I took the photos above (click on them to see a larger view) yesterday at the inaugural Pride On The Pier event, held on the Pier and Pier Square Gardens in Erith. Despite some heavy and intermittent rain showers, the event was extremely well attended. As well as a large attendance from the LGBTQ+ community, many other local people turned up to provide support and to enjoy the events that took place during the day. Food and drink stalls, along with representatives from a number of charities were represented, along with a fire engine and members of the emergency services. Local MP Abena Oppong-Asare and several local councillors, including Nicola Taylor - one of the organisers of the event, were all present. I have yet to get feedback from the organisers, but such was the success of Pride On The Pier, that I hope the event will become a regular annual event in the local social calendar. Apart from the rain, the event was happy, good natured and relaxed. Prior to Pride On The Pier, I had some concerns about the possibility of the event being disrupted by far right and anti LBGTQ+ protesters. Happily my worries were completely unfounded. I will explain below.
As I have previously written, far right group Patriotic Alternative targeted the Drag Queen Story Hour at Bexleyheath Library last August. I had been concerned that they, or a new offspring fascist organisation may have targeted the Pride On The Pier festival - fortunately this did not happen. Patriotic Alternative promotes a white nationalist ideology and aims to combat what it calls the "replacement and displacement" of white British people by migrants who "have no right to these lands". They support deportation of people of "migrant descent", and would offer financially-incentivised repatriation for "those of immigrant descent who have obtained British passports". Patriotic Alternative opposes all immigration unless one has a shared cultural and ethnic background or who can prove British ancestry. According to Hope Not Hate, members of Patriotic Alternative have supported Holocaust denial, political violence and the white genocide conspiracy theory. They have targeted the LGBTQ+ community as allegedly being a danger to young children. Patriotic Alternative opposes Black Lives Matter and have displayed White Lives Matter banners around the UK. Patriotic Alternative was founded in July 2019 by the British neo-Nazi and antisemitic conspiracy theorist Mark Collett, the former director of publicity of the British National Party. The Times reported in October 2021 that Mark Collett attended combat training with former members of the now-proscribed neo-Nazi organisation National Action. The investigation also revealed that Kris Kearns, who leads Patriotic Alternative's "Fitness Club" initiative, was active in National Action before the group was banned. Sam Melia, a regional organiser for Patriotic Alternative, has previously been affiliated with National Action. Since the demonstration by Patriotic Alternative last August, the organisation has undergone a rift between members - something not uncommon in extremist organisations on both the left or right. According to analysis by anti-fascist research group Red Flare, a majority of Patriotic Alternative’s regional organisers have defected to form a new party called “Homeland”. The split has been led by Kenny Smith, a former BNP organiser, who in 2022 pleaded guilty to firearms offences. A leaked audio recording of an emergency meeting of Patriotic Alternative on the 20th of April shows how Collett pleaded with activists not to leave the party, which had been the most significant party on the far-right and recently gained prominence through protests outside hotels housing migrants and drag story hour events. Collett has long been considered a star of far-right politics, but he has lost the faith of a large number of his former followers. Party officers from every region, including Yorkshire (Collett and Melia’s region), as well as two thirds of the party’s website team have left the party have started a new group called Homeland. The group held its inaugural meeting on the 20th April, celebrated by neo-Nazis as the date of Adolf Hitler’s birthday. As well as Collett’s perceived arrogance, the split was caused by organisational and political problems. Activists have been left frustrated by Patriotic Alternative’s repeated failure to gain registration as a political party from the electoral commission, as well as a focus on online activism rather than real-life community organising. But much like Patriotic Alternative, Homeland’s members will have neo-Nazi politics beneath the surface. An investigation by Scottish investigative website the Ferret revealed how Smith posted in a neo-Nazi Telegram chat in which members posed with weapons, encouraging “true” national socialists to join Patriotic Alternative. According to the anti fascist group Red Flare, Homeland represents a dangerous new force on the far right. “While splits on the far right are often a cause for celebration for anti-fascists, the emergence of Homeland presents new dangers,” the group said in a recent online interview. "Homeland represents a distillation of PA’s most dangerous elements into something harder, more serious and better organised. It is important to emphasise that both Homeland and Patriotic Alternative are neo-Nazis and fascists: Holocaust denial and Hitler worship is rife among members of both organisations. This split is not ideological in nature – rather, it is the result of differences in strategy and approaches to organising. Homeland is entering a very different political landscape to the one in which Patriotic Alternative was created. The cost of living crisis and government rhetoric about refugees and the transphobic bile of the culture wars have created a toxic environment where a party like Homeland could thrive. Preventing them from benefiting from these conditions needs to become the top priority for anti-fascists. Homeland is now the most dangerous group on the British far right.” Comments and feedback as usual to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
