Week 31.10 3rd August

Tendring Topics………on Line

The Queen…….and I

The Queen and I haven’t a great deal in common. We’re both members of the human race, we’re both well past the first flush of youth and we both wore uniform during World War II, though hers was a good deal more elegant, and more comfortable, than mine was. When, in a mood of patriotic fervour, I volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939, she was included when I took my enlistment oath to protect her father King George VI and all his lawful heirs and successors. Oh yes, and my wife and I were very pleased when the Queen sent us a card and message of congratulation on our sixtieth wedding anniversary.

That was about it until very recently, when I learned that, like me, she had a collection of photographs displayed on the Flickr Web Site. This site displays many thousands of photographs submitted by people all over the world and is recommended to art teachers and students seeking inspiration and example.

Trooper Hall, F.C. 17th Lancers 1901

I have over 400 pictures on display – a great many family ones of course, with some of me as a tiny baby with my proud parents, culminating with some of me as I am now. There is a picture of my father in 1901 (one of Queen Victoria’s Redcoats) newly enlisted as a trooper in the very dashing 17th Lancers which, just fifty years earlier, had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimean War.

Right: Younger Son Andy with granddaughter Jo

There are pictures of my now-middle aged sons, and of my grandchildren as babies and, as they are now, in their late twenties.

Above - Myself, Chris girlfriend Ariel,Chris, Pete

Right - Arlene, Pete, Nick, Nick's girlfriend Romy

There are pictures of record too, some unrepeatable; a glance into a girls and a boys primary school class in the 1930s, pictures of a frozen sea off Clacton during a now-long-ago winter, and pictures of the famous Turkish packhorse bridge at Mostar in Bosnia, taken in 1980 before it was destroyed in the Jugoslav civil war.

The old Turkish pack-horse bridge at Mostar in Bosnia taken on a never-to-be-forgotten holiday in 1980. Through the archway a mosque can be seen in the distance. The bridge was destroyed in the subsequent bloody civil war. It has since been rebuilt at the expense of the Turkish government. It isn’t really the same though!

You can see my flickr pages by accessing www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea (my somewhat romantic code name was a product of the fertile imagination of my elder grandson Chris, who set the site up for me). The website has brought me into contact with a Canadian distant cousin whom I hadn’t known existed; a Baptist truck driver from the USA’s ‘deep south’ with whom I had a brief but interesting correspondence, in which we disagreed with each other on practically every issue raised; and with a number of interesting people with requests, always granted, for permission to use one or other of the pictures displayed.

I hope that the Queen gets as much pleasure and interest from her flickr site as I have from mine.

Clacton's Bashful Fountains!

Clacton’s water feature, on what was once called ‘Christmas Island’ but is now ‘The Town Square’ has had a short history but a distinctly chequered one. When first installed in 2008 (amid inevitable accusations of its being ‘a waste of taxpayers’ money) it resembled similar water features in many other English towns. Fountains of water shot up into the air from hidden nozzles at pavement level.

It was attractive to look at. In what passed for a summer that year, it attracted small boys who enjoyed running through it and getting soaked. A great many adults enjoyed watching them do so!

Outside Sheffield’s Town Hall. This is how Clacton’s water feature is supposed to look

It was too good to last. First of all some joker introduced washing powder to it and the jets squirted bubbly suds! (Clacton, I’m sorry to say, has more than its fair share of such humorists.) The water feature was switched off, emptied and cleaned. It was at about that time that the Council realized that their fountain hadn’t been provided with an adequate water purification plant. It had been an economy measure, a typical case of spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar, though in this case it would have been a pretty big ha’porth.

Stray cats and dogs, and even seagulls, could be fouling the water through which little children were innocently disporting themselves! The possible threat of expensive lawsuits initiated by the kind of ambulance-chasing lawyers whose ‘no win: no fee’ adverts keep daytime commercial tv on its feet, began to haunt the dreams of Councillors and senior Council Officials. What if some child developed an unpleasant disease, blamed it on the fountain, and the parents sued? Playing safe, they switched off the fountain and off it remained for several months.

Last summer, again not much of a summer, the fountain started up again – but with an instantly derided (and expensive) fence all round it. The only justification for the fountain’s existence was the contribution its attractive appearance made to the town centre. The fence effectively destroyed that!

This year they are having another try. The ugly fence has come down and the fountain again enhances the attractions of the town centre.

Now though, thanks to electronic wizardry, it resembles the bashful heroine of a mid-Victorian romantic novel. The general public is invited to enjoy its beauty but strictly on a ‘keep your distance and touch me not’ basis. Get too close and electronic sensors send it into the equivalent of a Dickensian swoon – the fountains of water start to fail and eventually shut down altogether.

Nineteenth Century novels usually include ‘some blackguard’ managing to break down the young heroine’s reserve and threaten her virtue. So it is with our water feature. Already, so I understand, small boys have discovered a blind spot in the electronic barrier and have managed to get past it to frolic in the fountains without activating the protective screen!

A few days ago (28th July) I drove my mobility scooter to the town centre to get a photo of that accident-prone fountain. The jets weren’t working; presumably closed down again while someone sought an answer to the latest problem. I wonder what the one after that will be?

‘Essex Works’

‘Essex Works’, proclaims the headline on the latest edition of the County Council’s self-congratulatory newsletter. No one would doubt it, though I am by no means so confident that the same can be said about its County Council.

