Week 44.10 2nd November 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘In winter I get up at night, and dress by yellow candle light……
……..In summer, quite the other way. I have to go to bed by day’

So wrote Scottish poet and author Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his poems for children. Last Saturday evening (30th October) we put our clocks back an hour, giving us all an extra hour in bed, and bringing nightfall an hour earlier into the afternoon – a process that will continue inexorably until just before Christmas.

We can’t do anything about the period of daylight each day shortening in the winter and lengthening again with the spring and summer. We can though decide for ourselves how to alter our activities – ruled by our clocks – to make the most of what daylight there is. Is it more helpful to have the longer period of daylight in the afternoon and evening, or first thing in the morning? In the summer we have no doubt about it. Most of us don’t want broad daylight at 4.00 a.m. but we do appreciate the ability to work or enjoy outdoor leisure activities in the summer evenings, so we put our clocks forward an hour, bringing daylight an hour later in the morning and putting off dusk until between 9.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m. in May, June and July.

At the end of October we put those clocks back an hour to Greenwich Mean Time. Darkness, often enhanced by leaden overcast skies, advances into mid-afternoon.

During World War II every minute of daylight counted – especially for those working on the land. We put our clocks forward two hours in the summer (Double Summer Time) and brought them back just one hour to what we now call British Summer Time, in the winter. I remember when I returned from Germany in 1945 finding that it was still light at 10.30 p.m. in June!

After the war we experimented with British Summer Time throughout the year, from 1968 till 1971, but in 1972 reverted to British Summer Time in the summer months and Greenwich Mean Time in the winter. Attempts have been made to bring back the wartime Single and Double Summer Time but all have so far failed. This year though the idea has been revived and is thought to have a reasonable chance of success. We are again in crisis and once again we need every minute of daylight we can get both for work and leisure. In addition, it has been calculated that with lighter evenings, less energy will be used, and as there would be a lighter ‘rush-hour’ there would be fewer road accidents and fewer casualties. Children would be safer coming home in daylight throughout the year.

Strongest opposition comes from Scotland where it is pointed out that children would be going to school in darkness as it wouldn’t get light there till as late as 10.00 a.m. There’s nothing that can be done about the fact that the further north you are, the shorter is each winter’s day and, conversely, the longer each summer’s day. If the Scots prefer children to come home, rather than go to school, in darkness it would surely be possible to make Scottish school hours from 10.00 a.m. till 5.00 p.m. instead of 9.00 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. Could it be that last Saturday was the very last time that we shall have to put our clocks back to Greenwich Mean Time?

'Never mind the offender. Let’s punish the whistle-blower?’

Years ago, when I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, the usual initial response of any Council tenant about whom a complaint had been made, was not to deny or justify his or her activities but to demand indignantly ‘Who told you that?’

It seems that much more distinguished people react in precisely the same way when their actions, or their failure to take action, are revealed to the public gaze. Thousands of documents, leaked from British and American Forces operating in Iraq and recently published by Wikileaks, revealed that captured Iraqi insurgents had been handed over to their compatriots in the knowledge that they would be mistreated or tortured, and that on at least one occasion Iraqi insurgents trying to surrender had been gunned down by a US helicopter gunship. It has been upon Wikileaks, and upon the news media publishing the content of the leaked material, that the wrath of the Establishment, particularly in the USA, has been focussed (‘Arrest Wikileaks’ head and try him for treason!’ was the predictable demand of some right-wing Republicans).

Wikileaks is accused of being unpatriotic. Its revelations would assist El Quaida and similar organisations in their recruiting campaigns. I suppose that they might have done so had not the insurgents already been well aware of what was going on. Unless we really believe that not one of the victims of this misuse had ever been released or had escaped, the insurgents are sure to have known what was happening – and will have already used it in their recruiting campaigns. Had they told us about the abuse we would simply have denounced the revelation as lying propaganda.

It is those who committed these war crimes and those who failed to seek out and punish the perpetrators, who have endangered the lives of our troops. It is they who have encouraged recruitment to the insurgents and the terrorists. It is significant that, in all the thousands of words condemning the whistle blowers, there has not been a single suggestion that the accusations are untrue.

Although the focus of the press has been on the misuse of prisoners and the slaughter of insurgents trying to surrender, a very large number of cases of ‘friendly fire’ also feature in the leaked papers. Between 2004 and 2006 United States and other coalition forces mistakenly attacked British forces on at least eleven occasions. Attempting to overtake US vehicles appears to have been a particularly hazardous venture. Early in 2004 three British vehicles overtook some Czech trucks near the Kuwait border and found themselves held up by a slow-moving American convoy. Attempting to pull out and overtake they were threatened by a US soldier with a heavy machine gun! This happened three times despite the clearly visible British military number plates on their vehicles. Later in the same year British vehicles were fired on in the same area and under similar circumstances, on three occasions from American convoys and once from a Bulgarian one.

It seems that ‘our boys’ in Iraq learned to regard these attacks from their allies with true British phlegm. In February 2005 a report from a three-vehicle British convoy about being strafed by an American gunner, concluded laconically, ‘both convoys continued on their journeys without stopping’.

Friendly Fire!

The ‘friendly fire’ revealed by Wikileaks seems, thank goodness, to have been remarkably ineffective. Perhaps itchy trigger fingers tend to be on shaky hands! Sadly, not all friendly fire is like that. There have been far too many incidents – culminating in the recent death of the kidnapped Aid Worker killed in a bungled rescue attempt – in which soldiers and innocent civilians have been killed by bombs, shells or bullets from their ‘own side’. Nor is it purely a recent phenomenon.

