Bike Ride, One Door Three Ways

I chanced upon this fine old door on a short bike ride yesterday…

World Tulip Summit

In 2000, after ten years working in the private sector in the waste management industry  I volunteered for redundancy and started to look for alternative employment.  I was fortunate to get a job back in local government and on 8^thAugust I started work at South Holland District Council.

When I was a boy I used to like to do jig-saw puzzles (this was a year or two before Nintedo and Gameboy you will understand) and I can remember having a set of two that were about flowers.  The first was the Battle of the Flowers in Jersey and the second was the Spalding Tulip Parade.

As I put those puzzles together on the dining room table I could not have possibly foreseen that nearly thirty-five years later I would move to Spalding to work at South Holland District Council and have the pleasure of helping to prepare and deliver that Parade and neither could I have imagined either that nearly forty years later (give or take a year or two) that I would have the very great privilege to welcome delegates from across the World to the World Tulip Summit in Spalding.  And believe me this was a real privilege because you don’t get that many World Summit meetings in Spalding

Actually there are quite a lot of World Summits across the globe each year and as I looked around to see what other sort of enthusiasts were meeting up at the same time in 2008 I was interested in these examples:

•  Mountain Bikers World Summit – Berlin (that wouldn’t work very well in South Holland on account of the land being so flat)
• Adventure Travel World Summit – Brazil & Norway
• Knowledge Society World Summit – Athens

But my favourite just has to be the World Toilet Organisation Summit in Macau.  I can’t help thinking that I bet the delegates get to listen to a load of crap.

My research informs me that there are three South Holland’s across the world.  The first and the original is not surprisingly in the Netherlands.  The second is a village in Chicago in the USA, which like Lincolnshire’s South Holland has its origins with Dutch farmers and settlers.

During the Second-World-War the Dutch Royal Family took shelter in Canada and after the war the Netherlands sent gifts of tulips that helped promote the famous annual Ottawa tulip festival.

The name Tulip was first applied to the plant by a man called Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq who was a Dutch ambassador in Turkey in the sixteenth century and was also a great floral enthusiast.  One day he was talking to a sultan and he noticed that he was wearing an attractive flower in his headwear.  When I say talking what I mean is that they were communicating with each other in the way that people do when they can’t speak each others language with lots of funny faces and wild gesticulations.  Busbecq was curious about the flower and pointed to it and enquired its name.  In Turkey the name of the flower was a Lale but the Sultan tought he meant what is the name of his hat so he told him it was a Tulipan or turban and Busbeqc, who completely misunderstood, acquired some bulbs and sent them back to Europe with the information that they were called Tulipa.

All parts of tulips are edible and the bulb can be substituted for onions (although they are a little more expensive and less flavourful). The Dutch ate tulip bulbs in hard times of WW2 even though the petals have little taste but can be used to garnish a dish, chop a few petals and throw them in a salad, sugar them to decorate a cake or use the entire flower for a fruit bowl, pinching out the pistil and stamen in the middle.

My plan was to work at South Holland for just a few months until I could find something different, but I liked it so much and they kept on promoting me so in the end I worked there for over ten years when once again I volunteered for redundancy and left the place and all of its happy memories on 30^th April 2011.

A Tornado and a Dim-Wit MP

Thursday 28^th July 2005 was an ordinary sort of day with nothing exceptional  happening except for some unseasonal Summer weather with a lot of rain and some high winds.  At five o’clock, or thereabouts, I finished work as normal and drove the seven mile journey to home where I changed clothes and settled down to watch the TV.

At about quarter past six my phone rang and it was my boss, Terry Huggins, who had a bizarre story about a tornado ripping through my next door village of Moulton and leaving a trail of destruction behind it.  As I looked out of the window at what was by now a blue sky streaked with only the occasional cloud I told him that as this was only a couple of miles away from my house that I found this to be extremely unlikely but that I would go and take a look just to be sure.

