fishermen protest

Fishernen's protest

    The news that quotas imposed on English fishing boats to protect stocks are being taken up by foreign boats are causing fishermen to demand action from the Government.  They want safeguards to be brought in to protect the small fishing communities around the coast.   These provide 80% of the fishing, but have only a tiny 4% of  the quotas allowed by the Common Fisheries Policy in Brussels.    The rest are being taken by foreign boats fishing in English waters.   One Dutch vessel is reports by Greenpeace investigators to be taking 23% of the limited fishing permits and taking the dlarge catches back to Holland.
      This country has always suffered from foreign boats sweeping the fish from its seas, though the modern efforts to protect the fish stocks and promote sustainable fishing led to the regulations and system of quotas for each boat.   But now five large foreign-controlled vessels have 32% of the quotas.
       A fisherman's life is already one of complex bureaucracy, governed by the combined powers of Brussels and Parliament.     One boat can take on board fifteen different types of fish in one haul.   "How do you sort them out into what is an allowable catch?" asked one Cornish fisherman.   Even though he now had a smaller boat of under ten metres, and so was outside the official quota system, he still had to have catches allowed by Government rules.
     A typical bulletin issued for November by the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation Ltd. in Newlyn, the large fishing port, gives quotas.   Plaice in four different sea areas varies from 50kg to 200 kg per month, monkfish in one area 2.4 tonnes of live weight in only one arena, megrim 4 tonnes per vessel per month, and similarly lists thirteen other types of fish with no landings allowed for some and with a special ban on ray fish landings.
      The larger beam trawlers also have severe restrictions.  One was allowed  two and a half tonnes of monkfish over two months, but the owner said he needed to catch ten tonnes each trip to make a living.
       The former rules to discard any fish caught outside the allowed type are gradually being dissolved and discards will be abandoned when the reformed fishing policy is launched next year.   Maria Damanaki, the retiring Fisheries Commissioner in  Brussels claims to have ended the scandal of discarded fish in Europe, though others say that the process had already started before her arrival in 2010.   She also laid stress on protecting the small fishing communities, a challenge now taken up by the Dept of Environment, Fishing and Rural Affairs, who told me:"We value the inshore local communities.  In 2014 their catch was increased by 740 tonnes and we are taking steps to maximise their use of UK quotas.   Any company applying to fish with our quotas must show a clear economic link to our country.  All large vesses, mostly UK crewed, make catches in offshore waters out of reach by inshore.  
     We are urgently reviewing the economic value of all UK flagged vessels."


      Efforts are being made to restore rights to the small inshore fleets and communities.    This is as it should be, say the fishermen.  One Newlyn fisherman told me:  "The answer to our problems?  Fishermen should work it out for themselves."    And, of course, they are the only ones who know and understand about fish.

  

A war crime?

       A United Nations Human Rights Commissioner has said that Israel's attack on Gaza, causing more than 600 deaths - nearly half of them children - and the deliberate destruction of hundreds of homes  might be a war crime.   Children were being killed at the rate of one an hour.
        Criticism of Israel for any action is often muted, because of the general guilt felt about Jewish history - the Holocaust and the oppression of Jews down the ages    Apart from that, the strong Western backing for Israel has protected it from much condemnation of its invasion into an imprisoned Palestine.
         In fact, some protests against Israel's action have been labelled as anti-Semitic.    Media reporting has been balanced  more carefully than usual.   The rockets fired by the ruling Hamas organisation from Gaza with minor military effect on Israel are reported equally with the offensive from the tanks firing their way through Gaza's streets as drones bomb the houses.     The Obama/Putin disagreement over the responsibility for the shot-down passenger plane in the Ukraine has instead been the main focus of interest for the media.
    The lack of protest about the Gaza attack  from the US is understandable,   It is set to provide $30 billion of military aid to Israel over 20 years.    EU countries have exported billions of euros' worth of weapons to Israel, which ranks now as a leading military world power.
        The ruthless attack on civilians, offering pictures of dying and wounded children and bombed hospitals and homes have aroused anger and compassion, not lessened because the acts were carried out by a people who were themselves victims of the worst crime against humanity in recorded history.
         The horror when considering that history has links to the anger aroused by the inhumane destruction of people in Gaza.   These were not Hamas rocket firers, but people enduring their trapped existence in what has been described as "the world's largest open-air prison" in the borders sealed by Israel.  They had no control over the rockets which killed over 25 Israelis
     Six Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with 58 others supporting them, has called the invasion of Gaza "an inhumane and illegal act of military aggression" which it could carry out only with the complicit aid of international military co-operation and trade.  They called on the UN and governments across the world to put a legally binding and comprehensive military embargo on Israel, like the one imposed on South Africa during apartheid.   That would be a much-contested move, though the United Nations now has negotiators at the scene to put an end to what is being called "the war" but which the thousands of marchers and protesters in this country and throughout the world see as a bloodthirsty invasion which must be stopped.


end
       

nuclear war

   I was with my father, on leave from the Royal Artillery, when the first atomic bomb was dropped by the Americans.   It wiped out Hiroshima, at the end of the second World War, equalling 20,000 tonnes of TNT and killing 140,000.   Thousands more later died from horrific diseases caused by the radiation.     The first plutonium bomb was to kill 74,000 at Nagasaki, leaving it uninhabitable.