Thursday of next week (11th November) is what we used to call ‘Armistice Day’ when, at eleven in the morning (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) in 1918, the guns of World War I were silenced and four years of unparalleled carnage came to an end. On the following Sunday (14th Nov.) at War Memorials and in places of worship throughout our land, we shall be remembering and honouring the memory of those in the forces who lost their lives in two world wars, and in the armed conflicts that have gone on and continue to go on, ever since. A verse from Laurence Binyon’s To the Fallen will be recited again, and again, and again, together with the sounding of The Last Post, a verse and a trumpet call that never fail to stir the emotions of any old soldier – including myself.

They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Well, I am one of those who were left. I have grown old, age has wearied me – and I do remember them.

There were between seven and eight hundred of us in the 67th Medium Regiment RA. We were all young men mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, from Ipswich and the coastal area of East Suffolk who – with patriotic fervour – had volunteered for the Territorial Army when war threatened. We had been called up for full-time service on 2nd September 1939, the day before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. One hundred of us were destined never to see Suffolk again.

On 21st June 1942, after six months almost continuous action in the Egypt/Libya border area, we were over-run in Tobruk by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrikakorps and ordered by our garrison commander to put our guns out of action, burn our vehicles and surrender to the Germans. I remember as we walked disconsolately along the desert track to the prisoner of war ‘cage’, a German soldier called out (a little enviously I thought!), ‘Hey Tommy, cheer up. For you zee war iss ovair’. Little did he, or we, know that we were all just entering the most perilous part of our army careers.

We had had battle casualties of course, but not very many considering how much action we had seen. By far the majority of those one hundred fatal casualties occurred after we had been taken prisoner. We lost a few in a diphtheria epidemic in a transit prison camp near Benghazi. We lost rather more of starvation related disease in vast prisoner of war concentration camps in Italy. One or two died in industrial accidents in working camps, at factories and on railway sidings in Germany, several, who had found themselves in POW camps in Poland, died of hunger and exposure as they were marched westward during the bitter winter of 1944/’45 to avoid their being liberated by the inexorably advancing Soviet Army.

No less than half of my regiment’s casualties though died as a result of ‘friendly fire’. In November 1942, as PoWs, they were loaded onto the Italian steamer SS Scillin in Tripoli Harbour, to be transported to prison camps in Italy. Halfway across the Mediterranean the Scillin was torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine! The fifty from the 67th Medium Regiment RA were by no means the only PoWs on board the ill-fated vessel. A very few were rescued by the submarine but some 680 British and South African prisoners were drowned by ‘friendly fire’ that day.

I survived all those perils and have lived to remember fallen comrades whose graves are to be found in North Africa, throughout Italy and Central Europe, and others who have no grave but the ocean. I have visited both Italy and Germany in peacetime and found friendship and hospitality in both. I now have good friends in Germany and I have a little German honorary nephew (aged 1) and niece (aged 4). It has been estimated that 50 million people – men, women and little children, combatants and civilians, of every country and every race – died directly or indirectly as a result of World War II. Is the world of 2010 so much better than that of 1938 as to have made all that human sacrifice worthwhile? Looking back over the years, I ask, ‘Was it all worth it? And could it ever happen again?

I recently read a ‘reader’s letter’ in the East Anglian Daily Times in which the writer (who I suspect was in his forties or fifties) claimed that the servicemen and women of World War II, had fought for a free and independent UK, and were being betrayed by those who were now urging ever-closer ties with the European mainland. Unlike that letter writer I had been one of those servicemen. I had thought that I was taking part in a world-wide struggle to end the petty nationalism of which Nazism and Fascism were extreme examples, and to create a new united Europe of co-operation, freedom and peace, a precursor of the day when, as Alfred Lord Tennyson had put it a century and a half earlier,

The war-drums throb no more and the battle flags are furled,

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’

Week 43 10 26th October 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘We’re all in it together?’

I have to confess that when the Chancellor of the Exchequer finally announced his spending review on 20th October, my first feelings were of relief. The cuts didn’t, at first glance, seem quite as bad as had been expected. Government Departments, for instance, had been asked to cut only 19 percent of their spending when, just a fortnight earlier, the prime minister himself had suggested that those cuts would be 25 percent. Pensioners winter fuel allowances were untouched, as were our free prescriptions, tv licences and bus passes!

Looking back over the years though, I remembered that whenever unpopular finance measures had been introduced, they had never been quite as awful as had been predicted. The former Public Relations Officer in me entertained the cynical thought that some of that gloomy prior speculation may have been deliberately promoted, so that our feelings of dismay when the facts were revealed would be tempered by those of relief. We had been encouraged to expect even worse.

One cut that was deeper than had been anticipated has been in central government support for local authorities. This is to be cut, not by the anticipated 25 but by 26 percent; only one percent – but one percent of a very large sum is quite a lot. The effects of this cut won’t be noticed for months, perhaps not for a year or two. And then, when refuse collections are halved, broken paving stones are not replaced, the needs of the very young and the very old are neglected, libraries and leisure centres are closed down or survive only by introducing crippling charges to users, it won’t be central government that will be blamed but ‘that lot at the Town Hall’.

Among the local authorities whose governmental support will be cut is our own Essex County Council. We now learn that they were millions of pounds ‘in the red’ even before this financial crisis hit us. Surprised? I’m not. Jetting influential councillors and top officials half-way round the world to stay in luxury hotels, establishing an office in mainland China to encourage Essex exports (has it, in fact, found us any markets?), setting up a bank, taking over failing Post Offices, and putting self congratulatory adverts on tv cost money. What a pity that, unlike the Government, they can’t blame the debt on the profligacy of the previous Labour administration! The County Council is, of course, responsible for the care and support of the elderly and disabled. I’ll just have to try my very hardest keep out of a care home and maintain my present degree of independence for whatever remains of my life. I’d be unwise to count on much Social Service support!

