The photo above - click on it to see a larger view, was taken by me well before the infamous De Luci fish sculpture was hit and severely damaged in a crash by a motorist. In the last week I have been in contact with local Erith Councillor Nicola Taylor to see if I could find out when repairs to the landmark sculpture were scheduled to take place. I do know that originally it was due to be repaired last September, but at the time of writing it is still seriously damaged and unsightly. Nicola tells me that there have been very extended discussions and negotiations with the vehicles' insurance company. To be honest, I was quite surprised that the driver who hit and damaged both the sculpture and the roundabout itself actually had insurance. I gather that the police estimate that around 1 million UK drivers are on the roads without any form of vehicle insurance. It would not have surprised me if this was the case in this incident, but apparently they were insured. Typically the insurance company were reluctant to fund the repair and restoration works, which extend not only to the sculpture but also the roundabout itself. Apparently some kind of compromise is close to being made, but at the speed that things are moving I can see that it will be around 2 years from the time of the accident until any kind of remediation and repair is undertaken. Bearing in mind that the roundabout that joins Bronze Age Way, Bexley Road, Queens Road and Walnut Tree Road is the second busiest road junction in the London Borough of Bexley, beaten only by the roundabout adjacent to Hall Place and the A2 interchange in Bexley Village; as Nicola correctly stated, it does not provide a suitable welcome to visitors to the area, as it looks un-cared for and incredibly unsightly in its damaged form. Personally, I am of the opinion that if the fish sculpture was located in Sidcup or Bexleyheath, repairs would have been carried out far more swiftly and efficiently. I gather that in addition to legal negotiations with the insurers, there have also been availability issues with the artist, Gary Drostle, who was the original creator of the mosaic covered fish sculpture. I understand that he has been working on a commission overseas, and his availability to undertake repairs may be limited. In any case, it may also be that the current structure is so damaged. That repair would be prohibitively expensive, and replacement of the entire thing might end up being cheaper. Nevertheless, the current situation cannot be allowed to continue for any longer, as it presents a very poor image to travellers passing through the area, or indeed visiting. What do you think? Email me at the usual address - hugh.neal@gmail.com.
The 78th anniversary of the first visit of the M.V Empire Windrush to the UK with the first immigrants from the Caribbean took place last Monday - the 22nd June. I have a family connection with the Empire Windrush - albeit a little on the tenuous side. After the Empire Windrush made its historic journey to Tilbury, carrying British citizens of Caribbean origin, along with passengers from very diverse backgrounds, the story of which has rather become lost. The actual passenger list from June 1948 included The ship docked at the Port of Tilbury, on 21 June 1948, and the 1027 passengers began disembarking the next day. A commonly given figure for the number of West Indian immigrants on board is 492, based understandably on news reports in the media at the time, which variously announced that "more than 400", Jamaican men had arrived in Britain. However, the ship's records, kept in the United Kingdom National Archives indicate conclusively that 802 passengers gave their last place of residence as a country in the Caribbean. The ship also carried 66 people whose last country of residence was Mexico - they were a group of Polish people who had travelled from Siberia via India and the Pacific, and who had been granted permission to settle in the United Kingdom under the terms of the Polish Resettlement Act 1947. They had been among a group of Polish people who had been living in Mexico since 1943 and the Windrush had called at Tampico, Mexico in order to pick them up. Of the other passengers, 119 were from England and 40 from other parts of the world. The disembarkation of Windrush's passengers was a notable news event, and was covered by newspaper reporters and by Pathé News newsreel cameras. The name Windrush as a result come to be used as shorthand for West Indian migration, and by extension for the beginning of modern British multiracial society. The Empire Windrush was built in Germany in 1930, when it was called the Monte Rosa; unusually it was fitted with four-stroke diesel engines driving two propellers. At the time, the use of diesel engines was highly unusual in ships of this size, which would have been typically steam-powered, and their use reflected the experience ship builders Blohm and Voss had gained by building Diesel-powered U-boats during World War 1. Their top speed was 14 knots (26 km/h) (around half the speed of the large trans-Atlantic Ocean liners of the era) but this was considered adequate for both the immigrant and cruise business, and the diesel engines were substantially cheaper to operate. These early diesel engines were a constant source of problems, as they were under developed and mechanically unreliable - something that would eventually lead to the ships' fate. After World War II, the Monte Rosa was transferred to British ownership under the war reparations act, and then renamed the Empire Windrush. The ship made its last voyage in February 1954, and this is where my tenuous family connection comes in. Windrush set off from Yokohama, Japan, in February 1954 on what