              This meant the war with the Japanese was over.  The Nazis had already been defeated.  It meant my brother, flying Hurricane fighters and later American Thunderbolts against the Japanese in Burma, could at last come home after five years. 

               So why was my father, who had also served on the Somme in the first World War, not overjoyed at the news of the bomb?  Instead, he just looked worried.  "I don't think you realise what this means," he said.  "It's going to be the end of civilisation.  It will be like living in caves again - no electricity."   He looked at me but I still could think no further than that I would be seeing my brother again.

     When he did get home, at the age of 25, he started enjoying life with parties and dances and an MG sports car before it was too late, and went back to his old job in the family construction firm.   He did something else.   He helped to found one of the first branches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Yorkshire.   

             That was because of only two bombs.   Now, nine countries have more than 17,000 nuclear weapons, with the US and Russia having about 2000 each on high alert with thousands more stockpiled.    Each bomb now is at least 10 times more powerful than the original Hiroshima bomb.   What are they for?  When will they be used?  

              Britain is now planning to spend £20bn on updating the submarines which carry the Trident nuclear weapons leased from the US.   At a time of economic downturn, with cutbacks in health and education spending, why does the Trident project still remain?     It is backed not only by the Coalition (though the LibDems are the only main party to be openly  anti-nuclear) but by Labour.   Gordon Brown, when Labour Prime Minister, told a City gathering, "And of course we will maintain our independent nuclear deterrent."      (Admittedly, his constituents in Scotland depended on Trident for their jobs and the submarines are based on the Clyde in Scotland.)
          From the days of leftwinger Michael Foot, opposing the bomb has been equated with a lack of patriotism in this country, even though European countries generally - apart from France and others hosting US weapons - do not have them.
         Now that both President Obama and President Putin have begun to trade war threats over the uprisings in Ukraine - with Russian supporters in the east and a US-backed government in the capital - we are entitled to ask, what sort of military confrontations are they thinking of?    The Russians lost 17 million in the war against the Nazis in the second World War, and in so doing also saved Britain.    The Americans lost the thousands of troops they sent over to Europe to join the British - and the Russians - in the fight.   After two World Wars, Russia and Europe have had enough.   The foundation of the European Union meant the European countries were at last bound together peacefully, with the only fallouts being words about the terms of the Brussels agreement.
      On June 21 and 22, campaigners and civil societies from 23 countries will meet in Ankara, Turkey, to discuss efforts to achieve a global ban on nuclear weapons.   ICAN is a powerful international campaign, supported among others by Ban ki-Moon, the United Nations director, Desmond Tutu and Global Zero, former US officers seeking nuclear weapons production to be reduced to zero.     The International Trades Union confederation has tabled a resolution banning nuclear bomb use, manufacture, stockpiling and possession, and 1500 trade union representatives from 161 countries met in Berlin to adopt it last month.    Regarding the use of nuclear weapons as a war crime and calling for a total world ban on them is the INLAP organisation and the World Court Project.
     The nuclear non-proliferation talks are held every five years by the members of the NPT organisation and were held in Geneva in April.       But as one member said, there are now too many meetings, too much talking, and not enough success in getting rid of this huge threat to the survival of the plant.     India, Pakistan, and Israel have the bomb.   If being powerful in the world means possessing nuclear weapons, countries on the fringe, like Iran and north Korea, seek them too.   Now is the time for Britain to become a world leader in calling for their abolition, starting with her own.
ends
   

 

Does Europe still need NATO?

      The crisis in the Ukraine has called into question NATO's continuing role in Europe since the end of the Cold War, when it opposed the Warsaw Pact, now dissolved. Does it now heighten instead of lessen tension? A few years before his death in 2002, the late Professor John Erickson, for many years NATOs top adviser on Russia, consulted by US commanders and policy makers, and the West's leading authority on the Soviet Union for most of the Cold War, had himself questioned its post-Cold War role. "To question the utility and the viability of NATO is often construed as a form of heresy or unacceptable subversion. NATO did perform its Cold War functions admirably, as might be expected.....the issue is not simply that NATO has to define its mission, or even to consider that it may not have a future. There is the wider problem of delineating what must comprise Europe's defence interests, obligations and commitments, this time over a time span which will reach well into the next century."
        For the present, however, a 'bits and pieces' approach to European defence, in an arrangement which is part collaborative and part competitive, is plainly insufficient and no hiding behind NATO's ample bureaucratic skirts can conceal that. "NATO was only one bit of Europe," he said - a debate should now start on its new role. Which, in fact, it has. The latest issue of Peace News, one of the the main voices against nuclear weapons, carried the headline "Dissolve NATO to help Ukraine". Its editors write that Russian nationalism has popular support to a great extent "because of Western encirclement..... To help undo Russian imperialism, undo US/NATO imperialism and dissolve the military alliance that has advanced to the borders of Russia. Guarantee the neutrality of Ukraine. NATO is a machine for facilitating western domination. Dismantling it would be a step towards a more peaceful world and a valuable de-escalatory move in the current crisis."
        It's a view shared by many who are less extremely committed in their views than Peace News, thinking how the continued presence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, with its lavish headquarters and many jobs in Brussels, and its expansion into the states formerly under the Soviet Union, might be seen as threatening by Russia. NATO, founded in 1949 with the specific purpose of taking massive retaliation with nuclear weapons if there was any Soviet attack on Europe, has evolved, in its own words, into an organisation with different aims.
       In the 1950's it was there for defensive purposes, in the 1960's as a political instrument for détente, and in the 1990's as a tool for stability in Europe and central Asia through new partners and allies. Now its new mission, it claims, is "to extend peace through the strategic projection of security". Necessity has forced them to accept that violent extremism may be the "defining threat" of the first half of the 21st century, and that this needs a co-ordinated international response which could be the foundation stone of transatlantic peace. So why not change the name to the North Atlantic Peace Organisation and ask Russia to join? And make sure the many Ukrainian oligarchs join in. ends

