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 g
ardener, 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!
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!
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