Public Relations Officer 1973 - 1980

Public Relations Officer 1973 –1980

I was very disappointed indeed at my failure to become Tendring District’s Director of Housing. I enjoyed housing management and felt that I was pretty good at it. I appeared to have a choice between becoming again a District Public Health Inspector or Assistant, possibly Deputy, Director of Housing under Bill Todd. Neither prospect appealed to me and as I wasn’t a ‘Chief Officer’ I couldn’t opt for early retirement.

I was in despair – until I spotted the vacancy for a Public Relations Officer. The salary was nothing like that of Director of Housing, but it was a grade higher than my salary as Clacton’s Housing Manager. It required a wide experience of local government, of journalism and of public speaking, all three of which I possessed. I applied for it and was appointed.

I was Tendring District Council’s first Public Relations Officer and I held the post from October 1973 until the end of March 1980. The new Tendring District Council didn’t take over until 1st April 1974, so for the first five months of my new job as PRO, I was also Clacton’s Housing Manager. I was able to claim for overtime worked in connection with my new appointment.

` Looking back over my life I realize that the six and a half years that I spent as Public Relations Officer were the happiest of my entire local government career. I was doing the things that I enjoyed doing – talking and writing, and getting paid for it! I also came to realize that the ability to interest and entertain an audience, and that of stringing words together to create a readable narrative, are the only real skills that I have ever possessed.

I was also working on my own. I was in the Secretary and Legal Officer’s Department and I always kept Mr Tom Moonlight, the Secretary and Legal Officer, and Mr Derek Geale, the department’s senior administrative officer, informed of my activities. They never attempted to interfere. I could have summoned one of the young ladies of the typing pool to type my press releases, letters and reports. I had however, for years had the ability to transfer my thoughts directly onto paper from my own typewriter. I brought my little Olivetti Portable to the office and did all my own typing. It was quicker and easier – and if there were typing errors, I had no-one to blame but myself.

All this was long before the advent of desk-top, never mind lap-top computers. The old Clacton Council had a computer that Tendring District Council inherited. I didn’t ever see it but I understand that it was an enormous thing that occupied a room to itself that only a very limited number of people were allowed to enter.

I began my public relations work well before the new Tendring District Council began to function fully on 1st April 1974. It was clearly my task to familiarise the public with the changes that were going to take place. I designed striking posters stating briefly the principal changes that would take place on 1st April, and leaflets giving greater detail of these changes. The posters was displayed on the notice boards of existing local authorities and the leaflets distributed from Council Offices, Post Offices, and other public offices.

I saw the editors of the local newspapers, discovered how they preferred press releases to be presented, and arranged to pick up a free copy of each issue of their publication. I contacted the press offices of the regional BBC and ITV and discovered how to phone news items to their newsrooms.

As a direct result of this activity a BBC crew visited us on 1st April, and the Tendring District was the only authority in the Eastern Region to be featured on their item about local government reorganisation on BBC’s Look East that evening.

My office at Council Offices, Weeley was next to the Council Chamber and had been the official ‘Parlour’ (sitting room cum office) of the Chairman of the Tendring Rural District Council. It was panelled, extremely comfortable and had an open grate – much appreciated when I was able to get hold of a few logs and some coal during cold weather! There was even a large oil painting on the wall!

It was there that I wrote my letters and press releases, arranged speaking and other appointments, and planned the monthly newsletter – just a piece of A4 paper, folded to give four pages. On it I published the Council and Committee meetings, open to the public, to be held in the Weeley Council Chamber during the forthcoming month, and publicised tha Council’ services such as improvement grants and so on. The newsletter I named Minute by Minute. It was printed by the Council’s printing service in the office at Weeley and copies were left at all the Council office centres and at Post Offices throughout the district, for members of the public to pick up.

I tried to attend all the Council’s Committee Meetings and full Council Meetings and phone any noteworthy decisions or memorable quotes on to the BBC’s newsroom in Norwich. Councillors returning home would sometimes switch on their radios to hear a report from the meeting they had just left! Meetings sometimes went on till midnight and beyond, but the BBC’s newsroom closed at 10.30 p.m. so that was the latest that I stayed there

I regularly prepared press releases garnered from Committee Minutes and other sources and sent copies to all the local news media. It was very satisfying to find my releases, often unaltered, in the local papers the following day or week. I also wrote a number of feature articles. One ‘Value for your rates’ had a full-page spread in the regional ‘East Anglian Daily Times’ and on two occasions I had feature articles on Tendring Council’s services and activities published in the District Councils’ Review, a nation-wide publication for the newly created district councils. Rather to my surprise, as I had made it clear that the articles were sent in my capacity of public relations officer, I received cheques (I can’t remember for how much) in payment for these.

Receipt of the first of these cheques presented something of a problem. I had written the articles for which payment was made in my office, in my official capacity, and in ‘the Council’s time’. Despite my busyness I still made time for some freelance writing (it was during this period that my first book on domestic hot and cold water supply, and drainage was published) and it was clearly important to keep my official and my private writing entirely separate. I therefore paid this cheque and a second one a year or so later, to the Council’s Treasurer. I think that my colleagues in the Treasurer’s Department were a little surprised to have acquired a new, if extremely small, source of revenue!

