Monday, December 03, 2012

Feeling philosophical

It's that time of year. Winter has set in. It's about three weeks to my birthday. I'm busy researching for a book I want to write about my ancestors. I'm looking at transcripts of the West Briton from the 1830 and 1840s. Life was hard then.
The people who transcribed the papers have made a hard task easier by putting any names in capital letters which means that you can scan the text rather than read every word. So many people. So many lives.
Most of those who have gone before are long forgotten, yet the scant accounts in news articles and books give a hint to who they were. I'm trying to flesh out a host of little titbits, entries in a register, scraps of information gleaned from books and articles, in order to tell a story, one that not only satisfies my curiosity about who I am and where I came from, but one that will have a wider appeal.
For many years we've holidayed in Cornwall and invariably spent time in the town where I grew up. As we get older, our conversation inevitably turns to the possibility of moving back there.
There are of course, the problems of affordability and whether my health issues would be better served by remaining here.
Our ancestors had no such dilemmas. When the town of Hayle died just over a hundred years ago, my ancestors had to move. Move or starve.
Most of our ancestors lived and died and are forgotten. A few have left a mark.
And us? When we go, will we leave a mark, or a stain? If we move, will we move to live, or move to die?

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Apologies for absence

I've been busy on a host of other projects so haven't blogged here for months. I read this today and thought it apt for our times. It was written by William Playfair, inventer of the bar and pie-charts at the turn of the 19th Century ":...wealth and power have never been long permanent in any place. ...they travel over the face of the earth, something like a caravan of merchants. On their arrival, every thing is found green and fresh; while they remain all is bustle and abundance, and, when gone, all is left trampled down, barren, and bare." Never a truer word spoken. Look around you. All those factories- gone. All those shops- boarded up. All those jobs- in China and South East Asia.... for the time being.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Is home ownership a barrier to economic recovery?



I've been doing a fair bit of research into my family history. It has involved poring over census records trying to trace my ancestors. You notice all sorts of entries in passing and this one caught my eye:

1881 Census
Trelissick Terrace, Hayle
John Winter Head M 44 Ship Builder Scotland
Margaret Winter Wife M 44 Scotland
Margaret M Winter Daur S 20 Milliner Dress Northumberland, Newcastle
John E Winter Son S 17 Ship Builder Northumberland, Newcastle
Edith Winter Daur S 13 Scholar Durham, West Hartlepool
Maud E Winter Daur S 10 Scholar Durham, West Hartlepool
George J Winter Son S 4 Scholar Hampshire, Southampton

Ok, so what do we have here? It's 1881 and Hayle is a town in the far west of Cornwall. The west end of Hayle is called Foundry, named after the foundry where Harveys of Hayle built the huge Cornish beam engines. Harveys also built ships- iron ships. Harveys were the first firm IN THE WORLD to successfully install a steam engine in an iron ship. As usual the Admiralty were having none of it and it was thirty years before the idea of steam powered ships or even iron ships caught on. Isambard Kingom Brunel was a frequent visitor to Hayle, and many of the parts of his most famous bridges- the Clifton Suspension bridge in Bristol and the Royal Albert bridge at Saltash were manufactured in Hayle. Clifton Terrace which overlooks the harbour was built and named when the contract for the bridge was won.

Harveys built a number of ships, mostly tugs and river steamers and would have employed a lot of men in the shipyard. They would have come from all over the country- hence the appearance of the Winter family in 1881.

From the record you can see that John and his wife Margaret were scottish and when first married would have moved to the shipyards on the Tyne to work. The eldest two children were born there.
Later they moved to Hartlepool and the shipyards there. They were there for at least three years, possibly five, as their next two children were born there.
In 1875/6 they'd moved to Hampshire, once again to work in the shipyards. Finally in 1881 we find them in Hayle.
By now the eldest two were working locally, one as a dressmaker and the eldest son in the shipyard with his father.
But times were changing. In 1881 Harveys imposed a 10% pay cut on the workers. The mines had all closed and thousands had emigrated or moved to other mining areas in the UK. The shipyard struggled on. The last ship it built was the largest at 4000 tons and was launched in 1891.
So what happened to the Winters? They don't appear in the 1891 census for Hayle. They'd moved on. John Winter would have been in his 50s and his youngest child would have started work. There was no unemployment benefit, no health service, no housing benefit. You worked or you starved.
If there was no work in your town, you moved to where there was work. Cornwall's men moved abroad in their thousands, so much so that most of my female ancestors (my great grandparents' siblings) never married. There were no available eligible men. My great aunts lived at home with their ageing parents and worked as dressmakers.