A Thorn in their Side

It is 30 years since a political scandal broke around the mysterious murder of Hilda Murrell, a rose grower of national fame in her Shropshire garden and an ardent campaigner for peace and against nuclear power and weapons. A new edition of the book about her murder "A Thorn in Their Side" has been published for the anniversary by her nephew Robert Green, who has devoted years to following his theory that she was killed because of her anti-establishment views and the fact that she had secret documents that could have threatened the security of the Thatcher and succeeding governments and that these documents are still at large. He wants the murder case - for which the man found guilty, Andrew George, is now in prison, to be reopened. Robert Green was a naval officer who had originally led the team providing top-secret intelligence support to the Polaris nuclear submarine on patrol in the surrounding seas. Previously, he had been in a "nuclear crew" with the capacity to drop a ten kiloton bomb on a military airfield near Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. He switched to anti-submarine helicopters, and finally became publicly opposed to nuclear weapons. Then in March, 1984, his aunt was killed. It was a long time before a murder suspect was charged and tried. "My experience of sitting through the five-week trial of Andrew George in 2005 was that the English adversarial judicial process proved woefully ineffective in discovering who had murdered Hilda," he writes. He thinks the book provides enough evidence to re-open the case. Michael Mansfield QC, writing a foreword to the book, has called for a Commission of Inquiry into Hilda's case. There was cross-party support for a Parliamentary early day motion tabled by Austin Mitchell supporting this. He points out that Hilda was killed shortly before she was about to deliver her paper entitled "An Ordinary Citizens' View of Radioactive Waste Management" to the first UK Public Inquiry into the nuclear power industry, focusing on the proposed Sizewell B plan in Suffolk. Her fundamental objection was to the dangers of dealing with high-level radioactive waste. This, in itself, was a danger to the established forces supporting nuclear energy. "Continuing pointers towards State complicity into Hilda's murder have been the endless and remorseless efforts to put the authors off their stride by harassment, surveillance and intimidatory intrusion. Even after publication of this book in New Zealand, this has not abated," Mansfield writes. "No one in the UK should be in any doubt about this reality following revelations in January 2011 about the extent of police undercover activities in relation to perfectly peaceful and legitimate protest groups." The brutal killing of Hilda Murrell by stabbing and blows to her body and face was assumed to be local. The police theory was that it had been committed by a lone, panicking burglar. Or it could have been committed by hired attackers for a different purpose - to silence her. Robert Green, now living in New Zealand, and his wife Kate Dewes, will not give up until their theory has been properly tested and investigated when, they believe, the real truth will finally emerge. ends

Stop the live export of animals

Kate Humble with the sheep and lambs in the springtime TV show was a popular item with viewers, not surprisingly. The lambs ran around happily, feeding from their mothers, the sheep safely grazing and tending to them. But this was not quite the whole story. Along with the cows and the pigs, many thousands of sheep would be later transported in crowded trucks with no room to lie down or even turn around,shoved together for journeys thousands of miles long to be eaten as "fresh meat" in foreign countries. Except that many of them would lie dead and dying in the cattle trucks, having been left without food and water. You don't hear much about this. It would be bad for trade. Nor do the newspapers tell you about it. The demonstrators at the port of Ramsgate, on the south coast, raise their banners for "Stop Live Exports" as they have been doing ceaselessly since the ban on live exports was lifted in 2010. At least someone cares. The EU now recognises animals as "sentient beings" ranking with humans in their capacity for suffering. This being so, logically live exports should be forbidden because of their likeness to the crowded rail trucks running captives to the Nazi concentration camps. The charity organisation Compassion in World Farming have been backing the protesters. They have had observers with the cattle. Once they are landed outside the EU, conditions become far more brutal. In this country it has been shown that rough handling, beating, excessive use of electric prods and lack of food and water are common, with a failure by the authorities to inspect transport and prosecute offenders. Exhaustion, no proper ventilation, transport of animals unfit to travel and unsuitable vehicles can kill them en route and many journeys from the UK take several days or even weeks. So the question is why transport them live? If they must be killed, why not in local abbatoirs before being loaded on to the trains? Is it justified simply so they can be classified as "fresh meat"? Millions are making these journeys which can last for days or weeks, including the huge numbers from this country. So how can it be stopped? Appeals to farmers, appeals to transport companies involved in the exports (a few of which have already been successful) and to the BBC programme makers might make a difference - a little more, perhaps, than appeals to M.P.'s. Then people can happily eat their roast lamb, pork or beef dinner and even some veal from the calf torn away from its mother when it is born, so she can produce even more calves and milk. At least it wasn't exported. ends

dangerous games

Dangerous games

The wrangling between Russia and the West over the Ukraine and Crimea carries undertones of long held rivalries and also of the hairsplitting diplomatic arguments which led to the first World War.   This is why many feel  “let’s just keep out of it.”     The better-informed analyse, apportion blame on both sides, and usually end up taking a view either for or against the Russian claim that Crimea historically is part of Russia and that the Russian speakers in the Ukraine are being persecuted.

      I went once to Kiev, briefly, when covering an international women’s march against nuclear weapons organised by Scandinavians in the last years of the Soviet Union.     I t was grey but friendly, and there was friendliness and support in the outer states like Estonia, as compared with Moscow, where I had my exit visa taken away because I had dared to interview a dissident.         

       Those  who admire Russian literature and music, not to mention the Bolshoi, and have friends in Russia who would probably be too scared to discuss the present  situation in an email – for that reason, I haven’t tried)  certainly are against conflict.      But the politicians - Obama, threatened by his heavy Republican opposition,  Putin, replying to Western provocation and the EU leaders varying in their timid or not-so-timid reactions, seem to be unaware of how close they are to the brink, even though the Russians  have inherited the black memory of the millions lost in the last war, as have the Germans.   

      Some journalists  are responding  to the big story of the day and giving it plenty of drama and brinkmanship coverage.   Others, like Angus Roxburgh, who was  in Russia for 10 years for the BBC,  says in a New Statesman article that getting Russia right is difficult.   He was there under Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin.   “……knowing how little I understand after all those years, I am horrified to see our flat-footed ‘diplomats’ taking decisions so ill-informed and insensitive that they may be impelling the world towards catastrophe.”

      So it was not just me and the other pessimists who were seeing the acute dangers of the games of international slanging matches.

       “Which side are Ukraine’s oligarchs on?” asked a Guardian article describing the oligarchs who are major players in Ukraine and  have been stage-managing  the often corrupt financial dealings.   The best-known one, according to Nick Dochan, is Victor Pinchuk, worth $3.2 billion dollars.   He is said to tread a fine line between east and west, is a friend of Tony Blair and made his money selling steel pipes.  And then there is, of course, the better-known Dmytro Firtash with his second home near Harrods, who helped to finance Yanukovych until his downfall and has had many disputes over gas interests (he made his billions through an energy company.)

         Finally there is the view of  Evgeny Lebedev, Russian owner of the Independent newspaper,  who thinks that the complexity of understanding Russia is lost in a Cold War paradigm that Western  policy-makers still seem to depend on – that Russia and America and the EU must be in a zero-sum game.  

   The shared gas contracts, the “arms trade” with Russia – how extensive is that, could we be told? – the competition to have high numbers of nuclear weapons, all mean that this is far from being a game.  And the ones behaving as though it is should take themselves off to the nearest pool table, making it safer for all of us.

Memories of War   1

          We are being asked to offer memories  and photographs of the Great War, gleaned from survivors still alive or their letters and albums.

          There are photos in our family album, horses pulling huge field artillery guns, blurred pictures of groups of soldiers after the battle of Messines.   But, better than that, I had found    two old green suede diaries, obviously transcribed after the war from notes taken hurriedly at the time on the Western Front and the later campaign in Italy.   These have now been given to the British War Museum.    Before they went, I managed to link the entries to the accounts of military action given in official war histories. 

             My father, Harry Stead, was on the Somme in 1916 and his regiment was in the battles of Passchendaele as well as Messines.  He was with the Royal Artillery in battle for four years, was recommended for a DSO and given a Military Cross.   This was  for the time when he started off the day as a subaltern and ended it as a major at the age of 26 when he discovered he was the only officer who had survived.  He found his batman holding his lost cap and in tears thinking that he was dead.    He then took command of B Battery, at 102 Brigade, in the 23^rd Division, which fought through most of the Third Battle of Ypres before being sent to the Italian campaign in November 1917.

   The official account is from the history of the Royal Regiment  of Artillery, Western Front, 1914-18 by General Sir Martin Farndale, KCB, who records that 1917 and the spring of 1918 saw some of the heaviest fighting and the worst battles of the war, as the Germans and British with their allies fought savagely over each yard of ground.  Woods and railway lines, hills and spinneys were taken, lost and re-taken over and over again with huge loss of life.

   The Third Battle of Ypres , the history records, saw the mightiest bombardment so far on a frontage of 15 miles.  Seventeen British divisions, backed by the power of 3,106 guns fired the biggest artillery attack ever known until that time.  In an 18-day preparatory bombardment alone, almost 3m shells were fired on to the German forward positions.    Nothing like it had ever been attempted before.  It was “war on the grand scale.”

       There was nothing grand, though, about the men and horses struggling in the mud.  Harry Stead’s  diary starts cheerfully, impressed by the junior officers and other ranks of his new command in April 1917.    But there followed two months of attacks, counter-attacks and constant shelling before the big battle  at Messines Ridge which preceded Ypres.  The British and enemy lines were only yards apart.  The artillery plan, says the history, was “sound and brilliantly executed.”

2 Memories of War

    On April 10 the guns got bogged down in the mud.     On April 11,  “The remainder of the guns arrived at dusk.  It was an awful job.  The guns were sunk in mud up to the breech.  We didn’t get the guns into action until midnight and we were all wet through to the skin.”    Next day the battery was shelled and three guns knocked out.    “All the remainder were buried.  Our position is close to Shrapnel  Corner at Ypres.  Our O.P. is Windy Corner, to the right of Hill 60.  They are both bad places.”

