Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Working in Clacton

Workng in Clacton 1956 - 1974


Public Health Inspector

I quickly settled into my new job as District Public Health Inspector, based in Clacton Town Hall. The Chief Public Health Inspector was Norman Hawkins who originated from Yorkshire. There was one other Inspector, John Royle, whose home town was Salford. He was four years older than me and had had his call-up into the army deferred until he had sat and passed his qualifying examination. He had then served as sergeant in the RAMC in Egypt and the Dodecanese Islands in the eastern Mediterranean. He was married with two sons, older than mine of course, and lived in a Council House in Clacton’s Carrs Road at the time of my appointment. Later he bought a bungalow in Clacton’s Boley Drive. Hawkins, in turn, was four years older than him and had qualified as an inspector before the war. Because of his job and his age his occupation during the war had been ‘reserved’ and he had served part-time in the ARP ‘Heavy Rescue’.

It is, I suppose, an interesting sidelight on the spirit of the time that we three inspectors were never on first name terms – we worked together for years but we were always Mr Hawkins, Mr Royle and Mr Hall. It now seems quite absurd.

I was allocated the eastern side of the district that comprised half the town centre and the suburbs of Holland-on-Sea and the Burrs Estate or ‘Burrsville’. John Royle had the western – on the whole more ‘working class’ – part of the town and the always-problematic suburban township of Jaywick. Only three years before my arrival in Clacton, Jaywick had been badly affected by the tidal ‘East Coast Floods’ of early 1953. Many families had been rendered homeless and there had been over twenty fatal casualties.

The ‘weather observation’ duties that had been part of the job description, involved recording the dry-bulb and wet-bulb temperatures at 9.00 a.m. in the summer and 10.00 a.m. in the winter, the subsoil temperature at, I think, 3ft, the overnight rainfall and the barometer reading. The barometer was situated in the foreman’s office in the town yard, and the other instruments and the rain gauge in an enclosure ‘the weather station’ beside the Martello Tower in front of Clacton Hospital.

There was also a sunshine recorder, a glass sphere resembling a fortune teller’s ‘crystal ball’, that acted as a lens to concentrate the sun’s rays and burn a line on a specially prepared piece of cardboard inserted into the recorder. Measurement of the burn gave the hours of sunshine. This had to be read and the card changed at 6.00 p.m., summer and winter alike. During the summer it was a pleasant enough job. In the winter though, crossing the dry moat, unlocking the door of the old Napoleonic era fort, mounting the internal stone staircase and going out onto the wind-swept, and often rain-swept, roof – all by the light of a hand-held electric torch, was not a job for the faint-hearted or imaginative!

Every evening, after changing the card on the sunshine recorder, the observer on duty had to go back to the office and phone the daily recordings on to an anonymous voice at the Air Ministry.

Every morning, after taking and recording our readings and a general note of the weather, including visibility and estimated wind speed, the observer had to enter the temperature, hours of sunshine and rainfall on a printed form, together with his own local weather forecast, and post it on a public notice board near the entrance to the pier. Our local forecast was supposed to be based on our own observations though we usually bore in mind the BBC’s forecast for that morning!

There were four of us local weather observers; we three public health inspectors and the cleansing foreman who had been doing the job before any of us. It was not a difficult job but it was an onerous one, especially for the unlucky observer whose turn came round on, for instance, Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve!

Let me admit it, I was never a very good Public Health Inspector. I did the job well enough but I’m not naturally observant, the pre-requisite of a good inspector. There also seemed to be an inordinate amount of time spent writing reports and arguing about whether an obviously desirable course of action was ‘reasonable and practicable’. Health education was the part of the job with which I felt most at home. I really enjoyed talking to an audience – the bigger the better! – about food hygiene, about the work of the Health Department and about the history of environment health concern from the grubby and smelly middle ages, through the industrial revolution and Victorian Britain, to the world today.

