Week 21 31.5.2011

Tendring Topics……on line


A Birthday to Remember!


My 90th birthday was one that I like to think every member of my family and my German friends, will remember fondly for many years to come. The celebration lasted for three days and involved every member of my immediate family, sons, daughter-in-law and grandchildren, with the exception of grandson Chris in Taiwan and Jo’s partner Siobhan, the latest addition to our family. As a teacher, she was unable to get away in term time. I have no doubt that they were both with us in spirit.

It took place in Zittau, the small German town at the point where the frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic meet where, as a British PoW, I spent the final eighteen months of World War II. Because of my very minor role, as a PoW, in the 500 year long history of Zittau’s treasured Great Lenten Veil (readers of last week’s blog will know about that), the town’s Mayor and other local notables made their own, very considerable, contribution to the celebration of my birthday.



The view from my bedroom window

 My family – elder son Pete, daughter-in-law Arlene, grandson Nick and his Belgian girlfriend Romy, younger son Andy, daughter-in-law Marilyn and granddaughter Jo, and I (eight of us altogether), travelled by separate routes but converged on the Haus am See, a well-appointed hotel in a delightful lakeside location on Zittau’s outskirts on 18th May. Nick, who had made all the arrangements, had arranged for me to have a room on the ground floor overlooking the lake!

The following day was really action packed. In the morning Pete, Arlene, Nick and I had the great pleasure of introducing Andy, Marilyn, Jo and Romy to our friends for many years Frau Ingrid Kulke, her son and daughter-in-law Andreas and Kornelia (Konni) and their lovely children (my honorary nephew and niece) four year old Maja and 18 months old Tomas Friedrich. Maja presented me with a lovely framed photo of her brother and herself and we all enjoyed Frau Kulke’s generous hospitality for lunch



The Mayor and I



Zittau Town Hall is an imposing, and rather intimidating, building in the Prussian style. My wartime memory of it was of filling bags of sand and carrying them up to the roof for fire-fighting; not one of my more pleasurable recollections! Our visit there on 19th May was very different. An external lift took us to – I think – the third storey and the Mayor’s Parlour. Pete, Arlene and I had met the Mayor (Herr Arnd Voigt) on a previous occasion and we were pleased to introduce him to the other members of our family. He entertained us with a champagne reception and a tour of the Town Hall, and gave me a presentation bottle of Alter Zittauer feinster Kräuterlikör (Old Zittau finest herbal liqueur) made from a recipe dating from 1750 and said to be a sovereign remedy for most of the ills (other than old age!) with which we humans are plagued. I can’t vouch for its medicinal properties but it is very warming, has a pleasant taste (not unlike Pernod) and I have no doubt that its label proclaiming it to be 35% by volume alcohol is absolutely accurate.

From the Town Hall we made our way to the Museum/Church of the Holy Cross where Zittau’s Great Lenten Veil is displayed in all its glory. We listened to a tape, in English, telling the Lenten Veil’s story. Then came one of my very nicest birthday surprises. Into the Museum/Church trooped the twenty members of a local piano-accordion orchestra playing as they did so When the Saints come marching in!


The Piano-Accordion Orchestra


They set up their equipment, almost within touching distance of Romy and I who were sitting in the front row, and gave us a concert of precisely the kind of music that I most enjoy, very different from the stuff that thunders out from today’s ‘rock groups’ and the like, but the kind that I associate with Classic FM. The programme began with Ode to Joy the European anthem and continued with light classical and folk. Sitting, as I was, almost on top of the musicians I was struck, not only with the players’ musical skill but also with their enthusiasm and obvious pleasure as they played.
They completed their performance with a spirited rendering of 'Happy Birthday to you!'
It was then that Herr Helmut Hegewald Chairman of the Verein Zittauer Fastentücher (The Fellowship of the Zittau Lenten Veils) announced that I had been admitted into the Fellowship as a member, in recognition of my action in helping to take the Great Lenten Veil to safety in 1945 and the publicity that I had given to the Veil in England. He presented me with a splendid certificate to that effect. I was pleased to have the opportunity to thank Herr Hegewald for the honour that he had accorded me, and to thank the members of the accordion orchestra for their wonderful performance. I was later able to meet the orchestra’s members and have my photograph taken with them.

That wasn’t the end of the day’s activities. At 8.00 pm Nick had arranged on my behalf a celebratory dinner for the members of the family and our German friends.

There were twenty in all – all eight members of the family of course. Then we had invited my oldest friends in Zittau – Frau Ingrid Kulke, her son Andreas and daughter-in-law Konni. Sadly my closest German friend Ingrid Zeibig, Frau Kulke’s daughter, was in Florida celebrating her own birthday! She was missed though she did phone me from the USA with her good wishes just before the dinner began. We also invited Dr Volker Dudeck, almost as long-standing a friend as the Kulkes, and his wife Julia, Herr Arndt Voigt, the Mayor and his wife, and Herr Helmut Hegewald and his wife. We also invited two bilingual friends of Frau Ingrid Kulke and Konni Kulke to act as interpreters for them, and a gentleman whose name I can’t recall, to perform a similar function for Herr Voigt. All were very welcome. I gave a very brief speech of welcome to which Andy responded and we all settled down to enjoy an excellent meal prepared and served by the staff of the Haus am See. The occasion, I was assured, was a great success and, I like to think, a tiny contribution to Anglo-German understanding and friendship.




