Week 19 2011 17th May 2011

Tendring Topics……on line


Fourscore years and ten?


According to Psalm 90 ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow’. During my childhood and youth that seemed pretty reasonable to me. The years stretched far ahead of me – seventy (threescore years and ten) was almost unbelievably distant. I could well imagine that those who made it to eighty (fourscore years) would be so weary and infirm that they would wish that they hadn’t.

Prior to World War II I had never personally known anyone who had reached that age. I do remember my mother pointing out a particularly feeble member of the church we attended and saying, in accents of wonder ‘He’s nearly eighty you know!’


My father died of a coronary thrombosis in 1939, at the age of 57. That was young, though not so young as to cause particular surprise in those days. My mother, born in 1888, made it to within a fortnight of her ninetieth birthday.


The Hall family in 1922



It startles me to realize that I have already done better (if that’s the word) than that. I was born on 18th May 1921. So, if I post this blog as I intend, on Monday 16th May, it will be just a couple of days before my 90th birthday – when I shall be fourscore years and ten!


The Zittau Great Lenten Veil on display in the Museum Chush of the Holy Cross























I really must try to make it, because my immediate family – sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren (only they’re no longer children!) are doing their best to make sure that it is a very special birthday. I am going back to Zittau, the small town in eastern Germany where, as a PoW, I spent the final eighteen months of World War II, to celebrate my 90th anniversary with my family and my German friends. It will be the fourth time that I have been to Zittau as a free man. Some members of my family have already been there with me but this time they will all have the opportunity of meeting my German friends and seeing Zittau’s unique Great Lenten Veil with its 90 pictures from the Bible, 45 from the Old Testament and 45 from the New. It is the town’s pride and joy, and it was my quite inadvertent and accidental part in its five and a half century history that first ensured my welcome on my return to that small German town on the borders of both Poland and the Czech Republic.

I hope to be able to tell blog readers all about this latest and surely final visit. I may not be able to do so next week, as I shall be staying in Zittau until Sunday May 22nd and will probably not return to Clacton in time to prepare and post a blog on the 23rd or 24th.

Looking back over the two decades that have elapsed since I passed the threescore years and ten mark I certainly can’t claim that, as the psalmist suggests, they have been nothing but ‘labour and sorrow’. Until I was seventy I had never used a computer. Previously I had used a manual typewriter for all my writing. Since then, I have discovered the joys (and the frustrations) of the internet. I have hundreds of photographs on display on www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea organised by my older grandson. My younger grandson fixed me up first with a blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and then with my own website www.ernesthall.net. I have been posting ‘Tendring Topics….on line’ on both of these for the past three years.

My wife Heather and I both lived to see our two sons establish themselves in their careers and our three grandchildren grow up into fine young adults, all three of them graduating at university (we had considered ourselves privileged to have stayed on at school till we were sixteen while most of our contemporaries had been thrown on to the labour market at fourteen!)

It wasn’t all plain sailing. From about 2,002 Heather’s health began to decline and I took on more and more of the tasks about the house. Eventually she became almost totally disabled and for two years I was her sole carer. I didn’t leave her side except for essential shopping and so on, and only then if I had left her watching a tv programme or DVD that she would enjoy. Those last two years were by no means all doom and gloom. We were quietly happy together and, in some ways, it was the most satisfying and fulfilling time of my life. Her life came to an end almost five years ago, three months after we had celebrated our diamond (60th) wedding anniversary at a meeting of thanksgiving at our Quaker Meeting House. All our friends and all members of our extended family were present.

Heather - as many will remember her

Since Heather’s death my family and friends have helped me to fill my life. It has been during those years that my Flickr site, blogspot and website have been established. I have made three visits to Zittau, several to Brussels to see my younger grandson, and to Sheffield to see my granddaughter who is a social worker attached to the renal department of a large teaching hospital. With her, and my son and daughter-in-law, I have seen something of the Peak District. I have acquired an electric mobility scooter with which I am able to attend Quaker Meetings, services at St. James’s Anglican Church and a weekday service and coffee morning at the local United Reformed Church.

The interior of Clacton’s Quaker Meeting House. An important part of Heather’s and my life for over fifty years.

I have revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England as well as retaining my membership of the religious Society of Friends (Quakers) of which both Heather and I had been members since 1948. And – in a few days time - I hope to be celebrating my ninetieth birthday with my family and German friends.

Most people would, I suppose, consider that (for my age!) I continue to live a pretty full and active life. To myself though (especially when sleepless at two in the morning!) I am just filling in time, turning over, and enjoying, the colourful pages of the glossy magazines strewn on the table of God’s Waiting Room.

Sun, Sea and Sand – and 'The Case of the Missing Beach!'


The last really hot, dry summer that we had on the Essex Sunshine Coast was in 2006, five years ago. Since then, although we have had hot, sunny summer days, we have also had grey, chilly ones with strong winds and more rain than we expect. We haven’t had, as we had five years ago, day after day of hot, dry sunny weather.

