I had several fascinating responses to my Blog update last Sunday; indeed one regular reader and occasional contributor put together the following piece of feedback to the article I published on concerns about the future of the Gravesend to Tilbury ferry service. Jeff writes:- "I have occasionally used the ferry-to access some walks in Thurrock (Coastal Path, Thames Estuary Path). A few observations:- 1. One group of users not mentioned - school children from north of the river, heading to Kent's grammars (related to me by one of the more talkative crew members). 2. Thurrock is absolutely broke - the equivalent of 'Special Measures'. The reason is included in BBC One - Panorama, The Millionaire Who Cheated a Council The heading tells you all you need to know but otherwise The Sunshine Millionaire: How one man took £130m from British taxpayers — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (en-GB) (thebureauinvestigates.com) is a text version. Last September they had to terminate (I'm almost sure) all subsidised bus services. I've tried to find a reference - certainly all the ones I know of have gone. I don't think they would not be allowed to subsidise anything without ministerial interference. Public Transport is not an essential service. 3. The service is not particularly well advertised, especially at the rail stations. At Tilbury Town Station, the ferry terminal is referred to as Tilbury Riverside. There is a bus which links them (as well as calling at several other places). I found out by observation that if you have a ticket from the Town station (operator - C2C) , you can catch the bus for free. Does it work for SouthEastern - don't know but anyone would probably get away with it. Checks are not rigourous. This does not appear to be well known, I have been across about half a dozen times and I have told plenty of people who didn't know. I have even overheard two people talking - 'Do you know where you are going?', 'No, I'm following the man.' I looked round and found that I was 'the man'. You can walk if you particularly like diesel fumes (Port traffic). Gravesend - I don't think there is anything (at one time I believe the ferry was operated by British Rail). The bus and rail are not particularly well co-ordinated going towards Southend (if the bus is on time and the train is late, and you have a ticket you might be OK, otherwise no. There are barriers, and they won't let you through without a ticket. 4. It had been suggested that the ferry be used to transfer workers for the London Gateway from Kent when that is fully operational (they would then get picked up by bus). 5. The problem is that there is no consistency in passenger numbers. I would guess at peak time it is crowded,; I catch it just after 10am, return between 15:00 and 16:30. It may also depend on cruise traffic. Once, the ship above had docked. Some of the passengers got on the ferry to explore the delights of Gravesend. It was crowded, it would be crowded when they came back. A lot, lot more were trying to catch the bus. It is a single decker, not particularly long. I don't think they would have got a particularly good impression of the UK. 6. Tilbury is pretty grim. Anyone ever comments about Erith, send them to Tilbury!! There is a celebration of the arrival of the Windrush along the pedestrian access to the ferry (is that the best we can do). Few people use that as you are likely to miss the ferry/ bus - most use the vehicle access and dodge the traffic".
Greenwich born Del Palmer, a name synonymous with the music of former Welling and later Eltham resident Kate Bush, was more than just a bassist and engineer. He was a creative confidante, a musical partner, and a vital force in shaping the sound of one of England's most iconic artists. Sadly, Palmer died on January 5th 2024, leaving behind a legacy that extends far beyond his work with Bush. Derek Peter Palmer (3 November 1952 – 5 January 2024) was an English musician and sound engineer, best known for his work with Kate Bush, with whom he also had a long-term relationship from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Del's musical journey began early. By 15, he was already honing his skills on the bass, forming bands like Cobwebs and Strange and later, Tame. His musicality wasn't limited to one instrument; he dabbled in keyboards and percussion, showcasing a versatility that would become a hallmark of his career. Palmer's path crossed with Kate Bush in the late 1970s. He joined her band for her debut album, "The Kick Inside," and their musical connection soon blossomed into a personal one. Their partnership, both romantic and creative, proved to be incredibly fruitful. Palmer played bass on most of Bush's albums, from the soaring melodies of "Lionheart" to the complex soundscapes of "Hounds of Love." Palmer was also credited as an engineer on Kate Bush's Hounds of Love (1985), The Sensual World (1989), The Red Shoes (1993) and Aerial (2005). Furthermore, Del Palmer is prevalent in some of Kate Bush's music videos; in 1982, he played the get-a-way car driver in the video to "There Goes a Tenner", and in 1986, appeared in the critically acclaimed extended video to "Experiment IV", in which he plays a patient in a secret military base where the 'experiment' of the song's title is performed on him with horrific consequences. The clip, described as a 'film in miniature' also features Hugh Laurie, Peter Vaughan, Dawn French and Paddy Bush; it was banned from broadcast on the BBC programme, Top of the Pops, due to the graphic nature of the video. The music video, directed by Bush herself, went on to be nominated for the Best Concept Music Video at the 1988 Grammy Awards. Also in 1986, he appeared in the video to "The Big Sky" as a guitar playing Army Major, which, in 1987, was nominated for Best Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. Del Palmer also played Houdini, the man about to be kissed by Bush on the front cover to her 1982 album, The Dreaming. He's credited with engineering on three further albums involving Bush: Midge Ure's Answers to Nothing (where Palmer engineered her vocal guest recordings), Roy Harper's Once and Alan Stivell's Again. He played bass guitar on Lionheart, Never for Ever, The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, The Sensual World and Aerial (on 5 tracks), and on one track on 50 Words for Snow. Del Palmer died on the 5th January 2024, at the age of 71. Kate Bush paid tribute to Palmer, saying: "It’s hard to know what to say… He was a big part of my life and my work for many years. It’s going to take a long time to come to terms with him not being here with us. He was incredibly creative – talented in lots of different ways. He was a brilliant musician, bass player, a great artist – he was always drawing. Once he covered a whole recording console in cartoons. It took him days and it looked absolutely stunning. He taught himself to be a recording engineer, engineering several of my albums and later releasing his own music. I’m going to miss him terribly". Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
Last week marked the 40th anniversary of the launch of what should have been a revolutionary British computer; Sinclair Research launched the QL on January 12th 1984, nearly two weeks before Apple Computer launched its new Macintosh computer on the 24th. Both machines had Motorola 68000-family processors, a mere 128 kB of memory, and just a pair of serial ports for Input/Output. Both launched with powerful bundled applications. Both had brutally cut-down specifications to make them price competitive, and both were big technological gambles on unproven technology, previously only available in vastly more expensive computers. Following the massive success of the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, Sir Clive Sinclair wished to produce a "serious" business computer. It would eventually be released as the QL - short for "Quantum Leap" - and it would indeed be launched early in 1984, on 12 January at the Inter-Continental Hotel on London’s Hyde Park Corner. Many more months would pass before the new Sinclair micro arrived in buyers’ hands, however, prompting wags to dub it the "Quite Late". In charge of creating the QL was David Karlin, a young engineer in his early twenties who had just returned to the UK from a stint in Singapore with the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, where he had been engineering digital signal processor chips. Back in the UK – not entirely a move of his own choosing as it was his wife of the time who wanted to return - Karlin approached a recruitment consultant about a possible job opportunity he’d seen advertised. The advisor said the post wasn’t right for him and suggested instead a vacancy that had just come up at Sinclair Research. A meeting with Clive Sinclair later and Karlin was hired as Chief Design Engineer, Computers. David was one of a number of high flying engineers Sinclair Research brought on board on the back of rocketing ZX Spectrum sales. Karlin wasn’t particularly keen to return to Cambridge, where he’d taken his degree and MA – in Engineering and Electrical Sciences – but Sinclair was willing to pay him the salary he’d been making at Fairchild, well in excess of what he might otherwise earn in the UK, so he couldn’t really say no. David Karlin had a computer he desperately wanted to build. His time at Fairchild had begun with a brief induction period at the company’s Palo Alto HQ. There he had encountered a Xerox Star, the colossally expensive workstation that introduced the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointer) user interface and which - unknown to him at the time - inspired Steve Jobs and Apple to build the Lisa then the Mac, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates to start work on Windows I have written extensively about the Xerox Star in the past, which you can read about by clicking here. David was enthralled, and like Jobs and Gates realised that here lay, in concept, the future of personal computing. His notion, then, was to “create a £500 Xerox Star”, and it was this vision that helped persuade Clive Sinclair to give him a job. It also helped that Sinclair Research desperately needed to devise a business micro for recently de-nationalised UK IT giant ICL. He envisaged a desktop computer that would feature a proper keyboard and “some kind of networking”. It would come supplied with a dedicated monitor and its own printer, “both of which I considered to be really the minimum for a decent business machine”, he recalled in an interview “In fact, in terms of broad spec, you could say I was trying to design what the Amstrad PCW 8256 would eventually become.” He also wanted some kind of windowed user interface, which would in turn require high-resolution bit mapped graphics, plenty of memory and a fast processor. Intriguingly, though, he did not plan to add a mouse. “That seems an odd choice now, but at the time, I was fairly confident that people could do enough with arrow keys,” he said in a 2014 interview with The Register IT news website. At the start of 1983, with the basic system logic outlined and a CPU selected, Karlin started to devise the machine that would be based on these components and to specify the core software that would be required. In March 1983, he was given a nine-month deadline to deliver the ZX83, which was the original code name for what would eventually be renamed the QL. This would allow the machine to be launched just before Christmas. Even then it seemed, to some, a crazy deadline: Sinclair hadn’t yet succeeded in creating a machine in such a short time frame, and this was no extension of a well-understood, established platform. Sinclair’s chief hardware engineer, Jim Westwood, appears to have been a lone senior management voice arguing that more development time was necessary, but his advice was effectively ignored. The short development period would be tough enough for a new desktop machine, but it seems doubly arduous if Sinclair was indeed intending that the ZX83 be a portable computer, as Nigel Searle’s May 1983 comments to the press suggested, although this never came to pass. Westwood, like many others in the micro business at that time, realised that the market for business computing was about to grow the way the home computing market had been, and wanted to get a foot in the door. The ZX83 / QL project would certainly have allowed software developer Psion to do so with much less risk than launching standalone applications would. If the ZX83 / QL sold as well to business as the ZX Spectrum had to teenagers, it would establish Psion’s Quill word processor, Easel graphics