And so I drove the two miles to Moulton and as I turned in just as I expected everything seemed to be just as it should be but as I approached the centre of the village and the pretty little village green I was astounded to come across what looked like Belgium probably did in 1939 when Hitler’s Panzer tanks had driven through.  There was a scene of complete devastation where, sure enough, a twister had ripped through the heart of the village and caused untold amounts of damage.

It had swept through the back garden of the local MP, John Hayes, and then through the village green where three hundred year old oak trees stood in tatters with limbs ripped from their trunks and littering the grass below with debris.  After the green it had moved on to the parish church where it had ripped back the lead roof as though it were a flimsy sardine can and in the churchyard it had uprooted trees and gravestones and brought hundred year old skeletons to the surface.

It was calm now but there was a huge amount of damage which needed to be dealt with and although I had forgotten to bring with me the Council’s emergency procedure manual I got on the phone and called up a handful of people that I knew that I could rely upon in an emergency, Barry Bradley, Elmer Fischer and Jim Harvey who all responded immediately.  I called the police but they said they were busy and they would send someone along as soon as they could.

By this time John Hayes was walking around the green and surveying the damage with his young son in his arms.  He was looking up into the badly damaged trees and pointing out the dangerously swaying boughs that were broken off and might fall to the ground and crush him at any moment without any apparent regard for the danger he was in.  I didn’t want to have to explain the death of an MP so I ushered him away and cleared the green and talked a local resident to stop traffic driving through by redirecting it to an alternative route.

Eventually a police car arrived and the local constabulary had sent the most dim-witted constable that they could find to attend.  He was clueless!  I told him to tape off the green with some blue and white police incident tape and he tied it to the bumper of a car that was outside the village shop and within about two minutes of driving off!  I told him to put cones out but he said he hadn’t brought any with him and then I said that I thought he had better send for reinforcements.  Eventually a WPC turned up with a lot more brains than he had (not difficult) and after we found some cones in the churchyard we began to make some progress.

The most important thing to do was to make the trees safe so we called some tree surgeons and they went to work lopping the damaged branches.  This made John Hayes seething mad and he demanded to know on whose authority we were butchering his beloved oaks.  We were all working hard to clear the roads and the green and after an hour the vicar, the reverend Tim Barker, turned up to see the church.  This turned the WI members present into a hormonal frenzy and although there had been no refreshment for those of us doing the work the first thing they did was to put the kettle on and make him a cup of tea!

It took about four hours to get cleared up and finished and I’d like to say that at the end of it we left with the thanks and gratitude of the community ringing in our ears, but sadly I can’t.  Tim Barker didn’t say thank you, the police couldn’t wait to get away and John Hayes promised me that he would see to it personally that I would be disciplined for cutting back the trees.

Subsequently the Church made an insurance claim for the damage to the roof and was ironically told that it wasn’t covered because a tornado is an act of God!  How do you explain that to anyone?  In a newspaper report the following week the police had the cheek to claim the credit for dealing with the emergency.  A couple of years later however I met John Hayes and he did grudgingly concede that the trees had recovered and the pruning had in fact done them good because now they looked better than ever before.

I don’t suppose that I will ever have to deal with another tornado but, believe me, that was a very exciting evening.

John Hayes MP, now the Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning!

Lincolnshire Roads and a Tenancy

In August 2000 I was appointed to a job at South Holland District Council in Spalding, Lincolnshire which is about sixty-five miles from what was my home in Ilkeston, Derbyshire.  In my previous job I had been used to travelling long distances (I once drove daily from Rugby to Southend for three years) so I assumed that this tiny distance would present no problems at all.

How wrong I was!

This turned out to be the most tortuous, energy sapping and soul destroying journey imaginable.  First of all I had to negotiate the city of Nottingham which is a busy place in early morning rush hour and then the long drag to Grantham and by now I had been on the road for an hour and was only just over half way there and about to begin the worst part of the journey.

Lincolnshire has no motorways and is also desperately short of dual carriageways and the A52 is a single carriageway nightmare.  It is permanently full of lorries from the south Lincolnshire food distribution centres, caravanners making for the coast and tractors, hundreds of tractors, who all seem to come out on the roads together at a time certain to cause maximum inconvenience to motorists.