Will 2011 prove to be as good as, even better perhaps, than 2006? We are still in the spring but the auguries are good. A cold, windy and often wet Easter had become almost traditional – and it really didn’t seem to matter whether it was a year in which Easter was ‘early’ or ‘late’; but not this year! It was warm and sunny throughout the Easter holiday where I was, up in the Peak District, and I’m told it was just the same back here on the sunshine coast. On my return to Clacton we had a few days of bitter northeast winds blowing in off the sea but now, as we approach mid-May we have gentle breezes and summer sunshine again. The solar panel on my roof is working overtime, supplying me with free hot water!

Everything seems to have conspired for our benefit. Always we have a plethora of public holidays in the spring when the weather on the southern East Anglian coast is rarely at its best. This year we had an extra one of those early spring holidays – and the weather was perfect for it! I have been to the sea front on several occasions recently and once onto the pier and on each occasion there seemed to be crowds of happy shoppers and visitors. I’d be surprised if Clacton's tills haven’t been ringing merrily!

A natural feature of our Sunshine Coast of which we have every reason to be proud is the quality of our beaches. Compare our miles of tide-washed golden sand with the shingle and pebbles of other east coast resorts like Felixstowe and Southwold, and such famous south coast resorts as Brighton and Eastbourne. No wonder William the Conqueror stumbled and fell when, in 1066, he leapt from his invading landing craft onto the pebbled beach of Pevensey Bay!

Nature has been generous to us and Tendring Council deserve credit for having done their bit to complement nature. Blue flags, prestigious standards of European excellence fly proudly over Clacton’s Martello Beach, Brightlingsea Beach and the Beach at Dovercourt Bay. Quality control awards from the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, denoting freedom from litter and a safe environment, have gone to beaches at Frinton, Walton and Harwich as well as to those that have been awarded a blue flag.

A sad exception is Holland-on-Sea, once as proud as any of its safe and sandy beaches but which quite suddenly finds that part of some of them has disappeared almost overnight. Mrs Read, a Clacton mother of two who exercises her dogs and whose children play on Holland Haven beach is reported as saying, ‘We were there at Easter and there was plenty of sand’. Now, she says that the beach is no longer there. So much sand has gone that steps leading down from the promenade would no longer reach the beach – if there were any! ‘You can’t get down them’, says Mrs Read, ‘but you wouldn’t want to anyway, because there’s no beach there any more……..it’s just rubble, estuary mud and bits of metal sticking out of the ground’.

In response the Council has closed two sections of beach – almost a third of a mile between Hazlemere Road Car Park and the Queensway toilets and about 300 ft at Holland Haven.

The Council blames the disappearing sand on heavy onshore winds over several days and says that it can only wait for the tides to deposit fresh sand. Council Leader Neil Stock says that, ‘This loss of beach has been caused by nature and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it’ which is not a thought that brings much consolation to beach hut owners. Mrs Read says, ‘A beach doesn’t just disappear without a reason. Beach hut owners pay the council hundreds of pounds, but having a beach hut, sort of implies that there should be a beach’.

‘Neither a borrower, nor a lender be…..’


This was the advice given by Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet but it seems that it is only the second part of that advice that is the message to us from our government today. Increased tuition fees force debt on university students, and continuing record low interest rates plus rising inflation encourage borrowers and do nothing to hasten the clearance of their debts. Meanwhile those same low interest rates discourage savers and impoverish those who rely on their savings to augment their meagre incomes.

I suppose it couldn’t be all part of a cunning government plan to transfer the nation’s debt (incurred not by the last New Labour Government and the ‘public sector’ but by the cupidity and incompetence of the financial division of the private sector) from the government to us as individuals!

Week 33.10 17 August 2010

Tendring Topics……..on line

A ‘Big Society………'

……..or just another Confidence Trick? I am referring to our Prime Minister, David Cameron’s idea of a major redistribution of power from its present base in central and local government, to ‘the community’. When I first heard of it I had an eerie feeling of déja vu. Somewhere, at some time, I had heard it all before.

Then it came to me. During the ‘50s and ‘60s I had encountered some extraordinarily nice people who had assured me that an earthly paradise would only be achieved when the state ‘had withered away’ and society was organised in small self-sufficient communities, each managing its own affairs. These friends of mine tended to be bearded, bespectacled and sandal-wearing. The males usually wore corduroy trousers, jeans not yet having achieved their popularity, and the females, flowing and colourful print dresses. They were strict vegetarians, readers of The Guardian and the New Statesman (both of which they criticised for being too pro-establishment) and they described themselves as Tolstoyan Anarchists.

Charming and friendly as they were, they were surely not the kind of people whose ideas – even half a century later – would be likely to inspire a leader of the Conservative Party.

They hadn’t. His ideas are far less radical. Come to think of it, I can’t recall there being any reduction in the power of central government included in them – rather the reverse in fact. He is quite keen on parents and teachers running their own schools free of local government control. He proposes that if a local authority raises Council Tax above a central government dictated benchmark there could be a local referendum, the result of which would be binding on the council. He would like to see the ‘cabinet style’ administration that has been imposed on local government, replaced by the virtual dictatorship of a directly elected Mayor. Similarly, he would like to see the admittedly shadowy Police Authorities replaced by directly elected Commissioners, also elected dictators, to whom Chief Constables would be subordinate. Is that, power to the people? Hardly.

