Week37.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Problems with ‘the natives’!

Nobody could accuse Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues on Essex County Council of being timid and unimaginative. Quite suddenly (I suppose that it couldn’t be anything to do with the recent change in the political complexion of Tendring Council?) they have decided to make our holiday coast, ‘as important as it was in the 1950s and ‘60s. Let’s take Tendring back as a place that people want to go to for a day, a weekend or even longer’.

They have certainly come up with some big ideas: a new Marina for Harwich and a second one (why not while we’re about it?) in either the Brightlingsea or Manningtree areas; cash for Walton’s Naze Tower walkway; more attractions in Harwich for cruise visitors, and a major redevelopment in Jaywick. How, you may wonder; is it all to be paid for? That is certainly the question that would have been asked by Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues had the proposals been the brainchild of their political opponents.

The answer, it seems, lies in hopes of funding by the Government, from the usually derided European Union, and from such groups as the East of England Development Agency. But Lord Hanningfield is also reported as saying that the county council is prepared to dip into its own pocket to help make big changes, ‘Essex County Council has got to bite the bullet and so we are going to invest money and do it ourselves’. It should, of course, be remembered that it is our council tax that fills the County Council’s ‘own pocket’. If any ‘bullet biting’ has to be done it will be us who will have to do it!

Jaywick’s residents were cheered to hear that dealing with their problems was to be a priority. It will be recalled that Jaywick has the dubious distinction of being the third most deprived community in England. For years its residents have been pleading for paved streets, better street lighting and better policing. His Lordship’s words though, were just a little chilling, ‘While it (Jaywick) is there it casts a shadow over the whole area’.

His proposals go far beyond mere paving and lighting. He sees a glowing future for a Jaywick restored as a seasonal tourist area. A centre for the arts has already been promised. Now the county council would like to see beach huts and summer chalets for holiday makers, more amusements, possibly a big dipper, perhaps even a theme park.

It is impossible not to warm to this vision of a Jaywick transformed into the brightest jewel of the Essex holiday coast. There’s just one little snag though. It is the one that was encountered in the 18th and 19th centuries by pioneers bringing the joys of western civilisation to the Scottish Highlands, to the North American ‘ Wild West’, and to Australia and New Zealand. What on earth is to be done about the natives, and their clustered and unacceptably primitive homes? Residents of Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate, who had naively imagined that any improvements to their neighbourhood would be primarily for their benefit, have had a rude shock. They, it seems, are a major part of the problem. There really is no place for the chalets of Brooklands and their occupants in this vision of a New Jaywick Sands, Clacton-on-Sea’s reborn and desirable holiday suburb.

A big dipper for Jaywick? Surely Lord Hanningfield’s imagination can do better than that! Why not a Jaywick Wheel, rivalling that of Sheffield (illustrated) and the London Eye? Just imagine the breathtaking view from the top!

Genocide and/or forcible dispossession, the historically preferred solutions to ‘the native problem’, are no longer acceptable. ‘The County Council’, says its leader, ‘was working with Tendring Council and housing associations to create more affordable housing within Tendring to encourage people to move away’. I wish them joy. I wonder if the wizards of County Hall are aware that, almost half a century ago, the former Clacton Urban District Council tried and failed to find a legal final solution to ‘The Brooklands problem’.




















This picture and the one below, show the transformation of a piece of wasteland in Jaywick by my friends Janet and Rodney Thomas. They demonstrate what can be achieved with very little money but a great deal of determination and hard work.

It was in the ‘60s that Clacton UDC declared Brooklands to be a ‘Clearance Area’ under the slum clearance provisions of the Housing Act 1936. The whole area was to be cleared and redeveloped. The council would have rehoused the occupants (this was in the days when councils were encouraged to build houses for letting!). Property owners would have been compensated. They however, were fiercely opposed to the plan. There was an appeal and a public enquiry. The appeal succeeded. Brooklands remained and still remains largely unchanged.

Today’s property owners, many of them owner/occupiers are no less determined than those of the ‘60s . John Walton, chairman of the Jaywick Forum, told a reporter, ‘People love where they are. Most of the people down there, the owner-occupiers, have made little palaces of their places’. A possible, rather expensive, solution to the problem is suggested by the quoted words of Mick Masterson, a Brooklands resident; ‘I have got a billion-dollar view. Most people are thirty feet from the beach. What would encourage them to move apart from a lot of money?’

One thing is apparent to me. Essex County Council doesn’t want Brooklands to be improved. They want it cleared. I think that Brooklands residents can bid farewell to their hopes of properly surfaced roads and street lighting.

