week 18.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

A different glimpse of Jaywick

Where do you suppose these photographs were taken? Somewhere among Frinton’s leafy avenues perhaps…….in one of the posher parts of Clacton, possibly near the seafront in the Gardens Area ……or perhaps in some rural commuter haven near Colchester

Not a bit of it. They were taken in less-than-posh Jaywick, described as one of England’s most deprived areas, better known for squalor and ugliness than for beauty, where even a work of art, commissioned for £40,000, turns out to be at best a joke and at worst an insult. Mind you, this plot hasn’t always looked as it does on these pictures. It was a piece of waste land, adjacent to the home of my friends Rodney and Janet Thomas of Jaywick’s Crossley Avenue, which encapsulated the popular view of Jaywick! It was a depository for broken down furniture and every kind of odorous and unsavoury rubbish! It was when their pet cat proudly brought home the bodies of two adult and six baby rats that Janet and Rodney decided to do something about it.
The result is as you can see……a work of horticultural art, not produced on commission, for a large cash prize, or even for honour and glory, but simply out of the goodness of their hearts to improve the environment in which they live. Janet, as a Quaker and Clerk of our Clacton Quaker Meeting, would possibly say that it was in response to the leading of the Inward Light that is the heritage of every man, woman and child in the world. Still unmistakeably Jaywick - but not Jaywick as it exists in the popular imagination

Nobody’s Darling!

On Budget Days I always remember my mother’s contention: Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he will not be disappointed. Mr Darling’s (what a very inappropriate name for a Chancellor!) Budget was just a little different. This time nobody was expecting any good news. The world financial crisis made sure of that. It was really just a case of who would suffer most and how soon?

I judge Budgets as good or bad by whether they narrow or broaden the gap between the wealthy and the poor. It follows that it has been many years since we had what I consider to be a ‘good’ one. For as long as New Labour honoured its absurd promise never to raise the upper band of income tax, and continued with the previous government’s policy of reducing direct taxation (income, capital gains and inheritance tax) and increasing indirect taxation such as VAT and duties on petrol, alcohol and tobacco, there was no hope of the situation changing for the better.

My spirits were raised, very slightly, when I heard that the top rate of income tax was to be raised from a maximum of 40 percent, to 50 percent for incomes over £150 thousand a year. This seemed to be a move in the right direction. However its impact is reduced by the fact that it will not come into force until April of next year. The lawyers, accountants and financial advisers of the seriously rich therefore have plenty of time in which to work out clever schemes of tax avoidance. These are of course, quite different from the illegal tax evasion, sometimes practised by lesser folk.

It must be remembered too that that 50 percent isn’t half a millionaire’s income. It is only a half of that part of his or her income above £150 thousand a year. The new tax isn’t going to send anyone to the bread line or the soup kitchen!

I heard a financial ‘expert’ on tv claim that raising the income tax of the better off was simply removing the incentive that kept them working hard for us all. How strange that the wealthy have to be persuaded to work with cash incentives whereas the poor are compelled to work by threatening to cut their benefits!

Anyway, unlike the small minority affected by the new upper rate of income tax, motorists, smokers and drinkers won’t have a year’s grace to stock up with their supplies at the former lower rate. They’re going to have to make their contribution to national recovery right away.

Is offering £2,000 toward the cost of a new car to those prepared to have their old bangers crushed, a good idea? It is claimed to work in Germany but, as so often happens, our scheme is half-hearted by comparison with theirs and therefore that much less likely to succeed. In any case, brought up as I was in an environment in which very penny counted and we had no alternative but ‘to make do and mend’, I view with deep distrust the idea of deliberately scrapping an old car that may be perfectly serviceable for a shiny new one.

The staggering burden of national debt? The figures involved are so enormous as to be beyond my comprehension. In this blog I have consistently warned against incurring personal and family debt beyond the capacity to repay. I don’t believe, as a former prime minister claimed to, that managing the national finances is just the same as managing the household ones but on a larger scale. Neither can I believe though that a course of action that has proved to be disastrous to tens of thousands of individuals and households, can possibly be beneficial to a community or a nation.