proved to be her final voyage. She called at Kure and was to sail to the United Kingdom, calling at Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo, Aden and Port Said. Her passengers including recovering wounded United Nations veterans of the Korean War, some soldiers from The Duke of Wellington's Regiment wounded at the Third Battle of the Hook in May 1953. However, the voyage was plagued with gearbox and engine breakdowns amongst other defects, and it took ten weeks to reach Port Said, from where the ship sailed for the last time. On board were 222 crew and 1276 passengers, including military personnel and some women and children, dependents of some of the military personnel. At around 6:15am on Sunday March 28, there was a sudden explosion and fierce fire in the engine-room that killed the Third Engineer, two other members of the engine-room crew and the First Electrician; a fifth crew-member in the engine room and one in the boiler-room, both Greasers, managed to escape. The ship quickly lost all electrical power as the four main electrical generators were located in the burning engine room; the back-up generator was started, but problems with the main circuit-breaker made its power unusable. The ship did not have a sprinkler system. The Chief officer heard the explosion from the ship's bridge and assembled the ship's fire-fighting squad, who happened to be on deck at the time doing routine work. However they were only able to fight the fire for a few minutes before the loss of electrical power stopped the water pumps that fed their fire-hoses. The Second Engineer was able to enter the engine room by wearing a smoke hood, but was unable to close a water-tight door that might have contained the fire, due to a lack of electrical power. Attempts to close all water-tight doors using the controls on the bridge had also failed. At 6:23 am, the first distress calls were transmitted; further SOS calls used the emergency radio transmitter as electrical power had been lost. The order was given to wake the passengers and crew and assemble them at their emergency stations, but the ship's public address system was not working, nor were its air and steam whistles, so the order had to be transmitted by word-of-mouth. At 6:45 am, all attempts to fight the fire were halted and the order was given to launch the lifeboats, with the first ones away carrying the women and children on-board. While the ship's 22 lifeboats could accommodate all on board, thick smoke and the lack of electrical power prevented many of them from being launched. Each set of lifeboat davits accommodated two lifeboats and without electrical power, raising the wire ropes to lower the second boat was an arduous and slow task. With fire spreading rapidly, the order was given to drop the remaining boats into the sea. Many of the crew and troops on board abandoned the ship by climbing down ladders or ropes and jumping into the sea. However, they were quickly picked up by Windrush's lifeboats and also by a boat from the first rescue ship, which reached the scene at 7.00 am. The ships responding to Windrush's distress call were the Dutch ship MV Mentor, the British P and O Cargo liner MV Socotra, the Norwegian ship SS Hemsefjell and the Italian ships SS Taigete and SS Helschell. The last person to leave Windrush was the Chief officer at 7:30 am. All the passengers were saved and the only fatalities were the four crew killed in the engine room. Around 26 hours after Windrush had been abandoned, she was reached by HMS Saintes of the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet - my Mother's late cousin Ralph was a member of the crew of HMS Saintes at the time, and some years ago, he kindly supplied the photographs of the burning Windrush and some of the crew involved in the tow above. The fire was still burning fiercely more than a day after it started, but a party from HMS Saintes managed to get on board Windrush and attach a tow-cable. HMS Saintes attempted to tow the ship to Gibraltar but Empire Windrush sank in the early hours of the following morning, Tuesday, 30 March 1954 after been towed a distance of only around 16 kilometres (8.6 nautical miles). The wreck lies at a depth of around 2,600 metres (8,500 ft).
The recent extreme heatwave that has hit much of Europe and the UK has had a somewhat unexpected consequence. Delivery drivers, bus operators and others who work out of a vehicle on a daily basis have been suffering from dehydration and heat exhaustion. In many cases this has been because they do not drink enough water, and keep themselves hydrated. The reasons for this can in some instances be quite complex, but one common factor that recurs is that the people involved are wary and hesitant about drinking too much liquid, as when they are out on the road, there are almost no public toilets available nowadays. They constantly worry about being caught short. I know that bus drivers, whose services start or terminate in Bexleyheath, regularly use the toilets in The Furze Wren Wetherspoons pub, which is conveniently located very close to the Bexleyheath bus halt in Geddes Place. Drivers who operate buses that start or terminate at the Erith Riverside Shopping Centre are able to use the dedicated driver's toilet, which is located next to the Domino's Pizza takeaway. This toilet can be identified by the mechanical code lock on the door. Unfortunately, these two lavatory resources are the exception rather than the rule, and for many commercial drivers there are no such options available. Before I was housebound due to illness, I would also find it difficult to drink fluids when the weather was hot, as I was concerned about the lack of toilet facilities available in the local area.
