Week 25 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Now thrive the armourers…….’

          This line, spoken in the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V suggests that as long as 400 years ago it was realized that the real winners in any international or civil conflict are those who manufacture and sell the means with which the combatants kill each other.  Henry V is Shakespeare’s account of the campaign in France in 1415 that began with the siege and eventual capture of Harfleur, and ended at Agincourt.  There a much larger French army was defeated in its attempt to prevent Henry’s   depleted and disease-ridden force from reaching Calais, then an English possession, and returning safely to England. 

The campaign was part of a war that dragged on for a century. It cost thousands of French and English lives and thousands of pounds wrung from the ordinary people of France and England.   Agincourt was indeed a famous victory in which English bowmen and foot soldiers defeated a much larger French Army and slaughtered large swathes of the French nobility and chivalry.  Whatever else may have been its result there’s no doubt at all that, on both sides of the Channel, those ‘armourers’ did very nicely out of it, and out of the century-long war.

Let us hope that the war ‘the west’ has been waging ‘against terrorism’ since ‘9/11’ doesn’t go on for so long.  In Iraq the flames of conflict have been dampened down but not extinguished. The future of Afghanistan seems likely to be similar, if not even bleaker.  Libya could hardly be described as a country at peace.

In Syria a motley array of rebel fighters (many with a minimal knowledge of Syria but a wide experience of terrorism) are trying to overthrow the government of President Assad.   We are being dragged deeper and deeper into the conflict.  At first there was just aid for the victims, more recently there has been supply of ‘non-lethal’ military equipment to the rebels.  The government of the USA has repeatedly said that it would take more positive action if it were satisfied that the Syrian government’s forces were using chemical weapons.  Now it proclaims that that Rubicon has been crossed – Sarin gas has been used and it has claimed over 100 victims.  The USA will therefore support the rebels with military aid of all kinds. It is to the credit of our Prime Minister that for once he strikes a note of caution.  I hope that he will resist any plea to send more weaponry and perhaps troops from our depleted army, to ‘train and support’ rebel fighters, among whom, eagerly gaining more murderous experience, are the very terrorists who threaten us in the UK.

Reports suggest that the principal backer of the Syrian rebels is Saudi Arabia, which is supplying them with both weapons and funds.  Compared with Saudi Arabia, pre-civil-war Syria was an oasis of liberty and tolerance.  Does anyone seriously imagine that the rulers of Saudi Arabia, with its absolute ban on any religion other than its own version of Islam, its religious police (who make the ‘thought police’ of pre-war imperial Japan look like well-meaning boy scouts), its subjugation of women and its medieval legal and penal code, want to see a new liberal and tolerant Syria as preferred by Barak Obama and David Cameron?

It is probable that Sarin gas, or whatever, has claimed victims in the Syrian conflict.  But which side has used it?   Barak Obama has repeatedly said that the use of chemical weapons by the government side would result in more positive action by the USA in favour of the rebels. That’s just what the rebels need. Is it likely that the Syrian government would authorise the use of a small amount of Sarin gas; enough to provoke the USA into action but by no means enough to turn the conflict in the government’s favour?  Nor would it be likely to do so at a time when government forces are gaining the upper hand using conventional weapons. Surely it is much more likely that the rebels have used it as a sure, if desperate, means of gaining greater support from ‘the west’ in their cause?   We were deceived into taking part in the invasion of Iraq by a dodgy dossier of ‘irrefutable evidence’ that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction at his disposal.   He hadn’t. Nor had he, as was falsely claimed at the time, played any part in the outrage of 9/11. We surely have more sense than to be again deceived into military action by false or flawed evidence.

Perhaps we should look on the bright side.  Arms manufacturers and salesmen (modern ‘armourers’ engaged in one of the UKs most successful industries) are doing do very nicely out of the conflict. If the UK and USA give more support to the rebels, they could do even better. They’d make more profits and might even be able to ‘create more jobs’ knocking a few hundred off the UK’s two and a half million unemployed   For some that would be ample compensation for the destruction of a country and for  tens of thousands of its inhabitants being slaughtered, mutilated and/or rendered homeless.