There are plenty of people who will suffer – really suffer – as a result of this spending review. They are the people, and the families, who survive on the benefits that are to be reduced or eliminated. Some of them no doubt are scroungers who have chosen a life of squalid idleness, funded by benefit fraud and minor crime. I shall be very surprised if these are any more than a small minority. Most, I think, lack saleable skills, are mentally, physically or emotionally inadequate, or have been just plain unlucky. Some would undoubtedly take any job that was offered. But none is offered. And if there is one thing that can be predicted with certainty, it is that the coming months will bring fewer jobs and more unemployed.

Those of us who were brought up in loving homes with parents, however poor, who valued education and wanted their offspring ‘to get on in the world’ often don’t realize how very, very lucky we have been. It is those who didn’t have those advantages, those who drew a losing ticket in the lottery of life, who will have to suffer most to free us from the economic prison into which we have been led by avaricious financiers, and myopic politicians incapable of looking beyond the next election.

Saving the Planet! (and saving on gas bills)

From time to time there are features in the popular press ‘exposing the renewable energy racket’. According to the authors, all this business about the need for alternative sources of energy and the savings, or even profit, that can be made by solar power or wind turbine installation is illusory. There’s rarely enough sun or wind in Britain to make either source of power profitable. Better by far to install double-glazing and draught proofing, and rely on tried-and-tested gas or oil (‘there are still plenty of reserves of both in the world!) for space and water heating. What rubbish!

I know nothing about privately owned wind-turbines in the back garden, or roofs with their sunward slopes covered with solar panels; heating homes and hot water and selling surplus electricity back to the national suppliers. My experience is limited to a single small solar water heating system that I had installed in my bungalow just before Easter in 2009. I knew that I was unlikely to live long enough to see it recover the capital cost of its installation, but I thought that it would add value to my home and that its saving would probably exceed the meagre interest that I was receiving from the ‘rainy-day-fund’ in my Building Society account. It has fulfilled all my expectations.

On the southern slope of my bungalow roof I have a solar panel and two photoelectric cells, one on each side of it. An antifreeze solution is pumped in a closed circuit through the solar panel to heat the water in a heavily insulated storage cylinder in the roof space. This cylinder is connected to my main storage cylinder so that when domestic hot water is drawn off for baths, showers, washing and so on, preheated water flows into the main storage cylinder. During sunny summer days, sufficient water is heated to meet all domestic hot water needs. Even in the winter the domestic water supply is preheated, so that less fuel is needed to bring the water in the main storage cylinder up to the required temperature.

There are, in fact, two electric pumps, both activated by the photoelectric cells on the roof. One circulates the antifreeze solution between the solar panel and the new storage cylinder in the roof-space, the other exchanges the water between the new storage cylinder and the main storage cylinder, when the temperature of the water in the upper cylinder is ten degrees Celsius higher than that in the main cylinder. This means that there is little wastage of cold water when the hot taps are turned on, and that, on warm and sunny days, I have two cylinders – between 50 and 60 gallons in all – of stored solar heated hot water. Temperature sensors, connected to a control panel in my airing cupboard, switch the two pumps on and off.

The completed system is complex but the principle on which it operates is straightforward enough. I described a very basic solar water heating system in my ‘David and Charles Manual of Home Plumbing’ and my ‘Teach Yourself – Plumbing’, published way back in the 1980s. Then though, I knew nothing about photoelectric cells or electronic control. Nor, I think, had anyone at that time conceived the idea of the second pump. My solar system is now working perfectly – though I wouldn’t pretend that it didn’t have plenty of teething troubles, to which the installers (Solar Power (UK) Ltd. of Rayne, Braintree) gave prompt and painstaking professional attention.

I pay my gas and electricity bills together by direct debit monthly to one supplier, Eon through an ‘Age Concern’ account. Eighteen months ago I was paying £110 per month. A year ago, when my solar heating system had been installed but was still having teething problems, my monthly payment was reduced to £70. I have just been informed that, from 1st December this year, I shall be paying £53 a month only – and that is after a long, hard winter and a far-less-than-perfect summer. The Building Society annual interest on the capital cost of the installation hadn’t been anything like the £684 annually that solar power is saving me – and that saving is tax-free!

Let no one tell me solar water heating doesn’t pay. Mine certainly does!

Writing about tax-free savings…….

…….reminded me that among the features of the Spending Review that brought joy to the hearts of all of us pensioners, was the retention of our Winter Fuel Allowance, free bus passes, free tv licences and free medical prescriptions. The national press had prophesied that the first two of these might well be dropped or at least means tested.

However, my sense of satisfaction was severely dented when I read the headline in one of the dailies that I trust, ‘Disabled and sick pay the price to save winter fuel allowance’. I read on: The main losers are those receiving Employment and Support Allowance, a payment of up to £97 a week for those unable to work because of ill health or disability. Under the changes, claimants will receive the benefit for only 12 months………..At the end of that time, some of those still claiming will either be forced to find work or given the Job Seekers’ Allowance instead, meaning they could be around £30 a week worse off. Others will be given a slice of the old benefit under a means tested basis. All of this comes on top of the £11bn chopped from the welfare budget in June’s emergency budget; cuts to the disability living allowance, housing benefit and child benefit, and a £3.2bn tax credit squeeze.

Is the un-means-tested winter fuel allowance paid to us pensioners, at the expense of others many of who may be worse off than at least some of ourselves? Ought we to receive a universal benefit, whatever our circumstances may be, while others lose theirs or are severely means tested? Should our eligibility for winter fuel allowance be means tested, or limited to those disabled or over a rather higher age than at present? I don’t like means-tested benefits. They are expensive to administer and some who really do need the extra money might be reluctant to fill in the required forms, disclosing their poverty. We oldies are sometimes proud!

