Tendring Topics……..on Line
Oasis to SnOasis?
After Heather and I were married in April 1946 our first real home (I don't include furnished rooms in that category) was a bungalow in the rural parish of Barham, three or four miles northwest of Ipswich. It was one of a group of five bungalows that had been converted from a redundant Isolation (infectious diseases) Hospital, to house members of the staff of the Gipping Rural District Council. There we lived from the New Year of 1948 until our move to the Clacton area in 1955.
As this little group of bungalows had once been an Isolation Hospital, its site was quiet for the sake of the patients, and remote from other properties to reduce the risk of the spread of infection. We were sufficiently distant from the main Ipswich to Norwich Road to be unaffected by the sound of its traffic. Behind us stretched a stony, rabbit infested waste called The Broom, through which ran a railway line with an uncontrolled pedestrian level crossing. Then, perhaps half a mile distant from our home, was a footbridge over the River Gipping which led to the sleepy village of Great Blakenham on the road from Ipswich to Stowmarket.
We lived in an oasis of peace and tranquillity in a world that even then, was becoming daily noisier and more intrusive.
I went back there recently, after a lapse of over fifty years. A busy motorway now divided the approach lane into two separate parts, making the former hospital site even more remote from the former main road. There had clearly been gravel workings on the Broom. A worked-out gravel pit was now a small lake, planted about with trees and offering reserved fishing. There was an official picnic site nearby. The group of bungalows in which we had lived had had only names in our day – ours we had named 'Broomside'. Now there were wooden gates giving access from the lane. On them were prosaic numbers. Our 'Broomside' had become 'No. 5, The Crescent'.
Still though, the site retained something of the atmosphere of tranquillity that I remembered from the late '40s and early '50s.
That, I think, is likely to change dramatically in the near future. About a mile away across the river in the parish of Great Blakenham, is to be built an enormous leisure complex that will, I am sure, have a marked impact on economic and social life throughout the whole of southern East Anglia. I shall be very surprised if its effect (a positive one I hope) isn't felt along our Essex holiday coast.
Last week SnOasis, a unique indoor winter-sport and general leisure centre, with a cost estimated at £350 million, received its approval from the Government. Work, on a development site the size of 195 football pitches, is likely to begin shortly. Its features will include a 415 metre long ski slope (with real snow!) with a 100 metre vertical drop, that will be capable of coping with 2,400 skiers per hour, a nursery slope, a 100 metre drop full-length bobsleigh track, an ice rink, a speed skating track, an ice climbing wall and a cross-country ski run, plus a multi-purpose sports hall, triathlon course, roller-blade track, swimming pool, a ten-pin bowling hall with 20 lanes, tennis courts, and fishing facilities.
Also on the site will be a 350 room 4-star hotel and a self-catering holiday village with 350 units and 100 holiday apartments. It will have its own main-line railway station linking Great Blakenham to London Liverpool Street, and of course, there will be enormous car parks. It will, claim the developers, be the world's very first indoor winter sports resort. Construction will employ 3,500 jobs and, once it is up and running it is estimated that it will provide the equivalent of 1,800 full-time jobs.
It is expected to be completed by 2,012 and it is hoped that it will attract 650,000 visitors a year!
Now that I am a Clactonian by adoption I can watch the development with interest, hoping that it will reduce East Anglian unemployment and that there may be a spin-off for Tendring's seaside holiday towns. Ours are, after all, the nearest sandy seaside beaches to Great Blakenham. They're less than an hour's drive away and the journey doesn't involve driving through traffic-packed Ipswich or even going more than a fraction of the way round its motor-way bypass.
I suspect, mind you, that if I were still living in that quiet little cul-de-sac the other side of the river in Barham I'd be one of those protestors prepared to go to the last ditch in an attempt to stop it happening!
It certainly puts into perspective all the local fuss about the proposal to provide a few wind turbines between Clacton and St. Osyth!
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Armistice Day
Throughout my childhood and youth 'before the war', 11.00 a.m. on Armistice Day, 11th November, was a sombre and universally observed time and date every year. The nearest Sunday, observed nowadays as 'Remembrance Day', was just another Sunday then. The actual anniversary of the date and time when the guns of World War I fell silent was our special time of remembrance. It was taken very seriously.
Memories of the carnage of the trenches were still fresh in people's minds. There were still-young war widows wearing mourning black again for the occasion. There were those we realized were wounded ex-servicemen, on crutches, with an empty sleeve pinned across their chests, or using a white stick.
All those who had served in the war, and that was a very large proportion of the male population, wore their medals. My dad would spend a half an hour during the preceding evening polishing his six. He was particularly proud of the Mons Medal that marked him as one of the original tiny British Expeditionary Force who, according to the poet Alfred Houseman had, in 1914, 'followed their mercenary calling, and took their wages, and are dead', and of a French 'Medaille d'Honneur' which had been accompanied by a certificate signed by the then French President M. Poincaré.
At eleven oclock, the sirens sounded and everything stopped. Cars stopped on the roads, teachers would stop, with chalk in their fingers, as they were about to write on the blackboard. Everything went into suspended animation until the sirens sounded again and brought us all back to normal. Woe to he or she who broke that silence!