This weeks’ local history article features author and historian Christopher Lee - namesake of the famous actor. Christopher Robin James Lee was born in Dartford in 1941; his name was a nod to his parents’ love of AA Milne. He was the only child of James Lee, a bus driver, and Winifred (née Robertson), a buyer for Bobby’s department store, and grew up on the Erith Marshes with church choir practice on Friday nights. “My father’s family were Kent fishermen,” he recalled. “I lived on the water. I felt at home there.” He learnt to sail in a small scull in the creeks of the Thames. “If somebody asked me, ‘How far is Shoeburyness?’ I’d reply, ‘If you catch the top of the tide it’s about four hours.’ I wouldn’t know in miles.” As a child he also lived in Bedonwell Road, Upper Belvedere. At age six he became acquainted with Erith public library in Walnut Tree Road, “the most wonderful bazaar of learning — and the warmest”. He adored those who worked there. “The first autograph I ever asked for was a librarian’s,” he said. “Must have been female,” quipped his first wife. His parents emigrated to Australia when he was 14, leaving him with an aunt. He was educated at Dartford Technical High School (later Wilmington Grammar School), but the upheavals scrambled his education and he was asked to leave, as he told History Today: “Misbehaviour, they said. Something about a pavilion that nearly burnt to the ground. Nowadays I would have had counselling and three weeks’ rehabilitation snorkelling in the Maldives. Not then. Parents were called. The headmaster, tall, cadaverous, black gowned, pointed a bony finger at the crested iron gates. We got the bus home.” Faced with an apprenticeship at the machine-tool factory where his grandfather worked, the 16-year-old Lee “did the obvious thing: I ran away to sea”. He ran away to sea on a tramp steamer, “one of the last that would seek dry cargo from port to port, never quite knowing where the next load might come from or where we would be asked to take it”. He sailed the world, discovering the pink bits from his atlas and recording “what he saw, what he felt and what he did” in school notebooks. Along the way he learnt to “stow salt from the Sudan, scrap from Texas, bags of sugar from Havana, and hills of phosphate from Nauru”. He recalled this “supreme gap year” in Eight Bells and Top Masts (2012), which he recreated from those notebooks. It came with the caveat that “what follows is part-fact and part- fiction — just like real life”. Yet if only a fraction was strictly true, it was a fascinating time with a remarkable cast of characters: “MacAuley, the hugely bewhiskered Mate who once designed shoes. Brown, the dour engineer. Butrell, the Yorkshire skipper who puts on his bowler hat when entering and leaving port. Wilson, who keeps a snake in his locker. Chong Ah Ping, the carpenter who sends all his money home to his two wives in Kowloon. Bevan, who once was a priest and is now the Second Mate.” After 19 months Lee returned to dry land determined to be a historian. After abandoning a course in English at what is now Goldsmiths, University of London, he joined one of the country’s first free newspapers, The News Shopper, as a reporter. The paper had been co-founded by David English, who went on to edit the Daily Mail, and after learning the tools of the trade, in 1967 Lee landed a job at the Daily Express. He acted as deputy to its celebrated investigative and defence writer Chapman Pincher, and became an assistant editor of the paper (1975-76). In addition, he served in the intelligence arm of the Royal Naval Reserve as a volunteer officer, and its communications centre at Chatham (1966-82). His Falkland war reporting was praised in a memo from BBC radio’s head of news for its “strength, quality and sobriety”. Lee strove to live up to an ideal. He stuck a sign on his office door by way of a reminder every time he went on air: “Be careful. They’re going to believe you.” Lee was invited by Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to become its first quatercentenary fellow in contemporary history. “I regarded this as earthly heaven,” he said. “I would have all the time in the world to research wherever I wished and, more or less, on whatever I wished.” During his five years there he played jazz trumpet and wrote scripts for The Archers. Thereafter he was a freelance writer and completed an MA in the history of ideas at Birkbeck College. Three decades later he wrote the outline of a simple history of the British Isles starting in 55BC with the arrival of Julius Caesar and concluding, at least initially, in 1901 with Queen Victoria’s death. “It was a bit old-fashioned in its style, strictly chronological, and not written for revisionists, nor indeed for other academics,” he told The Times Educational Supplement. The BBC called his work This Sceptred Isle, from a line in Shakespeare’s Richard II, and between June 1995 and June 1996 broadcast 216 daily episodes, each of 15 minutes, read by Anna Massey. The quotations were spoken by Paul Eddington, who died during production and whose role was completed by Peter Jeffrey. He wrote several radio plays, including Air-Force One (2013) examining what happened in the 90 minutes between the assassination of President Kennedy and the swearing-in of Lyndon B Johnson. His 30-plus books include the novel Nicely Nurdled, Sir!, a homage to his lifelong love of cricket, and From the Sea End, a history of Sussex County Cricket Club, as well as The Bath Detective, a whodunnit trilogy. Although he enjoyed female company, Lee also craved solitude. In later life, he owned a series of cottages in the West Country where he was largely alone save for Bertie Wooster, a blind rescue dog. One of the cottages had a 19th-century Wesleyan chapel in the garden that was his office. He kept a 32 ft sloop at Poole harbour, although work continued to encroach. “Within half an hour I can be on the boat, sailing round the Dorset coast, where I can drop anchor, put the kettle on and sit down with the laptop,” he said. He was partial to red wine and long lunches. He was also a great hoarder and behind every old cigarette box lay an engrossing yarn. As a young man he had flirted with the Anglican ministry, but a dozen years ago he was received into the Catholic Church. His daughter Victoria bought him an exercise bike, though he insisted on smoking a cigar as he pedalled. Having studied more than two millennia of British history, Lee concluded that the 20th century was the least interesting period. “It’s too predictable,” he complained. “Once it was proved that humans could build planes that would fly, learnt to talk to each other around the globe, and the 20th century produced its greatest invention, penicillin, all the rest comes across as refinement.” Christopher Lee died aged 79 from the effects of Covid-19 in March 2021.