I suggest a fairer idea would be to make the winter fuel benefit taxable, though I suspect that the suggestion will outrage many of my fellow pensioners. Our state retirement pension is already ‘means tested’ in that it is added onto any other income that we may have, and income tax is deducted from the total. Why not treat winter fuel allowances, in the same way? Those who have no private pension or other income to supplement their state pension would continue to get their benefit with no deductions. PAYE would deduct the appropriate sum from the total incomes of the better-off at source. I would still, I think, get about two thirds of my present winter fuel allowance. Others, whose private pension or other income bring them within the higher tax band, would retain about half of theirs.

It is a system that would surely be reasonable and not too difficult to administer. Why not apply it to other ‘universal’ benefits? The main objection that I can see is that our current income tax system needs to have more income ‘bands’ and that those who receive (I can’t bring myself to say ‘earn’) over a million pounds a year, pay just the same rate on their taxable income as the inhabitants of ‘Middle England’ with an income of perhaps £50,000 a year. It is a reform that could certainly be introduced by a resolute government that was not blinded by billionaires!

How the ‘other half’ lives!

How appropriate that just as the Chancellor was telling us all to tighten our belts, the Supreme Court in London was ruling on the divorce settlement of a couple of millionaires! The marriage of Katrin Radmacher, who is said to be worth more than £100 million and Nicolas Granatino had ended. The latter had hoped that the Supreme Court would help him get his hands on what he considered to be a fair share of his former wife’s fortune.

He failed, but we don’t have to worry. He won’t be joining the queue for ‘benefit’ from a hard-up British government. His ‘failure’ leaves him with a million pounds in cash, the use of a £2.5 million property rent-free for 15 years, a holiday home in the south of France until the youngest child of the former marriage is 22, a personal income of £76,000 a year for the next fifteen years, and child maintenance of £70,000 a year even though he is not the primary carer. He will also get £25,000 for a car, and most of his debts paid of by his ex-wife. Most of us, I think, could manage to live with that kind of failure! ‘We’re all in this together’, says the Chancellor. I doubt if Mr Granatino and the former Mrs Granatino, beset by their own personal problems, have even noticed that the society in which they live has a few financial problems of its own. If I may make a minor alteration the last verse of a once-popular folk ballad:

It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure.
It’s the poor wot ‘as to pay.
Thus it was in former ages
And it’s just the same today!

Tendring Topics…..on line

Helping the Old and Disabled
Flatford Mill, once the home and birthplace of landscape painter John Constable, has been one of my favourite destinations for over seventy-five years! In my mid-teens I was an enthusiastic fresh-water angler. Usually I exercised my skills on the River Gipping, near to my Ipswich home. Occasionally though, taking a packed lunch from my mum, I would cycle along the London Road to East Bergholt and on to Flatford, to see what the Stour had to offer. The headmaster of the Northgate School, my Ipswich Secondary School, was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Accordingly he established a tradition that all candidates for the Matric (the national school leaving examination, usually taken at 16) cycled to Flatford for the day before the exams started (we were all cyclists in those days) and spent it on the river in hired skiffs.


In adult life, although I no longer fished, I found Flatford Mill as attractive as ever, and drove there on a number of occasions with friends and family, sometimes again hiring a skiff for a leisurely row up-river to Dedham. In recent years, I have had to rely on others to provide transport. Both my sons have driven me there on a number of occasions, reviving old memories.

Progressively limited mobility has meant that I can no longer stride over that wooden bridge and stroll along the river bank from which I had, years before, cast my fishing line. I can now do little more than walk, unsteadily and with the aid of a stick, from the disabled car park to the riverside restaurant for refreshment, and back to the car park again. On our most recent visit though we spotted, standing near to the restaurant, an electric mobility scooter with a notice announcing that its use was free, ‘enquire at the Bridge Cottage Shop’.

I have been using a mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) for years. My son enquired, and a friendly and helpful young lady showed me how the controls worked – not quite like mine but easy enough to use. She asked me a few questions, watched me do a short test drive (to make sure that I wasn’t going to drive straight into the river!) and entrusted me with the key!

The range of the mobility scooter is a little limited. The wooden bridge giving access to the Essex bank of the river is, for instance, out of bounds. However one can drive along the lane behind Bridge Cottage and the restaurant and shop, to Willy Lott’s Cottage and to Flatford Mill itself. Because maximum speed of the scooter is that of a comfortable walking pace, accompanying friends and relatives have no difficulty keeping up with it. The Mill has for some years accommodated a ‘field studies’ education centre where my then fifteen-year-old elder son once spent a week with a school party during his final years at Clacton County High School.

From the Mill it is possible to go on a pleasant circular route through the countryside, returning to the Mill and eventually to Bridge Cottage, where the mobility scooter is returned to its owners.

I think that, combined with the nearby car park for disabled drivers or their passengers, and the adjacent disabled toilet, it provides a valuable service for no-longer-agile visitors that deserves all the publicity it can get. Not many beauty spots and tourist destinations do as much.

Flatford Mill, viewed from the Essex bank of the Stour

‘Thanks be to God!’
On Tuesday of last week (12th October) when I posted the predecessor of this blog on the internet, the release of the thirty-three entombed Chilean miners was imminently expected. Originally it had been thought that the relief shaft through which they were to be lifted to freedom wouldn’t be completed till Christmas. Progress though, had been much better than expected. By 12th October (over two months ahead of schedule!), the relief shaft had reached the man-made cavern in which the miners were confined. A rescue capsule had been designed and manufactured and the liberation of the miners, one at a time, might possibly begin within hours. I had been delighted but had decided not to refer to it in my blog. There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip! I had seen too many unforeseen last-minute disasters!

