Week 34.10 24th August 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Mammon’s Servants?

A month or two ago I expressed my disquiet at the fact that at Clacton’s new Coastal Academy pupils were being offered material prizes, not for outstanding work or extramural activities, but for simply turning up at school on time most days, attending classes and generally behaving themselves. I contrasted that attitude with the situation in developing countries, where education is so valued that children will walk barefoot for miles to sit on mud floors and attend to every word that their teachers utter.

Today’s adult world offers children a thoroughly bad example. Bankers, for example, who receive what most of us would consider to be an extremely handsome salary, have to be offered even more handsome annual bonuses if they are not to up sticks and exercise their talents elsewhere. The same threat is made if it is suggested that their salaries and bonuses might be subject to special taxation. They are, of course, among the first and loudest of the patriots who accuse public service workers of ‘holding the country to ransom’ when they strike for a pound or two extra pay!

It might have been thought that the public service at least would have been free of this extra-payment-for-doing-the-job-properly culture. Not so – top Civil Servants also get ‘performance bonuses’, and the plague has now spread to local government. A few weeks ago I mentioned that at a time of savage cuts in services and an income freeze on rank and file staff, the members of the Essex County Council had awarded themselves increased ‘allowances’ and had also paid out handsome cash bonuses to a favoured few top officials!

The practice has now spread to Tendring District Council. It appears that in addition to the Chief Executive, his Deputy and his Assistant (the Council’s three highest paid officials) there are four departmental chiefs, on salaries of £65,000 a year, who are designated as ‘Performance Champions’. Nigel Brown, Council Spokesman (once my job but I’m glad I haven’t got it now!) explained to the Gazette that the authority’s constitution authorises the Chief Executive to appoint four designated heads of service as ‘Performance Champions’, with a range of additional responsibilities. They may be granted an ‘enhancement in salary’ (a bonus in plain English) not exceeding twenty percent of their salary and for not more than three years. This year they are each getting £13,000 despite a general Council wage and recruitment freeze. What is it for? Making some of their colleagues redundant perhaps?

If that is the Council’s Constitution it is high time that it was amended. An unnamed ‘Council insider’ is reported as having told the Gazette: ‘It seems wrong. They are already well paid and are getting a payment which seems to be made behind people’s backs, especially when others may lose their jobs. Surely they should already be performance champions if they are heads of their service’.

Do ‘top people’ have to be bribed, as well as paid, to give of their best these days? I would have hoped that the satisfaction that comes with a good job well done would have been a sufficient incentive.

Pakistan’s Floods…..and other Charities

Worldwide, the response to the appeal for aid for the victims of Pakistan’s catastrophic floods has, so we are told, been disappointing. Among the reasons suggested for this are appeal fatigue, Pakistan’s perceived association with Islamic terrorism, and a suspicion that Pakistan is a country in which money donated to help the many would be in danger of being siphoned off to further enrich the few. I think that ‘appeal fatigue’ is probably the nearest to the truth. The fact is that there have simply been too many natural and man-made disasters in the past few years; earthquakes, tsunamis, civil wars, floods, mudslides, avalanches – there has been no end to them. Some of them are on going. Haiti is going to need charitable aid for years to come. There is no sign of an end to the humanitarian crises in the Sudan, in central Africa and in the Gaza strip.

Meanwhile, the appeals for Charities nearer home continue to land on our doormats, getting ever more desperate as the world-wide financial crisis reduces their income, and support once regularly received from central and local government dries up. Christian Aid, Oxfam, Cafod, War on Want, The Red Cross, The Salvation Army, charities supporting the very young, the very old, the chronically ill, the dying, the blind, the deaf, the disabled, the homeless, alcoholics, drug abuse victims, ex-service men and women, the RSPCA, the NSPCC, the PDSA, the Lifeboats, the Air Ambulances, the hospitals, the Hospices and so on, and on, and on.

They’re all thoroughly deserving but none of us can hope to support more than a handful of them. All are no doubt hoping for a multi-millionaire patron (the British Legion must be delighted to have found one in Tony Blair!) but all of them know that it is from the masses of generous ordinary people that their continuing support comes. It really isn’t surprising that some people have found that Pakistan is ‘an appeal too far’. Nevertheless the response from the British Government and the British people has surely been generous. We are said to have funded, either officially or through charities, a quarter of the aid that has so far reached the stricken area.