    New guns are brought to replace the ones  knocked out.  Then the battery was shelled.   He left to go to the forward infantry lines and looks for position.  “Sniped.  Left front line at 5.15 p.m.  Shelled from 6.30 to .45.  More guns knocked out.

       April 18.  “Kirkley (a lieutenant)  had to leave observation post owing to the shells.  Battery heavily shelled by 5.9” and 8”.  More of our guns have gone west. The mess is a complete washout.”

     April 21.  “Moved the OP because of heavy shell fire, from Windy Corner to Grand Fleet St.  Heavy shelling everywhere.”  Then, in a classic understatement, “It’s been an uncomfortable day.”

      The battle of Messines started at exactly 3.10 a.m. on June 7.     From the diary, “June 6. Arrived at Battery from leave at 5.30 p.m.  Arranging barrages fort next day’s battle. Gas shells until 3 a.m.     June 7.  Battle of Messines, Zero hour 3.10.  Hill 60.  Gunfire intense.  Went forward to reconnoitre Observation Post.  Lost Blyth and three telephonists got buried in a trench by Hill 60 from shellfire.  Inspected Hill 60 craters and Boche dugout.  Found maps.  Shellfire very bad.  Narrow escapes.  Went to front line and found Infantry battalion out of touch.  Took their dispositions back to Base.  Good day but very hectic.”

     Infantry positions were important.  Cut lines meant that they could be right out of touch.  The official history recounts that many forward observation officers on Messines Ridge, no one having told them there was to be a second, following attack were unable to tell their own troops from the enemy and engaged them.  There was no way of stopping them.  Neither they nor their officers knew what was happening. Next evening, one battalion of a forward brigade was heavily engaged from Messines Ridge, being mistaken for an enemy counterattack.  It wasn’t until the next day that the breakdown in control was put right.    “The blunder marred one of the best periods of artillery bombardment so far in the war,” says Farndale’s history.   It was actually, in modern phraseology, a “friendly fire” at its most tragic, and showed the importance of Harry Stead’s visits to the infantry front lines.

   There was a lull for Battery.  Then fighting continues.

 “June 13.  Battery shelled with gas.  Went with Kirkley to find a new position forward.  Shelled all the time.   SGT Massey and Sgt Howarth killed.

   June 14.  Repairing lines to OP.  Firing for infantry.  Corp. Jones wounded.  Attack on canal successful. 

Memories of War  3

  June 15  Kirkley at new position preparing pits for guns.  Two guns with 12 loads of ammunition and four GS wagon loads of high explosive material all in.  Wired guns on SOS lines.

June 16.  Went to look for OP to observe on Klein Zillebeeke  (in maps in the official history this is about two miles north west of Hill 60, near a lake and about three miles south eas of Ypres.)  Walked for about six hours, nearly hit by 5.9.  Registered guns at Hill 60 in new position.  Four rounds.  Lost wire transport FM.  Back to old position.  Four gunes ready for moving.”

      There are more movements of guns overnight.    “Tired out.” he records.   There follows drenching rain, wet all night in bivouacs and cleaning up.   

     By June 22 the Battery had moved off to Boecheppe, arriving in the evening.  The diary is blank.  The next action recorded is heavy and daily bombing in July, before the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, part of the Third Battle of Ypres and the massive bombardments at Passchendaele from July 1 to November, 1917.

     From the official Royal Artillery history:  “Passchendaele:  what emotion that name generates, even to those who were not there:  it means many things to many people but to all it means mud, massed bombardments, bloody and cruel fighting and, above all, courage and stamina in the face of appalling conditions.   Strictly speaking, Passchendaele was part of the Third Battle of Ypres, which consisted of a series of battles.  First was the initial British attack on Pilckem Ridge, which was launched on 31 July and lasted until 2 August.

    My father and his Brigade were now with the 2^nd Corps in the Fifth Army.

“July 30.  Getting guns laid on barrage lines, digging dugout.  Sat up all night.  Pat and Marks had made dugout.  Hook (Sgt James Hook, his batman who was with him throughout), Page and Kirkley made one for Kirkley and myself.  Hook and Kirkley nearly buried.  Shelled all night.

July 31  3.50 a.m.   Zero Battery shelled by 8”, 5.9”, 4.2”.   Whizzbangs and some gas shells.  Ten Boche planes over ujs M.G 12.45.  Ellison with ammunitiuon.

1.10  New target.   Barraging all day, cease firing 7.30 p.m.  Blyth back.  Rain.

August 1.  One foot of water in dugout.    Soaked through.   New SOS lines.  Everyone went through.

August 2.   Dugout caved in on Kirkley and I.  9 a.m. Gen. Arbuthnot round, very sorry for us.  Shelled all day.  Rain all day, heavy rain all night.”

   The history records that a German counter-attack started at 11.30 hours.  By 1300 hours (when Harry Stead records that he is seeking a new target) drizzling rain settled in, blinding observation.  Control of guns became difficult.  Drenching rain began to fall making artillery observation nearly impossible.  The counterattack followed up.  But the prearranged protective barrage was fired by the British Gunners with such speed, accuracy and ferocity that the Germans broke and fled.

Memories of War  4

       At Ypres, the labours of the artillery were as gruelling as those of the infantry and judging by the casualties,  almost as hazardous.  There had been almost no proper rest or relief fom 16 to 31 July, when the battle commenced and detachments were near total exhaustion at the time when  they should have been most alert.

