Week 27.10

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Dedham Vale Hopper

The Dedham Vale Hopper sounds as though it might be a seriously endangered species, found only on the Suffolk/Essex border. In fact though it is a new, very promising, development that could indirectly benefit the whole of our area. I have long thought that our Tendring Holiday Coast, historic Colchester, and the lovely Constable country of Dedham Vale complement each other as a holiday and touring destination and that what benefits one will ultimately be to the advantage of the other two.

The Hopper is a sight-seeing bus that, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays throughout the summer, is running on a circuit from Manningtree railway station through Flatford, East Bergholt, Stratford St. Mary, Dedham, lawford and back to Manningtree. It sets off hourly from Manningtree station from 9.40 a.m., the final tour of the day starting at 5.25 p.m.

















Left - Bridge Cottage, Flatford. Right - Flatford Mill

This service began on Saturday 3rd July and will continue until Sunday 26th September. It has been designed to connect with rail services from Liverpool Street Station to Manningtree and is also accessible by rail from Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester and Harwich.

As an added incentive it is to be free for the first four weeks of its operation. That, I think, takes us to the end of July. From then on it will cost just £2 for a day ticket that will allow passengers to hop on or off the bus (hence the ‘Hopper’!) anywhere along the route.

Of special interest to American visitors is Sherman House, Dedham, ancestral home of General Sherman of ‘Marching through Georgia’ fame in the American Civil War.

The project is being funded by the National Lottery, the National Trust, and the Dedham Vale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the Stour Valley Countryside Project. It is being run by the Hadleigh community bus service and funding is assured until 2012. Adrian Clarke of the National Trust, is quoted as saying; ‘We are delighted to be supporting the Hopper Bus service. We want to encourage people to visit this beautiful area in a sustainable, environmentally-friendly way’.


I wish the Dedham Vale Hopper project the success that it deserves. The auspices are good. A pilot scheme undertake in 2005 proved very successful.


I hesitate to mention the weather in this blog because the last time I did so the wind promptly swung round to the north and the temperature dropped ten degrees!

The Cathedral-like interior of Dedham’s parish church.


However, as I write it does seem possible that we may expect a summer with plenty of warm, sunny weather, interspersed with heavy, perhaps thundery, showers. It could be – in fact has been – a lot worse!

Professional Politicians

A month or so ago I forecast in this column the future development of a breed of professional local politicians, managing to acquire a comfortable income by serving as elected members on local authorities and other public bodies. I hardly expected confirmation of this forecast to present itself either quite so quickly or quite so near to home.

It seems that local husband and wife team Neil Stock and Sarah Candy net total allowances of £91,000 a year for their roles on Tendring District Council, the Essex County Council and the North East Essex NHS. That, of course, is just their spare-time voluntary work. Their ‘day job’ is running a very successful mail-order fashion and haberdashery enterprise from their Little Bromley home, with customers world-wide.

Mrs Candy is the biggest contributor to this successful husband-and-wife partnership. Last year she earned more than £46,000 from Essex County Council as Cabinet Member for children’s services plus £15,500 for her position as Cabinet member for Planning with Tendring District Council and more than £5,000 as a non-executive director at North East Essex Primary Care Trust. I hope that the meeting times of these three bodies never coincide! Mr Stock meanwhile, collects £25,000 as Leader of Tendring District Council.

Mr Stock is reported as saying, ‘We are both incredibly busy people who do an incredible amount of work. It might not even equate to the minimum wage, the number of hours we put in’. The ‘incredible’ was of course his word, not that of the Gazette interviewer. If they really are doing so much work that their income doesn’t equate to the minimum wage they are both heading for a serious breakdown and I feel very sorry for them.

With another comment made by Mr Stock I whole-heartedly agree. He said that there should be a national debate over whether councillors needed to become full-time professionals because of the workload, which he blamed on the Labour Government, for introducing cabinet-style local government. One thing is certain. I am sure that a local authorities don’t need top officials on salaries in the region of £200,000 a year and council members on ‘allowances’ amounting to tens of thousands.

During my time as Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I helped to entertain a journalist from Virginia, USA, who was studying public administration in the UK. He admired practically everything he saw. I showed him over Clacton’s Percy King Council Housing Estate (I had fairly recently bade it farewell as Housing Manager). It was at that time virtually vandal-free and well kept and he was full of praise. It was, he assured me, very different from public housing in the States.

His particular admiration though was for our elected councillors who, at that time, were only refunded out-of-pocket expenses for their services. I sat with him in the Public Gallery through one or two pretty boring Committee Meetings. He was astonished at the service they rendered for no personal reward and for nothing more than a desire to serve the public. In the States, he told me, people serve on public bodies only to advance themselves or to further their family’s interests.

I reckon that if he came back now he’d feel more at home!

