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!