From Suffolk to the Essex Coast

From Barham to the Essex Coast (1956 till today)


‘Why on earth did I decide to leave Gipping Rural District for a new job as a Sanitary Inspector that involved my wife, myself and our twenty month old son moving from Suffolk to north-east Essex?’ That is a question to which 54 years later I find it quite difficult to find an easy answer. I had a satisfying job and we had a comfortable home (by 1950s standards!) with good neighbours, in an area that I had known and loved since I was a boy.

There were I think, a number of reasons. In my job I felt that I had come to a dead end. Housing Management in the Gipping Rural District was not wholly independent but came within the Council’s Engineer and Surveyor’s Department. I was responsible for tenant selection, maintenance and general management of roughly 1,000 council houses scattered throughout the district, but it was manual staff of the Engineer and Surveyor who carried out the repairs, and rent collection (the regular weekly contact with tenants) was carried out by the Treasurer’s Department – though I was expected to chase up arrears!

There had been a promise that one day there would be a separate Council Housing Department with comprehensive housing responsibilities. I had hoped that that day might dawn with the retirement of the existing Engineer and Surveyor. It didn’t. His successor was a younger man who showed every sign of taking a less-than-welcome direct interest in housing management. Finally, there was a new nationally agreed pay scale for Sanitary Inspectors that meant that, had I remained in my old job, I’d have received a welcome rise. The council, somewhat unwillingly, gave the inspectors the new agreed rate but didn’t accept that it applied to me in my new position.

Perhaps I would have been wiser to sit it out and see what happened – but I didn’t. I was young, somewhat indignant, and conscious of the fact that I was now both a qualified Sanitary Inspector and a qualified Inspector of Meat and other Foods. I felt that I owed it to my family to get the highest salary that I could achieve. I applied for a post as Additional Sanitary Inspector to the Tendring Rural District Council in north-east Essex. I was appointed and we were allocated a Council House in Thorpe-le-Soken to which we moved on 1st April 1955.

We settled into 39 Byng Crescent, Thorpe-le-Soken comfortably enough though, even then, Heather realized that the day would come when we would need to live in a bungalow. The district was a pleasant one, not unlike the Gipping Rural District in some ways, though with the wide estuary of the Stour to the north, that of the Colne to the south-west and the arc of the north-east Essex coast to the south-east, it was almost an island. Clacton-on-Sea and Frinton-on-Sea were both about four miles away and Colchester about fifteen.

Although I was a qualified Meat Inspector, having passed the qualifying examination while I was with Gipping RDC, I had had very little practical experience in meat inspection. Most of the cattle, pigs and sheep destined for local homes being slaughtered in nearby Ipswich. Tendring Rural District was to put that right! There were no less than three slaughterhouses within the area for which I became responsible, by far the busiest being Byfords’ slaughterhouse on a small farm in Little Clacton, about half-way between Thorpe-le-Soken and Clacton-on-Sea.

Wearing a white coat and using a knife with its blade honed to razor sharpness (owning it nowadays would probably get me arrested!) I carried out post mortem examinations on every bovine (steer, heifer, cow or calf) and every pig slaughtered there. Sheep, thank goodness, were generally free of conditions that can be passed on to humans, so a fairly cursory examination of the carcase and organs was sufficient. The principal defects that we looked for in those days were tuberculosis and liver fluke infestation. In cattle this involved palpating (squeezing) the lung with the hands to feel for any unwonted lumps, and slicing into the retro-pharyngeal lymph glands at the back of the throat, and the bronchial and mesenteric glands. I also palpated the tongue (if the beast had just been killed it would often twitch as I did so!) and the liver (seeking signs of cirrhosis due to liver fluke infestation) and, particularly in cows and heifers, looked for any signs of inflammation in the pelvic region.

Similar examinations were carried out on pigs but these were most likely to be infected with tuberculosis from their food. The most important glands for incision were therefore the sub-maxillaries that are near the root of the tongue. A code of practice dictated when the presence of an abnormality demanded the condemning and destruction of a organ, the lungs or liver for instance, or the whole carcase and organs.

What made this particular responsibility more onerous was the fact that the Byford brothers usually slaughtered in the evenings and on Sunday mornings. As an extra hazard they had no mains electricity for lighting and relied on a generator that had a habit of breaking down at crucial moments. On several occasions they slaughtered, disembowelled and flayed cattle by the light of the headlights of my car! My experiences at Byfords’ slaughterhouse are at least partly responsible for the fact that, although I am nowadays by no means a strict vegetarian, I do on the whole still prefer vegetarian food!

