Week 46 2012

Tendring Topic.....on line

‘They shall not grow old………..’

A Lifetime ago ……….. The last voyage of the SS Scillin

            The SS Scillin was an Italian cargo ship, built in 1903, of some 1,600 tons.  Just seventy years ago, on 13^th November 1942, she was in Tripoli Harbour being loaded with a living cargo of allied prisoners of war to be transported from camps in Libya across the Mediterranean to Italy.  814 prisoners were ordered into her hold which is reported as having been suitable for no more than 300.   There would have been a further 195 but for the vehement protests about the severe overcrowding and insanitary conditions of the prisoners’ accommodation, made by Captain Gilbert a British medical officer

Among the 814 were 50 members of my own regiment, the 67^th Medium Regiment RA. Most of them, like me, were from Ipswich or East Suffolk, were in their early twenties, and had volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939.    We had been in action in the Egyptian/Libyan border area since the previous November.  By the end of 1941 we had been involved in a number of successful assaults against German and Italian garrisons in Bardia, Sollum and Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass). In the spring and early summer of 1942 we found ourselves in defensive actions in the desert south and west of Tobruk.  Finally we became part of the Tobruk garrison and were overwhelmed and taken prisoner by Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21^st June.  My own transportation to POW camps in Italy had been from Benghazi in July on the SS Ravello.  The voyage across the Med. to Taranto had been uneventful and the fact that, after 70 years, I can remember little about it suggests that it can’t have been too awful an experience.

            That of my 50 former comrades in the Scillin was vastly different.  What happened to them, and to all but a handful of the rest of the 814 prisoners crammed into its noisome hold, remained a secret for more than half a century. It was not until 1996 that persistent enquiries by historians and by relatives (among them friends of mine in Ipswich researching the lives of their fathers who had been in my regiment) forced a full revelation from the Ministry of Defence. 

            It transpired that during the night of 14^th November the Scillin was intercepted by the British submarine HMS Sahib.  The submarine surfaced and fired 12 rounds from its 3in deck gun at this unarmed Italian merchant vessel. Ten of these rounds found their target and brought the Scillin to a standstill.   The Sahib then closed to within 750 yards and fired a torpedo at the Scillin’s engine room.  The torpedo did, in fact, explode in the hold and the Scillin sank almost immediately. Only 27 of those 814 prisoners, plus the Scillin’s captain and crew, survived and were picked up by the Sahib.

            At an enquiry the Sahib’s commander (Lt. John Bromage) was cleared of culpability.  He claimed that the Scillin had no lights, had not responded to his initial shelling and had appeared to be heading for Africa.  He had believed it to be carrying Italian troops.

Nor was the Scillin the only Italian vessel to be similarly attacked.  Five other vessels carrying PoWs were attacked by British submarines during 1941 and 1942. These attacks resulted in the deaths from ‘friendly fire’ of a total of 2,000 British and allied PoWs.  It was particularly in  memory of those forgotten 2,000, fifty of whom had been from my regiment and some of whom had been my friends, that I wore my scarlet Flanders poppy on Remembrance Sunday.

A Triumph for Democracy?

          It is said that a somewhat taciturn Scotsman, who had just attended a service at a local church that had a new Minister, was asked what the sermon had been about.  ‘Sin’, he replied.  ‘And what did the Minister have to say about it?’   ‘He was agin it!’

            I feel somewhat like that questioner with regard to the six candidates for the post of Police and Crime Commissioner to the Essex Constabulary, for whom we are all invited to cast our vote on 15^th November. I have already received my ballot paper as I vote by post. I assume that all six applicants are ‘agin’ crime or they’d hardly be standing.   I know their names.  I know that four of them are standing as representatives of political parties (Conservative, Labour, UK Independence Party and English Democrats) and two are Independents.   Apart from what appears to be a political party slogan ‘More Police – Catching Criminals’* after the name of the political party (English Democrats) that candidate Robin  Tilbrook is representing, we know nothing about the candidates other than what we may have seen in the press or on the internet.