Late News

The Post-Budget headlines of one national newspaper warned us that the new tax on the small minority of us whose taxable income exceeds £150,000 a year will drive many brilliant entrepreneurs from the City of London to other lands where they can accumulate wealth without having to contribute some of it to the communities in which they live and work.

Since these ‘economic refugees’ will undoubtedly include some of those whose greed and irresponsibility triggered the current economic situation I’m not quite sure whether that is a threat or a promise!

‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’

Thus, according to Shakespeare in his play Henry V, the eponymous hero ended the rallying speech in which he urged his possibly less-than-enthusiastic troops ‘once more into the breach’ at the siege of Harfleur. It is sad that in England, St. George, our patron saint, receives nothing like the regard that is accorded to his counterparts in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, particularly since he shares 23rd April with the birthday of William Shakespeare, our greatest national poet, whose work is revered world-wide. Imagine the celebration there would be in Glasgow if St. Andrew’s Day and Burns Night coincided!

23rd April 2009. St. George’s Red Cross Flag flies from the flagpole outside Clacton Town Hall and two miniature versions fly from the Tendring Helpline car parked opposite on the left.

A possible reason for English lack of enthusiasm for our patron saint is that we know so little for certain about him. Tradition suggests that he was a very appropriate patron for a multi-ethnic country like ours. He was probably of Greek origin, born in what is now Turkey. He was a legionary in the Imperial Roman Army and was martyred in Palestine early in the fourth century A.D. during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. His legendary slaying of a ferocious dragon and the rescue of a fair maiden from its clutches is said to have taken place in Libya. He had certainly never heard of England (there was no country of that name in the fourth century) though he may well have heard of Britain as a damp, windy and inhospitable island on the extreme edge of the Empire.

There must have been something very special about him though, since he is the patron saint of Portugal as well as of England and is also much revered in eastern Christendom, particularly in Greece and Russia. He was an early Christian martyr and has inspired thousands of Englishmen and women over the centuries. Even the mythical image of St. George as a knight in shining armour slaying the dragon has its value as a metaphor of the courageous soldier of Christ struggling against, and overcoming, the forces of evil.

A New Renal Unit for Clacton

I didn’t think that the former Eastern Electricity site in Clacton’s Kennedy Road was at all a good idea as the proposed site of an up-to-the-minute comprehensive Medical Centre replacing existing doctors’ surgeries in both Great Clacton and Holland-on-Sea. It may well though be eminently suitable for a badly needed haemodialysis unit to meet the needs of the many Tendring District patients with kidney problems who currently have to travel three times a week to Colchester for their dialysis treatment.

It is a development that will certainly interest my granddaughter, who has recently been appointed as Social Worker with the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital.

As well as helping Clactonian renal sufferers, an eleven-station unit in Clacton with the capacity to treat up to sixty-six patients will help to take the pressure off the Colchester renal unit. Seventy percent of those treated at this twenty-station unit, opened in June 2006, come from the Tendring District, in or around Clacton.

If planning permission is granted, as it surely will be, and all goes according to plan (which is perhaps a little less certain!) the new unit, with a convenient ambulance drop-off point and ample parking, should be operational by next spring.

I have seen it suggested that it might make Clacton a more attractive holiday destination for kidney sufferers from elsewhere, offering ‘Sun, Sea, Sand and Dialysis’!

Perhaps; but without wishing to be too locally xenophobic, I hope that we’ll make sure that it meets local needs before offering its services nationwide.
,

Week 17.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

An Expensive Fence…..for an Expensive Fountain!

Those of us who had thought that Clacton’s town centre water feature would eventually prove to have been worthwhile had a nasty shock when it was revealed that it would be operating again this summer but with a £20,000 fence round it to keep the children out! During the very occasional warm and sunny days that we have had during which the feature was operating, the children have loved running through it and many of us adults have enjoyed watching them enjoying themselves!