A little grand-paternal pride!

Nick and Romy in a Brussels restaurant 

            I am very proud of the fact that Nick, my younger grandson, has become an authority on international tourism.   Shortly after graduating he obtained a post with the European Travel Commission and was appointed as their on-line Sales Manager.  Later, despite the fact that he was not yet thirty and that the UK had opted out of membership of the ETC, he was appointed as the Commission’s Acting Executive Director. Nick though, had no intention of becoming a senior International Civil Servant or of limiting his tourism activities to Europe. With the experience he had gained and the world-wide contacts that he had made, he launched his own international tourism consultancy SE1Media Ltd. of which he is now Managing Director (www.se1media.com).  Since then he has organised international tourism conferences and seminars world-wide and has visited the tourism and holiday-travel ministries of over forty countries.

            Nick had, of course, visited my wife and I in Clacton on many occasions as a child and adolescent. I don’t recall his ever expressing any great enthusiasm for our town as a holiday destination.  I was a little anxious therefore when, after the guests at the celebratory  lunch for my 92^nd birthday (see Blog Week 21) began to disperse, my German friend Ingrid and her partner Ray announced that with the younger members of my guests, they would be going down to the sea front to see the cliff-top gardens and the pier.  How, I wondered, would  Nick, now an international expert, regard Clacton's holiday attractions?

                                                                        Clacton’s Memorial Gardens

            I am very pleased to be able to record that they all, including Nick, thoroughly enjoyed themselves and were deeply impressed.  They appreciated the pier and its present rides and facilities.  Nick was very impressed with the Pier Restaurant with its large glass windows looking out on to the great sweep of the sea and the new Maplin Sands wind farm.

 There was Ingrid from Germany (originally from Zittau but now living and working in Bayreuth), her Austrian god-daughter Jenny, grandson Nick, and Romy, from Brussels, grandson Chris from Taiwan, granddaughter Jo from Sheffield and Ingrid’s partner Ray from Ipswich.   It is good to think that they have all returned to their homes with positive memories of their visit to Clacton-on-Sea and the Essex Sunshine Coast on the occasion of my ninety-second birthday.

Oh dear!  Sixteen year old Austrian Jenny has been gobbled up by an alien ogre from outer space, on Clacton Pier.     

                                                         The Pier Restaurant

Week 32 2012

Tendring Topics.........on Line

Two Grandsons……….and ‘The World-Wide Web’!

Nick and his Belgian girl-friend Romy in a Brussels Restaurant

            Since the death of my wife in 2006 my two grandsons, Chris and Nick have played an important, and very positive, role in my life.  Nick, who holds an honours degree in photography from Westminster University, was for some years the European Travel Commission’s On Line Sales Manager and subsequently the ETC’s acting Executive Director.  He is now the founder and managing director of SE1 Media Ltd, a consultancy for all involved in tourism and world-wide travel. 

         It was he who established the blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and web site www.ernesthall.net  on which, every week for the past four years, I have published this blog.  I now know from Google that I have readers in the UK and throughout the world – in Russia, the USA, most western European countries and as far afield as Peru,  Australia, China and Japan.

Heather Gilbert (destined to become Heather Hall) as I first knew her, aged fifteen. A line drawing by elder Grandson Chris

    His elder brother Chris earned an Honours Degree in art after studying in Boston, USA and Camberwell College of Art in London.  He has for several years lived and worked in  Taiwan, teaching English to children and adults.  He speaks Mandarin fluently and a couple of years ago was declared Teacher of the Year by the educational organisation that employs him.  It was Chris who first involved me with the internet.  I had never touched a computer before I was eighty and when I first had one I used it strictly as a word processor and for sending and receiving mostly family emails.  He realized how much I was missing his Grandma and how much I needed some creative activity to fill the gap left by her death.             