            I’m not really blaming the candidates for this.  I daren’t think what delivering an election address to every household in Essex would cost – and the candidates have already had to find £5,000 deposit!  No doubt the government, always ready to save money, declined to go to the expense of a free mail-shot for each candidate!

            To pretend that this election is an exercise in democracy, much less an exercise in the ‘localism’ for which the government claims to be so enthusiastic, is quite ridiculous.  How can one man, or one woman, possibly be able to respond to the needs of residents of a Police Authority Area as large, as populous, and as diverse as Essex?   How can the election of just one person in charge of its police force be, in any sense of the word, ‘democratic’?

            No doubt the old Police Authorities were less than perfect, though I don’t recall hearing very many complaints about them.  There were surely better ways of replacing them than with a single all-powerful individual.  

There was a simple, democratic solution to their replacement that would have empowered local people while saving the government the very considerable expense of this ridiculous election.  Police Authority boundaries coincide with those of County or Unitary Authority.  Why not make the existing democratically elected local authority the Police Authority?  It could perhaps be stipulated that the authority should appoint a Police and Crime Committee of say ten members, representative not of the political parties comprising the council but of the geographical parts of the council’s area?   Then, all voters would have their own member of the Police Committee whom they could contact with regard to policing problems.  Such a system would also have facilitated co-operation between the police and other local authority activities – education and social services for instance.

But we are afflicted with a government convinced that what is best for those living on the other side of the Atlantic must necessarily be best for us. Possibilities other than that of having a single elected commissioner overseeing each constabulary had not, as far as I know, even been considered.  All of this presented me with a dilemma.  If I voted in the election would I be giving support to a process that I believed to be a ridiculously expensive and unnecessary waste of time and money; a cynical negation of the principle of representative democratic control of our Police Services?

 

  My first inclination was to ignore it – or perhaps deliberately spoil my voting paper before posting it back.  Then I realized that although I didn’t know much about the individual candidates, I did know something about the parties that four of them stood for.  Was it just possible that my failure to vote would allow the UKIP candidate, representative of a Party with policies to which I am strongly opposed, to head our Essex Police Force?

            That possibility made me decide that I must vote!  My first choice will be Linda Belgrove, Independent.  She lives in Alresford and is therefore more-or-less local. She was vice-chairman of the Essex Police Authority that is being replaced, so she at least knows what the job is all about.   She has worked for solicitors and has served on the parish council so she is acquainted with the workings of the law and of problems in our area.  She is not the representative of any political party and (this was probably the deciding factor!) on the photographs that I have seen of her in the local press, she has a friendly smile!  I don’t suppose for a moment that she’ll get elected, but I wish her well. 

And my other vote, my second choice in case whoever gets most votes doesn’t get a clear overall majority? I haven’t yet decided.  Perhaps I won’t use it……. or perhaps I will.  I’ll make up my mind just before I slip my voting paper into the envelope provided and post it.

* I'm rather surprised that that was permitted.

Making the most of the Sunshine

            I have no doubt at all that Britain’s best interests lie in developing alternative renewable sources of energy to reduce, and ultimately replace, our reliance on such fossil fuels as coal, gas and oil.  I believe, and the recent great storm affecting North America has strengthened that belief, that neither Middle East terrorism nor ‘the deficit’ but steadily accelerating climate change, is the biggest and most urgent threat to Britain and to the rest of the world of the 21^st century.  The use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, increases that threat.  What’s more, our oil and gas supplies come from notoriously unstable parts of the world and are, in any case, finite.  They will one day – perhaps a few decades, perhaps a century or more ahead – begin to run out and as they do so their price will escalate.

            The production of nuclear energy, although favoured by the government, is – as we have seen in at Chernobyl and, more recently, in Japan – potentially dangerous. Moreover it produces a waste product that remains lethal for centuries, and for which no-one has yet discovered a safe and permanent means of either disposal or storage.

            Safe and infinitely renewable sources of power available to an island nation such as ours lie in the waves that break upon our shores, in the inexorable ebb and flow of the tides, in the wind and in the rays of the sun.  I believe that the power of the waves and of the tides has yet to be fully exploited, but that of the wind and of the sun is currently being harnessed and has infinite further potential for exploitation.

            I am delighted to see the still growing regiment of wind turbines off our north-east Essex coast and have little patience with those who complain they are spoiling the view.  Consider what climatic change, strengthened and accelerated by mankind’s profligate use of fossil fuels, has done for the view of the east coast of the USA!

            A proposal to build on-shore wind turbines never fails to produce local outrage.   They are, and will always be, either too near to people’s homes or alternatively, destroying hitherto unspoilt countryside and a threat to wild life. There was certainly a storm of protest about the proposed provision of wind turbines between Clacton and St Osyth.  Yet now that they are actually in position and operating we hear little about them.  Could it be that they haven’t proved to be quite the noisy, unsightly and health-threatening monsters that protesters had been led to expect?

            Then there’s sunshine – and this really is the Essex Sunshine Coast!   Solar panels have no moving parts so they can’t be noisy. They are effective.  My single solar panel, from which water heated by the sun is circulated in a sealed circuit through my hot water storage cylinder by a pump activated by two small photo-electric cells, supplies nearly all my hot water needs during the summer months.  Winter sunshine preheats the water in the cylinder before it is brought to the required temperature by my gas boiler, and therefore saves money all the year round.

            More ambitious schemes involve virtually covering the sun-side slope of the roof with solar panels that are, in fact, photo-electric cells and convert the sun’s light, rather than its heat, into electric power to be fed back into the national grid, making the householder an actual supplier of electricity.

            I was delighted when I learned that there are plans to provide no less than 40,000 power generating solar panels locally on fields at Chisbon Heath between Great Bentley and St Osyth, and 15,000 at Sladbury’s farm between Holland-on-Sea and Great Holland.  The south-facing solar panels would be no more than three metres off the ground and would be screened from public view by trees and bushes. Together they are expected to produce sufficient electricity to power 4,750 homes.

            There are similar plans further inland.  A £20 million pound solar scheme in Kelvedon will involve 60,000 solar panels and is expected to provide enough power for 7,200 homes.  Wind power we have and solar power is on its way.  If only some practical and economic way can be found to harness the power of the waves that crash on our beaches, Southern East Anglia could be among the leaders of the development of safe and carbon-free means of energy supply.  

Week 33 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Olympics Fever (continued)

            My elder son Pete, a regular blog reader, felt that I wasn’t being quite fair to Great Britain’s Olympic team in my comments last week.  He pointed out that, taking into consideration the size of the populations from which each country has to choose its Olympic teams, Great Britain had already overtaken both the USA and China.

            Here’s what he has to say:

I see from your Blog that you have also been watching the Olympics. I would say that considering  our population, we are doing far better than the USA or China.  To be fair, you should compare Team GB with any collection of 10 American States. Similarly we are doing so much better than the Russians who have twice our population. Did you know that New Zealand is the country doing the best compared to its population, with 3 gold medals and only 4m people – about the same as Scotland?  Also Yorkshire has won 7 of our gold medals, which means they would be 8^th in the Country list.

            In a later email sent on the eve of the Games’ closure, he wrote:

            I think it is  pleasing to see everyone cheering on the son of a Somalian refugee.  In the Games Britain has massively benefited from its immigrant population, and regardless of other allegiances, from what I saw in Greenwich where everyone was watching a giant screen, a very multi-cultural audience was rapturously cheering British athletes of any colour or creed. I think this has been a bit of a victory for “multi-culturalism”

Pete’s figures in that first email are, of course, based on the situation a week ago, but I doubt if the proportion of medals won by each national team changed all that much after that.