I think that that water feature would make this area even more attractive.

It seems though that the children whose ‘health and safety’ is supposed to be threatened by the less-then-sterile water in the fountain are also claimed to be a major cause of its alleged pollution. Other polluting agents are said to be seagulls, pigeons and stray dogs. There’s not much that can be done about seagulls and pigeons, though I don’t think that either are very keen on being drenched. All dogs in a town centre should, in their own interest, be on a lead and under their owners’ control. Strays should be, and I think probably are, impounded.

What is there about our water feature that is so different from apparently identical ones in the centre of Sheffield and in many other British towns? Could it be that their councils had the foresight to provide them with adequate filtration and purification equipment or are they simply less obsessed with ‘health and safety’?

Sheffield’s water feature outside the Town Hall. Don’t tell me that kids never plunge through those fountains in the summer!

Has anyone thought that perhaps the sea should be fenced off in the interest of health and safety? That, after all is subject to pollution every summer from thousands of children and adults, not to mention from seagulls and fish!

Even in ‘sunny Clacton’ there are only a limited number of weeks during the year when the weather is sufficiently warm to tempt children or anyone else to plunge through that town centre water feature. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to drain off and change the water, say once a week or once a fortnight, during that period? A dilute bactericide added to the replacement water would surely keep it adequately free from harmful bacteria until the next change was due.

We’d get quite a few changes of water for that £20,000.

A Party Political Leaflet


Above is a leaflet from a prospective County Council election candidate for my part of Clacton. I hope that included in the ‘best education’ that he hopes our children will receive will be the time-honoured rule, ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’.

On the Pier

When my elder grandson Chris brought his Taiwanese girlfriend on a visit to England last year, one of the ‘thoroughly English’ things that she wanted to see was a seaside pier. Clacton Pier in early autumn, on a grey and rainy day with a brisk on-shore breeze was, I thought, thoroughly uninviting. She enjoyed herself though and, with Chris, sampled the dodgems and other rides that were in operation.

Ariel (her English name, the same as that of ‘the good fairy’ in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’) with me on Clacton Pier

The Pier is in new ownership and if she were to pay us a visit now I think that she would find it a lot more exciting. Just a week ago the new owners (Billy and Elliot Ball) installed a 500 ft. tall helter-skelter (formerly used in a Marks and Spencer advert) which can be seen from far away along the promenade. There hasn’t been one on the pier for at least twenty years and my abiding memory of a former helter-skelter is of it having been blown into the sea during a ferocious gale in July 1956!

Messrs Ball are introducing a new policy of having a changing programme of ‘guest rides’ which will give visitors something new to try out every time they come onto the pier. Currently there is a fifty-two-seater ‘wave swinger’ situated on the very edge of the pier and swinging users out over the sea. That sounds ‘white-knuckle’ enough for me but, according to Billy Ball, it is nothing compared with one that he is currently trying to book as its successor. It is proving very popular though and is expected to stay on the pier until well into May.

The new owners have also, so far, brought in some more fairground stalls and some smaller rides for children. They are also keeping the pier open later in the evenings.

I wish Billy and Elliot Ball every success but I think that their constantly changing programme of rides may be less popular with children than with their parents. The young can be very conservative. A child who has been looking forward for a week or more to another go on a ride that he has thoroughly enjoyed, is unlikely to be very pleased to find that it has been replaced by something else!

Letting ‘the train take the strain’!

It astonishes me how often I write something that I think on reflection was probably something of an exaggeration; only too find that it was, in fact, an understatement!

Coming back from London a few days ago on an uncrowded train that had departed from Liverpool Street dead on time and promised to arrive equally punctually at Clacton Station, I wondered if perhaps I had been guilty of hyperbole in referring in this blog a few weeks earlier to ‘Britain’s abysmal public transport system’.