I reported this almost continuous evening and weekend work to Chief Sanitary Inspector George Yearsley and he gave me permission to take afternoons off work to compensate. This had advantages. I was able to take Heather and toddler Pete down to the beach at Holland-on-Sea or Frinton more often than would otherwise have been possible. I very much appreciated this. I was somewhat dismayed though when, in Clacton some years later, I was told that I had been spotted enjoying myself on the beach when I should have been at work. My compensatory leisure time had been spotted but not, of course, the hours of overtime that had earned it!

Other sanitary inspectors’ tasks were much as they had been in Suffolk. One incident that caused me some embarrassment occurred as a result of my investigating a complaint that the cesspool of a cottage in Thorpe-le-Soken was leaking sewage effluent into Holland Brook. I poured some fluorine dye into the cottage’s drainage system to see if the colour appeared in the brook. Fluorine is a non-toxic green dye that is (or was) used by airmen who ditched in the sea to draw the attention of rescuers to their position. The dye appeared in the brook all right, but I must have overdone it. It turned the brook green all the way to its final outlet to the sea from Holland Marshes!

We had never intended that our son Peter, just three months short of two years old when we moved from Barham to Thorpe-le-Soken, would remain an ‘only child’. I had neither brother nor sister and Heather had remained an only child until she was thirteen. We both agreed that Peter should have a brother or sister with whom to grow up but, bearing in mind Heather’s medical history, we were by no means sure when it would be wise to have another. We hadn’t long been in our new home though when we realized to our surprise (though not, I hasten to add, to our dismay) that nature had decided the matter for us. Another baby was on the way!

He or she (the day had not yet arrived in which the sex of a baby could be discovered before birth) was due at the end of December. Once again Heather was determined to feed the baby herself and, once again, to have the birth at home. No, we didn’t for one moment consider the possibility of terminating the pregnancy. Abortions were not so easily obtained in those days as they are now, but I realize that in view of her medical history, Heather could certainly have had one. She wouldn’t have dreamed of it though. It was something about which she felt very strongly. While it wouldn’t have been her nature to condemn anyone else who decided to terminate a pregnancy, she herself would never have done so no matter how dire the risk to her health.

The winter of 1955/’56 was a bitterly cold one. I don’t remember much about Christmas but I have no doubt that my mother stayed with us and that I drove her back to Ipswich either on Boxing Day or the day after. In those days Town Halls and Council Offices closed down only for the two public holidays. A skeleton staff remained on duty on Christmas Eve.

Heather went into labour during the evening of the 29th. My recollections of the next few hours are jumbled and chaotic. We had made up a bed for Heather in the ground-floor sitting room. In those days mobile phones had not yet been dreamed of and very few ‘ordinary people’ had a landline phone. We certainly hadn’t. I had to go to the public phone box at the junction of Byng Crescent and the Frinton Road to summon the midwife who lived at Walton-on-the-Naze. It must have been about 10.00 p.m. when she arrived, having had to drive through snow and ice to get to us.

The baby was born – I think – soon after midnight. This time I was present at the birth. A potentially lethal complication was that the umbilical cord was round the baby’s neck. The midwife (thank goodness she had turned up in time) dealt with it swiftly and efficiently. Heather had given birth to another fine and healthy baby boy. His name was inevitably Andrew, after the New Testament’s ‘Andrew, Peter’s brother’. Both Heather and I had second names that we disliked – Ina in Heather’s case and George in mine (mind you, I don’t think that I disliked my second name half as much as I did my first name Ernest!). We therefore gave our sons just one name each – Peter and Andrew which, throughout their lives, have been abbreviated to Pete and Andy.

Heather and I had never felt really settled in Thorpe-le-Soken. I didn’t enjoy the amount of meat inspection (at thoroughly unsocial times) that I was required to do. Both Heather and I wanted to move to an area where we could set down roots and buy our own home, which Heather insisted must be a bungalow. ‘The day will come when neither of us is capable of climbing stairs’, she said. Goodness! How true that turned out to be. Still in my mid-thirties though, I didn’t realize it at the time!

I scanned the advertisement pages of the local government press, ‘Municipal Journal’. ‘Municipal Engineering’ and so on, for Public Health Inspectors’ posts (our official title changed from Sanitary Inspector to Public Health Inspector at about that time!). I wanted a job, preferably in a town where we felt our sons would get a better education than they would in a country village, with housing accommodation, a car allowance, rather more social hours of work and, in view of my growing family, a little more pay!

I found one just a few miles away, in Clacton-on-Sea. Clacton Urban District Council (as it was then) required an additional public health inspector. Rented housing accommodation was offered and there was a car allowance. The salary grade was the same as I was getting with Tendring RDC but there was an extra £20 a year for duties as a part-time weather observer. £20 a year may sound totally trivial nowadays but in the mid-‘50s it was well worth having! Discreet enquiries evoked the information that there was little, if any, meat inspection.