'Nothing but the night'?

‘Oh no – not another sermon!’ Well, perhaps; it’s just that a news item on the tv last week caught my attention. The government, it was claimed, had relaxed Britain’s licensing laws in the hope it would promote the Continental practice of the moderate social use of alcohol with meals, and thus discourage binge-drinking. It has worked in reverse. We haven’t stopped binge-drinking but Continentals are beginning to take it up. It is already a serious problem among young people in Italy. I’d be surprised if Italy is the only country affected.

In the 1930s regular binge-drinking (drinking for no other purpose than that of getting drunk) was a relatively rare practice engaged in mainly by sad and lonely middle-aged or elderly alcoholics. It was certainly not a regular Saturday night social activity of teenagers and young adults.

What has happened to public attitudes during the past seventy-plus years to make such a difference? I think that a major factor has been loss of faith and hope. In the 1930s practically all of us believed in at least something, and looked toward the future with hope and confidence.

In this country most of us, deep down, accepted the truth of one or other of the traditions of the Christian faith. Many didn’t go to church but church-going was recognised as a natural and normal thing to do. Thanks to universal education with regular ‘Scripture’ lessons, we all had at least a sketchy acquaintance with the contents of the Bible and the basic teachings of Christianity.

We all hoped and believed that, as a result of scientific progress and the processes of parliamentary democracy, life would get steadily better for us all. Most had little doubt that another and better life awaited us beyond the grave. Throughout my teenage years I met only one person who wasn’t at least nominally a Christian; and who proclaimed himself to be an atheist, with no belief whatsoever in a spiritual dimension to our existence, or in an afterlife. He was a classmate and a good friend of mine (with whom I had heated arguments!) at Ipswich’s Northgate School. Atheist he may have been but it would have been quite wrong to describe him as a non-believer. He had a fundamentalist belief in the infallibility of Marxist materialism and a most fervent hope that its propagation would, sooner rather than later, bring us all to an earthly Paradise.

In those days all of us had at least a measure of faith and hope. For some the faith was in things of the spirit; others in the development of scientific knowledge or in political and economic theory. Some hoped for a Paradise beyond the grave and others for one on earth. Me? Oh, I wanted the best of both worlds. As a teenager I was a convinced Anglo-Catholic but I also believed profoundly that we could, by political means, 'build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’, and that we should strive to do so. Did not members of every Christian denomination pray, ‘Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’?

Today, communism is ‘the god that failed’. Sadly in my opinion, democratic socialism is dying too…..perhaps it is due for rebirth! There are no Utopians. Scientific progress seems as likely to lead to disaster as to a better world. How long is it since any science-fiction writer envisaged a future that was anything but a nightmare? The only political groups that are consistently gaining strength are the extreme nationalist and xenophobic ones. Fortunately they are still very small. The Christian tradition that is most flourishing is a charismatic and fundamentalist evangelicalism, for which, try as I might, I cannot feel much enthusiasm.

Generally, I think that the prevailing spirit of the age is of disillusion, disbelief and distrust of all political, religious and scientific leaders. There is a taken-for-granted conviction that ‘those of us who live in the real world’ know that it, and the whole universe, is the product of mere chance (a cosmic accident!) and the world’s multifarious life forms simply the result of blind evolution. Nothing has ‘a purpose’ beyond that of perpetuating its species. Every species though…. and the world….and the universe, is ultimately destined for extinction. Fear, greed and the gratification of the senses are humankind’s only motivations. ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ And death isn’t, of course, eternal life or even eternal rest, but obliteration, total extinction. It will be as if we had never existed. Edward Fitzgerald summarised this nihilistic non-credo in his translation of ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’:

Alike for those who for ‘the day’ prepare.
And those who unto a ‘tomorrow’ stare.
The muezzin from the tower of darkness cries,
‘Fools! Your reward is neither here nor there.

as did A.E. Housman in the second and final verse of his short poem, 'The hollow fires burn out to black, the lamps are guttering low.........'


Never fear lad, nought’s to dread.
Look neither left nor right.
In all the endless road you tread,
There’s nothing but the night!

It is hardly surprising that young people regularly try to blot out the total futility of their existence with drugs and/or by drinking themselves into insensibility. If I shared their disbelief and lack of hope, I’d do the same.

St Paul told the people of Corinth that there were three great abiding virtues; faith, hope and love……and that the greatest of these was love. So it is, but it is also true that a society without faith and hope is heading for disaster.