My feeling of guilt disappeared completely when I read a letter from Tony Baxter of the Outrack Rail Users’ Association in a recent Clacton Gazette. I quote:

Buses will replace trains between Clacton, Walton and Colchester over the weekends of April 18 - 19th, April 25 – 26th and May 2nd – 4th. Furthermore on the first two of these weekends there will be no train services south of Colchester and buses will operate from Colchester to Billericay for train connections.

Over the May Day weekend, the line will be closed between Ilford and Liverpool Street, and buses will operate between Ingatestone and Liverpool Street and between Romford and Newbury Park Underground (on the Central Line).

Please note that further weekend engineering work is planned for subsequent weekends.

Mr Baxter’s letter also tells of even more closures of the whole section of line between Walton and Thorpe-le-Soken from 18th April until 4th May inclusive, with trains being replaced by buses.

Just imagine (or perhaps you’d be wiser not to!) the congestion on the roads leading to and from London that will be created on those spring weekends, as passengers who have paid for a rail journey have to travel by bus. The inevitable discomforts and delays will be particularly bitter for us pensioners who, under other circumstances, could have made those journeys free with our bus passes.

It makes those tv adverts about the delights of a day spent in London, courtesy of National Express ring a little hollow. Perhaps we should add ‘Don’t make a fuss, there’s always a bus’, to that advertising slogan about letting the train take the strain!

Week 16.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

The Easter Holiday

As so often happens, in London at least (and I doubt if it was very different in Clacton!) Easter was overcast, drizzly and chilly until the afternoon of Bank Holiday Monday when, just for a few hours, we basked in warm spring sunshine.

However I had a very enjoyable and active break. My grandson Nick was home from Brussels for Easter, and granddaughter Jo was also home from Sheffield with my younger son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn. They live just a mile or two from my elder son and daughter-in-law, with whom I was staying. It was therefore an opportunity for a family get-together.

On Sunday morning Pete drove Arlene and myself to Southwark Cathedral where we attended and took part in an Easter Choral Eucharist. It was a really special occasion as it was televised live for BBC 1. Every seat in the Cathedral was occupied and there were over forty in the choir! If you watched it on tv you’ll know that it was a very splendid and a very happy event.

Afterwards we watched the service on BBC i-player. Arlene and I were able to spot ourselves in the congregation, but we did of course, know where to look.

Left -Magnolia in Bloom in the gardens at Wisley

Then, on Bank Holiday Monday, Pete drove us to the Royal Horticultural Society’s HQ and gardens at Wisley in Surrey. The sun came out while we were there and it was lovely to see the spring flowers and the blossoming trees and shrubs in the spring sunshine. There was a fascinating selection of plants in the enormous glass house where, thanks to clever design, plants from dry and temperate parts of the world are able to live and flourish under the same glass roof as those from tropical rain forests.

It was a lovely break and I enjoyed every moment of it. It's nice to be home in Clacton again though!

Right - a woodland path at Wisley

The Lovely Stour Valley

A new exhibition of John Constable’s work displaying his portraits rather than his already well-known landscapes*, a new biography ‘Constable in Love’, featuring his seven-year long courtship of Maria Bicknell, the girl he was to marry, and a National Trust Tour ‘Early Summer in the Stour Valley’** starting on Saturday 23rd May, brought back memories of my own of the lovely Stour Valley and, in particular, the ‘Constable country’ centred on Flatford and Dedham.

I was a keen fresh-water angler in my teenage years and sometimes on a Saturday or during the school holidays, I would seek a change from the familiar reaches of the River Gipping. I would get my mother to make me a packed lunch and carrying all my fishing gear on my bicycle, peddle my way along the London Road from Ipswich to East Bergholt and then on to Flatford for a day’s angling in pastures new.

Below - Bridge Cottage, once owned by John Constable’s father, and now a welcoming restaurant, is the first sight that the visiting motorist or cyclist sees in Flatford.

