Public Relations Officer – a Supplement!
The human memory is a fickle faculty that grows more and more fickle with advancing age. How extraordinary that a fortnight ago, when I was recalling my time as Tendring Council’s first PRO, I remembered the incident of the repentant shop-lifter, and that of the anxious Bulgarian mother, but had temporally forgotten what was certainly the most colourful episode of my entire local government career; an occasion that culminated in my being seen by tens of thousands of viewers singing in a choir on a popular tv programme!
I could have simply rewritten my original ‘chapter’, inserting this incident (how simple and easy a computer makes this nowadays!) into it. It was not a story that could be told briefly though and I thought that it would have unbalanced what I had already written. So – I have made it a supplement to ‘Public Relations Officer 1973 – 1980’, intended to be read at the end of that chapter of my life.
It was in the spring, and during Tendring Council’s interregnum. Chief Executive Mr Harwood had, sadly, died and Mr Painter had yet to be appointed in his place. It must therefore have been early in 1979. Acting Chief Executive was easy-going Mr Tom Moonlight, formerly Harwich’s Town Clerk and since local government’s 1974 reorganisation, Secretary and Legal Officer of the new District Council.
My office phone rang. It was someone from the BBC Television Centre. One of the directors of Esther Rantzen’s popular tv show That’s Life would like to see me about the possible inclusion of Tendring District Council in a tv programme. It would be to the credit of the council, he assured me. Would I be available the next day if he came down to Clacton?
I was, at that time, one of a small minority of people who had never watched That’s Life. I knew that it was very popular though and decided that it could at least do no harm to see this man from the BBC. I said that I’d be free all the afternoon and that, if they’d let me know which train he was coming on, I’d meet him at Clacton Station. I mentioned it to Mr Moonlight, who had watched the show, and he said he’d like to know what was proposed.
The director proved to be a pleasant and businesslike young man. I met him off his train and drove him to my office at Weeley. He outlined what the producers of ‘That’s Life’ had in mind.
It seemed that the toilet door of one of our council houses in Frinton was ill fitting and wouldn’t close properly. The tenant’s wife had written about it to the council’s works department. To make sure that her complaint received the early attention that it deserved she worded her letter in rhyming verse. It certainly achieved its purpose. The foreman of the works department was something of a humorist. He wrote back in similar verse, telling her when the necessary work would be done.
The good lady very much appreciated this and sent both rhymes to Esther Rantzen whom she thought might appreciate it too. She did. She set her team to the task of expanding the two letters into a song, to be sung as a duet by two small choirs!
It was hoped that the Council would be prepared to provide those two choirs, one of four carpenters or other workmen, and the other of eight council officials; the choirs to perform on location at the site of the council house in Frinton and in the Council Chamber.
On one day the ‘choirs’ would have to travel up to London to the BBC Television Centre to sing for recording under studio conditions. The following day a camera crew would go with the ‘choirs’ first to Frinton and then to Weeley, to sing their pieces again. This time the singing would not be recorded but the action would be filmed. The sound, recorded the previous day, would be added to the pictures later at the studio. What the director wanted me to do was to find the members of each choir, arrange for them to have paid leave for two days while they worked for the BBC, get them all up to the Television Centre when required and, on the following day, make sure that the ‘workmen’ were available at Frinton and the ‘officials’ at Weeley. He also wanted to be able to use the Council Chamber at Weeley in the afternoon. ‘That will be ideal for our purpose’ he said.
Goodness – it wasn’t much to ask! Certainly a lot more than I had the authority to offer! I took the director along the corridor from my office to see Mr Moonlight, acting chief executive. We told him the story. I said that I was pretty certain that I could find volunteers for the two choirs, and make sure that they got to London safely but obviously I couldn’t arrange for them to have paid time off work, nor could I authorise the use of the Council Chamber.
I fancy that both Mr Ramsden and his successor Mr Painter would have vetoed the whole idea out of hand. Mr Moonlight thought about it. What were the words of the song? They were read out to us. They certainly weren’t great poetry but they rhymed and they scanned. They were not in any way critical of the council and they were amusing without being offensive. After nearly thirty years I have forgotten most of them but for some reason one verse, to be sung by the workmen, has stuck in my memory:
Dear tenant, there’s been a t’do,
About trouble you’ve had with your loo.
Never mind, do not fuss,
Though there’s just four of us,
We are carpenters, strong, tough and true!
It was, of course, in limerick form and it was to be sung to the tune that I think of as being ‘the limerick song’. It is impossible to describe a tune in words. I had heard the limerick song only in the army, but I think it is probably sometimes to be heard in the kind of pub that ‘nice people’ would never frequent, and at the kind of party for which they would decline an invitation! It’s really a precursor of karaoke. The ‘lead’ singer has a repertoire of half a dozen or more limericks that he sings one after the other. After each limerick the audience roar out the chorus ‘That was a sweet little song. Sing us another one, do’. By this time, especially if the alcohol is flowing freely, there will be others happy to contribute limericks, getting less and less printable as the time passes. You have never heard of it? Good, you haven’t missed much. Enough to say that it has a simple and memorable melody that virtually anyone can manage. There was nothing unprintable or offensive about the lyric for which I was asked to find a choir.
Mr Moonlight said, ‘I don’t see why not. Better see what others think about it though’. He phoned the Chairman of the Council and his fellow Chief Officers. They were happy about it if he was. Provided that I could find the volunteers for the choirs it could go ahead.
It wasn’t too difficult to find volunteers. A free trip to London, a visit to the Television Centre and a free lunch at the staff canteen – an opportunity perhaps to see in the flesh the folk one saw every day on the small screen; it was an almost irresistible bait. One of the ‘officials’ dropped out at the last minute. He had some lame excuse but I think it was just cold feet. The BBC had specifically asked for, and been promised, eight choristers. I had intended to be ‘just the organiser’ but I was also first reserve so I had to step in and join the choir.
It was quite an experience. We had to catch an early train and be at the Centre by 9.30. In the studio we sang our verses over, and over, and over again, until the director decided that we were just exactly right and were recorded. We finished at about 12.30. We were then invited to a free lunch at the BBC canteen and were free to go home how and whenever we liked. I declined the lunch as I had promised – if I had time – to look in at the offices of Do-it-yourself magazine for a chat with the editor!
The next day the ‘workmen’ and I met the film crew in Frinton at 10.00 a.m. There was some filming of the lady whose amateur poem had triggered all this activity, and the workmen’s choir performed again for the camera, singing among other poetic gems, the four-line verse that I have remembered over the years. The ‘workmen’s’ choir’s filming was finished by lunchtime.
I had a ploughman’s lunch with the director, his young lady assistant, and the camera man, at The Essex Skipper and we then repaired to Weeley for the afternoon’s filming of the ‘officials’ choir in the Council Chamber. It did take all the afternoon too. I reckon that there must have been times when Mr Moonlight, hearing our not-very-melodious voices belting out the words of our ‘limerick song’ for the umpteenth ‘take’, must have wished that he had never granted that permission. The director wanted our hands, our heads, our facial expressions – everything about each one of us – exactly right, before he was satisfied. In the end, for the few minutes required, he turned each one of us into a professional actor.
It ended at last. As the film crew packed up, the director thanked us all and promised that we’d all be told when ‘our’ programme would be transmitted and would be given tickets to be at the studio on that occasion. That was a promise that was not kept – though I don’t believe that it was the director’s fault. One Saturday afternoon a few weeks later I had a phone call from the BBC. An emergency had arisen and they were going to have to transmit ‘our programme’ the next day. There wasn’t time to arrange for free tickets but they’d gladly let all of us have free tickets for any other ‘That’s Life’ show in the future.
I didn’t bother to take up that offer though I believe some members of the two choirs did, and enjoyed themselves. I did phone everybody though to let them know we’d be ‘on air’ the next day. Heather and I watched it. It was long before we had a video recorder so I have no record of it.
It was fun to watch. I think that it did something to counter the popular belief that all council employees are humourless morons and that all council officers are pompous ‘stuffed shirts’ devoid of imagination and human feeling. Tendring Council came out as an authority that listened to its tenants and kept their houses in repair.
Was it all worth it? Perhaps it was, just possibly. All that hard work and (on my part) worry for two whole days, was compressed into just four, possibly five, minutes!
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Earning a living
Earning a Living!
At Ipswich’s Northgate School in the 1930s, a particularly dreaded part of the General Schools Certificate Examination that we all took in the fifth form was ‘The French Oral’. An outside examiner would descend on the school to interview each one of us individually…in French!
It was the same examiner every year. He came from Bristol and was referred to by Dr Kerby, our French Master, as ‘the Bristol Doctor’, in much the same tones as those in which one might speak of ‘the Boston Strangler’.
We were carefully coached in the probable course of the interview. He would hand us a picture postcard that we would be asked to describe. I remember that the central feature of mine was a clock tower, and the French word for clock had vanished from my memory! He would ask us a number of questions, one of which was likely to be (I won’t attempt it in French): ‘What do you expect to do when you leave school? The recommended answer, in French of course, was, ‘I am not sure but I expect that I shall become a clerk’.
What a prospect! It wasn’t one that appealed to me, but in the late 1930s few school-leavers were able to ‘choose a career’. Most just looked for a job.
I wanted to be a writer. I had been awarded the top grade in ‘English, language and literature’ in the General Schools Certificate Examination and, praising my essays, my English master had forecast a career in journalism for me. However, shortly before the end of my last term a visiting ‘careers expert’ had warned against just such forecasts and just such ambitions. ‘You’d have very little chance’, he said. ‘You’d be competing with university graduates – and if you went up to London, you certainly wouldn’t earn enough as a trainee to live on’.
Discouraged, I didn’t even enquire if there were any vacancies for trainees with the East Anglian DailyTimes. Probably there weren’t though. Most of Ipswich’s major employers; Ipswich Borough Council, East Suffolk County Council, Churchmans, Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies, Ransomes and Rapier, Cranfields Ltd., W.H. Paul Ltd. notified Northgate’s Headmaster when they had vacancies at the end of the school year.
It was in response to just such a notification that, towards the end of July 1937, I presented myself for interview for the post of Junior Clerk at the offices of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department, then in Elm Street, behind the Town Hall. It was a terrifying experience. First I was grilled by Mr Herbert Walton, the Chief Clerk, and then passed on to Dr. A.M. Pringle, Medical Officer of Heal
It was with mixed feelings that I learned that it wasn’t a clerical career that was being offered. If appointed I would be expected to attend Evening Classes in Building Construction and Drawing, Shorthand and Typing while working as a Junior Clerk in the general office, during my first two years in the Department. Then I would be transferred to the Sanitary Inspectors’ Office to receive practical training as a Sanitary Inspector while travelling up to London twice a week to attend an approved course of theoretical training.
Train fairs, course fees and books would cost me about £100 (a vast sum in those days) that the Council would be prepared to loan me, and I would be expected to take and pass the Sanitary Inspectors’ national qualifying examination at the end of the course. If I failed, I was warned, there wouldn’t be a job for me in the Public Health Department.
The starting salary would be seventeen shillings and sixpence (88p) a week but a qualified Sanitary Inspector could expect to earn as much as £350 or even £500 a year. That, in 1937, seemed wealth beyond the dreams of avarice!
I said that I was still keen on the job. It seemed to promise more interest than spending my life sitting in an office, totting up figures and shuffling papers. I might have been even keener had I known that the distinctly unappealing title of Sanitary Inspector would one day be changed to that of Public Health Inspector and ultimately (but after my retirement!) to Environmental Health Officer.
There were, so they said, other school-leavers to interview. A week later, when I had all but abandoned hope, I received a letter from the Medical Officer of Health offering me the post of Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector and asking me to report for work immediately.
Thus I entered the local government service at a time when it was at the very zenith of its power and prestige, as for the past three decades it has been at its nadir. Ipswich was a County Borough, in third millennium new-speak a ‘Unitary Authority’, responsible for all local government services, a vastly wider range of activities than any authority undertakes today.
The town had its own Police, Fire, Education and Highway services.; its own parks, recreation grounds and swimming pools; its own museums, public libraries and its own council housing estates. The council was also responsible for social security and for the Public Assistance Institution or Workhouse. The council supplied gas, electricity and water, provided and ran its own public transport service and was responsible for refuse collection and disposal, street cleansing, sewerage and sewage treatment.
In the field of Public Health, where my foot was on the very lowest rung of the ladder, the Council had comprehensive responsibilities. In the Public Health Department, in addition to Dr. Pringle at the head, there were three qualified medical officers running their own clinics and specialist services; a School Medical Officer (in those days all school children had regular medical inspections); a Maternity and Child Welfare Officer and a Tuberculosis Officer. Professional support staff included School Dental Officers, Sanitary Inspectors, Health Visitors, School Nurses, District Nurses and midwives together, of course, with clerical and manual employees.
The Health Department was responsible for the Borough Maternity Home in Wingfield Street, the Isolation Hospital and Tuberculosis Sanatorium, both in Foxhall Road and the Borough General Hospital (now greatly expanded as Ipswich Hospital), off Woodbridge Road.