I woke up soon after 4.00 a.m. on the 13th. It was long before I needed to get up but I knew from experience that there would be no more sleep for me. I wondered what was happening in Chile. There was bound to be something on BBC World News. I switched on my bedside radio to learn that the first trapped miner had already been brought to the surface. The second was on his way! And so it continued all day – a smooth, perfectly organised rescue operation. The target had been one rescue an hour, but this was exceeded. It took less than twenty-four hours for every one of those thirty-three miners to be snatched from what had seemed likely to be their grave.

I watched much of the rescue on tv. It was a wonderful to see the tearful joy on the freed miners’ faces, and on those of their parents, wives or girlfriends, and their little sons or daughters, as they were reunited after weeks of fear-filled separation. Some of the freed miners knelt on the ground and crossed themselves, thanking God for their deliverance. ‘How ridiculous to credit God with this rescue!’ must have thought the disciples of antifaith zealot Richard Dawkins. ‘It obviously owed everything to the skill and determination of we humans, and nothing whatsoever to the imaginary world of the supernatural!

Really? Then who, or what, was it that had persuaded those humans to devote hundreds of thousands of pounds, the experience and skills of an army of rescue workers, and weeks of potentially profitable time, to the rescue of just thirty-three poor Chilean miners? It certainly wasn’t fundamentalist Darwinism. Those miners had lost the possibility of contributing to the infinitely slow evolutionary process of perfecting the human gene – the sole ‘purpose’ of our existence. Put their loss down to experience and get on with living.

Nor was it the service of Mammon, the third millennium’s most popular god. Mammon’s three abiding virtues are Productivity, Profitability and Cost Effectiveness (and the greatest of these is Cost Effectiveness!) Never was there a less cost effective exercise than that of bringing those Chilean miners – thirty-three low value human resource units - to safety.

I suggest that it was what we Quakers describe as ‘the promptings of love and truth in our hearts’ (sometimes called ‘that of God’ or ‘the Inward Light of Christ’), God’s gift to every man, woman and child in the world. It was this that had inspired and urged on those untiring rescuers and those who had organised and funded their efforts. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me!’

Centuries ago, St Theresa had said, ‘In this world God has no hands but ours to do his bidding, no feet but ours to run his errands’

Of course the miners were right to thank God for his goodness. So should we all.

‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind’

That answer, provided by Bob Dylan in a famous ‘protest’ song of the early 1960s is certainly part of the answer to the solution of Britain’s energy problems. It could also help solve some of Tendring District’s economic and employment problems.

Tendring Council is bidding, against competition from Germany, the Netherlands and other parts of the UK, for Harwich to be developed as a ‘wind farm port’, building and maintaining the hundreds of wind farms already built, in the process of being built, or planned for the future along England’s east coast.

Council leader Neil Stock is reported as saying that the potential is enormous. ‘It’s a real opportunity for the town and would bring in skilled jobs to revitalise what is a struggling area…..we are talking hundreds of jobs and, with the boost to the economy, it would mean thousands’.

In Harwich’s favour would be the fact that it is already an internationally known port, and its central and easily accessible position convenient for the Continent, with a major wind farm offshore at Clacton, and positioned midway between the wind turbines off the Kent coast, and those off the coast of north-east England. It could be developed where a new container port had been proposed at Bathside Bay. Mr Stock said that the current economic climate meant that that container port couldn’t have been provided ‘for at least a generation’.

INTend, Tendring Council’s private enterprise regeneration agency, has been given the job of turning those ambitious hopes into reality – a brilliant opportunity to prove to its critics (including me!) that it really can earn its keep.

The Council’s bid has the backing of Harwich and North Essex MP Bernard Jenkins. Perhaps it is just as well that Harwich is no longer within the constituency of Richard Carswell – Clacton’s climate-change-denying MP. I fear that he might have been unable to show much enthusiasm for the development of an alternative source of energy.

Week 41.10 12th October 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘How will the Chancellor’s child benefit move hit you?’

This was the question posed by the daily Coastal Gazette to its readers on Tuesday 5th October, the day that Chancellor George Osborne broke it to the Conservative Party Conference that from 2013 higher rate taxpayers would not be eligible for Child Benefit. Predictably the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph saw it as yet another assault on ‘Middle England’. Local readers of the Coastal Gazette however seem to have taken the news much more philosophically.

The higher rate of income tax comes into force on incomes of about £44,000 a year. I reckon that a substantial number of Gazette readers think in terms of a weekly wage rather than an annual salary. For them £44,000 a year is roughly £850 a week, not the sort of sum that many of them find in their wage packets on payday. Unsurprisingly they see the Chancellor’s decision as a sound one. Nina Hamilton, who lives not far from me in Old Road, is reported as saying, ‘People who are bringing in about a grand a week don’t really need the help in my opinion. Child allowance makes a big difference to people on lower incomes’. Amanda Snelling, a mother of one, from Great Clacton, made a similar point: ‘I’m all for these cuts for people earning upwards of £40K a year. If they’re on that money then what does a £20 a week benefit really mean to them anyway? It’s good news for the working classes who rely on that money’

Those who definitely will see the Chancellor’s proposals as unfair will be ‘Middle England’ mums whose husband’s income only just comes into that upper tax band and who feel that being at home for their growing children is more important than, for instance, owning a second car, living in a rather posher home or taking regular holidays in the Caribbean. Next door to them, in the leafy suburb in which they both live, may be a family with a total income of £60,000 a year – but it comes from a man and wife both working and earning £30,000 a year each. They will still get their child allowance because no one in the household is on the higher tax band! ‘Fair’, did I hear David Cameron say?

