

            I wonder how many people under the age of 75 even realize that this Saturday, 24^th May used to be celebrated as Empire Day.  Very few I fancy.  Yet in the 1920s and '30s it was one of the important non-holiday dates that punctuated our year.

 

            Others included Boat Race Day.  It was amazing how many people with no connection whatsoever with either University 'supported' one or other of the crews in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and wore light blue or dark blue 'favours', sold by street hawkers for a penny or tuppence each, to proclaim their loyalty. 

 

            Then there was Armistice Day on 11^th November when everyone wore a Flanders Poppy and observed a strict two-minutes silence at 11 a.m.  All ex-servicemen wore their campaign medals and there were still many youngish war widows and blind, limbless or otherwise disabled casualties from World War I in evidence.

 

            Armistice Day was a sad occasion and by the evening of Boat Race Day something like half the population would always be disappointed with the performance of 'their' crew.

 

            Empire Day though (the date had been chosen because it had been the birthday of the Queen-Empress Victoria) was an occasion that everyone could celebrate without reservation.  It wasn't a school holiday but it was certainly a school-day with a difference.  At the morning assembly we would always have suitable thanksgiving prayers and scripture readings, and an appropriate hymn, Kipling's Recessional for instance or 'I vow to thee, my country'.  In my primary school (and I don't think that we were unique in this!) we used to march round the playground and salute the flag – the Union Jack that fluttered bravely overhead.

 

            In my secondary school, attended only by a privileged minority, we didn't quite go to those lengths.  The flag was flown though and at some time during the day we would be treated to a talk, sometimes illustrated by epidiascope, by a visitor (always a white Anglo-Saxon, of course) from Zululand, Jamaica, Singapore, the Khyber Pass or some other exotic outpost of Empire.  Always too we were told of the differences between a Self Governing Dominion, a Crown Colony, a Protectorate or (since the end of World War I) a Mandated Territory and reminded of the opportunities that still existed for Empire builders among our far-flung possessions.  Just look at the red on the world map, we were told, it was 'the Empire on which the sun never set' – the greatest and most enlightened Empire that the world had ever known.

 

            In 1937 at the age of 16 I sat for and passed the London University School Leaving Examination (the matric).  One of my exam subjects was British and World History from 1815 to 1914, a period of tremendous Imperial expansion and consolidation.  I was awarded a 'distinction' mark in that particular paper.

 

            Had anybody told me then that by the time I was middle aged, the British Empire would have disappeared (and that most people would feel that that was a good thing!) I'd have been quite sure that they were insane.

 

            Who would have thought that one of the verses of arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling's Recessional would prove to be so prophetic?

 

Far-called, our navies melt away:

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget; lest we forget!

 

            Our pomp of Empire is indeed 'one with Nineveh and Tyre'.  I wonder what similar surprises may await my grandchildren and my great grandchildren (if I ever have any!) in the decades that lie ahead.

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