Week 6.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

History repeats itself!

Did you, by any chance, watch the tv programme about the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the world-wide depression that followed it? It was on BBC 2 on Saturday evening 24th January? If you did you must have been struck by the very obvious parallels between the events of that fateful year and those that we are currently experiencing.

Today’s crisis was triggered by thoroughly irresponsible lending by banks, first in the USA and later in this country. Mortgages as high as 125 percent were offered to applicants who had little chance of keeping up their repayments. The risk to the lender was reduced by passing on the debt to other banks, in the USA, in Europe or elsewhere, thereby exporting the subsequent financial crisis world-wide! While house prices continued to escalate the system appeared to work well. If the home-buyer (often referred to incorrectly as a home owner!) failed to keep up his payments, the property could be repossessed and sold at a considerably higher price than the amount of the mortgage loan.

By these means banks made a substantial profit, their top executives ‘earned’ enormous bonuses, and as a British prime minister once said, some of the money ‘trickled down’ to those who actually created wealth either by making things or providing services. Everyone was happy, except of course the unfortunates who had thought they were on the road to home ownership and had discovered that they weren’t. However the ethics of the market place (somewhat similar to those of the jungle!) do not waste too much time worrying about losers.

All went well until the price of houses ceased to rise and began to fall. We are experiencing the result today!

Precisely the same thing happened in 1929. The only difference was that the Wall Street banks didn’t lend money to buy houses but to buy stocks and shares. New investors were told, for instance, that if they had $600 to invest, the banks would lend them sufficient money to increase that investment ten-fold, allowing them to buy not just $600 worth of shares but $6,000. Every stockholder felt that he was well on his way to becoming a millionaire! Again, it worked well until the value of shares began to fall, and fall, and then go into free-fall, as investors tried in vain to sell their shares and get out while they could.

Among those who lost all their savings was the comedian Groucho Marx. A few months before the crash he had asked his stockbroker how it was that the value of his shares could keep on going up and up. ‘Ah’, came the ready reply, ‘that’s because we’ve now got a global market’. That was in 1928 but it could have been said early in 2008! You’d really have thought that among all the top graduates in history or economics who had been recruited in recent years at enormous salaries by our financial institutions, there would have been some who would have seen what was coming and given a word of warning! Perhaps some did see it.…..and took it as an opportunity to make hay while the sun shone, and to get out when the clouds started to gather!

The closed-down Woolworth's Store with frontages in both West Avenue (above) and Pier Avenue, is the most obvious sign of the Economic Depression in Clacton. It isn't difficult to find others. However, perhaps the scaffolding poles and the building work in progress behind those cars on the right of the picture indicate that our town isn't totally moribund.

Ultimately of course, it will be the rest of us who will have to pay for the folly and greed of the high flyers in the financial services. Furthermore, the switch by successive recent governments from reliance on direct taxation like income tax to indirect taxes like VAT and duty on, for instance, petrol, alcohol and tobacco, will make sure that it is the less well off of us who find ourselves paying the greater proportion of our incomes in doing so.

We shall have to bail out the banks, subsidise the manufacture of luxury cars that few of us can afford to buy, and meet the inevitably increasing cost of unemployment pay and welfare benefits.

Surely two world-wide financial crises, plus two wars (three if you count ‘the war against terrorism’), and an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ that isn’t independent and clearly doesn’t deter the threats that we are actually facing, effectively turn upside down Lady Thatcher’s contention that, ‘All Britain’s problems have originated in Europe, and all their solutions have come from America’!

I wish that I could say with confidence that this time the financiers, the politicians and the rest of us will learn. I’m afraid that I can’t though. It is my guess that, as we eventually emerge from depression, we shall at first apply tight controls to the Banks and Financial Institutions to make sure that ‘it can’t happen again’. That was done in the ‘30s. As the years pass though, ‘in the interests of unfettered free enterprise and to allow the banks to expand and improve their services’, these controls will be loosened, top bankers and financiers will again pocket their six figure bonuses, and, probably some time in the last quarter of this century, history will yet again repeat itself.

A Nation of Illiterates?

I thought that last week’s saddest news story didn’t relate to the financial situation, depressing as it is, but to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee’s report on adult literacy and numeracy.

Despite the government having spent £5 billion between 2001 and 2007 on efforts to improve adult literacy and numeracy skills, ‘England still has an unacceptably high number of people who cannot read, write and count adequately’ says the report. In 2007 the government announced a new target to help 95 percent of adults of working age to achieve functional literacy and numeracy skills by 2020. Even if that target is reached though, our national skill levels will only have reached a level already achieved by 25 percent of developed countries ….. and by 2020 they too may well have moved on!

I can’t help feeling that the situation has deteriorated in my lifetime and that the problem has its origins long before school leaving age. I went to a very ordinary council elementary school in Ipswich until I was ten. I am quite sure that by that age every boy in my class (the sexes were segregated over the age of seven in those days!) could read, write and do simple sums, though the standard of their spelling, handwriting and use of grammar may have left a lot to be desired. By that time too we would have had at least a sketchy acquaintance with Britain’s history and the world’s geography.

I was called up into the army in September 1939. I was a gunner in a regiment of young (18 to 25) working class men from Ipswich or from rural villages in south-east Suffolk. In the seven years I was in the army I can recall only one fellow-gunner who was unable to read the orders on the battery notice board and unable to read and write letters to and from his home. He was by no means either idle or unintelligent and I have little doubt that nowadays he’d have been diagnosed as ‘severely dyslexic’; something we had never heard at that time!