For that first Christmas, using an old photograph as a reference he made me a  pencil drawing of Heather as the still-fifteen year old schoolgirl that she had been when I first met her.  That pencil drawing stirred my memory in a way that a photograph could never have done. I was deeply grateful and have it framed in my home today.  He then remembered that I had an enormous collection of photographs both recent and from years past.   He arranged for me to have a Flickr site on the web where I could post copies all of my photographs, each with a commentary, for all the world to see.

Chris receives his 'Teacher of the Year' award. 

And so I have done!  Over the years I have scanned into my computer and posted on my Flickr pages some four hundred photos, many taken by me but some by others; a few from years before my time!  Some are of historic interest.  There is, for instance, a photo that I took on holiday in Jugoslavia in 1980 of the famous Turkish pack-horse bridge in Mostar before it was destroyed in the Civil War, others of the sea off Clacton-on-Sea beach when it froze over during one memorable winter, glimpses into boys’ and girls’ classrooms in primary schools in the 1930s, one of a passenger hovercraft on Calais beach in the 60s, and one of my father in 1901 as  one of Queen Victoria’s redcoats,  a dashing newly recruited trooper in the 17th Lancers!

 Nor is it only pictures of obvious public interest that attract viewers’ attention.  Here is a very ordinary picture of my wife and I in 1991 when I was seventy and she was 67.   Only yesterday (2nd August) I received the following email from someone whose memory had been stirred while browsing through my photographic collection.  Here is the picture and what she had to say about it:

What a lovely picture. This is how I remember you at the Quakers Meeting house in Clacton. I'd recently lost my dad and was seeking solace. Heather and Ernest, you were both so welcoming and friendly thank you.  I'm sorry to read that Heather is no longer with us.x

            Thank you dear viewer! 

If you haven’t yet made the acquaintance of my Flickr site, here is the web address. www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea   Perhaps, if you have half an hour or so to spare, you too would find something of interest there: Chris gave me that rather romantic Flickr identity because, so he said, all the appropriate but more mundane, names were already in use

Some thoughts on Higher Education

            Blog readers may be interested in the thoughts on ‘Higher Education’ of a regular fellow reader who had attended state primary and secondary schools, had gone on to University and had done well both there and later in life.  These thoughts were inspired by the contention of another former fellow graduate that, ‘Since LEA grants have been abolished Cambridge Uni has once again reverted to being the social network where public schoolboys make their connections to further their future privileged lifestyles. Perhaps I'm exaggerating but I'm sure that those of us from the state sector, who went there to tackle the academic subjects on offer, raised the standard’.

            My correspondent has a rather more positive outlook than that on private education in ‘Public Schools’.   He believes that:   Yes, there is a lot of social networking for the furtherance of privilege, but I couldn’t help but feel that the “upper class” had actually had a better education – not necessarily in their specialist subjects – but in just about everything else that matters:- self-confidence, eloquence, ambition, breadth of knowledge, general knowledge in the arts (even though they were scientists) and social skills. Frankly, these are  things that don’t demand an IQ of 150 or cost a lot of money to impart, and state schools would do well to take on board.

 State schools tend to turn out a handful of brilliant geeks with no breadth of knowledge or social skills at all, together with a huge number of people who don’t meet the first criteria for public contact work - which is being well presented, polite and able to converse intelligently with customers, speaking grammatically without resorting to swear words or text speak. Later the ‘brilliant geeks’ can’t understand why they  don’t get to be Managing Directors, Cabinet Ministers or High Court Judges while those who don’t meet the basic requirements for public contact work find themselves beaten to a job in a coffee shop by almost any Polish migrant!

            I think that both  those Cambridge alumni exaggerate a little.  I’m pretty certain for instance that my correspondent (who as it happens, is a managing director) does not consider himself to be a ‘brilliant geek’.  Nor, though I left a state school at the age of 16, do I believe that, even then, I was a total barbarian. Thanks to an inspiring English teacher I did leave school with an appreciation of English Language and Literature and, through wide reading, a considerable store of general knowledge. I knew very little about either either art or music though and  I was agonisingly shy and certainly lacking in self-confidence, eloquence and social skills.  Nor did seven years in the army (in the barrack room, not in the officers’ or even the sergeants’ mess!) do anything to remedy those deficiencies, though I hope that over the years I have managed to counter some of them.

