Aleksy Navalny June 1976-February 2024

Aleksy Navalny June1976-February 2024

 Alexei Navalny was a Russian lawyer, anti-corruption campaigner and politicia whose activities led to his global recognition as one of, possibly chief among, the domestic critics of Vladimir Putin, Russian President [1999-2008; 2012- ] Navalny suffered a near-fatal poisoning in 2020, was jailed on several occasions and died while imprisoned in an Arctic penal colony. I am currently reading his autobiography which reveals the huge loss to Russia’s fledgling democratic urges and the terrifying nature of Russian politics.

Navalny’s father was a Soviet army officer, and his mother was an economist, so Alexei grew up in a series of garrison towns in the Moscow area. He spent summers with his paternal grandparents in the countryside near Chernobyl, in Ukraine. After the infamous nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in April 1986, his paternal relatives were officially and swiftly evacuated with other residents from the area but not before they had witnessed the attempted cover-up of the disaster by the Soviet authorities. All residents were forced to go out immediately after the explosion into the radioactive fields and plant potatoes as a demonstration of how safe the area was. The long-term results were thousands of deaths and malformed births from close exposure to the radioactive fields.

Alexei attended the People’s Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, graduating with a law degree in 1998. He remained in Moscow, practising law, continuing his studies and earning an economics degree from the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation. In 2000, while still a student, Navalny joined Yabloko a political party promoting liberal democracy in a market economy. In Putin’s early days in power, it had seemed possible that opposition groups might be tolerated though with limited power, in the State Duma, but the unification of pro-Putin parties under the banner of United Russia in 2001 revealed Putin’s intentions to stifle dissent. In 2007, Navalny was expelled from Yabloko after what Alexei claimed were personality clashes with party leader Grigory Yavlinski. Meanwhile, Yabloko asserted that Navalny had damaged the party with “nationalistic activities” including attendance at a far-right march.

Putin meeting Grigory Yavlinski, party leader of
Yabloko, originally Russia's only liberal party.

Denied membership of, and potential protection by, a political party, Navalny began a solo career as a political activist. This was brave, in Russia, and some might say, foolhardy. He had the brilliant idea of using stakeholder activism to target publicly traded state-owned companies and by purchasing a small amount of stock in each company, he gained entry to shareholder meetings. Once there, he could grill corporate officials about inconsistencies in financial reporting and lack of transparency in management and book-keeping. As many of the executives he challenged also happened to be close political allies of Putin, these encounters provided an effective means of expressing dissent in a society where political debate and challenge were 

Navalny family: Yulia, son Zahar and daughter Daria. 

increasingly restricted. In an extension of this shareholder activism, Navalny began to document his activities on a blog that became so popular that the President had to acknowledge the scale of corruption. By then, Putin who was limited to one term as President, had installed a compliant Dmitry Medvedev as President while he unofficially retained the power in decision-making. According to Medvedev himself, about $31 billion annually was being siphoned off from the state procurement system. In December 2010 Navalny launched a whistleblowing website, RosPil, the name using Russian slang for ‘embezzle’ and the site publicised cases in which state contracts appeared to have been awarded corruptly. Navalny invited visitors to post details of suspicious government deals anonymously online for discussion and within one month of its start-up, the site was reportedly getting one million visits a month. Navalny went further, coining the phrase ‘Party of crooks and thieves’ to describe Putin’s United Russia party and this became the popular catchphrase at Russian protests. Russian elections followed one year later in December

United Russia Party Congress

2011 when widespread irregularities were discernible triggering the largest popular demonstrations since the fall of the Soviet Union. Navalny had urged his followers to support any party other than United Russia and, despite ample evidence of vote-rigging, United Russia won less than half the vote. Meanwhile Navalny was jailed for 15 days for participating in an unofficial protest, but his efforts had been noted and when Putin predictably returned to power as President, he immediately moved to clamp down on dissent and Navalny’s home was raided by the police and a criminal investigation on suspicion of corruption was launched against him. Putin introduced harsh new penalties for individuals who participated in unauthorised rallies.
 