My duties were, needless to say, extremely menial. As office junior I had to see that the inkwells (red and black) were clean and full of ink (this was long before ballpoint pens had been thought of!) and that those more important than me, which was just about everybody, had clean blotting paper. I had to answer the phone and, using an old-fashioned manual switchboard, put calls through to other offices in the building. I had to deal with personal callers at the general office counter. I had to stamp, record and post the office mail, and try to keep the post book balanced. And, of course, I had to do any other jobs that I was asked to do.
Office hours were 9.00 a.m. till 5.30 p.m. (or as much later as it took the Medical Officer of Health to sign the Department’s post and get it down to me) with an hour for lunch, from Monday to Friday, and from 9.00 a.m. till 12.00 noon on Saturday. I was granted a fortnight’s holiday a year.
During my second year in the Health department, I was just one rung up the ladder. I still had to undertake some pretty menial tasks but I was in charge of the Registers of Notifiable Infectious Diseases and Minor Infectious Diseases, and of admissions to the Isolation Hospital. Infectious diseases such as Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria, Puerperal Pyrexia or Childbed fever, Poliomyelitis and so on, were sadly common in those days. An Ipswich doctor, wanting a case or suspected case admitted to the Isolation Hospital, would phone the office. I would take the message, phone the hospital to arrange for an ambulance to pick up the patient, and enter the case in the register of admissions
Doctors from outside Ipswich had to contact the Medical Officer of Health of their local Urban or Rural District Council. This Medical Officer then had to phone the office and ask for the patient to be admitted to our hospital – and had to promise, and later confirm in writing, that his authority would accept responsibility for the cost of treatment and nursing care.
This arrangement almost landed me in the most serious trouble of my entire local government career. One lunchtime while I was in the office on my own, the MOH of a neighbouring rural authority phoned to ask if we would accept a case of Scarlet Fever from his district. I took the details, made sure that he accepted financial responsibility, and phoned the case on to the hospital
A couple of hours later a furious Hospital Medical Superintendent phoned Dr Pringle to say that ‘some idiot junior’ (that was me!) had made what could prove to be a lethal mistake. When the ambulance, with blankets and a nurse from the Scarlet Fever Ward, had arrived to pick up the patient, she was found to have, not Scarlet fever but Puerperal Pyrexia. If the unfortunate woman now developed Scarlet Fever on top of her existing infection there would be no doubt as to who would be to blame.
Dr Pringle phoned the Medical Officer of Health who had made the request to me. He claimed that he had of course, known that it was Puerperal Pyrexia and that that was the message he had passed on to me. Who would be likely to accept the word of a seventeen-year-old junior over that of a qualified and experienced doctor?
I spent a sleepless night. Could I have misheard? I was sure that I hadn’t, but no-one was likely to believe me. Supposing the patient did develop Scarlet Fever on top of her Puerperal Pyrexia – and died. I went into the office in the morning pale faced, bleary-eyed and shaking in my shoes as I wondered what fate awaited me.
There, to my unspeakable relief, I found salvation. In the post was a form from the Medical Officer who had phoned me, accepting responsibility for the patient’s maintenance – and describing her as suffering from Scarlet Fever!
Needless to say, I was up the stairs two at a time to Dr, Pringle’s office. He shooed me out of the room before he phoned the Medical Officer in question – but I learned afterwards from his secretary that the conversation was well worth hearing!
In my third year, with my salary pushed up to a splendid twenty-five shillings (£1.25) a week, I was due to go into the Sanitary Inspectors’ Office and to start my training in earnest. It didn’t happen. The year was 1939 and I was a volunteer in the Territorial Army. Called up with the embodiment of the TA the day before war was declared, I didn’t give another thought to public health or local government for the next seven years.
……………………………….
At Ipswich’s Northgate School in the 1930s, a particularly dreaded part of the General Schools Certificate Examination that we all took in the fifth form was ‘The French Oral’. An outside examiner would descend on the school to interview each one of us individually…in French!
It was the same examiner every year. He came from Bristol and was referred to by Dr Kerby, our French Master, as ‘the Bristol Doctor’, in much the same tones as those in which one might speak of ‘the Boston Strangler’.
We were carefully coached in the probable course of the interview. He would hand us a picture postcard that we would be asked to describe. I remember that the central feature of mine was a clock tower, and the French word for clock had vanished from my memory! He would ask us a number of questions, one of which was likely to be (I won’t attempt it in French): ‘What do you expect to do when you leave school? The recommended answer, in French of course, was, ‘I am not sure but I expect that I shall become a clerk’.
What a prospect! It wasn’t one that appealed to me, but in the late 1930s few school-leavers were able to ‘choose a career’. Most just looked for a job.
I wanted to be a writer. I had been awarded the top grade in ‘English, language and literature’ in the General Schools Certificate Examination and, praising my essays, my English master had forecast a career in journalism for me. However, shortly before the end of my last term a visiting ‘careers expert’ had warned against just such forecasts and just such ambitions. ‘You’d have very little chance’, he said. ‘You’d be competing with university graduates – and if you went up to London, you certainly wouldn’t earn enough as a trainee to live on’.
Discouraged, I didn’t even enquire if there were any vacancies for trainees with the East Anglian DailyTimes. Probably there weren’t though. Most of Ipswich’s major employers; Ipswich Borough Council, East Suffolk County Council, Churchmans, Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies, Ransomes and Rapier, Cranfields Ltd., W.H. Paul Ltd. notified Northgate’s Headmaster when they had vacancies at the end of the school year.
It was in response to just such a notification that, towards the end of July 1937, I presented myself for interview for the post of Junior Clerk at the offices of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department, then in Elm Street, behind the Town Hall. It was a terrifying experience. First I was grilled by Mr Herbert Walton, the Chief Clerk, and then passed on to Dr. A.M. Pringle, Medical Officer of Heal
It was with mixed feelings that I learned that it wasn’t a clerical career that was being offered. If appointed I would be expected to attend Evening Classes in Building Construction and Drawing, Shorthand and Typing while working as a Junior Clerk in the general office, during my first two years in the Department. Then I would be transferred to the Sanitary Inspectors’ Office to receive practical training as a Sanitary Inspector while travelling up to London twice a week to attend an approved course of theoretical training.
Train fairs, course fees and books would cost me about £100 (a vast sum in those days) that the Council would be prepared to loan me, and I would be expected to take and pass the Sanitary Inspectors’ national qualifying examination at the end of the course. If I failed, I was warned, there wouldn’t be a job for me in the Public Health Department.
The starting salary would be seventeen shillings and sixpence (88p) a week but a qualified Sanitary Inspector could expect to earn as much as £350 or even £500 a year. That, in 1937, seemed wealth beyond the dreams of avarice!
I said that I was still keen on the job. It seemed to promise more interest than spending my life sitting in an office, totting up figures and shuffling papers. I might have been even keener had I known that the distinctly unappealing title of Sanitary Inspector would one day be changed to that of Public Health Inspector and ultimately (but after my retirement!) to Environmental Health Officer.
There were, so they said, other school-leavers to interview. A week later, when I had all but abandoned hope, I received a letter from the Medical Officer of Health offering me the post of Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector and asking me to report for work immediately.
Thus I entered the local government service at a time when it was at the very zenith of its power and prestige, as for the past three decades it has been at its nadir. Ipswich was a County Borough, in third millennium new-speak a ‘Unitary Authority’, responsible for all local government services, a vastly wider range of activities than any authority undertakes today.
The town had its own Police, Fire, Education and Highway services.; its own parks, recreation grounds and swimming pools; its own museums, public libraries and its own council housing estates. The council was also responsible for social security and for the Public Assistance Institution or Workhouse. The council supplied gas, electricity and water, provided and ran its own public transport service and was responsible for refuse collection and disposal, street cleansing, sewerage and sewage treatment.
In the field of Public Health, where my foot was on the very lowest rung of the ladder, the Council had comprehensive responsibilities. In the Public Health Department, in addition to Dr. Pringle at the head, there were three qualified medical officers running their own clinics and specialist services; a School Medical Officer (in those days all school children had regular medical inspections); a Maternity and Child Welfare Officer and a Tuberculosis Officer. Professional support staff included School Dental Officers, Sanitary Inspectors, Health Visitors, School Nurses, District Nurses and midwives together, of course, with clerical and manual employees.
The Health Department was responsible for the Borough Maternity Home in Wingfield Street, the Isolation Hospital and Tuberculosis Sanatorium, both in Foxhall Road and the Borough General Hospital (now greatly expanded as Ipswich Hospital), off Woodbridge Road.
My duties were, needless to say, extremely menial. As office junior I had to see that the inkwells (red and black) were clean and full of ink (this was long before ballpoint pens had been thought of!) and that those more important than me, which was just about everybody, had clean blotting paper. I had to answer the phone and, using an old-fashioned manual switchboard, put calls through to other offices in the building. I had to deal with personal callers at the general office counter. I had to stamp, record and post the office mail, and try to keep the post book balanced. And, of course, I had to do any other jobs that I was asked to do.
Office hours were 9.00 a.m. till 5.30 p.m. (or as much later as it took the Medical Officer of Health to sign the Department’s post and get it down to me) with an hour for lunch, from Monday to Friday, and from 9.00 a.m. till 12.00 noon on Saturday. I was granted a fortnight’s holiday a year.
During my second year in the Health department, I was just one rung up the ladder. I still had to undertake some pretty menial tasks but I was in charge of the Registers of Notifiable Infectious Diseases and Minor Infectious Diseases, and of admissions to the Isolation Hospital. Infectious diseases such as Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria, Puerperal Pyrexia or Childbed fever, Poliomyelitis and so on, were sadly common in those days. An Ipswich doctor, wanting a case or suspected case admitted to the Isolation Hospital, would phone the office. I would take the message, phone the hospital to arrange for an ambulance to pick up the patient, and enter the case in the register of admissions
Doctors from outside Ipswich had to contact the Medical Officer of Health of their local Urban or Rural District Council. This Medical Officer then had to phone the office and ask for the patient to be admitted to our hospital – and had to promise, and later confirm in writing, that his authority would accept responsibility for the cost of treatment and nursing care.
This arrangement almost landed me in the most serious trouble of my entire local government career. One lunchtime while I was in the office on my own, the MOH of a neighbouring rural authority phoned to ask if we would accept a case of Scarlet Fever from his district. I took the details, made sure that he accepted financial responsibility, and phoned the case on to the hospital
A couple of hours later a furious Hospital Medical Superintendent phoned Dr Pringle to say that ‘some idiot junior’ (that was me!) had made what could prove to be a lethal mistake. When the ambulance, with blankets and a nurse from the Scarlet Fever Ward, had arrived to pick up the patient, she was found to have, not Scarlet fever but Puerperal Pyrexia. If the unfortunate woman now developed Scarlet Fever on top of her existing infection there would be no doubt as to who would be to blame.
Dr Pringle phoned the Medical Officer of Health who had made the request to me. He claimed that he had of course, known that it was Puerperal Pyrexia and that that was the message he had passed on to me. Who would be likely to accept the word of a seventeen-year-old junior over that of a qualified and experienced doctor?
I spent a sleepless night. Could I have misheard? I was sure that I hadn’t, but no-one was likely to believe me. Supposing the patient did develop Scarlet Fever on top of her Puerperal Pyrexia – and died. I went into the office in the morning pale faced, bleary-eyed and shaking in my shoes as I wondered what fate awaited me.
There, to my unspeakable relief, I found salvation. In the post was a form from the Medical Officer who had phoned me, accepting responsibility for the patient’s maintenance – and describing her as suffering from Scarlet Fever!
Needless to say, I was up the stairs two at a time to Dr, Pringle’s office. He shooed me out of the room before he phoned the Medical Officer in question – but I learned afterwards from his secretary that the conversation was well worth hearing!
In my third year, with my salary pushed up to a splendid twenty-five shillings (£1.25) a week, I was due to go into the Sanitary Inspectors’ Office and to start my training in earnest. It didn’t happen. The year was 1939 and I was a volunteer in the Territorial Army. Called up with the embodiment of the TA the day before war was declared, I didn’t give another thought to public health or local government for the next seven years.
……………………………….
Early years at the Northgate School
Early Years at Ipswich’s Northgate School
In July, 1931, at the end of the summer term, the old Ipswich Municipal Secondary School (known locally as ‘The Muny’!) on Tower ramparts, near the town centre, closed for ever. In September the school was reborn as the Northgate Municipal Secondary School (destined to be called simply ‘The Northgate’) in new buildings in Sidegate Lane, in what was then virtually open countryside. Unlike in the past, the boys’ and the girls’ schools were on the same site though with strictly separated playing fields. There was a shared ‘utility block’ between the two schools.
I was among the first new intake as the school reopened. Ten years old (I have never understood how it was that I started a year earlier than practically everybody else!) I cycled the three miles from my home in Bramford Lane, along Valley Road and Colchester Road to the new school, wearing the regulation school uniform of grey trousers and blazer, white shirt with school tie, navy blue mac and navy cap with the school badge, the Ipswich Municipal Crest.
It was a journey that I was to make twice a day, in both directions, during school term for the next six years. Our days at school were long by today’s standards 9.00 a.m. till 4.30 p.m. Mondays to Fridays plus, once we had progressed beyond the first two forms, 9.00 a.m. till 12 noon on Saturdays. We did have an almost-two-hours midday break though and many of us, having sampled the school dinners (only 6d or 2.5p) opted to cycle home for the midday meal.
