Week 36 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

SURELY NOT AGAIN!

Britain’s involvement with the Islamic Middle East and North Africa

          For more than two centuries the United Kingdom has again and again been involved in armed conflict in North Africa and the Middle East. Empire building during the 19^th century we twice tried, and failed, to occupy and subdue Afghanistan by force.  In that same century we were involved with Egypt and the Sudan as well as with southern Africa.  During World War I, since Turkey was an ally of Germany, we were involved with the whole of the Near and Middle East from the Balkans and Egypt to what was then called Mesopotamia (now Iraq).  Conflict during World War II involved both the whole of the Middle East and the whole of North Africa.  During that war I was a gunner in the Royal Artillery and was in action in the frontier area of Egypt and Libya throughout the winter, spring and early summer of 1941 and 1942.  My active military career came to an abrupt end when Tobruk in Libya fell to Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21^st June 1942!

            In recent years the pace has accelerated.   To our shame the UK and the USA supported the ‘gallant Afghan Mojihadin’ in their armed resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s – thereby financing, training and encouraging the ‘terrorist extremists’, still killing ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan who for the past ten years have been engaged in a mission similar to that of the Soviets in an earlier decade.   All British and other NATO troops are to be withdrawn in the near future.  My guess is that, after an initial blood-bath of Afghans who are considered to have helped the NATO forces, within a year Afghanistan will be as it was before either the Soviet or the NATO interventions.

The Gulf Wars and Iraq’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’

            In the meantime the UK has been involved in two Iraq or ‘Gulf’ wars.  We became a combatant in the second bloodier one as a result of false claims that the Iraqi government had been somehow involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and that they possessed concealed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ threatening the peace of the region and of the whole world.  What nonsense!  And I believe that those who deceived Parliament and much of the Press into supporting the invasion of Iraq were well aware that both claims were nonsense!   On the eve of the invasion millions of Brits protested – in vain!  I am proud of the fact that both my sons and daughters in law, and my grandchildren (by then, children no more!) were among the protesters.

            Could it be said that the end has justified the means?  Our invasion gained hundreds of recruits for El Qaeda, who had been responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack and who had hardly had a foothold in Iraq prior to our action there! Nowadays scarcely a week goes by without news of a terrorist bomb attack by one or other of the country’s warring factions killing scores of innocent Iraqi civilians.  The Iraqi Christian community, once an influential and tolerated minority, has been subject to constant attacks by Islamist zealots.  Those of them who can get out of the country have done so.   It would surprise me if today there are not thousands of Iraqis who look back on the rule of Saddam Hussein as a golden age!   There’s certainly no sign of any benefit that might have arisen from that ill-considered and illegal invasion.

‘The Arab Spring’ – in Libya and Egypt

            Next came Libya.  Our involvement started innocently enough with the enforcement of a ‘no fly zone’ to prevent Colonel Gaddafi’s forces from bombing innocent civilians.   Soon we were offering every kind of help short of of troops on the ground, to the rebels. Any bombing of innocent civilians was being done by us! The government forces were defeated and Colonel Gaddafi murdered.  At least that prevented him from telling the world at his trial all about Tony Blair and the other dear friends in ‘the west’ who had supported him while it had suited them to do so!

It is now over a year since Gaddafi was overthrown and the elected government hasn’t yet managed to rule and control the country effectively.  Corruption is rife.  Benghazi, where the rebellion against Gaddafi began, is said to be ruled by armed militia and militant Islamists.  Cemeteries of our dead from World War II have been vandalised and desecrated, and Libya isn’t considered to be a safe destination for British travellers.  It is hardly the outcome for which Cameron, Haig and Co did battle from their comfortable Whitehall armchairs!

Then there’s Egypt.   There, many people in Britain who wished the Egyptians well had high hopes.   A bloodless revolution of ordinary people overthrew an unpopular autocratic President and democratic elections were held. The new elected President represented the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest single political party but by no means representative of the majority of the Egyptian people.  A great many Egyptians  (in particular Egypt’s Coptic Christians, long established - longer than Islam in fact - and ten percent of the total population) feared the outcome.