Unauthorised protest in Moscow

Within a few months, Navalny declared his candidacy for Mayor of Moscow and the following day he was found guilty of embezzlement in a trial that was widely regarded as having been politically motivated. In response, thousands demonstrated filling the streets in Moscow and he was immediately freed pending the hearing of his appeal. He resumed his Mayoral bid and, denied access to the main television channels, running a Western-style campaign with glossy posters of him and his family posted in the streets and on the Internet. On September 8th, 2013, Putin’s nominee, Sergey Sobyanin won 51% of the vote and Navalny, a respectable 27.2%. After this, Navalny’s activism and attempts to participate in the Russian political system continued and his almost routine incarceration by the Putin administration, would become a recurring event.  For instance, in December 2014 he, and his brother Oleg, both received a three year suspended sentence on fraud charges.2020, he became seriously ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and, fearing for his safety in a Russian hospital, his family had him flown to Berlin where tests confirmed that he had been exposed to Novichok, a lethal complex nerve agent developed by the Soviets. 

Recovering from Novichok

He remained for months in a medically induced coma before recovering during which period, he worked with Bellingcat, the investigative journalism group, to try to uncover the specifics of the Novichok attack. The names of several of the FSB [Federal Security Service] agents were identified and Navalny called one of them, posing as a senior Russian security official. Their lengthy conversation about the attempted assassination was recorded and published with the agent, still assuming he was speaking to a security official,  blaming the plane’s emergency landing in Omsk and the hasty intervention of emergency medical personnel for the failure of the plot. Soon after, on January 17, 2021, Navalny, perhaps recklessly, returned to Russia and was immediately arrested and quickly sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony. His hunger strike there encouraged his followers to take to the streets in protest and as a result, in June 2021  a Moscow court ruled that any group tied to Navalny would be labelled extremist and denied access to any public office. 

Persecuted by Putin

In 2020, Navalny was campaigning in Siberia for regional elections scheduled for September that year and on August 20^th he was sent to the notorious IK-6  maximum security prison and kept chiefly in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, government response to the many public protests reached draconian levels and any criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine was criminalised. The list goes on! In March 2022, an emaciated Navalny was found guilty of fraud and contempt of court and sentenced to nine years in a “strict regime penal colony” and denied the right to speak in court. In December 2023, Navalny’s attorneys lost contact with him for three weeks before learning he was in a brutal penal colony in the Arctic Circle where he died two months later, almost certainly from poisoning.

Arrest!

Postscript

I rarely become emotionally involved in any way in whatever I discuss in my blogs but Navalny’s story and particularly, the last months of his fearless and inspiring life pursued by a corrupt regime intent upon the destruction of the one voice it feared, is incredibly moving and sad. His autobiography, Patriot, referred to above, gives a detailed look at his thinking. Patriot is, in fact, part autobiography of his early years plus extracts from his secret prison diaries compiled after his death by his wife, Yulia.

In the Epilogue we discover why he felt the urgent need to return home to Russia when he had no illusions about the murderous intentions of the regime. " I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life- either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime.” He considers his options and refers lovingly and thankfully to his wife, Yulia Navalnya (who organised the publication of Alexei’s Patriot chiefly from his secret prison diaries), and acknowledges the huge support he continues to receive as a believer, from his faith. “Faith makes life simpler.” He muses that since his return to Russia three years before when he was recovering from the Novichok poisoning, his life has been spent in jail. But “I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country and betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.” 

Unbelievably, it is only slightly more than eighteen months since Navalny died but the Putin regime continues. As Navalny often mused, “Autocracies in the modern world are resilient.”

Last picture, in jail.

 

Navalny at a court hearing in Moscow 2023

 

Notre Dame de Paris

 

Notre Dame brule.  April 2019.

2019. The morning after.

The reasons for my choice of topic today are twofold. First, the disastrous fire of the roof and spire of Notre-Dame in April 2019 when the world held its breath as images of the disastrous flames were broadcast, rampaging through part of perhaps the most iconic building in France, beloved not only by the French, but by millions of us in the Western world. The second reason is simply that I had mentioned to my son earlier in 2025 that I would love to see the renovated Cathedral in its newly restored glory. To my surprise he said that he too would love to see it and he suggested that we could do a short trip together. Delight unbounded on my side, while David, my son, said he would have a look round for accommodation when we had worked out dates. He was as good as his word and frankly, when our little outing materialised, the hotel in Montmartre was perfect, on a small hill generously surrounded by cafes, restaurants, bars and bistros. The Metro, hardly used in fact, was a few minutes’ walk away and Sainte Chapelle and Sacre Coeur not too distant with the newly shining Notre Dame nearby.

Heartbreak as helpless Parisians watch the flames.

