Heat.

As has happened during many hot and dry summers in the past, the local area has been subject to yet more grass fires. In the last week alone there have been two fires located in the Whitehall Open Space, adjacent to Slade Green Station, as can be seen in the image above - thanks to the reader - who prefers to remain anonymous, who sent me the photograph. Please click on it to see a larger view. A number of local residents who could smell smoke but not see the grass fire were concerned that it was another fire located at the notorious scrapyard in Manor Road, Erith operated by the large recycling company EMR, but fortunately this was not the case. As has happened in previous droughts, the large area of open grassland in Slade Green has been the subject of fires almost every year when the weather gets hot. I believe that this is due to a combination of factors, including vandals deliberately setting fire to the dried out grass, people dropping lit cigarettes, and pieces of broken glass acting as magnifying glasses and setting fire to the tinder dry grass through the action of the sun. At the time of writing the current cause of the two fires that have happened in the last week is unknown, but unfortunately it has now become a regular occurrence. Fortunately, I am now led to believe that no disruption was caused to either London-bound or Kent-bound trains travelling through Slade Green Station due to the fire. 

Last October I wrote at some length about the historic The One Bell pub in Crayford, and its connection to the Chartist movement in the early to mid 19th century. The Chartists were historic predecessors of the later Socialist and Labour movement. They were a group of men (no women’s suffrage back then) who wanted electoral rights for the working classes. The central tenets of the Chartist movement were:- 1) a vote for every man over the age of 21 who was of sound mind and not undergoing punishment for a crime. 2) All ballots to be held in secret. 3) No requirement to be a property holder for members of Parliament, thus enabling rich or poor to stand for election equally. 4) MP’s to receive a living wage – meaning rich or poor could represent a constituency. 5) Equal constituency sizes – enabling the same amount of representation for the same number of electors. 6) Annually elected parliaments – the theory being that a rich man might be able to win an election through bribery if elections were held every five or seven years, but if it was held every year, even those with the deepest pockets could not keep paying bribes to throw the result in their favour. Chartists were pioneers of social justice and equal rights for all; they were also opposed to any form of state sponsored religion. Since then I have discovered that one of the leaders of the Chartist movement, who spent several months living either in or very close to The One Bell pub was an eccentric Welshman called Dr. William Price. As well as being one of the founders of the Chartist movement, he was at times also a nudist, an arch druid and the original inspiration for the formation of the National Health Service. Once he had qualified as a surgeon after serving an apprenticeship starting in 1814, he became interested in both Welsh nationalist politics and socialist activity. As a result of this, he founded a cooperative society to pay medical costs for working people in the South of Wales, and later in both South and East London and parts of North Kent. This was the direct inspiration for Aneurin Bevan to create the post-World War II National Health Service. Following the failure of the Chartist uprising in 1839, which I have written about in the past, he fled to Paris disguised as a woman. Later he returned to his native Wales where he dressed in an extremely eccentric manner. He often wore what he considered to be Druidic costume; he grew his hair long and went about dressed in a headdress made of fox skin, which he thought conferred the power to heal. From very early on in his life, he opposed the idea of marriage because he believed it enslaved women, instead he moved in with a woman called Ann Morgan and in 1842 they had a daughter whom he baptised as the Countess of Glamorgan. To try and demonstrate his influence in 1855, he led a procession through the streets of the then iron smelting town of Merthyr Tydfil, accompanied by a naked man who called himself Merlin, a goat and a deputation of the nationalist local population, who conducted themselves exclusively in the Welsh language and greeted each other with a secret handshake. Later he was once again forced to escape to France after he ran up large debts, and thus avoided debtor's prison. When he was eventually able to return to Wales when the furore over his escapades had died down, he discovered his lady friend had died, and his daughter was now an adult. After this he had a relationship with another woman and a son resulted from this, although tragically, this son died as a baby, something that was extremely common at the time. Price attempted to cremate the body of his late son, something which at the time was considered by many to be abhorrent, and indeed potentially illegal. As a result of this Dr. Price was prosecuted, but successfully defended himself in court and the case was dismissed as a result. Following this, The 1902 Cremation Act was passed. As an elderly man, he had a relationship with another woman, resulting in two more children. He never formally married. Price died aged 92, and he was indeed cremated in a public ceremony attended by over 20,000 spectators. His funeral pyre insisted of two tons of best quality Welsh coal. Whilst a statue was erected in Wales in 1982, there is currently no commemoration of his contribution to the Chartist and later the Labour movement locally. Dr Price was certainly an eccentric, and some might say somewhat unhinged individual, but he did have a direct influence on what was to become the NHS, so in a way he already has a nationwide monument, it is just unfortunate that most people do not know of its origins. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