In my younger days, certainly in families from ‘Middle England’ and in many working class ones too, the wife made and maintained the home and looked after the children. The husband was, and was expected to be, the ‘breadwinner’. My mother never had a job other than home making once she was married. Neither did my wife. What a medieval idea that seems today! There was much less juvenile delinquency though in those days, many fewer schoolgirl pregnancies and many fewer teenage sufferers from alcoholism or sexually transmitted diseases.

One thing that has been made plain by those who protested indignantly at the Chancellor’s proposals, and those who thought that they were a good idea, was that everyone welcomes cuts in services and benefits – provided that they always affect other people. And that this is true of wealthy and poor alike! This will no doubt be confirmed when more details of ‘the cutbacks’ are known on 20th of this month. I really don’t envy the Chancellor in his task! He can’t possibly please everybody and he can’t possibly be fair unless he pleases nobody!

Some Cheerful News – for now!

There isn’t much good news about these days but it was nice to spot a small news item on an inside page of the Clacton Gazette announcing that the village of St Osyth has been listed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the best endowed by nature as a place to live. It has, says the report, low levels of air pollution and offers its residents ‘exhilarating sea walks’.

Its outstanding positive feature though is its low rainfall, at 20in or 513mm, the very lowest in Britain and (as I used proudly to claim when I was Tendring Council's Public Relations Officer) was comparable with that of the fringes of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert! If you prefer a nearer comparison, Britain’s wettest spot, Crib Goch in Snowdonia (an area where thousands go on holiday each year) has almost 90 times as much annual rainfall at 177in or 4500mm.

It isn’t quite so good of course for keen gardeners. I remember, in the distant days when I was one of their number, surveying my parched lawn and wilting runner beans after weeks of drought, and reflecting that there were snags about cultivating a garden just three miles from the centre of Britain’s driest location!

It won’t, of course, affect the weather but I reckon that if the present owner of St. Osyth Manor gets his way and doubles the total number of homes in the village, St Osyth will become a lot less desirable place in which to live. Perhaps though, as Britain’s population grows, expansion on those lines is inevitable. I won’t be around to see it, but I think it possible that before the end of this century the village community will have been swallowed up in Clacton and will have become one of the town’s more attractive suburbs. 'Oh brave new world!'

Chip off the old block?

It can be disconcerting to find traits in your offspring that are replicas of your own. It can, of course, also be extremely satisfying. I have been more than pleased that my two sons have both chosen socially useful careers motivated by job satisfaction rather than by financial gain, and that my three grandchildren have followed in their parents’ footsteps. I am pleased too that, although no longer ‘go-to-meeting’ Quakers, my sons pursue what I consider to be the Quaker values of honesty, plain speaking and concern for others. In that respect I fear that it was their mother rather than I who set the example.

A little while ago I confessed in this column that I was an opinionated old man and one who was not content to keep his opinions to himself. Pete, my elder son, is beginning to display similar symptoms. I tend to spread my opinions via this blog and in the correspondence columns of the press. He – more usefully perhaps – shares his with his member of parliament. I should perhaps mention that in many respects, the present Prime Minister would consider Pete to be an ideal role model. Made redundant from a very senior post in local government housing administration, he launched his own IT consultancy, gathering round himself a team of IT experts experienced in public administration, to solve the problems of local, police and other public authorities. HUB Solutions Ltd ( www.HUBSolutions.co.uk ) now has satisfied clients throughout England and Scotland and an office in Glasgow as well as in London. This doesn’t mean that, any more than I do, he supports all – or even many - of the policies of David Cameron and the coalition that he heads. Very shortly after the General Election he wrote to his local MP, Lib.Dem. Lynne Featherstone about the coalition’s axing of the school building and renovation programme and received a very rapid and positive reply. Now he has written again in the wake of policies announced at the Conservative Party Conference. Below, slightly abbreviated, is his letter.

Dear Lynne,

I wrote to you shortly after the General Election, in which I voted for you, concerned at the decision your Government has made to cut the entire School Building Programme. I appreciated your prompt reply. However, I feel that policy pronouncements of the last week require me to tell you that the latest decisions of your partners in the Coalition seem to me to move so far in the wrong direction, that it is difficult for me to understand how you can remain a party to such a regime.

I am sure that I am not alone in noticing, that while the Prime Minister says that the burden of cuts must be shared by all, in fact a particular sector of the community – those with children in their care – has been relentlessly singled out for sacrifice. This anti-child policy started with the immediate and apparently careless decision to cut the school building programme. Since it became apparent that this could not even be accurately listed, it could hardly have been carefully assessed.

The Chancellor, in his first speech to the House, announced a cap on Housing Benefit, knowing that it would mainly impact upon families with several children living in central London properties, who would, as a result, be forced to move out – possibly away from extended family and schools, which are so important to children. I am sure that you are aware that it is practically impossible for a Benefit claimant to start a private tenancy on a high rent, as very few landlords would allow that. Therefore, the arbitrary cap would mainly affect those who were working and suffered misfortune such as illness, separation or redundancy.

The Chancellor this week announced two further policies that deliberately and quite carelessly extend this strategy, placing an arbitrary cap on Benefits receivable, and removing entitlement of Child Benefit from households in which any member is paying the higher rate of tax.
I have yet to see any attempt to share the “national sacrifice” with single young people and childless couples, who often have a high disposable income much of which is spent on entirely unnecessary luxuries. Just as relevant, if we are genuinely concerned about people who should be more motivated to get a job, I haven’t seen anything to encourage single young people, neither in work nor in full time education, who are potentially highly mobile and who have very little justification for claiming benefits, to seek employment.

I believe that decisions such as these which focus on the most vulnerable in our society are not just a matter of political judgement – or misjudgement – but are quite immoral in their motivation, carelessly indifferent to the impact of their application, and nothing whatever to do with the financial crisis.