tool, Archive database and Abacus spreadsheet – together later called the xChange suite - as a new de facto standard in 16-bit business applications. At the launch, Sinclair would begin taking orders for the QL at the end of January. The computer would ship with 128KB of Ram, and be priced at £399 plus £7.95 postage and packing. There was no mention of the 64KB version, originally intended to go on sale for £299, because Psion’s business applications would need more memory. Sinclair had not managed to get its previous computer, the ZX Spectrum out on time, and the proprietary storage medium - the Microdrives took even longer to arrive: they were more than a year late. A few observers rightly guessed it wouldn’t do so this time round either. But such fears did not stop many thousands of eager customers - more than 9000 by the end of February, rising to 13,000 as of late April - sending off their credit card details or their cheques, which the company had no hesitation in cashing. That the QL subsequently failed to appear as promised was bad enough, but worse, customers were out of pocket. In an attempt to cap the growing flow of bad publicity, not to mention the growing interest in the saga of the Advertising Standards Authority, Sinclair promised to put the money into a “trust fund” and pledged not to touch the cash pile until the first QLs were dispatched. By the middle of March, eight weeks after Sinclair began taking orders, no QL had shipped. Officially, the QL's operating system QDOS was taking longer to finish than expected and one of the QL’s two dedicated processor chips required further hardware modifications. The press were vicious - one review read:- “Shoddy finish and un-loadable software seems to be the least of their problems,” wrote Your Computer magazine in its June 1984 issue (published in May 1984). “The Screen Editor can make the system crash and the promised real-time clock is missing - along with the manuals.” The Microdrives - the proprietary storage system originally designed for use with the earlier ZX Spectrum - were exceedingly unreliable, fragile and prone to breakage, not something a business user would tolerate. If this was not bad enough, in early versions on the QL, the TV display modulator was located next to the sensitive read / write heads of the Microdrive, causing load and save errors due to electromagnetic interference. And yet, there were still issues with the machine - most, but not all, due to its storage system. “The manager of the local branch of Dixons told me that out of 1000 machines delivered to their warehouse, only 190 worked properly,” claimed a Sinclair User magazine journalist in November 1984. “Further rumbles from Spectrum distributors seem to indicate similar troubles, with one hapless dealer spending a whole morning with six QLs and six sets of Psion software trying to find a combination that allowed all the Psion wares to be loaded.”. Even had the proprietary Microdrives been reliable, only Sinclair could produce them, and they were proving far less robust than audio cassettes when it came to high-speed duplication. Making them was not easy - in a May 1984 interview it was said that Sinclair was then punching out 100,000 a month with an eye to ramping up to 40 million a month at some undefined point in the future. It almost certainly never achieved that. Software scarcity didn’t help sales any, and nor did the reputation for fragility and instability gained by those early, prematurely released models. A WH Smith spokeswoman said at the end of 1984 that sales had been “very slow, thus far"; “disappointing” was the word used by a Boots spokesman. Estimates in the press put the number of QLs in users’ hands at just 40,000, a fraction of the machine’s potential audience. None of Sinclair’s promised add-ons, among them a 512 KB memory expansion module, a hard drive interface and a modem, had yet materialised. I recall, back when I worked for the then largest independent computer retailer in the UK at the time - Silica Shop, who had their HQ in Hatherley Road, Sidcup, we had great trouble selling the Sinclair QL; build quality was terrible - the cases were very flimsy, and obviously made down to a very low price. The keyboards were worse - if you turned a QL upside down, several of the keyboard keys would drop off. The Microdrives were maddeningly unreliable and also far too flimsy for serious use. Silica Shop staff only half jokingly referred to the QL as the "Quantum Lurch". The QL effectively bankrupted Sinclair, who never recovered from the QL. in 1986, Sinclair Research was sold to Amstrad for £5 million, less than half what it was considered worth the previous summer. One of the first things new owner Alan Sugar did was cancel the entire QL project. Quite apart from the QL’s woeful sales performance to date, Amstrad was doing very nicely selling its low-cost, business-centric, highly integrated PCW 8256. Sugar also made lots of Sinclair Research people redundant. Never again would Sinclair reach the heights of the days of the ZX Spectrum, and the company would fold a few years later.
Regular readers will be aware of how much I like "then and now" photographs of the local area; the upper of the two photos above was taken in July 1966, and it shows what Erith Riverside Gardens looked like then. The lower photo shows what the gardens looked like much more recently. Unfortunately due to physical changes in the garden layout, I was unable to get a shot from the very same position as that in the original, but it is close enough for an easy comparison.
The end video this week was taken on the 19th of July 2022 during the heatwave. It shows the fire which spread through the fly - tipped rubbish on the Slade Green Marshes, as mentioned in the article at the start of this update - who says I don't plan these things? What is also notable is that the fire service were so stretched at the time that fire engines had to come from as far away as Surrey to extinguish the blaze, as local resources were already attending emergencies at other locations. Hopefully with the new actions being put into place, the issue of illegal rubbish dumping in the area will cease, though I am not holding my breath. Comments and feedback to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
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