Muenchner Hof (now the Zittauer Hof) 

  On the Friday I showed members of the family where I had lived and some of the places where I had worked during those last eighteen months of the war. Our ‘Lager’ (PoW barracks) had been in the Neustadt Square, then known as Der Platz der SA (Hitler’s brown-shirted stormtroopers) in what was left of the town theatre after a disastrous fire several years earlier. We had a day-room and a dormitory on the first floor with our guards on the ground floor below us. The building has since been demolished and replaced by a commercial Bank. Its memory has been retained in the naming of an alleyway beside it as Theatergasse (Theatre Alley). Immediately opposite was the Münchner Hof Guest House where we collected our rations – usually swede soup, black bread and margarine – each day. It was there that the Russian slave-worker Anna, who taught me a few useful Russian words and phrases, worked. Oh dear, if she is still alive she will be a very old babushka now!




Kurt Kramer, Wholesale Grocer

  At the end of the square, now a restaurant, was Kurt Kramers, wholesale grocers, from which for several weeks in 1945 another POW and I, accompanied by Christian, an elderly German civilian, pulled a handcart round the streets of Zittau, loaded with groceries for the small retailers in the town. We also drove to the former site of Fructhof a wholesale greengrocer for whom I worked for some time and, across the border into Poland, to see the opencast lignite (brown coal) mine – now a dreadful scar on the landscape – where I once worked.

Later, Pete and Nick drove the two cars to Oybin while the remainder of us – Arlene, Jo, Romy, Andy, Marilyn and myself took the narrow gauge steam train to the same destination. We lunched at a restaurant in Oybin village opposite the Tourist Office where later we were to be introduced to Elke Manke, a charming lady dressed as a mid-Victorian flower seller (I never did discover why!) who spoke fluent English and was to be our guide for the afternoon.


The entrance to the Crypt




The View from the top of Oybin












 I had been determined to get to the summit of Mount Oybin and see, once again, the crypt to which we had taken those heavy cases containing the Lenten Veil in 1945. I wondered though if I could do it. It was a considerable distance from the nearest spot to which it was possible to take a car – and it was very steep. Elke solved the problem. As a very ancient VIP I was offered a lift in a Japanese ‘Jeep’. Marilyn and I travelled in style, along narrow twisting mountain tracks and up all-but-vertical gradients, while the rest trudged up on foot! It was worth it. We relished the breath-taking views from the summit, saw the entrance to the crypt, took coffee in a mountain-top café – and wondered why the city fathers hadn’t installed a cable railway to double, treble or quadruple the number of visiting tourists!

We concluded the day with a convivial family dinner at Zum Alten Sack (The Old Sack), a hostelry ‘with atmosphere’ just a few yards from my former PoW quarters in Zittau’s Neustadt.


A convivial family occasion


The following day, Saturday, was a ‘free day’. Andy Marilyn and Jo departed for Berlin and home, while Pete and Arlene, Nick, Romy and I visited Bautzen and Görlitz.

We departed from the Haus am See at 5.30 am on Sunday 22nd May. Pete drove us to Dresden. There we caught our train to Brussels where we left Nick and Romy. Eurostar took us to London and Pete and Arlene drove me home. I walked through my front door – to find a pile of post and 15 emails waiting for me – at 9.30 p.m.

Zittau’s Pride and Joy – attracting 300,000 visitors in ten years!

Next week Tendring Topics…..on line will be back to normal – I promise!

.

Week 20 2011 24th May 2011

Tendring Topics……..on Line



As I am only just returned from my birthday celebration in Zittau, I haven’t had an opportunity to prepare my usual blog but I thought blog readers might like to read this article, which I wrote some months ago, which explains one of the reasons why I have enjoyed my visits there.



Zittau’s Lenten Veils

From at least early medieval times it was the practice in many churches throughout European Christendom to screen off the choir and sanctuary from the congregation during the period of the Lenten fast. This was usually achieved by means of a Lenten Veil, a large linen sheet suspended from the rood screen. Behind the veil the priest and his lay assistants, and the choir where there was one, would perform the Mass. The congregation could hear the Mass being said or sung, in Latin of course, but they could not see what was taking place. Thus, visual – and perhaps spiritual – fasts were imposed upon the congregation in addition to the physical one that they were already enduring.


The first written evidence of this practice comes from England. In A.D.1004 Abbot Aelfric of Winchester wrote, ‘in quadragesima reliquiae et cruces occultantur et velamen inter sancta sanctorum et populum ponitur….’. I am not a Latin scholar but I believe that that translates as 'from the first Sunday in Lent, relics and crosses are concealed and we interpose a veil between the Holy Sanctuary and the congregation….’

These Lenten Veils were originally plain linen sheets but, as time went by many of them were decorated with pictures of a religious nature so that the laity could be instructed, and perhaps entertained, during the weeks of fasting.

Then came the Reformation. It isn’t difficult to imagine how this practice of screening off the choir and sanctuary and saying the Mass in Latin behind it, would have incensed the Protestant Reformers. ‘Mumbo-jumbo going on behind a curtain’, was probably one of the more polite ways in which it would have been described. Lenten Veils were torn down or dragged from where they were stored. Many were destroyed. Others were no doubt stolen for use as wall covering in stately homes and palaces.

Throughout Protestant Europe the Lenten Veil disappeared. In Catholic areas the Veils lingered longer, beginning to disappear from the seventeenth century onwards. In churches in some Alpine valleys in the Carinthia province of Austria, Lenten Veils are used to this day, and there are said to be signs of a revival of their use in other parts of Austria and Germany*.

