A trip into the Past
So – to Sutton Hoo we had driven. To get there we had to bypass or drive through Ipswich. We took the opportunity of visiting the place where Heather and I had spent part of our early married life in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. Still further back in time, we visited places where I had spent my childhood and adolescence eighty years ago.
First we found the bungalow, just off the Norwich Road in Barham, where Heather and I had had our first real home and where our older son, Andy’s brother Pete had been born in 1953. It had been one of four one-storied buildings that had formerly been an isolation hospital and had been converted into homes for members of Gipping Rural District Council’s staff. Our bedroom, where Pete was born, was the room on the right of the picture. The middle section had been the quite large kitchen. On summer days Pete would be in his pram on the lawn just outside while Heather worked in the kitchen. Just below the sash windows, one of which would be wide open, we would place a low stool so that Heather could step out of the window and be with the pram in a second!
Driving back into Ipswich we passed the spot, in Bramford Road where when I was about ten, climbing a tree in search of bird eggs I had fallen (served me right!) and grabbed a piece of barbed wire as I fell. The scar is on my right hand to this day! The house to which Andy and Pete’s mum, then a schoolgirl of 15, had been evacuated, just before the outbreak of war in September 1939, and where I had first met her, had been demolished and replaced with a modern home. We passed the church that I had attended and had been first a choirboy and then a server, and drove to Valley Road, along which I had cycled to and from the Northgate School for six years.
On to Sutton Hoo, a couple of miles from Woodbridge, on a hillside overlooking the river Deben. It didn’t disappoint. There had in fact been two ship burials as well as many other interments on the site in the first half of the seventh century A.D. This was before the conversion of East Anglia to Christianity though the faith was gaining ground in Enland. The occupants of the ship graves had been military men, perhaps royal, of great power and wealth.
Excavations had been carried out throughout the 1930s but it was not until July 1939 (I well remember that feverish last summer of peace!) that the real treasures were found. I quote the official guidebook:
‘They included silver bowls and spoons, fragments of clothes and textiles, weapons, armour, buckets, chains, cauldrons, fine Celtic enamels and many other wonderful things. Most impressive were the many large gold ornaments of early Anglo-Saxon workmanship, elaborately inlaid with bright red garnets. These, finer than anything else of their kind, came from the ground as bright as the day they were buried. It was among the richest graves ever excavated in Europe’
Much of the treasure is now safely in the British Museum where Andy and Marilyn visited it that same weekend and sent me back this picture of an excavated warrior’s helmet. We found the museum on the site of great interest. Exhibits included a reproduction of the burial chamber, examples of the treasures found and a model of part of the structure of the ships, which were 27 metres long, clinker built, with boards carefully shaped and held together with iron rivets.
You may be wondering how I managed to get round the museum and the quite large Sutton Hoo site. I could I suppose have managed to walk round the museum, but it would have exhausted me. Andy though was good enough to push me round in one of the wheelchairs freely available for visitors. I certainly enjoyed the visit more that I would have had I tried to walk. As for getting round the site – there are three electric mobility scooters, just like my own familiar and friendly ‘iron horse’. These have to be – and mine was – booked in advance. There is also a welcoming licensed buffet restaurant on the site where we were able to obtain a more-than-adequate lunch and, before we drove back to Clacton, a welcome cup of tea. It had been a very enjoyable excursion into my own past and the past of the English people. Perhaps there had been rather more light and colour in those dark ages than we may have imagined.
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| Myself at Sutton Hoo - burial mound in the background |
It is pleasant to be able to record a little good economic news in our Tendring District, in contrast to the gloom that seems to deepen by the hour!
In the face of strong competition from other European enterprises a Brightlingsea boat-building firm, CWind, secured the contract from Siemens, the giant Munich based global engineering corporation, to build three specialised catamarans to work on the London Array offshore wind farm being built in the Thames estuary.
The first of these catamarans CWind Alliance has now been completed, launched, and is off to work. Its equipment includes an amphibious rescue pod, capable of carrying out rescues on sand.