In the UK the trend since the end of the Second World War has been to own your house. It is something many people aspire to. I understand that this is peculiar to the British. The Germans seem happy to live in rented accomodation.

Home ownership has been a boon to many- if you bought your home 50 years ago you are sitting on a gold mine. I work in a solicitors and occasionally get a glimpse of old conveyance documents. In the fifties a house in this town would sell for a few hundred pounds. That same house today would cost up to £150,000. In the sixties my parents bought our house in London as sitting tenants. It cost £2600. Today those houses are worth £750,000!
There is a diminishing return however. We bought our house 20 years ago and it's now worth three times what we paid for it. A house bought ten years ago is only worth twice a much, etc etc.

One wonders why all the effort and expense to buy a house that ties you to a particular location? A hundred and thirty years ago we had a mobile workforce that could move to where the work was to be found.
Now we don't.

Have the presumed blessings and benefits of the Wefare State become a curse?

We have thousands of people looking for work, and apparently have thousands of vacancies. We have upwards of a quarter of a million migrant workers from Eastern Europe paying rent and doing all manner of jobs that our university educated youth consider beneath them, or pay so "poorly" that they cannot afford to come off benefits. There's also a whole underclass of unemployables who produce nothing but children. The Ancient Romans called them the Proletariat so it's not a new phenomenon.

How can we break the cycle that will inevitably result in the destruction of this country of ours, an outcome that mirrors the fall of the Roman Empire 1500 years ago?

One small step might be to remove the stigma that appears to taint the idea of paying rent for your home. My son is typical of the viewpoint. He wants to buy a house because he thinks that in twenty five or thirty years he will have something to show for all his mortgage payments. But will he?
It's true that those who bought houses fifty, forty or thirty years ago have made huge profits. But that won't happen in the future. The cost of getting on the housing ladder is already beyond most people's ability to pay, and it could be argued that the monthly mortgage payment is pricing many out of the jobs market.

I'm Cornish and the idea of moving back there is appealing but for two glaring points.
The first is the cost of housing in Cornwall. The locals can't afford to buy houses, and neither can I. I happen to live in one of the cheaper parts of the East Midlands, which suited me when I was moving to the area, but it means that I can't afford the same size house anywhere else in the country.

Home ownership stifles mobility.

The second point is the wages in Cornwall. They are far below the national average. If i could find a house I could afford, could I find a job that paid enough?

Home ownership stifles mobility.

It could well be that there's a job going down there that only I can fill. The vacancy may go unfilled because I can't move there to take it.

Unless I rent.
Food for thought?

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

The Great Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962


Never heard of it? I'm not surprised. These days the media make a huge fuss over extreme weather events, and some claim they are proof of Climate Change or Global Warming. I beg to differ.

In 1962 my family moved from Cornwall to London. It was in July. We'd no sooner got settled in our new home when we experienced the wettest August Bank Holiday since records began. Our house looked out (to the rear) at the huge Kensal Green gasometer and we could see the rain flowing off the structure in rivers. The drains could not cope. A few months later, following the Guy Fawkes night where everyone in London had a bonfire, we had the worst smog ever. I used to walk to school and for the three weeks that it lasted you could not see the other side of the road. All noise was muffled and buses drove carefully along with headlights on full- even at midday, the drivers straining to see the bus stops. For Parliament it was the last straw. Within a few months they'd passed the Clean Air Act, which prohibited coal fires and bonfires in London, and they never had another smog like it. The air was foul. You could taste it. If you breathed through a handkerchief it soon became filthy with soot and smuts. Eventually the rain fell and cleared it away.
We had a couple of weeks of "normal" weather before it snowed on Boxing Day. I know we all sing about "White Christmases" but it was no joke. The snow didn't clear. It froze hard and stayed frozen for about three months.
We had no central heating. Very few people did. I was thirteen and my daily chore was to take our old pram to a coal merchants off Southern Row, about 500 yards away. The coalman would fill my sack with 56lb of coal and I'd wheel it home, stopping to collect a gallon of paraffin for the heater in the kitchen. That was the extent of our heating. A coal fire in the living room (which I'd clean and light every morning), and an old paraffin heater in the kitchen.
We survived.