Not all Lenten Veils were destroyed. In Upper Lusatia, in south-eastern Saxony, the Protestant Reformation took place quietly and peacefully. Catholic Churches became Lutheran without violence. This tradition of religious tolerance persisted over the centuries. In Upper Lusatia there are two Cistercian Convents in a predominantly Lutheran area that have continued uninterrupted since their foundation in the 13th Century. In the town of Bautzen is the ‘Petridom’, a church that has been used by both Catholics and Lutherans since the 16th Century*. This peaceful and tolerant tradition probably accounts for the fact that the small town of Zittau has not just one, but two, Lenten Veils or Fastentücher that are its most precious possessions.

Zittau is a town of about thirty thousand inhabitants just on the German side of the point at which the now unguarded, frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic coincide. It may not be ‘where east meets west’, but it undoubtedly is the town where Teuton meets Slav – nowadays in peace and friendship.

Zittau’s Great Lenten Veil dates from 1472. It is 8.20 metres high and 6.80 metres wide. Unique in Germany, it has painted on it 90 pictures illustrating Bible stories, 45 from the Old Testament and 45 from the New. They range from The Creation to The last Judgement. In historical importance it has been compared with the Bayeux Tapestry. It is certainly the town’s pride and joy, and has attracted visitors not only from every country in Europe, but from all over the world.

The Smaller Lenten Veil is 4.30 metres high and 3.40 metres wide. It dates from 1573, almost exactly a century later than the Great Veil. It is itself a quite remarkable artefact but has been to some extent eclipsed by the larger and more spectacular one. It has on it just one large and very striking picture of the crucifixion with an angel collecting in a goblet the blood from the wound in Christ’s side. Round its margins are symbols of Christ’s Passion – the crown of thorns and so on.

The Great Lenten Veil, like Zittau itself, has had a very chequered history. The town was once part of the Holy Roman Empire. Between 1158 and 1635 Zittau, then known as Zittavia, was within the Kingdom of Bohemia (the realm of the ‘Good King Wenceslas’ of the Christmas carol!). Later it became one of the principals of the semi-independent ‘six-city league’ of Upper Lusatia. The town was almost totally destroyed in the Seven Years War of the mid-eighteenth century. Later it was within Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’ and, in the divided Germany that followed World War II, it was part of Eastern Germany or the DDR. Now, of course, it is within the German Federal Republic and is Federal Germany’s most easterly town.

Thus, the Great Lenten Veil successfully survived nation change, several regime changes, the Protestant Reformation, the Seven Years War and two World Wars. It came nearest to its end in the aftermath of World War II.

Immediately after the cessation of hostilities it was realized that the huge artefact was missing from its home in Zittau’s town Museum. It was surely too large for its looting to have passed unnoticed. No one who had been in the town during the final months of the war knew what had happened to it. A few months later it was found - on the slopes of Mount Oybin, a small but spectacular mountain six or seven miles from the town. Some Russian soldiers had it in their possession. It was in four pieces, which were being used to line the walls of a sauna!

Those four pieces were rescued and stored until the reunification of Germany made it possible to launch a nation-wide appeal for the cost of repair and restoration. The appeal was successful. The historic Veil was lovingly and painstakingly repaired and restored by a specialist firm in Switzerland. Returned to its hometown, it was in 1999 installed as the single object within what is now Zittau’s church/museum of the Holy Cross. In what the Guinness Book of Records acknowledges to be biggest picture frame in the world it is displayed to the public in a controlled light and atmosphere that will ensure its continued preservation. In the ten years following its installation in the Church of the Holy Cross, it has had no less than 30,000 visitors a year – 300,000 altogether! Meanwhile Zittau’s smaller Lenten Veil is displayed in the Zittau Town Museum (formerly a Franciscan Monastery) where it had remained undisturbed throughout Word War II and its aftermath.

A mystery remained. When, how and why had a textile artefact 8.20 metres by 6.80 metres been transported from a museum in Zittau’s town centre to Mount Oybin, without anyone noticing or knowing?

This is where I play a tiny ‘walk-on’ part in the five and a half century old drama of the history of Zittau’s Great Lenten Veil. I spent the final eighteen months of World War II as a member of a ‘working group’ (Arbeitskommando) of other-rank British prisoners of war in Zittau.

Nearly sixty years later I made friends with a family in that small German town of which my memories were far from being wholly negative. In the course of an email correspondence I mentioned that one of the more unusual jobs I had had to do as a POW was to help transport some very large and heavy wooden cases containing ‘treasure’ from Zittau Town Museum to a ruined Monastery on the summit of Mount Oybin ‘for safety’. It had been late in February 1945, a week or so after the devastating air raids on Dresden by the RAF and the American Air Force. The thunder of gunfire from the east had been growing louder daily. It was obvious that the war would be over within a matter of weeks.

Mount Oybin. The ruined monastery (and a ruined castle) are hidden by the trees at the summit.

We had imagined that the ‘treasure’ in those heavy wooden cases had been gold or silver, but my correspondents immediately thought of the Great Lenten Veil. They consulted the scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck, then Direktor (Curator) of the Museum. He was in no doubt that the Veil had been among the contents of those cases. It was then – when the residents of Zittau had many more urgent problems on their minds – that it had been taken unnoticed from the museum to Mount Oybin.