            I am not at all sure that they are qualities that can be instilled in state day schools to pupils with non-privileged backgrounds, though I would very much like to think they can be.  Pupils at posh boarding schools are exposed to the school’s ethos for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week during term time – and probably spend their holidays in an atmosphere of culture and privilege. State day-school pupils are exposed to their school’s ethos for only about six hours a day for five days a week. For some unfortunate kids the rest of the time may well be spent in an atmosphere that accords with the late Air-Marshal Hermann Goering’s remark ‘When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my revolver’.  It is hardly surprising that, in some fields, they are virtually unemployable.

Olympics Fever!

           Among my possessions is a certificate to the effect that Hall E, of the 5^th Form of the Northgate Secondary School for Boys, Ipswich swam a distance of one mile on a date in July 1936.  I also possess the Bronze Lifesaving Medallion of the Royal Life Saving Society, presented to me during that same year.  They comprise the record of the sole athletic and physical achievements of my school-days. I have always been uniformly useless at gymnastics, athletics, rugby, hockey, cricket and tennis. 

            I had therefore imagined myself to be totally immune to the epidemic of Olympics Fever  (Pyrexia Olympica to the scholarly) currently sweeping the country.    Certainly I showed no signs of the early symptoms exhibited by tens of thousands of others when ‘The Olympic flame’ made its leisurely progress through the country on its way to the Olympic Stadium in London. ‘What possible connection’, I asked myself rhetorically. ‘can that gas flame within an aluminium holder being paraded round Britain, have with the flame that had been ignited by the rays of the sun, hundreds of miles away in Olympus a week or so earlier?

            I was amazed when thousands of apparently rational people turned out in wind and rain to watch and cheer its passing, and when locally, Tendring District Council and the local press were so upset when they learned  that the towns of the Tendring Peninsula – Clacton, Frinton, Walton, Harwich and Brightlingsea – were to see nothing of its progress.  I was quite pleased that local residents were to be spared the resultant traffic congestion and expense.  I pride myself on keeping a finger on the local pulse.  On this occasion it clearly wasn’t!

             The Olympics Opening Ceremony, which I thoroughly enjoyed and said so in this blog, did nothing to arouse my fears of contracting Olympics Fever.  Britain had produced Shakespeare and Milton, Isaac Walton, Isambard Brunel, Florence Nightingale and the NHS.  It was only fair to leave gymnastic and athletic prowess to other nations.

            The first symptoms appeared within a couple of days of the Games beginning.  The fact that Great Britain (I hadn’t yet quite reached the stage of saying ‘we’!) had not yet been awarded a gold medal, began to arouse a certain disquiet. Surely we (it was just beginning to creep into my vocabulary!) would get one soon.  Over the weekend (3^rd to 5^th August) I realized that I was severely infected.  I found myself glued to the telly, willing our girl, or our fellow, to win.  I was delighted when they did, dismayed when they didn’t, and found myself wondering why we were only in third place on the league table.  What’s so special about those Chinese and those Yanks that we can’t beat them?  Perhaps in Rio?

            Oh dear; obviously a severe case of Olympics Fever, an affliction for which there's no known cure!   However I am assured that the more distressing symptoms are likely to disappear within the next few days and that I should be back to normal by the end of the month.   What a relief!    

  

           

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Week 40 2011 18.10.2011

Tendring Topics……on line


The European Travel Commission’s new Acting Director!




 Jo. AKA Ms Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc





Chris is nominated Teacher of the Year


















All three of my grandchildren are sources of great pride and satisfaction to me. There is Jo, my only granddaughter who is both an M.A. and a B.Sc. and has a socially valuable job as Social Worker with the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital   Then there is Chris, her cousin and my elder grandson. He graduated in art but has found his vocation as a teacher of English to both children and adults in Taiwan.. A couple of years ago he was nominated ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the educational enterprise that employs him.