Cwind first came to the attention of Siemens London Array project manager when he had worked with them on the Gunfleet Sands wind-farm off Clacton-on-Sea. There he had had been impressed by the company’s approach and attitude. He said, ‘It’s important for us to have confidence in the skippers, their crew and the quality of the vessels’.
At a recent international conference held in Clacton to discuss the regeneration of deprived areas like Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate, it was suggested that servicing the growing number of off-shore wind farms could be our area’s best hope of reviving its economic prospects. CWind has clearly shown the way.
A Public Correspondence
Several weeks ago I mentioned in this blog that when picking up a local or national newspaper, after a quick glance at the front page headlines, I go straight to the Readers’ Letters. Whether wise, misguided or just plain stupid, each one expresses ideas about which someone feels sufficiently strongly to ‘write to the paper about it’. It is a pretty safe bet that for every letter written and published there will be dozens? hundreds? thousands? of other people who feel exactly the same way as the writer.
A regular contributor to the local daily Gazette is a David Brown who, possibly inspired by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express – or even by the expressed views of our own Clacton MP – attributes most of the United Kingdom’s ills to our folly, as he sees it, in joining the European Union and remaining in it. I always read his letters with horrified fascination.
His latest (though I am sure not his last) contribution to the Gazette’s letters page described the Euro as a ‘car crash’ and said how grateful we should all be to the Eurosceptics who kept the UK out of the Eurozone.
I was pleased to see a prompt reply from Roy Procter of Thorpe-le-Soken, a fellow Quaker who is much more knowledgeable about financial matters than I can ever hope to be. It must be said though, that one doesn’t have to be an economics whiz kid to follow the points that he made.
His letter was sadly abridged, no doubt unavoidably, by the Gazette subeditor and thereby lost some of its impact. I thought that blog readers might like to see the original unabridged and unexpurgated version, so here it is:
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David Brown (Letters 3/10/2011) describes the Euro as a 'car crash' and how good it is that the Eurosceptics kept us out- I suggest he should look a bit further than the Daily Mail's leaders for his information - In 1999 a Euro would have cost 64p, in 2003 70p, in 2007, 69p and today 86p.- how exactly is increasing its value against other currencies (and not just Sterling) a 'car crash'?
Those in the Eurozone can trade with each other without paying the banks an extra percentage to simply pay bills and tourists can get at their own money in a large area for free.
The Euro would be even stronger with UK participation, and UK businesses and tourists would pay less in fees to the bankers - so the losers would be banks and the city, and the gainers - everyone else. How is that a bad idea?
I hope that Roy is right. I note that despite the gloomy predictions, the Euro continues to maintain its value against the pound. Of one thing I am certain. The United Kingdom's best future lies with the European Vision rather than the American Dream!
Cause – and Effect
There were two apparently unconnected news stories on BBC Breakfast tv this (14th Oct.) morning, that I believe have a close association. The first was the shocking revelation that nationwide young children are being tricked, bullied or blackmailed into the hands of criminal gangs whose members sexually abuse them and/or force them into prostitution. Sometimes the victims are first ‘groomed’ with generous hospitality and lavish gifts, and then kept in subjection by blackmail or by threats of physical violence to themselves or members of their families.
The other piece of news was that, in the future, part of the child benefit of single mums will no longer be paid once their youngest child reaches five years – the age for starting school. It will be assumed that they will then be in a position to get a job to supplement their incomes. Only oldies like me will remember with nostalgia the time when it was usual for the man-of-the-house (he was always, of course, a husband in those distant days!) to be the breadwinner and for his wife to be the home-maker and primary child carer. The few 'single mums' in those days were most likely to be widows. Nowadays women with partners are expected to go out to work and, according to their financial circumstances, either help pay the rent or the mortage and help feed and clothe the family or, for the better off – make possible the second car, the yacht and the annual holiday in Bermuda. Those without partners are deprived of their benefit to force them into work.
In the ‘bad old days’ when at least one parent reckoned to know where the children were after school, there was far less risk of teenagers joining criminal gangs or of young and innocent children being trapped, groomed and abused by them.
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