If I was lucky I could do the journey in an hour and forty-five minutes but sometimes (especially going home on a Friday night) it could take two hours!  Even though I was still driving the Onyx UK company car and they were fuelling it for me for six months as part of my redundancy deal this was not sustainable and when this perk disappeared and I had to pay for my own diesel I had to make alternative arrangements.

The solution was to rent a house and live closer to work and I found a delightful place in Moulton Seas End about seven miles from Spalding and what I was saving in fuel more than paid for the modest rent on the two bedroom, one hundred year old, ex agricultural farm workers cottage and on 6^th June 2001 I signed the tenancy agreement.

I don’t remember thinking that I would still be there ten years later but I enjoyed working at South Holland District Council and living in South Lincolnshire and after a while I came to consider it my natural home with a good job and an excellent quality of life.

Unfortunately, good things come to an end and with the Tory assault on the public sector the good job was gone and so was my happy enjoyment of Moulton Seas End and South Lincolnshire so after ten happy years I terminated the tenancy and started a new life in the north of Lincolnshire instead, sad to go but happy to move on.

A Life in a Year – 8th August, South Holland District Council and Tulips

In 2000, after ten years working in the private sector in the waste management industry  I volunteered for redundancy and started to look for alternative employment.  I was fortunate to get a job back in local government and on 8^th August I started work at South Holland District Council.

When I was a boy I used to like to do jig-saw puzzles (this was a year or two before Nintedo and Gameboy you will understand) and I can remember having a set of two that were about flowers.  The first was the Battle of the Flowers in Jersey and the second was the Spalding Tulip Parade.  As I put those puzzles together on the dining room table I could not have possibly foreseen that nearly thirty-five years later I would move to Spalding to work at South Holland District Council and have the pleasure of helping to prepare and deliver that Parade and neither could I have imagined either that nearly forty years later (give or take a year or two) that I would have the very great privilege to welcome delegates from across the World to the World Tulip Summit in Spalding.  And believe me this was a real privilege because you don’t get that many World Summit meetings in Spalding

Actually there are quite a lot of World Summits across the globe each year and as I looked around to see what other sort of enthusiasts were meeting up at the same time in 2008 I was interested in these examples:

•  Mountain Bikers World Summit – Berlin (that wouldn’t work very well in South Holland on account of the land being so flat)
• Adventure Travel World Summit – Brazil & Norway
• Knowledge Society World Summit – Athens

 But my favourite just has to be the World Toilet Organisation Summit in Macau .  I can’t help thinking that I bet the delegates get to listen to a load of crap.

My research informs me that there are three South Holland’s across the world.  The first and the original is not surprisingly in the Netherlands.  The second is a village in Chicago in the USA, which like Lincolnshire’s South Holland has its origins with Dutch farmers and settlers.

During the Second-World-War the Dutch Royal Family took shelter in Canada and after the war the Netherlands sent gifts of tulips that helped promote the famous annual Ottawa tulip festival.

The name Tulip was first applied to the plant by a man called Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq who was a Dutch ambassador in Turkey in the sixteenth century and was also a great floral enthusiast.  One day he was talking to a sultan and he noticed that he was wearing an attractive flower in his headwear.  When I say talking what I mean is that they were communicating with each other in the way that people do when they can’t speak each others language with lots of funny faces and wild gesticulations.  Busbecq was curious about the flower and pointed to it and enquired its name.  In Turkey the name of the flower was a Lale but the Sultan tought he meant what is the name of his hat so he told him it was a Tulipan or turban and Busbeqc, who completely misunderstood, acquired some bulbs and sent them back to Europe with the information that they were called Tulipa.

All parts of tulips are edible and the bulb can be substituted for onions (although they are a little more expensive and less flavourful). The Dutch ate tulip bulbs in hard times of WW2 even though the petals have little taste but can be used to garnish a dish, chop a few petals and throw them in a salad, sugar them to decorate a cake or use the entire flower for a fruit bowl, pinching out the pistil and stamen in the middle.