I also gave talks on the work of the council to public and voluntary organisations (Women’s Institutes, Ratepayers’ Associations, church fellowships, schools and the like) all over the district.

I was a founder-member of the Society of District Council Public Relations Officers (with the unfortunate acronym of SODPRO!) and was somewhat dismayed to find that I was the lowest paid PRO in the Eastern Region! However I enjoyed what I was doing – and what one enjoys doing isn’t really ‘work’.

Needless to say I had to deal with a great many phone calls, mostly from the media, about council activities. I hope that I acquired a reputation for honesty and helpfulness and for always ringing callers back when I had promised to do so. As for post – any letters to the Council that didn’t obviously fall within the sphere of some other officer came straight to me. Among them were always a number of letters from school children seeking help with a school ‘project’. I always did what I could to help them but very few bothered to write back to thank me.

One of the odder queries that I had was from a young woman who had ‘seen the Light and repented of her past sins’. It seemed that fifteen years earlier, when she had been a young teenager, she had shop-lifted a few bars of chocolate from a small confectioners in Holland-on-Sea. She told me where the shop had been and asked me to find the address for her so that she could make restitution. Sadly, the shop had since been demolished and no one knew what had happened to its owner. My correspondent had to find some other way of easing her conscience.

Another letter addressed to Clacton’s Mayor came from an elderly lady in Bulgaria. One of her friends had translated her letter into English. It seemed that her son had obtained permission to emigrate to Israel, but when he arrived there he hadn’t cared for it and had managed to get to England. She had a partial address in Clacton. Could the council find him?

Inevitably, the letter arrived on my desk. I was able to find her son. He was living in quite comfortable circumstances, and I never did discover why he had failed to contact his poor old mum. He said that he would write to her at once. In case not, I wrote to her telling her that I had located her son and that he was well and prospering, and giving her his full address. I also sent her a Come to sunny Clacton holiday brochure to publicise the attractions of the Essex Holiday Coast on the shores of the Black Sea.

I publicised the Council’s campaigns – housing improvement grants, anti-dog fouling, anti-vandalism and so on. Vandalism was, and still is, an endemic problem with all local authorities. Young trees are broken and killed, public toilets wrecked (some vandals appear to have been equipped with sledge hammers!), windows of seaside shelters broken, beach rescuer lifebelts stolen or thrown into the sea, beach huts set on fire, and walls defaced with offensive graffiti. Anything of use or beauty, anything that gave pleasure or support to the elderly or handicapped was liable to be broken, stolen or defaced.

The Council offered a cash reward (I think of £50) to anyone giving information leading to the arrest of a vandal. There were one or two claimants. One young man made the mistake of committing an act of vandalism within sight of a holidaying policeman from one of the London Boroughs. He wasn’t just reported – but arrested and taken round to the Police Station and charged! I saw that the reward scheme, and responses to it, appeared in the local press and on local radio and tv.

Dog-fouling of pavements was another apparently insoluble problem of the 1980s. I designed and had printed, in black on fluorescent orange, a poster that purported to be addressed to dogs. It read, as far as I can recall, like this:

CALLING ALL DOGS


Please don’t foul the footpaths. Humans hate it and it causes disease. What’s more, if you foul the footpath, your owner could be fined………and he wouldn’t like that at all.


Note for dog owners: If your dog can’t read please pass on the message.


This I posted on notice boards in Clacton and passed on copies for display to every town and parish council in the district. I also sent copies to the editors of local newspapers and to regional tv and radio stations.

The news media loved it. It was pictured on both BBC and ITV Regional programmes. The Evening Gazette (as it then was) and the Clacton Gazette printed a photograph of the poster pinned to a tree, where it was apparently being read by a rather puzzled dog.

Most town and parish councils, and members of the public, liked it. One or two shopkeepers asked for copies to display in their windows. A few dog-lovers didn’t like it and one parish council, Wrabness I think, denounced it as ‘cheap, gimmicky and unworthy’, and announced that they had no intention of displaying it. Ah well, the poster certainly fulfilled its objective of bringing dog-fouling to the attention of the public…….and demonstrated that you can’t hope to please everybody

Tree planting was another of the Council’s activities that I enjoyed publicising. The Trees Working Party, headed by the late Councillor Malcolm Holloway, a genuine enthusiast, was a strictly non-political group of councillors which had a great deal of success in encouraging tree planting and tree preservation throughout the district. They persuaded the Planning Committees to make tree planting a condition of many planning approvals, encouraged individuals to sponsor tree planting, and (Malcolm Holloway’s idea) recruited ‘volunteer tree wardens’ in every locality to report acts of vandalism on street trees and water them (if only with used washing-up water) in periods of drought. They agreed to a district-wide essay competition, with small prizes, for school children, on the importance of trees to us all.

The working party really took me into their confidence and valued the service that I could give them. I organised the essay competition and persuaded the editor of the Clacton Gazette to judge the entries. I kept up a steady stream of press releases and wrote a number of feature articles about the working party’s activities. These were, I recall, published in the East Anglian Daily Times, The Clacton Gazette and the District Councils Review.