That was not my only experience of Flatford. Mr Alfred Morris, the headmaster of Ipswich’s Northgate Secondary School for Boys (there was a separate girls’ school) was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Accordingly, he had established a tradition that the day before the annual London University School Leaving Exam began, all the candidates would spend a day on the river.

We turned up at school as usual on our bikes (we were nearly all cyclists in those days) but bringing with us packed lunches. We then cycled en masse to Flatford. Here we clambered into skiffs hired by the school and spent an enjoyable day rowing (and some of us swimming) on the Stour between Flatford and Dedham. Those, of course, were the days before everybody became obsessed with ‘health and safety’!

By about 4.00 p.m. we all made our way up river to Dedham, where a lavish tea was provided for us in one of the village’s restaurants. The tea, like the hire of the skiffs, was paid for by the school. Replete, we rowed back to Flatford for the long cycle ride home. Many of us sat the exam the next day with aching backs and limbs and blistered hands but, on the whole, I think that our results justified the headmaster’s obsession.

I have been back to Flatford many times since and on one occasion hired a skiff and rowed some visiting American friends from Flatford to Dedham and back again. It still retains the charm that it exerted in the mid-1930s. Age however has brought a greater appreciation of Flatford and the River Stour as the inspiration and subject of Constable’s best-known works, together with the historical interest of Dedham’s cathedral-like parish church. Just opposite is Sherman House, the ancestral home of the Federal General who marched his victorious army through Georgia ‘from Atlanta to the sea’, during the American Civil War

Left -Sherman House, Dedham. Above Dedham Parish Church

It has been forecast that, thanks to the economic down-turn an extra £5 million will this year be spent on holidays in England. I certainly hope that our Essex Holiday Coast gets its fair share of it. The fact that we are little more than half an hour’s drive from the lovely Stour Valley, with its natural beauty and its artistic and historical associations, should attract the many discriminating visitors who want a little more from their holiday than sun, sea and sand.

*‘Constable Portraits; The Painter and his Circle’, National Portrait Gallery until 14 June.
** First tour begins at 10.30 a.m., cost £5 per person. For details phone 01206 298260

MPs’ Expenses

I have found the unfolding revelations about MPs’ expenses depressing rather than (or perhaps as well as) outrageous. I don’t find the continual excuse and justification that not a thing has been done that is against the rules, in the least reassuring. Yes, of course the rules need a thorough overhaul but somehow in my innocence I had imagined that MPs weren’t in the business for their personal profit but to serve their fellow men and women; ‘to make a difference’ as they say these days.

Surely that doesn’t include making a close study of the rule book to find out exactly how much money you can extract from the public purse in ‘expenses’ without risking expulsion from Parliament or having to ‘assist the Police with their enquiries’. Our parliamentary representatives continually refer to each other as ‘honourable members’. I would have thought that it was thoroughly dishonourable, even if not illegal, to claim for expenses that were unjustifiable or clearly need not have been incurred.

Could it be because our representatives are no longer conviction politicians with a cause that they find themselves compelled to promote at whatever personal cost? Nowadays are they simply men and women who have chosen politics as a career? Many would find it a very attractive one and it is one for which there is never a shortage of applicants. MPs enjoy a generous salary and (at the moment anyway) almost unlimited expenses, together with a certain local and possibly even national and international celebrity. Provided that they keep on the right side of the Party whips they can expect occasional luxurious ‘fact finding’ trips abroad at the national expense plus, if they can manage to get re-elected often enough, a very comfortable pension, and possibly a knighthood or a life peerage, at the end

I have, in the past, been highly suspicious of burning-eyed, honey-tongued (or vitriol tongued!) zealots, ‘who will not cease from mental fight, nor will their swords sleep in their hands’ till they have built their own particular version of New Jerusalem ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’. Experience suggests that they are every bit as likely to lead us to disaster. I have to say though that I can’t imagine Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Tony Benn or Eric Skinner considering, even for one moment, the possibility of ‘fiddling their expenses’.