Mr Alfred Morris was the headmaster throughout my time at the Northgate. He was an august figure whom we saw mainly at Assembly every morning. Once we reached the fifth form though he would take us for what was then called ‘Scripture’. He was fascinated (but failed to pass his fascination on to us!) by Middle Eastern archaeology and would carry on at length about Assyrian kings with unpronounceable names and about the excavations of a Sir Henry Layard in what was then called Mesopotamia but is now Iraq.
Of other masters I have much more colourful memories. In the junior forms Scripture was taught by Mr Lord (‘Ginger Lord’ to us boys for obvious reasons). He was fully persuaded that every word in the Bible was literally true. ‘Never mind what other teachers may tell you’, he’d say, in a strong ‘Coronation Street’ accent. ‘In the centre of the earth on one side is Paradise or Abraham’s Bosom where the souls of ‘the Just’ of the Old Testament are to be found. On the other side is Hell – and between the two there is a Great Gulf fixed’. He’d draw a circle on the blackboard and write ‘Paradise’ on one side and ‘Hell’ on the other with two lines in the middle labelled ‘Great Gulf’. I wonder how he got on with his colleagues in the staff room?
Then there was Mr Bishop, who taught us Geography, and taught it very well too. I recall though, his assuring us, this must have been in 1933 or ’34, that Ipswich could never have a professional football team. ‘We lack the industrial hinterland to make a team viable’, he insisted.
Mr Edwin Day and Mr ‘Johnny’ Cousins I recall with gratitude. They taught me to appreciate English Literature and to string words together acceptably myself. It is the only real skill that I have ever possessed. There was Mr Rees-Jones, whose lessons gave me a somewhat cynical view of British and world history that I have retained to this day; Mr Litchfield, who failed to turn me into a mathematician, and Dr Kerby who was even less successful at teaching me French.
Dr Kerby, as any of my contemporaries would confirm, was a real eccentric. He was a little man who had constant trouble with classroom discipline. On one Armistice Day (11th November) when we were particularly unruly, he shouted, ‘I will have order. I’ll fight you for it! I can fight’. He added, pulling aside his jacket to display two World War I campaign medals pinned to his waistcoat. He then spoilt the effect by explaining that he hadn’t been ‘a real soldier’, only an interpreter. His wife insisted upon his wearing his medals on Armistice day (all ex-servicemen did in those days) but he didn’t want to display them – so he compromised and wore them where they couldn’t be seen!
Our French pronunciation appalled him.‘You’re mutilating my favourite European language’, he would say to us with total contempt. ‘It’s le lendemain not ‘le laundryman’. He constantly complained that we weren’t taught English properly. ‘Yes, I know. You probably know more about Shakespeare than I do, but how can I teach you French grammar when you don’t know any English grammar?’ I wonder what he would think of English teaching today?
I believe that Dr Kerby was, in fact, a very distinguished scholar. During my time at the school the French President paid a state visit to the UK and Dr Kerby was among those invited to meet him. Thereafter he would sometimes punctuate his lessons, not altogether seriously, with, ‘As I said to Monsieur le Président…..’
Northgate School in those days liked to imitate the public schools. We were organised into ‘Houses’, and sport and games played an important role in school life. We played rugby during the autumn term, hockey during the spring term and tennis and cricket on alternate weeks during the summer term. I was uniformly useless at all of them. It wasn’t until decades later that I discovered that one of the reasons for this was that I had non-stereoscopic vision. Each of my eyes functioned satisfactorily, but not together. When one was working the other ‘switched off’. Consequently I saw nothing in 3D – and was hopeless at any game involving a fast-moving ball. I was a good shot with a rifle though, and not bad at lawn bowls and ten-pin bowling!
As well as being required to take part in team games every week, we were also expected to turn out on at least three Saturday afternoons during each term to ‘support the school team’.
Not that academic work was neglected. We were kept hard at it during each day, and with homework during the evening. In the first two forms we were expected to spend an hour each evening on homework, in the third form an hour and half and in the fourth and fifth forms two hours. There were written exams at the end of each term and regular tests throughout the term.
Each term saw the production of a school magazine. Very occasionally, when a teacher was running out of ideas, we’d have a lesson devoted to ‘writing a contribution to the magazine’. For some reason we all seemed to find verse easier than prose. I blush to think of some of my contributions that may be still in the school archives!
On one such occasion a classmate, totally bereft of inspiration, passed the time by idly copying from a poetry anthology Tennyson’s fairly well known verse fragment ‘The Eagle’. ‘He clasps the crag with his crooked hands…….etc’ The teacher, glancing over his shoulder, recognised this as being real poetry but, almost incredibly, failed to recognise its source. He snatched it up, enthused about it, and submitted it to the School Magazine editor in my classmate’s name. The editor didn’t recognise its source either (which doesn’t say much for my school’s teaching of English Literature) and published it in the Christmas 1934 issue of the magazine, still available in the school archive. A first former blew the gaff ‘Please sir – this poem by Tomlin in form 4b is in my poetry book!’. I would have been 13 at the time so Tomlin would probably have been 14. I don’t know what happened to him. Nothing much I suspect. He always said that he had never, for one moment, claimed that he had written the poem. The teacher just assumed that he had.
All our academic efforts were in preparation for the London University School Certificate Examination that we took in the fifth form at the age of sixteen. To be awarded the General Schools Certificate you had to get a mark of 40 percent or above in at least five subjects of which English (including both language and literature), Maths and French had to be three. If you failed in one of those five subjects you failed the whole exam. If you were awarded a credit mark of 50 percent in those five subjects you were exempted from the Matriculation (entrance) examination of London University. Because of this the school-leaving exam was often referred to simply as ‘the Matric’.
Headmaster Alfred Morris was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Consequently he had established a tradition that all School Certificate candidates spent the day before the exams started, boating on the Stour at Flatford Mill. We cycled from Ipswich to Flatford (we were all cyclists in those days) taking sandwiches with us for lunch. We spent the day on the river in skiffs hired by the school, rowed up the river to Dedham for tea (again provided by the school) and then rowed back to Flatford for the ride home. Many of us sat the exam the next day with blistered hands and an aching back!
Be that as it may, I left the Northgate in July 1937 with my School Certificate and Matriculation Exemption. I had taken the exam in English, Maths, French, History, Geography and General Physics. The last of these was guaranteed to be an examination on the principles of Physics only – with no mathematical problems to answer!
For a sixteen year old it was not, I think, too bad a preparation for life.
In July, 1931, at the end of the summer term, the old Ipswich Municipal Secondary School (known locally as ‘The Muny’!) on Tower ramparts, near the town centre, closed for ever. In September the school was reborn as the Northgate Municipal Secondary School (destined to be called simply ‘The Northgate’) in new buildings in Sidegate Lane, in what was then virtually open countryside. Unlike in the past, the boys’ and the girls’ schools were on the same site though with strictly separated playing fields. There was a shared ‘utility block’ between the two schools.
I was among the first new intake as the school reopened. Ten years old (I have never understood how it was that I started a year earlier than practically everybody else!) I cycled the three miles from my home in Bramford Lane, along Valley Road and Colchester Road to the new school, wearing the regulation school uniform of grey trousers and blazer, white shirt with school tie, navy blue mac and navy cap with the school badge, the Ipswich Municipal Crest.
It was a journey that I was to make twice a day, in both directions, during school term for the next six years. Our days at school were long by today’s standards 9.00 a.m. till 4.30 p.m. Mondays to Fridays plus, once we had progressed beyond the first two forms, 9.00 a.m. till 12 noon on Saturdays. We did have an almost-two-hours midday break though and many of us, having sampled the school dinners (only 6d or 2.5p) opted to cycle home for the midday meal.
Mr Alfred Morris was the headmaster throughout my time at the Northgate. He was an august figure whom we saw mainly at Assembly every morning. Once we reached the fifth form though he would take us for what was then called ‘Scripture’. He was fascinated (but failed to pass his fascination on to us!) by Middle Eastern archaeology and would carry on at length about Assyrian kings with unpronounceable names and about the excavations of a Sir Henry Layard in what was then called Mesopotamia but is now Iraq.
Of other masters I have much more colourful memories. In the junior forms Scripture was taught by Mr Lord (‘Ginger Lord’ to us boys for obvious reasons). He was fully persuaded that every word in the Bible was literally true. ‘Never mind what other teachers may tell you’, he’d say, in a strong ‘Coronation Street’ accent. ‘In the centre of the earth on one side is Paradise or Abraham’s Bosom where the souls of ‘the Just’ of the Old Testament are to be found. On the other side is Hell – and between the two there is a Great Gulf fixed’. He’d draw a circle on the blackboard and write ‘Paradise’ on one side and ‘Hell’ on the other with two lines in the middle labelled ‘Great Gulf’. I wonder how he got on with his colleagues in the staff room?
Then there was Mr Bishop, who taught us Geography, and taught it very well too. I recall though, his assuring us, this must have been in 1933 or ’34, that Ipswich could never have a professional football team. ‘We lack the industrial hinterland to make a team viable’, he insisted.
Mr Edwin Day and Mr ‘Johnny’ Cousins I recall with gratitude. They taught me to appreciate English Literature and to string words together acceptably myself. It is the only real skill that I have ever possessed. There was Mr Rees-Jones, whose lessons gave me a somewhat cynical view of British and world history that I have retained to this day; Mr Litchfield, who failed to turn me into a mathematician, and Dr Kerby who was even less successful at teaching me French.
Dr Kerby, as any of my contemporaries would confirm, was a real eccentric. He was a little man who had constant trouble with classroom discipline. On one Armistice Day (11th November) when we were particularly unruly, he shouted, ‘I will have order. I’ll fight you for it! I can fight’. He added, pulling aside his jacket to display two World War I campaign medals pinned to his waistcoat. He then spoilt the effect by explaining that he hadn’t been ‘a real soldier’, only an interpreter. His wife insisted upon his wearing his medals on Armistice day (all ex-servicemen did in those days) but he didn’t want to display them – so he compromised and wore them where they couldn’t be seen!
Our French pronunciation appalled him.‘You’re mutilating my favourite European language’, he would say to us with total contempt. ‘It’s le lendemain not ‘le laundryman’. He constantly complained that we weren’t taught English properly. ‘Yes, I know. You probably know more about Shakespeare than I do, but how can I teach you French grammar when you don’t know any English grammar?’ I wonder what he would think of English teaching today?
I believe that Dr Kerby was, in fact, a very distinguished scholar. During my time at the school the French President paid a state visit to the UK and Dr Kerby was among those invited to meet him. Thereafter he would sometimes punctuate his lessons, not altogether seriously, with, ‘As I said to Monsieur le Président…..’
Northgate School in those days liked to imitate the public schools. We were organised into ‘Houses’, and sport and games played an important role in school life. We played rugby during the autumn term, hockey during the spring term and tennis and cricket on alternate weeks during the summer term. I was uniformly useless at all of them. It wasn’t until decades later that I discovered that one of the reasons for this was that I had non-stereoscopic vision. Each of my eyes functioned satisfactorily, but not together. When one was working the other ‘switched off’. Consequently I saw nothing in 3D – and was hopeless at any game involving a fast-moving ball. I was a good shot with a rifle though, and not bad at lawn bowls and ten-pin bowling!
As well as being required to take part in team games every week, we were also expected to turn out on at least three Saturday afternoons during each term to ‘support the school team’.
Not that academic work was neglected. We were kept hard at it during each day, and with homework during the evening. In the first two forms we were expected to spend an hour each evening on homework, in the third form an hour and half and in the fourth and fifth forms two hours. There were written exams at the end of each term and regular tests throughout the term.
Each term saw the production of a school magazine. Very occasionally, when a teacher was running out of ideas, we’d have a lesson devoted to ‘writing a contribution to the magazine’. For some reason we all seemed to find verse easier than prose. I blush to think of some of my contributions that may be still in the school archives!
On one such occasion a classmate, totally bereft of inspiration, passed the time by idly copying from a poetry anthology Tennyson’s fairly well known verse fragment ‘The Eagle’. ‘He clasps the crag with his crooked hands…….etc’ The teacher, glancing over his shoulder, recognised this as being real poetry but, almost incredibly, failed to recognise its source. He snatched it up, enthused about it, and submitted it to the School Magazine editor in my classmate’s name. The editor didn’t recognise its source either (which doesn’t say much for my school’s teaching of English Literature) and published it in the Christmas 1934 issue of the magazine, still available in the school archive. A first former blew the gaff ‘Please sir – this poem by Tomlin in form 4b is in my poetry book!’. I would have been 13 at the time so Tomlin would probably have been 14. I don’t know what happened to him. Nothing much I suspect. He always said that he had never, for one moment, claimed that he had written the poem. The teacher just assumed that he had.
All our academic efforts were in preparation for the London University School Certificate Examination that we took in the fifth form at the age of sixteen. To be awarded the General Schools Certificate you had to get a mark of 40 percent or above in at least five subjects of which English (including both language and literature), Maths and French had to be three. If you failed in one of those five subjects you failed the whole exam. If you were awarded a credit mark of 50 percent in those five subjects you were exempted from the Matriculation (entrance) examination of London University. Because of this the school-leaving exam was often referred to simply as ‘the Matric’.