In the newsletter are set out five ways in which that Council proposes to save £300 million pounds – Buying better, Working smarter, Working together, Thinking ahead, and by means of Sharing and Trading Services. It reads to me more like a wish list than a programme for action but it ends with the bold claim that, by means unspecified, they have already saved £60 million!

I hope that they are successful. They have certainly been very good at spending our money. It seems likely that they’ll have to spend a good deal more of it if they are going to bring all their services up to an acceptable standard. Their child-care services, in particular, have long been below standard. I remember a year ago it being promised that they would take immediate effective steps to improve them. They don’t seem to have been very successful. During 2009/2010, 148 enquiries and complaints about the ECC were received by the Local Government Ombudsman, compared with 139 the previous year. Complaints relating to children and family services rose from 4 to 14 and those relating to adult care doubled from 9 to 18. There were also 36 complaints about education. As a result of these complaints the County Council had to make eleven local settlements in compensation, costing the taxpayers £16,456. This is trivial compared with the £300 million they are hoping to save but, as they say when commenting on these, ‘Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’. The converse is also true, ‘Squander the pennies and you soon won’t have any pounds to save’.

In an attempt to improve their failing Children’s Services they have appointed a new Director of Schools, Children and Families. Dave Hill, the new Director, will be moving from a similar job in Croydon. His salary is not reported but it certainly won’t be peanuts! They are also offering a two-year contract of up to £150,000, not for new staff, but to a company able to bring in non-EU social workers to reduce reliance on agency staff. I’d have thought that non-EU workers from cultures and traditions very different from our own would be particularly unsuitable for social work.

I mentioned a few weeks ago in this blog that, despite their enthusiasm for saving, Essex Councillors had just voted themselves increased allowances. I now learn that during the last financial year they paid out £90,000 in staff bonuses, not to hard-pressed social workers and the like, but to top officials already on six-figure salaries. I have also discovered that they have spent no less than £800,000 (now that isn’t a trivial sum by anyone’s standards!) redesigning the Council’s website. Of this extravagance Emma Boon, campaign manager of the Taxpayers’ Alliance says, ‘The Council already has a site designed and built at the public’s expense. They shouldn’t spend more of our money doing it all over again’.

And so say all of us!

Above left: myself, Ariel Chris' girlfriend, Chris.

Right: Arlene, Pete, Nick, Romy Nick's girlfriend

The Turkish packhorse bridge at Mostar, taken while we were on holiday in 1980. The bridge was to be destroyed in the subsequent bloody civil war. It has since been rebuilt at the expense of the Turkish government. It isn’t really the same though!

There are some pictures of record too, some of them irreplaceable: a glimpse into boys and girls classrooms in primary schools in the '30s; the sea frozen over off Clacton Beach in a cold winter many years ago; the Turkish packhorse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, destroyed in the civil war.

You can see my flickr pages by clicking on www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea (my somewhat romantic code name was a product of the fertile imagination of my elder grandson, who set the site up for me). The website site has brought me into contact with a Canadian distant cousin whom I hadn’t known existed; a Baptist truck driver from the USA's ‘deep south’ with whom I had a brief but interesting correspondence in which we disagreed with each other on practically every issue raised; and with a number of interesting people with their requests, always granted, for permission to use one or other of the pictures displayed.

I hope that the Queen gets as much pleasure and interest from her flickr site as I have from HM from mine.

Week 30. 10

Tendring Topics……on Line

‘£1.2 million to Save the Naze for 50 years’

In the interests of accuracy, the above headline from the Coastal Daily Gazette
ought really to be ‘£l.2 million to postpone the loss of part of the Naze for 50 years’. A fortnight ago, commenting on the fact that, despite savage cuts elsewhere, the funding for both the Crag Walk at Walton’s Naze and the redevelopment of Clacton’s Pier Avenue was said to be safe, I pointed out that desirable as the construction of the Crag Walk might be, it certainly wouldn’t Save the Naze.

In earlier blogs I have explained that the erosion of the cliffs of the Naze arises primarily from surface water penetrating the subsoil and the stratum of permeable red crag beneath it. Then as it drains away over the impermeable layer of clay beneath them, it destabilises these upper strata, causing the cliff edge to break away and fall onto the beach below. The sea washes away the fallen material, and the process continues. It will continue to do this until the subsoil and the red crag stratum are properly drained and a revetment is provided at the foot of the Naze cliffs for the whole of their length.

A scheme to do this was prepared by the Tendring District Council soon after it took over the whole of the Tendring District in 1974. After a Public Enquiry it was approved by the Government’s inspector but was then vetoed by the government on economic grounds. ‘The time wasn’t right’. I don’t think it ever will be!

The Crag Walk Scheme may prevent (postpone would be a better word) the erosion of 110 metres of the cliff immediately in front of the Naze Tower. 1,200 tons of bedding rock and 13,305 tons of armour stone are to be used to protect that length of cliff. They will also provide the foundation of the Crag Walk, which will form a viewing platform in front of the fossil-rich red crag cliffs.

I wouldn’t care to predict whether this work will endure for 50 years or for a longer or shorter time. It is obvious to me though that the sea will continue to nibble away at the cliff on each side of the protected area. This will, after a few years become a roughly 150 yards wide projecting peninsula or salient. A feature of a salient, as old soldiers will confirm, is that the enemy can attack it from both sides as well as from the front – and there is no enemy more implacable than the sea!