Week 15.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Happy Easter!

I offer all readers of Tendring Topics……….on Line every good wish for Easter, which is surely one of the happiest of our public holidays. For one thing, it is the longest of the official breaks; for most people from Maundy Thursday evening to the Tuesday of Easter week. It may, particularly for children, lack the excitement of Christmas but at Easter (however fickle may be the weather!) with the days getting steadily longer and the early spring flowers blooming in the gardens, we know that spring and summer are on their way.

Whatever our faith, or lack of it, we can all enjoy nature’s rebirth in the spring in the spirit of Browning’s Home thoughts from abroad: ‘Oh to be in England, now that April’s there………..’

The splendid interior of St. James’ Church of England church in Clacton-on-Sea.

For many of us, of course, Easter has a much deeper significance. It is without question, the most important festival of the Christian year. First comes remembrance of the terrible events of that first Good Friday. It is difficult for us to imagine the degradation, pain and horror of a Roman first-century crucifixion; to be nailed naked to a cross, struggling for breath and with every inch of one’s body screaming in agony. Every minute of those the three hours on the cross must, for Jesus, have seemed to be an eternity of never-ending pain.

The interior of Clacton’s Quaker Meeting House .

It is important that all of us, believers and unbelievers alike, should have this annual reminder of mankind’s capability for cruelty to his fellow men and women, which continues to this day.

Then, of course, came the miracle of Easter Day, an event that changed Jesus’ disciples from a faint-hearted rabble into proselytising heroes, prepared to suffer martyrdom for their faith. I think that there are few more beautiful passages in the Bible than the account, in Chapter 20 of St. John’s Gospel of Mary Magdalene who, having been the first to discover the empty tomb, ‘early, while it was yet dark’ lingered there weeping after the others had departed. The risen Christ approached her with the words ‘Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?’ She, (blinded by tears) supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, ‘Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away’. Jesus said unto her, ‘Mary’. She turned herself, and saith unto him ‘Rabboni’, which is to say ‘Master’.

The interior of Christ Church United Reformed Church in Clacton-on-Sea

It was the very beginning of a faith by which, over the past two thousand years, and still today, tens of thousands have tried to live, and for which they have been prepared to die.

Note: The three churches illustrated above follow three very different Christian traditions but all three have been, and are, of great importance to me.

Will ‘the arts’ give new life to Jaywick?

If you were to be asked which places in Britain are famous as centres for lovers of the visual arts you might well think of St. Ives and the Cornish coast, of the Lake District, the mountains and valleys of Wales, the Scottish Highlands and, in our own area, the lovely Stour Valley made famous by Constable and Gainsborough.

Jaywick is not, I think, a name that would spring instantly to your mind. Yet many thousands of pounds have already been spent on arts projects in this Clacton suburb (declared to be one of the most deprived areas in England) and more is promised!

In 2005, the Jaywick's Martello Tower was converted into an arts gallery and centre, and attracts many visitors. In November last year a £40,000 grant from Colchester based Firstsite, an organisation for the promotion of works of art, led to the commissioning of ‘acclaimed artist’ Nathan Coley. He created an admittedly unforgettable, and mercifully temporary, work of art out of timber in Jaywick’s Brooklands Gardens. I suggested in a local newspaper that it resembled an oversized but uncompleted poultry shed. Many others made similarly uncomplimentary comments.

It had its admirers though. Ian Burrit, member of the Jaywick Forum said, ‘I was all for the Nathan Coley project. It actually caught the attention that Jaywick needs to highlight its problems’. Well, if you believe that all publicity is necessarily good publicity, I suppose that it did.

Anyway, there’s more money to come. Essex County Council has made a successful bid for funding from the Department of Culture and Media’s Sea Change project. This project will give £15 million to culture and the arts in coastal regions over the next two years.