Penal Reform

I have always entertained a warm feeling for now-Justice-Minister Ken Clarke. He is a colourful, larger-than-life character who, unlike most top politicians, would probably be a welcome and entertaining companion on a long train journey. I don’t agree with many of his ideas but he does have in my opinion very sound view on European integration and has, so it now appears, astonishingly progressive views on Penal Reform.

He is surely the very last person likely to be accused of being a head-in-the-clouds, woolly minded, bleeding-heart do-gooder. Yet, in direct contradiction to one of his predecessors, Michael Howard, who evoked a standing ovation at a Tory Conference by proclaiming that ‘Prison works!’ Ken Clarke declares unequivocally that it doesn’t.

Britain’s grossly overcrowded prisons are, he says, wastefully expensive human warehouses from which well over half the inmates offend again within months of their release. We must, he says, reduce the prison population, concentrating on reform and rehabilitation rather than punishment. There should be fewer custodial sentences and more sentences to service in the community. Firms and charitable organisations should be offered cash incentives to help with the rehabilitation of discharged prisoners.

I wish him every success in his endeavours. It will probably earn him insults from The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express and rather more measured disapproval from The Daily Telegraph. However his views on Europe have no doubt already accustomed him to that.

Dire warnings!

The River Gipping at Sproughton Mill – in the 1930s an ideal spot for angling, and for swimming!

Directly we have a spell of warm weather we have dire warnings from Health and Safety experts, about the perils of bathing in rivers and lakes, no matter how inviting the water may look on a very hot day. The water will be colder and deeper than you think and there may well be hidden obstacles that endanger life and limb. Even if you are a strong swimmer, confine your activities to public baths or swimming pools. Such warnings always revive memories of my childhood and youth spent on the outskirts of Ipswich, where my friends and I received no such warnings – and probably wouldn’t have heeded them if we had!

My home was within easy walk, and even easier cycle ride, of the River Gipping, not one of England’s greatest waterways but one of which I have many fond memories. Along its banks I spent many happy leisure hours as a boy. From about the age of fifteen I was a keen angler, the terror of the roach, perch and pike that lurked in its depths. From an even earlier age (I was a competent swimmer before I was ten) my friends and I would enjoy a swim in its waters on hot summer days. Ipswich was well provided with municipal swimming pools but our parents had to watch every penny and could ill afford frequent requests for the 'threepence or sixpence' entrance charge. The river was free, and much more fun. Possibly because we learned from the experience of other older kids of the potential dangers, I don’t recall any serious accidents and certainly no drownings. Perhaps we were just lucky.

Heather and I in September 1939

It was by the Gipping’s tree-shaded stream that I did my ‘courting’ during the first fortnight of World War II. Pupils from Wanstead County High School had been evacuated to Ipswich. They were, I think, sent there by mistake as they remained only two weeks. Among those evacuees was fifth-former Heather Gilbert, then not quite sixteen. I was a just-eighteen-year old soldier, newly called up with the Territorials. Heather and I met, were attracted to each other and enjoyed a few precious days and evenings together. It was the very beginning of a relationship that ended only with Heather’s death in 2006, sixty-seven years later and after sixty happy years of marriage.

Cheer up. It ny never happen!

As I write these words the immdiate future of this blog is in doubt. My broadband internet service is provided by BT. Currently there is an industrial dispute and I understand that there could be a strike, threatening my email and www service, as soon as next Monday (12th July).

I would, I hope, continue to write these blogs (at my age I don't like to make firm promises!) but would be unable to post them onto the internet until the strike was over.

Pious Victorians used to add the letters DV (the initials of the Latin for 'God willing') to any written promise. Perhaps I should do the same to my assurance that Normal Service would be resumed as soon as possible!

Still, as we used to say in the Army, 'Cheer up. It may never happen!'

Week 36.09

Tendring Topics……on line

A lifetime ago!

I shall be posting this blog onto the Internet on Wednesday 2nd September 2009. Seventy years ago that date fell on a Saturday. The postman pushed through the letterbox of my home in Ipswich an OHMS envelope addressed to Gunner Hall E.G. Its contents informed me that ‘His Majesty King George VI had been graciously pleased to embody the Territorial Army’. I was instructed to report, in uniform and with full kit, to the Drill Hall, in Princes Street, Ipswich forthwith.

The 67th Medium Regiment RA’s first guns – iron-tyred 6in howitzers with limbers – intended to be horse-drawn! The distinctly unsoldierly way in which we are clambering all over them suggests that we – and they – had only just arrived at Roedean. These antique weapons were replaced by new limberless and rubber tyred howitzers when we left Ipswich.

The summons wasn’t unexpected. I had not long returned from two weeks at a Territorial Camp at Roedean (in front of the famous girls school), Brighton. There we had been introduced to our guns, ancient iron-tyred 6in howitzers with limbers, that may well have played a part in the defence of Mafeking. Back in Ipswich I had found the Public Health Department, where I worked, in turmoil. As a result of the worsening international situation, and in expectation that another world war would begin with massive air attacks, first aid posts were being established all round the town, ‘black-outs’ were being prepared for windows and the office phone had to be manned day and night to receive and pass on the news that ‘the balloon had gone up’.

