Tendring Topics…….on line

Home Rule for Essex?

To be fair, Essex County Council’s leader, Lord Hanningfield isn’t quite demanding that. He did once in the past though….and then hastily assured us that he was ‘only joking’. Now though, he would like to see the billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money entrusted to quangos, to be made accountable to Essex County Council. He would also like, within the county, to have power to decide who should receive benefits such as Jobseekers’ Allowance and Income Support, and how much recipients should receive.

He would like the county council to be allowed to hold referendums on local issues, and to negotiate and then enforce a set of standards with such quangos as the East of England Development Agency, Arts Council East, Natural England and English Heritage. If they failed to meet these standards the county council would then be able either take on their jobs itself or find someone else to do it.

We do have a strange county council. They have sold off their old people’s homes, are eager to turn their schools into privately funded ‘academies’, and to put out to tender practically all the other services for which they are statutorily responsible. Yet, at the same time, they are taking over failing post offices (that’s one action of which I whole-heartedly approve!), running a bank and suggesting the provision of a county-wide public relations service. Now they want to become involved with the Social Security Benefit System and are casting envious eyes on the functions of the quangos?

Do they really want to run all these things, I wonder? Or do they simply wish to have the power to sell them off (like their old people’s homes) to the highest bidder?

The fact that Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues were recently returned to the County Hall with an increased majority confirms a conviction that I have held for some time. Most of the ever-fewer number of people who bother to vote in local elections don’t vote positively to get their representative elected…..but negatively to keep out of the Council Chamber those whom they trust even less or dislike even more!

With one statement reported as having been made by Lord Hanningfield I do whole-heartedly agree; ‘As things currently stand, the political system in England is far too centralised’. I’d add that the same applies to Essex, one of England’s largest counties. I believe that most of the County Council’s services could be run more efficiently and much more democratically by individual district and borough councils. The few that need overall strategic planning, together with many functions currently performed by central government, and least some of those of the Quangos on which Lord Hanningfield has set his sights, would be better performed by a larger East-of-England elected authority covering the whole of the Greater East Anglia Region.

Something to think about!

Once or twice a year I am asked to provide a ‘Thought for the Week’ (a kind of five-minute sermon) for inclusion in the Tendring Talking Times, the free weekly ‘talking newspaper’ sent to blind and visually impaired people within the Tendring District. I felt that one I recorded a few weeks ago might be of wider interest – so here it is, in its entirety. I don’t know if the ‘on tape’ version has yet been distributed.

Hello Friends. Ernest Hall here, with your thought for the week. You may remember that I am a Quaker and am also a member of the Church of England.

A visitor from another world, surveying religious practices on planet Earth, might be forgiven for concluding that of all the world religions, Christianity is the soft option. Think about it. There are no dietary restrictions. There is no rigid dress code. Any kind of dress or state of undress that is socially and legally acceptable in a public place, is likely to be acceptable in any place of Christian worship. Men, women and children are permitted, indeed are encouraged, to worship together. Christians, men or women, who marry someone of another faith, abandon their Christian faith, or are foolish enough to convert to another faith, suffer no temporal penalty. Those who attempted to exact such a penalty would themselves be liable to prosecution.

Initiation into full church membership may range from nothing at all, as with the Quakers, to brief total immersion as with some Protestant Evangelical traditions. For most it involves no more than a ceremony involving sprinkling of water on the forehead either in infancy or later in life.

Yes, the visitor from some distant galaxy might well conclude that Christianity is the soft option. But would he be right? I think not.

The late Archbishop William Temple once said that Christianity is the most materialist of the world’s religions. It doesn’t just require us to give thanks, praise and sacrifice to our Heavenly Father – or to follow a rigid dietary, dress or even moral code. Our religion is one of faith-in-action. We are expected to do God’s will as it is revealed to us in the example and teaching of Jesus.

The man who built his house upon a rock is compared by Jesus, not with a man of faith and nothing else, but with those who heard his words and acted upon them. Jesus said that not all who called upon him ‘Lord! Lord!’ would enter into his Kingdom but those who do the will of his Father, and our Father, in Heaven.