They did so with good reason. Just like Hitler (who also was democratically elected in the first instance) Morsi, the new President, began to appoint members of his own party, the Muslim Brotherhood, into positions of power and influence and to transform Egypt from a tolerant liberal multi-faith democracy into an Islamic State, introducing the Muslim Brotherhood’s version of Sharia law.  Attacks on Christian Churches and individuals increased, though the British Church Times records that other Muslims, not members or supporters of the Brotherhood, attempted to defend their Christian neighbours against these attacks.

This was emphatically not what those tens of thousands of Egyptians who had toppled the Mubarak regime had wanted.  They gathered once again in their thousands to protest at the democratically elected President whom they believed was abusing his position of power.  At the same time there were mass demonstrations supporting President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Egyptian Army came down on the side of those opposing a Muslim Brotherhood takeover.  They arrested President Morsi and created a new interim Government.  Demonstration sit-downs by thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters threatened to bring life in Cairo to a stand-still..  The army claims, probably truthfully, that they tried to persuade the demonstrators to disperse peacefully – and failed.  They then resorted to what armies are best at – the use of force! They opened fire on the demonstrators, killing or wounding hundreds of them.  The demonstrators were dispersed.  They had achieved their objectives though.  Scores – perhaps hundreds – of innocent victims were proclaimed to be ‘martyrs’. The Muslim Brotherhood gained the sympathy and verbal support of the Western World.

And that’s where the situation remains today. I can’t see any solution.  I am sure that supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood will refuse to accept the result of any new election producing a non-Brotherhood President, and they are sufficiently numerous and resolute to sabotage any attempt to liberalise Egypt into a freedom-loving parliamentary democracy.  Fortunately there has so far been no suggestion that the UK, the USA, or NATO should intervene in this conflict.

SYRIA

I am delighted that Britain will not now be joining the USA and France in bringing even more death and destruction to unhappy Syria in the guise of ‘punishing a war crime’.   Thursday 29^th August 2013 will surely go into the history books as the day when, through their elected MPs in the House of Commons, the British public made it clear that the UK had meddled militarily in Middle East politics long enough.  Since the beginning of the armed rebellion against the Syrian government our government has been giving moral and practical support to the rebels, despite the fact that among them are committed terrorists including members of El Qaeda. Would the revelation, on our tv screens, of a particularly horrifying incident in which scores of civilians – men, women and little children - had died in agony as a result of what appeared to be a ‘chemical weapons attack’ provide justification for British military intervention together with the USA and France?.

The Prime Minister recalled MPs from their summer holidays to consider the issue. At first he had hoped to get, on 29^th August, approval from parliament for immediate military action.  That was modified so as to delay a final decision until after the report of the United Nations’ Inspectors, currently investigating the incident, had been received.  Our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were quite sure that a chemical attack had taken place and that the Assad government was responsible.  Many others were far less certain.  Yet others believed that, even if all the allegations were true, our military intervention would be more likely to add to the toll of slaughtered innocent civilians than to stop the killing.

Was the Syrian government responsible for that particular atrocity?  I don’t know.  It is difficult to believe though that, at the precise moment when UN weapons inspectors had arrived in Damascus to investigate alleged chemical attacks, the Syrian Government would launch a very conspicuous and well-publicised attack of the very kind the inspectors were investigating.  As George Galloway, Respect MP, said at the debate – President Assad may be bad but he’s surely not mad! Even if the Syrian government was wicked enough to launch such an attack upon civilians, can they possibly have been so stupid as to provoke the righteous anger of the whole world without gaining any discernible military advantage?

 Certainly it is the rebels who have benefited from the attack.  It seems probable that the USA and France – even without the UK – will launch punishing blows on their enemies, possibly altering the course of the war and bringing defeat on the Syrian government..  It has been said that it couldn’t possibly have been the rebels who used the lethal substances because they don’t possess the capability of manufacturing or buying them and, in any case, they would surely not use them against civilians who may have been their supporters.

Perhaps they couldn’t have bought or manufactured those materials themselves, but they undoubtedly have powerful and wealthy friends and allies (Saudi Arabia for instance and other of the Gulf States) who could have obtained them and smuggled them into Syria.  I don’t think they’d have been deterred by the thought of causing a few score – or even a few hundred – civilian deaths.  They would be just collateral damage on the way to final victory – and in any case, they’d all be martyrs and, as such, assured of a place in Heaven.