In my elementary school and in the secondary school that I later attended, discipline was very strict by modern standards. Some of the lessons were boring and repetitive We learned the multiplication tables, for instance, by chanting them in class; terrible – but we did learn them.
We hadn’t been told that ‘learning is fun’
and we didn’t expect it to be. It’s true that I did enjoy learning (at least the subjects at which I was good!) as I progressed up the school. That though, was only after I had done a year or two’s hard and often uninteresting work at acquiring the basic principles of arithmetic and of English grammar and syntax, and reading a great deal of English poetry and prose that, until the words began to strike a chord in my brain, had seemed deadly boring.

I wonder if the idea that learning must always be fun and that there should never be a need for hard and uninteresting work could be at the root of our problems today?

Photos - above left, a class of nine year olds at Springfield Primary School, Ipswich. I am the anxious looking little boy with glasses, sitting just by the Headmaster's knee. The Headmaster was Mr. Offord ('Pip' Offord to us kids!) and the class teacher a Miss Dunkley. You can see that we were well drilled!

Above right. A similar class in a girls' primary school in Manor Park, taken two or three years later than the other photo. Heather Gilbert, who was later to become my wife and share my life for 60 years, is the second little girl from the right in the back row. No teachers are shown on the picture but the apprehensive look on the girls' faces suggests that they were a menacing presence behind the camera!

‘A Monstrous Regiment of Women’?

It was in 1558 that Reformer John Knox published his polemic with the less-than-snappy title of ‘The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regiment (reign) of Women’. That was the year in which Queen Elizabeth I succeeded her half-sister Queen Mary as Queen of England in her own right while in Scotland Mary of Guise was acting as Regent on behalf of her then 16 year old daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, who had just married the French Dauphin.

It is surely strange that in England and Scotland at least, despite the protests of the old 16th Century misogynist, the office of ruler has for centuries been open to women, when so many other offices and professions have remained closed to them. Within my own lifetime there has been a tremendous, and very welcome, change of public attitude from strong opposition, through reluctant and often patronising acceptance, to wholehearted welcome to women in virtually every walk of life. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the medical profession.

In my childhood and youth ‘between the wars’ women doctors, or ‘lady doctors’ as they were then always called, were a rarity. Few medical practices included a female practitioner and the work of those who had managed to pass all the hurdles that discouraged their qualification was liable to be limited to the medical care of young children. Surgeons and Consultants, even those specialising in Gynaecology and Obstetrics, were almost always men. From 1937 to 1939 when I held a very junior post in Ipswich Council’s large Public Health Department, the medical staff comprised a Medical Officer of Health, his Deputy and a number of Assistant Medical Officers. Among the latter was just one woman, Dr Doris Jolley, Maternity and Child Welfare Officer, who ran the Antenatal and Children’s Preschool Clinics.

Chatting with other allied prisoners of war and civilian ‘slave workers’ while I was a POW in Germany in World War II, I recall being astonished to learn that in the Soviet Union most general medical practitioners were women.

During the past three or four years I have, due to my age, had more medical attention than during the whole of my previous life. The doctor who cared for my wife during her final illness was a woman. It is she whom I prefer to see when I have medical problems myself. A woman surgeon conducted the cataract operation on my right eye and women surgeons carried out the two operations to eradicate the skin cancer that I had on my ear. I have recently seen an Ear, Nose and Throat Primary Care Consultant, another woman, about a small problem I had with my throat, and when I had my hearing tested recently it was again a woman audiologist (I suppose that that was her title) who carried out the investigation. Oh yes, and the optician who tests my eyes once a year to see if my glasses need new lenses is also a woman.

All of this would, I dare say, have given John Knox apoplexy, and most of it would certainly have been quite impossible in the 1930s. However, I have to say that from all these women I have received professional care and attention that has been at least equal to that that I might have received from their male equivalents……and I think it possible that they were just a little more friendly, courteous and caring than men might have been.

I am proud to be able to record that I have a very gifted and hard-working nineteen-year-old great-niece who has just begun her medical training in a university in the West Country! I wish her every success in her chosen career. As far as I am concerned, long may the anything-but-monstrous ‘Regiment of Women’ continue to flourish in the NHS.

Week 5.09

Tendring Topics……on Line

The Harwich Society.....Forty Years on!

It is difficult for me to realize that the Harwich Society, surely one of the most active and prestigious organisations of its kind in East Anglia, is only forty years old. I am sure that the handful of enthusiasts who launched the Society at a public meeting in the town on 7th February 1969 didn’t, in their wildest dreams, imagine that four decades later their fledgling society would have over a thousand members, many living far from Harwich, and would have a record of solid achievement upon which the present membership fully intends to build.
A few yards from the waterfront is the home of Christopher Jones, Master of 'The Mayflower' on which the Pilgrim Fathers of the USA sailed across the Atlantic

The photos on this page were taken by me in the 1980s. I was then writing a number of articles for the New England Senior Citizen (‘on your trip to England don’t fail to visit Harwich, home of the Mayflower’ and so on) thus giving a tiny boost to our tourist trade and putting a few welcome dollars into my bank account!

At that time the Harwich Society had been in existence little more than a decade but was already making its presence strongly felt. An article in the current issue of Highlight, the Society's quarterly journal, refers to a photograph in a 1976 issue of the Harwich and Dovercourt Standard depicting ‘the Electric Palace looking forlorn and dilapidated. The entrance is boarded up, the plasterwork disintegrating’. The Palace was, in fact, threatened with demolition but, thanks largely to the efforts of the Harwich Society, the Electric Palace, one of England’s oldest purpose-built cinemas, was saved, restored to its former glory and is still a valuable centre of entertainment in the town. My photo shows the then-recently-restored cinema.

This mural, the first of its kind, depicting something of Harwich’s history, had been sponsored by the Harwich Society and painted by the pupils of Harwich School.