Jesus told us that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament is summed up in the two commandments ‘Love God with every atom of your being. Love your neighbour as you love yourself’. In the Sermon on the Mount he clarified that second commandment telling his listeners, and through them telling us, that we should always treat other people in the same way that we ourselves would wish to be treated.

That is surely quite clear and easily understood. At first glance one might think that it could be complied with fairly easily. We all know how we would like to be treated. All we have to do is treat other people in the same way. Have we done that though? Sadly not; even the disciples who heard Jesus’ words and witnessed his example failed the test. When a Samaritan village refused to offer them hospitality and drove them out, they asked Jesus to bring down fire from Heaven to destroy the offenders!

Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to those that despitefully use you’. Many of our forefathers have preferred to follow the example of those disciples rather than that of Jesus. Would medieval Christians, who condemned others to be burnt alive, really have liked to be treated in the same way? Nowadays we have nuclear weapons, cluster bombs and anti-personnel land mines. Do we really imagine that the manufacture and use of these weapons would receive the blessing of Jesus Christ, as we know him from the four Gospels?

Perhaps you are thinking, ‘It’s all very well telling us that Christianity is faith-in-action – but I am frail, disabled, old. It is as much as I can do to look after myself, never mind others’. Believe me, I understand that. I am myself in my late eighties and all too familiar with the progressive weakness and disability of old age.

Our God understands it well too. He is the God who rules the Universe but also notes the fall of the sparrow. A well-loved prayer in the Church of England Prayer Book begins; ‘Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid………..’ God knows our weaknesses and our strengths and never imposes upon us a burden that, if we seek his help, we are unable to bear.

Even the weakest and most feeble of us can greet others with a smile, be generous with words of praise and encouragement and sparing with those of complaint and condemnation, never forgetting to say 'please' and 'thank you', and always apologising when causing inconvenience to anyone else. That may well be all that God requires of us. One of our Quaker advices tells us, ‘Be ready to give help and to receive it’. I know from personal experience, that for those who were once very active, receiving may be much more difficult than giving! Above all - however much or however little you do or give, do it with love in your heart. It will then follow, as the night follows day, that your heart will also be filled with peace and joy.

Thank you for listening Friends. Goodbye and may God bless you all.

Some, reading the above, may well wonder, ‘Does he really believe all that himself?’ I can only answer that I do…most of the time. I am often assailed by doubt though or, as our Quaker ‘Advices and Queries’ put it, I consider the possibility that I may be mistaken. Do I act upon that belief? I try to, but I don’t always succeed….which is why I value the Christian doctrine of forgiveness.

What I do know, without the least shadow of doubt, is that the world would be a much happier place if more people believed it, and acted upon it.

The New ‘Levellers’

Some months ago, I mentioned in this blog having read a review of a book by two esteemed academics, promoting and justifying statistically a conviction to which I have clung instinctively throughout my life; that the happiest human societies are those with the least difference between their wealthiest and their poorest members.

The book, which I have now purchased and read, is The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, both of whom hold University Professorships, published by Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books) at £20. It didn’t disappoint. Below is a quotation from Chapter 13 that expresses its whole theme.

It may seem obvious that problems associated with relative deprivation should be more common in more unequal societies. However, if you ask people why greater equality reduces these problems, much the most common answer is that it must be because more equal societies have fewer poor people. The assumption is that greater equality helps those at the bottom. As well as being only a minor part of the proper explanation, it is an assumption which reflects our failure to recognise very important processes affecting our lives and the societies we are part of. The truth is that the vast majority of the population is harmed by greater inequality.

Across whole populations, rates of mental illness are five times higher in the most unequal compared to the least unequal societies. Similarly, in more unequal societies people are five times as likely to be imprisoned, six times as likely to be clinically obese and murder rates may be many times higher. The reason why these differences are so big is, quite simply, because the effects of inequality are not confined just to the least well-off: instead they affect the vast majority of the population

This is demonstrated by statistics from the countries surveyed showing clearly the effects of inequality on virtually every aspect of human activity. Chapter headings include Community life and social relations; Mental Health and drug use; Physical health and life expectancy; Obesity; Educational performance; Teenage births; Violence, Imprisonment and Punishment; and Social Mobility.