Much has been made of the claim that prior to the latest most serious attack there had been 14 other incidents in which chemical weapons had been used by government forces.  Did those alleged incidents occur before or after President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron had publicly declared that the use of chemical weapons would change their whole attitude towards the conflict?   If after then the rebels are clearly suspect.

  In the end the debate back-fired spectacularly onto the government. Parliament didn’t decide to postpone a final decision until the weapons inspectors had made their report.  They made a decision there and then that they didn’t want military action – and the Prime Minister, however reluctantly, has accepted that decision.

Will the UKs decision not to join with the USA in a punitive action against the Syrian government reduce Britain’s status in the world and harm the ‘special relationship’.  It is surely more important to do what is right – and refrain from doing what is clearly wrong, than to gain international popularity. As for the ‘special relationship’ it has always surely been understood that the USA and the UK do not necessarily always have identical objectives and priorities.

 Despite the ‘special relationship’ Britain did not join with the USA in its campaign in Vietnam.  In Harold Wilson we had a Prime Minister with sufficient strength of character to refuse Britain’s support for what proved to be a disastrous American adventure. Neither did the USA support Britain in the Falklands.  In October 1983 (almost exactly twenty years ago) the USA led an unprovoked invasion of the Caribbean island state of Grenada to unseat an elected socialist government that was in danger of setting a good/bad (delete as preferred) example to its south and central American neighbours.  The USA President (Ronald Regan) didn’t even bother to notify Grenada’s Head of State of his intention to invade that island and enforce a ‘regime change’. Grenada was part of the British Commonwealth and its Head of State was our Queen, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.  Mrs Thatcher was her Prime Minister.  She seems to have been more of a ’tinfoil’ than an ‘iron lady’ on that occasion!

Since those incidents don’t appear to have damaged transatlantic friendship I  don’t see why our present disinclination to join with the USA in its ‘punishment’ of the Syrian Government should do so.

  

           

           

 

Week 28 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

 ‘Where ignorance is bliss ‘tis folly to be wise’

            That is, of course, unless you are a national of some other country, living in the UK and wishing to acquire British citizenship. Citizenship is a valuable and valued possession and I think it quite right that every British citizen should have at least some acquaintance with our customs, our traditions and our culture.  This could, as the government suggests, include some knowledge of Shakespeare and his works, of such historical characters as Florence Nightingale, Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington and of past events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar.   My only reservation about requiring would-be British Citizens to acquire this knowledge of British culture, history and geography is the feeling that such a requirement, like charity, should begin at home.  In my childhood and, I think, until after the 1960s, most British citizens would have had at least some acquaintance with the events and people mentioned above.   I am by no means certain that that is so today.  

            I have not reached this conclusion as a result of careful research but simply by casually watching and listening to bits of some of the popular quiz shows on tv. I assume (perhaps rashly) that those prepared to take part in such a quiz consider themselves to be pretty knowledgeable.  From this I have learned that there is widespread encyclopaedic knowledge of world-wide sporting events (particularly football), and of ‘pop and rock groups’ and their performances; and an astonishing ignorance of practically everything else.  Quiz contestants confess that they ‘didn’t do’ history, or geography,  or English literature at school (or found them ‘boring’!) – and don’t seem to have picked up anything about these matters from radio or tv, or from general reading, since.

            My tv viewing preferences are far from being mainly scholarly or intellectual.  I am, for instance, a regular follower of Casualty on Saturday evenings.  It is preceded by the National Lottery Draw, with which is a popular quiz programme, In it to Win it.  I often therefore find myself inadvertently watching the last ten minutes or so of this programme.  One evening a month or so ago I switched on to hear the ‘quizmaster’ saying to a so-far successful contestant.

            ‘This is your final question.  Get it right and you go home with a cheque for £26,000.  Get it wrong – and you go home with nothing.

            ‘This is it.  On one side of the Straits of Dover is the English Channel.  What is the name of the Sea on the other side: Is it The Baltic Sea? The North Sea? or the Mediterranean Sea?’

