Week 20 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Syrian Bloodbath.

            I know of no better validation of the Quaker testimony against all wars and physical violence than the current situation in Syria.   The Civil War there has cost the lives of thousands of men, women and little children, has inflicted disabling wounds on thousands more and has turned tens of thousands of innocent civilians into homeless and penniless refugees.

Let’s forget for a moment questions of morality and consider the current conflict from a purely materialistic and practical point of view. It is surely obvious that, however awful the Assad regime may have been, when the war comes to an end, whichever side is finally ‘triumphant’, life in Syria will be far, far worse than it was before the first shot was fired in anger. If the rebels win, as seems quite possible, we in ‘the west’ hope to see the emergence of a free and democratic Syria with equal rights for every Syrian,  male or female, and freedom of religious worship comparable with every country in Western Europe.  It is quite possible that that is the objective of some of the rebels.   It certainly isn’t the objective of all, or even most, of them.  I have little doubt that within months of the peace, Syria will be under the control of Islamist extremists, women will be relegated to the status of second class citizens, and all the freedoms that are so important to us will have been made illegal.  It happened in Iran after their popular revolution against the Shah.  It is happening in Iraq, in Egypt and in Libya.  It will certainly happen in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of  NATO troops.

            What is more, the extreme Islamist rebels, having become experienced in the art of killing their fellow-men and women, will look round for fresh worlds to conquer and destroy, and fresh targets on which to vent their hatred of everything we think of value.   They will find them in Western Europe, in the UK and in the USA.

            Was the Assad regime a cruel dictatorship?  Perhaps - but I have heard of no secret killings and no torture chambers such as we heard about from victims of the regimes in Iraq and Libya. Compared with Saudi Arabia, pre-civil-war Syria was an oasis of freedom and tolerance in a desert of autocracy and bigotry. Women enjoyed freedoms unknown in other Muslim countries and Christian and Muslim communities lived side by side in peace and tolerance. Now the Saudi Arabian government is backing the rebels!  I suspect that President Assad’s principal fault is that he is ‘the wrong kind of Muslim’, was probably too friendly with Iran and was giving positions of power and influence to his co-religionists.   Now, of course, we hear of mass killings carried out by government forces.  The reports are probably true.  Violence begets more violence.  It was Gandhi who said that if we all insisted on ‘an eye for an eye’ we would all end up blind.  If in a civil war both sides claim ‘a life for a life’ they will surely end with a country of the dead.

             Other nations are taking an unhealthy interest in the conflict.  Russia is supporting (or at least not opposing) the Assad Government.  The UK and the USA are supporting the rebels. As if there was not already death and destruction enough, the Israelis have launched lethal rockets into Syria, ostensibly to prevent arms from Syria reaching a pro-Iranian Islamic group operating from Lebanon.  Does anyone seriously imagine that a Syrian government, fighting for its very existence, would allow, much less encourage, arms to pass out of the country to any other armed group whatsoever?

            Britain is becoming steadily more and more involved.  It started highly commendably with humanitarian aid.  Our intervention in Libya began, you’ll recall, with the very moderate ‘enforcement of a no-fly zone’.   In Syria we have progressed to non-lethal military aid.  What next I wonder – supplying the rebels with weapons?   That would surely be almost as daft as the idea, currently held by some in the USA, that the best way to end gun crime is to make sure that all ‘the good guys’ are armed to the teeth!   The only winners in that particular arms race will be the arms manufacturers and dealers.

            The Syrian conflict is not of our making.  When it is all over I hope that we will help with the reconstruction and the establishment of peace.   In the meantime I do urge our rulers:  For God’s sake (and I do not mean that blasphemously) keep Britain OUT of it.

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good…….

          ……..and the cold wintry weather that plagued our holiday resorts during the Easter holiday seems to have done no harm at all to one outdoor leisure activity enjoyed along the Essex Sunshine Coast.  Sea angling has flourished and a report in the Clacton Gazette by John Popplewell carries the headline Cod and Thornbacks in plentiful supply.

            During my adolescence I was a keen fresh-water angler.  My home was on the outskirts of Ipswich and I fished regularly for pike, perch and roach along the River Gipping at weekends and during school holidays.  Occasionally, venturing further afield, I would cycle the ten or so miles to Flatford Mill to spend a day in the ‘Constable country’ angling along the River Stour between the lock gates at Flatford  and Dedham, a mile or two upstream.

            Only once have I been sea angling, and that was some twenty years ago when I was writing advertising features for Essex County Newspapers.   I went out on a charter boat from Harwich for a very enjoyable day’s fishing off the Gunfleet Sands and, with help and advice from the professionals, I caught several skate and a sea bass. I know that I later wrote a glowing report of the day that I hope brought the skipper of the boat some custom!

            John Popplewell reports catches from boats, from beaches, from kayaks operating just a few hundred yards offshore, and from piers all along our coastline.  Boats from Mersea and Brightlingsea have been catching more thornbacks than he can ever before remember, as well as fair-sized (one weighed ten pounds) cod.  From Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton and Clacton there are similar reports, with bass, whiting, dogfish and skate also being caught.  