Another major project that by the 1980s was well under way was the restoration of Harwich’s Redoubt, a fort constructed to defend Harwich Harbour from Napoleonic invasion in the first decade of the 19th century. It is now one of the town’s most valued assets and the venue of an annual Spring Bank Holiday fête that year after year helps to meet the cost of its upkeep. Heather (formerly Heather Gilbert), my late wife, had a family interest in Harwich and in the restoration of the Redoubt. Her grandfather had been one of the crew of the ill-fated SS Berlin. Its loss at the Hook of Holland in February 1907, left her grandmother a widow with three orphaned children one of whom was the twelve year old boy destined to be Heather’s father. Heather’s cousin Roger Gilbert was a keen member of the small group of Redoubt Volunteers who undertook the mammoth task of clearing the dry moat of nearly two centuries-worth of discarded rubbish!

A brief history of Harwich, also in the current issue of Highlight explains why it is that historic Harwich doesn’t get a mention in William the Conqueror’s Doomsday Book, while its apparently-more-modern sister town of Dovercourt does.

It appears that the outlet to the sea of the rivers Orwell and Stour used to be further north than it now is and was roughly where Felixstowe Pier stands today. The rivers broke through to the sea on their present course at the beginning of the twelfth century and a few decades later the importance of the settlement of Herewyk strategically situated on a promontory on the southern side of the newly formed estuary was realized. It developed into the Borough and Port of Harwich, which was to play an important role in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the settlement of North America, the Dutch wars, the Napoleonic wars and two world wars.
Harwich's unique treadwheel crane, originally used for loading and unloading cargoes. The crane is owned by the Tendring District Council but the Harwich Society keeps a watchful eye on it and informs the Council when the crane needs maintenance or other attention

Developments in Clacton

I have to admit that when I first heard that the disused former insurance offices on the western side of Clacton’s Jackson Road were to be converted into a Travelodge Hotel and a number of flats, I was sceptical. During the half century that I have lived in the town I have seen hotel after hotel along the seafront converted into apartments. Why on earth should a new hotel, away from the sea front, succeed where they had failed?

However, when I mentioned the development to members of my family, all of whom are much more accustomed to staying in hotels than I am, I was told that it would very likely prove to be a success. What Clacton needed, they assured me, was an up-to-the-minute hotel (not a late Victorian one more or less adapted to modern needs) that offered reasonably priced short stay accommodation. Travelodge, and most of them seemed to have stayed in a Travelodge Hotel at one time or another, was just what the town needed.

As for its location? It isn't very far from the busiest part of the sea front and, if it were hoping to attract customers all the year round and not just at the summer season, there might be a positive advantage in being near the town centre but a little way back from the sea front.

It may be that with the falling value of the pound making holidays abroad ever more expensive, Clacton-on-Sea will see something of a revival this year if only the weather is kind. If so, the new Travelodge Hotel should be able to profit from it. Work is already in hand as you can see in this picture taken last week. The contractors hope to have it completed and ready for occupation in time for the 2009 holiday season.

An even more ambitious plan, which it is hoped will come into fruition by the spring of next year is the proposal by Primero Management to demolish the Comfort Inn on Clacton’s Marine Parade West and replace it with a 61 room hotel, a roof-top restaurant and other facilities. These would include a sixteen-lane bowling alley, basement parking spaces and children’s party suites.

The proposed bowling alley has sparked protests from existing owners of amusement facilities in the town who in 2003 had been granted planning permission for the provision of a nine-lane bowling alley in Clacton’s Pier Pavilion. The new development would, they say, undermine their plans for the future and they are urging to Council to refuse planning permission.

However, they have done nothing to further their plans for five years. Primero, on the other hand, is proposing to start work on their project in May of this year and to have the new hotel and its ancillaries open and ready for use in March 2010. The Council if they are wise will remember that, ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!’ and grant Primero their planning permission.

Congratulations!

I think that we residents of the Tendring District (well, most of us anyway) are entitled to feel pretty pleased with ourselves about the efforts that we have made to separate our recyclable refuse from our landfill waste and to put them out separately for collection each week. We produce the least landfill waste per head of any district or borough council in Essex and we come only sixteenth from the top in the whole of England! The national average for the year 2007/2008 was 450 kilogrammes per head. The very lowest was Hyndburn in Lancashire with 300 kgs while we in Tendring come fairly closely behind with 330 kgs per head.

I said that most rather than all of us should be feeling pleased with ourselves because a stroll down any residential road on collection day will find some houses with several black bags filled with landfill waste put out for the refuse collectors, but no sign of a Council-supplied green box or any other container filled with recyclables.

I think that the Council needs to make a note of these addresses and write to, or call on, the occupiers to stress the importance of recycling and to try to persuade them to mend their ways. If friendly persuasion doesn’t do the trick I think that, in fairness to the rest of us, the Council should see what coercive measures may be available to them.

A Town Hall Bank?

On Radio 4’s Moneybox programme last Saturday (24th January) there was discussion of the problems of perfectly sound businesses that now find themselves unable to obtain the credit that they need from their usual commercial Bank. Should Local Authorities take over some of the responsibilities of these Banks in fields where they are clearly failing? Both Essex County Council and Birmingham Council are, it seems, eager to pioneer Town Hall (or County Hall) banking.

Essex County Council’s leader Lord Hanningfield, never one to hide his light under a bushel, was very keen on the idea. There were, he said, many businesses within our county which were failing simply because commercial banks were unwilling to advance loans that in the past they would have offered without hesitation. The County Council could and would step in and save them.

I am sure that they could and think it quite possible that they will. Regular readers of Tendring Topics…..on line will know that I am usually strongly in favour of public services being carried out by public enterprise rather than by private firms motivated by market forces and the profit motive. Also, of course, local authorities are better able than nationally owned commercial banks to assess the local financial climate and the credibility of a local firm.