In conclusion the authors give some thought to ways in which more egalitarian societies could be achieved without violent political upheaval. These are both convincing and encouraging, though not easily summarised. The Spirit Level is, on the whole, an optimistic book, diagnosing the ills of today’s society and suggesting possible remedies.


Everyone who is concerned about what David Cameron has described as 'our broken society' and interested in ways in which it might be mended, should borrow or buy a copy and, as it says in the Book of Common Prayer, 'read, mark, learn and inwardly digest it'.

Week 31.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

Floral Clacton-on-Sea

We Clactonians have had reason to be proud of our cliff-top gardens for many years. Throughout the time that I was employed first by Clacton Council and latterly by Tendring District Council, they were the responsibility of the Council’s Parks and Gardens Department. The Department had its own nursery that supplied all the Council’s horticultural and arboreal needs. The gardening staff planted and maintained the Council’s cliff-top and other gardens, provided cut flowers and potted plants and shrubs when required, and regularly competed successfully in the Tendring Hundred Farmers’ Show and in the Essex Show.

I became closely involved with the department in the 1970s when, under the leadership of Councillor Malcolm Holloway, the Council’s Trees Working Party carried out several very successful tree planting and tree maintenance campaigns. At that time the Council had a separate tree nursery in Thorpe-le-Soken where tree whips were grown into young trees for planting out. The head of the department, the Council’s own gardening expert, was always available for consultation and advice.

Now, of course, maintenance of public gardens, like most other public services, is contracted out. In this instance at least, the contractors have maintained the former standards. I was glad to know that the excellence of the gardens has now been officially recognised and rewarded with the presentation of a ‘Green Flag’ award. I hope we’ll have equal success with the Britain in Bloom Competition.

My wife Heather, at the beginning of the New Millennium

The Memorial Garden in particular, has special memories for me. Seven or eight years ago, when my wife was still able to walk with the aid of a four-wheeled shopping trolley (a ‘sholley’), I would often drive her on warm sunny days to Marine Parade West. There, courtesy of her ‘blue badge’ I parked a few hundred yards from Pier Gap. With the sholley we then walked back, through the cliff-top gardens as far as the Memorial Garden. There we would sit on one of the benches and enjoy the flowers and the general atmosphere of peace and tranquillity for half an hour or so before returning to the car. It was at home, several hours after such an excursion, that my wife fell and broke a hip. Sadly, throughout the remaining two years of her life, she was never able to walk independently again.

Since then I have been driven along Marine Parade, past the cliff-top gardens, many times, but last week with my mobility scooter I decided to visit them again at my leisure. On that scooter I realize that I am much more aware of my surroundings than I had ever been in a car, or even on a bicycle. It was a sunny morning and I enjoyed the hanging containers of colourful growing flowers on the pavement railings at the junction of Pier Avenue and Rosemary Road. I fully appreciated the young street trees and the wide smooth pavements on the newly-laid-out town centre.

Still quite early in the morning, the Memorial Garden was even more colourful and peaceful than I had remembered it. I drove on, past the Japanese Garden, the dry Mediterranean Garden and the 1920s Garden. I enjoyed them all, though I didn’t quite spot the connection between the 1920s (a decade that I can just remember!) and the last of these.

My expedition ended with a leisurely cup of coffee at the café near the Martello Public House, with its views of the sea and of the wind turbines being constructed off-shore. I used to park my car near there when Heather fancied a walk along the lower prom. It had been a personal pilgrimage that I can well imagine being equally enjoyed by visitors to our town……particularly perhaps those who, like me, are well past their youth!

‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’

One swallow doesn’t make a summer……..and one would have to be very bold indeed to claim that there are local signs of spring in the current national and international economic winter.

It cannot be denied though that Clacton’s outlook is a lot brighter today than it was just a few months ago. It is good to note the continuing activity out to sea. During my recent visit to the sea front I noted sixteen completed wind turbines. By the time you read this there may well be more. Things are definitely on course for the completed wind farm to be in operation early in the New Year. This may not have much, or even any, effect on Clacton’s current economic future but, together with many other similar enterprises, it does help to ensure that our town has a future!

More to the immediate point is the fact that a large retail premises in the town centre that has been looking for an occupier for several months has found one. Another, threatened with closure, is continuing in business with the same staff but in different ownership.

The former Woolworth’s store with its commanding frontages on both Pier Avenue and West Avenue has been taken over by the ‘99p Store’; not quite ‘Bond Street’ perhaps but then few of Clacton’s residents and, I think, even fewer of our holiday visitors are potential Bond Street shoppers!

I think that the 99p Store is a direct and worthy successor of the Woolworth’s that I remember from pre-World War II days. Their boast then was ‘nothing over sixpence’.

Venturing into the crowded 99p Store on its opening day I was reminded of going into ‘Woolies’ in Carr Street, Ipswich at the age of ten or eleven, with a tanner (that’s what we used to call a sixpence) in my pocket and thinking to myself that I could, if I wished, buy anything at all that was on display! Sixpence in ‘old money’ is two-and-a-half pence in ‘new’, but I reckon that its purchasing power in the 1930s couldn’t have been very different from that of a pound today.

The other threatened town centre business was the Co-op Department Store in the busiest part of Station Road. This has been taken over by the Vergo organisation, a national retail chain that seems likely to offer a similar range of goods to the Co-op. The really great thing about the Vergo takeover is that they are continuing to employ the whole of the existing Co-op staff.

These developments, taken in conjunction with the modernisation and added features of the Pier, and the imminent completion of the Travelodge Hotel in Jackson Road surely mean that, in Clacton at least, an economic spring may be on the way!

Bishops Park College – the Good News, and the Bad

There was good and bad news about Clacton’s Bishops Park College last week. Bishops Park, you’ll recall, is Clacton’s latest and most modern Secondary School, best known for the fact that a number of determined local parents are teaching their children themselves at their own expense, rather than send them there. Next month the Government is expected to rubber stamp a plan to amalgamate it with Clacton’s Colbayns High School as ‘The Clacton Coastal Academy’.

The good news is that Bishops Park, which had been listed as a ‘failing school’ by Ofsted, was last week taken out of special measures and will therefore be on equal terms with Colbayns as it takes its place in the new Academy.

Then too, a new uniform has been designed for the Coastal Academy in black, blue and gold; a black blazer with a light blue trim and the school logo (designed by Nikki Light, a learning support assistant) on the breast pocket to be worn by both boys and girls. Under it girls will wear a white open-necked shirt and boys a similar shirt but with a light-blue and gold striped tie. All year 7 to 11 students will, so the Clacton Gazette report says, be given a new Academy blazer together with two new white shirts, and a tie for the boys, as well as the new sports kit. Academies clearly expect to be funded more generously than ordinary local authority schools!

I wonder if dissident parents will decide to send their kids to the newly created academy?

And the bad news? Just that I was shocked to read in the Daily Gazette last Friday (24th July) that a gang of fifteen teenagers had beaten an autistic fourteen year old boy into unconsciousness, leaving him with severe facial injuries and stamp marks on his back. Another teenager, with whom he had been having an argument, had used his mobile phone ‘to call for back-up’ from his gang members!

What has it got to do with Clacton Coast Academy? Simply that the attack took place at the Pudney Woods Playing Field off St Johns Road, which means that the majority, if not all, the assailants were likely to have been pupils or former pupils of either Bishops Park College or Colbayns High School.

Furthermore the victim’s dad told reporters that his son had been ‘tormented by his peers, who took advantage of his autism, ever since he moved into a new class at Bishops Gate College last September’.

I hope that the new Academy will include in its curriculum the teaching of what I am old-fashioned enough to think of as ‘Christian values.’

Week 30.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

The Covers are off!

The plastic covers and the scaffolding that for months have masked the façade of the converted building in Jackson Road that is to become Clacton’s Travelodge Hotel have been removed. We can now see what the hotel will look like from the outside. No doubt internal work has been simultaneously carried out and, as promised, Clacton’s latest hotel will be open and ready for business by the end of July, less than a fortnight from the posting of this blog.