In any case, will the proposed crag walk really attract the anticipated ‘wave of tourists’? I‘m a bit doubtful. The cliffs are indeed ‘fossil rich’. I remember many years ago, my two then pre-teenage sons arriving home from cycle excursions to Walton with fossil shells in their pockets and red sandstone dust inextricably permeating their clothes and their hair. I think it unlikely though that those fossils will be visible from the Crag Walk viewing platform and I hardly imagine that visitors will be encouraged to attack the cliff face with clasp knives or similar implements to find them.

Lies, dam’ lies……and Prime Ministerial Pronouncements!

For several weeks we hadn’t heard very much from the Chilcot Enquiry into the Iraq war. There simply hadn’t been any revelations of the kind that make front-page news.

Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, a grande dame if there ever was one, and Head of MI5 before and during the Iraq War, certainly put that right. Her evidence to the Enquiry was in complete contradiction of statements made by Prime Minister Tony Blair and, of course, his American puppet-master George W. Bush junior.

They, for instance, claimed that Iraq was involved with al-Qaida and thus, indirectly, with the ‘nine-eleven’ outrage. Lady Manningham-Buller said in evidence, ‘There was no credible evidence to support that connection and that was the judgement, I may say, of the CIA’

On weapons of mass destruction, Mr Blair assured the House of Commons that our Intelligence Service had concluded that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, that he had military plans for the use of these weapons which could be activated within 45 minutes, and that he was actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability. Lady Manningham-Buller said ‘We regarded the direct threat from Iraq as low….we didn’t believe Saddam Hussein had the capability to do anything in the UK. And ‘We were asked to put low-grade, small intelligence into it (the report later known as ‘the dodgy dossier’) and we refused because we didn’t think it was reliable (So had MI5 not refused to publish questionable material, the dodgy dossier would have been even dodgier!)

Mr Blair claimed that as a result of the war ‘I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our security is better, I believe we are. The world is safer as a result'. He denied repeatedly that the war had acted as a stimulus to the recruitment of terrorists.

Lady Manningham-Butler told the Enquiry, ‘our involvement in Iraq radicalised a generation of young people, who saw it and our involvement in Afghanistan, as an attack on Islam. We in MI5 were swamped with intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with in terms of plots, leads to plots and things we needed to pursue. We gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad, so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not able to before’. Perhaps the most telling evidence that the danger of terrorism in the UK had increased with the onset of the Iraq war (and that Tony Blair was well aware of this) is that in 2003 Lady Manningham-Butler found it necessary to ask the Prime Minister for a doubling of MI5’s Budget, and the Prime Minister agreed!

I am more than ever proud that my two sons and my grandchildren, with their wives and girlfriends, were among the nearly a million protesters who marched - in vain - through London on the eve of the war, while New Labour MPs trooped like sheep into the ‘Aye Lobby’ to endorse it. Nor can today’s Conservatives congratulate themselves. With one or two honourable exceptions they too supported a course of action that was justified only by deceit, deception and downright lies, that cost, and is still costing, tens of thousands of lives. ‘A plague o’ both your houses!’


Repealing ‘The right to buy’

There was what I believe to have been a highly significant news item on BBC tv’s Breakfast programme this (21st July) morning that the BBC clearly didn’t consider sufficiently important to be repeated on the 6.00 pm national news bulletin. I am sure though that it must have been on the Welsh Regional News.

This was that the Welsh Assembly had passed a law, that was to be given the Queen’s assent at once, permitting Welsh local authorities to rescind the requirements of the ‘Right to Buy’ Act passed by the Thatcher Government in 1980. This Act might more accurately have been described as the ‘Compel to Sell Act’. It compelled local authorities to sell to sitting tenants, at a fraction of their market price, houses that had been built by their far-sighted predecessors to facilitate slum clearance, alleviate overcrowding and generally improve the housing of the working classes.

A great many tenants, naturally enough, took advantage of this generous offer made at other people’s expense. Many elderly folk were helped to ‘own their own homes’ by sons or daughters hoping to benefit under their wills and thus find their own way to home ownership. After ten years (when you’re my age you realize what a short period that is!) the home, bought on the cheap, could be sold at the market price. With, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, constantly rising house prices, this offered a quick way to a fortune.

The best homes were quickly sold off, many in attractive locations, as second homes or as rural bases from which comfortably-off commuters could get to their city offices each day. House prices rose. Banks were happy to finance the purchase of Council Houses, often to those who could ill-afford the repayments. Unsold Council properties degenerated into slums. Homes in rural villages were unaffordable to working people. Since there were now no Council houses to let, many young families whose ancestors had been villagers for generations were compelled to emigrate from the country to the city.

Repealing right to buy is an obviously needed reform that no government has had the courage to make. Thank goodness the Welsh Assembly has taken the first step in the right direction. I hope that others will follow.

A Matter of History

Can David Cameron, our Prime Minister, really have said publicly that in 1940, we British were the junior partners of the USA in the war against Hitler?

What do they teach the kids at Eton these days? Throughout 1940, and for almost the whole of 1941, the USA was neutral, and there were powerful voices in the States urging that it should remain so. It was a country with large ethnic Irish and German populations. While I am quite sure that the overwhelming majority of them had no time at all for Hitler and the Nazis, neither did they feel any great urge to support Britain. As Winston Churchill said, from the time of the fall of France in the spring of 1940, until June 1941, ‘We stood alone’ against the Nazis.

Called up with the Territorial Army at the beginning of September 1939, the Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a member was dug in, heavily camouflaged, near the village of Elmdon in north-west Essex throughout the anxious Battle of Britain summer of 1940. Our 6in howitzers were kept in constant readiness to shell Duxford Aerodrome and blow it to smithereens immediately German airborne troops swarmed in - an event that was expected hourly.

Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone until 21st June 1941 when Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union and we acquired our first powerful ally. On 7th December of the same year the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and the USA declared war on Japan. Hitler then declared war on the USA in support of his Japanese ally. Would the USA have declared war on Germany at that time had Hitler not moved first? Probably not; there was no treaty obligation to do so. Powerful, and not unreasonable, voices within the USA would undoubtedly have claimed that the American first priority was to defeat the Japanese. They would not have wished to enter an alliance that included the USSR and they would have pointed out to Anglophiles that, in concentrating on Japan, they were supporting the British by easing the Japanese pressure on our forces in India and the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Once they had defeated the Japanese, there would be plenty of time to consider whether or not to confront Hitler.

Hitler made up their minds for them!

In 1941, Hitler’s failure to learn the lessons of history led him to two decisions that made Germany's defeat a certainty. He invaded Russia, ignoring the lessons of Napoleon’s catastrophic experience when he had attempted the same thing in 1812. Then he declared war on the USA, ignoring the much more recent lesson of the effect of the late entry of the USA into World War I, which tipped the balance on the western front decisively in favour of the French and British allies.

Has our Prime Minister forgotten (or perhaps has never learned) the lessons of the fairly recent history of Afghanistan and the Indian sub-Continent? In the 19th Century there was an ignominious defeat of our first attempt (1839 – ’42) to occupy Afghanistan and add it to our Empire, and a not very glorious withdrawal after the second (1878 – 1880). A much more recent attempt on the same lines by the Soviet Union was similarly defeated. On that occasion, today’s Taliban insurgents (then hailed by us as gallant freedom-loving Mojihadin) had enjoyed the covert help of the British and American governments.

There have been four occasions (one very recent) during the present campaign on which members of the Afghan armed forces being trained by British or American troops, have murdered their trainers and fled to join the Taliban. These incidents should surely make us ask whether there may be lessons to be learnt from the Indian Mutiny of 1857/58? Then, native troops whose discipline and loyalty had seemed beyond question, had turned on their British officers, slaughtering them and their families before going on to incite other garrisons to mutiny. Thanks to their British army training, they enjoyed considerable success before the Mutiny was, very bloodily, put down.

There really are lessons to be learned from history, for those who don't imagine that they already 'know it all'!

Week 29.10

Tendring Topics………on line

Dispensing with the Bureaucrats?

Under the new coalition government the NHS, so they say, is to experience the biggest shake-up of its history. Power, and the cash that goes with it, is to be taken from the Primary Care Trusts and handed over to the Medical Practices in their areas. They will decide which consultants we may need to see, and when. They will organise minor operations and through them, patients will be able to say which hospitals they wish to go to and who will operate upon them. Thousands of NHS managers will be sacked. It is envisaged that two or more practices may get together in some cases, to ensure that they give the most efficient and comprehensive service possible.

Wonderful! But who, in each medical practice will make the thousands of decisions that have to be made, and who will make sure that the actions that result from those decisions actually take place.

The doctors? Well, there are of course lots of decisions that individual doctors have to make and some that will probably have to be made by general agreement among the doctors of the practice. They can’t spend too much time in discussion and debate though – at least I hope they can’t. We need them in their consulting rooms and by our bedsides, diagnosing our ailments and trying to cure or alleviate them!

Most up-to-date practices, employing several medical practitioners and nurses, will already have a practice manager. There will also be a number of clerical and administrative staff to make appointments, man the telephones and the reception desk, type letters, keep accounts and undertake the multifarious tasks that exist in any busy enterprise. With more responsibilities, more of these will be needed. There will need to be a deputy and perhaps one or more assistant managers. They’ll require professional accountants to supervise the practice’s finances. More clerical and junior administrative staff will be required to service the professionals.

There is, I fear, a real danger that we shall be sacking dozens of managers and chief executives of Primary Care Trusts and getting rid of their bureaucratic retinues only to replace them with hundreds of rather-less-well-paid managers and chief executives of independent medical practices and combined practices. They’ll need their own, admittedly smaller, retinues. In the twenty-first century not even the smallest organisation can hope to survive without the skills of at least some of those often denigrated bureaucrats!

I wonder if the new streamlined Health Service will really prove to be more efficient, more cost effective and more customer-friendly than its predecessor?

‘More than the Prime Minister!’

It is strange how the Prime Minister is used as a sort of benchmark of annual income. Any public servant with an income in excess of £200,000 is described in terms of shock and horror, to be, ‘earning more than the Prime Minister!’

I may have done it myself. If so I apologise, because it isn’t really a fair comparison. The Prime Minister’s salary, although enormous by the standards of most of us, is quite modest compared with those of quite a few of our fellow countrymen and women. The Prime Minister’s job does carry a few pretty valuable perks though. There are, for instance, two fully staffed palatial homes, one in central London and the other in its own grounds in the lovely English countryside. On retirement, or on being evicted by the electorate, he or she, as well as enjoying a comfortable pension, can reckon on earning many thousands of pounds from writing memoirs and from lecturing and after-dinner speaking. Company directorates and consultancies are theirs for the asking and they might even get a part-time job as a special envoy for NATO or the UN!