            To my amazement the contestant was dismayed.  ‘Oh dear’, he said, ‘I never was much good at Geography’.  He scratched his head, pondered for a few minutes and then said, ‘I think it must be the Mediterranean’. 

While native-born Brits display that degree of ignorance about our country, it seems a little harsh to deny British citizenship to someone born and brought up in Karachi, Budapest, or Little Rock, who confuses Florence Nightingale with Lady Godiva or Elizabeth Fry with Boadicea.

Dangerous Liaisons

          Everybody is shocked and dismayed at the revelation of widespread corruption and fraud in the hallowed world of The City.  Everybody (except, of course, those directly involved) insists that there must be a full public enquiry to find out what went wrong and to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.  What’s more it is generally agreed that it must be thorough and that evidence should be given under oath so that if subsequently it were to be established that witnesses had strayed from the truth, they could be prosecuted for perjury.

            There was profound disagreement though about how this enquiry is to be conducted.  Ed Miliband wanted it to be a transparently independent enquiry (like the Leveson Enquiry into the activities of the Press) presided over by a judge.  Prime Minister David Cameron however and as was to be expected his view prevailed, insisted that what the public want is an enquiry that can be conducted speedily and efficiently, and conclude with firm recommendations that can be swiftly implemented – quite unlike  the Leveson Enquiry.

            I am not at all sure that on this matter the Prime Minister has correctly gauged the public mood.   Surely most of us would like to see a thorough rather than a rapid probing of ‘the City’s’ little secrets and would prefer it to be conducted by a politically-independent judge. The MPs’ expenses scandal has left us with as little trust in professional politicians as in professional money-changers.

            To me one of the most fascinating aspects of the Leveson Enquiry so far has been to see top politicians squirming  as they tried to answer embarrassing questions about the closeness of their relationships with Rupert Murdoch and his entourage (I bet David Cameron will never again sign off a letter, email, text or even a birthday card to anyone at all with L.O..L.)  It confirmed my suspicions that, although there was never any formal agreement to do so, political leaders did bend the policies of their parties to please their media friends and, by so doing, ensure friendly and positive press headlines.

            Had the Enquiry been conducted by MPs, however carefully chosen, I don’t believe for one moment that we would have had those revelations.  Conservative MPs certainly wouldn’t have wanted to take part in the embarrassment  of those on whom any possible future advancement would depend.  Opposition MPs would have been cautious – thinking, ‘It could be me being questioned next time!’

            I would like there to be a similar probing of close friendships between leading MPs and influential leaders of The City’ – the Chairmen and Chief Executives of  Banks and of similar prestigious financial institutions.   I think we might well be given a few surprises.

            This is unlikely to happen if a parliamentary committee is to preside. We had a preview of this in the ‘grilling’ given to the former Chief Executive of Barclays Bank when he appeared before a Parliamentary Committee.  All that emerged was that the former Chief Executive dearly loved Barclays for whom he had worked for many years; that he had suspected that other Banks might be metaphorically ‘cooking the books’ but that it had never occurred to him for one moment that his own bank might be doing the same thing.   He would never have got away with that had Lord Leveson been questioning him!

The Taliban’s ‘Fifth Column’

            When, during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, the Fascist General Mola was besieging Republican-held Madrid, he claimed that he had four columns of troops outside the city and a further clandestine ‘fifth column’ of sympathisers inside. Thus was born the expression fifth columnist to describe the unknown enemy within.

I thought of this when I learned of the latest ‘friendly fire’ incident in Afghanistan.  Three young British soldiers had been shot by an Afghan.  At first we were told that it was by a man wearing Afghan police uniform, giving the impression that he could have been a member of the Taliban who had stolen the uniform.  Later it was revealed that the culprit was, in fact, a genuine Afghan police officer who had been recruited two years earlier and had been trained (presumably this had included perfecting his marksmanship!) by us.

            I can imagine nothing worse for a soldier on active service than to be never quite sure that you won’t unexpectedly be shot in the back by someone whom you had helped train and whom you were expected to regard as an honoured and trusted comrade. Afghan soldiers and police officers who turn their weapons on those who have trained them are, so we are assured, only a tiny minority. No doubt - but for every one who summons up the courage and resolution to act in this way, there are probably a score who would do the same if they could summon up that resolve – or who are waiting for the right moment.   What’s more, I am quite sure that for every active Afghan mutineer there are thousands of Afghan civilians who would never dream of actively revolting against NATO forces, but who equally would never consider handing over one of their compatriots and co-religionists, whatever crimes he may have committed, to the justice of the foreign infidels.