It was only when I was in my late eighties, in 2007 and then again in 2008 and 2009, and I was able to revisit Zittau as a free man, that I realized quite how important that Lenten Veil was to the town. I met Dr Dudeck, by then retired from his directorship of the museum and devoting all his time to the preservation of the Great Lenten Veil and presenting it to the world. He became a personal friend. My son and grandson, who accompanied me on my first visit, and I, were given a VIP showing of the Veil in its permanent home. Every one of its 90 pictures was explained to us, in English! We were photographed and interviewed by the local press, which later carried a very positive front-page feature about the ‘rescuer of the Lenten Veil’.

On a subsequent visit I was welcomed by the Mayor of Zittau who presented me with a silver ring and pendant cross, symbolic of the town’s two Lenten Veils, and was invited as an honoured guest at an ecumenical ‘meditation’ on the Great Lenten Veil arranged by the Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran and Methodist Churches of the town. At the Meditation a long article of mine about my first visit, Return to Zittau’, translated into German as Rückkehr nach Zittau, was read to the congregation, to whom I was invited to ‘say a few words’ at the end. My German is very basic and I was glad that one of my German friends was able to act as an interpreter. Rückkehr nach Zittau has since been published as a well-produced illustrated booklet and is on sale in the ‘book and souvenir shop’ of the Museum/Church of the Holy Cross at 5 Euros, in aid of the Great Lenten Veil’s continued preservation.

Standing in the nave of the Church of the Holy Cross, with the Great Lenten Veil displayed in front of me it was impossible for me to avoid a warm feeling of pride at having played a part, albeit a tiny one, in the history of a unique artefact that has been a source of inspiration to Christians in this small town in Germany for some twenty generations.

*Last Saturday (21st May 2011), the final day of my visit to Zittau, my elder son drove us to the ancient town of Bautzin, closely linked to Zittau by both history and geography.  There I was able to visit the Petridom which I found to be much more than a mere 'church'.   It is, in fact, a large and magnificent cathedral, dominating the town centre and used and greatly valued by Roman Catholic and Lutherans alike. It was an example to us all and a welcome demonstration of the fact that all whom the Anglican Book of Common Prayer describes as those who profess and call themselves Christians (whether they belong to the Church of England, the Church of Rome, or any of the many dissenting churches)  are all members of Christ's Holy Catholic (Universal) Church and are all equally precious to God.

Week 19 2011 17th May 2011

Tendring Topics……on line


Fourscore years and ten?


According to Psalm 90 ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow’. During my childhood and youth that seemed pretty reasonable to me. The years stretched far ahead of me – seventy (threescore years and ten) was almost unbelievably distant. I could well imagine that those who made it to eighty (fourscore years) would be so weary and infirm that they would wish that they hadn’t.

Prior to World War II I had never personally known anyone who had reached that age. I do remember my mother pointing out a particularly feeble member of the church we attended and saying, in accents of wonder ‘He’s nearly eighty you know!’


My father died of a coronary thrombosis in 1939, at the age of 57. That was young, though not so young as to cause particular surprise in those days. My mother, born in 1888, made it to within a fortnight of her ninetieth birthday.


The Hall family in 1922



It startles me to realize that I have already done better (if that’s the word) than that. I was born on 18th May 1921. So, if I post this blog as I intend, on Monday 16th May, it will be just a couple of days before my 90th birthday – when I shall be fourscore years and ten!


The Zittau Great Lenten Veil on display in the Museum Chush of the Holy Cross























I really must try to make it, because my immediate family – sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren (only they’re no longer children!) are doing their best to make sure that it is a very special birthday. I am going back to Zittau, the small town in eastern Germany where, as a PoW, I spent the final eighteen months of World War II, to celebrate my 90th anniversary with my family and my German friends. It will be the fourth time that I have been to Zittau as a free man. Some members of my family have already been there with me but this time they will all have the opportunity of meeting my German friends and seeing Zittau’s unique Great Lenten Veil with its 90 pictures from the Bible, 45 from the Old Testament and 45 from the New. It is the town’s pride and joy, and it was my quite inadvertent and accidental part in its five and a half century history that first ensured my welcome on my return to that small German town on the borders of both Poland and the Czech Republic.

I hope to be able to tell blog readers all about this latest and surely final visit. I may not be able to do so next week, as I shall be staying in Zittau until Sunday May 22nd and will probably not return to Clacton in time to prepare and post a blog on the 23rd or 24th.

Looking back over the two decades that have elapsed since I passed the threescore years and ten mark I certainly can’t claim that, as the psalmist suggests, they have been nothing but ‘labour and sorrow’. Until I was seventy I had never used a computer. Previously I had used a manual typewriter for all my writing. Since then, I have discovered the joys (and the frustrations) of the internet. I have hundreds of photographs on display on www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea organised by my older grandson. My younger grandson fixed me up first with a blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and then with my own website www.ernesthall.net. I have been posting ‘Tendring Topics….on line’ on both of these for the past three years.

My wife Heather and I both lived to see our two sons establish themselves in their careers and our three grandchildren grow up into fine young adults, all three of them graduating at university (we had considered ourselves privileged to have stayed on at school till we were sixteen while most of our contemporaries had been thrown on to the labour market at fourteen!)

It wasn’t all plain sailing. From about 2,002 Heather’s health began to decline and I took on more and more of the tasks about the house. Eventually she became almost totally disabled and for two years I was her sole carer. I didn’t leave her side except for essential shopping and so on, and only then if I had left her watching a tv programme or DVD that she would enjoy. Those last two years were by no means all doom and gloom. We were quietly happy together and, in some ways, it was the most satisfying and fulfilling time of my life. Her life came to an end almost five years ago, three months after we had celebrated our diamond (60th) wedding anniversary at a meeting of thanksgiving at our Quaker Meeting House. All our friends and all members of our extended family were present.