We have had another forthcoming technology birthday in the next week; on the 18th of August, it will be the 30th anniversary of the launch of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0. You may wonder why version three of the early web browser would be heralded, rather than version one, Well, in reality Internet Explorer 3.0 was really the first version of the browser as modern users would see it. Microsoft were actually quite late in producing a web browser, and another software company - Netscape Communications - produced a product called Netscape Navigator, which for a couple of years in the early 90's was the de facto web browser of choice. The launch of Internet Explorer 3.0 was an important event in the so-called browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape. in 1993 developers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications thought the World Wide Web could be quite big if it were easier to use – say, with a client that sported a GUI (Graphic User Interface) rather than a text interface. That effort produced a browser called Mosaic, and one of its developers – a chap named Marc Andreessen – quickly created a commercial version of it, which he initially called Mosaic Netscape and started a company to market it. Netscape took off, as did the web. Microsoft saw the web's potential and started work on a browser that became Internet Explorer 1.0. That work happened during Microsoft's massive push to create Windows 95 and give the world a cut of Windows that improved on the illogical user interface that was Windows 3.1. Microsoft felt that Windows 95 was the product that would see it reach Bill Gates's goal of "a microcomputer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software." But as Netscape grew in popularity and the potential for a GUI-driven web became ever-more apparent, Microsoft knew it could only achieve that goal if Windows 95 included the Internet Explorer 1.0  web browser. Versions of Windows 95 supplied pre - installed on new computers had Internet Explorer 1.0, but a majority of users at the time opted to update their existing PC's with the then new operating system. The version of Windows 95 boxed and sold in shops (those were the days...) did not ship with the web browser at all - lead times for printing, packaging, and distribution made its inclusion impossible. Internet Explorer 2.0 came along a few months after the launch of Windows 95 but it again lacked features available in Netscape. The Microsoft browsers never gained much market share. Bill Gates of Microsoft invested heavily in the next, critical version - Internet Explorer 3.0. This version of the web browser was intentionally almost impossible to uninstall from a Windows 95 computer, and would also detect and overwrite certain Netscape Navigator Windows registry files if it detected it installed on a PC. Microsoft defended that on grounds that some of those components made it easier for developers to include HTML forms in their Windows products. Others saw it differently and IE's persistence became a key element of antitrust action against Microsoft that, for a time, looked like it could see the corporation broken up. American Courts eventually decided on less severe remedies. Internet Explorer 3.0 was given away free by Microsoft, which was deliberately aimed at breaking Netscape's hold on the international web browser market, as Netscape Navigator was at the time a paid for product. While Netscape began with about 80 percent of the market share, and a good deal of public goodwill, as a relatively small company deriving the great bulk of its income from what was essentially a single product (Netscape Navigator and its derivatives), it was financially vulnerable. The company's total revenue never exceeded the income generated by Microsoft's funds that were readily available for use. Microsoft's resources allowed them to make Internet Explorer available without charge, as the revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and marketing. As a result, Internet Explorer 4.0 was provided free for all Windows and Macintosh users, unlike Netscape which was free for home and educational use but would require a paid licence for business use, which put off a lot of potential users. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with every copy of Windows, which had an over 90 percent share of the desktop operating system market, allowing the company to obtain market share more easily than Netscape, as customers already had Internet Explorer installed as the default browser. In this time period, many new computer purchasers had never extensively used a web browser before. Consequently, the buyer did not have anything else to compare with and little motivation to consider alternatives; the set of abilities they had gained with access to the Internet and the World Wide Web made any difference in browser features or ergonomics pale in comparison. Microsoft went on to produce Internet Explorer versions 5.0 and 6.0, but work on subsequent versions ceased for several years, as Microsoft had "won" the browser war, and did not feel that any further development would be profitable. The story of what happened next, and how Microsoft eventually were overtaken by a couple of superior competitors can wait for another time. Suffice to say, in retrospect. Microsoft won the web browser battle, but ended up dramatically losing the war to others. Nowadays the most popular web browser is Chrome by Google.