The public are also invited to let the Government know their ideas on savings and cuts that could be made. However there is no question of us having a referendum on the increase in VAT or on the value of the Trident nuclear deterrent. The idea that the system of income tax should be reviewed, with a penny or two immediately added to the standard rate, is a subject, like sex, religion and politics, that simply ‘isn’t discussed’ in polite society.

More use should be made of free volunteer labour, says Mr Cameron. Everyone has ideas about how such volunteers could best be used, invariably ways which do not affect the person making the suggestion. A number have had the idea that volunteer labour could be used to keep flower beds in parks and public gardens neat and tidy. I’d be surprised if any of those making this suggestion are council gardeners or members of their families. Nor, I think, would nurses and paramedics welcome Red Cross or St. John’s Ambulance volunteers supplementing or supplanting them in hospital wards or on NHS ambulances. What would be the reaction of postal workers to boy scouts voluntarily delivering the mail?

I rather warmed to the idea, suggested by a tv viewer, that David Cameron might like to set an example. He has, so the viewer said, ample private means (I have no idea whether or not that is the case) and could resign from his job as Prime Minister – and then take it up again as a volunteer. He would, of course, retain the perks; two comfortably furnished and staffed homes, free VIP travel and goodness knows how many free official dinners and lunches!

Think of the valuable spin-off. Every time workers – even those on the minimum wage – asked for a pay rise, they could be told, ‘Stop moaning. You’re already getting more than the Prime Minister!’


A correspondent to the East Anglian Daily Times summed up 'The Big Society' very succinctly:

'As I understand it, the aim of the big society is to get the work currently done professionally by workers in the public sector, transferred to the 'voluntary sector'. In other words, Davnick Cleggeron is asking me to volunteer in order to put one of my neighbours out of work'.

No member of the present government, or of any possible future government, can remember the 1930s. I can. Then democratically elected representatives of local communities ran services as diverse as gas, electricity and water supply, hospitals and maternity homes, domiciliary health care, schools and further education institutions, public transport, sewers and sewage treatment, highways, parks and gardens and housing estates; most of the services in fact, that make the difference between civilisation and barbarism. Through their representatives elected to county, borough and district councils, the ‘communities’ provided and controlled all those services. In those days, when local government was truly local and had a considerable measure of independence, there was no apathy at the time of the elections.

The post-war Labour Government, no doubt with the best of intentions, entrusted most of those service to giant nationalised corporations. Their Conservative successors, also well intentioned, privatised them, passing them for the most part to giant, often international, private enterprises similar to the nationalised ones they had replaced. Meanwhile local government was reorganised, drastically cutting down the number of authorities, and eliminating the local from local democracy. Subsequent measures, politicising Councils and investing them with all the worst features of parliamentary government, have all but removed the democracy!

There is, I fear, no turning back. Despite Mr Cameron’s good intentions, I can see no possibility of our recovering the community control of essential local services that once we had.

By the riverside

It must have been in the spring of 1944 that a friendly (yes, it really was friendly) football match was arranged between a team of we British prisoners of war at a working camp in the little German town of Zittau, and one of German soldiers from a nearby Wehrmacht barracks. I have always been totally useless at ball games, so I was one of the spectators, sharing the touchline with some of my fellow prisoners and off-duty German soldiers, both groups good-naturedly cheering our sides on. The match was, of course, arranged strictly unofficially. No doubt our respective governments would have preferred us to be trying to kill each other.

We lost 2 –1, which was hardly surprising as there were only 30 of us (including me!) from which to choose a team, while there were several hundred at the barracks. It was by no means a shameful defeat, as our opponents freely acknowledged.

The match was not played on a proper pitch but in a meadow beside the River Mandau, that flows from the nearby mountains through Zittau to join the rather larger River Neisse and thence to the great river Oder. There were no proper goal posts or line markings. The Mandau in Zittau was quite small but fast flowing. One of our worries during the football match was that the ball might be accidentally kicked into the stream and be carried away before it could be retrieved. During the past four years I have visited Zittau three times and have on a number of occasions crossed the Mandau. The river was unchanged but I was never quite sure where the meadow was on which that match had been played.

These memories were brought back vividly last week when one of my current friends in Zittau, the scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck, emailed to me these pictures of the raging, flooded Mandau, as it had been a few days earlier. Zittau, and of course the mountains where the Mandau and the Neisse rise, had had several days of heavy and continuous rain on an unprecedented scale. The town is near the confluence of the two rivers, and is also at the point where the frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic coincide. There has been serious flooding in all three countries. Dr Dudeck, in his latest email, tells me that the floodwaters are now subsiding, no doubt creating havoc further down the river. The local damage is being assessed. In Zittau and the three-countries area, thousands have been made homeless and there have been 10 fatalities. Nothing, of course, compared with the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan – but to the bereaved it is little consolation to know that you are one of just ten, rather than tens of thousands.