The latest subject of press ‘more than the Prime Minister’ outrage, is the head of an inner city (London) school, whose total income last year was described in some newspapers as over £200,000 and in at least one other as £270,000.
A class of eight year olds at an Ipswich primary school in 1930. I am the
anxious little boy with glasses by the headmaster’s right knee! What an easy
and rewarding job teaching must have been when kids were obedient and
attentive, parents were respectful and co-operative – and there was always
the cane to reinforce the headmaster’s authority!

It appears that the Head Teacher’s actual salary from his Education Authority was £80,000 a year; a lot of money by my standards but, I understand, not at all unreasonable for a hard-working educationalist who has successfully ‘turned round’ an inner city school full of tough inner-city pupils! Most of the rest of his income was derived as awards for that or similar achievements from educational trusts. That said, it does seem that he was rewarded from at least two separate sources for the same, admittedly valuable, work and £200,000 is surely an absurdly high sum.

Nevertheless I felt some sympathy with an email correspondent to BBC tv’s ‘Breakfast’ programme who said, ‘Why pick on the salary of a hard-working and successful head teacher to compare with that of the Prime Minister. What about the incomes of top footballers?’

What indeed? And what about the salaries and continuing bonuses of the bankers whose irresponsibility and incompetence triggered the current financial crisis? What about the wealthy stock holders who use their resources to buy football teams and players, and own luxury yachts in which to entertain compliant members of the Government and the Opposition. It is they who should be targeted by the national dailies; but then, of course, they probably own most of them!

A properly graded income tax, clawing back more than fifty percent of income in excess of, say, £200,000; coupled with measures to curb income tax avoidance, would surely relieve all these people, including the affluent head teacher, of some of their superfluous wealth. It would also do just a little to ease the burden of debt repayment, and help to persuade us that the government is determined that the weight of that burden is shared fairly among us all.

Poverty Kills

I don’t think that anyone in this country, probably not anyone in Europe, need these days die of malnutrition. There’s little doubt though that poverty can undermine our health and impoverish and shorten our lives. Affluence on the other hand, can enrich and lengthen them.

This has been demonstrated by a government study called Health Profiles that provided a study of the quality of life of residents in Colchester and in the Tendring District. Colchester’s St. Andrew’s, St.Anne’s and New Town wards include some of the poorest people in the UK. As a result life expectancy in Colchester generally is 73 years for men and 81 for women. Move a few miles out though to rather-more-affluent Lexden, Wivenhoe, Dedham and Langham and men can expect to live to 80 and women to 84.

Similar results were shown in the Tendring District. In Jaywick and in Clacton’s Pier Ward male life expectancy is below 74 years compared with 81 years in posh Frinton-on-Sea.

Other visible results of the effects of deprivation on our lives are the fact that in both Tendring and Colchester there are more-than-average numbers of pregnant smokers, the number of cases of diabetes diagnosed is among the highest in England, ever more children are found to be obese when starting school, and educational achievement of Tendring pupils is among the lowest in the country.

I don’t live in one of Clacton’s more favoured areas. I once heard Dudley Road referred to by a Planning Official as ‘working class residential’, which I am happy enough to accept. Goodness knows my wife and I did have a struggle when, with two young children and a mortgage, we moved here fifty-four years ago! I don’t think that we ever considered ourselves to be ‘deprived’ though.

Our two sons both did very well at both primary and secondary school and our elder son progressed to Cambridge where he obtained a good degree. Both have professional qualifications and have held responsible and satisfying jobs throughout their working lives; hardly low achievers!

My wife had more than her share of ill-health, partly, I think, as a result of deprivation during World War II when she lived and worked in London through the Blitz. Nevertheless she lived till the age of 82 and, as regular blog readers will know, I am 89. I could perhaps hardly be described as ‘still going strong’ but I am quite definitely ‘still going’ and hope to keep going for a little while yet.

I am not the most observant of persons but my neighbours all appear to be pretty healthy and showing little sign of deprivation. It appears that our ‘working class residential’ road may offer as beneficial an environment as Colchester’s posh suburbs and Frinton’s tree-lined and leafy avenues.

Minimum Wage-Earners?

A couple of weeks ago I referred in this blog to the £91,000 a year that husband and wife team Neil Stock and his wife Sarah Candy were managing to earn from their spare-time voluntary work in Local Government and with the NHS. Ms Candy is a cabinet member of both the Essex County Council and the Tendring District Council, and Mr Stock is leader of Tendring District Council. Ms Candy is also a non-executive member of the Northe East Essex Primary Care Trust.

From their Great Bromley home, the husband and wife team also run a very successful mail order fashion and haberdashery enterprise.

Mr Stock, in explanation, told a Gazette reporter that he and his wife worked incredibly hard for long hours. The £91,000, he said, ‘might not equate to the minimum wage, the number of hours we put in’.

A blog reader, who is better at sums than I am, tells me that worrying about that possibility should not keep them awake at night. She has calculated that if both of them were on the minimum wage and worked a 20 hour day each, they would between them earn rather less than half that £91,000 in a year. They wouldn’t, of course have much time for socialising, running the business that is their ‘day job,’ or indeed for eating and sleeping, but they would make something in the region of £40,000.

The fact that Mr Stock could have imagined, even for a moment, that £91,000 might not equate to the minimum wage, demonstrates how very little well-heeled members of the District and County Councils understand about the problems of the low-paid electors whom they claim to represent.

Week 28.10

Tendring Topics…….on line

Tommy Fritz

A month or two ago I opened this Blog with a calendar picture of my honorary German niece Maja, three year old daughter of my good friends Andreas and Konnie Kulke of Zittau. Now, in July my calendar picture is of her little brother and my honorary nephew, Tomas Friedrich, who is just coming up to his first birthday.