My plan was to work at South Holland for just a few months until I could find something different, but I liked it so much and they kept on promoting me so in the end I worked there for over ten years when once again I volunteered for redundancy and left the place and all of its happy memories on 30^th April 2011.

A Life in a Year – 28th July, a Tornado and a Dim-Wit MP (John Hayes)

Thursday 28^th July was an ordinary sort of day with nothing exceptional  happening except for some unseasonal Summer weather with a lot of rain and some high winds.  At five o’clock, or thereabouts, I finished work as normal and drove the seven mile journey to home where I changed clothes, opened a can of beer and settled down to watch the TV.

At about quarter past six my phone rang and it was my boss, Terry Huggins, who had a bizarre story about a tornado ripping through my next door village of Moulton and leaving a trail of destruction behind it.  As I looked out of the window at what was by now a blue sky streaked with only the occasional cloud I told him that as this was only a couple of miles away from my house that I found this to be extremely unlikely but told him that I would go and take a look just to be sure.

And so I drove the two miles to Moulton and as I turned in just as I expected everything seemed to be just as it should be but as I approached the centre of the village and the pretty little village green I was astounded to come across what looked like Belgium probably did in 1939 when Hitler’s Panzer tanks had driven through.  There was a scene of complete devastation where, sure enough, a twister had ripped through the heart of the village and caused untold amounts of damage.

It had swept through the back garden of the local MP, John Hayes, and then through the village green where three hundred year old oak trees stood in tatters with limbs ripped from their trunks and littering the grass below with debris.  After the green it had moved on to the parish church where it had ripped back the lead roof as though it were a flimsy sardine can and in the churchyard it had uprooted trees and gravestones and brought hundred year old skeletons to the surface.

It was calm now but there was a huge amount of damage which needed to be dealt with and although I had forgotten to bring with me the Council’s emergency procedure manual I got on the phone and called up a handful of people that I knew that I could rely upon in an emergency, Barry Bradley, Elmer Fischer and Jim Harvey who all responded immediately.  I called the police but they said they were busy and they would send someone along as soon as they could.

By this time John Hayes was walking around the green and surveying the damage with his young son in his arms.  He was looking up into the badly damaged trees and pointing out the dangerously swaying boughs that were broken off and might fall to the ground and crush him at any moment without any apparent regard for the danger he was in.  I ushered him away and cleared the green and talked a local resident to stop traffic driving through by redirecting it to an alternative route.

Eventually a police car arrived and the local constabulary had sent the most dim-witted constable that they could find to attend.  He was clueless!  I told him to tape off the green with some blue and white police incident tape and he tied it to the bumper of a car that was outside the village shop and within about two minutes of driving off!  I told him to put cones out but he said he hadn’t brought any with him and then I said that I thought he had better send for reinforcements.  Eventually a female PC turned up with a lot more brains than he had (not difficult) and after we found some cones in the churchyard we began to make some progress.

The most important thing to do was to make the trees safe so we called some tree surgeons and they went to work lopping the damaged branches.  This made John Hayes mad and he demanded to know on whose authority we were butchering his beloved oaks.  We were all working hard to clear the roads and the green and after an hour the vicar, the reverend Tim Barker, turned up to see the church.  This turned the WI members present into a hormonal frenzy and although there had been no refreshment for those of us doing the work the first thing they did was to put the kettle on and make him a cup of tea!

It took about four hours to get cleared up and finished and I’d like to say that at the end of it we left with the thanks and gratitude of the community ringing in our ears, but sadly I can’t.  Tim Barker didn’t say thank you, the police couldn’t wait to get away and John Hayes promised me that he would see to it personally that I would be disciplined for cutting back the trees. 

Subsequently the Church made an insurance claim for the damage to the roof and was ironically told that it wasn’t covered because a tornado is an act of God!  How do you explain that to anyone?  In a newspaper report the following week the police had the cheek to claim the credit for dealing with the emergency.  A couple of years later however I met John Hayes and he did grudgingly concede that the trees had recovered and the pruning had in fact done them good because now they looked better than ever before.

I don’t suppose that I will ever have to deal with another tornado but, believe me, that was a very exciting evening.

A Life in a Year – 6th June, Lincolnshire Roads and a Tenancy

In August 2000 I was appointed to a job at South Holland District Council in Spalding, Lincolnshire which is about sixty-five miles from what was my home in Ilkeston, Derbyshire.  In my previous job I had been used to travelling long distances (I once drove daily from Rugby to Southend for three years) so I assumed that this tiny distance would present no problems at all.

How wrong I was!

This turned out to be the most tortuous, energy sapping and soul destroying journey imaginable.  First of all I had to negotiate the city of Nottingham which is a busy place in early morning rush hour and then the long drag to Grantham and by now I had been on the road for an hour and was only just over half way there and about to begin the worst part of the journey.

Lincolnshire has no motorways and is also desperately short of dual carriageways and the A52 is a single carriageway nightmare.  It is permanently full of lorries from the south Lincolnshire food distribution centres, caravanners making for the coast and tractors, hundreds of tractors, who all seem to come out on the roads together at a time certain to cause maximum inconvenience to motorists.

If I was lucky I could do the journey in an hour and forty-five minutes but sometimes (especially going home on a Friday night) it could two hours!  Even though I was still driving the Onyx UK company car and they were fuelling it for me for six months as part of my redundancy deal this was not sustainable and when this perk disappeared and I had to pay for my own diesel I had to make alternative arrangements.

The solution was to rent a house and live closer to work and I found a delightful place in Moulton Seas End about seven miles from Spalding and what I was saving in fuel more than paid for the modest rent on the two bedroom, one hundred year old, ex agricultural farm workers cottage and on 6^th June 2001 I signed the tenancy agreement.

I don’t remember thinking that I would still be here ten years later but I enjoyed working at South Holland District Council and living in South Lincolnshire and after a while I came to consider it my natural home with a good job and an excellent quality of life.

Unfortunately, good things come to an end and with the Tory assault on the public sector the good job has gone and so has my happy enjoyment of Moulton Seas End and South Lincolnshire so after ten happy years I will soon be terminating the tenancy and starting a new life in the north of Lincolnshire instead, sad to go but happy to move on.

A Year in a Life – 12th March, Spalding, Warship Week and HMS TAKU

During the Second World War, the Royal Navy lost two hundred and fifty-four major warships in addition to over a thousand minor vessels and auxiliaries due to enemy action and to counter these losses a huge shipbuilding programme was begun.  The enormous expense involved forced the Government to appeal to the British people to assist in meeting the bill and weeks were set aside during which local communities were encouraged to save to adopt locally a warship. 

The weeks were organised by the National War Savings Committee and there were over one thousand ‘Warship Weeks’ organised during the campaign, involving 1,273 local authority districts.  The campaigns encouraged civilians to save their money in Government accounts, such as War Bonds, Savings Bonds, Defence Bonds and Savings Certificates. Each Council set its own target appropriate to the size and wealth of its population.  A small village for example might be able to sponsor something small such as a motor launch whereas a large city could aspire to reach the two million pounds that was required to buy a major battleship.  The national campaign raised £955,611,589 for the war effort and resulted in the adoption of 8 battleships, 4 aircraft carriers, 49 cruisers, 301 destroyers, 25 submarines, 164 corvettes and frigates and 288 minesweepers. 

Other national war campaigns were a ‘Wings For Victory’ Week to buy bomber planes, a ‘Spitfire Week’, a ‘War Weapons Week’ and a ‘Tanks For Attack’ Week. The purpose of all these campaigns was to finance the building of ships, tanks or aeroplanes that would then ‘belong‘ to the particular locality where the funding to build it had come from.