Headmaster Alfred Morris was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Consequently he had established a tradition that all School Certificate candidates spent the day before the exams started, boating on the Stour at Flatford Mill. We cycled from Ipswich to Flatford (we were all cyclists in those days) taking sandwiches with us for lunch. We spent the day on the river in skiffs hired by the school, rowed up the river to Dedham for tea (again provided by the school) and then rowed back to Flatford for the ride home. Many of us sat the exam the next day with blistered hands and an aching back!
Be that as it may, I left the Northgate in July 1937 with my School Certificate and Matriculation Exemption. I had taken the exam in English, Maths, French, History, Geography and General Physics. The last of these was guaranteed to be an examination on the principles of Physics only – with no mathematical problems to answer!
For a sixteen year old it was not, I think, too bad a preparation for life.
Return to Suffolk 1948 - 1955
Return to Suffolk – 1948 to 1955
Who, in his right mind, would choose to live in furnished rooms in Battersea and work in central London when there was a chance of a job, with unfurnished living accommodation, in a familiar and well-loved part of rural Suffolk? Certainly not me!
It was in the late autumn of 1947. I had been discharged from the army after nearly seven years’ service, on 23rd April 1946. Heather Gilbert my fiancée (whom I had met in Ipswich on the day that war was declared!) and I were married four days later on 27th April at Gants Hill Methodist Church, Barkingside, Ilford. Recalled a week early from our honeymoon in Devon so that I could attend a government course for ex-service trainee sanitary inspectors, Heather and I trudged the streets of south-west London with our suitcases until we eventually secured furnished rooms in Battersea’s Southolm Street, within a few hundred yards of the Polytechnic that I was to attend.
I attended lectures and demonstrations at Battersea ‘Poly’, at the Brixton School of building and at Smithfield Meat Market. I underwent practical training with Battersea Borough Council and with Sutton and Cheam, and Esher Urban District Councils. I bought myself a second-hand bicycle and cycled to Smithfield Market, and to Sutton and Esher every day that I trained there. In September 1947 I sat for the Sanitary Inspectors’ statutory qualifying examination and passed.
Armed with my newly acquired certificate I found employment with the Westminster City Council on what was then the princely salary of £450 a year, including ‘London weighting’. The Knightsbridge District, which I was to take over when I was thoroughly familiar with it, included Buckingham Palace, which gave me no trouble whatsoever, and the Royal Albert Hall. If today the drains of the latter famous edifice are less than perfect, it could be because supervising their reconstruction after damage sustained during the war, was one of my tasks.
Parts of ‘my’ district could only be described as very posh indeed! I recall that on one occasion we received a complaint about some building defect (was it a leaking roof? a blocked drain? I don’t remember) at the ‘White Eagle’ Polish Officers’ Club. I called to explain that as their premises were Crown Property the Council had no jurisdiction over it at all and they should get in touch with the Crown Agent who would, no doubt, quickly sort their problems out for them.
I was welcomed by a very regal Polish gentleman speaking perfect English, who simply refused to listen to a word I had to say until we had first lunched. ‘But …’, I tried. ‘Not a word!’ he said, showing me at my seat. ‘First we lunch. Then we talk business’
Well, we had a splendid lunch and it was only over the post-prandial coffee that I was able to explain and apologise. ‘Not a word, old man’, he replied. ‘Thank you for giving me the phone number of the chap I should have contacted – I hope that you enjoyed your lunch’. Well yes, I had - but all the time I had had the feeling that I was enjoying it under false pretences!
I was happy enough working ‘at the centre of things’ in Westminster, and might well have spent my whole local government career in London, had I not seen that job advertisement in the ‘Municipal Journal’. It was for an Additional Sanitary Inspector with the Gipping Rural District Council. The salary was only £390 a year (£60 difference in salaries seems trivial now. Believe me, it wasn’t then) the bottom rung of the Administrative, Professional and Technical grades. There was a car allowance though and the promise of unfurnished housing accommodation to rent.
The Gipping Rural District! I knew it well of course, and couldn’t have asked to work anywhere better. It was bisected by my beloved River Gipping. It encircled Stowmarket, its administrative centre was at Needham Market, and it included parishes like Bramford, Claydon, Great Blakenham, Coddenham and Somersham, through which my friends and I had cycled in my youth.
My scruples at applying so soon for another job were laughed at by my colleagues at Westminster. I applied and was granted an interview at the Council Offices, Needham Market on 20th November 1947. I remember the date well, since it was the wedding day of the Queen (then Princess Elizabeth) and Prince Philip!
There was only one other applicant at the interview. I was familiar with the district. I was prepared to buy a car and learn to drive – and I still had a Suffolk accent! I was appointed and started work on 1 January 1948. My father had died in 1939 and Heather and I lived with my mother in her home in Kensington Road, Ipswich, while the bungalow that had been allocated to us was being completed.
This was half the main block of a former isolation hospital in what had once been called Workhouse Lane but had been renamed ‘The Crescent, off the Norwich Road in Barham near the ‘Sorrel Horse’. The hospital was being converted into five bungalows for members of the Council’s staff. We moved into our new home, our first real home, in the spring.
Opposite us was Barham’s disused and disintegrating workhouse while behind our bungalow was an area of stony, rabbit-infested heathland known as ‘The Broom’. A walk across the Broom and over the railway line took us to the River Gipping and to Great Blakenham. Here we could catch a bus to Ipswich or Needham Market. We called our first home ‘Broomside’ and later, when we moved into another smaller but more convenient bungalow on the same site, we took our nameplate with us. It became new ‘Broomside’.
The Public Health Department was on the upper floor of the Council Offices, a large converted house in Needham Market’s High Street that had been called – and was still usually called - ‘Hurstlea’. Chief Sanitary Inspector was Ewart Morgan, a Welshmen from Port Talbot. There was another Additional Sanitary Inspector, older and more experienced than I was. He was Bernard Davies who came from the Birmingham area. Sam Seamans was the administrative officer, clerk and mainstay of the Department. Sam Seamans and I were the only ‘natives’. We were also the only ex-servicemen in the Department.
Bernard Davies and I were occupied with the rural housing survey. Every rural home in the district had to be inspected and classified either as fit in all respects, capable of being made fit at reasonable cost or unfit for human habitation. The survey taught me that slum dwellings were not an exclusively urban phenomenon and that delightful thatched ‘picture postcard’ cottages sometimes concealed unbelievable squalor behind a picturesque façade.
I inspected cottages where the ground floor was simply mother earth and where every interior wall was running with dampness. One remote group of cottages, I recall, had a fenced-off ‘drinking water pond’ as its sole source of water. Things are, I have little doubt, very different now – but I can’t claim to have played any material part in effecting that improvement.
We were responsible for refuse collection, cesspool emptying and, since few properties in the district were on a sewer, for organising the odoriferous ‘nightsoil collection’. This noxious task was carried out during the hours of darkness so we didn’t see a great deal of the nightsoil collectors.
There was an arrangement with Ipswich Corporation that the tanker used for cesspool emptying and nightsoil collection could be emptied down a designated sewer inspection chamber, into Ipswich’s sewerage system. The designated chamber was well over the other side of town from the Gipping District. On one occasion, when running a little late, the driver of the vehicle decided to raise a sewer manhole cover and dispose of his load in Ipswich’s Henniker Road, near the Gipping boundary.
The vehicle was a tanker with an 18in. diameter quick release facility for rapid emptying. What happened when the full tank was suddenly discharged into an inspection chamber carrying a 9in diameter sewer can be better imagined than described! That was when the driver learned the hard way, that there was a reason for that distant specially designated disposal point.
I have never relished taking other people’s orders – or indeed, giving orders to other people. All my working life I have yearned for independence. When the post of Housing Manager of Gipping’s roughly a thousand council houses became vacant I applied for it and was successful. Nominally in the Engineer and Surveyor’s Department I reported directly to the Council’s Housing Committee on tenancy and rent arrears matters. I had just one subordinate, Les Mayhew, who looked after the office and priced the housing repairs jobs that were carried out by the maintenance staff – a job that I could never have managed! Les became a trusted friend. He married Thelma Overton, a member of the office staff, and Heather and I exchanged news and Christmas greetings with them for many years.
Gipping RDC at that time had an extraordinary method of allocating council house tenancies. When a house became vacant, or houses under construction were completed, posters advertising them for letting were displayed in the parish in which the vacancy or vacancies existed and on the Council notice board in Needham Market. Application forms had to be completed, and I visited and reported on the circumstances of each applicant to the Housing Committee.
Some people filled in many application forms for different houses before they were successful. It isn’t a system that would be likely to appeal to any local authority today but I can only say that it seemed to work reasonably fairly, and it did tend to preserve village communities.
If a rent collector were on holiday or off sick, I would occasionally go out on rent collection. Even in those days it astonished me to find that some tenants, having to go out on rent day, were trusting enough to leave their back door unlocked and the rent with the rent book on the kitchen table!
Rents were low; phenomenally low by today’s standards. I can remember some of our council house rents going up to £1 a week (inclusive of rates). ‘Yew’ll never get folk round here to pay that sort of rent’, insisted one local ‘expert’. ‘They’re used t’ paying tew or three bob a week’.
The working atmosphere in the public services generally (at least in rural Suffolk) in the early 1950s was infinitely more relaxed than it is today. In one very remote parish of the Gipping rural district, there were just two council houses. Their address, somewhat unimaginatively, was 1 and 2 Council Houses, The Street.
They were in need of external painting. We invited tenders and accepted the lowest tender. From time to time on my rounds I would drive out to this particular parish and was quite surprised to see no evidence of work being done there. I phoned the builder who assured me that he had finished the job the previous week. ‘It certainly needed doing and I made a good job of it’, he insisted. ‘You’ll be getting the bill next week’.
I drove out there forthwith. It transpired that as well as there being two council houses in the Street, there were, two or three hundred yards away, two semi-detached Police houses. He had painted them – ‘and they certainly needed painting more than your council houses do’, he insisted. I phoned the Police Authority, told them what had happened and assured them that, by making that mistake, the builder had probably saved them hundreds of pounds. ‘Goodness knows what it might have cost you in repair bills if they had been neglected for another year’, I told them.
The Police Authority (probably guiltily aware that the maintenance of those out-of-the-way houses had been neglected) paid the builder! I just can’t imagine even a remote possibility of that happening today – or indeed at the time of my retirement from the local government service in 1980.
Things have changed – and things have changed throughout Gipping too. I went back there on a sunny Saturday a few years ago. Gipping Rural District has, of course, been absorbed into the new Mid-Suffolk District Council. Hurstlea looked much the same from the front – from Needham Market High Street – as it had before. At the rear though, the lush lawn on which we used to play a leisurely lunch-hour game of bowls, had disappeared. In its place were new office buildings looking like a set for a new Sci-fi soap opera set in a humanoid colony
I parked my car in the car park of ‘The Chequers’, Great Blakenham and walked over the Gipping and across the Broom to The Crescent. The Broom, as I knew it, had disappeared. There was now, presumably on the site of a worked-out gravel pit, a large tree-lined lake with preserved fishing, which appeared to have been there for years. An official picnic site was nearby.
The old workhouse was no longer there and, most startling of all, the Crescent had been cut in two by the new dual-carriageway A45. This separated the old isolation hospital site from the bungalows nearer Norwich Road. The five bungalows were still there though. I gazed again at our very first home, ‘old Broomside’ and nearby, ‘new Broomside’ where our elder son had been born over half a century ago.
.
Perhaps it was a mistake to go back. It might have been better to have continued to remember Needham Market the Crescent, Barham and the Broom, and indeed the old Gipping Rural District, as I once had known them.
Heather 1948 - 1955
I had lived and worked in the Gipping district for seven years, and they had been seven momentous years for me. Soon after we moved into the original ‘Broomside’ it became clear that Heather was far from well. She tired very quickly, was losing weight and sweated heavily at night. Her voice became hoarse and she developed a worrying ‘bronchitic’ cough. She had a nagging ache in the upper part of her back. I took her temperature. It was high every evening and subnormal every morning.
We visited our doctor. She produced sputum samples and had X-ray examinations. In the late summer she was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis. She had to take to her bed and my mother moved in to help look after her while we waited for her to be offered a bed in a sanatorium.
In November she was removed by ambulance to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium (though taken over by the newly-created NHS) at Nayland, near Colchester, where she was destined to remain for the next two years. The first few months were desperately worrying ones. Her condition seemed to be deteriorating. She was given a course of streptomycin (she was one of the first patients to be given this powerful antibiotic) and, to rest her larynx and give it a chance to heal, she was forbidden to speak for three months.
Under this regime her larynx healed and the progress of the disease in her left lung was halted. Her right lung had, fortunately, never been affected. Her left lung was partially collapsed by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space between her diaphragm and the left lung (a PP or Pneumo-Peritoneum). She was put on the list for radical surgical treatment. This was to be a thoracoplasty – a surgical procedure involving the removal of a number of ribs to collapse part of the lung permanently and give it a better chance to heal.
This was to be carried out at Papworth Hospital, now famous for heart surgery but then specialising in the treatment of tuberculosis. It was a very drastic procedure, carried out in three stages (two or three ribs at a time!) in which the patients invariably lost a stone in weight. Heather therefore had to put on a stone in weight before she could undergo it!