I admire the loyalty that Liberal Democrats have shown to the concept of a coalition in the national interest, but morality demands that loyalty must have its limits. It doesn’t look as if the Liberal Democrats were even consulted on any of the policy pronouncements I have listed and I would urge you to consider the threshold at which, from a Liberal Democrat point of view, the Coalition is no longer serving the National interest. I believe that you can compromise on judgement, but not on the issues of fundamental morality to which I have referred..

Yours sincerely

Peter Hall

It is all stuff that I would have been happy to have written myself, except that I hadn’t realized the effect that capping housing benefit would have on poorer households in central London. But there, I haven’t had experience of housing administration in central London. Pete has. I am glad too that he has drawn attention to the fact that well-off ‘singletons’ and the DINKY (Double Income, No Kids Yet) Brigade seem so far to be escaping the cuts that are threatening those with families.

Looking at the bigger picture, it leaves me wondering whether financial measures affecting the great majority of us who are neither the seriously wealthy nor even residents in the very comfortable ‘Middle England’ of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, should be under the control of a Chancellor from a privileged background who has never experienced poverty or been in a situation where every penny (or even every fiver!) counts.

A Bungled ‘Rescue’

I can’t stop thinking about that Aid Worker, full of compassion for the Afghan people; kidnapped by those she was trying to help and then killed by our NATO allies in a bungled rescue attempt. The final indignity was surely the ever more detailed lies that were told about the manner of her death. (‘The embrace of death’, ‘Clutched to the bosom of a suicide bomber in the hour of rescue’) until, so it appears, photographic evidence suggested that she was killed by a fragmentation grenade hurled by one of her rescuers into the room in which she was held captive. Resolutely casting aside such thoughts as ‘trigger-happy Yanks’, there are two or three questions to which I would dearly like to know the answers.

The need for her rescue was said to have been urgent because she had been about to be transferred across the frontier into Pakistan. Isn’t the Pakistan government supposed to be our loyal ally who has recently fought a vastly expensive (both in resources and in human life) campaign clearing their border area of Taliban terrorists?

Why on earth were fragmentation grenades carried by troops engaged in a rescue mission? Stun grenades and stun guns, certainly – automatic rifles and hand guns, probably – the rescuers wouldn’t have known what armed resistance they might have encountered immediately before or after the rescue attempt. Tear gas or similar grenades, possibly. Surely not fragmentation grenades, deadly weapons used at relatively close range and guaranteed to kill or maim anyone, friend of foe, in their immediate vicinity!

Had it not been for that photographic evidence, we would still believe those lies about that aid worker’s death at the hands of her dastardly captors as the heroic rescuers drew near. How many other lies have we been told, I wonder, about this unwinnable war that is looking more like ‘Vietnam’ (except that then there were no British troops involved) as every day passes?

Week 40.10 5th October 2010

Tendring Topics………on line

North of the Border!

Although I was born in Tidworth, a small garrison town on Salisbury Plain not far from Stone Henge, and have lived for the past fifty-five years in north Essex (fifty-four of them in my present home in Clacton’s Dudley Road), I still think of myself as a ‘Suffolk man’. My parents moved to Suffolk when I was five. I went to school and to my first job in Suffolk and I served in a Suffolk Territorial Regiment in World War II. After the war I lived and worked in Suffolk from 1948 to 1955. My elder son was born in the county and when I become heated my accent becomes more and more that of a rural Suffolk ‘swede-basher’! Consequently I probably take a greater interest in what is going on across our northern border than most Tendring residents.

A few weeks ago I commented on the problems that Essex County Council was encountering in its attempt to save money on a huge scale by outsourcing all its IT services to a giant international corporation. Now I learn that Suffolk County Council is outdoing them. They are putting virtually all their services out to private tender. That really is a revolutionary move – and one that horrifies me. The chief remaining function of the Council will presumably consist of occasionally meeting to consider tenders for the running of schools and further education establishments, social services, highways including footpaths and street lighting, refuse disposal and recycling, consumer protection and so on, and on, and on! The council will, I suppose, still need to employ specialist staff to police all these functions and make sure that they are carried out efficiently – or will that be done by yet another private firm, or perhaps by ‘Big Society’ volunteers?

The idea is, of course, based on the assumption that money will be saved because private enterprise is always more efficient than the public service. It seems to have been conveniently forgotten that the current crisis was not created by any failings of the public sector but by the irresponsibility and greed of financial services – arguably the most prestigious (and certainly the best paid!) area of the private sector!

It is clear to me that private enterprise will only do those jobs more cheaply, thus simultaneously saving money for the tax payers and producing profits for its share-holders, by savage reductions in staff numbers and reducing vital services or cutting them out altogether.

When, in the local government reorganisation of the early 1970s the possibility of Tendring District and Colchester becoming part of Suffolk was under consideration, I was one of a small minority in the area who thought it would be a good idea. (Even I though had to admit it would be just a little odd to have Essex University in an adjoining county!)

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am far from being an uncritical admirer of Essex County Council. However, these moves north of the border now make me feel that by staying in Essex on that occasion we may well have had a lucky escape!

Clacton's Martello Tower

Clacton has, of course, more than one Martello Tower – but the best-known one is on the landward side of Marine Parade West, and in front of Clacton Hospital. It has had a somewhat chequered past but it now seems possible that it will have a brighter future. Tendring Council has just granted planning permission for the provision of a tearoom and a museum within the building, and a ‘petting zoo’ in the large dry moat, likely to be especially popular with young children. This enterprise, expected to be up and running for next spring, is the brain-child of Tower leaseholders Roger Ling and Rosalie Robinson in partnership with Paul Nash, owner of the aquarium on Clacton Pier. Early residents of the mini-zoo will be two alpacas, two pigmy goats and two rabbits.
Nobody except me (one of the penalties of outliving most of my contemporaries!) seems to remember that something very similar was attempted there in the past. It was while my younger grandson, now in his late twenties, was still at primary school. It must therefore have been twenty or more years ago. He, with his dad and elder brother, were staying with us on holiday – and the two boys decided to go and see the miniature zoo at the Martello Tower. They came back in some distress, complaining that the few animals that were there were badly housed and, they thought, badly neglected. Shortly after that the Martello Zoo closed.