The floods in Europe (including those in Cumbria earlier in the year), in China and on the Indian subcontinent, and the unprecedented drought, heat and bush fires in Russia are, I have little doubt, all the result of the accelerating world-wide climate change that the recent international conference in Copenhagen failed miserably to address. Dr. Dudeck writes to me sadly that,n ‘It is nature taking revenge for the sins of mankind’. Perhaps I should let him know that our recently re-elected MP is convinced that, if climate change is taking place, it is a purely natural phenomenon and not mankind’s fault. Trying to do anything about it is a waste of time and money.

It might cheer him up – but on the other hand I suppose that it might not!

Clacton’s Station Buffet

Since the sad loss of my wife four years ago I have made a number of trips to and from London by rail, making use of the discounted fares available to pensioners. They have been the first and last stages of my visits to Zittau, to Brussels to visit my grandson there, and of visits to my sons and daughters-in-law who live in the London area.

I usually arrived back in Clacton at about noon. Before finding a taxi to take me home I would pop into the Station Buffet that for many years had welcomed and served hungry, thirsty and weary travellers arriving in Clacton, and those waiting at the station for trains to arrive and depart.

It provided me with a welcome break for a drink, and a leisurely sandwich or light meal before returning to face the washing, the emails and the junk mail that I knew would be awaiting me. Refreshed, I would find my taxi, knowing that whatever else greeted me as I opened my front door, at least I wouldn’t need to make myself a mid-day meal.

It is a little doubtful if I shall be making such journeys in the future. I am beginning to find travel by rail (not so much the travel itself as the hassle before and after!) too much for me

Clacton Station Buffet – now closed

Even if I am unlikely to want to use that Station Buffet again, I am sorry to see that it is closed and that there are so far no signs of its re-opening. Vacant, it’s an ugly ‘missing tooth’ on Clacton Station and I am sure that a great many people must miss the service that, for many decades, it has rendered the travelling public.

Tendring Council claim to be eager to help aspiring local entrepreneurs. They are also eager to promote Clacton-on-Sea’s image as a friendly and welcoming holiday, residential or business destination. Somewhere ‘out there’, there must be a young and ambitious would-be restaurateur, lacking only the funds – or perhaps the self-confidence – to bring new ideas and energy to bear on again making Clacton’s Station Buffet the welcoming venue that once it was.

The Council should co-operate with Network Rail, the station’s owners, to find that young entrepreneur, and offer encouragement and practical help to harness that energy and bring those ideas into fruition..

Tendring Topics…….on line

A Glimpse into the future?

The above news cutting from a German regional newspaper was sent to me by a friend living in the Black Forest area. It shows a ten-years-older (and wiser) German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, commenting in 2020 on the failure of the Copenhagn Climate-Change Conference to come to a satisfactory concluson. It is doubly prophetic since the newspaper is dated 4th December, before he Conference had even begun!

The print of the caption is, I regret, too small to read on this blog. My ability to read German is distinctly limited. However I have managed to work out that it is headed 'Late Repentance' and goes on to say that this is one of the posters that greeted Angel Merkel, and other national leaders when they arrived at Copenhagen airport for the Conference. It was part of a Greenpeace Poster campaign.

I don't really think that Chancellor Angela Merkel (or Prime Minister Gordon Brown) need be repentant about their roles at Copenhagen, except perhaps that, unlike Greenpeace, neither of them had foreseen inevitable failure.

A Lucky Year?

To ethnic Chinese, ‘eight’ is a lucky number. That, so I am told, is why they were so keen to hold the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. Ariel, my elder grandson’s Taiwanese girl-friend was convinced that the year that is coming to an end would be an extremely fortunate one for me. It was the year of my 88th birthday and my house number is also 88!

Myself and Ariel, Grandson Chris’ Taiwanese girlfriend

Actually, I often feel that I have been blest by good luck all my life. No, I have never won the lottery…..but as I have never bought a lottery ticket that is hardly surprising. Over and over again though my life has been punctuated by extraordinary coincidences, and circumstances that seemed to be disasters, but have turned out to be blessings in disguise.

Right -grandson Nick and Romy, his Belgian girlfriend.

2009 isn’t quite over yet, but yes, despite the recession it has so far it has been a good one for me. I had an enjoyable Easter, attending with my daughter-in-law a wonderful Choral Eucharist in Southwark Cathedral that was televised and transmitted on BBC tv. To celebrate my 88 years I visited Brussels with my son and daughter-in-law, to see my grandson Nick who lives and works there. I was introduced to his girl-friend….a charming young lady whose native tongue is French but who also speaks fluent, and virtually unaccented, English. Returning to England for the actual birthday, my son, daughter-in-law and I had a celebratory meal at the very posh Essex pub run by the parents of Jamie Oliver, the well-known tv chef.

Left:Me on my 88th birthday.

Right: Jo

AKA Miss Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc.