Heather - as many will remember her

Since Heather’s death my family and friends have helped me to fill my life. It has been during those years that my Flickr site, blogspot and website have been established. I have made three visits to Zittau, several to Brussels to see my younger grandson, and to Sheffield to see my granddaughter who is a social worker attached to the renal department of a large teaching hospital. With her, and my son and daughter-in-law, I have seen something of the Peak District. I have acquired an electric mobility scooter with which I am able to attend Quaker Meetings, services at St. James’s Anglican Church and a weekday service and coffee morning at the local United Reformed Church.

The interior of Clacton’s Quaker Meeting House. An important part of Heather’s and my life for over fifty years.

I have revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England as well as retaining my membership of the religious Society of Friends (Quakers) of which both Heather and I had been members since 1948. And – in a few days time - I hope to be celebrating my ninetieth birthday with my family and German friends.

Most people would, I suppose, consider that (for my age!) I continue to live a pretty full and active life. To myself though (especially when sleepless at two in the morning!) I am just filling in time, turning over, and enjoying, the colourful pages of the glossy magazines strewn on the table of God’s Waiting Room.

Sun, Sea and Sand – and 'The Case of the Missing Beach!'


The last really hot, dry summer that we had on the Essex Sunshine Coast was in 2006, five years ago. Since then, although we have had hot, sunny summer days, we have also had grey, chilly ones with strong winds and more rain than we expect. We haven’t had, as we had five years ago, day after day of hot, dry sunny weather.

Will 2011 prove to be as good as, even better perhaps, than 2006? We are still in the spring but the auguries are good. A cold, windy and often wet Easter had become almost traditional – and it really didn’t seem to matter whether it was a year in which Easter was ‘early’ or ‘late’; but not this year! It was warm and sunny throughout the Easter holiday where I was, up in the Peak District, and I’m told it was just the same back here on the sunshine coast. On my return to Clacton we had a few days of bitter northeast winds blowing in off the sea but now, as we approach mid-May we have gentle breezes and summer sunshine again. The solar panel on my roof is working overtime, supplying me with free hot water!

Everything seems to have conspired for our benefit. Always we have a plethora of public holidays in the spring when the weather on the southern East Anglian coast is rarely at its best. This year we had an extra one of those early spring holidays – and the weather was perfect for it! I have been to the sea front on several occasions recently and once onto the pier and on each occasion there seemed to be crowds of happy shoppers and visitors. I’d be surprised if Clacton's tills haven’t been ringing merrily!

A natural feature of our Sunshine Coast of which we have every reason to be proud is the quality of our beaches. Compare our miles of tide-washed golden sand with the shingle and pebbles of other east coast resorts like Felixstowe and Southwold, and such famous south coast resorts as Brighton and Eastbourne. No wonder William the Conqueror stumbled and fell when, in 1066, he leapt from his invading landing craft onto the pebbled beach of Pevensey Bay!

Nature has been generous to us and Tendring Council deserve credit for having done their bit to complement nature. Blue flags, prestigious standards of European excellence fly proudly over Clacton’s Martello Beach, Brightlingsea Beach and the Beach at Dovercourt Bay. Quality control awards from the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, denoting freedom from litter and a safe environment, have gone to beaches at Frinton, Walton and Harwich as well as to those that have been awarded a blue flag.

A sad exception is Holland-on-Sea, once as proud as any of its safe and sandy beaches but which quite suddenly finds that part of some of them has disappeared almost overnight. Mrs Read, a Clacton mother of two who exercises her dogs and whose children play on Holland Haven beach is reported as saying, ‘We were there at Easter and there was plenty of sand’. Now, she says that the beach is no longer there. So much sand has gone that steps leading down from the promenade would no longer reach the beach – if there were any! ‘You can’t get down them’, says Mrs Read, ‘but you wouldn’t want to anyway, because there’s no beach there any more……..it’s just rubble, estuary mud and bits of metal sticking out of the ground’.

In response the Council has closed two sections of beach – almost a third of a mile between Hazlemere Road Car Park and the Queensway toilets and about 300 ft at Holland Haven.

The Council blames the disappearing sand on heavy onshore winds over several days and says that it can only wait for the tides to deposit fresh sand. Council Leader Neil Stock says that, ‘This loss of beach has been caused by nature and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it’ which is not a thought that brings much consolation to beach hut owners. Mrs Read says, ‘A beach doesn’t just disappear without a reason. Beach hut owners pay the council hundreds of pounds, but having a beach hut, sort of implies that there should be a beach’.

‘Neither a borrower, nor a lender be…..’


This was the advice given by Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet but it seems that it is only the second part of that advice that is the message to us from our government today. Increased tuition fees force debt on university students, and continuing record low interest rates plus rising inflation encourage borrowers and do nothing to hasten the clearance of their debts. Meanwhile those same low interest rates discourage savers and impoverish those who rely on their savings to augment their meagre incomes.

I suppose it couldn’t be all part of a cunning government plan to transfer the nation’s debt (incurred not by the last New Labour Government and the ‘public sector’ but by the cupidity and incompetence of the financial division of the private sector) from the government to us as individuals!

Week 18.2011 10.5.11

Tendring Topics…….on line


Justice…..or Vengeance?