There is little chance of the present venture meeting a similar fate. Paul Nash, who has a local record of success with the Pier’s aquarium, will care for the animals and be in charge of the petting zoo. He is reported as being delighted with the news that the scheme now has planning permission, ‘It’s fantastic news and has made me very happy. We will have a big opening, hopefully with a celebrity, and it should be a big day’.

My own most vivid memories of that Martello Tower go back to the late 1950s. When I was first appointed as a public health inspector by Clacton Urban District Council, the two existing inspectors, the council’s cleansing foreman, and I, were expected to be the part-time weather observers, each of us doing one week in four throughout the year. For this we were paid the princely sum of £20 a year, on top of our salaries. £20 was worth a good deal more then than it is now but was still a very small and very hard-earned bonus!

That Martello Tower was the Council’s Weather Station. A ‘Stevenson’s Screen’ housing wet and dry, and maximum and minimum thermometers, was installed within a low fence on the grassy slope between the tower and Marine Parade West – near the top and just to the left of the path in my photograph above. A rain gauge was provided on the miniature golf course that in those days existed between the Martello Tower and the Hospital. On the roof of the Tower was a sunshine recorder. This consisted of a glass sphere, 4 or 5 inches in diameter (rather like a fortune teller’s ‘crystal ball’) contained within a framework holding a specially treated strip of cardboard, marked out in hours and minutes. As the sun moved across the sky the glass sphere acted as a magnifying lens, concentrating the sun’s rays onto the card, the progress of a burn-mark on the card giving an accurate record of the hours and minutes of sunshine.

Every evening at 6.00 p.m., Christmas Day and other public holidays alike, the weather observer on duty had to cross the drawbridge, unlock the door to the tower, climb the internal stone steps to the roof (there was no coastguard station there in those days) and change that cardboard sunshine record. It was a pleasant enough job on a summer’s evening but in December or January, by the light of an electric torch, in a howling gale and with rain or snow blowing in the air, it was not a job for the frail, the imaginative or the claustrophobic. It was all too easy to imagine that the ghost of one of the Duke of Wellington's 'redcoats' was watching from the shadows, deciding whether or not this intruder was one of Napoleon’s spies, intent on mischief!

‘All is safely gathered in……

……….e’re the winter storms begin’, says the well-known harvest hymn and most Christian churches will have celebrated their harvest thanksgiving services during the past few weeks.

During my childhood when ‘going to church on Sunday’ was rather more usual than it is today, churches would be packed for the evening ‘Harvest Festival’ service even if on most other Sunday evenings there were plenty of empty pews. We sang the well-loved harvest hymns We plough the fields and scatter…, Come, ye faithful people, come….., All things bright and beautiful….. and, in prayer, we would thank God for his bounty. Keen gardeners among the congregation (my father among them) would have vied with each other to grow enormous potatoes, vegetable marrows and pumpkins, long and perfectly formed runner beans, succulent cabbages and cauliflower, rosy apples and other garden produce with which to adorn the church on that occasion. These offerings were subsequently all passed on to local children’s homes or to hospitals in the area where they were much appreciated.

It is a practice that continues today as these pictures taken in St. James' Parish Church in Clacton last Sunday (3rd October), the day of the church's Harvest festival, demonstrate.

It is surely a good thing for Christians to gather together once a year to thank God for the harvest – and to give some of our surplus to those who need it. We become so used to buying all our food from the nearest supermarket that we tend to forget that everything that we eat and drink comes ultimately from the soil. We have lost the certain knowledge of former years that when a harvest failed, hunger, hardship and death followed. Then, our forebears knew all too well how much reason they had to be thankful when the harvest had been a bountiful one.

In some parts of the world a failed harvest is as devastating today as it was to our forefathers. In today’s global economy widespread crop failure affects us all, even if only by worldwide higher prices. This year climatic change has brought drought and bush fires to the Russian steppe, aborting or destroying crops and compelling the Russian government to embargo grain exports to ensure that there was sufficient left to feed its own people.

That same inexorable climatic change, largely the result of humankind’s own activities (even if our MP thinks otherwise!) has brought about devastating floods in Pakistan, drowning crops over thousands of acres of farm land and resulting in widespread homelessness, sickness and death. It will take all our efforts for several years to help the victims and restore normality – and who can be sure that there will not be equally devastating floods again next year?

Meanwhile, a short distance from the devastated areas a man-made catastrophe rumbles on in neighbouring Afghanistan and threatens to spread beyond that country’s borders. Every week brings its toll of British and American casualties, and every week innocent civilians are killed as our forces strive to destroy an elusive and unidentifiable enemy.

If only all the money, the resources and the energy that is devoted to death and destruction there, could be redirected to the succour of suffering humanity! Just think of the difference that those helicopters, the military transport and the thousands of fit, young, able-bodied young men and women (not to mention the ingenuity and energy expended in making and planting ‘improvised explosive devices’ and creating ambushes!) could make if they were redirected to Pakistan and used to save lives instead of to take them, to rebuild homes instead of destroy them!

Then we really would begin to see the fulfilment of the prayer that, even in this secular society, is uttered daily by the many thousands of faithful Christians:

‘Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven’