Tendring Topics..........on Line
‘When the Bon Marché was shuttered…….’
‘When the Bon Marché was shuttered…….’
……..When the feet were hot and tired,
Outside Charringtons we waited, by the STOP HERE WHEN REQUIRED’
So wrote the late Sir John Betjeman in his poem Parliament Hill Fields, a graphic evocation of part of the London Clacton ’s Bon Marché in Pier Avenue
The Peacock Group, like the country as a whole and many of its inhabitants, is seriously in debt. A spokesman for the Group is quoted as saying that the board and its advisors have been discussing possible restructuring with its creditors. No agreement has been reached but discussions with other possible investors are taking place. He added ominously, ‘To protect the business while discussions with such investors are going on, the directors of the Peacock Group have filed a notice of intention to appoint an administrator’.
Compared with many other towns Clacton-on-Sea hasn’t done too badly during the past few years. The gap left by the closure of Woolworths and that left by the closure of the Co-op Departmental Store in Station Road have both been filled, though in each case with less prestigious enterprises employing fewer people than their predecessors. The much-criticised re-design of the town centre has, I think, been found attractive by visitors, though it was surely idiotic to move the Tourist Information Centre from its central position at the junction of Pier Avenue West Avenue
Could this now be changing? Pierre Oxley of the Clacton Chamber of Trade says, ‘If we do lose Peacocks and Bon Marché it would hit us hard. I always think that one empty shop leads to more appearing. It looks like it is going to get harder and harder for businesses this year’.
Other depressing local news is that the number of unemployed within the Tendring District has risen steadily for five consecutive months. There are 170 more people unemployed today than at the same time last year. Nationally eight percent of 18 to 24 year olds are unemployed. In the Tendring Area the figure is almost 12 percent, well above the national average. On the plus side, there have been more vacancies at Tendring’s Job Centres – the number has risen from 500 last November to 635 today. Cheering perhaps, but it still means that there are about six applicants for every job vacancy!
A day or two ago I listened to a young man who has never experienced employment being interviewed on BBC Radio 4. He has qualifications in gardening and regularly goes up to the local golf course where there is a half-promise of work some time in the future. He is, of course, the kind of young man whom local authority parks and gardens departments were once seeking. He would have started off on menial jobs like weeding flower beds and clearing them of rubbish, and gradually learnt his trade. Who knows? He could have been another Alan Titchmarsh in the making!
However local authorities no longer have their own Parks and Gardens Staff. They have to employ private contractors for the work that those departments once undertook. In any case, the kind of jobs that this young unemployed man is capable of doing in the first instance are precisely those that supporters of David Cameron’s Big Society are hoping will be done free by enthusiastic volunteers!
How much longer will it be, I wonder, before that young man is not just unemployed but unemployable?
Waste and Recycling Collections
I don’t think that I am likely to be accused of being an uncritical admirer of the current Tendring District Council and its policies. I had thought though that its members had reason to be proud of their waste and recycling collection service. Householders are all issued with a supply of black plastic sacks for unrecyclable waste and a green box for items that can be recycled. These, in our district, are paper and cardboard, metal cans of every kind, and plastic bottles.
Collections of both refuse and recyclables take place regularly, both on the same day each week. Our council has stayed with a weekly collection while many others changed to fortnightly to save money. I have been sorry that glass jars and bottles are not included among the recyclables. It isn’t easy for those without a car to take glass containers to the nearest bottle bank and, for those who do have a car, burning petrol by making a special car journey for that purpose is surely defeating its purpose.
Despite this reservation I was very surprised and disappointed to learn a month or two ago, that the Tendring District’s record for collecting recyclables was the poorest in the whole of Essex ! It is presumably in an effort to remedy this situation that the Council and their contractors Veolia intend to introduce a restructured collection system within the next few months.
Every householder will be issued with a red recycling box for paper and cardboard only and two new green boxes, one large and one small, for cooked or raw food waste, in addition to the existing green box (which will then be used only for metal cans and plastic bottles) and the black plastic sacks used for residual waste. The small new green box for food waste is to be kept in the kitchen and is intended to be emptied into the larger one to be kept out outside.
The black plastic bag of unrecyclable waste will be collected and the large food waste container will be emptied ever week. The red box of paper and cardboard and the green one of cans and plastic bottles will be collected on the same day but on alternate weeks.
I realise that, now that I do no gardening and am living alone, I have virtually no food waste! I use mostly frozen or otherwise ready-for-cooking vegetables and prefer vegetarian dishes though I am only a somewhat half-hearted vegetarian. I never prepare and cook more food than I can eat in one meal! Mind you, even in my previous married life when I was a keen gardener I would have had no food or other organic waste for the Council’s bins – I had my own garden to keep productive and my own compost bins to feed for that purpose!