The interview went well enough. I was asked what experience I had had of street cleaning. The honest and straightforward answer would have been ‘none whatsoever’. It certainly wasn’t a responsibility of the Public Health Department in either of the two rural districts in which I had worked, nor was it during my brief period with Westminster City Council. However I think that I impressed the Committee by telling them that although I had had no experience of managing street cleaning, as a prisoner of war I had, on occasion, wielded a broom myself to help keep the streets of Zittau in pristine condition.

A few days later I was notified that my application for the post had been successful and I was offered the tenancy of 41 The Chase, Holland-on-Sea, a modern semi-detached council house within easy walking distance of the cliffs and the sea front. We moved in on 18th May 1956. I remember the date because it was my 35th birthday.

At my interview I had told the Committee that my family and I had every intention of settling in Clacton and buying a home here at the very earliest opportunity. Afterwards I was told that some members of the committee had thought that I had said that just to improve my chances of getting the job; that when we had moved into the Council house they were going to let us have we would give up any thought of buying our own home.

We were determined to prove them wrong. Heather and I both wanted to own our own home and, while I would have been happy enough with a two storey dwelling, Heather was determined on a bungalow. I was certainly willing enough to go along with her in this determination.

We had been married for ten years. We had no serious debts but, on the other hand, running a car, moving home twice in the course of a little over a year, and having two young children, had made sure that we had no savings either. We thought that we would be able to make the regular mortgage repayments without much trouble but how were we to raise the deposit and meet the expenses that would be involved in yet another move to a new home? We expected to be able to get a 90 percent mortgage on the kind of property we thought that we could afford. Enquiries suggested that with a Council guarantee (which I felt sure the Council would give) we might be able to raise the percentage that we could borrow to 95 percent.

The £100 to £150 we knew that we would have to find sounds piffling now – but to us, in 1956, it was a vast sum. One of Heather’s aunts promised her a used three piece suite, so we sold the one that we had purchased new when we moved into our bungalow in Barham. After I had been employed by Clacton Council for a few weeks I was sent on a Meteorological Observers’ Course at an Air Ministry Centre somewhere in Middlesex. I had an aunt living in Twickenham. I asked if she would put me up for a few days and she was very willing. Instead of offering her the fairly generous lodging allowance the Council gave me, I gave her a box of chocolates at the end of my brief stay and put the allowance into our ‘house purchase fund’. She had been quite willing to put me up for nothing, and could well afford to – but afterwards I felt guilty about it for a long time.

Finally, and this was Heather’s sacrifice, not mine, we sold her engagement ring. It was a single diamond in a square setting on which, in May 1945, I had spent a considerable chunk of the army back pay that I had accumulated as a prisoner of war. I imagine that it is because I felt, and still feel, so badly about this transaction that I cannot now remember either how much I paid for the ring in the first instance or how much I managed to sell it for. I do remember that we felt that I had done quite well out of the deal. It brought our savings up to the sum that we felt we needed to have available before embarking on house purchase.

We started studying the adverts in the local newspaper and in Estate Agents windows for a suitable bungalow. Our main requirements were that it should be within Clacton itself and have three bedrooms. There were many new and fairly new bungalows with two bedrooms. We had two boys though and, at that time, didn’t rule out the possibility that they might one day have a sister. In the meantime my mother would be a fairly frequent visitor and Heather’s parents and other relatives and friends occasional ones. We felt that we needed that third bedroom.

In the autumn of 1956 we saw an advert for a bungalow that exactly met our specification. It was in Clacton’s Dudley Road, within walking distance of the town centre, there were good infants’ and primary schools nearby, it had been built in 1953 and it had three bedrooms. I drove to Dudley Road; we looked over it, and decided that it was to be our future home. The price was £1,900 (yes, that really was a reasonable price in those distant days!), and we felt that we could manage both the deposit and the mortgage repayments

In early-November 1956 we moved in. It was an adequate but basic building with open fires (the one in the kitchen with a back boiler), a lavatory with a high level Burlington (pull and let go!) flushing cistern, very few shelves in the pantry or elsewhere and no carpeting whatsoever on the ‘Marley tiled’ floors.. There was a deep ‘Belfast pattern’ glazed stoneware sink with hot and cold water supplies and a wooden draining board, in the kitchen – and that was all. The quite large garden though had been immaculately tended in a way that I couldn’t hope to emulate!

We have, over the years, brought the bungalow’s facilities up to date. We have brought up our two sons here and, in due course, welcomed their wives and our grandchildren here. Here it is that we celebrated our silver, ruby, golden and diamond wedding anniversaries and it was here in July 2006, three months after our 60th wedding anniversary, that my dear wife Heather’s life came to an end – as she would have wished, in her own bed in her own home.

I am typing these words in this bungalow today. I hope that it is here that my own life will come to an end.