After the end of World War II Armistice Day was replaced by Remembrance Sunday. Acts of remembrance took place at the Cenotaph in London, in churches and at war memorials all over the country. It wasn't the same though. No longer were there sirens calling the whole nation to silence for just two minutes. Sunday became steadily less 'special' and church attendances fell. Attendances at war memorials fell too and many, perhaps the majority, of us no longer kept those two minutes of silence.
This year, perhaps because this Armistice Day, is the 90th since the day that the guns fell silent on the battle fronts throughout Europe, has seen a reversal of the trend. There has been tremendous media coverage of memorial events both on Remembrance Sunday and on Armistice Day. BBC tv has been running a series of features on World War I and its millions (yes, millions!) of victims.
Some years ago, in many parts of the country, the British Legion was instrumental in reviving the tradition of commemoration at 11.00 a.m. on 11th November. Their members met and observed a two minutes silence, together with prayer and the sounding of the Last Post followed by Reveille. They invited members of the public to join them. In Clacton this takes place on what is now known as the Town Square, the pedestrian area at the Junction of Pier Avenue and West Avenue.
I'm not a member of the British Legion and I usually go to the Quaker Meeting for Worship on Remembrance Sunday. I have made a practice though of trying to attend that act of remembrance on 11th November. I went this year and was pleased to note a larger than usual attendance, including many people obviously far too young to remember either of the two World Wars.
The new town centre layout meant that the event was less disturbed by traffic than in the past. The ceremony was brief, but moving. The vicar of St. Paul's Church prayed briefly and there were two short readings. Then, the British Legion standards were lowered as a Bugler sounded the Last Post (always a moving moment for me) and we observed our silence, the end of which was signalled by the joyful sounding of Reveille and the raising again of the flags.
During those silent two minutes I was thinking of the young men I had known who never returned, particularly, because of the blog I had just written, of Gunner Ted Baker, aged 24, who had served on the same Troop of four guns as myself. He had been fatally wounded, by a splinter from an air-burst shell I believe, during that last lost battle for Tobruk, and had died of his wounds on the following day. He is buried (Grave Ref. 2.D.14) in Knightsbridge War Cemetery, Acroma, near Tobruk, Libya).
Ted's home was in Great Blakenham, Suffolk and his next of kin were his parents, Frank and Ella Baker of that village. His name is inscribed on the war memorial at the village church there. I wondered what he would have thought of the development that is about to transform his rural home and much of the surrounding Suffolk countryside?
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Who'd be a Social Worker?
My grand-daughter is a social worker in the Sheffield area (I am hoping to go there to see her this weekend!). I am very proud of her, not least because with her capacity for hard work and her M.A., B.Sc. degrees I am sure that she could have chosen a much more financially rewarding profession had she wished to.
I don't envy her though. We all like to be liked and there can surely be few more vilified occupations. They are invariably portrayed in fiction as being bossy and totally unsympathetic bureaucrats, revelling in using red tape to entangle and ensnare other people's lives. No 'realistic' tv series set in modern times is complete without a loving but down-on-her-luck young mum, or a pathetic but independently minded octogenarian tearfully pleading, 'Please don't tell "the social", they'll take the kids off of me', or 'they'll cart me off to one of them homes', as the case may be.
Well, I'm nearer ninety than eighty and have myself had one or two encounters with social workers. I have found them to be charming ladies, eager to offer help though sometimes constrained by financial considerations from doing so in ways that they, and I, would have liked. They seemed to be greatly relieved at the fact that, for the moment anyway, I have neither the need nor the inclination to, 'go into a home'. I am quite sure that their attitude is much the same with struggling young mums. They would much rather offer them support to stay in their own homes to look after their children, than compulsorily take the children 'into care'.
But that too is a course of action fraught with peril. Supposing, shortly after a visit from a social worker, I had decided that my life wasn't worth living and attempted to end it or, even less probably I hope, harmed someone else in a fit of senile rage and frustration? Imagine the amateur psychologists at work! 'The social worker should surely have spotted the warning signs; all those photos of his deceased wife about the house, his garrulousness, his obsessive church-going and writing (Tendring Topics, his autobiography, his many emails), his failing sight and physical strength. He was obviously heading for a break-down'. If she had decided that I did need domiciliary care and had done anything about it, she would have been 'a power-drunk petty official, revelling in taking away a war-veteran's independence'.
When dealing with young mums and their kids the situation is even more fraught with peril. Take the children into care and you invite pictures in the tabloids of a weeping mother and screaming terrified children. If the mum is from an ethnic minority the social worker is likely to be accused, at best, of insensitivity to the customs of other cultures, at worst of being 'blatantly racist'.
Fail to take action and, as we have seen just this week, appalling tragedy can result. For the social worker involved, ten thousand previous correct decisions can't cancel out or even mitigate the effects of just one wrong one. It is the exception that makes the news! I admire my granddaughter all the more for the fact that social work is certainly not a profession that I would ever have chosen for myself!
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