Nick, Chris’ brother, is the youngest of my grandchildren, but by no means the least! He has always been a great traveller and many years ago won a Guardian competition with a prize of £5,000 with which to travel cheaply all over Europe, sending a weekly report on his adventures to the Guardian Travel Supplement. This inspired him, in his last year at University to retrace my travels sixty years earlier as a POW, from Tarranto in southern Italy to a POW camp in the north of the country. Thence to a working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany and finally, after the war ended, through Czechoslovakia to Prague. As he did so he created a video diary that helped to earn him a good honours degree in photography at Westminster University.
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Student Nick on his travels

This experience, plus an unrivalled knowledge and experience in IT (it was he who organised the blogspot and web site on which I am publishing these words!) ensured the success of his application for the post of On Line Sales Manager, with the European Travel Commission in Brussels. The ETC is a non profit-making international organisation which encourages, co-ordinates and facilitates tourist travel to Europe from the rest of the world. Its members are the national tourist offices of 33 co-operating European states, many of them members of the European Union but others (Norway, Switzerland and Serbia for instance) that are not. ETC has an elected President (currently a German lady) and an executive committee of national representatives.
The ETCs permanent staff have a headquarters in Brussels and are headed by a Director (in effect the Chief Executive and head of paid staff). Nick’s duties as On Line Sales Manager took him all over the world. He was also personally involved in the development and launch of www.visiteurope.com ETC’s own publicity web site, invaluable for all visitors to any part of Europe.

Now Nick has risen to the very top of the organisation. Last week the President and Executive Committee confirmed his appointment as Acting Director. Nick’s achievement is all the more remarkable for the fact that the United Kingdom is not one of the thirty-three members of the ETC. Among the membership you’ll find large countries like Germany, tiny ones like San Marino and Monte Negro, island states like Cyprus, Iceland and the Irish Republic – but no United Kingdom. I suppose that if there are many British ‘Tourism bosses’ of the calibre of Tendring District’s, and many MPs as stubbornly Europhobic as Clacton’s, we shouldn’t be surprised.


Nick in Zittau with myself and our friend Ingrid Zeibig.


It does demonstrate very clearly that Nick’s promotion was owed entirely to recognition of his own merit and not as a result of pressure from national representatives. There were none. It also demonstrates that European Union rules, that permit citizens of any member state to live and work anywhere within the EU, do not work only in one direction. It is possible for a Brit with determination and the necessary skills, to find and hold down a worthwhile job on the continent.

I am proud and very pleased that a grandson of mine has done so.

Late News!


Hardly had Nick been appointed to his new post before he was required to accompany ETC's President and Vice-President to a meeting of European Union Tourism Ministers in Krakow, Poland, last Thursday (6th October). He says that he was given VIP treatment, sharing a car with the Vice President and racing through the streets of Krakow with a police escort. He had, of course. helped the ETC's President to prepare for the occasion and was very pleased to hear almost universal praise and support from the EU Ministers for the work of ETC and for the www.visiteurope.com web site. He feels that he has made a good start


Buying Votes…….with other people’s money


That was how I described the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation when it was enacted during Mrs Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister. I make no apology for doing so. It might more accurately have been described as ‘Compel to sell’ legislation, as it compelled local councils (as democratically elected as our rulers in Westminster!) to sell off to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices, council houses that had been provided and paid for by earlier generations to house the homeless, alleviate overcrowding and make possible slum clearance in their areas. The same privilege was not of course, offered to tenants of privately owned homes. Their owners were, for the most part, loyal supporters of Mrs Thatcher’s political party.

It took a few years for the baleful effects of that legislation to take full effect. Almost immediately though the best homes in the most desirable locations were sold off. Many were sold to tenants who could ill-afford the mortgage and insurance repayments, the cost of maintenance and the separate rate bills for which they became responsible. Many grown-up children of elderly parents spotted their opportunity to cash in on already steadily rising house prices. They provided the small deposit required and in some cases even offered to pay the mortgage on their parents’ home. Naturally it was understood that they would inherit it in due course.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, while they waited to inherit and for the time to expire in which the house couldn’t be resold, house prices didn’t just rise. They rocketed. Former council houses were sold at a handsome profit. In rural areas houses that had been built to house members of village communities were snapped up as second homes or as bases from which to commute to the nearest big city. Councils were unable to build houses for affordable letting and Housing Associations were unable to satisfy the resulting need for social housing . House price inflation meant that young families, whose forebears had been part of the village community for generations, were unable to find a home. Villages ‘died’, no longer having enough daytime round-the-year residents to keep going a pub, a church, a village hall, a post office – or even a well-stocked village store.