The new Travelodge Hotel, opposite the ‘Clacton Gazette’ office in Clacton’s Jackson Road is nearing completion.

Everyone knows that it is what happens in August, during the school holidays, that really determines whether or not our holiday trade has a good season. The augurs are promising. While the weather has so far been a bit mixed, we have certainly already had more warm and sunny days than we had in either 2007 or 2008. We have had rain and thunderstorms but, as usual, rather less than practically anywhere else. Even when the skies have been cloudy, it has usually been warm.

Visitor numbers during those three successive spring public holidays suggest that many may be on the way, and that we may have more than the usual number of overseas visitors taking advantage of the weakness of the pound. Despite all the criticism in the correspondence columns of the Clacton Gazette, I believe that most visitors will be attracted by our town’s newly laid-out centre and will be encouraged to come again. I have been telling my German friends (who live nearly 700 miles from their nearest seaside beach!) about the Essex holiday coast’s low rainfall, welcoming piers, colourful public gardens, and miles of tide-washed sandy beaches, not to mention the proximity of historic Colchester and the lovely Stour Valley; just as I tell my English friends about the mountains and lakes, the hotels and pubs, the ancient towns and villages and the low prices, of the three-country-corner land where the frontiers (which happily no longer exist!) of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic come together.

‘Some corner of a foreign field…….’

Nowadays, the bodies of soldiers killed in action are brought home for burial and thus do not become, as claimed in Rupert Brooke’s poem 'The Soldier', ‘some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England’. Plenty of British blood has watered Afghan furrows though, from our two disastrous adventures there in the 19th century. It has, no doubt, mingled with the Russian blood that was shed there just a few short years before our own latest campaign began.

I am writing these words on Tuesday 14th July, the day that eight bodies were flown home together, after one of the worst weeks for the British army since the Falklands War. I sometimes wonder how many British and American, not to mention Russian and Afghan, lives might have been spared had our politicians refrained from encouraging and giving covert support to those to whom we then referred as ‘the gallant Mojihadin’ but who are now the fanatical insurgents exacting a bloody daily toll from among our young soldiers. It is quite possible that British or American agents taught them how to make those simple roadside bombs currently causing so much death and destruction.

Can the present war be won? Top British and American politicians insist that it must be – but then I have little doubt that British politicians said much the same thing in 1850 and 1882, and that the same claim was made in Moscow just a few years ago. Events proved otherwise then and I very much fear that they will do the same this time….after even more lives have been lost.
I have no doubt that NATO Forces (what on earth has Afghanistan to do with the North Atlantic?) can subdue the Taliban and its allies, possibly even succeeding in eliminating all their strongholds and hiding places. But ideas (even thoroughly bad ones!) can’t be destroyed by force. I don’t believe that we can establish an Afghan government with either the inclination or the strength to eliminate in Afghanistan the pernicious doctrines of the Taliban – opposition to democracy and to freedom of speech and religion; opposition to girls receiving any education beyond religious instruction, and relegation of women to the status of personal property; slavish adherence to the most intolerant and restrictive interpretation of the Islamic Faith – the equivalent of that of the Christian iconoclasts, witch-hunters and heretic-burners of past centuries.

Opinion polls suggest that almost half of British people feel that we should pull our forces out of Afghanistan. My own instinctive feeling is the same, but I realize that that too could have disastrous consequences. After the Soviet withdrawal (‘Afghanistan is free again!’, our newspapers and politicians proclaimed) there was a not-widely-publicised bloodbath in Kabul and other Afghan cities. Those who had co-operated with the Soviet-approved regime were hunted down and slaughtered and Afghan women and girls (who had enjoyed more freedom under the Soviets than they had ever before known!) were again reduced to the status of chattels and house slaves.

Does anyone imagine that the situation would be any different if we were to withdraw our troops? Red, and Red-White-and-Blue flags look remarkably similar to Taliban zealots. They believe that both are flown by Godless infidels intent on attacking their religion and destroying their centuries old customs and culture. The conviction that God is on their side can inspire men and women to great heights of heroism – but it can also license deeds of almost unbelievable cruelty and inhumanity.