It is said that at the beginning of the Battle of Waterloo, a British Artillery officer reported to the Duke of Wellington that he had spotted Napoleon within range of his cannons? Should he open fire? ‘Certainly not!’ Wellington is said to have replied. ‘We are soldiers, not assassins!’

Had those cannons opened fire and successfully ‘taken out’ Napoleon, the chances are that the death of their charismatic leader would have demoralised the French troops and the Battle of Waterloo would have been won by the British without the help of Blucher and his Prussian army, and with many, many fewer casualties. Wellington though, drew a sharp distinction between killing enemy troops in battle, and deliberately targeting and killing their leader.

Nowadays we are less squeamish. There is, I think, little doubt that the recent air attack on Colonel Gaddafi’s HQ in Tripoli was aimed at killing him, even though the building destroyed was probably a command point from which troops were being deployed and commanded. Not only did that attack fail to kill Gaddafi, but it did kill his son and two grandchildren. There has not yet been independent confirmation of this says a NATO spokesman. I think though that it is almost certainly true and that it will do much to strengthen the determination of Gaddafi’s supporters, and probably make at least a few of his opponents wonder about the justice of their cause. Whatever may be said about Gaddafi using members of his own family as human shields it was definitely an ‘own goal’ for NATO as well as a tragedy for the families of those killed.

That, and the fact that neither NATO nor the Libyan insurgents will even consider the possibility of peace talks while Gaddafi remains in control makes me feel that we may have already entered the next phase of our progress towards all-out war about which I warned a fortnight ago.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the USA made a deliberate – and this time successful – attempt to assassinate Osama Bin Laden when their special forces attacked the fortified compound in Pakistan in which he had been living. The Americans have certainly learnt a lot since their spectacular failure to free the Embassy hostages in Iran by force and the CIA’s comic opera attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with explosive cigars! It seems that their special forces were told not to hesitate to kill Bin Laden rather than take him prisoner. This they did. He was unarmed but, so it was claimed, attempted resistance – so they shot him. The hundreds of people, men, women and children, whom Bin Laden had conspired to kill had also been unarmed, as The Sun was keen to point out. However, are we really happy that we, or our allies, should model our behaviour on his?

Has ‘Justice been done’? Is the world, ‘a safer place’ without Osama Bin Laden. I think that both are doubtful. If Bin Laden had been captured alive and put on trial, justice unmistakeably would have been done. What what was the advantage to the Americans of a dead Bin Laden, rather than a Bin Laden facing international justice? His death saved the vast expense and time taken by a trial in the international criminal court.  It prevented a long-drawn-out propaganda campaign claiming that Bin Laden was obeying the command of a higher power in his war on the USA.  Above all perhaps, it prevented him from being in a position to publicise worldwide the fact that the USA had launched him and supported him in his career of terrorism for so long as his murderous activities were directed only against the Russians?

Justice may not have been done but vengeance has certainly been satisfied – and it was clear that it was vengeance and not justice that those joyful, triumphal crowds in Washington celebrating the news of Bin Laden’s death, had wanted. Hitler caused worldwide death, destruction and human misery on a scale far beyond the wildest dreams of Bin Laden. Were there similar joyful and triumphal scenes in London, Washington and Moscow when his death was announced? I think not. Such spectacles, I had imagined, belonged to the distant past when defeated enemies’ heads, or their broken bodies, were displayed to a rejoicing mob.

Because it was vengeance rather than justice that was satisfied, the world is not a safer place than it was before Bin Laden’s death. There are those who will be determined to avenge him. The way in which he was killed will gain further recruits to their cause. Western governments are well aware of this and have stepped up their anti-terrorist activities, warning us all to be doubly vigilant. Quite possibly, despite all the precautions, in the USA or perhaps in the UK, there will be an act of terrorism that will give us something else to avenge! I am reminded of Gandhi’s chilling prophecy that if we all demanded ‘an eye for an eye’ we would end with a world full of blind people.

I hope that we will never entirely forget that, while we humans do our best to administer and dispense justice -‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord, ‘I will repay’

The Tale of a footpath

Immediately opposite my bungalow in Clacton’s Dudley Road, is a narrow footpath providing a short cut through to Agincourt Road. It was useful to me when I was a motorist. I could drive the car the long way round into Agincourt Road, leave it for servicing or whatever with the commercial garage there, and take the short walk home again via the footpath. Now that I rely on a mobility scooter for local journeys I save myself five minutes or so by taking a short cut through the passage when visiting a friend in Coppins Road. I notice women coming through it to reach shops in St Osyth Road or to take young children to school. It is in fairly regular use.

That is the positive side of the footpath. Sadly, there’s a negative side too.

The Footpath

It is a handy escape route for perpetrators of any kind of anti-social behaviour. They can run through the passage and, once on the other side, can scatter and disappear. It has been the venue of serious crime. I can recall – admittedly several years ago – two muggings taking place there after dark. I understand that it is used for drug dealing. A ‘customer’ loiters in the immediate vicinity. A car draws up. A quick exchange takes place. The car speeds away and the customer disappears down the passage.

It is regularly a site of minor and not-so-minor nuisance. Litter of all kinds is regularly discarded there (the Council does have it cleared from time to time) and it is often used as a toilet. There was an open space half-way along the footpath that was used as a dumping place for larger items of refuse, until one of the neighbouring residents recently took unilateral action and blocked it off! Users are likely to find the footpath litter-strewn and smelly.