Later in the year my other son and daughter-in-law drove me Sheffield for a weekend to spend time with my granddaughter, an M.A., B.Sc., of whom I am immensely proud. Still in her mid-twenties she works as a social worker attached to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital. We drove out into the Peak District and, for the first time in my life, I was able to see traditional Derbyshire ‘well dressing’.

In July I was able to return to Zittau in Germany for my third (and, I think, final) time since the end of World War II. It was to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the town’s restored Lenten Veil (in the 500 year history of which I am believed to have played a tiny part) in its own museum/church of the Holy Cross. Grandson Nick organised the visit and accompanied me. This time I travelled by rail, from London to Brussels by Eurostar and then, with Nick, from Brussels to Dresden with just one change of train at Frankfurt. By booking well in advance we travelled first class at second class prices and, believe me, first class on a German long-distance train really is first class!

Nick drove me from Dresden to Zittau, sixty-odd miles, in a pre-arranged hired car. It was a great pleasure to meet again my friends Dr Volker Dudeck and his wife Julia, and Ingrid Zeibig and her family, including her little niece Maja, now almost three! This time I managed to get to the summit of Mount Oybin, where I had helped take the heavy cases containing the famous Lenten Veil, in February 1945.

From the Left: Ingrid Zeibig, Maja, Ingrid’s mother Frau Ingrid Kulke, Ingrid’s sister-in-law Kornelia (Konnie) and brother Andreas. Konnie’s second baby was born in September; a boy, Tom Friedrich, a brother for Maja.

The view from the summit of Mount Oybin the far distance, swathed in mist, is the town of Zittau.

To my great surprise and pleasure, I was also given by Dr Dudeck proof copies of a long article of mine entitled ‘Return to Zittau’. It had been translated into German and published as a glossy booklet, illustrated with photographs taken locally, and pictures culled from my Flickr web site, www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea More copies of this booklet have since been published and are on sale in the tourist shop at 5€, profits going to the upkeep of the Lenten Veil, which has recently had its 300,000th visitor (an English tourist!) in the ten years that it has been on public display.

Inspired by the German booklet, I am self-publishing a similar booklet entitled ‘Zittau…..and I’ Incorporating my original Return to Zittau’, but with a great deal of additional material and half a dozen or so photographic illustrations. I am having 150 copies printed for family and friends. The typescript has gone to the printer and I hope to have them before the end of January..

Yes, it has been a good year, though I don’t think that ‘all the eights’ has had a great deal to do with it. Those who read this blog a year ago may remember that my New Year Resolution was to ‘count my blessings, count them one by one’. Two thousand-and-nine certainly gave me many to count. As, in two thousand-and-ten I shall, if I am still around, be entering my ninetieth year, I ought perhaps to hope that it will be a little less action-packed!

‘Incapable of running a bath!’……..yet the best in Essex!

It was, of course, our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell who claimed that the previous ‘Clacton First’, non-Conservative coalition administration of Tendring Council, was incapable of running a bath. Not everyone however regards him as the greatest living authority on local and world affairs. Rather more reliable is the Government’s Independent Audit Commission which awarded the Council three out of four for performance, and declared it not only to be the best local authority in Essex, but in the top twenty-five of the two hundred plus local authorities in the country! I wonder what Mr Carswell, who is perhaps best known as a climate change sceptic, and for his purchase (at public expense) of ‘a love seat’ and a £60 kettle for his second home in Thorpe-le-Soken, has to say about all the other Essex authorities. Unlike Tendring Council, several of them invested their tax-payers’ money in high-interest-earning banks in Iceland…..and are now regretting it!

Most of the data on which the Audit Commission’s report was based was garnered during the previous non-Conservative administration of which Mr Carswell was so scathing. Possibly that is why the reaction of the present Council leader, Mr Neil Stock has been distinctly low-key. He praises the Council’s staff (not the Council!) for their hard work but says that the Audit Commission has given a loud and clear message that they still have some serious concerns. The report had pointed out that the council’s public image was poor, with less than half of local people surveyed expressing satisfaction with the way it ran things.

He added encouragingly that the report said that Tendring had ‘a firm foundation for future improvement’ (under Mr Stock’s new Conservative administration of course!)

There are, of course, several reasons why Tendring Council has a poor public image. The current in-fighting between the two, almost equal, opposing Parties doesn’t help. Then again many people imagine that all public services are the responsibility of the district council. Mobility scooter users like myself for instance, are particularly conscious of the atrocious state of many of the pavements away from the town centre. How many, I wonder, realize that these are the responsibility of the Conservative County Council (who received only an ‘adequate’ rating from the Audit Commission) to whom the greater part of our Council Tax is paid. I think that many of Tendring Council’s services, including, for instance the refuse collection and recycling collection services and the street cleansing service, that are second to none.

Then again, for both the local and national press, local government disasters provide much more attractive stories than local government triumphs. The news story about the Audit Commission’s findings is to be found only at the bottom of Page 7 of the Clacton Gazette of 17th December, with the headline, ‘Council staff earn a pat on the back’. I suggest that had Tendring been rated the worst, instead of the best, local authority in Essex, the story would have been on the front page with some such headline as ‘Tendring First’ Council comes Last! and a story about how the new administration was doing its best to clear up the mess left by its predecessor.