But back to March 1962. I'd forgotten when this occurred until I read an account in Wattsupwiththat a couple of days ago.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/06/50-years-ago-the-great-atlantic-storm-of-1962/

The author describes the damage caused to the eastern seaboard of the US, but the same storm wreaked havoc in Cornwall, most notably in Penzance.
I used to travel by train from Hayle to my school in Penzance. We knew there's been a storm in the night, but when the train was terminated at Marazion and we had to get on buses to continue, we realised that it had been serious.
I sat upstairs in the bus and we saw that Mounts Bay was full of ships sheltering from the storm. The storm had hit land at Penzance, which was unusual in itself as it's sheltered from the prevailing winds. As we neared Penzance station we could see that the sea had washed away some of the trackbed and the harbour was severely damaged. Huge blocks of granite had been lifted and tossed aside. I could only guess at the power of the sea that could do that.

The WUWT article caused me to look up to see if there was anything on the net about the storms. I found two sites
http://picturepenzance.co.uk/photos/showimage.php?i=14759&c=373
And here
http://freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~treevecwll/pzseaashwed.htm

Here's one of the photos. If you know Penzance Promenade you will be amazed at the damage caused.

And here's a picture I took of a storm hitting Penzance in 2006. Just not in the same league.

That 1962 storm must have been one of the biggest to hit these shores

Friday, February 24, 2012

Wise words from a wise man


I was over at wattsupwiththat and he drew my attention to an article first published over 60 years ago. Bertrand Russell wrote it, and you can find it here:
http://www.panarchy.org/russell/decalogue.1951.html

As someone commented, some of it can be summed up simply:
Be sure your sins will find you out.
Or as Blanchard & Peale wrote in their book "The power of ethical management":
There ain't no right way to do a wrong thing

Russell wrote:
The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1.
Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2.
Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4.
When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5.
Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9.
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

The wheels are falling off the Man Made Global Warming bandwagon. Mr Gore and his cronies might wish to look at what a very wise man wrote all those years ago..

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Quote of the day


“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

—George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose“, 1946

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Water water everywhere...



" Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink."

Coleridge wrote this poem over two hundred years ago, and yes, I studied it for English Literature at grammar school back in the 60s. Back when grammar schools served an important function- that of educating the lower classes so that they could run the Empire and the Civil Service. The upper classes run the country, but needed useful idiots like me to do the actual work. These days there is no Empire, no industry and computers do all the donkey work so that all that is needed are box tickers and paper shufflers.

The papers are full of the news that our reservoirs are empty, despite the fact that we sit slap bang in the path of the Gulf Stream and tons and tons of rain fall on us every year. Every year we have floods, yet we also have constant drought. Why?

Two hundred years ago a ragged band of labourers armed only with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows transformed the land, making it possible to travel by boat from one end of the country to the other. They were called Navigators, shortened to navvies, and their efforts were ultimately doomed by the coming of the railway age. However, by and large, their canals and waterways still criss cross the country.

It's become a modern fad for the Prime Minister of the day to leave a legacy, a mark.
Bliar built a white elephant by the Thames. It was called the Millennium Dome and when it was announced what was going to be in it, some nonsense about the Body Zone etc, I realised that it was the reincarnation of Corby's Wonderworld project that was going to be the tourist attraction to draw millions to a former ironstone quarry.

(Read about it here- http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A787809)

The government spent millions and millions on the Dome, then gave it away.
So much for Bliar's legacy.

We all know Brown's legacy. He promised an end to boom and bust, and them presided over the biggest financial meltdown in history, all the while proclaiming that he'd saved the banks (and in a famous slip of the tongue- saved the world).



Cameron has put his name on the planned HS2 rail line, an idea that would appear to be European in origin. The route chosen has caused uproar, and according to Wikipedia
"Arup, which did the engineering work to identify routes for HS2 Ltd., has opposed the chosen route for HS2 (route 3) calling it "deeply flawed" It says the route should link to Heathrow and then follow the M40 motorway and Chiltern railway line, improving the business case, lowering construction costs and creating less impact on the countryside."
Another flawed idea chosen by a flawed man looking for a legacy project.

There is no justifiable excuse for our reservoirs to run out of water- ever.
If a few navvies can create a network of waterways with a few simple implements, whay can't this once great country use those same waterways, with a few extra pumping stations and some underground pipeline, move the water around the country from where it falls in abundance to where it is used?

Now wouldn't that be a legacy?