Twenty six years ago last week, Microsoft released Windows 2000 in the UK. A rock-solid, 32-bit business-oriented alternative to the older DOS based Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition, it paved the way for future consumer versions, including Windows 11. If you used a Windows PC in the late ’90s, you were quite familiar with the frequent crashes, lockups, and reboots that were common on MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 / 98. The DOS-based PC ecosystem was a house of cards built on an ancient patchwork of code that ran on endless variations of hardware. As DOS-based Windows became more complex and feature-laden, more people began to rely on their PCs for serious work, and the instability issues came to a head. Windows 98 frequently required reboots and re-installation to fix puzzling, recurrent issues with applications that conflicted with each other and the OS. Critics widely panned the utterly terrible Windows Me (released in September 2000), the last in the line of MS-DOS-based Windows, for being bloated and extremely unstable. Enter Windows 2000, which ran with rock-solid stability on the very same hardware most people used with Windows 98. At the time, being able to leave a computer running without it crashing, and not having to reboot after installing software seemed like a miracle. In fact, Microsoft included “Dramatically Reduced Reboot Scenarios” as one of the primary selling features of Windows 2000 on its website back in 2000. Although intended as a business desktop operating system, Windows 2000 Professional also found its way to many home PCs. This was due to both its reputation for stability and, of course, rampant piracy thanks to CD-R drives and the relative leniency of the serial-number-based copy protection Microsoft used at the time. Since it didn’t ship on consumer-level PCs, if you wanted it on a home machine, you either had to buy it or get a copy from someone who had an installation disk sitting around at work. After years of Windows 98 and Windows Me crashes, Windows 2000 was a revelation on consumer machines. Windows 2000 also served as an alternative to its successor, Windows XP, for several years. XP included some features that were controversial at the time. These included an Internet-based product activation system that complained if you changed your PC hardware such as changing your video or sound card, and a colorful new shell interface some derided as “Fisher-Price”. The more professional, grey appearance of Windows 2000 was preferable to some, and it could also run most XP programs just fine. Within Microsoft, Windows 2000 represented a crucial step for bringing the much more stable, technologically mature Windows NT platform to the masses. It proved that a technically advanced Windows OS could also have a consumer-friendly interface and multimedia-friendly features. Windows 2000 was an essential link in an unbroken chain that started with Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 and continues to this day with Windows 11.
As I have previously written, the BBC has been, and is undergoing major changes. Most of these are connected with the fact that fewer people are using their services, and consequently are not purchasing annual TV licences. The TV viewing figures for BBC channels have plummeted dramatically over the past few years, with many viewers instead watching content on streaming services such as Disney Plus, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and also YouTube. Viewing habits have changed remarkably, And many feel that the BBC television linear services no longer represent content that is relevant, value for money, and some also feel that some stories and programmes are politically biased. As I've previously written, some years ago, I worked for a very large technical consultancy as a project manager. I was responsible for the contract supplying digital connectivity to BBC Wales. With a couple of notable exceptions, I found the senior management at the BBC to be extremely entitled, pompous and self-important. I'm sure that there were others that were entirely reasonable, but I seem to have very little contact with anybody of that nature within the BBC. I would say that in my opinion whilst BBC television is full of repeats and content that has little or no interest for me, the radio services offered by the organisation are still of very high quality for the most part. I was quite surprised to read last week that the BBC was making drastic cutbacks to their flagship news programme "The Today Programme" on BBC Radio 4. It no longer employs dedicated journalists, and those that are from the general pool of reporters have been told to prioritise their content on digital platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. "The Today Programme" has essentially been downgraded from its previous flagship status and is now merely an also ran. This coincides with the close down of the BBC Radio 4 Long Wave service on 198 kHz, which happened at 1:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. The end video this week comes from the very well respected YouTube channel Ringway Manchester, which explores the legacy of the historic Droitwich transmitting station, detailing its cultural significance and urban legends. The short documentary examines the technical history of Long Wave broadcasting in the UK, the role of radio teleswitch meters, and the strategic importance the station held throughout the Cold War era. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
