Wednesday, 23 September 2009
VTF1255
VTF1255. Yet another anonymous number on a nasty-green steel security door. "Warning. These premises are protected by Hackney Council". The "premises" were once a home, a family, a life. For VTF1255 it was the home of Lilian Karpin, committed Labour Party member when - long ago - that meant fighting for genuine values and integrity. She was a wonderfully generous and fair-minded lady. Did any slick, busy, promotion-hungry New Labour politician ever pass by to say hello? Maybe at election time. Maybe to make sure of the vote. Maybe.......
We salute Lilian Karpin and the many decent, honest folk like her. And damn VTF1255.
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
3 September 1939
'Talking Point' by Councillor Ian Sharer, leader of Hackney Council's Liberal Democrat group, for the 'Hackney Gazette', 3 September 2009
I'm sure there are still many Hackney residents who will remember where they were this day seventy years ago. They will have heard the lugubrious tones of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, declaring over the radio that this country was at war with Germany. How many, I wonder, realised how profoundly that short announcement would affect them over the succeeding years? And how many of us now have any real understanding of the impact of that moment on our present lives?
It was only a month previously that the 'Hackney Gazette' had assured its readers that "the ordinary citizen may go on his holidays without any alarms or qualms". It seems ironic that it was glorious weather at the beginning of that September. Thoughts of battle and bloodshed appeared deceptively unreal. Yet throughout Hackney sandbags were being assembled and air-raid shelters prepared. Trenches were being dug in Stoke Newington. Evacuation was in full swing in Hoxton: according to the 'Gazette's reporter, "Thousands of parents, principally mothers, accompanied their children to the school gates. Here there were many affecting farewells but for the most part mothers and children accepted the situation as inevitable and did their best to brighten up."
Evidently the new black-out regulations didn't go down well with some citizens - complaints abound of over-officious wardens and police call-outs to break up squabbles - and there are sightings of a new "road pest", the local authority official dashing around the streets with 'Air Raid Precaution Priority' emblazoned over his car.
Some emergency measures, however, look as if they might be singularly sensible today: the Defence Regulations order prohibiting the purchase of excessive amounts of food, for example, or the provision of 'growing spaces' for residents to grow their own food with help to purchase plants and tools - a project remarkably similar to Islington Council's imaginative 'Edible Islington' initiative in the present day.
Inevitably normal life went on. A young hooligan, put on probation for harassing his neighbours, is described by the local constable as suffering from a "swelled head". Stores of potassium chloride and detonators for making bombs are discovered in Clapton. Arsenal, as always, "are confident that the coming season will be more successful". 'The Secret Service of the Air' is showing at the Stoke Newington Savoy starring Ronald Reagan. The ruling Labour group on one of the local councils dissolves in acrimony amidst shouts of 'Dictator!' hurled at the Mayor. There are protests about "the adverse effect of delayed rebuilding whereby large and ugly vacant spaces are left derelict to the detriment of local residents". Nothing new there, then!
What comes across so strongly from the local press reports seventy years ago is the all-pervading poverty, the domestic violence caused by necessary penny-pinching, the lack of decent clothes for evacuated children, the poor health. Little wonder that even as the first air-raid sirens were sounding, the 'Gazette' was demanding completion of a previous Liberal Government's health insurance reforms - soon to be realised in the attack by another great Liberal reformer, William Beveridge, on "the Five Giant Evils of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness" and the creation of the National Health Service.
I'm sure there are still many Hackney residents who will remember where they were this day seventy years ago. They will have heard the lugubrious tones of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, declaring over the radio that this country was at war with Germany. How many, I wonder, realised how profoundly that short announcement would affect them over the succeeding years? And how many of us now have any real understanding of the impact of that moment on our present lives?
It was only a month previously that the 'Hackney Gazette' had assured its readers that "the ordinary citizen may go on his holidays without any alarms or qualms". It seems ironic that it was glorious weather at the beginning of that September. Thoughts of battle and bloodshed appeared deceptively unreal. Yet throughout Hackney sandbags were being assembled and air-raid shelters prepared. Trenches were being dug in Stoke Newington. Evacuation was in full swing in Hoxton: according to the 'Gazette's reporter, "Thousands of parents, principally mothers, accompanied their children to the school gates. Here there were many affecting farewells but for the most part mothers and children accepted the situation as inevitable and did their best to brighten up."
Evidently the new black-out regulations didn't go down well with some citizens - complaints abound of over-officious wardens and police call-outs to break up squabbles - and there are sightings of a new "road pest", the local authority official dashing around the streets with 'Air Raid Precaution Priority' emblazoned over his car.
Some emergency measures, however, look as if they might be singularly sensible today: the Defence Regulations order prohibiting the purchase of excessive amounts of food, for example, or the provision of 'growing spaces' for residents to grow their own food with help to purchase plants and tools - a project remarkably similar to Islington Council's imaginative 'Edible Islington' initiative in the present day.
Inevitably normal life went on. A young hooligan, put on probation for harassing his neighbours, is described by the local constable as suffering from a "swelled head". Stores of potassium chloride and detonators for making bombs are discovered in Clapton. Arsenal, as always, "are confident that the coming season will be more successful". 'The Secret Service of the Air' is showing at the Stoke Newington Savoy starring Ronald Reagan. The ruling Labour group on one of the local councils dissolves in acrimony amidst shouts of 'Dictator!' hurled at the Mayor. There are protests about "the adverse effect of delayed rebuilding whereby large and ugly vacant spaces are left derelict to the detriment of local residents". Nothing new there, then!
What comes across so strongly from the local press reports seventy years ago is the all-pervading poverty, the domestic violence caused by necessary penny-pinching, the lack of decent clothes for evacuated children, the poor health. Little wonder that even as the first air-raid sirens were sounding, the 'Gazette' was demanding completion of a previous Liberal Government's health insurance reforms - soon to be realised in the attack by another great Liberal reformer, William Beveridge, on "the Five Giant Evils of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness" and the creation of the National Health Service.
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