      Conditions at the guns were terrible, pouring rain, thick oozing mud capable of swallowing a man, a horse or even a gun, made hopeless platforms.  For shelter, a piece of corrugated iron over a water-filled shell hold was all that could be done.    General Farndale writes:The sheer courage and endurance shown by the exhausted , weary gunners at Third Ypres was as great as had ever been shown in the Regiment’s history for the horror of it went  on and on without respite, without mercy until death itself was merciful.”

    From my father’s diary:     “August 4.  Shelled all day.  Registered guns.  Signallers wounded.

August 5.  Heavy  shelling.  Heavy rain and mud.  Everything miserable.  Went to wagon lines.  Given 48 hours rest – much needed.   Hot baths in great request at rest  area.

Recalled to Battery after 20 hours. Shelled all way.  In action again at 4 p.m.  Bad night.  Boche shelling.

August 7. Shooting all day.

August 8  Battery and Mess shelled all day.  Rain again.  Direct hit on No. 1 gun.  SOS 9.40 to 10.15, shelled again.  Hitchcox wounded, Sgt Massey got DCM.

August 10  Zero hour 4.35 a.m.  Heavily shelled as soon as we opened fire.  Lt. Corder wounded, also Sgt. Massey. Gunner Cubley killed, Corporal  Hodgkins wounded.  Quietened down 10,30 a.m. New SOS.  Gunners Buxton and Boswell killed.  Bombardier Blackman and Sgt Rigg killed.  Bombs.  Brown, Barlow and Barnes wounded, also Cpl Forman, Gunner Jacks.

      August 9 Cleaning up round Battery.  Developed irrigation scheme.  Battery shelled .  Sgt Smith killed, Sgt Richardson wounded.

August 11   700 rounds got into position.  Heavy rain, also shells.

August 12   Intermittent shelling all day.  Went to Observation post, had to run once or twice.

August 13.  Handed over to 242 Brigade, RFA.  B242 knocked out within three hours of taking over.

August 14. Cleaning up.  Kirkley takes ammunition to Elverdin.  

On this day, the history records the start of the battle of Langemarck.   The fighting for Inverness Copse on the XIV and XVIII Corp[s front was long and better.  Though the Copse was taken, it had later to be abandoned.

      All of this time Harry Stead’s No 2 Corps, Fifth Army was in and out of action.

Memories of War   5

Sept  5   Went into acion in 155 Groupl  Fired smoke barrage.   Battle on right 8.45 p.m.  Standing by for SOS.

Sept 6  Zero hour 7.30 a.m., shooting match till 9 a.m.  Registered guns and checked lines of Battery.  Centre section relieved by section of B.290.

 Sept 7 Centre section to Hamjoek.   Marks, Seale and I returned to 290 Brigade and took 4 guns straight to Hamhoek around 10 p.m.   Heard we were going back to Dickebushe.

(In II Corps area 36 batteries had been moved into the Dickebushe area before Pilckem Ridge.)

     The Battery was now moved and went on a five hour march, having got up at 3.30 a.m. and ready to leave at 6.30 a.m., to what can most nearly be deciphered as Renungmelst, though this place is not in the index of the  history.   There they were busy constructing a Mess and even a table.  They must have been some way behind the front line.

     But illness followed.  By Sept 12 my father was laid up with boils, the result of weakness from the appalling conditions and bad weather.

   He carried on, with notes about Sanctuary Wood, making gun positions for Ypres and Polygon Wood being captured by 25 Division.    These woods recur again and again in accounts of the Battles of Ypres and figure prominently on the maps.

   All this time, Harry Stead was growing progressively sicker  and on Sept 28 had a carbuncle cut out of his neck.  Then the diary goes blank.  On October began the battle of Broodseinde, followed by Poelcappelle on October 9 and the first battle of Passchendaele on October 12.  The 5^th Army. Of which the Brigade was a part, was in the thick of it.  Hundreds of guns were knocked out.    There are continual changes in the diary.   Though the weather had broken and drenching rain fell for two days, producing the terrible mud of Passchendele, Douglas Haig, a master of the ruthless wrong move, determined to press on.  On October 12, the first battle began.

     The Farndale history recalls:    “Conditions now became quite frightful, wounded lay unattended around the guns and pillboxes, and trenches were full of them.  Snipers did great execution on the survivors and the supply of food and ammunition became virtually impossible.”   Yet Haig had said he believed his troops were practically through the enemy defences.  “This ignorance of the truth and of the terrible misery of the forward troops cannot really be forgiven.” 

     Nowhere were the conditions worse than in the gun lines.  Guns sank and disappeared – men and horses sank for ever into the boiling quagmire of Passchendaele.

    The Battery missed the second battle, from October 26 to November 10,  which saw the horrors of mustard gas and a sneezing gas, which forced men to remove their gas masks.   “The battlefield took on a weird likeness to an artist’impression of hell.”    After the battle which improved the Ypres position for the winter, Haig decided to halt the Flanders campaign.

 Memories of war   6

      And some five British divisions, including Harry Stead’s, were ordered to Italy under General Plomer to help the struggling Italian armies.    That is another story.

Profiting from the housing shortage

The rent racketeers     1.