I was to remember these talks years later when, as ‘the new’ Tendring District Council’s first Public Relations Officer, I gave many talks to organisations throughout the district about the Council’s services. I always asked for questions at the end of my talk and on one occasion a lady asked, ‘Are you the same Mr Hall who gave us a talk about Public Health fifteen or so years ago – or was that a younger, thinner man?’ Another question I was once asked was, ‘What part of Australia do you come from?’ Other people have told me that their Suffolk accent has sometimes been mistaken for an Australian one!

I must have been pretty good as a public speaker because the Council decided to give me a half-day off a week for two years to attend lectures and study for the Further Education Teaching Certificate of the City and Guilds of London Institute. At the end of the course I sat the examination and passed it comfortably, though by that time I was no longer employed as a Public Health Inspector. I was Clacton’s Housing Manager.

Housing Manager

This happened almost accidentally when the existing Housing Manager secured another similar post but with a larger authority – Hove I think – on the south coast. As so often happened at that time in local government, nothing was done about replacing him until it was too late. It was then realized that, small though it was, the housing department needed someone to run it. The council decided that it should be combined with the Public Health Department under the headship of the Chief Public Health Inspector. Because I was the only officer in the Department (or indeed among the whole of the Council’s staff) who had any experience of housing management, I became the ‘Temporary Acting Housing Manager’.

I soon began to enjoy my temporary job. I had a small staff comprising two management assistants, John Dooley whose work was mainly accountancy and Bob Young, who assisted with tenants selection and tenants welfare and a typist, Margaret Pickess, a very competent young married woman who always described herself as ‘The Housing Manager’s Secretary’, although that wasn’t her official designation. There were also two full-time rent collectors though many tenants found it more convenient to call into the office to pay their rent.

I reckoned personally to chase up rent arrears, visit tenants with problems, interview and visit all applicants for council house tenancies, hand new tenants their keys and rent books and generally supervise the work of the department.

I hadn’t been doing the job for more than two or three weeks before I realized that I was really enjoying myself at work for the first time in years. I wrote a letter to the Clerk of the Council (nowadays he’d be called the Chief Executive) setting out my qualifications and experience and asking if I could be considered for the permanent post of Housing Manager. A week or so later I was, without further ado, offered the job. It would remain within the Public Health Department (thus avoiding the necessity of giving me a Chief Officer’s salary!) but I would have independence of action and would report independently to the Council’s Housing Committee. I was moved up one salary grade from the ‘Administrative and Professional’ Grades to the ‘Senior Officer’ Grade with a relatively small wage rise.
As I was expected to deal with telephoned enquiries out of office hours, the Council was prepared pay my telephone rental and would also pay for official phone calls if I recorded them. There really weren’t very many outgoing official calls so I contented myself with claiming the rental only. This was a somewhat mixed blessing. On one occasion I was dragged out of bed at two in the morning by a tenant in Elm Grove who complained that he couldn’t sleep because of his neighbour’s dog barking!

The previous Housing Manager had allocated two afternoons a week for interviewing tenants and housing applicants who wanted to see him. This resulted in there being queues of disgruntled and impatient women waiting to see me on these afternoons under the mistaken impression that the only way they would get the council house they wanted was by turning up to nag at me every week.

I changed all that. I had no intention of ‘holding court’ on two afternoons of each week. I let it be known that, provided that I was in the building (and if I were out my colleagues would have a good idea when I would return) I would see anyone who turned up wanting to see me – but they might well have to wait a while until I was free. I was also prepared to see tenants and prospective tenants by appointment, but only if they had something new to tell me or ask me, other than, ‘when am I going to get a council house?’

That did spread the interviews through the week and helped to dispel the myth that making my life a misery was an unfailing path to a council tenancy!

Tenant selection wasn’t quite as bizarre as it had been in the Gipping Rural District (see ‘Return to Suffolk’ in this ‘My Life’ series) but it was still somewhat unusual. I had a file for every applicant including the original housing application giving details of the family and their current housing circumstances, my report on them, and any supporting documentation – medical certificates and the like.

To each meeting of the Housing Committee I would present details of about ten of those whom I considered most in need of rehousing, together with any applicants that members of the Council had asked to be considered. From that number the Committee would select two or three for ‘priority rehousing’. They would go on a ‘priority list’ from which I selected a suitable tenant when a house or flat became available. Applicants with only one child or with two young children of the same sex would be unlikely to be offered a three bedroomed house. There were always larger families on the priority list who would get these. Similarly I wouldn’t offer very elderly people, or disabled people flats above ground-floor level.

We had a number of always-popular two bedroomed bungalows that were intended primarily for disabled people. We would alter and adapt them as necessary to suit their particular disabilities. I also, without having to refer to the Committee, would arrange exchanges between tenants. A couple whose family had grown up and left home might well wish to exchange their three bedroomed house for an easier to manage flat with a lower weekly rent. I was also authorised to arrange exchanges of tenancy between Clacton tenants and tenants of other local authorities. It often happened, for instance, that tenants in a Clacton house might wish to move to London to be nearer grown-up children while there were always London tenants eager to move ‘to the seaside’. Although I arranged such exchanges and transfers of tenancy on my own initiative, they were, of course all reported to the six-weekly meetings of the Housing Committee.
This photo, in which I look every inch a bureaucrat, pictures me as most tenants and housing applicants will have seen me during interviews.

Private tenants who had been given notice to quit were always brought to the attention of the next committee or, if their case was very urgent, to that of the Chairman and Vice-chairman of the Committee who had power to act in an emergency. My first job was to make sure that the date of their eviction was delayed as long as humanly possible. I had to assure the desperately worried tenants that they couldn’t actually be evicted without a court order and that even when the landlord had obtained such an order, postponement could usually be obtained from the Court.

Housing applicants didn’t like that advice and I hated having to give it. But it had to be given. The supply of Council houses depended upon the building programme and on casual vacancies arising from an existing tenant moving away or dying. The council had a Conservative majority but was strongly opposed to selling council owned houses to sitting tenants, regarding the housing stock as a trust left to them by their predecessors to eliminate overcrowding and homelessness. We did encourage those tenants who were able to do so, to buy their own homes leaving their Council house empty. Quite a few tenants, including of course Heather and I, did just that.

By delaying eviction till the latest possible date and making use of casual vacancies as they arose we never, during the time that I was Housing Manager, had any family involuntarily homeless or reduced to ‘bed and breakfast’ accommodation. I stress ‘involuntarily’ homeless because we did have one couple in late middle age who spent a couple of nights on the pavement (it was the height of summer) because they wouldn’t accept the tenancy of the ground floor two-bedroomed flat that I was able to offer them. It wouldn’t accommodate the large amount of furniture they had accumulated over a lifetime. I think that in the end they managed to find some larger accommodation on their own.

I soon realized that the one criterion by which most of the councilors judged the housing manager was by whether the weekly tally of rent arrears went up or down. Ours was going steadily upwards and something had to be done about it. John Dooley, unaided, was doing all the accountancy, and collecting the rent from the many tenants who preferred to bring it into the office. I decided that he needed extra help and asked Bob Young to spend more of his time giving him a hand. I would do the outside work with which he had been occupied.

This wasn’t popular with Bob. He had been on very friendly terms with my predecessor and possibly felt that he should have succeeded him. He applied for and was appointed to a job in the Council’s Holiday Publicity and Entertainments Department where he was much happier.

I had to find a successor. The job was advertised, I drew up a short list and a representative from the Personnel Department and I interviewed those who were on it. It was then that I discovered that interviewing someone for a job is almost as stressful as being interviewed for one! We chose Keith Price, a young man who had been employed in the Clacton Branch of the County Library but was unhappy there. It was an inspired choice. He fitted in well with the housing management team and I believe that he later rose steadily in housing administration.

I also spent much more of my own time chasing rent arrears. I would visit defaulting tenants in the evenings, when the husband was at home (this was in the early ‘70s before it became the norm for housewives and mothers to be in full-time employment). Sometimes I would call shortly before a meeting of the Housing Committee and tell them that the committee would be discussing their arrears in an hour’s time. What was I to tell them? It was surprising how often this would result in a few fivers being found behind the clock on the mantelpiece.

I also realized that all rent arrears began with one week’s rent payment being missed, so I wrote at once to every tenant missing a week’s rent urging him or her to make sure that they paid the two weeks’ rent the next week. I worded the letter very carefully because I realized that there could be many valid reasons why a perfectly responsible tenant might occasionally miss the rent man. Nevertheless I did receive a few indignant letters from tenants whom I would have preferred not to antagonize.

The rent arrears did begin to fall though and, after the first month or two of my management, I was able to report a reduction in the volume of rent arrears, to almost every six-weekly meeting of the committee. In the office every Friday afternoon we totalled the rent collected during the week and celebrated with a can of beer for each member of the Housing Department staff. If the arrears had gone up since the previous week, my colleagues bought the beer between them. If, as most often happened, they had come down, then I bought it.

Goodness knows if the Council would have approved of this had they known about it. However it did give every member of the staff a small interest in reducing those rent arrears – and it was a pleasant social occasion with which to end the working week.

This was a very busy and a very happy time for me and I think that my job satisfaction must have been apparent in my home life. Our elder son Pete (sixteen years old and in the ‘express class’ at Clacton County High School) was taking his ‘A’ levels. Andy, two and a half years younger, was also doing very well at the same school. Later they both went into local government housing administration. I like to think that that was because they had seen how happy I had been as housing manager and how much I had enjoyed the job’s challenges and satisfactions.

It was too good to last. In the early 1970s the spectre of reorganisation hung over local government. In 1973 we learned how it would affect us. Clacton, Frinton and Walton, and Brightlingsea urban districts were to be merged with the Borough of Harwich and Tendring Rural District to form the new Tendring District. The actual transformation was to take place on 1st April 1974.

1973 was an anxious year for all local government officials. The top jobs with the new authority were much better paid than their equivalents in the existing ones but, of course, there were far fewer of them. Existing ‘Chief Officers’ were well provided for. If they were over fifty years old and failed to get a top job, they were offered the option of early retirement on very favourable terms. I was fifty-two in 1973 and would have been eligible for early retirement. However I was reckoned as ‘second tier’. Theoretically the Chief Public Health Inspector was the Housing Department’s supremo. He was sixty and did take the retirement option.

All local government jobs were re-advertised, first throughout the county. Few of us could be confident that we would get a post with ‘our own’ new authority, so most applied also for top jobs elsewhere. I applied for several posts of Director of Housing and was short-listed for interview with three of them, a Thames-side authority near Southend whose name I can’t recall, Harlow, and Colchester. I wasn’t successful with any of them, and was particularly disappointed about Harlow. There were three of us interviewed. I thought that I had done quite well in the interview. In the end though, we were all three told that the committee had decided not to make an appointment that afternoon. They clearly didn’t know whom they wanted – but it wasn’t one of us!

I had, of course, also applied for the post of Director of Housing to the new Tendring District and felt that I had a pretty good chance of being successful. I had never made a secret of my personal political views but I never allowed them to influence my work either as a public health inspector or housing manager. As a result I knew that I had the support of the leaders of both the Conservative and the Labour groups on the old Clacton District Council. Clacton councillors though were a minority on the new Tendring Council. Clacton’s Senior Officer, Clerk of the Council Cecil Ramsden, had already been appointed as Chief Executive of the new authority. Many rural councillors, and those from Harwich, Brightlingsea, and Frinton and Walton, were determined that their officers should fill most, if not all, of the other top jobs.

There were four candidates on the short list for interview. Two outsiders, myself and Bill Todd, Tendring Rural District’s Housing Manager. Bill Todd and I were the only serious contenders. He had been in office longer than I had been in Clacton but his qualifications were not as good as mine and, unlike me, he had not had both rural and urban housing management experience. It was a severe blow to me when he was appointed. My damaged pride was somewhat assuaged by my conviction that former rural district councillors had probably been determined to get ‘their man’ appointed. Years later, after Bill Todd’s death, I read in his obituary that he had been an enthusiastic Freemason – as were a number of influential councillors and Chief Officers!

What was I to do? I could, of course, have applied for a subordinate job in the new Housing Department and would almost certainly have been appointed as Bill Todd’s deputy on a salary at least equal to the one that I had as Clacton’s Housing Manager. I could also have reverted to Public Health Inspection and become a district inspector with the new authority.

Neither prospect appealed to me. I was in despair (and no doubt difficult to live with!) – until I noticed that on the establishment of the new authority there was to be a Public Relations Officer, an appointment that none of the constituent authorities had ever had. The PRO was to be the ‘mouthpiece’ of the Council, acting as liaison officer with the press and other news media, preparing posters and leaflets publicising the council’s services and generally keeping news media and public informed about the Council’s activities. The salary grade Senior Officer Grade II was one grade higher than the one that I currently had.

I knew that I could do it. I knew much more about local government than most journalists, and I knew a great deal more about journalism and public speaking than most local government officers. I was a member of the Institute of Journalists (later to merge with he NUJ) and had had a great deal of experience as a spare-time journalist, writing feature articles for both local and national publications. I was an experienced and, I thought, entertaining public speaker and well-known as a speaker about Public Health by a number of local organisations. I was acquainted with the editors and many of the staff of the local newspapers and I was a qualified teacher of Further Education (surely relevant to the post!).

I applied for the job, was interviewed, and appointed. Luckily for me there were three journalists on the committee, a former editor of the Harwich and Manningtree Standard, a reporter of the East Anglian Daily Times and an employee of Radio Orwell, a local radio station based in Ipswich.

I was appointed in October 1973 but the new Tendring District Council didn’t take over until 1st April 1974. It had been decided that the PRO should be part of the Secretary and Legal Officer’s Department, with its office in Weeley. In the interim, newly appointed officers like myself were expected to continue in their existing posts but to prepare themselves for their new appointments in the meantime. We were able to claim overtime payments for work in connection with our new positions.

I was determined to hand over ‘my’ Housing Department to the new administration in as good a state as possible. I sent a circular letter to every tenant thanking them for their cooperation in the past (some probably thought that in their case I was being sarcastic!) and telling them what was to happen in the future. This, I realized as I drafted the letter, was actually a ‘public relations’ task! I also redoubled my efforts to reduce the rent arrears. The winter of 1973/’74 was ‘the winter of discontent’ when, in an effort to conserve fuel, a three-day week was enforced by the government. On several evenings I went back to an unheated office and by the light of an oil lamp used one of the very basic mechanical calculators that we had in those days to add up rent arrears, and personally to type letters to defaulters.

At the same time, I was getting to know my future colleagues and familiarise myself with the new district, covering the whole of the Tendring peninsula. I met, and instantly liked, Tom Moonlight, formerly Town Clerk to Harwich and now head of Tendring’s Secretarial and Legal Services Department and Derek Geale, head of the Department’s Secretarial Section of which, as PRO, I was a member. I produced posters and leaflets explaining the change in local administration that was taking place, prepared and distributed press releases on the subject, and introduced myself to the editors of the local newspapers and the news editors of BBC tv’s ‘Look East’, of ITV’s regional service and of the BBC’s and private run radio stations.

As a result of my efforts, the Tendring District was the only local authority in the eastern region to have a news team from the BBC visit us on 1st April 1974 and to have a full report that day on local government reorganisation within the Tendring District on BBC ’Look East’.

The day before I had bade farewell to my colleagues of Clacton’s Housing Department and established myself as full-time PRO in the Council Offices at Weeley.

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