Heather was moved to Papworth in the summer of 1950 and spent six weeks there, returning to Nayland after having had three separate major operations and losing no less than eight of her ribs on the left side of her body. Inevitably, this was to affect her physically for the rest of her life.
It did ‘cure’ her TB though. Her condition improved rapidly after her return from Nayland and in the late autumn she was discharged home.
While she had been in Nayland and at Papworth I had visited her every week, sometimes twice a week, and had written every day. Once she was well enough to do so she wrote back to me equally regularly. Although it had been a terrible two years it was a time in which Heather made real and lasting friendships among the other young women patients at the sanatorium.. I remember particularly Lily ‘Chick’ Cottis, Pat Burrows and Pat Troy. Chick was an eighteen year old who had been diagnosed very shortly after enlisting in the Army. Pat Burrows was about Heather’s age and was married with one small son. We visited Pat Troy at her home in Woolwich after her discharge from Nayland. She and Heather corresponded regularly until her death, a few years before Heather’s. All three were ex-service. ‘Chick’ and Pat Burrows corresponded with Heather until her death in 2006. I still communicate regularly with Pat Burrows, now a widow and living in Australia.
Throughout her time away and during subsequent periods of ill-health, Heather was always patient, cheerful and concerned only about the inconvenience that she might be causing others. When seriously ill and asked by a doctor how she felt, her most typical response was, ‘I’m fine thank you doctor – and how are you?’
We stayed with my mother in Ipswich for a short while after Heather’s discharge from the Sanatorium but we were both eager to get back into our own home in Broomside. When the other, smaller bungalow in the Crescent became vacant we moved in – naming it New Broomside. We had both wanted to have a family and on 17th July 1953, less than a year after the doctor had pronounced Heather strong enough to become a mother, it was at home, in New Broomside that our first son, Peter was
It was at our home in Barham that Pete was weaned, took his first faltering steps, and learned to talk. He came to love our kitten José (given to us by the local vicar), the hens that we kept for eggs at that time, and playing in the sand pit that I made him in our large back garden, where Heather could keep an eye on him from the kitchen window.
And a bit more about myself
As well as becoming a father while we lived in Barham, I realized my own interest in housing administration, I, also studied for and passed my qualifying examination as an Inspector of Meat and Other Food, passed the driving test (at my fourth attempt!) became a competent amateur photographer and took my first faltering step towards satisfying my school-days’ yearning to become ‘a writer’. Heather and I also became Quakers (see ‘To Church on Sunday’ in this ‘My Life’ series).
I enjoyed being Housing Manager in a way that I had never enjoyed being a Sanitary Inspector. It is true that I returned to my former employment in 1955 but this was solely because it offered a higher salary now that I had acquired the Meat Inspector’s Certificate and I felt that I owed that to my growing family.
Many years later the opportunity arose to return to housing management and I seized it with both hands. I was very pleased indeed that at that time both my sons realized how fulfilling I found the job, and became trainee housing managers themselves in the London area. I hope that it wasn’t because, ‘Anything the old man can do must be dead easy!’
Having a baby inspired both Heather and myself to become amateur photographers. I bought (and I think it cost £12 – a considerable sum in those days!) a Paxina 2.25in x 2.25in camera with a 3.5f lens and variable shutter speeds. It was really very basic but was a great advance on the cheap box cameras to which we had both been accustomed. It produced publishable pictures and we spent more money on an enlarger and dark room equipment. Both Heather and I became capable amateur photographers and, to our great satisfaction, managed to sell a few pictures to the press.
It was while Heather was in the Sanatorium that I decided to try my hand at freelance writing but it was not until after her discharge (in 1953 in fact, the year that Peter was born) that I had any success. I sold ‘The Sanitary Man’, a light-hearted article of a thousand words about my former job, to ‘Men Only’ for the princely sum of five guineas (£5.25 but with the purchasing power then of over £100 today). I hasten to add that the ‘Men Only’ of 1953 was very different from the publication into which it has evolved and which may, I think, still be seen on the top shelves of newsagents’ displays!
With Heather’s support and encouragement – it was she who first realized how our photographic skills could be combined with my writing to make articles more saleable - I persevered with my spare-time writing, increasing my output and my income every year. An article of mine published in ‘Municipal Engineering earned me a regular feature on establishment matters in that popular local government publication. Another article on ‘How your hot water system works’ was accepted by ‘Practical Householder’ and led to a regular plumbing or drainage feature in ‘Do-it-yourself’ magazine and to my replying to readers’ queries on those subjects. Ultimately it led to my having published seven or eight commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage, including two hard-backs and two that ran to two editions.
Our time in Barham saw the beginning of a profitable hobby that, when I took early retirement from the local government service in 1980, became a second career. Even today, as I approach my nineties, I have not entirely abandoned it!
The years between Heather’s discharge from Nayland Sanatorium and our leaving Barham for north-east Essex, were happy ones for both of us. Like so many good things though, I don’t think that we realized quite how happy they had been until they were past.
……………………………………….
Who, in his right mind, would choose to live in furnished rooms in Battersea and work in central London when there was a chance of a job, with unfurnished living accommodation, in a familiar and well-loved part of rural Suffolk? Certainly not me!
It was in the late autumn of 1947. I had been discharged from the army after nearly seven years’ service, on 23rd April 1946. Heather Gilbert my fiancée (whom I had met in Ipswich on the day that war was declared!) and I were married four days later on 27th April at Gants Hill Methodist Church, Barkingside, Ilford. Recalled a week early from our honeymoon in Devon so that I could attend a government course for ex-service trainee sanitary inspectors, Heather and I trudged the streets of south-west London with our suitcases until we eventually secured furnished rooms in Battersea’s Southolm Street, within a few hundred yards of the Polytechnic that I was to attend.
I attended lectures and demonstrations at Battersea ‘Poly’, at the Brixton School of building and at Smithfield Meat Market. I underwent practical training with Battersea Borough Council and with Sutton and Cheam, and Esher Urban District Councils. I bought myself a second-hand bicycle and cycled to Smithfield Market, and to Sutton and Esher every day that I trained there. In September 1947 I sat for the Sanitary Inspectors’ statutory qualifying examination and passed.
Armed with my newly acquired certificate I found employment with the Westminster City Council on what was then the princely salary of £450 a year, including ‘London weighting’. The Knightsbridge District, which I was to take over when I was thoroughly familiar with it, included Buckingham Palace, which gave me no trouble whatsoever, and the Royal Albert Hall. If today the drains of the latter famous edifice are less than perfect, it could be because supervising their reconstruction after damage sustained during the war, was one of my tasks.
Parts of ‘my’ district could only be described as very posh indeed! I recall that on one occasion we received a complaint about some building defect (was it a leaking roof? a blocked drain? I don’t remember) at the ‘White Eagle’ Polish Officers’ Club. I called to explain that as their premises were Crown Property the Council had no jurisdiction over it at all and they should get in touch with the Crown Agent who would, no doubt, quickly sort their problems out for them.
I was welcomed by a very regal Polish gentleman speaking perfect English, who simply refused to listen to a word I had to say until we had first lunched. ‘But …’, I tried. ‘Not a word!’ he said, showing me at my seat. ‘First we lunch. Then we talk business’
Well, we had a splendid lunch and it was only over the post-prandial coffee that I was able to explain and apologise. ‘Not a word, old man’, he replied. ‘Thank you for giving me the phone number of the chap I should have contacted – I hope that you enjoyed your lunch’. Well yes, I had - but all the time I had had the feeling that I was enjoying it under false pretences!
I was happy enough working ‘at the centre of things’ in Westminster, and might well have spent my whole local government career in London, had I not seen that job advertisement in the ‘Municipal Journal’. It was for an Additional Sanitary Inspector with the Gipping Rural District Council. The salary was only £390 a year (£60 difference in salaries seems trivial now. Believe me, it wasn’t then) the bottom rung of the Administrative, Professional and Technical grades. There was a car allowance though and the promise of unfurnished housing accommodation to rent.
The Gipping Rural District! I knew it well of course, and couldn’t have asked to work anywhere better. It was bisected by my beloved River Gipping. It encircled Stowmarket, its administrative centre was at Needham Market, and it included parishes like Bramford, Claydon, Great Blakenham, Coddenham and Somersham, through which my friends and I had cycled in my youth.
My scruples at applying so soon for another job were laughed at by my colleagues at Westminster. I applied and was granted an interview at the Council Offices, Needham Market on 20th November 1947. I remember the date well, since it was the wedding day of the Queen (then Princess Elizabeth) and Prince Philip!
There was only one other applicant at the interview. I was familiar with the district. I was prepared to buy a car and learn to drive – and I still had a Suffolk accent! I was appointed and started work on 1 January 1948. My father had died in 1939 and Heather and I lived with my mother in her home in Kensington Road, Ipswich, while the bungalow that had been allocated to us was being completed.
This was half the main block of a former isolation hospital in what had once been called Workhouse Lane but had been renamed ‘The Crescent, off the Norwich Road in Barham near the ‘Sorrel Horse’. The hospital was being converted into five bungalows for members of the Council’s staff. We moved into our new home, our first real home, in the spring.
Opposite us was Barham’s disused and disintegrating workhouse while behind our bungalow was an area of stony, rabbit-infested heathland known as ‘The Broom’. A walk across the Broom and over the railway line took us to the River Gipping and to Great Blakenham. Here we could catch a bus to Ipswich or Needham Market. We called our first home ‘Broomside’ and later, when we moved into another smaller but more convenient bungalow on the same site, we took our nameplate with us. It became new ‘Broomside’.
The Public Health Department was on the upper floor of the Council Offices, a large converted house in Needham Market’s High Street that had been called – and was still usually called - ‘Hurstlea’. Chief Sanitary Inspector was Ewart Morgan, a Welshmen from Port Talbot. There was another Additional Sanitary Inspector, older and more experienced than I was. He was Bernard Davies who came from the Birmingham area. Sam Seamans was the administrative officer, clerk and mainstay of the Department. Sam Seamans and I were the only ‘natives’. We were also the only ex-servicemen in the Department.
Bernard Davies and I were occupied with the rural housing survey. Every rural home in the district had to be inspected and classified either as fit in all respects, capable of being made fit at reasonable cost or unfit for human habitation. The survey taught me that slum dwellings were not an exclusively urban phenomenon and that delightful thatched ‘picture postcard’ cottages sometimes concealed unbelievable squalor behind a picturesque façade.
I inspected cottages where the ground floor was simply mother earth and where every interior wall was running with dampness. One remote group of cottages, I recall, had a fenced-off ‘drinking water pond’ as its sole source of water. Things are, I have little doubt, very different now – but I can’t claim to have played any material part in effecting that improvement.
We were responsible for refuse collection, cesspool emptying and, since few properties in the district were on a sewer, for organising the odoriferous ‘nightsoil collection’. This noxious task was carried out during the hours of darkness so we didn’t see a great deal of the nightsoil collectors.
There was an arrangement with Ipswich Corporation that the tanker used for cesspool emptying and nightsoil collection could be emptied down a designated sewer inspection chamber, into Ipswich’s sewerage system. The designated chamber was well over the other side of town from the Gipping District. On one occasion, when running a little late, the driver of the vehicle decided to raise a sewer manhole cover and dispose of his load in Ipswich’s Henniker Road, near the Gipping boundary.
The vehicle was a tanker with an 18in. diameter quick release facility for rapid emptying. What happened when the full tank was suddenly discharged into an inspection chamber carrying a 9in diameter sewer can be better imagined than described! That was when the driver learned the hard way, that there was a reason for that distant specially designated disposal point.
I have never relished taking other people’s orders – or indeed, giving orders to other people. All my working life I have yearned for independence. When the post of Housing Manager of Gipping’s roughly a thousand council houses became vacant I applied for it and was successful. Nominally in the Engineer and Surveyor’s Department I reported directly to the Council’s Housing Committee on tenancy and rent arrears matters. I had just one subordinate, Les Mayhew, who looked after the office and priced the housing repairs jobs that were carried out by the maintenance staff – a job that I could never have managed! Les became a trusted friend. He married Thelma Overton, a member of the office staff, and Heather and I exchanged news and Christmas greetings with them for many years.
Gipping RDC at that time had an extraordinary method of allocating council house tenancies. When a house became vacant, or houses under construction were completed, posters advertising them for letting were displayed in the parish in which the vacancy or vacancies existed and on the Council notice board in Needham Market. Application forms had to be completed, and I visited and reported on the circumstances of each applicant to the Housing Committee.
Some people filled in many application forms for different houses before they were successful. It isn’t a system that would be likely to appeal to any local authority today but I can only say that it seemed to work reasonably fairly, and it did tend to preserve village communities.
If a rent collector were on holiday or off sick, I would occasionally go out on rent collection. Even in those days it astonished me to find that some tenants, having to go out on rent day, were trusting enough to leave their back door unlocked and the rent with the rent book on the kitchen table!
Rents were low; phenomenally low by today’s standards. I can remember some of our council house rents going up to £1 a week (inclusive of rates). ‘Yew’ll never get folk round here to pay that sort of rent’, insisted one local ‘expert’. ‘They’re used t’ paying tew or three bob a week’.
The working atmosphere in the public services generally (at least in rural Suffolk) in the early 1950s was infinitely more relaxed than it is today. In one very remote parish of the Gipping rural district, there were just two council houses. Their address, somewhat unimaginatively, was 1 and 2 Council Houses, The Street.
They were in need of external painting. We invited tenders and accepted the lowest tender. From time to time on my rounds I would drive out to this particular parish and was quite surprised to see no evidence of work being done there. I phoned the builder who assured me that he had finished the job the previous week. ‘It certainly needed doing and I made a good job of it’, he insisted. ‘You’ll be getting the bill next week’.
I drove out there forthwith. It transpired that as well as there being two council houses in the Street, there were, two or three hundred yards away, two semi-detached Police houses. He had painted them – ‘and they certainly needed painting more than your council houses do’, he insisted. I phoned the Police Authority, told them what had happened and assured them that, by making that mistake, the builder had probably saved them hundreds of pounds. ‘Goodness knows what it might have cost you in repair bills if they had been neglected for another year’, I told them.
The Police Authority (probably guiltily aware that the maintenance of those out-of-the-way houses had been neglected) paid the builder! I just can’t imagine even a remote possibility of that happening today – or indeed at the time of my retirement from the local government service in 1980.
Things have changed – and things have changed throughout Gipping too. I went back there on a sunny Saturday a few years ago. Gipping Rural District has, of course, been absorbed into the new Mid-Suffolk District Council. Hurstlea looked much the same from the front – from Needham Market High Street – as it had before. At the rear though, the lush lawn on which we used to play a leisurely lunch-hour game of bowls, had disappeared. In its place were new office buildings looking like a set for a new Sci-fi soap opera set in a humanoid colony
I parked my car in the car park of ‘The Chequers’, Great Blakenham and walked over the Gipping and across the Broom to The Crescent. The Broom, as I knew it, had disappeared. There was now, presumably on the site of a worked-out gravel pit, a large tree-lined lake with preserved fishing, which appeared to have been there for years. An official picnic site was nearby.
The old workhouse was no longer there and, most startling of all, the Crescent had been cut in two by the new dual-carriageway A45. This separated the old isolation hospital site from the bungalows nearer Norwich Road. The five bungalows were still there though. I gazed again at our very first home, ‘old Broomside’ and nearby, ‘new Broomside’ where our elder son had been born over half a century ago.
.
Perhaps it was a mistake to go back. It might have been better to have continued to remember Needham Market the Crescent, Barham and the Broom, and indeed the old Gipping Rural District, as I once had known them.
Heather 1948 - 1955
I had lived and worked in the Gipping district for seven years, and they had been seven momentous years for me. Soon after we moved into the original ‘Broomside’ it became clear that Heather was far from well. She tired very quickly, was losing weight and sweated heavily at night. Her voice became hoarse and she developed a worrying ‘bronchitic’ cough. She had a nagging ache in the upper part of her back. I took her temperature. It was high every evening and subnormal every morning.
We visited our doctor. She produced sputum samples and had X-ray examinations. In the late summer she was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis. She had to take to her bed and my mother moved in to help look after her while we waited for her to be offered a bed in a sanatorium.
In November she was removed by ambulance to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium (though taken over by the newly-created NHS) at Nayland, near Colchester, where she was destined to remain for the next two years. The first few months were desperately worrying ones. Her condition seemed to be deteriorating. She was given a course of streptomycin (she was one of the first patients to be given this powerful antibiotic) and, to rest her larynx and give it a chance to heal, she was forbidden to speak for three months.
Under this regime her larynx healed and the progress of the disease in her left lung was halted. Her right lung had, fortunately, never been affected. Her left lung was partially collapsed by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space between her diaphragm and the left lung (a PP or Pneumo-Peritoneum). She was put on the list for radical surgical treatment. This was to be a thoracoplasty – a surgical procedure involving the removal of a number of ribs to collapse part of the lung permanently and give it a better chance to heal.
This was to be carried out at Papworth Hospital, now famous for heart surgery but then specialising in the treatment of tuberculosis. It was a very drastic procedure, carried out in three stages (two or three ribs at a time!) in which the patients invariably lost a stone in weight. Heather therefore had to put on a stone in weight before she could undergo it!
Heather was moved to Papworth in the summer of 1950 and spent six weeks there, returning to Nayland after having had three separate major operations and losing no less than eight of her ribs on the left side of her body. Inevitably, this was to affect her physically for the rest of her life.
It did ‘cure’ her TB though. Her condition improved rapidly after her return from Nayland and in the late autumn she was discharged home.
While she had been in Nayland and at Papworth I had visited her every week, sometimes twice a week, and had written every day. Once she was well enough to do so she wrote back to me equally regularly. Although it had been a terrible two years it was a time in which Heather made real and lasting friendships among the other young women patients at the sanatorium.. I remember particularly Lily ‘Chick’ Cottis, Pat Burrows and Pat Troy. Chick was an eighteen year old who had been diagnosed very shortly after enlisting in the Army. Pat Burrows was about Heather’s age and was married with one small son. We visited Pat Troy at her home in Woolwich after her discharge from Nayland. She and Heather corresponded regularly until her death, a few years before Heather’s. All three were ex-service. ‘Chick’ and Pat Burrows corresponded with Heather until her death in 2006. I still communicate regularly with Pat Burrows, now a widow and living in Australia.
Throughout her time away and during subsequent periods of ill-health, Heather was always patient, cheerful and concerned only about the inconvenience that she might be causing others. When seriously ill and asked by a doctor how she felt, her most typical response was, ‘I’m fine thank you doctor – and how are you?’
We stayed with my mother in Ipswich for a short while after Heather’s discharge from the Sanatorium but we were both eager to get back into our own home in Broomside. When the other, smaller bungalow in the Crescent became vacant we moved in – naming it New Broomside. We had both wanted to have a family and on 17th July 1953, less than a year after the doctor had pronounced Heather strong enough to become a mother, it was at home, in New Broomside that our first son, Peter was
It was at our home in Barham that Pete was weaned, took his first faltering steps, and learned to talk. He came to love our kitten José (given to us by the local vicar), the hens that we kept for eggs at that time, and playing in the sand pit that I made him in our large back garden, where Heather could keep an eye on him from the kitchen window.
And a bit more about myself
As well as becoming a father while we lived in Barham, I realized my own interest in housing administration, I, also studied for and passed my qualifying examination as an Inspector of Meat and Other Food, passed the driving test (at my fourth attempt!) became a competent amateur photographer and took my first faltering step towards satisfying my school-days’ yearning to become ‘a writer’. Heather and I also became Quakers (see ‘To Church on Sunday’ in this ‘My Life’ series).
I enjoyed being Housing Manager in a way that I had never enjoyed being a Sanitary Inspector. It is true that I returned to my former employment in 1955 but this was solely because it offered a higher salary now that I had acquired the Meat Inspector’s Certificate and I felt that I owed that to my growing family.
Many years later the opportunity arose to return to housing management and I seized it with both hands. I was very pleased indeed that at that time both my sons realized how fulfilling I found the job, and became trainee housing managers themselves in the London area. I hope that it wasn’t because, ‘Anything the old man can do must be dead easy!’
Having a baby inspired both Heather and myself to become amateur photographers. I bought (and I think it cost £12 – a considerable sum in those days!) a Paxina 2.25in x 2.25in camera with a 3.5f lens and variable shutter speeds. It was really very basic but was a great advance on the cheap box cameras to which we had both been accustomed. It produced publishable pictures and we spent more money on an enlarger and dark room equipment. Both Heather and I became capable amateur photographers and, to our great satisfaction, managed to sell a few pictures to the press.
It was while Heather was in the Sanatorium that I decided to try my hand at freelance writing but it was not until after her discharge (in 1953 in fact, the year that Peter was born) that I had any success. I sold ‘The Sanitary Man’, a light-hearted article of a thousand words about my former job, to ‘Men Only’ for the princely sum of five guineas (£5.25 but with the purchasing power then of over £100 today). I hasten to add that the ‘Men Only’ of 1953 was very different from the publication into which it has evolved and which may, I think, still be seen on the top shelves of newsagents’ displays!
With Heather’s support and encouragement – it was she who first realized how our photographic skills could be combined with my writing to make articles more saleable - I persevered with my spare-time writing, increasing my output and my income every year. An article of mine published in ‘Municipal Engineering earned me a regular feature on establishment matters in that popular local government publication. Another article on ‘How your hot water system works’ was accepted by ‘Practical Householder’ and led to a regular plumbing or drainage feature in ‘Do-it-yourself’ magazine and to my replying to readers’ queries on those subjects. Ultimately it led to my having published seven or eight commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage, including two hard-backs and two that ran to two editions.
Our time in Barham saw the beginning of a profitable hobby that, when I took early retirement from the local government service in 1980, became a second career. Even today, as I approach my nineties, I have not entirely abandoned it!
The years between Heather’s discharge from Nayland Sanatorium and our leaving Barham for north-east Essex, were happy ones for both of us. Like so many good things though, I don’t think that we realized quite how happy they had been until they were past.
……………………………………….
Into 'Civvy Street'
Into ‘Civvy Street’
1946 – 1948
Looking back over the years, it astonishes me that during the final year that I spent in the army I never for one moment considered any possible future other than resuming the career that had been abruptly interrupted in 1939 – that of student sanitary inspector. Had six years in the army, including three as a POW, addled my brain, or had the imminence of marriage driven every other thought from my mind?
I was twenty-four years old. My six years military service (seven by the time I was discharged) plus my General School Leaving Certificate with Matriculation Exemption from London University, would have ensured me a university place. The Labour Government would have been happy to pay both my tuition fees and a living allowance for my wife and myself. I could have pursued my schooldays’ dream of becoming a writer.
I didn’t even think of it! The few working class boys I knew who had made it to University had all become either teachers or priests. Neither calling appealed to me. No, I was delighted to know that the government would pay for me to attend a special ‘Further Education and Training’ course for ex-service trainee sanitary inspectors and would pay my wife-to-be and myself an allowance that, we calculated, would be enough for us to live on. I attended a selection board for such a course and was accepted. I would be notified of the time and place of the first course that began after my discharge from the army.
I was discharged from the army on 23rd April 1946. Heather and I were married just four days later, on the 27th. We had planned a fortnight’s honeymoon at a guesthouse that had been recommended to us on the outskirts of Dawlish in Devon. I have forgotten its name but it was owned and run by a Quaker, the first Quaker I had ever actually met. All the guests were invited, if they wished, to attend a Quaker Meeting for Worship held at the guest house on Sunday mornings. Heather and I politely declined.
I don’t remember much about that honeymoon (does anybody?) except that it was cut unexpectedly short. A letter from my mother enclosed an official notification that a course for trainee Sanitary Inspectors would begin at Battersea Polytechnic on the following Monday. My attendance would be expected.
So, we had one week’s honeymoon instead of the fortnight that we had planned. The guesthouse proprietor, when told about our situation, generously declined any payment for the second week that we had booked.
We went back to the home of Heather’s parents. It was just about possible to get to Battersea Polytechnic from there daily and we knew that we would be welcome to stay until we had found somewhere to live in Battersea.
We certainly didn’t want to do that though. I signed in as instructed but the course didn’t actually begin for another few days. Heather and I trudged round the streets of Battersea and Clapham with a suitcase, calling in at estate agents, studying the cards in tobacconist’s shop windows and the advertisement columns of the local newspapers. It took only a few days for us to find at least a temporary home. A very kind lady in The Grove, Clapham Common took pity on us and let us have a furnished apartment on the top storey of her home, stressing that we could have it only ‘for a month or two’ while we found something more permanent.
It was Heather’s Uncle Charlie who found us a more permanent home. There was an advert in the ‘Methodist Recorder’ for furnished rooms in Battersea at No 14 Southolm Street, off Battersea Park Road and only a few hundred yards from Battersea Polytechnic in one direction and Battersea Park Station in the other. The accommodation consisted of a ground floor kitchen and toilet compartment and a roomy sitting room and bedroom on the first floor. The rent was a good deal lower than we were paying on Clapham Common.
There were snags about it though. It was in a somewhat slummy street and our accommodation had only very basic facilities – no bathroom and only a cold water tap over the kitchen sink. A large ‘tin’ bathtub was hung up against an outside wall in the tiny back yard.
There was another furnished apartment on the top floor. Occupants were a very friendly and helpful lady called Mrs Somerville who had a husband that we never saw and a son Alex, who was still away in the forces. Her accommodation was even more basic than ours. She had no proper kitchen sink – just a three cornered sink with a cold tap over it (they used to be called ‘dripstone sinks’ I believe) in a corner on the floor of the landing! Another snag was that it was only a few hundred yards from a railway embankment carrying the main line from Waterloo to Clapham Junction. Trains seemed to pass, shaking the building, every few minutes of the day and night. It was astonishing how quickly we became used to it.
We took the tenancy and, despite all the drawbacks, the months that we spent there were happy ones. I was quite enjoying my course at Battersea Polytechnic and Heather seemed happy as a housewife. She couldn’t do the washing and get it dry in the flat, so every week she would put it in a large suitcase and take a tram from the end of Southolm Street to the Municipal Washhouse, a journey of – I suppose – about half a mile. Here there were no washing machines (they were yet to make their appearance!) but there was hot and cold water, sinks, scrubbing surfaces, and detergents. There was also what I now realize was an enormous spin dryer called a hydro-extractor or ‘hydro for short, in which the women using the washhouse put their washed clothes to get them damp-dry.