I have wondered why we haven’t heard of a few millions being donated from Pakistan’s wealthy co-religionists in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States – the purchasers of racehorses, country estates and football teams in this country. And isn’t it surprising that Pakistan’s government should have found the millions required to manufacture, develop and maintain a nuclear arsenal but has apparently been unable to prepare adequately for devastating floods – a much more likely peril than nuclear attack. But, of course, that was not a matter about which the unfortunate flood victims were consulted - and if we ever suffer a natural disaster and need international support, the same will be said about us.

Late News - I am pleased to learn that the Pakistan Flood Disaster Appeal is gathering pace and that useful sums of money are now being received. Like Haiti though, it is going to take years to bring Pakistan back to ‘normal’. While it is very unlikely that Haiti will suffer another equally devastating earthquake in the near future, there is no reason at all why Pakistan should not experience a similar inundation next year – or the year after. We really must do something about world climatic change, even if it does upset our local MP and his supporters!

A letter to the Press

I am, let me confess it, an opinionated old man – and I don’t keep my opinions to myself! As well as writing this blog every week, I sometimes find myself writing letters to the Readers’ Letters Pages of the press. Local blog readers may have noticed my occasional contributions to the Daily Coastal Gazette and the Clacton Gazette.

On Wednesday of last week (18th August) the East Anglian Daily Times published one of my letters. It was in response to a correspondent who, while admitting that he wasn’t around at the time, wrote about the relationship between Britain and the USA in World War II. Well, I had been around at the time. I agreed with much of what he said but felt that he had an exaggerated idea of the number of British girls, and married women, who succumbed to the charms of American Servicemen, forgetting their boyfriends or husbands in the forces overseas.

Some, of course, did. Many more though certainly did not. Among them was my girlfriend Heather Gilbert, whom I had met as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl on the day Britain declared war on Germany. She loyally waited for me for the four years that I was overseas, including three as a POW in Italy and Germany, despite the fact that we were not engaged and had no more than a verbal ‘understanding’, and that there was no certainty about when, if ever, I would be home again. With my letter I attached a photograph of Heather in 1942, aged nineteen, to make the point that she would have had no problem finding another boyfriend, American or British, had she wished to do so. The photo had been sent to me at my work camp in Germany and I had been particularly pleased to see that in her lapel she was wearing the miniature Royal Artillery cap-badge brooch that I had given her when we had said goodbye.

In my letter I also mentioned that I had been a member of the 67th Medium Regiment RA, an East Suffolk Territorial Regiment that had been successfully in action in the Egypt/Libya frontier area from November 1941 till June 1942 when we had been part of the Tobruk garrison overwhelmed by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrikakorps.

Within twenty-four hours the letter produced surprising results. There was a phone call from a relative of a former member of the 67th who was researching the regiment’s history. There was another phone call from a former member of the regiment who, like myself, was nearly ninety! We hadn’t known each other. He had been at regimental HQ and I had been a member of a gun team, but it was good to have a chat about old times. We’ll be in touch again.

There was a totally unexpected letter from another nearly nonagenarian whom I had known well as a boy in Ipswich but hadn’t seen or spoken to for some seventy-five years! He was living within half a mile of his childhood home and was anxious to renew contact.

I was most pleased though – and emotionally overwhelmed – by the postcard below from a Mrs Henderson of Norwich. I only wish that she had let me have either her postal address or phone number, so that I could have thanked her, and told her how much her message had meant to me.

Heather would, of course, have been delighted but also totally astonished. She never spent a great deal of time or money on her appearance. The only ‘make-up’ that she ever used was a little face powder if she thought that she had a shiny nose. She very rarely visited a hairdresser and would certainly never have dreamed of going to a manicurist or a ‘beauty parlour'. She made certain that she was always neatly dressed and prepared for any occasion and any company. While she wasn’t as self-sufficient as the Amish teenage girls recently featured on Channel 4 tv, she was an expert with a sewing machine and with needle and thread. That photo was taken in 1942, in the height of World War II and of the blitz, when she was working in central London and living with her parents in the often-bombed suburbs.

She retained her beauty (and her loyal and loving nature) into old age. I was very proud of her though I fear that, as with so many things in this life, I didn’t fully realize how much she meant to me until I lost her after sixty years of marriage. Thank you, Mrs Henderson, for seeing how beautiful she was – and for telling me so.