We cannot with clear consciences withdraw our forces from Afghanistan before we have found a way protecting, or evacuating, those Afghans who have embraced the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-government towards which we have urged them.

We ‘ignorant pensioners’?

Is the ‘Tendring Pensioner’ destined to replace the ‘Essex girl’ as an iconic symbol of human ignorance? It seems that the Tendring District is an area of ‘low educational achievement’ with 22 percent (about 9,500 people) having no qualifications, compared with a mere 12.5 percent across the East of England.

It’s OK though. It isn’t the up-and-coming young and middle-aged who’re ignorant. The survey has been ‘skewed’ by the large number of over-65s living in the district and, of course, they didn’t have the educational advantages that the young enjoy today! The Clacton Gazette tries, in its understanding-the-elderly way, to be helpful. ‘It is never too late for learning’ announces its ‘Comment’ column. It assures us that, ‘for those that do commit to learning later in life, they are much the richer for it and education is one of the few things in the world which, if it were universally available and availed of, can be seen as a panacea for most of the ills that infect us at home or abroad. If, at eighty-eight, I wanted to express such patronising rubbish I would certainly manage to do so rather more succinctly and literately than that!

Doesn’t it occur to whoever conducted the survey, and to those who pontificate in the columns of the press, that lack of ‘paper qualifications’ could simply mean that education authorities of fifty, sixty or (in my case) over seventy years ago didn’t distribute these qualifications quite as freely as they do today?

A class of nine-year old boys at Springfield Council School, Kitchener Road, Ipswich in 1930. I am the anxious looking little boy with glasses sitting just by the knee of the Headmaster (A Mr Offord , ‘old Pip Offord’ to us kids – behind his back, of course). I was admitted to the Northgate Grammar School a year later.

In the 1930s I was one of a minority who attended a secondary school and stayed on at school until I was sixteen. The vast majority of my contemporaries received only a primary (we called it an elementary) education and left school at 14. For them there was no ‘school leaving certificate’ but that did not mean that they were totally ignorant. Very few boys and girls in those days left school at 14 unable to read, write and do as much arithmetic as they were likely to need in later life. They also had a sketchy idea of Britain’s history and of the geography of the world, and at least some acquaintance with English classical poetry and prose including, of course, the Bible. Today’s sixteen-year-old school leavers who knew as much would certainly get some kind of a certificate.

At my secondary school we studied for the London University ‘General Schools Certificate’ which, for those who obtained high enough marks, conferred exemption from the Matriculation (minimum entrance requirement) of London University. For that reason the exam was often known simply as ‘the Matric’. To obtain the certificate we had to study and reach the pass standard in at least five subjects including English (language and literature), Mathematics (arithmetic including logarithms and stocks and-shares, algebra, geometry and trigonometry), a foreign language (at my school only French was on offer), a science, and at least one, of either history, geography or another science (general physics, chemistry, biology and, I think, a more advanced physics, were on offer). To obtain matric. exemption you had to achieve ‘credit’ level in all of those five subjects.

It will be obvious that many pupils who took the exam failed in just one or two subjects and left school without any kind of certificate. It would be absurd though to claim that, because of that, they were less well-educated than someone who left school last year with a couple of mediocre GCSEs.

I sat the exam in English, Maths, French, history, geography and ‘general physics’ (guaranteed to be about principles only, with no mathematical questions!) and passed with Matric Exemption, though only because the examiners were allowed a little latitude. They considered that my ‘Distinction’ in English outweighed my ‘lower than Credit standard’ in French! I didn’t, of course, go to London University. In 1937 that wasn’t really an option for working class pupils, but the Matric did help me to get a better job!

Oh yes, along the way to eighty-eighty I have picked up two or three other professional qualifications, including a certificate qualifying me to teach in one of those adult educational colleges so warmly recommended to us poor ignorant old pensioners by the Clacton Gazette!