Next Wednesday - the 19th August will mark the thirty seventh anniversary of a notorious event - one which had severe implications to both British and European Union law, and also had a profound impact on the right to free speech in the pre World Wide Web era. On Saturday the 19th August 1989 representatives from the Dutch PTT and the British DTI travelled out into the international waters of the North Sea (where they had absolutely no legal jurisdiction, as was later proved in court) and boarded the Ross Revenge, home of Radio Caroline, where they smashed the transmitters and damaged the generators and illegally removed all of the studio gear and records from the library. Several of the Dutch PTT officers were armed with revolvers and some uncooperative Caroline crew members were both physically attacked, and verbally threatened. Much of this raid was broadcast live on air to most of Europe, before the transmitter was put offline and the valves smashed. I was out in Bexleyheath doing some shopping when this happened, but when I returned to my parents house, my sister played me a cassette recording of the events. Ironically I was already involved with the station at this point, and had been on board the Ross Revenge only two weeks previously. My photos were some of the last taken prior to the raid, and copies were used in evidence in the later court case. Caroline’s shore based management were racing down from North London to get out to the Ross Revenge as quickly as possible – a light aircraft was chartered to fly over the ship, and a speedboat was commandeered to get Peter Moore, the station manager and a couple of engineering staff on site as quickly as possible. Meanwhile I met up with the staff of local land based pirate radio station Radio Lumberjack in the Fox pub in Nuxley Road, Upper Belvedere where we had a council of war. Friend Captain Colin brought along his giant Land Rover V8 station wagon (a vehicle fitted with two RSJ girders on the front in lieu of a conventional bumper bar – Colin believed in crumple zones, just as long as they only involved the other vehicle).  We decided we would head into town and try and get onto as many radio stations with the story as we could. Suffice to say that Radio Caroline was back on air in only a few weeks; in fact it should not have come on air when it did. I was one of the team that had arranged for a very large supply run of fuel, drinking water, food, replacement transmitter parts and new records to be sent out to the Ross Revenge from a secret port in Kent (the Gravesend Canal basin) on a ship called the M.V Galexy (not a typo) – a former Tyne ferry boat that was featured in the classic Michael Caine crime thriller “Get Carter”.  We were ready to go for a very quiet and stealthy “fishing” trip when Caroline came back on air, and the authorities were alerted that the station was not dead after all. Caroline management got into a furious row over the correct policy and course of action and the supply run had to be delayed, though it eventually went ahead. Some months later with the ship, transmitters and studios patched up, I chucked in my day job and went to work for Radio Caroline. All a very long time ago now. Caroline may no longer be broadcasting from the North Sea, but they are now a very important presence online on DAB+, streaming online via smart speakers and internet radios, and on 648 KHz Medium Wave – you can read more about the station and also listen to their programmes by clicking here. The British Department of Trade and Industry had chartered a former Trinity House pilot boat, the M.V Landward. Some weeks after it was involved in the raid, we got word that it was moored in Gillingham Marina. A sympathiser had been speaking to the owner, who was smugly boasting of how much money the British government had paid him to take officials out to the Ross Revenge at its mooring fifteen miles off the North Foreland. A small team of Caroline shore staff paid the Landward a visit late one night after everyone had gone home. There had been some debate about whether we should pour a couple of bags of Lime into the bilges; this would quickly eat through the wooden hull and sink the ship. We decided that as Caroline preached a philosophy of peace and non - violence, known as Loving Awareness that this would be inappropriate. Instead when the owner came back on board the Landward the next day, he found a Radio Caroline car sticker neatly stuck on the wheelhouse window on the inside, with no sign of the door lock being forced, and no signs of any damage. We later found out that he had been incredibly rattled by this - as it sent the message "we know who you are, and what you did, and we are watching you". He was looking over his shoulder for months afterwards! He never discovered how we did it, which to be honest was a bit of a Happy Shopper "Mission: Impossible" project. Our informer was the owner of the yard, who was a big Caroline fan; the owner of the Landward left the keys to the ship in the yard office when he went home - we just borrowed them, opened the wheelhouse door, put up the sticker and locked the door back up. Simple but very effective.

The end video this week is from a local  person that I have not featured before. The public spirited chap is called Liam, and he collects and cleans up illegally fly tipped rubbish from around the London Borough of Bexley, to be properly and responsibly disposed of. His popular YouTube channel has nearly 43,000 subscribers. Comments and feedback as always to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.