However, our County Council is the one that early last year sent some of its members on an expensive jaunt to the USA to help drum up orders for Essex firms. How many orders, I wonder, came to Essex as a result? It is the same council that is causing outrage in Colchester about its proposal to close two schools and spread their pupils among the others. It is also the council that recently put virtually the whole of its services out to private tender, sold off its old people’s care homes, and received a report on the quality of its child care provision ranking it not much higher than that of the now notorious Haringey! None of which inspires me with a great deal of confidence.

Essex County Council also receives and spends the greater part of the money that I, and all other Tendring householders, pay in Council tax. Tendring District Council is often strongly criticised in the correspondence columns of the Clacton Gazette. On the whole though, I’d feel happier trusting my money to their care than to that of their counterparts at County Hall in Chelmsford.

I hope that local authority banking is tried out, and proves to be a great success, in Birmingham!

Week 4.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Too close for comfort!

Since I have had my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) I have become more anxious about the possibility of being mugged and robbed than I once was. This is probably partly due to my age and consequent loss of physical strength, but also I think, because, seated on the scooter, I feel particularly vulnerable. I have never yet, for instance, been out on it after dark
Me, on my 'iron horse' outside my bungalow in Dudley Road during the summer. I have recently had a canopy fitted which should make me a little less vulnerable to muggers as well as to the weather.

However, although some reported muggings have taken place in the vicinity of my home, the most common time for such an attack tends to be after midnight, when the victim is on his way home from a nightclub or somewhere similar. That is not, and never has been, my scene.

That is something that couldn’t be said though about a mugging and knifing, that took place on Tuesday of last week (13th Jan.). A 47 year old man was attacked by three muggers who took from him his mobile phone and a quantity of beer, presumably in cans. They left him with a knife wound in his hand that needed hospital treatment. It is true that it didn’t take place in the hours of daylight. It was in the early evening though at about 7.15 p.m., just the time that I might venture out if there were to be some evening event that I particularly wanted to attend.

What’s more, it took place in Clacton’s Key Road within a few yards of its junction with Old Road. It’s only a few hundred yards from my home and I pass it at least twice every Sunday on my way to and from the Quaker Meeting House and on the fairly frequent occasions that I visit the computer shop, a local pharmacy or other shops in the area.

It may be that this wasn’t just a random attack by three yobs on someone who appeared to be on his own and vulnerable. Perhaps the assailants knew their victim and had some other motive than robbery for their assault. That thought would make the rest of us feel a little more secure.

However, I think that for the present I’ll stick to my resolution not to venture out after dark except, of course, as a passenger in a friend or relative’s car.
Key Road's junction with Clacton's Old Road, where the attack took place. I learn 'from a usually reliable source' (as they say!) that this is a spot where negotiations for the sale of drugs sometimes takes place. Perhaps then, the attack wasn't quite as random and purposeless as it had appeared to be.

‘Education, Education, Education!’

Education, Education, Education were claimed to be Tony Blair’s top three objectives when New Labour first took office over ten years ago. On a visit to Moscow he even managed to make the point in a soap opera on Russian tv!

I certainly wouldn’t claim that his subsequent educational policies have proved to be a dismal failure. The prowess of my three grandchildren, all three of whom have graduated during the past decade, clearly indicate otherwise. I am quite sure that it has produced a great many notable successes. There have been some sad disappointments though, well to the fore among them being Clacton’s Bishops Park College, at the ceremonial opening of which Tony Blair himself attended as a VIP guest just a few years ago.

Of the 111 pupils from this school eligible to take the GCSE examination last year only 52 percent managed to get five or more GCSE grades at or above ‘G’ level and only 8 percent managed to get these grades in five subjects including English and Mathematics. ‘G’ level, by the way, indicates a bare ‘pass’. The only other grade is ‘F’ for Failure which I am quite sure examiners are reluctant to award.. This was the lowest score of any of the hundred Essex Schools recently surveyed.

Compare this with Clacton County High School whose pass rate was 96 percent and 45 percent respectively and Tendring Technology College with a pass rate of 94 percent and 49 percent. The very best? Chelmsford County High School for Girls, Colchester County High School for Girls, and Colchester Royal Grammar School, all three with 100 percent passes in both categories.

A rather closer look at the league table reveals that 24.3 percent (almost a quarter) of Bishops Park College pupils had ‘special educational needs’ and 23.7 percent (again not far short of a quarter) of its pupils were ‘persistently absent’ from school. These figures are much, much higher than those for any other of the schools listed. It is surely obvious that Bishops Park College’s problem is not really ‘educational’ at all but ‘social’. Children need to have superhuman determination and potential to lift themselves out of an environment in which ‘book learning’ is regarded with contempt.

Mr Nick Pavitt, the head teacher who has done a very creditable job in lifting Colbayns High School out of failure and now has the responsibility for Bishops Park, claims that the school ‘is on the road to recovery’. I hope that it is, but fear it will be an uphill path, because it seems clear to me that the real problems lie not in the school but in the homes of some of the pupils.

In the meantime I can well understand the motives of those local parents who are spending their last penny in educating their children at home rather than send them to Bishops Park College, the only local secondary school in which they have been offered places. I’m only thankful that I was never called upon to make such a decision about my own sons’ education.

Our Wind-farm

Those old enough to remember the days of World War II will recall that the standard reply at the time to complaints of delays and inefficiency was; ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ More recently it used to be, ‘Well, it’s the weather has held us up’ or ‘Our suppliers have let us down’ or ‘It’s them EU regulations, you know’. Now though there’s an all-purpose excuse that is almost as good as ‘the war’; ‘Blame it on the Credit Crunch’. That covers just about anything.