Out of this, £30,000 will fund a feasibility study into an art project for Jaywick featuring the creation of a park publicising art and architecture. Katie Canning of the County Council is quoted as saying, ‘We want to create an innovative arts and environmental parkland which will be a unique destination and a major tourist attraction, drawing on the heritage of the coast, the tower, the sense of place in Jaywick, as well as the environmental aspects of the area’. She added that local people would work with ‘facilitating artists to plan an innovative and environmentally-friendly landscape design that deals directly with the issue of flood-plain and sea shore.’

That’s certainly an ambitious programme and one that appears to promise rather better value for money than Mr Coley’s masterpiece. Many of the residents of Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate remain unconvinced though. They feel that if anyone has £30,000 to spare it would be much more sensible to spend it on repairing the estate’s appalling road surfaces, and generally providing better services to local people.

So of course it would, but as the County Council received the funds solely for use on ‘cultural and arts projects’, they have to spend it on such projects. Jaywick is at least as worthy a recipient as anywhere else. Perhaps the ambitious scheme envisaged by the County Hall’s culture-vultures will come to fruition. Perhaps it will bring some much-needed prosperity to that run-down and neglected area.

Certainly those Jaywick residents who take a pride in their homes and gardens and would like to be able to take a pride in the community in which they live, deserve something better than they have at present.

Local Government reform……again!

News of the latest ‘reform’ of local government has inevitably been overshadowed by the international economic summit that was taking place in London at the same time. Nevertheless it has still managed to make at least the second pages of some national newspapers, as the greatest shake-up of local government since 1974. That, you will recall was the year that saw the abolition of the Harwich Borough Council, the Urban District Councils of Clacton-on-Sea, Brightlingsea, and Frinton and Walton, and the Tendring Rural District Council. All were replaced by the new Tendring District Council.

I hope that the fact that both that reform and the present one took effect from 1st April was simply due to the coincidence of the date with the beginning of the financial year – and had no other significance!

We in north-east Essex remain unaffected by the present upheaval but elsewhere in the country, forty district and county councils will disappear and will be replaced by just nine ‘unitary authorities’, responsible for all local government functions in their areas.

Although hailed as a new bold experiment in local administration there is, in fact, nothing new about it. Unitary authorities existed prior to 1974 and were called County Borough Councils, having the responsibilities and powers of both boroughs and county councils. Ipswich and Norwich were both County Borough Councils and it was in Ipswich’s public health department that I began my local government career in 1937.

Today’s unitary authorities are pale shadows of the ones that existed in the pre-war years. Ipswich Corporation, for instance, ran its own gas, electricity, water, sewerage and sewage treatment services and its own public transport service.. It had its own General Hospital, its own Maternity Home and its own Isolation Hospital for patients suffering from infectious diseases. It owned and ran its own large housing estates, its own magnificent parks and museums and its own primary, secondary and technical schools. It had its own social services, maternity and child welfare services, and its own school medical and dental services as well as all the services and responsibilities that local authorities have today. And at that time Ipswich had a population in the region of 100,000, rather less than that of the Tendring District today!

I think that one of the most serious mistakes of that first Labour Government that I am proud to have helped to elect in 1945, was in imagining that the only way in which essential services could be brought into public ownership (an aim that I whole-heartedly support) was to create enormous ‘nationalised industries’ encompassing local authority owned services as well as privately owned ones. I believe that they should have built on the success that many local authorities had enjoyed in owning and running those services and have put more and more of them into their care.

Yes, the results would have been uneven and there would have been bitter complaints about ‘postcode lotteries’. I believe though that these negative effects would have been outweighed by the healthy competition for better and more cost effective services between neighbouring local authorities, and we ‘consumers’ would have been able to express our satisfaction or otherwise with those services at the local elections. That was a privilege that we didn’t enjoy when they were run by giant nationalised organisations, nor do we enjoy it now that they are mostly run by private enterprise!