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!
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!
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.
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!
+1930s.jpg)
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 read+1930s.jpg)
ing 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!
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!
+1930s.jpg)
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 read
+1930s.jpg)
ing 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.
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.
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.
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