It is nice to know though that there’s one important enterprise in our area that needs no excuses. The Danish Dong Organisation (I wish that they’d change their name!) gave us the time-table for the installation and commissioning of the 48 wind turbines that they are erecting on the Gunfleet Sands almost directly south of Clacton pier, well over a year ago; and they have stuck to it. They are currently driving the monopiles that support each turbine into the seabed. Seventeen of the forty-eight are already in place and they have completed their off-shore sub-station. They are confident that the wind-farm will be completed and in operation before the end of the year.

The construction has brought a little unexpected prosperity to Brightlingsea at a time when the town, like all of us these days, could do with it. Large vessels involved in the provision of the wind farm lie in Brightlingsea Creek until needed. Crews working on the project have their base in the town. They board in bed-and-breakfast accommodation and spend money in pubs, shops and restaurants.

The contractors have also been given permission to demolish a boatyard and to build a three-storey office block and warehouse in Tower Street. This will be used for the service and maintenance of the wind farm when its construction has been completed. Thus it seems that the wind-farm will be a continuing bonus for the Cinque Port Town.


Eight Hundred Years of History

Cambridge University’s celebration of the 800th anniversary of its foundation reminds me of the pride that Heather and I felt were when our elder son Pete was one of four Clacton County High School Boys to be accepted as undergraduates by the University in 1971. We both came of working class parents and considered ourselves to have been privileged in having stayed on at school till we were sixteen to take the School Leaving Exam and matric, instead of leaving school to start work at fourteen as most of our contemporaries had.

No member of either of our immediate families had ever dreamed of going to any kind of University. For our son to go to one of England’s and Europe's most historic and prestigious ones had been beyond our wildest hopes. Our pride on the day that we drove him to Cambridge and settled him into his in-college room was surpassed only by that on graduation day.

Those of course were ‘the bad old days’ when tuition was free and a living allowance, to which parents had to make a ‘parental contribution’ depending upon their means, was paid by the county council. Graduates therefore left their universities without the huge burden of debt that they carry today.


Photos: Left - Graduation Day. Right - Heather and I on the Cam during the course of a visit to Pete. This, you'll realize was in my beardless days. I wasn't too bad a hand with a punt pole! This picture reminds me that Heather and I weren't always old fogies!










Welcome Barack Obama!

I wish the new President of the USA all the luck in the world in his Presidency, and I think that he'll need it if he is to clear up the mess left by his predecessor!

Mr George W. Bush presided over, and was largely responsible for the involvement of the USA and its ever-compliant junior partner Britain, in two unwinnable wars. These have won countless new recruits for the terrorism that they are supposed to be combating. He established the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where we now know that torture has been used in questioning prisoners. He has blindly supported Israeli foreign policy, even in opposition to all his other allies. I do not believe it is just a coincidence that the Israeli campaign in Gaza ended, and the Israeli troop withdrawal began, just hours before the inauguration of a President who couldn't be depended upon to defend without question every Israeli action.

On the world stage Mr Bush effectively blighted every international attempt to slow down the pace of climatic change. I have no doubt whatsoever that this will be seen by future historians as overwhelmingly the most serious problem that faced mankind in the 21st century. By extending the boundaries of NATO and ringing Russia with missile bases (purely defensive, of course!) he has made an enemy where he might have found a friend.

At home his blind support for an unfettered free market encouraged the irresponsible lending that precipitated the financial crisis first in the USA and then throughout the world. How ironic that a committed anti-Marxist's policies should threaten to demonstrate the truth of Karl Marx's assertion that 'Capitalism carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction'.

In his Presidency Mr Barack Obama carries the hopes of millions for a better and safer world, perhaps even the one envisaged by Alfred Lord Tennyson in the nineteenth century:

Where the war-drum beats no more and the battle flags are furled, In the Parliament of man, the federation of the World.

Mr Obama has one big advantage as he begins his all-but-impossible task. He isn't George W. Bush

Week 3.09

Tendring Topics …..on line

So, you think it has been cold?

And, of course, it certainly has been. It has been colder in the past though. Bitter winters that I remember particularly, with snow and ice for week after week, were those of 1938/’39, 1940/’41, 1946/’47 and 1962/’63. There were many more I am sure but those are ones that, usually because of a memory of some way in which the icy weather affected me, have stuck in my mind.
These photographs were taken some time during the first three months of 1963 when we had a particularly long cold spell. The sea froze over near Clacton pier and, I have no doubt, at other places along our coastline. The first picture shows the snow-covered beach and frozen sea near the pier, the frozen ripples giving a wrinkled effect on the surface of the sea near the shoreline. The other picture shows how far the ice extended out to sea along over half the length of the pier.

The winter of 1962/1963 was the only occasion during the fifty-three years that I have lived in Clacton that the sea has frozen over and, in fact, I haven’t heard of it having frozen at any other time.

I was employed by the Clacton Council at the time as a Public Health Inspector. I remember hearing of the difficulties encountered by grave-diggers in Clacton Cemetery. No sooner had they broken through one layer of frozen soil than the frost followed them down, freezing the next layer before they could get their spades into it.

In those days, of course, there was no winter fuel allowance and no cold weather payments for pensioners. I live in a well-insulated detached bungalow and am very grateful for the government’s winter fuel payment, which now totals £400. It knocks a substantial hole in the £1,500 that I pay annually for gas and electricity supply. I am also grateful for the fact that the Christmas bonus to us pensioners has been raised from a derisory £10 to a much-more-worthwhile £60. The first £10 of this has already been paid and, so I am assured, the remaining £50 will be paid some time this month.