Swine ‘Flu

Swine ‘Flu is in the news again. It is spreading rapidly…..and there have been some deaths. These are obviously a tragedy for the relatives and friends of the victims. For most people though, Swine ‘Flu remains a mild affliction, less serious than the ‘seasonal ‘flu’ that occurs every winter and which also always claims some deaths.

Generally with epidemics it is the very young and the very old who are most at risk. This time, although the very young are in danger the very old, like me, appear to be immune. This is, I suppose, most likely to be for the rather boring reason that we have already encountered and beaten off every possible mutation of the ‘flu virus.

I prefer to think though that on this, Charles Darwin’s anniversary year, we are being given a demonstration that ‘survival of the fittest’ is not a universal rule. We oldies, with no possible evolutionary justification for our continued existence, manage to resist swine ‘flu better than our still-young, active and virile contemporaries!

Tendring Topics……on Line

Some Pictorial Memories

It was just as I was posting last week’s blog on the internet that my grandson Nick’s photographs from our trip to Zittau arrived by email. They were far better than mine (well, he did get a B.A. Honours degree in photography at Westminster University) and really revived my memories of that very happy and action-packed weekend.

There was the picture of the high-speed train pulling into Frankfurt Airport station where we changed trains on the way home. Its streamlined glass-fronted driver’s cab reminded me that on our outward journey we had been in a carriage just behind the cab. It was possible for us to move forward so as to be just behind the driver, able through the glass windscreen to have a driver’s-eye view of the rail-track ahead.

Then there were the pictures taken on the summit of Mount Oybin: the arched doorway to the crypt through which, in February 1945, we had carried those heavy cases that we now know contained the historic Great Zittau Lenten Veil, and the nave of the monastic church with its soaring stone walls and windows. How on earth, we wondered, had those medieval builders managed to create such a magnificent and beautiful structure at the summit of a mountain? While we were there, concealed loud-speakers brought us the sound of plainsong chant from an invisible monastic choir; very spooky!

The following day had been the celebration of the restoration of the Lenten Veil and tenth anniversary of its installation in the museum/church of the Holy Cross. Speeches in German, most of which neither Nick nor I could understand, were punctuated by captivating performances by a Polish choral group, two violinists, two guitarists and four singers (though the musicians also sang). The lyrics, some in German some in Polish, all so we were told, had their origins in the Bible. The music was arranged by one of the choir members and had been inspired by traditional folk music of Polish, gypsy and Jewish origin. It was just the kind of light-classical/folk music that I, and it was obvious the German audience, enjoyed.

Among the speakers was my friend Dr Volker Dudeck, retired director of the Zittau Museum, who referred to the contribution that ‘the Englishman, Ernest Hall’ had made to the history of the Lenten Veil and how honoured they were that he and his grandson were with them on this occasion!

When the speeches were over, but before we repaired to a posh mayoral reception at the Town Hall, Dr Dudeck presented me with three copies of a glossy, illustrated booklet entitled, in German, ‘Return to Zittau’ by Ernest Hall. It was a German translation of the long, nearly 8,000 words, article that I had written after my visit to Zittau two years earlier, illustrated by local pictures and pictures taken from my Flickr site. It came as a complete, and very pleasant, surprise. The photograph shows my friend Ingrid and myself each holding one of the booklets.

But, of course, the photos also recorded something of the friendship that has developed between my family and the Kulke family of Zittau. There was Ingrid’s little niece Maja, who will be three in September and, at about the same time, will have a new brother or sister. Her mum and dad, Ingrid’s brother and sister-in-law Andreas and Kornelia, and Ingrid and Andreas’ mother Frau Ingrid Kulke who has always been so friendly and hospitable. And, of course, Ingrid herself, who now lives in Bayreuth in Bavaria but who made the long car journey to Zittau to see us.

Nick and I are on the photograph too. My eyes are shut and my mouth open (I hope I wasn’t snoring!) and I appear to be asleep. Perhaps I was! It was at the end of three very busy and tiring days and, as I constantly need to remind myself, I am eighty-eight!

‘Forty years on…….’

No, I wasn’t at either Eton or Harrow. Nor, as far as I know, have I ever met anyone who was. However I have always had an ear for a good lyric and the opening lines of the Harrow School Song have stuck in my mind.

