Week 23 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

 ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream..........'

            During the past few weeks two events have conspired to give me salutary reminders (as though I need them!) of my advancing years.

There was my ninety-first birthday on 18^th May.   Obviously it was never going to be as exciting as my ninetieth when the whole immediate family, eight of us altogether, travelled to Zittau to join my German friends in celebration.  I was very glad of that because I am increasingly conscious of the fact that I am a year older, a little feebler, a little less steady on my feet, a little more forgetful and a little more easily tired than I was then.  

We didn’t have a family photo this year but here we all are celebrating my 90^th Birthday in Zittau last year.  Younger son Andy isn’t in the picture – he was behind the camera

         

This year all the family, except grandson Chris in Taiwan, joined me for a celebratory meal and exchange of family news at The Bowling Green at Weeley. The following day Ingrid my longest standing German friend, who had been unable to be with us the previous year, came to see me with a friend.  We again lunched at The Bowling Green and came back for a chat to my home in Dudley Road afterwards.  I was pleased to learn that her family are all well and that her nephew and niece (my ‘honorary’ nephew and niece!) two year old Tom and his six year old sister Maja, are thriving.

     In addition I received 35 posted birthday cards plus email and text greetings from friends and relatives in England and Germany (and one in Australia!). 

With Ingrid on 20^th May – I think I look very tired (which I was!)             

 Then, of course, another reminder of my age came with the Queen’s Jubilee and the realisation that, despite the fact that she has been our Queen for sixty years, I have actually seen the reign of no less than three other British monarchs!  During my childhood there was George V.   He seemed very grand, very distant and very worthy, deserving our respect and loyalty but hardly our affection.  That was until, years later, I learned what are said to have been his last words (no, not the official ones – I never did believe that he said How goes the Empire?)  before dying. When I learned what he really said I realized that he had been very human and ‘one of us’, after all.

  His successor Edward VIII had a very short reign.  He abdicated to marry twice-divorced American socialite Mrs Wallis Simpson. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Cosmo Lang and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin were strongly criticised at the time for forcing the abdication. I really think that they were right though.  It had been difficult to imagine a Queen Wallis! Quite apart from her earlier broken marriages she had been much too friendly with some of Germany’s top Nazis. Not everyone took the situation desperately seriously and there was a lot of back-street humour at the situation.  One printable witticism was, ‘He could have been Admiral of the Fleet but chose to be third mate to a Yankee drifter.’

            I was in the fifth form of Ipswich’s Northgate School for Boys at the time of the abdication crisis.  In Ipswich we had something of a grandstand view of the crisis as the divorce making the royal marriage legally (if not ecclesiastically) possible was granted in an Ipswich Court. After the abdication, we fifth formers were given a couple of hours off school and encouraged to cycle down to Ipswich’s Cornhill to hear the proclamation of the accession of the new king – George VI – publicly made by the Mayor on the steps of the Town Hall.

            When, over two years later, I volunteered for the Territorial Army it was to King George VI ‘and all his lawful heirs and successors’ that I swore my allegiance and loyalty.  I have known quite a few avowed republicans in my time but have never heard a word of personal criticism either of King George or of his consort the Queen Elizabeth.  She is best remembered today as the indomitable Queen Mother with a passion for race horses and salmon fishing.   People of my generation  remember when she and the king were a youngish middle-aged couple with two endearing little girls, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. They stayed in London throughout the blitz, though they could have easily gone to Canada for safety.  Viewers of ‘The King’s Speech’ will know of the struggle the King had with his speech impediment.  I heard on ‘the wireless’ (that’s what we called the radio in those days!) the speech – the climax of the film – that the King made on the outbreak of World War II, and remember thinking that the King’s impediment was not nearly as bad as the popular press had suggested.  I now realize what an ordeal making that speech must have been.

            I remember being told of King George VI’s death.  I was Housing Manager to Gipping Rural District in Suffolk at the time and someone told me the news as I visited a Council House in the village of Haughley.  It came as a complete surprise.  I hadn’t even known that he was ill.  I think that it must have come as a surprise to our top politicians and to members of the Royal family as well.  Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would surely never have embarked on a Commonwealth tour had they imagined for a moment that the King’s death was imminent.

            The accession of our new young Queen in 1952 was hailed as the beginning of a New Elizabethan Age in which our country would recapture some of the splendour of the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth.  It hasn’t worked out quite like that.  Few of us then could have imagined that during the course of the next 60 years we would see the systematic denigration and dismantling of the Welfare State  created by the generation that had won World War II; that in the first decade of the new millennium a spectacular failure of the capitalist free market economy world-wide had meant that Britain’s public services, of which we had been so proud, would be run down, that all of us (except the very rich) would be facing years of hardship; that more young British lives would have been lost and were still being lost in warfare, and that in the  Diamond Jubilee year the gap between rich and poor would have become wider than it had ever been.

            Don’t blame the Queen – blame the politicians and the financiers!  The Queen too has had cause for sadness.  Those sixty years have seen the Empire disappear and the Commonwealth shrink.  She has seen one of her most historic homes – Windsor Castle – threatened with destruction by fire.  She has seen the first marriages of three of her four children end in divorce.  She has said farewell to her Royal Yacht.  Yet she has remained apparently serene, a worthy representative of all her people.  She is just four years younger than I am and I have seen her, in the press and on tv, develop from engaging child to outwardly imperturbable matriarch.  My late wife and I appreciated the card of congratulation that was sent us on her behalf on the occasion of our own Diamond Wedding Anniversary six years ago. 

Heather and I, with our extended family, celebrating our Diamond Wedding Anniversary in Clacton's Quaker Meeting House in April 2006.  Three months after that happy event, Heather’s life came to an end.     

I offer her every good wish, and hope that her lawful heirs and successors, to whom I swore allegiance and loyalty in 1939, profit from her example.  I have been asked how I reconcile my belief that a constitutional monarchy is best for our country with my fervent desire that our country should become a more ‘equal’ society.  There really is no contradiction.  Norway, Sweden and Denmark are all constitutional monarchies.   The USA is a republic.  Yet, I don’t think that anyone would question the assertion that the USA is a far less equal society than every one of those three Scandinavian countries.  In the British Utopia of which I sometimes dream, the principal source of government revenue would be the Citizenship Tax, levied proportionately as the first charge, without exception, on the income of every single citizen, from the wealthiest and most powerful to the very poorest.  The monarch and members of his or her family would be subject to that tax in the same way as the humblest citizen. That, I think, would level off society far more effectively than toppling the monarchy and replacing our hereditary ‘head of state’ with an elected president.

            May God save the Queen and, as the never-used-nowadays second verse of the National Anthem puts it in its final line, may God save us all!’

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…….’

            That’s how, in the silent movies of my childhood, the scene shifted from the menfolk gallantly combating marauding rustlers or Indian warbands, to the ranch-house where the dastardly villain (you could tell him by his twirly moustache and –‘city slicker’ clothes) was threatening the virtue of the rancher’s beautiful daughter.

            At the end of May 2012, as Britain prepared for a four-day Jubilee holiday weekend, life was going on, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan – and at the Leveson Enquiry.

            Tony Blair, not one of my favourite people, was disarmingly honest when he explained that politicians simply couldn’t afford to get on the wrong side of powerful press magnates.  That’s why he had pursued Rupert Murdoch half-way across the world to get into his good books.  No, of course there was no kind of formal agreement between himself and the American (formerly Australian) multi-millionaire.  There didn’t need to be.  Mr Blair was well aware of Murdoch’s policy preferences.

            If there is one thing that is worse than a government-controlled press, it’s a press-controlled government!

            The theme continued with the long awaited appearance before the enquiry of Jeremy Hunt, Culture Minister, who had been given the responsibility of deciding whether or not News International (the Murdoch media empire) should have total control of BSkyB tv.  Mr Hunt explained that he had held, and did hold, a personal view favouring News International’s case but, in the quasi-judicial role to which he had been appointed, he had put his personal views on one side and had acted strictly ‘according to the book’.  He had done nothing wrong.  Why on earth should he resign? 

            I am quite sure that he had done nothing wrong.  He had consulted all the right people and had been able to put affirming ticks in all the right boxes.  When the time came he would be in a position to make his own quasi-judicial decision – and who could possibly doubt what that decision would have been? However Mr Murdoch, evidently more shaken by the phone hacking and police bribing scandal than Mr Hunt had been, withdrew his application for full control of BSkyB.  Mr Hunt, who had done nothing wrong, was off the quasi-judicial hook.

            Prime Minister David Cameron is to appear before Lord Leveson in the near future.  I look forward to hearing his explanation of his sacking Vince Cable from the post of adjudicator for having been tricked into declaring his personal opposition to the BSkyB takeover, and on the same day, appointing Jeremy Hunt, who had equally emphatically declared his support for the takeover, to the same post.  Email evidence suggests that Chancellor George Osborne had also been involved in those decisions. Those two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk (both of whom had close contacts with the Murdoch Empire) had been at it again!

           

           

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Week 21 2012 24.5.2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘Where the body is………

           ……..There the vultures are gathered together’; so says St. Matthew’s Gospel – and the vultures are certainly gathering round Greece’s moribund economy.  While top politicians from other, more fortunate (so far!), European countries, deplore the reluctance of the ordinary people of Greece to accept austerity measures that result in 25 percent unemployment, abject poverty and semi-starvation for millions, and early death for babies and old people at the very bottom of the Greek social ladder, others are making a fortune out of their poverty

             Ordinary Greeks see nothing of the millions of Euros generously donated by other European countries to ‘bail them out’.  Most of that money goes straight back in interest payments to the European and trans-Atlantic money lenders whose loans got them into their current position.  These bail-outs are not even ‘buying the Greeks time’. They are just lending them a little more time in which to make the money changers even richer. I am once again reminded of a satirical poem by writer G.K. Chesterton about a Mr Higgins, who ‘drives a weary quill – to lend the poor that funny cash that makes them poorer still!’

            One lucky recipient of cash from the all-but-bankrupt Greek government is Mr Kenneth Dart whose family fortune was established from the manufacture and sale of the ubiquitous plastic cup.   Mr Dart is an American citizen who has lived on Cayman Islands for years.  The Cayman Islands are a tax-free British possession in the Caribbean Sea much favoured by multi-millionaires who prefer not to hand over even a small amount of their wealth to the taxman.  Mr Dart’s very considerable fortune has recently been augmented by a cheque for 400 million Euros (£320 million pounds sterling) from the Greek Government.  They bought him off while they still had a few millions with which to do so.

            I don’t pretend to know how to solve ‘the Western World’s’ financial crisis.  It seems to me to result largely from fear of what may happen.  The most inconsequential events can make ‘the markets’ go up or down.  I am reminded of the way in which our Prime Minister and his government managed to create a nation-wide fuel crisis simply by suggesting that there might be a strike of tanker drivers.  In fact, we now know that that particular fear was completely unjustified.   Conciliatory talks were going on even as the Prime Minister was stimulating panic buying. There has since been a settlement agreed by both sides in the dispute.  There was and is no strike!

            I don’t know of a better way to organise our financial affairs more fairly and more efficiently than our current deeply flawed free-market/capitalist system – but am quite sure that there is one. I am equally sure that those very wealthy and very influential people who are doing quite nicely out of the present system will fiercely resist any attempt to change it.

Old Before their Time?

          It has sometimes seemed to me that in my childhood and youth most of us were expected to grow up and take on adult responsibilities at a much earlier age than is the custom today.  Most kids left school at fourteen, found themselves a job in a shop or factory or, in rural areas, on the land, and began to contribute to the family income.   My wife and I were members of a privileged minority who stayed at school until we were sixteen and, for the most part, secured white collar jobs in local offices.  I found a job in the General Office of Ipswich’s Public Health Department.  My future wife, when she left school at sixteen, worked in the London office of Unwin Brothers, printers.

            We both expected to hand over the greater part of our pay to our Mums. As a Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector my pay was seventeen shillings and sixpence a week (about 80p, though with a purchasing power far greater than that today!)  I handed over ten shillings (50p) of it to my Mum, and kept the remaining seven-and-sixpence.  It was expected though that I would save at least two shillings and sixpence of that ‘for the future’.  By the time we were twenty we all expected to be self-supporting and most of us confidently expected to be able to marry and start a family in our early twenties.  When, at eighteen I was called up into the Army, my Mum and Dad received a generous ‘billeting allowance’ for providing bed-and-breakfast and, with my two shillings a day army pay, I was better off financially than I had ever been! Nowadays all kids have to stay at school until they are sixteen and a very considerable number stay till they are eighteen and then carry on in further education for a number of years. Some are dependent upon their parents till well into their twenties.

            Although economically children today grow up much more slowly than we did, emotionally, physically and – in particular – sexually they are expected to develop and mature at lightning speed.  ‘Sex’, a mystery to us till we were into our teens and it forced itself upon us, is now taught in primary school.  Contraception (something I had never even heard of till well into my teens!) is taught to mixed classes. ‘Progressive opinion’ is that it should be taught at an ever earlier age.  The press, tv and radio are flooded with sexual images and suggestions. Teenage sex and teenage pregnancies are taken for granted by the press and by tv scriptwriters.  I remember an episode of Waterloo Road, well before the 9.00 pm watershed, in which a sixteen year old lad, after a night of passion with a female classmate of the same age, was commended as being ‘responsible’ when he urged her to take a ‘morning after’ pill.

 Little girls are eager to ‘grow up’ and become attractive to the opposite sex. Fashion and cosmetic retailers pander to this urge.  It is little wonder that unhappy and disturbed children become prey to those who flatter them, ply them with gifts (and booze and drugs) and groom them for their own purposes.  As a regular blog reader colourfully put it, ‘Schoolgirls dress as prostitutes and prostitutes dress as schoolgirls!’.  I used to think that children of my generation were expected to grow up too quickly and that we were robbed of the best part of our youth by the war.  We were certainly not robbed of our childhood quite so blatantly, and with quite such potentially dreadful consequences, as are the children of today.    

 Faithful Shepherds of their Flocks

            2012 is proving a fateful year for Clacton’s Christian communities.  Rev Anthony Spooner (‘Father Anthony’ to his flock) of St James Anglican Church has already retired and Rev. Chris Wood of Christ Church, URC Church, is leaving this summer to take his ministry to Stowmarket and neighbourhood  (the part of Suffolk with which I am most familiar!).  The Vicar of St. Paul’s  Anglican Church is also leaving as, so I understand, is the current Minister of Trinity Methodist Church and the local Minister (Commanding Officer?) of the Salvation Army.

            I am sure that every one of them will be greatly missed.  I shall particularly miss Father Anthony of St James’ and Rev. Chris Wood of Christ Church, both of whom – I hope I can say without presumption – have become personal friends.  I first attended a Sunday 8.00 am Holy Communion service at St James twenty or more years ago.  I had been brought up as a High Church Anglican but had lost my Christian faith completely. However I had slowly recovered it in the silent Meetings for Worship of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), of which I  had been a member for over forty years.   Sometimes though, I yearned for the sonorous words of the three centuries old Anglican ‘Book of Common Prayer’; hence, my attendance at St James’ that morning.

The rather splendid interior of St. James’    

I wasn’t disappointed - but I was very pleasantly surprised when Father Anthony, who knew me as a Quaker but knew nothing of my Anglican background, invited me to take the consecrated bread and wine of Holy Communion with the members of his congregation.  Subsequently I was a very occasional attender at that early service, and after my wife’s death in 2006 I became a regular attender.  About six months later I revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England (strictly speaking I had never left it!) and am now in dual membership of St. James' Church and Clacton local Quaker Meeting..  I find that the liturgical and sacramental nature of the 8.00 am Mass (that’s what we members of St. James’ prefer to call it), and the silent waiting on God that is the basis of the Quaker Worship in which I take part at 10.30 am, complement each-other perfectly.  Always I have found Father Anthony friendly and welcoming.  We certainly don’t agree about everything  (I don't for instance, share his deeply held objection to the ordination of women to the priesthood, and I am quite sure that my blog – of which he is a regular reader – must sometimes raise his eyebrows!) but I don’t think that that has dimmed our feeling of friendship.  He has a great respect for the Quakers and has occasionally joined us at Meeting for Worship. Then, of course, he becomes for an hour, simply ‘our Friend Anthony Spooner’.  Rev Chris Wood also has a high regard for Quakers.  A recent leading article in his church newsletter about Quaker values and practice brought a blush to my cheek – I would like to think that we always live up to his expectations!  He too, has occasionally attended Quaker Meetings for Worship and I was very pleased and deeply moved when, in July 2006, both he and Father Anthony attended the Memorial Meeting for Worship held at the Quaker Meeting House, to give thanks for the Grace of God made evident in the life of our late Friend Heather Hall.

       

                                                 Clacton Quaker Meeting house

I  have another personal reason for feeling warmly towards Chris Wood and his congregation.   Before his appointment and occasionally when, after his appointment, he was unable to be available at Christ Church, I was sometimes asked to lead the worship there.  It involved choosing the scripture readings and the hymns, leading the prayers, saying a few cheery words to the children (up to about a dozen of them!) before they departed to their Sunday School, and then preaching a sermon which, so the Church Secretary informed me, was expected to last for at least 25 minutes. It was a form of worship that was quite different both from that of the Church of England or of the Quakers, but I was prepared to do my best.  No one yawned or fell asleep, no-one stalked out of the church in a righteous huff – and I was invited to return and lead the worship again.  I can’t have been a total disaster.

Christ Church URC Church, Clacton

I enjoyed being ‘the Rev.’ for an hour – but it was exhausting and I certainly admire the stamina of those like Chris who have to do it as just one of their regular weekly tasks!  Nowadays a friend and I regularly attend the short service of ‘Celtic Prayer’ held every Thursday morning, and followed by ‘a cup of coffee, a bun and a chat’ in the church hall afterwards.  It is gratifying to find that a few of the older church members remember my  under-studying for Chris in the past. We also attend a brief mid-week mass held at St. James’ on Wednesday mornings.  This too is followed by tea or coffee, biscuits and a chat in the church hall.  The form of worship at St. James’ could hardly be more different from that at Christ Church URC – yet one thing that the members of their congregations have in common is the sincerity of the welcome given to strangers in their midst and the general atmosphere of warmth and friendliness that prevails in their presence.

            I have no doubt that much of this is the result of the encouragement and example of their spiritual leaders. My friend and I wish both Father Anthony and Rev Chris Wood happiness and fulfilment in whatever the future may hold for them