The Council’s new scheme seems a bit complicated but I hope that we’ll get used to it and that it will be a success. As I ride round Clacton on my ‘iron horse’ I notice that on ‘collection days’ there are a substantial number of homes with several black plastic bags bursting with rubbish on display and not a green recyclables box in sight. If Tendring is to move up the recycling ‘League Table’, dealing with these non-co-operating householders must be a top priority!
Just how ‘free’ is our ‘free’ Press?
If here is one thing about which all the witnesses at the Leveson enquiry into the behaviour of the press agree, it is that no-one wants a government controlled press. We have seen the results of that in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union . Our press must remain free and uncontrolled by politicians. Although the excesses of which a ‘free press’ is capable have been made clear for all to see, there remains strong opposition to any kind of statutory control.
But just how ‘free’ are our newspapers? Privately owned, they are subject to market forces like everything else in a market economy. For their survival they depend heavily on their revenue from advertising. The wise editor makes certain that he (or she) doesn’t upset too many advertisers too often.
This operates at even the very lowest level. As many blog readers know, this blog is a direct descendant of the Tendring Topics comment column that I wrote every week in the Coastal Express (it actually changed its name several times but that is how I always thought of it!) for twenty-three years. The Coastal Express relied heavily on advertising revenue from Estate Agents and from the sellers of new and used cars. Nobody warned me, but my reason told me that it would be foolish to be too critical of either estate agents or used car salesmen! So I wasn’t. Searching back through my memory I don’t recall a single occasion on which this thought affected anything that I wrote – but it could have done.
Similarly, one of the witnesses at the Leveson Enquiry commented that if a reporter saw that his employer was enjoying cosy tea parties with the Prime Minister and other senior Ministers, and that a former senior colleague had been appointed as the Prime Minister’s personal spin doctor, his reports were likely to be slanted accordingly.
Rupert Murdoch made no bones about the fact that he controlled the Sun for political purposes (‘It was us wot done it’, boasted the Sun after a Tory victory) but is proud of the fact that he gives the editor of The Times free rein. Very creditable – but surely the editor of The Times is well aware of Mr Murdoch’s general political philosophy and is unlikely to promote a point of view strongly opposed to it. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if he doesn’t actually call it – well, the piper knows his general musical taste. As a modern proverb that I heard recently put it, ’If you must hide your light under a bushel, make sure everyone knows under which bushel it is hidden!’
By the promotion or rejection of news stories as much as by direct persuasion, the news media does sway public opinion and thereby influence the results of local and general elections. The BBC and the ITV set admirable examples of objectivity. Perhaps newspapers should be run by independent editorial boards on similar lines.
I would not like to see government controlled newspapers, but the government does at least comprise politicians whom we can influence and ultimately accept or reject. On balance I would prefer to read a newspaper run by people who are answerable to the electorate than by immensely wealthy individuals, answerable to no-one, who may not be British citizens and therefore owe no loyalty to our country; or Brits who have their fortunes stashed away in an overseas tax haven and who therefore escape our burden of taxation. It is one thing for the very wealthy, whether they be Russian oil oligarchs or British or Trans-Atlantic multimillionaires, to own football teams, luxury yachts and half a dozen palatial homes – but quite another for them to control the means of influencing our thoughts and our choices. They will inevitably serve their own best interests, which are very unlikely to be the same as ours!
An Early Learning Aid
A modern silent movie’s nomination for this year’s film awards took me back to my childhood when all films were silent! Poole’s Cinema in Ipswich’s Tower Street, favoured by my parents because I was a member of a national daily’s ‘birthday club’ that gave me free admission, ‘when accompanied by a paying adult’, continued to project silent films long after all other local cinemas had gone over to ‘talkies’. I well remember my first talkie – it was a ‘who-done-it’ called ‘The Argyle Case’ and I saw it at the Ipswich Regent Cinema (it’s still there I believe) in the late 1920s or early '30s.
It has been only fairly recently when failing hearing has made me glad to make use of the subtitles nowadays available on tv programmes, that I have realized what a valuable learning aid those silent films must have been. To really enjoy them you had to be able to read – and to read fast – before each caption disappeared and its successor appeared on the screen.
Kids who might have scorned to read a ‘boring old book’ were desperately eager to know what ‘Buck Jones’ or ‘Tom Mix’ had said to the crooked Sheriff before leaping onto his trusty steed and galloping off to save the heroine from ‘a fate worse than death’*. There was just one way to find out – learn to read!
That accounts for the fact that, while I understand there are plenty of illiterates and semi-literates around today, during the seven years I spent in the Army from 1939 till 1946, I met only one chap who couldn’t read battery orders and couldn’t communicate with his mum and dad, and his girlfriend. We had all spent our early childhoods speed-reading the subtitles of those silent movies!
*Yes, some of us were quite eager to find out what that was too!
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