            I have little doubt that a week before the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in northern India in 1857 every junior officer in the East India Company’s army would have sworn that, whatever might be the case elsewhere, the men under his command were unswervingly loyal to the Company and to the Crown.  But, of course, they weren’t.  Hindu and Muslim native soldiers were united in believing that they owed a higher loyalty to their culture and their faith.   

            We have to face the fact that many, perhaps most, Afghans have a very different mind-set from our own.  A clear example of these different values was given us some months ago when some American soldiers thoughtlessly but accidentally, burned some copies of the Koran along with other discarded paper.  A week or so later a single American soldier ran amok, entered an Afghan village at night, and deliberately shot a number of innocent civilians, including women and children.  The accidental book burning provoked violent anti-NATO demonstrations all over Afghanistan, and the murder of NATO soldiers.  The deliberate murder of civilians was followed only by local protests and, as far as I can recall, there were no violent reprisals.

            It is time we realized that training indigenous armies and police forces and supplying them with weapons, does nothing to prevent those weapons and that training being used against us.   Some of the Argentinian army officers involved in the invasion of the Falklands, had been trained at Sandhurst.  The Taliban today are finding that the killing skills that our Intelligence Services and those of the Americans instilled in the ‘gallant Mojihadin’ a generation ago to kill the Soviet foreign infidels, are now being found to be equally effective at killing foreign infidels from NATO.

            When French NATO soldiers were shot by those they had helped to train, the French Government promptly withdrew its troops from Afghanistan.  My only reservation about our government taking the same course, is concern about the fate of Afghans who have been foolish enough to accept western values when they lose our protection.  There was a little-publicised bloodbath of ‘collaborators’ when Soviet troops withdrew.  I very much fear that our withdrawal would be the prelude to another slaughter of the innocents.  But that, I think, is bound to happen whether we withdraw early or ‘according to plan’ in a year or two’s time.

Danegeld?

          I learn from a tv news bulletin that there is international agreement to donate billions of pounds (mainly from the UK, Germany and Japan) to the Afghan Government ‘for development’, to buy their  loyalty when our troops are withdrawn.  Let’s hope it works.  I am reminded of a piece of verse that my wife Heather and I wrote many years ago to amuse our grandchildren, about King Ethelred’s attempt,  at the end of the first millennium, to buy off marauding Danes.

‘The Danes rampage throughout the land’, said poor King Ethelred.

‘No-one is ever safe from them, not even home in bed.

They’re worse than football hooligans, they’re worse than lager-louts,

And we’re not much good at fighting them.  We’ve lost the last three bouts!

I’ve heard that Norsemen can be bribed. I think that what I’ll do

Is scour the land for golden coins and find out if it’s true’

‘You there, the Danish leader! – yes it’s you I am addressing.

Let’s get this deal sewn up today – and let’s have no more messing.

Just take these three large bags of gold and sail away to Denmark.

First sign here, on the dotted line.  You can’t? Well, make a pen-mark.

‘Why, thank-you and God bless you sir. You’ve no more cause to fear.

We’ll sail away this very day;

See you again – next year!

  

Week 30.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

The Covers are off!

The plastic covers and the scaffolding that for months have masked the façade of the converted building in Jackson Road that is to become Clacton’s Travelodge Hotel have been removed. We can now see what the hotel will look like from the outside. No doubt internal work has been simultaneously carried out and, as promised, Clacton’s latest hotel will be open and ready for business by the end of July, less than a fortnight from the posting of this blog.

The new Travelodge Hotel, opposite the ‘Clacton Gazette’ office in Clacton’s Jackson Road is nearing completion.

Everyone knows that it is what happens in August, during the school holidays, that really determines whether or not our holiday trade has a good season. The augurs are promising. While the weather has so far been a bit mixed, we have certainly already had more warm and sunny days than we had in either 2007 or 2008. We have had rain and thunderstorms but, as usual, rather less than practically anywhere else. Even when the skies have been cloudy, it has usually been warm.