I felt that the members of the Trees Working Party (they came from every political party and none) were one group of councillors who could justly claim to have left the Tendring District a better place than they had found it.

Not everything went smoothly all the time. On evening at about 5 p.m., just as I was thinking about going home, I had a phone call from a young woman reporter (whom I thought I knew) informing me that there was a demand for a ‘naturist beach’ in Clacton. What would the Council think of the idea. I replied diplomatically that they would obviously give any such request careful consideration, but that Clacton was a ‘family resort’ and I thought that they would be unlikely to welcome the idea unless there was a big change in public opinion.

‘Thanks’, she said, adding quite casually, ‘How about you? Would you personally have any objection?’ I should, of course, have replied pompously that my personal views were quite irrelevant and the only view I could express was that of the Council. I didn’t. In my innocence I imagined that it was a casual off-the-record question put by one journalist to another. ‘No, I don’t really think so’, I said.

The next day her newspaper printed a story to the effect that Ernest Hall, Tendring’s Press Officer had said that the Council probably wouldn’t approve a nudist beach in Clacton - but that he personally would have no objection!

That was the only occasion, in nearly seven years of dealing daily with the press that I felt I had been let down. Otherwise I couldn’t have asked for a happier relationship than the one that I enjoyed with all the news media. Like Housing Management though, it wasn’t destined to last. Tendring Council’s first Chief Executive died quite suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack. Mr Ramsden was a barrister with a sharp tongue, who didn’t suffer fools gladly. I don’t think that either the councillors or his fellow chief officers had always found him easy to get on with. He had valued my particular skills though, and had encouraged me in my activities and in the way I carried them out. I was saddened by his death. During the next twelve months or so I was to become sadder still.

Immediately after Mr Ramsden’s death, Mr Tom Moonlight, the Council’s Secretary and Legal Officer, temporarily took over his duties. Most of us hoped that he would continue in that post, but he made it clear that he had no wish to do so.

The Council advertised and, from the applicants, selected a Mr Richard Painter. Mr Painter had been Chief Personnel Officer (I expect that his title had actually been Director of Human Resources) for the large Borough of Reading and had a reputation for reorganisation, rationalising and down-sizing; all the euphemisms that mean dispensing with other people’s jobs. His colleagues at Reading were said to have given him an axe as a parting present! I have no idea whether or not that was true, but can understand that it may well have been.

He immediately began the task of reorganising the Council’s departments, managing to shed jobs as he did so. He once remarked that reorganising a local authority was like painting the Forth Bridge; no sooner had one finished than it was time to start again. A year or so later, when I was writing Tendring Topics yet another reorganisation was taking place at the Town Hall. I took the opportunity of quoting that remark with the comment that it at least made sure that the painters were never out of work.

He clearly had no high opinion of either my activities or me. I was to move from my Weeley Office to Clacton Town Hall to come directly under his control but subordinate to his personal assistant. I would retain my title and salary until retirement (he clearly hoped that I would take the option of retiring at 60 – only some eighteen months in the future); but that I would then be replaced by a ‘Research Assistant’ on a salary four grades lower than my present grade. He and his Personal Assistant, with some modest help from the Research Assistant, would then deal with Public Relations.

That I couldn’t accept. I discovered that my army service would count as full-time local government service as far as superannuation was concerned. If I were allowed to retire right away I would be credited with 40 years service and would thus be entitled to a pension equal to 50 percent of my final salary.

I applied for early retirement ‘in the interest of the efficiency of the service’. This official formula was rather insulting to me but the efficiency of the service would certainly have been impaired if I had been compelled to work under the conditions proposed. I had a surprisingly amicable interview with Mr Painter* (we were, after all, both getting what we wanted!) and it was agreed that I should retire on 31st March, then a month away and about six weeks before by fifty-ninth birthday. In the meantime I would remain in my present office until retirement, continuing my work just as I had for the previous six and half years.

I had a very pleasant informal retirement party at my office in Weeley on the day of my departure. My colleagues presented me with a splendid tripod for my camera and life retired membership of NALGO (National and Local Government Officers’ association) of which I had been a member since I entered the service at the age of sixteen! NALGO has now become UNISON. I remain a life member.

A few weeks later Heather and I were invited to an official retirement presentation by the Chairman of the Council, in the Chairman’s Parlour at Clacton Town Hall. It had been suggested that I might invite up to (I think) twenty of my colleagues, and I did so. It was quite an emotional event and both Heather and I appreciated it. The Chairman (Mr. Fred Good of Harwich) paid tribute to the work I had done for the Council and presented me with a first-class pair of binoculars as a farewell present from the Council. He gave Heather a large bouquet of flowers.

My local government career had come to an end. A new career, as a freelance writer, was about to begin. But that is another story!

*Mr Painter moved from Tendring a few years after my retirement to take up a similar post with a large Thames-side authority in Kent. Some years later I saw him briefly on a tv news programme. He had been appointed Head of a London City Academy. No, he hadn’t any teaching experience – but his was an administrative post. Yes, of course all the students addressed him as ‘sir’

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