All of this I learned second-hand from Heather. Men were strictly prohibited from entering the washhouse and I was allowed to wait outside to help Heather home with the washing only as a very special concession. ‘House-husbands’ and lone fathers had clearly not been heard of in those days.
We were both very inexperienced slum-dwellers. There were no power points and I wrecked a new electric iron (a wedding present) by plugging the lead from it into a light socket. Not that that would have done any harm had our electricity supply not been DC (direct current). The iron had been designed for AC (alternating current)! Heather took her housewifely duties very seriously. One day, coming home from the Poly, I was horrified to see her outside the first floor windows standing on a plaster cornice while she hung onto the window with one hand and cleaned the pane with the other!
In the evenings Heather would help me with my studies – testing me on my knowledge of public health law and so on. It was possible to obtain past exam papers from the Sanitary Inspectors’ Examination Board and I practised answering them regularly. By the time the exam came round I reckoned that I had answered every question that could possibly be set me. Mind you, as well as the written exam there would be an oral exam and a practical inspection – which could be of a dwelling house, a factory, a slaughterhouse, a shop, a canal boat, or practically anything in fact. Candidates had to make an inspection and produce a written report. Both the final report and the notebooks we had used during the inspection had to be submitted to the examiners.
Although there was a separate examination for Inspectors of Meat and Other Foods this subject – perhaps at a less detailed level – was part of the Sanitary Inspectors’ syllabus. For practical inspection of meat and fish we had to pay regular visits to Smithfield and, less frequently, to Billingsgate. To familiarise ourselves with the practice of our other duties we had to spend six or eight weeks with the Public Health Department of a London Borough, an Urban District and either a Rural District or, since there were few of these within easy reach of Battersea, an urban district with rural characteristics.
For all of these expeditions I purchased a second hand bicycle for 30 shillings (£1.50) I think and made my way by cycle. We were, of course, entitled to travelling expenses based on the second-class rail fare or bus fare. Thus, with official approval, I was able to supplement our just-adequate living allowance.
The three authorities at which I had my practical experience were Battersea Borough Council, Sutton and Cheam Urban District Council, and Esher Urban District Council. It was the last of these that had rural characteristics.
It was Battersea – possibly because it was on my doorstep and had some serious housing and environmental health problems – that I found most helpful. I made one or two good friends among the inspectors and public health staff and was told that when I passed my exam there would almost certainly be a job there for me if I wanted it. Sutton and Cheam, and Esher I remember less well. At the end of our time with them the Chief Sanitary Inspector had to submit a general report about us. The Chief at Esher showed me his report before he submitted it. I was rather surprised to find myself described as being ‘of the right type’ since he and the only Additional Sanitary Inspector were committed members of the Conservative Party and I had never made a secret of my – at that time – quite radical left-wing views!
There are only two of my fellow-students that I remember with any clarity. There was a black Jamaican, Denzil Smith, who had a problem getting his living allowance as, although he had served in the RAF, was not a British Citizen. I invited him to our home on one or two occasions. Then there was another E. Hall (he was actually E.W.E. Hall) who had been a glider pilot and had taken part in the D Day landings. He and I were, I think, usually regarded as the course’s most promising students.
I was able to do him a service after we had both qualified. I fairly quickly got a job with Westminster City Council – and immediately signed on for the course for the Meat and Other Foods Inspectors Certificate that we had been advised to acquire. He left his application too late. The course was full and he would have to wait another year. Before the course actually began I had applied for and obtained an appointment with the Gipping Rural District Council in Suffolk. I immediately wrote to him and suggested that he should write to the course organisers, signing himself simply E. Hall, and tell them that he had now moved from 14 Southolm Street, Battersea, SW11 to wherever he was living. This he did – and no-one was ever aware that he wasn’t the E. Hall who had originally signed on!
There were also two women students – former ATS members – with us at Battersea Polytechnic. I think that they both passed the exam. I do remember though that one bleak and drizzly November afternoon we visited a Horse Slaughterhouse in Plaistow (not one of London’s more cheerful areas!) and one of them fainted. Mind you, I had felt pretty queasy myself and I don’t think that I had been alone.
The exam was held in the autumn of 1947. I felt fairly confident that I had done well in the written papers, and I had been very lucky with the practical inspection. I had a simple ‘two rooms up and two down’ terraced house in a poor area (not unlike my own home at the time!) with minimal facilities. It was empty and I noticed that most, if not all, of the houses in the street were also empty. Could it be one of the Housing Act’s Clearance or Improvement Areas that we had learned all about? I thought it likely.
When I wrote my report I detailed all the house’s deficiencies and items of disrepair and added, ‘A cursory glance at other dwellings in the vicinity suggested that there should be further inspections made with a view to the declaration of a Clearance or Improvement Area’. That, I thought, was one up to me!
I was less happy with the oral examination. Always, I think, it is as you are walking away from that kind of ordeal that you think of the replies that you should have made to the examiner’s questions!
The exam results were sent to candidates by post, but a few days earlier they were pinned up in the entrance hall of the Royal Sanitary Institute’s (now the Royal Society of Health) headquarters in Westminster. On the fateful day Heather and I took the train from Battersea Park Station to Waterloo and walked the short distance to the RSI’s HQ. Hand in hand we nervously perused the posted notice. I had passed! I had been fairly confident of success – but you can never be sure until you see it in print.
I was now a qualified sanitary inspector and my next task was to get a job. Theoretically I was still employed by the Ipswich Corporation and was on unpaid leave of absence for military service. I could have gone back there, but Heather and I had made ourselves a home, however humble, in Battersea. I was determined not to relinquish it except to move into somewhere at least equally satisfactory.
Ipswich Council replied to say that they were unable to help with housing so I terminated my appointment with them and ‘signed on’ for unemployment pay though – as it turned out – I drew it for only a few weeks.
Heather and I scoured the local government press – ‘The Municipal Journal’, ‘Municipal Engineering’, ‘The Local Government Chronicle’ for sanitary inspectors’ jobs in the London area – or elsewhere if they were offering housing accommodation. I applied for an inspector’s job in St. Pancras and was granted an interview. I wasn’t successful. Someone with experience was appointed.
Then I applied for one with the City of Westminster. This time I really was successful. I was appointed as an ‘additional sanitary inspector’ with what was, I suppose, the wealthiest and most prestigious borough in London at what was, at the time, the princely salary of £450 a year including ‘London Weighting’. In 1939, when I had been last in the labour market, anyone with a salary of £250 or over was reckoned to be ‘comfortably off’. My dad had certainly never earned that amount. It was, of course, appreciably more than the government grant on which we had been living.
The office was in Charing Cross Road, not far from the Edith Cavell memorial. I became a commuter. Every morning I would catch the 8.30 a.m. from Battersea Park Station up to Waterloo, then the bus to Charing Cross Road. Westminster’s sanitary inspectors used to foregather every morning after they had done their ‘paper work’ at a nearby Lyons Corner House for coffee and a chat, before departing to their various districts to investigate complaints or make routine inspections of homes or businesses.
There was a very good staff canteen for Westminster City employees just down the road from our office where we would gather again for lunch. My sons and grandsons are, I think, quite astonished when I tell them that that brief period I spent with Westminster City Council was the only time after leaving the army that I wasn’t able to get home for lunch or, as I tend to call it in my working class fashion, dinner.
It was a circumstance that only lasted a couple of months. A few weeks after I had started work at Westminster an advert appeared in the Municipal Journal for an additional sanitary inspector with Gipping Rural District in Suffolk – an area, just outside Ipswich, that I knew well. Salary was only £390 but there was a car allowance and the offer of the tenancy of an unfurnished bungalow!
I consulted my Westminster colleagues. They advised me to ‘go for it’. I did, and was successful. At the end of December Heather and I departed from Battersea for ever and in the New Year of 1948 I took up my appointment with the Gipping Rural District Council (see Return to Suffolk 1948 to 1955).
By the end of 1947 I had been out of the army and married for just over eighteen months. Heather and I had spent most of that time in Battersea and, on the whole, it had been a very happy time.
We had paid regular visits, though not as regular as both our parents would have liked, to both Ipswich and Ilford. We also, one day, took a train to Newbury and visited my old great-aunts Aunt Tem and Aunt Annie (See Origins, My parents). Heather’s sister Margaret stayed with us for a weekend (we had a bed-settee in the sitting room) and so did one or two of Heather’s old school friends.
On summer evenings we often went into Battersea Park and I remember rowing Heather on the ornamental lake there.
We attended a local Methodist Church and Heather resumed Sunday School teaching, a task she thoroughly enjoyed. Although I had lost my Christian faith I went along with her and helped where I could. She was, I remember, a great success in the leading role in a Harvest Festival event staged by the Church, ‘The Lord of the Harvest’. On another occasion she was one of a number of Sunday School Teachers who took a group of their kids to Southend for the day by train. I waited for them at Clapham Common tube station on their return.
It wasn’t long after we moved to Suffolk that Heather was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis. She was away from me for two years and in that time she had eight ribs removed on the left side of her body to collapse her left lung permanently and give it a chance to heal.
After that she gave birth to and brought up two fine sons and managed to live a more-or-less normal life for many years – for which I am profoundly grateful. She was always short of energy though, always liable to contract chest and throat infections, always needing to take an after-lunch rest, never able to do heavy shopping on her own or go anywhere for very long without me being there to give her a hand from time to time.
Possibly it is because it was just during those first eighteen or so months of our marriage that she was completely fit and ‘normal’ that their memory is so precious to me.
There were warning signs to which we should have paid more attention. The winter of 1946/’47 was a particularly bitter one with snow and ice on even Battersea’s streets for weeks. It was followed by a wet spring. Twice at least during that time she was stricken with what we, and the doctor, thought was ‘flu. She had a sky-high temperature every evening and a subnormal one every morning. She was hoarse and had a bronchitic cough. She sweated profusely at night and was completely devoid of energy. There were no antibiotics in those days and the doctor’s advice was the standard, ‘Keep her warm and in bed, give her plenty of warm drinks and some aspirin to get her temperature down’. Each time she seemed to recover but, thinking back, I realize that each time she was a little weaker. She should have had an X-ray examination. What a difference earlier diagnosis might have made!
Had her disease been diagnosed just a year or two earlier that disabling and energy-sapping operation might not have been necessary. Nor would she have had to have it had she developed the disease a year or two later. The continuing development of antibiotics made thoracoplasty operations obsolete.
These thoughts come unbidden into my head. There really is no point though in speculating about what might have been, had circumstances been just a little different.
Heather lived till she was eighty-two, outliving all her ‘fitter’ cousins. We had 60 happy years of marriage, two fine sons, three grandchildren of whom she was immensely proud and – as a bonus – loving nieces and a nephew whom Heather lived to see have wonderful and loving children of their own. Although I did, over the years, recover my Christian faith I have often wished, and still wish, that my faith were as strong and unshakeable as hers was.
I have typed those last few paragraphs with difficulty. I have been on my own now for over two years – and I still miss her more than I can say.
……………………………………….
1946 – 1948
Looking back over the years, it astonishes me that during the final year that I spent in the army I never for one moment considered any possible future other than resuming the career that had been abruptly interrupted in 1939 – that of student sanitary inspector. Had six years in the army, including three as a POW, addled my brain, or had the imminence of marriage driven every other thought from my mind?
I was twenty-four years old. My six years military service (seven by the time I was discharged) plus my General School Leaving Certificate with Matriculation Exemption from London University, would have ensured me a university place. The Labour Government would have been happy to pay both my tuition fees and a living allowance for my wife and myself. I could have pursued my schooldays’ dream of becoming a writer.
I didn’t even think of it! The few working class boys I knew who had made it to University had all become either teachers or priests. Neither calling appealed to me. No, I was delighted to know that the government would pay for me to attend a special ‘Further Education and Training’ course for ex-service trainee sanitary inspectors and would pay my wife-to-be and myself an allowance that, we calculated, would be enough for us to live on. I attended a selection board for such a course and was accepted. I would be notified of the time and place of the first course that began after my discharge from the army.
I was discharged from the army on 23rd April 1946. Heather and I were married just four days later, on the 27th. We had planned a fortnight’s honeymoon at a guesthouse that had been recommended to us on the outskirts of Dawlish in Devon. I have forgotten its name but it was owned and run by a Quaker, the first Quaker I had ever actually met. All the guests were invited, if they wished, to attend a Quaker Meeting for Worship held at the guest house on Sunday mornings. Heather and I politely declined.
I don’t remember much about that honeymoon (does anybody?) except that it was cut unexpectedly short. A letter from my mother enclosed an official notification that a course for trainee Sanitary Inspectors would begin at Battersea Polytechnic on the following Monday. My attendance would be expected.
So, we had one week’s honeymoon instead of the fortnight that we had planned. The guesthouse proprietor, when told about our situation, generously declined any payment for the second week that we had booked.
We went back to the home of Heather’s parents. It was just about possible to get to Battersea Polytechnic from there daily and we knew that we would be welcome to stay until we had found somewhere to live in Battersea.
We certainly didn’t want to do that though. I signed in as instructed but the course didn’t actually begin for another few days. Heather and I trudged round the streets of Battersea and Clapham with a suitcase, calling in at estate agents, studying the cards in tobacconist’s shop windows and the advertisement columns of the local newspapers. It took only a few days for us to find at least a temporary home. A very kind lady in The Grove, Clapham Common took pity on us and let us have a furnished apartment on the top storey of her home, stressing that we could have it only ‘for a month or two’ while we found something more permanent.
It was Heather’s Uncle Charlie who found us a more permanent home. There was an advert in the ‘Methodist Recorder’ for furnished rooms in Battersea at No 14 Southolm Street, off Battersea Park Road and only a few hundred yards from Battersea Polytechnic in one direction and Battersea Park Station in the other. The accommodation consisted of a ground floor kitchen and toilet compartment and a roomy sitting room and bedroom on the first floor. The rent was a good deal lower than we were paying on Clapham Common.
There were snags about it though. It was in a somewhat slummy street and our accommodation had only very basic facilities – no bathroom and only a cold water tap over the kitchen sink. A large ‘tin’ bathtub was hung up against an outside wall in the tiny back yard.
There was another furnished apartment on the top floor. Occupants were a very friendly and helpful lady called Mrs Somerville who had a husband that we never saw and a son Alex, who was still away in the forces. Her accommodation was even more basic than ours. She had no proper kitchen sink – just a three cornered sink with a cold tap over it (they used to be called ‘dripstone sinks’ I believe) in a corner on the floor of the landing! Another snag was that it was only a few hundred yards from a railway embankment carrying the main line from Waterloo to Clapham Junction. Trains seemed to pass, shaking the building, every few minutes of the day and night. It was astonishing how quickly we became used to it.
We took the tenancy and, despite all the drawbacks, the months that we spent there were happy ones. I was quite enjoying my course at Battersea Polytechnic and Heather seemed happy as a housewife. She couldn’t do the washing and get it dry in the flat, so every week she would put it in a large suitcase and take a tram from the end of Southolm Street to the Municipal Washhouse, a journey of – I suppose – about half a mile. Here there were no washing machines (they were yet to make their appearance!) but there was hot and cold water, sinks, scrubbing surfaces, and detergents. There was also what I now realize was an enormous spin dryer called a hydro-extractor or ‘hydro for short, in which the women using the washhouse put their washed clothes to get them damp-dry.
All of this I learned second-hand from Heather. Men were strictly prohibited from entering the washhouse and I was allowed to wait outside to help Heather home with the washing only as a very special concession. ‘House-husbands’ and lone fathers had clearly not been heard of in those days.
We were both very inexperienced slum-dwellers. There were no power points and I wrecked a new electric iron (a wedding present) by plugging the lead from it into a light socket. Not that that would have done any harm had our electricity supply not been DC (direct current). The iron had been designed for AC (alternating current)! Heather took her housewifely duties very seriously. One day, coming home from the Poly, I was horrified to see her outside the first floor windows standing on a plaster cornice while she hung onto the window with one hand and cleaned the pane with the other!
In the evenings Heather would help me with my studies – testing me on my knowledge of public health law and so on. It was possible to obtain past exam papers from the Sanitary Inspectors’ Examination Board and I practised answering them regularly. By the time the exam came round I reckoned that I had answered every question that could possibly be set me. Mind you, as well as the written exam there would be an oral exam and a practical inspection – which could be of a dwelling house, a factory, a slaughterhouse, a shop, a canal boat, or practically anything in fact. Candidates had to make an inspection and produce a written report. Both the final report and the notebooks we had used during the inspection had to be submitted to the examiners.
Although there was a separate examination for Inspectors of Meat and Other Foods this subject – perhaps at a less detailed level – was part of the Sanitary Inspectors’ syllabus. For practical inspection of meat and fish we had to pay regular visits to Smithfield and, less frequently, to Billingsgate. To familiarise ourselves with the practice of our other duties we had to spend six or eight weeks with the Public Health Department of a London Borough, an Urban District and either a Rural District or, since there were few of these within easy reach of Battersea, an urban district with rural characteristics.
For all of these expeditions I purchased a second hand bicycle for 30 shillings (£1.50) I think and made my way by cycle. We were, of course, entitled to travelling expenses based on the second-class rail fare or bus fare. Thus, with official approval, I was able to supplement our just-adequate living allowance.
The three authorities at which I had my practical experience were Battersea Borough Council, Sutton and Cheam Urban District Council, and Esher Urban District Council. It was the last of these that had rural characteristics.
It was Battersea – possibly because it was on my doorstep and had some serious housing and environmental health problems – that I found most helpful. I made one or two good friends among the inspectors and public health staff and was told that when I passed my exam there would almost certainly be a job there for me if I wanted it. Sutton and Cheam, and Esher I remember less well. At the end of our time with them the Chief Sanitary Inspector had to submit a general report about us. The Chief at Esher showed me his report before he submitted it. I was rather surprised to find myself described as being ‘of the right type’ since he and the only Additional Sanitary Inspector were committed members of the Conservative Party and I had never made a secret of my – at that time – quite radical left-wing views!
There are only two of my fellow-students that I remember with any clarity. There was a black Jamaican, Denzil Smith, who had a problem getting his living allowance as, although he had served in the RAF, was not a British Citizen. I invited him to our home on one or two occasions. Then there was another E. Hall (he was actually E.W.E. Hall) who had been a glider pilot and had taken part in the D Day landings. He and I were, I think, usually regarded as the course’s most promising students.
I was able to do him a service after we had both qualified. I fairly quickly got a job with Westminster City Council – and immediately signed on for the course for the Meat and Other Foods Inspectors Certificate that we had been advised to acquire. He left his application too late. The course was full and he would have to wait another year. Before the course actually began I had applied for and obtained an appointment with the Gipping Rural District Council in Suffolk. I immediately wrote to him and suggested that he should write to the course organisers, signing himself simply E. Hall, and tell them that he had now moved from 14 Southolm Street, Battersea, SW11 to wherever he was living. This he did – and no-one was ever aware that he wasn’t the E. Hall who had originally signed on!
There were also two women students – former ATS members – with us at Battersea Polytechnic. I think that they both passed the exam. I do remember though that one bleak and drizzly November afternoon we visited a Horse Slaughterhouse in Plaistow (not one of London’s more cheerful areas!) and one of them fainted. Mind you, I had felt pretty queasy myself and I don’t think that I had been alone.
The exam was held in the autumn of 1947. I felt fairly confident that I had done well in the written papers, and I had been very lucky with the practical inspection. I had a simple ‘two rooms up and two down’ terraced house in a poor area (not unlike my own home at the time!) with minimal facilities. It was empty and I noticed that most, if not all, of the houses in the street were also empty. Could it be one of the Housing Act’s Clearance or Improvement Areas that we had learned all about? I thought it likely.
When I wrote my report I detailed all the house’s deficiencies and items of disrepair and added, ‘A cursory glance at other dwellings in the vicinity suggested that there should be further inspections made with a view to the declaration of a Clearance or Improvement Area’. That, I thought, was one up to me!
I was less happy with the oral examination. Always, I think, it is as you are walking away from that kind of ordeal that you think of the replies that you should have made to the examiner’s questions!
The exam results were sent to candidates by post, but a few days earlier they were pinned up in the entrance hall of the Royal Sanitary Institute’s (now the Royal Society of Health) headquarters in Westminster. On the fateful day Heather and I took the train from Battersea Park Station to Waterloo and walked the short distance to the RSI’s HQ. Hand in hand we nervously perused the posted notice. I had passed! I had been fairly confident of success – but you can never be sure until you see it in print.
I was now a qualified sanitary inspector and my next task was to get a job. Theoretically I was still employed by the Ipswich Corporation and was on unpaid leave of absence for military service. I could have gone back there, but Heather and I had made ourselves a home, however humble, in Battersea. I was determined not to relinquish it except to move into somewhere at least equally satisfactory.
Ipswich Council replied to say that they were unable to help with housing so I terminated my appointment with them and ‘signed on’ for unemployment pay though – as it turned out – I drew it for only a few weeks.
Heather and I scoured the local government press – ‘The Municipal Journal’, ‘Municipal Engineering’, ‘The Local Government Chronicle’ for sanitary inspectors’ jobs in the London area – or elsewhere if they were offering housing accommodation. I applied for an inspector’s job in St. Pancras and was granted an interview. I wasn’t successful. Someone with experience was appointed.
Then I applied for one with the City of Westminster. This time I really was successful. I was appointed as an ‘additional sanitary inspector’ with what was, I suppose, the wealthiest and most prestigious borough in London at what was, at the time, the princely salary of £450 a year including ‘London Weighting’. In 1939, when I had been last in the labour market, anyone with a salary of £250 or over was reckoned to be ‘comfortably off’. My dad had certainly never earned that amount. It was, of course, appreciably more than the government grant on which we had been living.
The office was in Charing Cross Road, not far from the Edith Cavell memorial. I became a commuter. Every morning I would catch the 8.30 a.m. from Battersea Park Station up to Waterloo, then the bus to Charing Cross Road. Westminster’s sanitary inspectors used to foregather every morning after they had done their ‘paper work’ at a nearby Lyons Corner House for coffee and a chat, before departing to their various districts to investigate complaints or make routine inspections of homes or businesses.
There was a very good staff canteen for Westminster City employees just down the road from our office where we would gather again for lunch. My sons and grandsons are, I think, quite astonished when I tell them that that brief period I spent with Westminster City Council was the only time after leaving the army that I wasn’t able to get home for lunch or, as I tend to call it in my working class fashion, dinner.
It was a circumstance that only lasted a couple of months. A few weeks after I had started work at Westminster an advert appeared in the Municipal Journal for an additional sanitary inspector with Gipping Rural District in Suffolk – an area, just outside Ipswich, that I knew well. Salary was only £390 but there was a car allowance and the offer of the tenancy of an unfurnished bungalow!
I consulted my Westminster colleagues. They advised me to ‘go for it’. I did, and was successful. At the end of December Heather and I departed from Battersea for ever and in the New Year of 1948 I took up my appointment with the Gipping Rural District Council (see Return to Suffolk 1948 to 1955).
By the end of 1947 I had been out of the army and married for just over eighteen months. Heather and I had spent most of that time in Battersea and, on the whole, it had been a very happy time.
We had paid regular visits, though not as regular as both our parents would have liked, to both Ipswich and Ilford. We also, one day, took a train to Newbury and visited my old great-aunts Aunt Tem and Aunt Annie (See Origins, My parents). Heather’s sister Margaret stayed with us for a weekend (we had a bed-settee in the sitting room) and so did one or two of Heather’s old school friends.
On summer evenings we often went into Battersea Park and I remember rowing Heather on the ornamental lake there.
We attended a local Methodist Church and Heather resumed Sunday School teaching, a task she thoroughly enjoyed. Although I had lost my Christian faith I went along with her and helped where I could. She was, I remember, a great success in the leading role in a Harvest Festival event staged by the Church, ‘The Lord of the Harvest’. On another occasion she was one of a number of Sunday School Teachers who took a group of their kids to Southend for the day by train. I waited for them at Clapham Common tube station on their return.
It wasn’t long after we moved to Suffolk that Heather was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis. She was away from me for two years and in that time she had eight ribs removed on the left side of her body to collapse her left lung permanently and give it a chance to heal.
After that she gave birth to and brought up two fine sons and managed to live a more-or-less normal life for many years – for which I am profoundly grateful. She was always short of energy though, always liable to contract chest and throat infections, always needing to take an after-lunch rest, never able to do heavy shopping on her own or go anywhere for very long without me being there to give her a hand from time to time.
Possibly it is because it was just during those first eighteen or so months of our marriage that she was completely fit and ‘normal’ that their memory is so precious to me.
There were warning signs to which we should have paid more attention. The winter of 1946/’47 was a particularly bitter one with snow and ice on even Battersea’s streets for weeks. It was followed by a wet spring. Twice at least during that time she was stricken with what we, and the doctor, thought was ‘flu. She had a sky-high temperature every evening and a subnormal one every morning. She was hoarse and had a bronchitic cough. She sweated profusely at night and was completely devoid of energy. There were no antibiotics in those days and the doctor’s advice was the standard, ‘Keep her warm and in bed, give her plenty of warm drinks and some aspirin to get her temperature down’. Each time she seemed to recover but, thinking back, I realize that each time she was a little weaker. She should have had an X-ray examination. What a difference earlier diagnosis might have made!
Had her disease been diagnosed just a year or two earlier that disabling and energy-sapping operation might not have been necessary. Nor would she have had to have it had she developed the disease a year or two later. The continuing development of antibiotics made thoracoplasty operations obsolete.
These thoughts come unbidden into my head. There really is no point though in speculating about what might have been, had circumstances been just a little different.
Heather lived till she was eighty-two, outliving all her ‘fitter’ cousins. We had 60 happy years of marriage, two fine sons, three grandchildren of whom she was immensely proud and – as a bonus – loving nieces and a nephew whom Heather lived to see have wonderful and loving children of their own. Although I did, over the years, recover my Christian faith I have often wished, and still wish, that my faith were as strong and unshakeable as hers was.
I have typed those last few paragraphs with difficulty. I have been on my own now for over two years – and I still miss her more than I can say.
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