There are changes coming to the method of payment for users of the Dartford River Crossing - which I believe have not been very well publicised to local drivers. The company processing the Dart charge is changing, and this may cause confusion amongst drivers who are not aware of the changes. A new service provider named Conduent has been appointed for the responsibility of vehicle identification, payment processing and account management. These changes and new banking requirements mean that Dart Charge account holders will need to re-validate their payment cards from July 28, 2023, including Pay as You Go customers. If no action is taken and the account is not revalidated, crossings will not be automatically paid due to invalid card payment details, which may result in a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) being issued. Full details of the changes can be found by clicking here.
Last week, Abena Oppong-Asare, MP for Erith and Thamesmead, raised the important issue of public access to defibrillators in parliament. The issue was highlighted to Abena by the experience of Erith and Thamesmead constituent, Bonnie McGhee, who works on the cardiology unit at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Bonnie sadly lost her father to cardiac arrest and has since successfully raised funds for a defibrillator in his memory. Access to a defibrillator may have saved his life. Research from the Resuscitation Council UK shows that access to defibrillators, or AEDs, is not fairly distributed across England. Each year, there are 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the UK, with less than one in ten surviving. Whilst immediate CPR and defibrillation can more than double the chances of survival, defibrillators are used in less than one in ten cases. If you have a cardiac arrest and have access to a defibrillator within a minute, you are 90% likely to survive. To save lives, defibrillators must be in a well-signposted location, unlocked and easy to find that members of the community can access immediately in an emergency. They must be maintained and ready for use. Information about defibrillator location is hard to come by. People do not know where to find them and how to use them. The Circuit is a national database of defibrillators but it is incomplete, meaning that emergency services may not be able to direct someone to save a life. Abena says, “Knowing where a defibrillator is and how to use one saves lives. Learning simple resuscitation skills can make all the difference in an emergency. The Government needs to listen on this issue and help save lives.”
As some readers may already be aware, Southeastern are planning on permanently closing the staffed ticket offices at the following railway stations:- Albany Park, Barnehurst, Belvedere, Bexleyheath, Bickley, Blackheath, Brixton, Bromley North, Catford Bridge, Charlton, Chelsfield, Clock House, Deptford, Eden Park, Elmers End, Erith, Falconwood, Hayes (Bromley), Hither Green, Kent House, Kidbrooke, Knockholt, Ladywell, Lee, Lower Sydenham, Maze Hill, New Beckenham, New Cross, Penge East, Plumstead, Shortlands, Slade Green, St Johns, Sundridge Park, Sydenham Hill, Welling, Westcombe Park, West Dulwich, West Wickham, and Woolwich Dockyard. Across the country, only 12 per cent of rail tickets were sold at ticket offices last year, according to the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), with the rest bought online or from vending machines. The RDG conveniently ignore the fact that many travellers are forced to purchase tickets online, as many of the ticket offices listed above are hardly ever open anyway - forcing customers to use other methods. This is especially true of Belvedere, Erith and Slade Green stations. I am certain that more customers would buy their tickets at ticket offices if the opportunity was actually there for them so to do. You can read more about the situation on the excellent 853 Blog by Darryl Chamberlain here.
The end video this week is a drivers eye view of the relatively new 180 bus service. The short film shows the route from its start in North Greenwich to its' terminus in Fraser Road, Erith, adjacent to the Quarry housing development. Comments, queries and suggestions to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
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