Week 41.09

Tendring Topics……….on Line

An Atmosphere of Suspicion

There was a time, years ago, when if the Friend who normally took the Quaker Children’s Class at our Sunday morning Meeting for Worship was absent, other members would step in and take the half dozen or so children we had at that time, under their wing. After the first fifteen minutes of based-on-silence worship, they would take them through to the Children’s room for their ‘lesson’ for the forty-five or so minutes remaining. Fifteen minutes were reckoned to be as long as normal kids could be expected to remain still and silent!

I took my turn, and so long as it happened only very occasionally, I quite enjoyed it. I doubt if I ever taught them anything very useful, but they got to know me, and at the very least, it made sure that their parents could relax in Meeting in the knowledge that their offspring were safe and out of mischief.

When I was a Public Health Inspector, and again when I was the Council’s Public Relations Officer, I would occasionally be invited to visit one or other of the local schools to chat to the children about subjects as varied as food hygiene, road safety, their future civic responsibilities, vandalism, litter dropping and so on.

As I grew older I rejoiced in seeing young children enjoying themselves at play and might occasionally pause for a few moments to watch them.

The first two of those activities I could now undertake only after my past had been searched for criminal activities and it had been certified, not only that I had never been convicted of any paedophilic activities, but that I had never been suspected of them. Were I nowadays to engage in the third one, watching children at play, I have little doubt that there would soon be a police officer on the scene, at the best ordering me to ‘move on’ at once, but more likely inviting me to accompany him or her to the Police Station for interrogation.

Child abuse is a detestable crime. It also seems to be the one crime in which the accused are not only deemed to be guilty until they have proved their innocence, but even when they have successfully done so, are likely to remain under suspicion for the rest of their lives. I feel particularly sorry for schoolteachers, youth leaders and members of the clergy. How easy it must be for a spiteful or revenge-seeking child to ruin forever a reputation and a career by claiming that the teacher, or the vicar, or the new curate, or the scout master, ‘behaved inappropriately’, one of those wonderful 21st century euphemisms that can mean anything from violent sexual assault to laying a friendly arm across the shoulders in sympathy or encouragement.

The latest idiocy in this connection has been the case of the two women police officers, both with young children and with different working shifts, who agreed to look after each-others’ children while the other was on duty. An eminently sensible arrangement that has resulted in their being accused of breaking the law! Very obviously someone whose path they had crossed during the course of their duties had made a complaint. It will, I suppose, have to be pursued. The final result is likely to be that they will both be compelled to pay a stranger to look after their children, rather than have a close friend and colleague look after them for nothing! If that is the law, then the law really is an ass!

Ironically, at almost the same time, a ‘children’s nurse’ in a day nursery who had presumably been thoroughly vetted, was pleading guilty to a series of charges of horrific child abuse! That of course, was a dreadful exception. In the overwhelming majority of day nurseries children are perfectly safe and secure.

Similarly, it can’t be stressed too strongly that most people aren’t paedophiles. Most men are neither rapists nor wife-beaters, most women don’t neglect or physically abuse their kids, and most kids aren’t malevolent little hooligans. There must surely be some way of protecting children without creating the fog of suspicion that nowadays hangs over us all!

Another Time Traveller?

Who, you may well ask, is this aristocratic lady who looks as though she has just stepped out of a tv costume drama set in the 18th Century.

No, she is neither an actor nor a time-travelling visitor from an earlier century. She is, in fact, my good friend Ingrid Zeibig, well-loved aunt of little Maja and Tom Friedrich, whom I mentioned last week. Born and brought up in Zittau, the little German town where I was once a POW, she now lives in historic Bayreuth in Bavaria, home of the Wagner festival and a Mecca for all lovers of Wagner’s music. From time to time she volunteers to transform herself into the Margravine Wilhelmine*. Bewigged and suitably gowned, she graciously agrees to accompany and inform visitors as they stroll round her domain.

Ingrid doesn’t always look quite as regal as that. On my recent trip to Germany with grandson Nick, she made the long journey from Bayreuth in Bavaria to Zittau in the most easterly part of Saxony, to meet Nick and myself again and to act as interpreter and ‘honorary daughter’ to me during my stay in her country.

The picture below was taken at the ceremony to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the restoration of the 500 years old Great Fastentuch or Lenten Veil (in the history of which I am believed to have played a tiny role!) and its establishment in the Museum/Church of the Holy Cross. I had just been presented with copies of the illustrated booklet ‘Rückkehr nach Zittau’, the German version of my article ‘Return to Zittau’ which I had written after my first visit to Zittau as a free man, in 2007.

Ingrid and I are both clutching copies of the German translation of ‘Return to Zittau’.

The Great Fastentuch has, incidentally, recently had its 300,000th visitor since it was installed and exhibited in the Church of the Holy Cross ten years ago. He was an Englishman from Dorset!