Particularly in urban areas, council estates deprived of their former not-too-badly-off tenants, took the first step on the road towards becoming drug ridden, crime-infested slums. A further step was taken recently when the government dictated (so much for localism!) that in future, council tenancies should be short-term only. Tenants whose financial circumstances improved would be expected to buy their own homes or rent privately. I can think of no better way of ensuring that the interior of council houses are never redecorated and the gardens never cared for!

For all of the above reasons I was absolutely astonished when, in the midst of an otherwise inspiring speech at the Labour Party Conference, Ed Miliband apologised for the Labour Party’s opposition to Right to Buy, way back in the 1980s!  He should, on the contrary, have apologised for New Labour’s failure to repeal that Act and to encourage local authorities to build homes for letting in their areas, when they were in a position to. Had they done so it might have put a brake on out-of-control house price inflation and avoided today’s nation-wide housing shortage.

Now I see that David Cameron, possibly dazzled by his Party’s success in buying votes with other people’s money in the 1980s, is trying to breathe new life into Right to Buy. I think that he’ll be unsuccessful this time round. There is no longer the spiralling house price inflation that made home ownership such a profitable investment 30 years ago. The policies of his government are ensuring that the occupants of council houses are increasingly limited to the very poorest of society, those least able to aspire to ‘home ownership’. As for the equivalent of those who helped their poor old mums and dads to own their own homes in the ‘80s – with incomes failing to keep up with inflation, plus government cuts and the threat of unemployment, they are struggling to survive themselves these days. They are also well aware that eventual home ownership no longer offers the prospect of wealth-to-come that once it did.

‘Can do?’ – Yes, you can add the final straw that breaks the camel’s back

Thank goodness that the Conference season is over for another year. Most of us, I think, have really seen enough of posturing politicians!

I am not sure whether it was Ed Miliband’s apologies for New Labour policies that were right (goodness knows that there were plenty that were wrong) or David Cameron’s constant reiteration of that idiotic trans-Atlantic mantra ‘can do’, that I found the more irritating. It was because greedy, irresponsible and incompetent bankers thought that they ‘could do’ anything that they thought would make a profit, that we are in the current financial mess. They ‘did’ us! I think that our Prime Minister would do better to consider a few of the things that can’t be done either by him or any of us. It was an American President who remarked that you can fool some of the people all the time and all the people part of the time but - no matter how loudly and how often you say, ‘can do’ - you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Nor can you indefinitely assert with apparently total conviction and sincerity one thing while doing the exact opposite. In his Churchillian final speech to the Conservative conference David Cameron asserted the importance, to the individual and to the nation, of paying off debts promptly and not adding to them. Yet this is the same Prime Minister whose government is piling tens of thousands pounds worth of debt on students and saying, in mitigation, that that debt doesn’t have to be paid off for years, in fact. in many cases it may never need to be paid off. Only a few days earlier he had been encouraging council house tenants, who haven’t already done so, to incur more debt by buying their homes.

While urging that local people should make decisions about local matters Mr Cameron’s government is systematically stripping democratically elected local authorities of their powers particularly, in relation to planning matters and to the letting of their own social housing. While stripping the armed forces of both personnel and equipment and, so many believe, reducing their ability to deal with any emergency that might arise – he has declared that those enormously expensive and totally useless Trident nuclear submarines that prowl the world’s oceans are sacrosanct.

As the government continues cutting services and pursuing policies that penalise the poor, the weak and the vulnerable, while having minimal impact on the wealthy and privileged, Mr Cameron may care to reflect that among things that top politicians can do is to add the final straw that breaks the camel’s back!