For those living on each side of the passage the final straw came over Easter weekend when someone set fire to a mattress and started a fire there! This seriously damaged fences and put properties and lives at risk.

What is the solution? Closing the footpath is the only effective one that those directly affected can see, It is not an ancient ‘right of way’. When my family moved into Dudley Road in 1956 there was a wide driveway opposite my bungalow, giving access to what had been a Carter Patterson depot. It became a similar depot for British Road Service. Huge lorries regularly came and went (damaging the paved footpath immediately outside my bungalow!) My sons, who in the early sixties were in their pre-teens and great local ‘explorers’ assure me that there was, at that time, no way that it was possible to use that route to get to Agincourt Road, without trespassing onto BRS property. The developer who built on what had once been the depot presumably created the footpath and is its owner today.

I am sure that there are a number of local people, including myself, who would suffer minor inconvenience if the footpath were to be closed. I think though that this is an instance in which, unless some other satisfactory answer can be found, the wishes of those directly affected should prevail.

Election Fever

I can’t honestly say that I am sorry about the defeats of the Liberal Democrats in the local elections. I voted for their candidate in the General Election but I certainly didn’t vote for the policies to which they have agreed with their coalition partners. It may be that we are being unfair to them. Perhaps Nick Clegg and his government colleagues really have modified David Cameron’s policies. We’ll never know how awful those policies might have been without a Lib.Dem. contribution!

But it is hardly surprising that faithful members of the party should regard the acquiescence of their leadership to increases in tuition fees at universities when they had specifically pledged to oppose these increases as a blatant betrayal. Since they had lied over that issue why should anyone believe anything that they say or anything that they promise in the future?

I am moderately pleased about Labour’s very moderate successes. I am sick of hearing Lib.Dems. and Conservatives complaining about the mess that they inherited from the previous Labour Government. The financial mess that the country is in was, as the Governor of the Bank of England has made clear on a number of occasions, the result of the greed and incompetence of ‘the Financial Sector’ from which the Conservative Party gets a great deal of its funds. New Labour’s fault lay in not having taken firm action to curb their excesses. Lord Mendelson said that he ‘didn’t have any problem with billionaires’. Well, he should have. The trouble with New Labour was that, just as Ramsey Macdonald had been dazzled by duchesses and had betrayed the party that had brought him to power, so Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues had been blinded by billionaires! I am hoping, though without a great deal of confidence, that under Ed Milliband the party will rediscover the idealism that brought it into existence.

I am sorry that the Conservatives have consolidated their control of Tendring Council because I felt that their ‘Tendring First’ predecessors had done a pretty good job. However, these days the main function of district councils, whatever their political complexion, is to take the blame for cuts forced upon them by central government policy. It really doesn’t matter much which lot are in office!

I am sorry too – though not all that sorry – about the overwhelming NO vote in the referendum about the ‘Alternative Vote’. I voted YES because I felt, and still feel, that it would have been an improvement on the ‘first past the post’ system. It was no more than second-best though and Nick Clegg was foolish to make the referendum a condition of his recruitment into the governing coalition. One day, though certainly not in my lifetime, Britain will have true proportional representation and our 1,000 year long evolution from autocracy to true ‘rule by the people’ will be complete .

I have no connection whatsoever with Scotland but I am pleased about the SNP’s resounding victory despite an electoral system that made it very difficult for any party to secure an overall majority! I have never understood why a Scottish national party should be ‘left of centre’, reformist and redistributive, whereas any similar party in England would almost certainly be ultra-conservative and neo-fascist.

My main worry about the possibility of Scotland gaining its independence is the risk that it could leave England with permanently right-wing governments!

Week 18. 2011 3rd May 2011

Tendring Topics……..on line


An Easter Wedding

It is springtime, a season in which according to Tennyson ‘A young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’. This springtime phenomenon is by no means limited to young men. Nor are thoughts of love necessarily light!

On Saturday 23rd April I was present, and played a very minor role, in the official Civil Partnership Ceremony (in effect the same-sex wedding) of my only granddaughter Jo to her loving friend and companion Siobhan Donnelly. It was the first ceremony of its kind that I had ever attended and I found it to be solemn, love-filled and deeply satisfying.

The happy couple; Siobhan on the left, Granddaughter Jo on the right. I have loved my granddaughter since she was a little baby* and over the years I have greatly admired her courage in overcoming serious illness, her prowess on the football field, her capacity for study and hard work and her lively intelligence. She is the only member of our family who is both an M.A. and a B.Sc.! It was not though until I saw her in that white bridal gown, that I realized how truly beautiful she is!


There were about 100 guests at the ceremony that was conducted, with warmth, understanding and respect, by two mature and friendly women registrars. Both Siobhan and Jo had a great many loving friends and relatives. A number of Siobhan’s guests had come from the Irish Republic and one had travelled from Canada for the occasion. Jo’s guests included my elder grandson Chris who lives and works in Taiwan and had travelled halfway round the world for his cousin Jo’s ‘big day’, and my younger grandson Nick and his Belgian girlfriend Romy, both of whom work for the European Travel Commission in Brussels. They had travelled directly from an assignment in Budapest to the wedding venue (an imaginatively converted farmhouse in the Peak District near Macclesfield)

I was the oldest guest, probably by as many as twenty years! Siobhan’s mum and I had both been asked to read something appropriate during the course of the ceremony. I don’t find reading aloud from a script easy these days. Fortunately though I still have a good memory for things that I have read and that have impressed me years before – if not for the events of the previous few hours!