Outline of the History of Notre-Dame       

The Rose Window in the North tower

Our visit to Notre-Dame was indeed memorable, both in its physical impact on the beholder and for the desire to know more about this important ecclesiastical structure. Notre-Dame today as a place both for tourists and pilgrims, turned out to be to be the most crowded place ever. We went  in May 2025 and found 1500 people or more within the Cathedral and at least a similar number outside, many queuing hours for entry, estimated on the Notre-Dame website, to involve a two to three hours’ wait; around 12 million people visit the Cathedral each year. But we entered very quickly, having booked, and, despite the huge melee, the extraordinary feeling, on entering, of graceful lines, jewel-like stained glass, curving Gothic  architecture, the immensity of the tall space, all combined to confer a most special sensation on any visitor. Notre-Dame is visually, almost ethereal! The extraordinary beauty and elegance on view belied the destruction of the fire five years before. The restoration in a five-year time span was impressive with the total estimated cost of 830 million covered by in donations pledged worldwide. The actual cost climbed to over 900 million dollars. At the site of the fire in 2019, a visibly emotional President Macron had said, “We will rebuild Notre-Dame because that’s what our history is worthy of. Because that is our deep destiny.”

Interior, Cologne Cathedral

The original Notre Dame spire was a medieval wooden and lead construction built in the mid13th century which was removed due to extensive damage between 1786 and 1792. Its height was approximately 78 metres [265 feet] from church floor to spire which also served as a bell tower. This original spire was later replaced by the spire of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc in the mid 19th century which collapsed during the 2019 fire. There was an intense national debate over whether to replace the building with a modern interpretation or try to rebuild as closely as possible to the original although using modern materials and methods. After much national soul-searching, Macron made the decision in 2020 to rebuild to the mediaeval design, and repair the considerable destruction, restoring the Gothic familiarity within an ambitious five years, and work began immediately to gather a veritable army of hundreds of skilled craftspeople from all over the world. Cologne Cathedral, an acknowledged centre of expertise in stained glass, was immediately involved in rescuing as much of the stained glass as possible. Katrin Wittstadt, Scientific Director of Stained Glass in Cologne cathedral, said that the urgent first problem was contamination from the thick layer of lead dust which must be urgently removed. The close existing relationship between Cologne and Notre-Dame effectively expedited the highly skilled glass restoration work and the windows today remain exquisite.        

Coronation of England's Henry V1 as King of France
in Notre Dame 16 Dec. 1431

 The appalling fire and the subsequent stunning restoration join the eight-hundred-year-old narrative of Notre-Dame which began its extraordinary story in 1163 under Bishop Maurice de Sully when Notre-Dame de Paris slowly emerged, situated on the Ile de la Cite, with completion around 1345. It was built on the site of an earlier basilica and featured Gothic architecture with flying buttresses and stained glass. Churches and cathedrals as early as Notre-Dame could fairly be described almost as illustrated books for most of the population which could not read but which could understand, and be impressed by, stained glass images of miracles and the awesome portrayal of priests and churches.                                                                                                                                  Among the numerous sacred and important events over the centuries to have occurred within Notre Dame, came one of especial importance to British history, on 16 December 1431 when the boy-king, H

1669 Te Deum for Louis X1V

enry V1 of England, was crowned King of France in the Cathedral, the more usual traditional church used for royal coronations, Rheims Cathedral, being inaccessible as it was under French control. Ecclesiastical style in favour changed too, over time, and the Gothic style, de rigueur in earlier centuries, fell out of favour during the Renaissance, and so the beautiful walls of Notre Dame were covered with tapestries in a bid to hide the earlier outmoded Gothic. In 1548 rioting Huguenots damaged some of the cathedral’s statuary, fearing them to be idolatrous. The fountain in Notre Dame’s parvis, [the square in front of the cathedral] was added in 1625, not for the church itself, but to supply nearby Parisians with running water.

Notre Dame 1689

The prestigious Parisian Goldsmiths’ Guild began in 1449 to make regular donations to the Cathedral Chapter [the Governing Body of the Cathedral] and nearly 200 years later, in 1630, the Guild initiated the custom of donating a large altarpiece annually, on the first of May. These works gradually formed a collection known as ‘les grands mays’, with the subject matter of each piece restricted to episodes from the Acts of the Apostles. The creation of each altarpiece was a valuable commission awarded to the most prominent painters and, after 1648, awarded only to members of the Academie Royale. By 1708, 76 such paintings had been submitted when financial stringencies stopped the custom. These works, always kept in Notre Dame, were confiscated in 1793 in France’s revolutionary period, with the majority dispersed among regional museums in France. Those that remained within the cathedral were removed or re-located within the building by nineteenth century restorers. