18th January 2015

Tendring Topics……….on line

The Parliamentary General Election

          There was a time when political parties existed to promote specific policies – the Conservative Party on retaining the status quo and, in general, observing the sage advice, ‘If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it’.  They were naturally the party of the ‘haves’ rather than the ‘have nots’.  The Labour Party on the other hand, was the party of change.  They wanted a fairer, more equal Britain, a Britain without nuclear weapons and without imperial pretensions or ambitions.  They argued that these objectives could best be achieved if most or all public services were owned and run by the public.   They were the party of the ‘have nots’.  Both parties tried to persuade a majority of the electorate to support them.

            Now both main parties, and what’s left of the Liberals, claim to serve the interests of the whole country.  In reality they all have just one overriding policy. It’s the same policy; to win elections, gain political power – and keep it.  To this end the Conservatives under Mrs Thatcher became a party of revolutionary change; among other things selling off most public services to private enterprise and compelling local authorities, who had built houses to rid their districts of overcrowding and homelessness, to sell them to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices; thus very cleverly buying votes with other people’s money.

            New Labour, ‘to make itself electable’, sold its own soul by going along with the retention of a nuclear ‘deterrent’, accepting the revolutionary changes that had been introduced by Mrs Thatcher and erasing ‘Clause 4’ from its own constitution.  I have little doubt that many party members voted for the removal of Clause 4 imagining that they were simply acknowledging that some activities were best carried out by private enterprise.  If fact they were accepting the wholesale privatisation of every public service.  In addition, they allowed our country to become the puppet of the most reactionary American president in living memory.  This resulted in our engagement in two ‘colonial’ wars – one illegal and the other unwinnable – resulting in the loss of billions of pounds and the sacrifice of hundreds of British lives

            Party policies are decided nowadays, not by principles or by the exercise of reason and compassion, but by the findings of the latest opinion polls.  And influencing opinion polls is the popular press, owned largely by foreign billionaires who owe no loyalty to the United Kingdom and care only about ‘circulation and profit’. I don’t find it in the least surprising that thousands of electors are now disillusioned with the traditional political parties.  It is upon the way that they react to that disillusion that the future of our country depends.

Don’t bother to vote

            Probably the commonest reaction is to decline to vote.  What’s the point?  They’re all the same – feathering their own nests.  If voting changed anything they’d ban it. Our first-past-the-post electoral system makes sure that the voice of those who can’t bring themselves to vote for any of the main parties, is never heard. The Chartists of the nineteenth and the Suffragettes of the twentieth century must be turning in their graves.  They suffered and died to make sure that everyone had a vote – and they really believed that universal suffrage would change the world.

           

Those who don’t bother to vote have no right to complain when they find themselves represented by someone whose views they thoroughly detest.  Those who can’t bring themselves to vote for any of the candidates must surely be able to select one of them whose policies and attitudes they detest more than those of the others. Vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him or her.  For the much-publicised recent Clacton-on-Sea by-election I voted Conservative for the first (and probably only) time of my life.  Although I disliked the Conservative candidate’s policies, he seemed to be a nice enough chap and I thought he was the candidate most likely to defeat Douglas Carswell who had defected to UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party).   He didn’t do so and Clacton had the dubious honour of returning the very first UKIP MP to Westminster!  Still – I did my best. 

Vote for one of the ‘minority’ candidates

            We don’t yet know how many candidates there will be for our own constituencies in next May’s General Election. In every English constituency there will certainly be representatives of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal-Democrat Party.  There will almost certainly be a Ukipper (in my Clacton constituency he’ll be the sitting MP) and a Green Party Candidate.  Also there’s likely to be a variety of fringe party and special-interest candidates ranging from the Official Raving Loony Party to those eager to publicise local or special concerns like ‘saving a hospital from closure’, ‘building a new bypass’ or, as we had for the Clacton by-election, a lady who wanted to raise the status and ensure the safety of ‘sex workers’.   

            My guess (and you can’t exaggerate how much I’d like to be proved wrong!) is that in the Clacton-on-Sea Constituency Douglas Carswell (the sitting UKIP MP) will retain his seat though with a smaller majority, The Conservative Candidate will come next but with only a few more votes than  his Labour opponent, followed by the Green, the Lib.Dem. the Official Raving Loony Candidate and the various ‘special interest’ candidates who will get only a tiny handful of votes each.

UKIP versus GREEN

            In my constituency (Clacton-on-Sea) our sitting MP is a Ukipper.  That is true of only one other constituency in the United Kingdom.  In most other constituencies there will be a Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat MP who will be looking nervously over his or her shoulder at the UKIP contestant and wondering what effect this new and apparently growing party will have on the election result.

            UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage, remind me uncomfortably of the NAZI party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, in Germany in the 1920s and early ‘30s.   There too, the electorate was disillusioned and tired of the old political parties and their failing policies.  In Adolf Hitler they found someone who was a fervent German nationalist, just as Nigel Farage is a fervent British Nationalist, who disliked the ‘old politics’ and offered a new path for Germany of action rather than talk.  What’s more he assured the Germans that they weren’t to blame for their country’s problems – it was all the fault of ‘the Jews’.  At first most Germans thought that he was a bit of a joke,  Then the wealthy thought they could manipulate him for their own purposes.   One morning though they woke up to discover that he and his brown-shirted followers had taken over their country. – Hitler’s Third Reich had arrived.

            Nigel Farage also assures us that outside forces – the European Union (demonised as ‘Brussels’) and all those foreign immigrants for which the EU, so he says, was largely responsible – were the cause of Britain’s problems.  Shake off the European yoke and get rid of all those foreigners, and Britain would be great again!  At first everyone thought that Nigel Farage – usually seen holding ‘a fag and a pint’ to assure those who saw him that he was ‘one of us’ - was a bit of a joke.  Then, as with Hitler, the wealthy and powerful thought they could use him for their purposes. They have poured their spare thousands of pounds into his party’s coffers. The story is on-going……….. UKIP is essentially a ‘one-objective party’.   The EU and immigrants are its main target.  Other causes are taken up as seems opportune, but generally UKIP policies are those of the extreme right of the Conservative Party.  Abolish ‘green taxes’ and cease subsidising solar and wind power schemes.  Encourage ‘fracking’ for cheap oil and gas.  Ignore the warnings about climate change and global warming.  It either isn’t happening or, if it is, it’s got nothing to do with human activities so there’s nothing to be done about it.  Vote for UKIP and cheaper fuel oil!  I have little doubt that thousands will be short-sighted enough to do so.

            The Green Party is almost the exact opposite of UKIP.  Below is a brief account of their policies and intentions.

We live in unsettling times. Many of the securities that our parents and grandparents fought for – a functioning National Health Service, free education, and an affordable home – now look out of reach for most of us. Coupled with this, climate change is bringing unpredictable and threatening weather patterns. People feel let down by politicians, and yet there has been an explosion in political activism. People want to do things differently and aren’t afraid to be bold and challenging.

We believe that public services should be for the benefit of the public, not sold off in bits; we believe that education is worth investing in and not something that should mean a lifetime of debt; we believe in leaving behind a better world for our children and grandchildren. This is the only world we have and its welfare, above all things, should be the highest priority for us all.

Politics should work for the benefit of all, not just those who shout the loudest or have the deepest pockets.  We believe in “The Common Good”. A vote for the Green Party is a vote for The Common Good.

            Like UKIP, the Green Party is growing.   They have just one MP – in Brighton – but in the European Parliament elections and in recent by-elections (including that in Clacton) Green candidates received more votes than the Liberal Democrats. Currently there is controversy as to whether The Green Party’s President is to join with the leaders of the Conservative Party, Liberal-Democratic Party, Labour Party and UKIP in public televised debate before next May’s general election.  David Cameron is refusing to take part in the debate unless the Greens are also invited.  He is probably wise to do so.   Green arguments, persuasively presented, are far more likely to draw voters from Labour, Liberal Democrat, and even UKIP than they are from the Conservatives.

            If (and it’s quite a big ‘if’) I’m still around in May, I shall vote for the Green Candidate.  I hope that a great many other people will do the same.    

           

Week 24 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘Cash for Questions?'

            ‘Goodness me - No! That would be quite contrary to the standard of integrity expected of ‘honourable gentlemen’ and ‘noble lords’ of both Houses of Parliament. Remember all that fuss there was a few years ago about twenty pound notes in little brown envelopes? Cash for Questions is definitely not on the programme.  Cash for Consultancies? – well, that could be quite a different thing.’

            According to reports on tv and in the press, conversations on the lines above took place a few weeks ago between some of our parliamentary representatives and under-cover journalists who pretended to represent well-heeled business interests.   It seems that the MPs and/or members of the House of Lords involved were - perfectly legally – offered well-paid spare-time consultancies and agreed to further unobtrusively the interests of their paymasters ‘in the House’.  There would be nothing so blatant as ‘cash for questions’, nor so squalid as ‘bulging brown envelopes’.  But the consultant could organise an all-party group of parliamentary friends and colleagues who might raise matters of concern and perhaps ask questions of the relevant Minister.   No-one would suggest for a moment that those friends received any payment for this but (who knows?) they too might be glad of a favour one day.

            David Cameron (who actually foresaw this kind of problem before the last election!) has been spurred into action.  All ‘lobbyists’ (professional benders of MPs’ minds!) are to be registered and steps taken to limit their activities.  Big business will no doubt be relieved to learn that the working poor are also to be prevented from using theiir meagre contributions, entrusted to their trade unions, to influence the minds of MPs! The members of the Government really do imagine that they are thus ensuring that, we’re all in this together!’

            Cash for questions, fiddled expenses and now ‘cash for consultancies’; is there no end to it?  Ordinary members of the public may be astonished that men (no women have so far been involved in the latest scandal) who are in the public eye and who, by most people’s standards, are handsomely remunerated for representing us in parliament, should behave in this way for a few extra quid.  It is surely a result of the general market-driven conviction of the past twenty or thirty years that the desire for money is humankind’s sole motivation; that the rich can only be goaded into action by the promise of even greater wealth, while the poor are kept working by the threat of homelessness and starvation. Everything and everyone has a price! We haven’t yet reached a state that justifies the cynical trans-Atlantic comment that, an honest politician is a politician who, when he’s bought – stays bought!’  - but we’re getting there!

New Labour’s ‘Bright Ideas’

          ‘New Labour’ might almost be called ‘New Conservative’ because, when they achieve power, they seem to have a penchant for conserving the results of their predecessors' actions – no matter how disastrous they may have been.  They didn’t, for instance, repeal the disastrous ‘right to buy’ legislation that compelled local authorities to sell off their community’s housing legacy at a fraction of its true value. Despite its malign effects becoming more and more obvious as the years have passed, Ed Miliband has even apologised for the Labour Party’s having opposed that legislation while in opposition!   Similarly, the new hard-line Conservatives of Mrs Thatcher and her successors might well have been called the ‘New Revolutionaries’. They had no qualms whatsoever about systematically destroying everything established by a Labour Government chosen by returning‘victorious’ servicemen and women from World War II; thus changing the nation’s zeitgeist from service and co-operation to greed and cut-throat competition.

            Ed Miliband has made it clear that, should he become Prime Minister, he will continue in the tradition of Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues.  There will be the same old devotion to the cut and thrust of the market place, the same deference to the money-changers in ‘the city’, the same preference of private to public enterprise.   He’ll try to make the whole system just a tad less unfair, a little less deferential to cosmopolitan multi-millionaires, perhaps even just a shade more efficient than the present cowboy setup.

            He will, for instance, stop the payment of the winter fuel allowance to those who pay the higher rate of income tax.  He will stop payment of children’s allowance to households where one member has an income above £50,000 a year.  The latter seems a good idea until it is realized that the household of a family with a member whose income is just over £50,000 a year might include a mother who stays at home, making a home for the family and bringing up her child herself, instead of passing the baby to the care of a child-minder while she makes more money.  That family would lose its child allowance while next door may be a couple where husband and wife each earn £45,000 and pass their child on to a day nursery at the earliest opportunity.   They’d keep their child allowance!

            Hasn’t it occurred to Ed Miliband, to George Osborne, or to anyone concerned with the nation’s finances that there is one way of making all ‘universal’ benefits fairer – and that is by making them subject to income tax?  This wouldn't penalise the poor in any way while the better off would be asked for no more than they can afford.  The state retirement pension, a universal benefit if there ever was one, is taxable.   There’s really no reason why children’s allowances, winter  fuel payments, disability (or whatever they’re now called) benefits, attendance allowances (that would affect me, but I’d gladly pay tax on it if all benefits were similarly taxed)  job seekers allowances and so on, should not all be subject to income tax.  Even with our income tax system as it is today it would make for fairness – and bring extra revenue to the government.  A reformed system taking a fixed proportion of the gross income (it’s between the gross and the net that all those wonderful tax avoidance schemes operate!) of every one of us, the poorest as well as the wealthiest, could make our income tax assessment the only means test to which any of us need be subjected – and it would mean that we really were all in this together

Art for Art’s sake

'Modern Art - in Jaywick

Folk of my generation tend to be dismissive of what I believe is known as ‘conceptual art’.  We can see no artistic merit whatsoever in, for instance, an unmade bed, a disembowelled sheep, a light flashing on and off, a pile of bricks, or the ‘acclaimed work of art’ resembling a half-finished poultry shed (on the left!) on which residents of Jaywick were able briefly to feast their eyes a year or so ago.  What’s more, we’re inclined to think that everyone sees them as we do, but that members of a younger generation (as with ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’) don’t like to say so.

This kind of ‘art’ (though, I think, a rather more attractive form of it) is found in the Orient too.  Here is a photo, sent to me by my niece in Hong Kong, of a giant inflatable duck that has been seen floating in the harbour there for several days.   She tells me that it has also been seen in Sidney Harbour in Australia.  Perhaps one day it’ll turn up in the Thames – or even perhaps in Harwich Harbour!

 

A giant duck in Hong Kong Harbour

Thinking about the far-flung members of my family made me realize that a completely original, and of course deeply meaningful (aren't they all?), work of modern art might be created by joining them up by pencilled lines on a globe.  There’s niece Christine in Hong Kong, grandson Christopher in Taipei (in Taiwan).  Then there’s grandson Nick who regularly commutes between London and Brussels. His journeys could make an art-work of their own.  He’s founder and Managing Director of an international tourism consultancy, SE1 Media Ltd.  (www.se1media.com) and on any given day is as likely to be found in Beijing or Brasilia as in either Belgium or the UK.

The ancient grandfather ('monarch of all he surveys!)

Then there are second cousins in Canada of whom I learned only through Facebook, and an even more remote relative (my grandsons’ Aunt) in Western Australia, plus a granddaughter in Sheffield and, right at the centre of the web in sunny Clacton-on-Sea, the ancient patriarch, the not-yet-quite-moribund nonagenarian grandfather!  I can’t wait to get those lines drawn to reveal the artwork of the century!  Where, I wonder, should I apply for an award – and perhaps a cash grant?

    

Week 14 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

A Second ‘Mrs Thatcher’?

The ‘Right to Buy’   

According to some sections of the press the promise in the Chancellor’s Budget  that the government will step in to guarantee a large proportion of the deposit currently required by Banks and Building Societies before they will grant a mortgage for house purpose, will help thousands to realize their home ownership dreams.   In furthering the cause of home ownership for all it is, so they say, comparable with Mrs Thatcher’s bold move in offering the right to buy their homes (at bargain basement prices) to all Council House tenants.

            I certainly hope not. Right to buy was surely a flagrant (and sadly probably very effective) example of buying votes with other people’s money.  It was made worse by the fact that the ‘other people’ whose money bought those votes were far-sighted Borough or District Councils that had invested in Council dwellings to ensure (or so they thought!) that there would never be homelessness or overcrowding in their areas, and that local young people who weren’t sufficiently well off to buy their homes would be able to move into a rented houses in the vicinity of friends and family.   It was significant that there was never any suggestion that the right to buy should be extended to include tenants of privately owned properties. The owners of those properties were likely to be supporters of Mrs Thatcher’s Party!

The Consequences of ‘Right to Buy’

           

As for the effects of right to buy; well, it certainly improved the fortunes of quite a few middle-aged people who seized the opportunity of, ‘helping poor old dad (or mum) buy his own home’, at a ridiculously low price. ‘At eighty-five he’d have never managed it on his own’,   Of course, they made sure that poor old dad left them the house when he departed.  They then sold it at its proper price immediately they were able to do so, making a very comfortable profit.

            Many urban council housing estates started degenerating into slums as the ‘best tenants’ bought ‘the best houses’, selling them at a profit when they could and moving on. Many other council tenants bought their homes and found that, even though the purchase price had been low, they were having difficulty keeping up the mortgage repayments, plus having to pay Rates (now Council Tax) and Water Rate and carry out regular painting and maintenance.

            It was though in rural village communities that the right to buy had its most malign effects. Council houses and bungalows in such areas tend to be built in small groups, infilling available space, and merging into the village scene.  These were quickly bought up by astute tenants, eventually either selling them or passing them on to their sons or daughters who had no trouble at all selling them on at inflated prices – in some cases as rural ‘second homes’.   Thus, councils were building no more houses to let and no longer had ‘casual vacancies’ as tenants died or moved away.   Young couples whose families had lived in village communities for generations, perhaps centuries, found themselves unable to make their homes there.  Meanwhile, house price inflation soared as ‘townees’, seeking second homes or rural homes from which to commute to the city, snapped up any rural property becoming vacant.  Village communities died and degenerated into dormitories for city workers as village shops, pubs and churches closed.

39 Byng Crescent, Thorpe-le-Soken. A rural council house where Heather and I were happy to live temporarily in 1955, and where our second son was born.                  

One of the more idiotic statements made by Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour Party was his apology for the Party’s opposition to right to buy, way back in the 1980s.  He should, on the contrary, have been apologising for the Party’s failure to repeal the legislation when, during the following decade, it had the opportunity to do so.

          Will George Osborne’s proposal to lend would-be house buyers a large proportion of their deposit, have the same disastrous results as Mrs Thatcher’s right to buy.  I hardly think so but, inspired by the same mirage of home ownership for all that blinded the Conservative government of the 1980s, it is likely to create disasters of its own.

House Purchase – then and now

           

Heather and I with our two young sons outside our bungalow in November 1957.  We had been home-buyers for just a year.    

Is this, for instance, a sensible time for anyone to be taking on a long-term loan for house purchase?   When, in 1956, my wife Heather and I began the purchase of the bungalow in which I am typing these words, I was thirty-five years old and a qualified Public Health Inspector with ten years experience.  I had just been appointed as a PHI by the then Clacton Urban District Council.  The mortgage loan was repayable over twenty-five years (in fact my spare-time freelance writing enabled us to pay it back in fifteen!) and I had every reason to believe that, unless I did something criminal or utterly stupid, I would stay in the same or similar employment for the whole of that time.

           

How many junior public officials nowadays can be confident of retaining their employment and being able to repay a similar loan over twenty-five years?  No job is really secure.  There’s no longer such a thing as a job for life.  During those pay-back years we would have described ourselves as home-owners. We weren’t really though.  Until we made that final payment and the Building Society returned to us the deeds of our bungalow, they were the true owners and we were only the home-buyers.  David Cameron has waxed lyrical about the pride and joy of receiving the house key and moving into your own home.  He’s right, of course. But he should also have given some thought to the shame, dismay and despair of being evicted from what you had thought was your own home, because – through no fault of your own – you could no longer keep up the mortgage payments.

            Then again, do you remember what triggered the current economic depression?   There was a housing boom.  House prices went up and up, way above the rate of general inflation.  Building Societies were eager to lend.  They no longer bothered about the credit-worthiness of applicants for a mortgage.  The steadily increasing price of houses made them believe that they were betting on a good thing even if the purchaser defaulted on his payments.  They were offering loans of 95 percent or 100 percent of the purchase price, sometimes throwing in an extra few hundred for moving-in expenses.   And then…….the bubble burst.  House prices dropped, Britain went into recession, and those loans were anything but secure.

‘What goes around comes around!’

            Banks and Building Societies had learned their lesson.  They weren’t going to be caught out like that again.   There were to be no more 95 and 100 percent mortgages. Deposits of 20 percent and more of the value of the house were demanded.  There was, and is, a housing shortage.  Unable to find the deposit, home-seekers looked to the rental market.  Social housing had become only for the virtually destitute. Private house owners put up their rents.  Not a penny of that Housing Benefit with which the government parts so reluctantly, stays with the actual recipients.  It goes straight into the pockets of rapacious landlords taking advantage of uncontrolled market forces.

            Now, thanks to this bright idea of clever Mr Osborne, the government is going to rush in where banks and building societies have learnt to tread with extreme care.  They are going to help by guaranteeing a large proportion of those high deposits.  Can they really not see that they are manoeuvring themselves into the same position that existed before the housing bubble burst?  The only difference is that it is the government’s money (our money!) that is being put at risk this time.

            The government’s offer will increase the number of potential home buyers –but there will, at least for some considerable time, be no corresponding increase in the number of new homes on the market.  Those all-powerful market forces will force up house prices again – and again – until once more the bubble bursts!  As Stan Laurel (or was it Oliver Hardy?) used to say ‘Now look what a muddle your right to buy and home ownership for all have got us into!’

The Teaching of History

            No regular reader of this blog is likely to accuse me of being an uncritical admirer of our present government and its members.  Yet I have to confess to having some sympathy for Mr Michael Gove, Education Minister.  He is painfully aware of the fact that there’s something wrong with Britain’s Education System (if you doubt this, watch any popular quiz show on tv and note the encyclopaedic knowledge of sport and pop music and the abysmal ignorance of virtually everything else) but his every attempt to do something about it provokes anger and derision from the teaching profession.   His ideas on the teaching of history go back, so they say, to the 1920s and 1930s.  His critics are quite convinced that in those unenlightened days, History Lessons consisted of learning, by rote, dates of kings and queens and the battles in which they were involved.

             Well, I was at school from the late ‘20s to the late ‘30s and my History Lessons weren’t a bit like that. They were exciting.   From our very first years at school, we learned something about Egyptian and Greek civilisation at a time when Western Europe was sunk in barbarism, about the Roman Empire, the Roman invasion and occupation of Britain and that empire’s eventual collapse.  As we progressed we moved on to learning about the Anglo-Saxon invasion and settlement of Britain, followed by the Vikings and eventually the Normans.  As we grew older we learned rather more about all these events and how they happened.  The Dark Ages were followed by the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.  We learned about the great Empires that succeeded the Romans – the Ottoman Empire, the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, and those of Spain, Portugal, France and ourselves.  In the 1930s the British Empire was, of course, still intact.   

            This narrative, that made sure we all realized how and in what order each event led to its successor, was lightened by colourful, sometimes legendary, stories about events of the past;  King Alfred burning the cakes,  the Burghers of Calais, Henry VIII’s six wives, the martyrdom of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley,  Raleigh spreading his cloak over a puddle so that Queen Elizabeth could walk on dry-shod, Drake finishing his game of bowls before sailing out to meet the Spanish Armada, the Speaker of the House of Commons defying King Charles I and so on.  They all helped to make us feel that history was about real people like ourselves.  In those days ‘school history’ ended with the Causes of the Great War (we didn’t, of course, call it World War I because we didn’t know there was going to be a World War II!)  Those like myself, who were studying history for the General Schools Examination (the Matric) spent two years studying one particular period of history in greater detail.   My class studied British, European and World History from 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, to 1914 – the beginning of the Great War.

            It was an action-packed century.  There were wars, in many of which we were involved, among them Crimea, two Boer Wars, Sudan, the Indian Mutiny, and two failed attempts to control Afghanistan (pity our present politicians hadn’t studied those more closely!)  There were others in which Britain was not involved; American Civil War,  Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War, and wars of liberation in Latin America.  It was a century of nationalism with the unification of both Germany and Italy. It was a century of social unrest – the birth of the Trade Union movement the Labour Party and of the Christian Social Movement.  It was the century of the Chartists and of Karl Marx; when even Benjamin Disraeli, founder of the Conservative Party was briefly a ‘Radical’!  It was a century of ‘dark, satanic mills’, slums, and cholera epidemics, but it was also a century of Parliamentary Reform, of Education, Factories and Public Health Acts.  A great many good, and evil, aspects of life in the third millennium saw their beginnings during the 19th Century.

            I reckon that we could do a lot worse than return to the History teaching of the 1920s and 1930s.  The fact that, after well over seventy years, I remember so much of it surely suggests that they must have got something right in those days!