In 1939, this building in Elm Street, Ipswich, housed the Council’s Public Health Department

Call-up, when it came, was quite a relief! However my parents, who had seen their young warrior off ‘to the war’ in the morning were somewhat surprised to see him trudge home again, still with full kit, in the evening. Having called us up, the army clearly hadn’t much idea what to do with us. The 67th Medium Regiment R.A., which I had joined early in the New Year, was a newly formed territorial regiment, comprising volunteers from Ipswich, Felixstowe, Woodbridge and the surrounding smaller towns and villages. Billets were found for those called up who lived outside Ipswich while we Ipswichians were billeted in our own homes, our parents receiving a welcome billeting allowance. And there we stayed ‘learning our trade’ until the spring of 1940 when we entrained for Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire and prepared to join the British Expeditionary Force in France.

The following day, Sunday 3rd September was a day that changed my life forever. Yes, I know that that was the day on which Britain declared war on Germany, beginning a conflict that was to cost millions of lives and bring devastation to many thousands of towns and villages in Britain and throughout Europe. Many of my comrades in the 67th Medium regiment RA would lose their lives and most of those of us who survived would spend three years in captivity in Italy and Germany.

The beginning of all of that was, of course, going on in the background. What changed my life forever on 3rd September 1939 was my meeting Heather Gilbert, an Ilford schoolgirl who had been evacuated with Wanstead County High School to Ipswich, to escape the anticipated mass bombing of the London area. Heather is no longer with me, but she has been in my thoughts at some time or another on every single day of the seventy years that have elapsed since I first met her, and I am sure that she will be will remain in them until my own life ends and, as I fervently hope, we are reunited.

Heather and I, as we were in September 1939

On our first (or possibly our second) date. I was in the army and can't remember whether we were allowed to wear 'civvies' off duty -or whether I was defying an order not to! After the photo was taken we 'went to the pictures' and saw 'Stagecoach', now recognised as a 'classic western' featuring a very young John Wain

She was almost-sixteen and still at school. I was just-eighteen and newly in the army. I am quite sure that her school had been evacuated to Ipswich by mistake. They remained in the town for only two weeks, but it was long enough for us to form a lasting attachment. We corresponded regularly throughout the war. After she had left school we met on rare weekends when I was given some leave and my unit was sufficiently near London for me to visit Ilford. Within a couple of days of my returning home from Germany in 1945 we were engaged. We married on 27th April 1946, just four days after my discharge from the army. Our marriage lasted for sixty years, Heather’s life ending three years ago, a few months after we had celebrated our diamond wedding anniversary.

Last week I mentioned in this blog the tear-off calendar, with a quote for each day, that we had in our barrack room when I was a POW in Germany. Here is another quotation that I have remembered over the years, from the poet Goethe I think:

Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden.
(To love and to be loved in return, is the highest happiness that there is in this world)

I have found that to be abundantly true.


Outside Gants Hill Methodist, Church, Ilford on 27th April 1946. We had to wait nearly seven years for this happy day.

Where there’s a will there’s a way!

I don’t get to Mistley very often. It is the ‘other side’ of the Tendring Peninsula and well beyond the range of my mobility scooter. I always enjoy going there though. Last Saturday (22nd August) my son and daughter-in-law, Pete and Arlene, drove me there. We parked on the quay and had a very enjoyable lunch overlooking the Stour estuary at the Quay Café.

The last time we were there, months before, the fence along the edge of the quay hadn’t been completed. Furious local residents were trying to prevent this with parked cars and lorries. They didn’t succeed. The fence has been completed and I have to say that it does look neater than it did. It is no better loved though locally. Posters everywhere demand ‘Free the Quay!’

It was high tide and a sailing barge, the Centaur of Harwich, had taken advantage of the high water to moor at the quay. It carried passengers and was involved in a ‘mini-cruise’ from Ipswich, down the Orwell to Shotley, then up the Stour as far as Manningtree, pausing at Mistley on the way, and then back again. It must have made a very pleasant excursion.

‘The Centaur’, moored at Mistley Quay. The ladder giving access from the ship to the quay can be seen just to the left of the figure.

Surely, you may be thinking, it couldn’t have been much fun stopping at Mistley when that unloved fence will have prevented landing. Not a bit of it! Where there’s a will there’s a way. Look at the picture and you’ll see that just to the left of the figure is a strategically placed ladder that gives access to and from the Quay. Using it is, of course, just a little more hazardous than simply striding across on a gangway. Which is odd when you consider that the fence, the cause of all the trouble, is supposed to have been provided ‘for health and safety reasons’.