In addition to those two payments that are not means-tested, there are ‘cold weather payments’ made to over-60s in receipt of Pension Credit, and to younger people on means-tested benefit who are either disabled or have a child under five years of age. These payments are of £25 for any period of seven consecutive days during which the air temperature falls to freezing point, Zero Celsius (or Centigrade as pensioners of my generation will remember it).

I certainly don’t envy those who are entitled to these pitifully inadequate sums. How much gas or electricity would you get during each 24 hour period for one seventh of £25; just over £3.50? It must be remembered too that those eligible for cold weather payments get nothing for weeks in which the temperatures, though sub-zero much of the time, didn’t fall below freezing point during seven consecutive days.

As is the case with all means-tested benefits there are many householders who aren't quite hard-up enough to qualify for the payments, but are still having extreme difficulty in paying today's inflated prices for gas and electricity.

Meanwhile it is said that there is a sum in the region of £5 billion in benefits of one kind or another that remain unclaimed.

Many of those entitled to those benefits will be pensioners. If you think that you might just possibly be one of them contact your local branch of Age Concern. They’ll be pleased to advise you and to help you fill in any necessary application forms. The phone number will be in the local phone book. If you live in the Tendring District the number is 01255 473346



Late News:

As I was writing this blog I received an email from my friend Ingrid in Germany. She and her husband live in Bayreuth where there is deep snow and the temperature at night has been right down to minus 19 degrees Celsius. That makes Clacton's occasional minus 2C or 3C seem like a heat wave! It isn't surprising that homes on the European mainland are generally much better insulated than ours are.



Myself, Ingrid and my son Pete during our visit to Zittau in 2007


The Camera Cannot Lie!’

Living as we do in a world in which trick photography and fake photography are thrust before our eyes every day of the week, more often to entertain us than to deceive us, it is difficult to believe that ‘the camera cannot lie’ was once taken as a statement of fact. How bland and uninteresting advertising on tv would be if the cameras were allowed to take only literally truthful pictures!

However, cameras lie only when prompted to do so by us humans. Strategically placed closed circuit tv cameras, unclouded as they are by emotion and able to record action as it is taking place, can record and recall events more fully and with greater accuracy than the human eye and memory. Despite inevitable protests about invasion of privacy I think that the CCTV cameras that are nowadays a feature of every town centre, do play a worthwhile part in the detection and deterrence of crime. They certainly make the law-abiding majority of us feel a great deal safer.

Limitations of this kind of surveillance include the fact that there are usually blind spots, the cameras can’t focus down to close-up, and they may tend to drive crime, especially antisocial behaviour, out of town centres and into back streets and suburbs.

For these reasons I think that we should welcome the decision of our Police Authority to trial the use of ‘head-cameras’ by some police officers within Colchester and the Tendring District. Fitted in front of the user’s ear, not unlike a hearing aid, the head-camera sees what its user’s eyes are seeing and provides a close-up view beyond the capacity of static CCTV.

. Chief Inspector Jon Hayter, Tendring’s District Police Commander, claims that they will be invaluable at gathering first-hand evidence of alcohol related crime and crime associated with antisocial behaviour. The cameras, he says, offer a two-fold benefit, ‘They get the best possible evidence of people committing offences and antisocial behaviour, and they will also act as a deterrent’.

They cost £1,000 each and in our area are to be used during the trial period on Friday and Saturday nights. I reckon they’ll prove to be money well spent.


‘What’s in a name?’

‘What’s in a name?’ asks love-sick teenager Juliet Capulet in Shakespeare’s tragedy ‘Romeo and Juliet', ‘that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.’

Very true, but under certain circumstances, not only in the 16th century but today, names are important. The trouble is that we don’t all realize quite how important they can be to some of our fellow men and women. I have to admit that I was astonished at the outrage and indignation that erupted when we learned that Prince Andrew, while serving in the army as an officer-cadet, had referred to one of his fellow cadets as ‘ Paki’ in a tv interview. This, on the face of it seems a perfectly reasonable, if slangy, abbreviation of Pakistani. When I was in the army (though not, of course, in the officers' mess!) we habitually referred to any Scotsmen among us as Jocks, Welsh as Taffies, and Irish as Paddies. None, that I recall, ever objected. We didn't have any Pakistanis, Pakistan didn't exist at that time, but if we had had one I have no doubt he'd have been called Paki. It certainly wouldn't have been regarded as insulting, but rather as a tribute to his ethnic origin.

It seems though that ‘Paki’ evokes such shock and disgust because it is a 'hate word' and because of the insults and the ‘skinhead Paki-bashing outrages’ of two or three decades ago. No word is a 'hate word' unless it is used in hate and skin-heads weren't and aren't representative of the British people.

The first time that I heard the word ‘Brits’ used as an abbreviation of British was perhaps ten or fifteen years ago by an Irish Republican in a tv interview. He spat it out with hatred and loathing. Nevertheless the word itself is harmless enough and I have used it at times myself, probably in this blog. ‘Us Brits’, may be less grammatically correct that than ‘we Britons’ but it’s less pompous too.

My father was a regular soldier and one of the British Expeditionary Force that arrived in France immediately after the outbreak of World War I on 4th August 1914. It was allegedly referred to by the German Crown Prince Wilhelm as ‘General French’s contemptible little army’. The members of that little army pounced on the word ‘contemptible’ with joy. They used it as a badge of honour and forever after, those who survived the carnage took pride in being ‘one of the original “Old Contemptibles”’

I don't think that very many Britons get upset when Australians refer to us as Pommies nor, I think, do Australians mind being called Ossies. I don't suppose that Americans particularly like being called Yanks but I am sure that they have learned to live with it.