I was fascinated by the names that his Mum and Dad had chosen for him. They seem to me to be symbolic of Anglo-German friendship, not at the level of top politicians and bemedalled Generals but of ordinary folk. The diminutive form of Tomas is, of course, Tommy, which is what the Germans always called British soldiers during two world wars. The diminutive of Friedrich is Fritz, which is how we often referred to German soldiers during those wars.

This picture of a happy, smiling Tommy Fritz brought to my mind the strictly unofficial Christmas Truce between front-line soldiers of the opposing armies on the Western Front in 1914. This had been graphically illustrated in the stage production of the satirical Musical ‘Oh what a lovely war’ to which my son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn had taken me during my visit to Sheffield a few months ago.

Satire often exaggerates to make its point. On this occasion though the truce was, if anything, understated. History records that on some sections of the line, German and British troops fraternised not just for an hour or two on Christmas Eve but for several days, until a furious High Command realized that there was every risk of ordinary soldiers discovering that their opponents were not all bloodthirsty monsters, but for the most part, quite ordinary chaps like themselves.

If only Fritz and Tommy, joined by Ivan and Pierre, had been able to follow their own instincts during that first wartime ‘season of goodwill’, instead of being subject to the fears and ambitions of far-from-the-battlefield Kings, Emperors and Presidents, millions of lives would have been spared and World War I really could have been a ‘War to end all Wars’.

When I was at school in the 1930s, 4th August 1914 was the date on which ‘History’ ended and ‘Current Affairs’ began! History was my favourite subject and we studied in some detail ‘The Causes of World War I’. Admittedly it was a long time ago, but do you know I can’t now think of a single one of those ‘causes’ that was worth the loss of a single British, German, French or Russian life!

Mind you, the carve-up of Europe, the continuation of the allied blockade on Germany till well after the Armistice, and the crippling and humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, provided a fertile field for the development of ‘The causes of World War II!’

Public Service Pensions

Public Service Pensions have come under increasing attention lately. Due to the obstinate determination of us oldies to live longer and longer lives, they are costing more and more money. These pensions are, it was claimed on a BBC news bulletin this (7th July) morning for the most part ‘unfunded’ so that their cost is having to come directly out of our taxes.

Well, part of my income does come from a very welcome public service pension. I am also a payer of income tax and, like everyone else in the UK, of VAT. It might be said then that I have a double interest in the matter.

It may be that Public Service Pensions are for the most part (more than 50 percent of them) unfunded. Mine isn’t though – nor are the pensions of the thousands of other retired local government employees who currently survive on them. From the age of 18, I paid 6 percent of my salary monthly into a compulsory superannuation scheme. My employer paid another agreed sum and the money was invested (one hopes wisely!) to ensure an adequate pension on retirement. I made these contributions for 35 years. I hope that no one will grudge me the fact that my army service from 1939 till 1946, during which I made no payments, counted towards my pension.

On retirement I was, and still am, paid a pension each month of forty-eightieths (one half) of my final salary. I would be the first to admit, though without any great feeling of shame, that because I have outlived most of my contemporaries, I have enjoyed my pension for rather longer than most, and have done very well out of the superannuation scheme. However my good fortune has been balanced by the fact that during my years as Tendring Council’s PRO, two of the Council’s Chief Officers, the Chief Executive and the Treasurer, died in office several years before they would have been due for retirement (contrary to popular belief, life at the Town Hall can be very stressful!)

Their salaries, and their superannuation contributions had been a great deal higher than mine. They paid a large sum into the fund and drew not a penny out of it. Several other of my colleagues died within two or three years of retirement and must therefore have delivered a net profit to the fund.

Has the money that I and my various employers have paid into the fund, been responsibly and profitably invested? My final and current Superannuation Authority is the Essex County Council. Remembering their Iceland Investments, their jetting top councillors and officials half-way round the world, their branch office in mainland China, their expensive tv advertising and their Bank of Essex (in which hardly anybody was interested), they are not a body to which I would voluntarily have entrusted a single penny of my money.

However, as both a pensioner and a taxpayer, I’ll just have to hope for the best.

Comment on the Crisis

I have been astonished at some of the more extraordinary inequities of the response to our country’s financial crisis. No doubt the redevelopment of Clacton’s Pier Avenue is a good idea, despite the fact that the dust has hardly settled on its last redevelopment. The proposed Crag Walk on Walton’s Naze Cliffs is a good idea too though it certainly isn’t, in the long run, going to Save the Naze!

It does seem strange that the funding for these two developments is said to be safe while, at the same time, scores of jobs are to be lost, vital municipal work is to be curtailed or abandoned, pensions threatened and the school building programme axed.

The last of these economies has particularly incensed my elder son Pete. I thought that blog readers might be interested in extracts from a letter that he has written to his Lib.Dem. MP, Lynn Feathestone.

After acknowledging the fact that Liberal Democrats in the coalition government had undoubtedly had a modifying effect on the Budget, he goes on to say:

I believe that there is a large and burning issue, which both Labour and the Coalition have failed to address. This is the identification of the architects of this crisis and ensuring that they pay in full for the damage done to the economy and to millions of hard working citizens.

However, it is beyond argument that school children are not in any way responsible. Many are now to have their education damaged by inadequate school buildings for the remainder of their education. This is surely a cut too far which moves the debate from an issue of pragmatism to one of morality. If axing the school rebuilding programme is to be the benchmark for all future decisions, then there surely can be no justification for almost any other capital project. Even though I am a supporter of Crossrail, High Speed 2 and the Manchester Metro, I cannot even begin to see the justification for continuing with any of these things, while neglecting the welfare of our children.