*The Margravine Wilhelmine (1709 - 1758) was a daughter of the King of Prussia. Her grandfather, on her mother's side, was our King George I. She married Frederick, Margrave (Marquess) of Bayreuth in 1732. There, decades before the advent of Richard Wagner, she established and nurtured the town's musical and operatic traditions.

Speeding and Cutting the Cost of dealing with Vandals and Hooligans

Public officials’ expensive and time-wasting note taking, box ticking and report writing are a constant complaint both of the victims of anti-social behaviour and of the tax payers who have to pay for it to be tackled. Yet these activities have to be noted and recorded by those on the spot, and passed on to those who will deal with them.

A report in Inside Housing, the official journal of the Institute of Housing, reports the way that Scotland’s South Lanarkshire Council are using mobile technology to deal with this problem.
The local authority has given wardens a piece of technology that lets them enter the details of an incident into a mobile phone which wirelessly transfers the details of the incident directly to a data base in the council’s offices.

Before this technology, developed by software consultants HUB Solutions, had been introduced, wardens had to log the details in a notebook, rewrite them as a report and pass them onto a data entry clerk who entered the details on the database. All of this took forty-eight hours, was prone to backlogs and occupied two staff members. Now, transmission is instant, and some of the warden’s time and all of the clerk’s time is saved.

Peter Hall, Managing Director of Hub Solutions says that his firm has also developed a system, to be tested by Portsmouth Council, that will enable members of the public to report incidents of anti-social behaviour via the internet. Their Gateway System will replace the old method of giving incident diaries to affected members of the public and from these collating a list of events that have to be keyed into a database.

Inside Housing reports Mr Hall as saying that Gateway will reduce the time staff spend recording anti-social incidents by twenty percent and that an added advantage of the system will be that staff will be immediately notified of any incidents, so that they will be able to nip problems in the bud. How valuable such a system might have been to that distraught woman who recently killed herself and her disabled daughter rather than face further persecution from a gang of youths!
Pete and I on holiday in 2007. European travellers may recognise the backdrop, the skyline of Prague

Yes, as you may have guessed, I do have a personal interest in all of this. Peter Hall is my elder son. He rose through the ranks of the staff of Hackney’s Housing Department to the position of Assistant Director of Housing and was in fact, for several months Acting Director. Made redundant following one of the borough’s political and administrative upheavals, he launched HUB Solutions Ltd. a software consultancy specialising in finding solutions to the problems of public authorities. HUB Solutions now has clients throughout the United Kingdom (South Lanarkshire and Portsmouth are pretty distant from each other!) and, as well as an HQ in London, has a base in Glasgow from which to service the firm’s many Scottish clients. Viewers of Taggart on tv may be interested to know that among these is the Strathclyde Police Authority!

Tendring Topics……on Line

Some Pictorial Memories

It was just as I was posting last week’s blog on the internet that my grandson Nick’s photographs from our trip to Zittau arrived by email. They were far better than mine (well, he did get a B.A. Honours degree in photography at Westminster University) and really revived my memories of that very happy and action-packed weekend.

There was the picture of the high-speed train pulling into Frankfurt Airport station where we changed trains on the way home. Its streamlined glass-fronted driver’s cab reminded me that on our outward journey we had been in a carriage just behind the cab. It was possible for us to move forward so as to be just behind the driver, able through the glass windscreen to have a driver’s-eye view of the rail-track ahead.

Then there were the pictures taken on the summit of Mount Oybin: the arched doorway to the crypt through which, in February 1945, we had carried those heavy cases that we now know contained the historic Great Zittau Lenten Veil, and the nave of the monastic church with its soaring stone walls and windows. How on earth, we wondered, had those medieval builders managed to create such a magnificent and beautiful structure at the summit of a mountain? While we were there, concealed loud-speakers brought us the sound of plainsong chant from an invisible monastic choir; very spooky!

The following day had been the celebration of the restoration of the Lenten Veil and tenth anniversary of its installation in the museum/church of the Holy Cross. Speeches in German, most of which neither Nick nor I could understand, were punctuated by captivating performances by a Polish choral group, two violinists, two guitarists and four singers (though the musicians also sang). The lyrics, some in German some in Polish, all so we were told, had their origins in the Bible. The music was arranged by one of the choir members and had been inspired by traditional folk music of Polish, gypsy and Jewish origin. It was just the kind of light-classical/folk music that I, and it was obvious the German audience, enjoyed.

Among the speakers was my friend Dr Volker Dudeck, retired director of the Zittau Museum, who referred to the contribution that ‘the Englishman, Ernest Hall’ had made to the history of the Lenten Veil and how honoured they were that he and his grandson were with them on this occasion!

When the speeches were over, but before we repaired to a posh mayoral reception at the Town Hall, Dr Dudeck presented me with three copies of a glossy, illustrated booklet entitled, in German, ‘Return to Zittau’ by Ernest Hall. It was a German translation of the long, nearly 8,000 words, article that I had written after my visit to Zittau two years earlier, illustrated by local pictures and pictures taken from my Flickr site. It came as a complete, and very pleasant, surprise. The photograph shows my friend Ingrid and myself each holding one of the booklets.