       " These people can't afford to live in Hampstead.   They just don't have enough money.     I'm going to sell the flats, they are worth a lot now".   Tidy properties they were,  a little square of well-tended flats with small gardens, one of them occupied by a local postman.     The new owner was quite young but well aware of the profits that might be made in Hampstead if its ancient tradition of mixed income housing could be broken up.        Further up the street, a row of houses built for local workers and traders in 1890, had already been bought up and the families living in them, usually three to each house with a flat on each floor,, evicted.
        Not so very different, then, from the recently publicised couple, obese and self-satisfied, who declared on Channel 4 television news their intention to evict hundreds of tenants who were having  rents paid by housing benefit.       The only difference was a separation of 50 years between the two events.    
        There was a happy ending for the 1960's flat dwellers.   The Guardian and other papers carried stories about it, pointing out that the flats could be compulsorily purchased by the local council.    This was done.   The tenantss were able to stay in their homes.  This would not happen now.
            There are few happy endings today.   In the 'sixties, I covered Rachmanism for my paper.  I spent hours trudging round the now-fashionable and then slummy Notting Hill (earlier I had carried out the same function in the slums of Leeds).   You could stop anyone on a pavement, explain what you were looking for, and almost certainly be taken to living conditions so appalling that you could not believe that even higher rents were being demanded for them.   The worst were the hundreds crowded into St. Stephen's Gardens, where one flat can now be worth millions but a place I still cannot look at without a shudder of remembrance.     The mother in the kitchen with the ceiling falling down, the rain coming through, nothing to cook with, the children crowded into one bed, the freezing cold, and tales of the cruel landlord coming round with fierce dogs to demand ever-higher rents, in pain of eviction.   Going back to a warm, spacious house was simply to experience shame.       Two tenants I still remember were asking for my help to get the landlord to let them keep their inadequate home in a garage from which he was trying to evict them..    The main organiser of the evictions, Rachman, became so infamous that he gave birth to the term "Rachmanism" as a symbol of ruthless exploitation of tenants.   In later years, I met him briefly, complacent about his actions.
      He first became known during the trial of Stephen Ward after the political scandal of the M.P. Profumo who had been having an affair with the same girl, Christine Keeler, as a Soviet agent.  I covered some days of the trial.   A witness, Mandy Rice- Davies, in the course of her evidence, spoke of a ruthless landlord involved  in this world and gave his name - Rachman.    The Insight team from editor Harold Evan's Sunday Times followed this up and  exposed  the shocking conditions of tenants  which no journalist seemed to have been aware of before.   I went to Notting Hill where many of the tenants were newly-arrived from the West Indies, as they were then known,      The affair of the overcharged and evicted tenants throughout the country became a national scandal, even though the night chief subeditor groaned "Not another story about broken lavatories, please."   No, there was nothing cheerful about the story,, and it was all much grimmer than non-working lavatories.
        But this , so long ago, had a good ending.   Rents were restricted.   No one could be evicted without a court order, and it meant most tenants were now safe from "rack renting" as it was known and the profiteering landlords, and from being turned out on to the streets.    Rent tribunals were set up and  the new Labour government, under its housing minister Dick Crossman  started on one of the most ambitious housing programmes the country has ever known.    Modern flats were built in Notting Hill near the old slums, where they still stand in contrast to the millionaire residences in St. Stephen's Gardens.      All over the country, modern flats were going up, high rise, often aesthetically unappealing, but giving safe and comfortable shelter instead of slums.
          An ambitious housing target has now been set by the Coalition government.   But meanwhile, as in the 'sixties, greedy, unscrupulous landlords are making huge profits out of the housing shortage, putting up rents and evicting tenants who cannot pay, forcing them to join the huge ranks of the homeless.   What is being done about this?   Will the government dare to start rent controls  and now they are having to foot the bill in benefits for higher rents which was not the case in the long-ago past  and stop it being an investment free-for-all?   Many  evictions are still required to have court orders before they can be carried out.  Two tenants I know spoke of the courts usually finding for the landlords, and there are a multiplicity of  rules for different kinds of  tenancies.
          The importance of a large-scale housing programme has now been recognised as more urgent than the last government's priority of getting more people to university.     People need jobs and somewhere to live.   The scandal of the high rents and eviction culture, the encouragement of buy-to-let investment has to stop.   The traditions of the post-war idealistic Attlee government need to be brought back.  Then we can be proud of our country again.
    

The Great War

'Tug of war', Jean Stead, Wednesday September 17th 1969.

