Week 11.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Yet another Supermarket




I would have thought that Clacton was pretty well served with Supermarkets. There is what is now Sainsbury’s in the High Street, Morrison’s in the Waterglade Business Park off Old Road and Lidl just a few hundred yards away from Morrison’s, extending between Old Road and St. Osyth Road. Further from the centre is the Co-op Fiveways Supermarket at the end of Oxford Road, and Somerfield’s in North Road, Great Clacton. Further out still is the new Tesco off the Little Clacton bypass and another Morrison’s on the edge of the village.

Now it seems likely that we shall have an Aldi Supermarket on what is currently the outdoor market site off the landward end of Pier Avenue. Aldi have purchased the site and will be submitting their plans to the council shortly. Reported remarks by influential councillors suggest that their application will be successful. In the current economic climate I have little doubt that any financial investment in the town is likely to be welcomed. Clacton's present out-door market, off Old Road

I am less surprised at the advent of another supermarket than at its proposed position. Is there really customer demand for another similar retailer within a few hundred yards of both Morrisons and Lidl? It doesn’t seem likely, but who can tell? No doubt ‘market forces’ (the economic equivalent of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest') will decide that for us. I don’t really share the fears of a correspondent to the Clacton Gazette that yet another town centre supermarket will strike a deathblow to small traders in the area. That deathblow has already been struck. The only independent traders left are those whose activities are outside the supermarkets’ range, and ‘convenience stores’ surviving on the custom of those unable or unwilling to make more than a very short journey to purchase their household needs.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago (to me at any rate!) that Clacton’s only supermarket was what now seems to have been that ridiculously small Tesco store in Station Road. It didn’t even have car-parking facilities!

Existing market traders seem resigned to losing their site to Aldi. Apparently sales have slumped in recent months and they are looking for another site. A possible solution both to that problem, and to the problem of a huge gap in Clacton’s town centre, was suggested by my former colleague Bob Young in the readers’ letters page of the Clacton Gazette of 26th February. He pointed out that at the same time that market traders were looking for a new venue for their market, Woolworths, in Clacton’s busiest holiday and shopping area, was looking for a new occupier. Why not use the Woolworth site as an indoor market?

The more that I think about it, the more attractive the idea becomes. It would be an ideal situation, within easy walking distance of the pier and the busiest part of the beach. It is on a bus route and there is access from both Pier Avenue and West Avenue. Many pedestrians would be inclined to use it as a short cut from one highway to the other and would have the opportunity to look at the stalls as they did so. Holiday makers and day trippers driven from the beach by a sudden (and we hope brief) shower, would find it a convenient spot to take shelter and, once again, would find the stalls of interest. It would be ‘something different’ in the centre of our town.

The only disadvantage that I can see about the idea is that the site wouldn’t be suitable for the car-boot sales that also currently take place on the market site. I think though that an alternative suitable site could be found for these and they are, in any case, of less importance than the market.


Essex jobs for Essex Men and Women?

A few weeks ago Lord Hanningfield, Essex County Council’s leader, was telling us about his determination that all County Council contracts should go to Essex firms. While I questioned the legality of this I could not do other than applaud his Lordship’s intentions.

He must surely have had a change of heart though. Essex County Council would now, it seems, be quite happy to award contracts for running virtually all its local government services (for a period of eight years and for up to £5.4 billion) not only to non-Essex firms but to non-British ones!

Lord Hanningfied is reported to have pursued this idea while chatting to representatives of the Mumbai based Tata Group when he visited India last year ‘on a trade mission’*. Tata was one of the companies short-listed for those council contracts but they have since been eliminated. Among others still on the list though is New York based IBM, London based Trillium, and Vertex from near Liverpool.



The winners of the contracts are to be announced at a full council meeting on April 21st; a pity the announcement can’t be brought forward a few weeks. 1st April might have been a more appropriate date!

UNISON (of which, thanks to the lifetime NALGO membership given me by my colleagues on retirement, I am a life member) is campaigning against this privatisation and is considering litigation to stop it. They point out the Audit Commission’s finding that between 60 and 70 percent of similar outsourcing processes end in failure. Remember what happened when an enormous American enterprise was entrusted with the relatively straightforward task of marking GCSE exam papers. Remember too the all-too-recent failure of the privately owned Banks and Financial Institutions in a field in which private enterprise might have been expected to have reigned supreme

I have just received my Council Tax Demand from Tendring District Council. The total annual charge for my modest bungalow is £1,103.67. I pay by direct debit and my monthly payments (for ten months of the year) will go up by about £2, not a shattering amount The £105.48 of this that goes to Tendring District Council, I pay willingly, as I do the much smaller amounts that go to the Essex Fire and Police Authorities.



I wish that I could feel equally confident about the prudent spending of the much larger sum of £829.50 of my money that is entrusted to the care of Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues at Chelmsford.

* in its commendable attempts to economise on the spending of our money has the County Council considered limiting its members' jaunts overseas?

Donkeys to return to Clacton’s seafront!

Donkey rides on the sands and motor-boat trips ‘round the bay. are as traditional to the English seaside holiday as Punch and Judy shows. We used to have all three in Clacton.

I think that motorboat trips from Clacton beach (remember the ‘Viking Saga’?) were discontinued sometime in the 1950s or ‘60s, and donkey rides on the greensward near Butlins ended in the early 1990s when Mrs Norah Cleghorn, owner of the donkeys retired after having provided a much-loved service for over 40 years.

I doubt if it will be long after the completion of our off-shore wind farm that some enterprising Clactonian will reintroduce motor boat trips ‘round the wind farm’ from one or other of Clacton’s beaches, or perhaps from the pier. As for donkey rides, it is hoped that these will be reinstated this coming season.

Mrs Jayne Johns of Rayleigh owns four very sociable donkeys. Tendring Council have given her a licence to operate rides from Martello Beach, again quite near the former site of Butlins Holiday Camp, and now one of Clacton-on-Sea’s most popular beaches. She hopes to bring her donkeys from Rayleigh every Sunday from 5th April (that’s the Sunday before Easter), and more often than that during the school holidays. The charge will be £2 a ride that I think most people will consider to be pretty reasonable.

I have a distinct memory of at least one of my two sons having a ride on one of Mrs Cleghorn’s donkeys in their 1950s’ infancy but I have searched in vain through my very considerable collection of old photographs for a pictorial record of the event. The best that I have been able to come up with is this picture of a little girl, about seven years old, astride not a donkey but a pony and on the sands, not of Clacton-on-Sea but of Dovercourt. The photo dates from 1930 or ’31. The little girl was Heather Gilbert of Manor Park, spending the summer holiday with her Dovercourt cousins. She was destined, some fifteen years later, to become Heather Hall!

Take a closer look at the snap-shot and you’ll see that seven year old Heather isn’t wearing any kind of protective headgear or clothing, or indeed anything at all, even on her feet, except for what was known in those long-ago days as ‘a bathing costume’. What is more, there is neither a safety harness nor a responsible adult holding the pony’s bridle in case it should suddenly buck, rear or bolt.

What carefree, unrestrained, and adventurous lives we children enjoyed in the 1920s and ‘30s! Perhaps in those days there were dreadful accidents that could have been avoided. Perhaps little children were molested, abducted and murdered. I can only say that I never heard of any.

I wish Mrs Johns every success with her venture and very much hope that today’s obsession with ‘Health and Safety’ won’t take all the fun out of donkey riding.