In the multi-ethnic society in which we live today, some of us including myself, probably have to be rather more sensitive than we have been about our careless words thoughtlessly hurting other people’s feelings. Is it possible though that others need to be just a little less sensitive about their own feelings and a little less ready to take offence and assume insult where none was intended?

There used to be a popular song, 'It ain't what you do, its the way that you do it, that's what gets results'. Perhaps it should be amended slightly to 'It ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it, that is what insults'.


Further thoughts

As I was about to post this blog the further furore over the Prince of Wales using the nickname 'Sooty' for a friend made the news headlines!

It occurs to me that it it isn't entirely a matter of 'the way that you say it' that makes all the difference, but who it is says it. Those whose indignation has made the story public may care to consider the possibility that the gentleman in question may have no objection whatsoever to being called 'Sooty' by his personal friends, but may dislike intensely this nickname being a matter of public discussion in the news media.

I am very happy when my grandchildren address me as Grandpa or Grandad but I'm a lot less pleased when a total stranger in a check-out queue does so!

Nicknames that I remember from my school days and army days include Buster, Curly, Darky (not racist - just a a fellow school-boy with unusually dark hair!), Oofy (goodness knows why), Hoompa (a chap with an unfortunate speech impediment), Ferret, Fatty and Squirrel, as well as the traditional Dusty for the surname Miller, Chalky for White, Nobby for Clark or Clarke, and Chips for Carpenter. Wearing glasses I was once, fairly briefly, known as Four-eyes but as I share a surname with a then well-known dance-band leader, my enduring nickname became Henry!

I don't think that any one of us objected to our nickname being used among our classmates or fellow-gunners but I'm sure that most of us wouldn't have wanted them to be in general use elsewhere. I was possibly the exception in that I was quite happy with the nickname Henry which endured well beyond my school and army days, some people imagining that it was my real name. Its use diminished and ceased as the memory of the 1930s dance-band leader faded but back in the early 1950s, when I was Housing Manager to a rural authority in Suffolk, I would often receive letters from tenants and others addressed to 'Mr H. Hall'!

Week 2.09

Tendring Topics….on Line

'Three score years and ten'

I find it difficult to believe that 1939, a year filled with events that will affect the lives of people world-wide for generations to come, is now seventy years - a lifetime - in the past. It was nearer in time (and I think in public attitudes) to the Victorian age of Gladstone and Disraeli, and of Britain's colonial wars, than to the present day! It was a year that dramatically changed the course of my life!

Myself, aged 17. I think though, that I look about 14! No wonder Heather and I were never conscious of the difference in our ages.

I can’t remember exactly when I volunteered to join the Territorial Army but it was certainly during the first two or three months of the year. Everything had seemed so clear-cut in those days. Fascism and Nazism were unmitigated evils and it was everybody’s responsibility to defeat them. Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, addressed a public meeting in Ipswich Public Hall. I sat near the back. He was a charismatic speaker but his words sent a chill down my spine. I remember being particularly dismayed by the fact that when he took his place on the platform, twenty or thirty black-shirted members of the audience leapt to their feet and gave the outstretched-arm Fascist salute which he, also black-shirted of course, returned.

Four of us members of the clerical staff of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department volunteered for the Territorial Army at the same time. Still under eighteen years of age, I had to attend the recruiting office armed with my father’s written permission to enlist. We found ourselves in the 67th Medium Regiment R.A., equipped with ancient iron-tyred 6in howitzers. We were issued with our inelegant ‘battle dress’ uniforms, attended two ‘drill nights’ a week and, in August went away for a fortnight’s training at Roedean, Brighton, camping immediately in front of the famous girls’ school.

The German army invaded Poland. Barely had we returned to our desks in Ipswich’s Health department when, on 2nd September we received notice that ‘His Majesty the King had been graciously pleased to embody the Territorial Army’. We were back into uniform, this time as full-time soldiers. Two-thirds of the members of our regiment lived in Ipswich. We were billeted in our own homes, our parents receiving a welcome billeting allowance. Billets were found for the remainder whose homes were in small towns and villages in southern Suffolk. There we stayed, continuing our training, until we were moved to Gloucestershire in the following spring.

This was the so-called ‘phoney war’ period in which there was some action at sea and the RAF dropped propaganda leaflets over towns in Germany but, on land, nothing much else happened. Plenty happened to me though!

On 3rd September, the day on which Britain declared war on Germany, I met the girl whom, nearly seven years later, I was destined to marry and who was to share my life for the following sixty years.
Heather as I first knew her. I carried a copy of this photo in my pocket (and looked at it at least once every day) until, in 1943 when I was a POW in Germany, she sent me a new photo of herself aged 19. My original photo was a little dogeared by that time!

Heather Gilbert, as she then was, was not yet sixteen. Her home was in Ilford. She had been evacuated to Ipswich with the Wanstead County High School and billeted next door to a close friend of mine. We spent a companionable evening together, discovered that we had similar backgrounds, similar tastes and a similar outlook on life. She had a most engaging smile and was, I thought, very beautiful. She retained that smile and remained beautiful until the day she died. Wanstead County High School must have been evacuated to Ipswich by mistake. Within a fortnight they had been moved, first to Maldon in Essex and later to the west country.

That fortnight had however been long enough for Heather and I to form an attachment that continued, largely by correspondence, throughout the war. It culminated in our wedding on 27th April, 1946, just four days after my discharge from the Army.

The other personal event for which I remember 1939 was a sad one. My father, then aged only 57, died suddenly and unexpectedly of coronary thrombosis on 27th November, after having been treated by his doctor for several weeks for ‘acute indigestion’! I had loved, respected and admired my father and I felt his loss acutely. I deeply regret that he was never able to welcome me safely home from the war, to get to know the girl I married, and to have the joy of seeing his two grandsons, of both of whom, I am sure, he would have been immensely proud.