            On Thursday (9^th August) afternoon I had the good fortune to switch on to BBC 1 just as the Dutch contestant had begun her individual ‘dressage’ performance at the Greenwich equestrian stadium.  She was followed by British gold-medal-winning Charlotte Dujardin.  I have watched a few medal-winning performances during these games but this was the first time that I could truly say that both performances were not merely committed, flawless and thoroughly professional, but almost breath-takingly beautiful to watch. For her horse’s dance the Dutch contestant had chosen pieces from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, with which I was familiar.  I enjoyed every minute of it.

            Charlotte had chosen a patriotic medley of familiar melodies.  It included ‘I vow to Thee my Country…..’ from Holst’s Planet Suite and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ from Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance. Her performance too held me entranced.  Horse and rider were as one, both responding as a single unit to the mood as well as to the melody of the music.  When she bowed out I felt that though both were excellent, Charlotte Dujardin was the better of the two.

            Thus the announcement of the score, which made it clear that she had in fact earned another gold medal to add to the one already gained in the team ‘dressage’ competition came as no surprise. No-one who had experienced that performance could have doubted that Charlotte had earned her place in Olympic history. Nor, I think, would anyone have doubted that her Netherlands predecessor thoroughly deserved the silver medal. How my father, who had spent all his working life with horses, would have appreciated and enjoyed those performances! 

           

‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’

            The perception of beauty and ugliness is indeed, a very personal matter.  Many tv viewers may have been quite unmoved by the spectacle of Charlotte Dujardin and her horse earning their Olympic gold medal.  Similarly there are paintings and structures about which others wax lyrical and that seem to my eyes to be just plain ugly.  One such is that extraordinary structure in the Olympic Park which to me suggests a meccano model made by a baby giant and abandoned half-finished.  I feel much the same about ‘the Shard’, that other monstrosity that now dominates the London skyline.   Others though, find them beautiful and inspiring.  Probably my opinion says more about me than it does about the structures concerned.  Yes, I am an old fogy.

            Locally, I realize from comments in the local press, many people have similar feelings about the wind turbines that have become a feature of the local seascape and more recently a conspicuous spectacle inland between Clacton and St Osyth, plainly visible from miles around. ‘Ugly, monstrous, noisy, dangerous, an eyesore, expensive, useless, unnecessary, a danger to birds and wildlife, a threat to house values in the area,’ are just some of the accusations levelled at them.

            It was quite refreshing to get a different view in readers’ letters page of last week’s Clacton Gazette.  Mr C. Griggs of Walton-on-the-Naze, an artist who was formerly an engineer, finds them delightful.  He writes that his artistic nature sees tham, ‘as an awe-inspiring work of art…..huge sculptures that enhance our skyline and otherwise bleak seascape’. He adds that, ‘as an engineering project they are awe-inspiring.  I look at them as my bus passes and wish that it would slow down so that I have them in sight for longer.  One day, I promise myself, I will get off the bus and go to the site, have a good look and maybe do some painting’.

            John Kampf of Meadow Way, Jaywick is a little less poetic but equally forceful: ‘When I was driving in Jaywick Lane the first time, I saw this beautiful invention, an invention that benefits mankind.  I would like one in my back garden. Wind turbines are harmless and cheap to run’.  I don’t like to think of the furious response that those two letters may evoke in next week’s Readers Letters!

             Wind turbines as objects of art, arouse neither my enthusiasm nor my indignation.   They do have a certain stark grandeur and they are certainly not so ugly, nor so potentially dangerous, as the electricity pylons that stride across our countryside and to which we are now thoroughly accustomed.  I have no doubt at all though that – together with the means of harnessing the power of the sun, the waves and the tides – they will provide a badly needed alternative source of the power that is needed to support our civilisation.  They are energy sources that are infinitely renewable, unlike the fossil fuels that will eventually be exhausted and will in the meantime, year by year, become more and more expensive.   Unlike those fossil fuels (coal and oil) they do not produce by-products that poison the environment and hasten climatic change nor, like nuclear energy, do they have a lethal residue that remains dangerous for centuries and for which mankind has not yet discovered a safe means of disposal.