            Clacton Gazette readers are accustomed to reading angry criticisms in readers’ letters about the wind turbines proliferating off our shores – they’re inefficient, an intolerable blot on the seascape, unreliable, uneconomical, a danger to migrating birds, and so on.  It was quite refreshing to have quite a different point of view from John Popplewell.  ‘My personal opinion on why we have so many thornbacks now is to do with our wind farms.  We have two that we can see from our coastline – the Gunfleet Sands and a larger one further out on the Greater Gabbard.   They seem to be acting as man-made reefs, and are a safe haven and breeding ground for a lot of species, including lobsters, which are now breeding happily in these areas.

            It really is an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

‘The old grey widow maker’*

            The juxtaposition of the anniversary of VE Day (8^th May 1945) when the war in Europe ended, and the commemoration of the thousands of dead in the Arctic Convoys, and in the Battle of the Atlantic, brought flooding back memories of my own artillery regiment’s voyage to Egypt through submarine infested waters in the late summer of 1941.  At that time enemy air power and submarines closed the direct route to Egypt via the Mediterranean.  We sailed in the New Zealand Shipping Company liner The Rangitiki from Avonmouth, first to the mouth of the Clyde to join a large convoy.   From there we sailed north-west almost (so we were told) to Iceland to avoid the German submarine packs, then south and east down the West African coast to the Cape of Good Hope. We put in for a few days in Durban, and finally sailed up Africa’s east coast to the Red Sea and Port Tewfik at the southern end of the Suez Canal.

The Rangitiki

           

 I volunteered to man a Breda machine-gun on the Rangitiki’s bridge, doing a four hours on and eight hours off ‘watch’ throughout the voyage. This was not out of heroism (my fervent hope was that there would be no air attack!) but because I was and am, as I mentioned in last week’s blog, mildly claustrophobic. We machine-gunners slept with members of the crew in the fo'c'sle on an upper deck, and not in hammocks on those crowded mess-decks at or below the waterline!

            There was a submarine alert while we were in mid-Atlantic.  We were warned to be ready to go to our lifeboat stations. I had been allocated a place on a raft with ropes round its side to which, if we found ourselves in the water and still alive, we could cling until rescued – or not, as the case might be.  The destroyers (or were they corvettes? I have no idea) circled round the convoy. Then their paths converged. We saw depth charges being launched and felt, rather than heard, the shock of the explosions on the Rangitiki’s hull.  I really wouldn’t have wanted to be a submariner!   The danger was declared to be over.  We relaxed and the convoy sailed on.

            There was one more, even more alarming, episode off the West African coast – in the vicinity of a reputed U-boat base.  The Rangitiki’s engines failed and our progress stopped.  The convoy, and its escort, sailed on. The escort had a whole convoy to worry about. They couldn’t stop for just one ship.  It was a clear night with a full moon.   To add to our disquiet there were thunderous banging, rattling and drilling noises emanating from below as the ship’s engineers strove to repair the engines.  We must have been clearly visible and audible to the crew of any U-boat within twenty miles! At last, after several anxious hours, there was silence, and then a scarcely audible hum.  We could feel a vibration in the deck and a white wake appeared in the rear of the vessel as the engines sprang into life.  We were moving again.  Soon after dawn the convoy came into sight.  We took our place in it and the journey continued uneventfully.

‘Ferret’ (left) and I in Durban.  The chap with the splendid head-dress never pulled that rickshaw. He just stood there having his photo taken with soldiers off the convoys

We put in, but didn’t go ashore, at Freetown.  It poured with rain. Local boys came alongside in their canoes and dived for pennies that we dropped into the murky water.  They always managed to retrieve them!  The seas were turbulent as we rounded the Cape of Good Hope.  The heavily loaded vessels of our convoy were tossed about as though they were match boxes.   At Durban we put in for five days and were allowed to go ashore if off-duty.  We machine gunners had no other duties and there was no risk of an air raid in Durban.  ‘Ferret’ Hawes (I don’t think I ever knew his first name), a fellow machine-gunner, and I went ashore each day.  Local residents were very welcoming.  Notices announced in English and Afrikaans that this, that or the other facility was ‘for whites only’.  I can’t pretend that this bothered us, though it probably would have if there had been any non-whites in the regiment.

It wasn’t till we left Durban that we were sure of our destination.  The convoy split up, half sailing eastward towards Singapore while we continued up the East African coast to the Red Sea and finally to Port Tewfik for our destination on the Egyptian/Libyan frontier.  As we went ashore, thankful for having had a relatively uneventful voyage, we little dreamed that just over a year later, fifty of our number would be crammed with 150 other prisoners of war into the hold of the Scillin, an Italian merchant ship, to be transported to a prison camp in Italy – and that they would meet their deaths in the Mediterranean, torpedoed by a British submarine!

Most of the 200 victims of the sinking of the Scillin were young unmarried men, but Kipling's old, grey widow-maker (Nicholas Monserrat's 'Cruel Sea) made a few more widows that night.

*What is a woman that you forsake her, and the hearth fire, and the home acre, To go with the old grey widow-maker?   ‘First verse of ‘The Harp-Song of the Danish Women’ by Rudyard Kipling.