Visitor numbers during those three successive spring public holidays suggest that many may be on the way, and that we may have more than the usual number of overseas visitors taking advantage of the weakness of the pound. Despite all the criticism in the correspondence columns of the Clacton Gazette, I believe that most visitors will be attracted by our town’s newly laid-out centre and will be encouraged to come again. I have been telling my German friends (who live nearly 700 miles from their nearest seaside beach!) about the Essex holiday coast’s low rainfall, welcoming piers, colourful public gardens, and miles of tide-washed sandy beaches, not to mention the proximity of historic Colchester and the lovely Stour Valley; just as I tell my English friends about the mountains and lakes, the hotels and pubs, the ancient towns and villages and the low prices, of the three-country-corner land where the frontiers (which happily no longer exist!) of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic come together.

‘Some corner of a foreign field…….’

Nowadays, the bodies of soldiers killed in action are brought home for burial and thus do not become, as claimed in Rupert Brooke’s poem 'The Soldier', ‘some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England’. Plenty of British blood has watered Afghan furrows though, from our two disastrous adventures there in the 19th century. It has, no doubt, mingled with the Russian blood that was shed there just a few short years before our own latest campaign began.

I am writing these words on Tuesday 14th July, the day that eight bodies were flown home together, after one of the worst weeks for the British army since the Falklands War. I sometimes wonder how many British and American, not to mention Russian and Afghan, lives might have been spared had our politicians refrained from encouraging and giving covert support to those to whom we then referred as ‘the gallant Mojihadin’ but who are now the fanatical insurgents exacting a bloody daily toll from among our young soldiers. It is quite possible that British or American agents taught them how to make those simple roadside bombs currently causing so much death and destruction.

Can the present war be won? Top British and American politicians insist that it must be – but then I have little doubt that British politicians said much the same thing in 1850 and 1882, and that the same claim was made in Moscow just a few years ago. Events proved otherwise then and I very much fear that they will do the same this time….after even more lives have been lost.
I have no doubt that NATO Forces (what on earth has Afghanistan to do with the North Atlantic?) can subdue the Taliban and its allies, possibly even succeeding in eliminating all their strongholds and hiding places. But ideas (even thoroughly bad ones!) can’t be destroyed by force. I don’t believe that we can establish an Afghan government with either the inclination or the strength to eliminate in Afghanistan the pernicious doctrines of the Taliban – opposition to democracy and to freedom of speech and religion; opposition to girls receiving any education beyond religious instruction, and relegation of women to the status of personal property; slavish adherence to the most intolerant and restrictive interpretation of the Islamic Faith – the equivalent of that of the Christian iconoclasts, witch-hunters and heretic-burners of past centuries.

Opinion polls suggest that almost half of British people feel that we should pull our forces out of Afghanistan. My own instinctive feeling is the same, but I realize that that too could have disastrous consequences. After the Soviet withdrawal (‘Afghanistan is free again!’, our newspapers and politicians proclaimed) there was a not-widely-publicised bloodbath in Kabul and other Afghan cities. Those who had co-operated with the Soviet-approved regime were hunted down and slaughtered and Afghan women and girls (who had enjoyed more freedom under the Soviets than they had ever before known!) were again reduced to the status of chattels and house slaves.

Does anyone imagine that the situation would be any different if we were to withdraw our troops? Red, and Red-White-and-Blue flags look remarkably similar to Taliban zealots. They believe that both are flown by Godless infidels intent on attacking their religion and destroying their centuries old customs and culture. The conviction that God is on their side can inspire men and women to great heights of heroism – but it can also license deeds of almost unbelievable cruelty and inhumanity.

We cannot with clear consciences withdraw our forces from Afghanistan before we have found a way protecting, or evacuating, those Afghans who have embraced the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-government towards which we have urged them.

We ‘ignorant pensioners’?

Is the ‘Tendring Pensioner’ destined to replace the ‘Essex girl’ as an iconic symbol of human ignorance? It seems that the Tendring District is an area of ‘low educational achievement’ with 22 percent (about 9,500 people) having no qualifications, compared with a mere 12.5 percent across the East of England.

It’s OK though. It isn’t the up-and-coming young and middle-aged who’re ignorant. The survey has been ‘skewed’ by the large number of over-65s living in the district and, of course, they didn’t have the educational advantages that the young enjoy today! The Clacton Gazette tries, in its understanding-the-elderly way, to be helpful. ‘It is never too late for learning’ announces its ‘Comment’ column. It assures us that, ‘for those that do commit to learning later in life, they are much the richer for it and education is one of the few things in the world which, if it were universally available and availed of, can be seen as a panacea for most of the ills that infect us at home or abroad. If, at eighty-eight, I wanted to express such patronising rubbish I would certainly manage to do so rather more succinctly and literately than that!

Doesn’t it occur to whoever conducted the survey, and to those who pontificate in the columns of the press, that lack of ‘paper qualifications’ could simply mean that education authorities of fifty, sixty or (in my case) over seventy years ago didn’t distribute these qualifications quite as freely as they do today?

A class of nine-year old boys at Springfield Council School, Kitchener Road, Ipswich in 1930. I am the anxious looking little boy with glasses sitting just by the knee of the Headmaster (A Mr Offord , ‘old Pip Offord’ to us kids – behind his back, of course). I was admitted to the Northgate Grammar School a year later.

In the 1930s I was one of a minority who attended a secondary school and stayed on at school until I was sixteen. The vast majority of my contemporaries received only a primary (we called it an elementary) education and left school at 14. For them there was no ‘school leaving certificate’ but that did not mean that they were totally ignorant. Very few boys and girls in those days left school at 14 unable to read, write and do as much arithmetic as they were likely to need in later life. They also had a sketchy idea of Britain’s history and of the geography of the world, and at least some acquaintance with English classical poetry and prose including, of course, the Bible. Today’s sixteen-year-old school leavers who knew as much would certainly get some kind of a certificate.

At my secondary school we studied for the London University ‘General Schools Certificate’ which, for those who obtained high enough marks, conferred exemption from the Matriculation (minimum entrance requirement) of London University. For that reason the exam was often known simply as ‘the Matric’. To obtain the certificate we had to study and reach the pass standard in at least five subjects including English (language and literature), Mathematics (arithmetic including logarithms and stocks and-shares, algebra, geometry and trigonometry), a foreign language (at my school only French was on offer), a science, and at least one, of either history, geography or another science (general physics, chemistry, biology and, I think, a more advanced physics, were on offer). To obtain matric. exemption you had to achieve ‘credit’ level in all of those five subjects.

It will be obvious that many pupils who took the exam failed in just one or two subjects and left school without any kind of certificate. It would be absurd though to claim that, because of that, they were less well-educated than someone who left school last year with a couple of mediocre GCSEs.

I sat the exam in English, Maths, French, history, geography and ‘general physics’ (guaranteed to be about principles only, with no mathematical questions!) and passed with Matric Exemption, though only because the examiners were allowed a little latitude. They considered that my ‘Distinction’ in English outweighed my ‘lower than Credit standard’ in French! I didn’t, of course, go to London University. In 1937 that wasn’t really an option for working class pupils, but the Matric did help me to get a better job!

Oh yes, along the way to eighty-eighty I have picked up two or three other professional qualifications, including a certificate qualifying me to teach in one of those adult educational colleges so warmly recommended to us poor ignorant old pensioners by the Clacton Gazette!

Swine ‘Flu

Swine ‘Flu is in the news again. It is spreading rapidly…..and there have been some deaths. These are obviously a tragedy for the relatives and friends of the victims. For most people though, Swine ‘Flu remains a mild affliction, less serious than the ‘seasonal ‘flu’ that occurs every winter and which also always claims some deaths.

Generally with epidemics it is the very young and the very old who are most at risk. This time, although the very young are in danger the very old, like me, appear to be immune. This is, I suppose, most likely to be for the rather boring reason that we have already encountered and beaten off every possible mutation of the ‘flu virus.

I prefer to think though that on this, Charles Darwin’s anniversary year, we are being given a demonstration that ‘survival of the fittest’ is not a universal rule. We oldies, with no possible evolutionary justification for our continued existence, manage to resist swine ‘flu better than our still-young, active and virile contemporaries!