But, of course, the photos also recorded something of the friendship that has developed between my family and the Kulke family of Zittau. There was Ingrid’s little niece Maja, who will be three in September and, at about the same time, will have a new brother or sister. Her mum and dad, Ingrid’s brother and sister-in-law Andreas and Kornelia, and Ingrid and Andreas’ mother Frau Ingrid Kulke who has always been so friendly and hospitable. And, of course, Ingrid herself, who now lives in Bayreuth in Bavaria but who made the long car journey to Zittau to see us.

Nick and I are on the photograph too. My eyes are shut and my mouth open (I hope I wasn’t snoring!) and I appear to be asleep. Perhaps I was! It was at the end of three very busy and tiring days and, as I constantly need to remind myself, I am eighty-eight!

‘Forty years on…….’

No, I wasn’t at either Eton or Harrow. Nor, as far as I know, have I ever met anyone who was. However I have always had an ear for a good lyric and the opening lines of the Harrow School Song have stuck in my mind.

Forty years on, when afar and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today…….

It was forty years ago, on 12th July 1969, that our then-new Quaker Meeting House was officially opened by George Gorman, Secretary of the Quaker Home Service Committee, in effect, though I doubt if its members would have cared for the description, the Quaker home mission organisation.

Clacton Quaker Meeting House as it looked when first opened. We have more recently added an extension to provide a toilet with wheelchair access

I was the Clerk (secretary, chairman and general dogsbody) of the Clacton Quaker Meeting at the time, so I had been deeply involved in the fund raising, the building and furnishing, and the official opening. We had invited members of every Christian tradition to attend. I am not sure if all sent representatives, but many did, and I know that there were, among others, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Salvationists present. With Clacton Quakers and others from Colchester and Sudbury, the Meeting House was full and those present overflowed into the entrance lobby. Luckily we didn’t, in those days, take ‘health and safety’ quite so seriously as we do today.

The interior of the Quaker Meeting House today. The central table and the stacking chairs were there for the opening but many of the chairs have since been reupholstered.

We didn’t do any singing at the official opening. That’s not the Quaker tradition. However, those who were present on that occasion certainly are scattered ‘afar and asunder’ and many have departed from this world. I was shocked to realize that I would be the only Clacton Quaker who remembered that official opening and who would be able to attend our Meeting for Worship on Sunday morning 12th July and the Area Business Meeting (with Quakers from all over north-east Essex and from Sudbury in Suffolk) in the afternoon. At both these Meetings our Meeting House’s fortieth birthday would be remembered with thanksgiving.

And so it was. The paragraphs above were written before 12th July and it is now the day after. What I haven’t so far mentioned is that that date was not only the 40th Anniversary of the Meeting House’s official opening, but was also the third anniversary of the death of Heather, my wife for sixty years.

The last fifty years of her life had been inextricably intertwined with that of the Quaker Meeting. We had attended Meeting for Worship most Sundays, for the last year or so with Heather in a wheelchair friendly taxi. In the 1960s and ‘70s she had run a successful Quaker Children’s Class. Until disability overcame her in 2004 she had visited the sick and disabled and written long and chatty letters to absent Friends. She had often provided the flowers for the Meeting Room table and served tea for an after-meeting chat. For thirty years she had organised the letting of the rooms at the Meeting House to local organisations, and had made firm friends of some of their secretaries. It was in the Meeting House that we had held meetings of celebration and thanksgiving to mark our silver, ruby, golden and diamond wedding anniversaries. It was in the Meeting House that, three months after our Diamond Wedding Celebration, we held a Memorial Meeting of Worship to give thanks for the Grace of God made evident in Heather’s life. All our F/friends and family were present and I was very pleased that the vicar of St. James’ Anglican Church and the Christ Church URC Church Minister were both there.

At 0ur Golden Wedding celebration at the Quaker Meeting House on 27th April 1996. Heather and I were still in our early '70s (well, I was almost 75) and we were both still pretty fit.

At the Sunday morning Meeting for Worship on 12th July, sitting where Heather and I had so often sat together on Sunday mornings, it was difficult to accept that she was not still sitting there beside me. I rose and spoke about her, as I felt impelled to do, with only the greatest difficulty.

I had promised to talk about Clacton Meeting and the official opening of the Meeting House for about thirty minutes at the end of the afternoon’s business meeting. Remembering how I had felt in the morning I wondered if I would manage to do so. I needn’t have worried. There’s nothing like a Quaker Business Meeting (or I imagine the business meeting of any church!) to dampen the emotions and restore calm to the mind. I managed to give my thirty minute talk and I think that Friends found it acceptable. At least nobody fell asleep; nobody got up and walked out; nobody came quietly up to me later and said, ‘I wish Friend, that you hadn’t felt called upon to say this, that or the other’, and several did thank me.

Afterwards I, and I think everybody else, thoroughly enjoyed the tea that a few untiring and unseen Clacton Friends had provided for us.

It had been, I thought, a good celebration of forty years of Quaker service to God and to the local community, and of the service that Heather had rendered to the Quaker Meeting.