 

Communities that successfully raised the money required to construct a ship were able to ‘adopt’ a warship, receiving a shield from the Admiralty in recognition and often, in return, presenting ‘their ship’ with a commemorative plaque of their own.  In Spalding, the Urban District Council and the Rural District Council decided in October 1941 to hold a Warship Week in March 1942, and a target was set at £425,000 to adopt a submarine.  For two relatively small local authorities and a population of under thirty-five thousand people this must have been hugely ambitious especially when many similar size councils went instead for the much cheaper ‘buy a Spitfire’ option at only £12,000.

‘Warship Week’ was set for the 7^th to the 14^th March 1942 using the slogan “MAKE THE WEEK A SUCCESS BY LENDING MORE AND SPENDING LESS”.   Parades and exhibitions as well as fund raising events were held in Spalding and in all of the villages and at the end of the week, the total reached was £383,151, which averaged £10.18s.0d (£10.90) per head of population.   To raise this considerable amount of money was a monumental task and to put it into perspective, at today’s values this would be the equivalent of raising twelve million pounds in one week.

This effort was enough to fund the construction of a new submarine and because of this fantastic achievement Spalding & District adopted H.M. Submarine ‘Taku’, a ‘T’ Class, Patrol Type Submarine.  The ‘Taku’ was already in service and had been constructed by Cammell Laird of Birkenhead and had been launched on 20^th May 1939 and completed on 5^th January 1940 and had cost at that time around about £350,000.  The Royal Navy’s T class of submarines was designed in the 1930s and approved in 1936.  The prototype was called ‘Triton’ and completed in December 1938 and in total fifty-three ‘T’ class submarines were built just before and during the war.

This is a bit obvious but all ‘T’ class submarines had a name that started with the letter T.  ‘TAKU’ was a Chinese fort situated in Tientsin Province, a strongly fortified spot guarding the approach to Tientsin and Peking that had been captured by British and French fleets in 1860 and again by allied troops during the Boxer uprising of June 1900.

 

In June 1942, some of the crew visited Spalding and stayed with local families.  Led by the Royal Marine Band they marched from the Grammar School to the Market Place and at a ceremony that followed Rear Admiral Buckley and Lt. P C A Day who was the 2^nd in command of H.M.S. ‘TAKU’ exchanged plaques with the Spalding Urban and District Councils.  The submarine’s Jolly Roger flew from the Corn Exchange, which is now the South Holland Centre.  Dances and other entertainment were put on in Spalding and surrounding villages because, as the presentation took place during “Wings Week”, many servicemen were in town for the party.

Seventeen of the fifty-three submarines were lost to enemy action but the ‘Taku’ was a very successful submarine that managed to see out the entire war.  She sank 32,473 tonnes of enemy shipping plus an unconfirmed 10,000 tonne tanker and many small craft.  Until the end of 1940, she spent time patrolling off the coast of Norway and in January 1941, she went on patrol in the Bay of Biscay.  In February, she was damaged by heavy seas in the Atlantic on the way to Canada and had to be towed back to the Clyde for repairs but by April she was in the Mediterranean sinking a number of merchant ships and auxiliary vessels.  Returning to the Mediterranean in May 1942 she carried out twenty patrols, attacking and sinking enemy shipping and was part of ‘Operation Vigorous’, which was an attempt to re-supply Malta from Alexandria.  On 16^th December 1942 in the Doro Channel, she was attacked by patrol craft and was kept under water for thirty-six hours before successfully making an escape.   This would have been an especially unpleasant experience for the crew who were forced to breathe stale rancid air for all of that period.

On 20^th December, she successfully landed three Greek agents on a special mission and then went on to bombard Port Kurn hitting some small ships and warehouses.    She arrived in Beirut on 1 January 1943 and then went on to Malta to join the 10^th Submarine Flotilla but developed engine defects so had to return to the UK.  In June 1943, she returned to Southern Norway and the Skagerrak but on 13^th April 1944, just before eight o’clock, she was rocked by an explosion, which put out all lights and sprang several leaks.  She had run into a mine and had to abort her mission and return to harbour.  She could never return to full combat service because the explosion cracked the hull but she remained on active service until June 1945 and was sent to the breakers yard in 1946.