This is not an opinion born out of self-interest. I fully understand that Haringey is not affected by this decision. My children have anyway grown up and left school – and left the country – and I am not employed in any way in the construction industry. I am, in fact, a regular train user, but would willingly endure uncomfortable or slower journeys if it meant that money would be released for more important issues.

I realize too, that this is not your area of decision making, but I would have hoped that your sense of integrity would be such that this decision of your Government would force you to reconsider your position within it.

Peter Hall,
Managing Director,
HUB Solutions

I can only say that I am glad and proud that my sons like, I hope, their Dad, find it impossible to remain silent in the face of injustice, even where they are not personally affected.

Pete in the Scottish Highlands, while visiting HUB Solutions' Scottish branch in Glasgow

Don’t forget your ears!

I’m not really a great one for giving health-and-safety warnings to other people. I’m all too conscious of the fact that in the past I have ignored, or been unaware of, a great many of the perils to which we are constantly having our attention drawn today and, with just one exception, I seem to have got away with it. My ears, about which I can’t recall hearing any specific warnings, are that exception.

Some three years ago I realized that I was developing small sore patches at the top of my left ear, which would scab over but never actually heal. They weren’t painful but were beginning to leak and stain my pillowcase at night. It wasn’t a major problem, but I did mention it casually to my doctor when I next saw her.

She took an immediate interest, referring me to the ‘plastic surgeon’ who examined it carefully and told me that it was a form of cancer and that he would arrange for the affected part of my ear to be excised. And so he did. The operation took place in the Day Surgery Unit of Colchester General Hospital. It was performed almost painlessly under local anaesthetic; the lady surgeon chattering away happily as she performed her butchery. All was well until a month or so ago when I noticed the same problem affecting my right ear. I saw the plastic surgeon again last week (on 8th July) and I’m to have another similar op., this time at Chelmsford, during the course of the next week or two. ‘Your right ear will then match the other one!’ said the Consultant cheerfully!

It’s not life threatening (at 89, how much life have I got left to be threatened anyway?) but I’d prefer not to have it. So, take my tip; when you’re going out into the garden to do some digging, weeding or pruning in the sunshine, or are about to relax on a sunny beach, do remember to apply the sun-cream and don’t forget your ears!

Week 27.10

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Dedham Vale Hopper

The Dedham Vale Hopper sounds as though it might be a seriously endangered species, found only on the Suffolk/Essex border. In fact though it is a new, very promising, development that could indirectly benefit the whole of our area. I have long thought that our Tendring Holiday Coast, historic Colchester, and the lovely Constable country of Dedham Vale complement each other as a holiday and touring destination and that what benefits one will ultimately be to the advantage of the other two.

The Hopper is a sight-seeing bus that, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays throughout the summer, is running on a circuit from Manningtree railway station through Flatford, East Bergholt, Stratford St. Mary, Dedham, lawford and back to Manningtree. It sets off hourly from Manningtree station from 9.40 a.m., the final tour of the day starting at 5.25 p.m.

















Left - Bridge Cottage, Flatford. Right - Flatford Mill

This service began on Saturday 3rd July and will continue until Sunday 26th September. It has been designed to connect with rail services from Liverpool Street Station to Manningtree and is also accessible by rail from Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester and Harwich.

As an added incentive it is to be free for the first four weeks of its operation. That, I think, takes us to the end of July. From then on it will cost just £2 for a day ticket that will allow passengers to hop on or off the bus (hence the ‘Hopper’!) anywhere along the route.

Of special interest to American visitors is Sherman House, Dedham, ancestral home of General Sherman of ‘Marching through Georgia’ fame in the American Civil War.

The project is being funded by the National Lottery, the National Trust, and the Dedham Vale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the Stour Valley Countryside Project. It is being run by the Hadleigh community bus service and funding is assured until 2012. Adrian Clarke of the National Trust, is quoted as saying; ‘We are delighted to be supporting the Hopper Bus service. We want to encourage people to visit this beautiful area in a sustainable, environmentally-friendly way’.


I wish the Dedham Vale Hopper project the success that it deserves. The auspices are good. A pilot scheme undertake in 2005 proved very successful.


I hesitate to mention the weather in this blog because the last time I did so the wind promptly swung round to the north and the temperature dropped ten degrees!

The Cathedral-like interior of Dedham’s parish church.


However, as I write it does seem possible that we may expect a summer with plenty of warm, sunny weather, interspersed with heavy, perhaps thundery, showers. It could be – in fact has been – a lot worse!

Professional Politicians

A month or so ago I forecast in this column the future development of a breed of professional local politicians, managing to acquire a comfortable income by serving as elected members on local authorities and other public bodies. I hardly expected confirmation of this forecast to present itself either quite so quickly or quite so near to home.

It seems that local husband and wife team Neil Stock and Sarah Candy net total allowances of £91,000 a year for their roles on Tendring District Council, the Essex County Council and the North East Essex NHS. That, of course, is just their spare-time voluntary work. Their ‘day job’ is running a very successful mail-order fashion and haberdashery enterprise from their Little Bromley home, with customers world-wide.