            Now we have a new generation of wind turbine – and the prototypes are being installed for testing with the existing forty-eight wind turbines just a few miles off-shore from Clacton-on-Sea.  We may well think that the existing turbines are enormous but compared with these new ones they are pigmies!

            The new giants are said to have have a blade-span equivalent to the length of two and a half football pitches! – and two of them are currently being installed on the Gunfleet Sands.  Work began in May and installation is expected to be complete by November.  The installers are so confident of success that plans are already being made for 300 of these monsters to be installed round the coast of Britain between 2013 and 2017.

            This pioneering development on the Gunfleet Sands presents the Tendring District with great opportunities.  It will strengthen Harwich’s claim to be the centre for the servicing of North Sea wind farms, and will surely attract extra visitors eager to visit the beaches and the pier from which these new giants can be viewed in action.  I wish I felt confident that the current District Council is up to seizing those opportunites and making the most of them.

            The engineering genius at the dawn of history who first had the idea of a windmill, using turning sails to harness the power of the wind and thus to supplement man and ox-power, would surely have been astonished at the development of his invention, centuries later!  Perhaps, somewhere beyond time and space, he does know about it….and is applauding.

The Olympics Legacy

          I don’t think that it is in any way an exaggeration to claim that The London Olympics of 2012 have been a tremendous success,  Britain’s best ever.  The opening and closing ceremonies excelled and were lauded world-wide, though I can’t pretend that most of the music of the closing ceremony was quite my cup of tea. Actually I much preferred that of Songs of Praise on BBC2 a few hours earlier. But there, that’s just the old fogy in me surfacing again!  

British athletes and gymnasts, cyclists, sailors and equestrians have garnered an unrivalled harvest of medals, a gratifying number of golden ones among them.  Taking Britain’s population into account we have done better than any of our major rivals.  The participants have been a credit to themselves, to their trainers and to the cheering crowds who had supported them.

            It might have been thought that the government would have been pretty pleased with the result and feel that they had got something right at last.  Britain had demonstrated its athletic and sporting prowess.  Now, while maintaining the standard in those fields, we needed to concentrate on upgrading our young people’s scholastic, academic and technical standards to rival those of their contemporaries in Europe, Asia and the USA. This too, just like the training for the Olympics, will demand determination, hard work, and sometimes deadly-boring continuous repetition and practice.

            Is that what the government is doing?   Not a bit of it.  Against all the evidence, a government that has cut education grants and is even now encouraging the sale of school playing fields, has  chosen this moment of triumph to decide that there isn’t enough physical education in British schools. What, I wonder, would they have done had we failed to win any medals?  Nor are they going to leave it to Head Teachers, much less Education Authorities, to decide how much PE there must be and what should be its nature.  These devotees of ‘localism’ who had  insisted that all reforms must come from the bottom up, not from the top down, are going to dictate not only how much time must be spent on PE but how it is to be spent.  It must be on proper competitive sport (like 'we' had in Eton and Harrow), none of this mamby-pamby ‘Indian dance’ stuff, insists David Cameron.

            Needless to say local politicians are getting in on the act.  London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, whose current motto appears to be ‘Anything David Cameron can do, I can do better’, has been quoted as urging that every schoolchild should have two hours of PE a day!   That would leave just three hours a day for reading, writing and arithmetic (the foundation of any education), science, history, geography and religious education, not to mention frivolities like art and music.  It would not however need the daft idea of devoting almost half of each school day to PE, to derail an already flawed educational system.   Every extra hour that is devoted to physical education means an hour less for the teaching of academic, scientific and technical subjects.    

Thanks to the government’s policy of combating unemployment by training the young unemployed for non-existent jobs, and extracting the maximum work capacity from the disabled, we are already building up the world’s best-trained army of unemployed.  The government’s post-Olympic educational policy could result in our also having an unrivalled host of athletic and muscular illiterates!

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Week 49.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘These Mechanical Beasts…..these Carbuncles…..these Monsters!’

These are the words of Tendring District Councillor Peter Halliday published on the readers’ letters page of the local Daily Gazette. The object of his wrath is, as you may have guessed, the five wind turbines that are to be built off St. John’s Road, between Clacton and St. Osyth. After a full public local enquiry in which the objectors had every opportunity to state their case Tendring Council’s decision to refuse this development was overturned by the government inspector.

Mr Halliday says that it became clear to him that this would be the outcome of the enquiry, ‘When the Environment Minister told the Labour Party Conference that local Conservative councils refusing such applications would see their decisions overturned by Government Inspectors’. I had realized it well before that. Regular readers of this blog may remember my comment, at the time, on the Council’s decision to refuse the development, against the advice of their own professional planners, for no reason other than that of well-orchestrated very local protests.
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I forecast with confidence that the developers would appeal, that there would be a full and expensive (for us council-tax payers) public enquiry, and that the Council’s refusal would be overturned. But there, I have probably had a rather longer experience of local government and of public enquiries than has Councillor Halliday.

The sole objection to the development was, as far as I know, the one plastered on all the objectors’ posters and banners ‘Too near to Homes!’ The Council’s Planning Officers, who were on the spot, and the Government’s inspector who visited the site, clearly thought otherwise.

There was no possible risk of physical danger from the turbines. Almost a mile away from homes, they would surely be inaudible. Unlike the hideous electricity pylons that stride across the English countryside, there has never been any suggestion that living in their proximity can endanger either child or adult health.

The sole objection was their appearance. They would obviously affect the view. The same objection could be made though wherever wind turbines are provided in a rural or semi-rural area ……..and if the turbines were to be sited anywhere but in such an area then they might truly be ‘too near to homes’.

Needless to say our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, like Mr Halliday, is outraged by the inspector’s decision. He, together with two or three correspondents to the local press, is convinced that no climatic change is taking place or, if it is taking place, that it’s a natural phenomenon and nothing to do with human activity. It must be very comforting to watch on tv the human misery created by horrific floods in Cumbria, for the second time in just a few years and worse than anything ever experienced in the past, and to be able to say, ‘Ah well, very sad……but of course it’s an “Act of God”, nothing whatsoever to do with us and our activities!’

Iraq

The long-awaited public enquiry into the events preceding the war in Iraq, the conduct of that war, and its aftermath has only been hearing witnesses for two or three days. Already though, it has become clear that the reasons for our joining the USA in invading Iraq were far different from those we were told at the time.

The invasion took place in the aftermath of ‘nine eleven’ and it was claimed that Iraq was a sponsor of the kind of international terrorism that was responsible for that event. This claim, it has been revealed, was held by the United States’ Government but was never really believed in Britain.

‘Nine eleven’ had its genesis within the frontiers of Afghanistan and of ‘the west’s’ allies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, rather than in either Iraq or Iran.

Then we were told that the Iraqi government possessed cunningly concealed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that posed a threat to the whole of the Middle East and to ourselves. The United Nations’ Weapons Inspectors had found no evidence of these before the allied invasion and none have been found since. It has now been revealed that there had never been any really convincing evidence that they existed.

It seems that the real motive of the Anglo-American Alliance had always been ‘regime change’ rather than either retribution for ‘nine eleven’ or the eradication of unspeakably terrible weaponry. Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator whom ‘the west’ had failed to topple after the Kuwait War. This was the time to make a thorough job of it. It now seems that, even if this very dubious excuse for war were considered to be valid, conflict could still have been avoided. Our former Ambassador to the USA has told the enquiry that pressure on Iraq was prompting rebellion and that, very shortly, the regime would have collapsed from internal pressure. Tens of thousands of lives may have been destroyed for want of a little patience!

That same former ambassador also told the enquiry about the friendly meeting between our Prime Minister and the American President at the latter’s ranch in Texas. The two of them had a cosy chat from which everyone else was excluded. No one knows what was discussed or what agreements may have been reached. It had been noticeable though that from that moment the Prime Minister’s attitude towards Iraq hardened. He began to talk both about possible war and about regime change. He was singing from the George W. Bush hymn-sheet!