The 23rd was, of course, Shakespeare’s birthday and I enjoyed sharing with Jo, Siobhan and their guests his well-known sonnet; ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove………and so on. I am sure that readers of this blog will be familiar with it. I added that, many years earlier, when I had been a PoW in Germany we had had in our ‘barrack room’ a tear-off calendar with a ‘thought for the day’, in German of course, for each day. One that I had remembered for nearly seventy years was by the German poet Goethe. ‘Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden’. In English ‘To love and to be loved in return is the greatest happiness that this world offers’. In sixty years of marriage Jo’s Grandma and I had found that to be abundantly true. I sincerely hoped that Jo and Siobhan would find the same. My contribution seemed to be found acceptable.



At the Wedding Breakfast, Jo chats with her cousin (my elder grandson) Chris.

The ceremony was followed by a sumptuous ‘wedding breakfast’ and an evening of music and dancing that I was far too old to appreciate. I was glad when the opportunity arose for me to depart.

Two families – left to right: Siobhan’s mum, me, Siobhan’s dad, Jo and Siobhan, Jo’s dad and mum.

23rd April (St. George’s Day and Shakespeare’s birthday) has been a significant date in the recent history of my family. It was on that day in 1979 that Jo’s mum and dad, my son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, were married. In 1946, thirty-three years earlier, it had been the date on which I had been discharged from the Army after nearly seven years service in World War II – and just four days before Heather Gilbert, destined to become Jo’s Grandma, and I were married.

23rd April 2011 is another date that I, and every member of my family, will remember warmly for as long as we live. We all wish Jo and Siobhan every happiness.

*Postscript

Jo was the most beautiful baby that I have ever seen. Here she is as I first knew her, just five days old! Very shortly after that photo was taken she showed the first symptoms of a life threatening illness from which, thanks to God and to the professional skills of the staff at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, she completely recovered.

……and the Royal Wedding!

I am not so tied up with events within my own family to have failed to note that there has been a Royal Wedding! I haven’t had my eyes glued to the tv all day, but I did watch and thoroughly enjoyed the wedding service for Prince William and Catherine Middleton in Westminster Abbey. I love the sonorous words and phrases of the Anglican wedding liturgy. The two hymns, Charles Wesley’s, Love Divine, all loves excelling and Blake’s Jerusalem are among my favourites, the former bringing back memories of my own wedding, almost exactly 65 years ago.

I was also delighted to hear Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas Deus ibi est   (where there is love and compassion, there also is God) used as an anthem. This – surprisingly perhaps – is often used (in Latin!) at a midweek United Reformed Church service that I regularly attend with a friend.

This was one of those occasions on I am doubly glad that I revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England a few years ago. I am now a regular communicant as well as, for well over half a century, a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a regular attender at Clacton Quaker Meeting. I find that Anglican sacramental and liturgical worship and Quaker worship, based on a prayerful and expectant silence, complement each other perfectly. I would be very sorry to lose either of them.

Today (I am writing this during the evening of the wedding day) I enjoyed the joyful peal of the Abbey bells, the thunder of the organ, the fanfares of trumpets, the dress and demeanour of the bride and groom, the colourful uniforms and the carefully rehearsed ritual, all performed before the  high altar and beneath the ancient soaring arches of the Abbey – and the noisy enthusiasm of the waiting thousands outside the Abbey. All are part of a thousand years of English history and part of our still-evolving culture.

Many of the thoughts that I have published in this blog could, I suppose, be described as radical, even – by the uncharitable – as ‘loony leftie’. But I am not a Republican. I think that there is a great deal to be said for having a head of state who is not closely identified with any political party, who can claim to represent all the British people. I do not see how that can be achieved except by means of a constitutional hereditary monarchy.

I wish the newly created Duke and Duchess of Cambridge every happiness and very much hope that they are destined to breath new life and credibility into a British institution that, I think, we would be very unwise to declare redundant.

My VE Day!

Partly perhaps, because the TV channel Yesterday has been running programmes on World War II and its climax, there seems to be greater public interest in the anniversary of VE Day, when in 1945 World War II in Europe came to an end, than there has been in recent years. I hope to publish this blog on the web on Tuesday 3rd May. The 67th Anniversary of VE Day will be the following Sunday.

I remember that first VE Day very well indeed. Still a prisoner of war, I was one of a party of 30 ‘other rank’ British POWs who had been marched away from the battle front (and possible liberation by the Soviet Army) the day before. At about 11.00 am our guards told us that they had heard on the radio that the war was over. In our area SS troops (Hitler’s elite army corps) were fighting on – as the sound of nearby gunfire made evident! However they were not SS. They proposed to get rid of their rifles and try to make their way home. They suggested that we do the same.

Myself, aged 24, in 1945

Jim Palmer, an Ipswich milkman who had been with me since our capture at Tobruk, and I decided to stay together. The next day found us in a part of Czechoslovakia liberated and occupied by the Soviet Army. I had learned, from Soviet POWs and civilian slave workers, enough Russian to explain that we were British comrades on our way home to England. No one hindered us as we hitch-hiked and grabbed train rides though Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia to Prague, and then on to American occupied Pilsen, by plane to a British army base near Rheims, and finally home.

Heather Gilbert.  The 'Essex girl' who waited for me for four long years.

 VE Day was on 8th May. Just ten days later, on 18th May, I stepped through the front door of 31, Kensington Road, Ipswich. It was my 24th birthday and – after four years overseas, three of them as a POW – I was home again