Mrs Candy is the biggest contributor to this successful husband-and-wife partnership. Last year she earned more than £46,000 from Essex County Council as Cabinet Member for children’s services plus £15,500 for her position as Cabinet member for Planning with Tendring District Council and more than £5,000 as a non-executive director at North East Essex Primary Care Trust. I hope that the meeting times of these three bodies never coincide! Mr Stock meanwhile, collects £25,000 as Leader of Tendring District Council.

Mr Stock is reported as saying, ‘We are both incredibly busy people who do an incredible amount of work. It might not even equate to the minimum wage, the number of hours we put in’. The ‘incredible’ was of course his word, not that of the Gazette interviewer. If they really are doing so much work that their income doesn’t equate to the minimum wage they are both heading for a serious breakdown and I feel very sorry for them.

With another comment made by Mr Stock I whole-heartedly agree. He said that there should be a national debate over whether councillors needed to become full-time professionals because of the workload, which he blamed on the Labour Government, for introducing cabinet-style local government. One thing is certain. I am sure that a local authorities don’t need top officials on salaries in the region of £200,000 a year and council members on ‘allowances’ amounting to tens of thousands.

During my time as Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I helped to entertain a journalist from Virginia, USA, who was studying public administration in the UK. He admired practically everything he saw. I showed him over Clacton’s Percy King Council Housing Estate (I had fairly recently bade it farewell as Housing Manager). It was at that time virtually vandal-free and well kept and he was full of praise. It was, he assured me, very different from public housing in the States.

His particular admiration though was for our elected councillors who, at that time, were only refunded out-of-pocket expenses for their services. I sat with him in the Public Gallery through one or two pretty boring Committee Meetings. He was astonished at the service they rendered for no personal reward and for nothing more than a desire to serve the public. In the States, he told me, people serve on public bodies only to advance themselves or to further their family’s interests.

I reckon that if he came back now he’d feel more at home!

Penal Reform

I have always entertained a warm feeling for now-Justice-Minister Ken Clarke. He is a colourful, larger-than-life character who, unlike most top politicians, would probably be a welcome and entertaining companion on a long train journey. I don’t agree with many of his ideas but he does have in my opinion very sound view on European integration and has, so it now appears, astonishingly progressive views on Penal Reform.

He is surely the very last person likely to be accused of being a head-in-the-clouds, woolly minded, bleeding-heart do-gooder. Yet, in direct contradiction to one of his predecessors, Michael Howard, who evoked a standing ovation at a Tory Conference by proclaiming that ‘Prison works!’ Ken Clarke declares unequivocally that it doesn’t.

Britain’s grossly overcrowded prisons are, he says, wastefully expensive human warehouses from which well over half the inmates offend again within months of their release. We must, he says, reduce the prison population, concentrating on reform and rehabilitation rather than punishment. There should be fewer custodial sentences and more sentences to service in the community. Firms and charitable organisations should be offered cash incentives to help with the rehabilitation of discharged prisoners.

I wish him every success in his endeavours. It will probably earn him insults from The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express and rather more measured disapproval from The Daily Telegraph. However his views on Europe have no doubt already accustomed him to that.

Dire warnings!

The River Gipping at Sproughton Mill – in the 1930s an ideal spot for angling, and for swimming!

Directly we have a spell of warm weather we have dire warnings from Health and Safety experts, about the perils of bathing in rivers and lakes, no matter how inviting the water may look on a very hot day. The water will be colder and deeper than you think and there may well be hidden obstacles that endanger life and limb. Even if you are a strong swimmer, confine your activities to public baths or swimming pools. Such warnings always revive memories of my childhood and youth spent on the outskirts of Ipswich, where my friends and I received no such warnings – and probably wouldn’t have heeded them if we had!

My home was within easy walk, and even easier cycle ride, of the River Gipping, not one of England’s greatest waterways but one of which I have many fond memories. Along its banks I spent many happy leisure hours as a boy. From about the age of fifteen I was a keen angler, the terror of the roach, perch and pike that lurked in its depths. From an even earlier age (I was a competent swimmer before I was ten) my friends and I would enjoy a swim in its waters on hot summer days. Ipswich was well provided with municipal swimming pools but our parents had to watch every penny and could ill afford frequent requests for the 'threepence or sixpence' entrance charge. The river was free, and much more fun. Possibly because we learned from the experience of other older kids of the potential dangers, I don’t recall any serious accidents and certainly no drownings. Perhaps we were just lucky.

Heather and I in September 1939

It was by the Gipping’s tree-shaded stream that I did my ‘courting’ during the first fortnight of World War II. Pupils from Wanstead County High School had been evacuated to Ipswich. They were, I think, sent there by mistake as they remained only two weeks. Among those evacuees was fifth-former Heather Gilbert, then not quite sixteen. I was a just-eighteen-year old soldier, newly called up with the Territorials. Heather and I met, were attracted to each other and enjoyed a few precious days and evenings together. It was the very beginning of a relationship that ended only with Heather’s death in 2006, sixty-seven years later and after sixty happy years of marriage.

Cheer up. It ny never happen!

As I write these words the immdiate future of this blog is in doubt. My broadband internet service is provided by BT. Currently there is an industrial dispute and I understand that there could be a strike, threatening my email and www service, as soon as next Monday (12th July).

I would, I hope, continue to write these blogs (at my age I don't like to make firm promises!) but would be unable to post them onto the internet until the strike was over.

Pious Victorians used to add the letters DV (the initials of the Latin for 'God willing') to any written promise. Perhaps I should do the same to my assurance that Normal Service would be resumed as soon as possible!

Still, as we used to say in the Army, 'Cheer up. It may never happen!'