I have been surprised by the amount of deception and chicanery that has been openly revealed in just the first few days of the enquiry. Whatever, I wonder, can possibly be in the evidence that – the press tells us – the Prime Minister has insisted must be revealed to the enquiry only in secret!

Crisis at the Top

Can it, I wonder, possibly be true that Tendring Council’s top three officials (each of them said to be enjoying a salary of over £100,000 a year) are facing redundancy and that councillors are thinking of replacing them with a new, lower budget ‘management board’?

If so it is interesting to speculate on the deliberations that preceded that decision. It must surely have been made by a group of influential councillors meeting in what would once have been described as ‘a small smoke-filled room’. Contrary to popular belief it is quite possible to sack a top official. I have a fairly recent memory of a Clerk of the Council (the less-well-paid equivalent of a Chief Executive prior to local government reorganisation in 1974) of the former Clacton UDC resigning his post after having been strongly encouraged to do so. To make the three at the top redundant does seem a little unusual.

The difference between local government in my day (admittedly over thirty years ago!) and life at the town hall today, was brought home to me by the composition of the triumvirate that comprises a management board of Tendring Council’s top, and most highly paid, officials. They are the Chief Executive, the Deputy Chief Executive and the Assistant Chief Executive, each of them I have no doubt, an expert in cost-effective ‘administration’ and ‘the management of human resources’.

In ‘the bad old days’, The Town Clerk, or Clerk of the Council, was ‘the first among equals’ of a number of Council Chief Officers, each of whom managed his or her own department and reported regularly to a Committee concerned with that department’s sphere of work. There would be the Council’s Treasurer, the Engineer and Surveyor and the Medical Officer of Health. Larger authorities might have an independent Housing Manager and the Chief Sanitary Inspector (later Chief Public Health Inspector) would sometimes be regarded as a separate Chief Officer.

The idea that there should be a Deputy and an Assistant Town Clerk who outranked, and were on a higher salary scale, than those professional heads of departments, would have been received with incredulity and derision, as would the suggestion that there should be a Chief Officers’ ‘Management Board’. It is true that, after the reorganisation of 1974 there was a ‘management team’, consisting of heads of departments, who met regularly to discuss common interests. Heads of departments though made their own reports and recommendations to their committees and the committees discussed them and made their recommendations to the whole council.

The present system of ‘professional managers’, exercising authority over professional doctors, accountants, architects and surveyors, appears to be part of a package that included the abolition of the committee system and its replacement by one aping party political government in Westminster. We now have a powerful officers’ ‘management board’ making recommendations to ‘Portfolio holders’ (local cabinet ministers!) who make decisions that would previously have been the responsibility of committees. At intervals the full Council meets and members of the majority party are expected to support loyally policies decided by that small ‘Cabinet’ of portfolio holders.

It is a system that may make for greater speed and efficiency (though I haven’t seen much evidence of this in Tendring) but it is a negation of representative local democracy.

Some Modern Art

I am not a great enthusiast for all-things-modern. It has sometimes seemed to me that there is a late twentieth century/early twenty-first century enthusiasm for ugliness…..in art, in architecture, in music and in poetry. Not all my family are so unenlightened. My younger son Andy and his wife Marilyn are enthusiastic Friends of the National Gallery. They share my liking for much of the art of the past, but also appreciate the work of contemporary artists. Possibly in an attempt to educate me in the finer things of life, they have recently sent me photos of an example of the work of Anish Kapoor CBE, Royal Academician, whose work has been acclaimed and exhibited world-wide.

Above - Sculpture by Anish Kapoor displayed outide National Gallery.

Left - Detail from above

Well, it certainly isn’t ugly. It’s new and refreshing. It’s beautiful in fact. But still (put it down to my advanced age) it’s not really my cup of tea!