Forty years on, when afar and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today…….

It was forty years ago, on 12th July 1969, that our then-new Quaker Meeting House was officially opened by George Gorman, Secretary of the Quaker Home Service Committee, in effect, though I doubt if its members would have cared for the description, the Quaker home mission organisation.

Clacton Quaker Meeting House as it looked when first opened. We have more recently added an extension to provide a toilet with wheelchair access

I was the Clerk (secretary, chairman and general dogsbody) of the Clacton Quaker Meeting at the time, so I had been deeply involved in the fund raising, the building and furnishing, and the official opening. We had invited members of every Christian tradition to attend. I am not sure if all sent representatives, but many did, and I know that there were, among others, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Salvationists present. With Clacton Quakers and others from Colchester and Sudbury, the Meeting House was full and those present overflowed into the entrance lobby. Luckily we didn’t, in those days, take ‘health and safety’ quite so seriously as we do today.

The interior of the Quaker Meeting House today. The central table and the stacking chairs were there for the opening but many of the chairs have since been reupholstered.

We didn’t do any singing at the official opening. That’s not the Quaker tradition. However, those who were present on that occasion certainly are scattered ‘afar and asunder’ and many have departed from this world. I was shocked to realize that I would be the only Clacton Quaker who remembered that official opening and who would be able to attend our Meeting for Worship on Sunday morning 12th July and the Area Business Meeting (with Quakers from all over north-east Essex and from Sudbury in Suffolk) in the afternoon. At both these Meetings our Meeting House’s fortieth birthday would be remembered with thanksgiving.

And so it was. The paragraphs above were written before 12th July and it is now the day after. What I haven’t so far mentioned is that that date was not only the 40th Anniversary of the Meeting House’s official opening, but was also the third anniversary of the death of Heather, my wife for sixty years.

The last fifty years of her life had been inextricably intertwined with that of the Quaker Meeting. We had attended Meeting for Worship most Sundays, for the last year or so with Heather in a wheelchair friendly taxi. In the 1960s and ‘70s she had run a successful Quaker Children’s Class. Until disability overcame her in 2004 she had visited the sick and disabled and written long and chatty letters to absent Friends. She had often provided the flowers for the Meeting Room table and served tea for an after-meeting chat. For thirty years she had organised the letting of the rooms at the Meeting House to local organisations, and had made firm friends of some of their secretaries. It was in the Meeting House that we had held meetings of celebration and thanksgiving to mark our silver, ruby, golden and diamond wedding anniversaries. It was in the Meeting House that, three months after our Diamond Wedding Celebration, we held a Memorial Meeting of Worship to give thanks for the Grace of God made evident in Heather’s life. All our F/friends and family were present and I was very pleased that the vicar of St. James’ Anglican Church and the Christ Church URC Church Minister were both there.

At 0ur Golden Wedding celebration at the Quaker Meeting House on 27th April 1996. Heather and I were still in our early '70s (well, I was almost 75) and we were both still pretty fit.

At the Sunday morning Meeting for Worship on 12th July, sitting where Heather and I had so often sat together on Sunday mornings, it was difficult to accept that she was not still sitting there beside me. I rose and spoke about her, as I felt impelled to do, with only the greatest difficulty.

I had promised to talk about Clacton Meeting and the official opening of the Meeting House for about thirty minutes at the end of the afternoon’s business meeting. Remembering how I had felt in the morning I wondered if I would manage to do so. I needn’t have worried. There’s nothing like a Quaker Business Meeting (or I imagine the business meeting of any church!) to dampen the emotions and restore calm to the mind. I managed to give my thirty minute talk and I think that Friends found it acceptable. At least nobody fell asleep; nobody got up and walked out; nobody came quietly up to me later and said, ‘I wish Friend, that you hadn’t felt called upon to say this, that or the other’, and several did thank me.

Afterwards I, and I think everybody else, thoroughly enjoyed the tea that a few untiring and unseen Clacton Friends had provided for us.

It had been, I thought, a good celebration of forty years of Quaker service to God and to the local community, and of the service that Heather had rendered to the Quaker Meeting.