It is only now, that I have been a widower myself for nearly three years, that I appreciate how deeply my mother must have missed and mourned him during those long war years and after.

The Wrong Sort of Spending?

Can we spend our way out of the current financial crisis, using borrowed money to do so? It seems unlikely to me, especially in view of the fact that the present crisis was created by rash and irresponsible lending and borrowing, first in the USA and then in Britain. But then my knowledge of economics is limited to knowing how to stay out of debt myself. High finance holds mysteries that I have never attempted to penetrate.

The government and its financial experts obviously think that increased borrowing and spending is the answer. They have increased the national debt and have thus been able to reduce VAT and to juggle with income tax and the allowances for us pensioners to give us all more spending power. They are urging the banks, whose fingers were so recently badly burnt by unwise lending, to start lending money again. The purpose of all this is to encourage us to go out and spend, spend, spend until the wheels of commerce once again begin to turn.

Somehow though it has to be the right sort of spending. At the same time as consumers are urged to spend, public services are told that they must economise and cut back. Furthermore the government (and our MP) are still worried to death about the number of people, particularly it seems in Essex, who are drawing sickness and disability allowances. They want the sick and disabled back into work, never mind the fact that every day there are fewer jobs for them, or anyone else, to do.

Can it possibly be true that spending on improving refuse and recycling services, making our parks and gardens more attractive and at least maintaining existing standards of education and health and welfare care, is less conducive to the national good than, for instance, members of the public getting new tv sets or bigger and better cars? Do local and other public bodies, as distinct from private individuals, indulge in ‘the wrong sort of spending’?

I was delighted to note that our Prime Minister warned us in his New Year message, of the evils that can arise from reliance on ‘unbridled market forces’. It’s a point that I have tried to make over and over again in Tendring Topics ….on Line. It was something of a surprise to hear it from Mr Brown though. Wasn’t it he and his predecessor who, during their terms of office, have done much of the unbridling.

Easter is coming!

Easter Day this year falls on the twelfth of April, over three months away. When I wrote in this blog a few weeks ago that no sooner would the Santa Clauses, the tinsel and the reindeer have vanished from the supermarket scene than they would be replaced by hot cross buns, Easter eggs and fluffy chicks, I quite thought that I was being guilty of mild exaggeration.

It seems that, on the contrary, I was guilty of understatement! At Morrison’s this morning (3rd January and three days before ‘12th night’ when Christmas is officially over and the Christmas decorations come down) I found that hot-cross buns and Easter eggs are already available for sale in some of Clacton’s supermarkets!

How soon after Easter, I wonder, can we expect to see Halloween masks on display and preparations being made for Christmas 2009?

Clacton’s Future

Last summer, before the credit crunch really began to make itself felt, it seemed to me that Clacton was experiencing a rebirth. We had the new town centre, greeted with derision at first by local residents. Visitors liked it though and I think that we natives are learning to love it. New businesses were coming into the town. Shops that had been empty for years began to be occupied again. There were to be two splendid new hotels

Is that all about to change – or already changing? The design of one of those planned hotels has been modified for economic reasons. Woolworth’s, one of the largest and longest established retail outlets in our town centre, today stands empty. Is it to be the first of many similar closures?

We must all hope not. On the plus side, the fall of the value of the pound against the Euro should encourage holidaying Brits to stay in Britain – and where better than the Essex coast, with its sandy beaches and low rainfall? Perhaps it will encourage holidaying mainland Europeans to visit us. I know that my visiting friends from eastern Germany were delighted with Clacton when I introduced them to Clacton’s town centre and vast expanses of tide-washed golden sand early last summer. Fortunately it was a warm, sunny and windless Sunday morning and the tide was right out!

Will the much-maligned and accident-prone water feature in the town centre be put into operation this year. I was among those unimpressed by it, largely I suppose because it was rarely working! However in the autumn I had the opportunity of seeing a similar feature at the front of the Town Hall in Sheffield.

It was attractive and impressive. If a water feature in a northern industrial town on a chilly and overcast day in late October can look attractive, surely in warm and sunny summer weather a similar town centre feature in a reborn seaside town on the Essex Sunshine Coast should be able to manage it!

Sheffield's water feature. The Town Hall is in the background. Taken on an overcast day in late October.

It’s the ‘warm and sunny summer weather’ that is problematic; and we can’t do anything about that! Surely fate can’t be cruel enough to deny us a proper summer again this year.

My Grandchildren’s New Year

Their granddad may be a has-been (or even ‘a never-wosser!) but my grandchildren are certainly doing their bit for the Hall name as we move into the New Year. Elder grandson Chris, who has been teaching English in Taiwan for the past two years and who is now a fluent Mandarin speaker, has just been designated ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the ‘Joy’ organisation that owns and runs the school at which he teaches and number of other similar schools in Taiwan.

Before a crowded audience in Taipei, capital city of Taiwan, Chris receives his award as the Joy Organisation's 'Teacher of the Year!

Chris' cousin, my granddaughter Jo, who has been working as a Social Worker with Sheffield Corporation, has this week taken up a much-sought-after post as Social Worker to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital. Meanwhile Chris’s brother, my younger grandson Nick, who is employed by the European Travel Commission in Brussels, returned in December from a mission in Tokio where he had been furthering the Commission’s task of encouraging and facilitating travel to Britain and mainland Europe. He will shortly be travelling to New York, and then on to Toronto, engaged in a similar task.

All three of my grandchildren are graduates and Jo is an MA as well as BSc. Can you wonder that I am proud of them?












Above - Nick on the phone in his Brussels apartment, and Jo and I during my trip to Sheffield in October 2008