        Edmund Blunden once painstakingly explained to me why he went on his regular pilgrimages to the Flanders battlefields - the effect on him when he saw the relics of old boots and helmets, as remote to most people now as Iron Age skulls; what he felt when he saw flowers growing over the ancient trenches. It was a phenomenon familiar to me. Blunden is a man of peace and I have known many others who have this odd combination of fear of another war and a compulsion to retread yard by yard their old battlegrounds. Some are even members of CND.
        It has nothing to do with the sort of jingoism that formed part of a television film on Arnhem last weekend: thousands, we were told, had died that others might live. As I remember it - I was very young at the time, though expertly informed - it was a massive failure of intelligence which caused the doomed men to parachute straight into the perfect trap set for them by the Germans.
        It is not that "noble war" stuff, but a curious ambivalence towards war shared by those who were in the worst battles. Perhaps it is because they thought they were seeing qualities of courage and fidelity displayed that could never be repeated in peacetime, because the necessary conditions would not be present.
      Yet they felt such horror at the waste of life, such premature consciousness of their own mortality, that they felt war was not worth it, for however high-seeming a principle. Siegfried Sassoon is probably the best example of this ambivalence? He was utterly involved in war, deriving all his greatest poetic inspiration from it, until he rejected it entirely.
      My childhood, in one way and another, was dominated completely by two wars. Looking back, it seems always to have been coloured by khaki and myself crying because people were going away. The stories I was told at my father's knee were unsuitable ones about Passchendaele and the Angel of Mons and by nine I was being reared on "Undertones of War", Sassoon, and Wagner. Later, the stories were about the dreadful defeat of Dunkirk because my father's regiment hadn't managed to bring its guns back with it.
       I realise that this is why when I once found a trench in the country, I flattened myself professionally against the bank and showed my small son how to look along the sight of a rifle and start shooting at the counter-attacking hordes. At least we didn't call them Germans.
       Yet the fear if war overshadows my family, as it did my parents, as no other calamity. I used to take the children as uncomprehending babies to Committee of 100 demonstrations. It has left them with a healthy fear of being bombed, which I share. But in spite of this, an artillery gun remains one of the homeliest objects in the world to me.
        A friend of mine is married to a poet who was in every bloody campaign of the last war, hated Monty and lived to be a militant pacifist. So struck was she by his tales of grisly death and poems about the dead hanging on barbed wire, that she has dug a large hole in her garden in the country and hidden in it quantities of corned beef and Marmite, in case they are ever attacked by the enemy. For his part, he went on a lone holiday for a tour of the Normandy battlefields.
          This is a dangerous ambivalence, more treacherous than ignorant jingoism. When schoolchildren were asked before the showing of the film of the Battle of Britain what they knew of it, they said nothing at all because they hadn't yet got to it in history. That is as it should be. And even so, it isn't worth more than a few paragraphs. There is little children can learn from it.
         The most peace-desiring of people, most of them ex-combatants, can be a threat to peace. War, they feel, is where all the playing with politics in fantasy-land stops and self-knowledge really begins. Perhaps they are right, but they should keep the secret to themselves.

A ride on an open line

1


     This is the story of a fraud.  I know it is true because it happened to me.  I should not have been taken in, because I used to be an investigative reporter once, nosing around to discover how criminals were getting away with it.

      There was a call from Harrods story in Knightsbridge one afternoon.   Someone claiming to be my nephew had tried to use what was a clone of my bank card to buy lingerie.  They had challenged him and were sending for the police.   I had been having having a quiet nap at the time, not as awake as I should have been.  "I don't have a nephew," I said, and checked my wallet.  "My bank card is here all right, though."   The man at Harrods said it would be as well to tell the bank security people.    There was a number on the back of the card, so I phoned it, and a helpful man answered.  He took it all very seriously, asking a lot of knowledgeable questions about my account and finally saying it was very important that I should send in all my cards and bank statement.   They would send a messenger.     I phoned back Harrods - the girl in the department did not seem to know anything, but a man rang back and said yes, it was all in hand, and the one claiming to be my nephew had been arrested and taken to the nearest police station.   I did not check the police station, which I should have done, because the messenger had arrived in a respectable looking black saloon, saying he had been asked to collect something, though he wasn't quite sure where he was supposed to be going with them.
        I was still on the phone to the banking official when my 26-year old grandson happened to drop in.   "This sounds like a fraud," he said.   ~"No, no, it's all in hand," I said, waving him away.   The man was still talking, so I gave him the phone and said " you talk to him then."   He asked why he wanted the bank cards and the man said to do an analysation, and my grandson said there is no such word and handed back the phone.  I made an excuse to the man, saying I wanted to ring my daughter, then rang the Yorkshire Bank and cancelled the cards - but not before they had managed to draw £500 on the credit card.   And they still had my bank statement, with lots of information about direct debit payments.
         I went to see the bank three days after Christmas Day - the phone call had happened on the day before Christmas Eve, and asked them to close my account and to open a new one.
          But most of the worst was yet to come.   The account was frozen, but the bank refused to transfer all the old account to the new one as I had asked.   This meant ahat the direct debit payments were not met.   But because the bank did not warn me about this, I assumed that all the bills would be met as before.   Not so.   First, without warning, Virgin cut off the phone and only after hours of calls and explanations was it switched on again.   Would it be electricity or gas next?  No, they did not seem to be due for payment, luckily, nor Camden who would have sent in the bailiffs if their council tax bill was not paid.   Then came a letter from the bank, 10 days after the account had been closed, saying that a cheque could not be honoured because there was no money in the account.   Would I let them know what was to be done about this they asked, taking a full A4 page to deal with it.   They did not seem to have noticed that the account had been closed or as I had discovered later, frozen..   The funds had been transferred to the new account, and standing orders set up by the bank, but that was all.
      Having discovered that several other people had been through this mental torture and expensive physical fatigue through all the phoning, I think we should be warned about these alleged calls from Harrods and other well-known stores.   I'd be grateful if the police could get on to these chaps and stop them.  
      How do they manage to do it?  By keeping an open phone.  When you think you are ringing your bank, their line is still open to you and they answer it.   The same with the alleged "Harrods" caller.  
     Oh, and Virgin have cut off my phone again, even though I paid the bill.  Someone there didn't get the message.  Maybe I should tell Richard Branson, he's a bit off-message himself sometimes.

ends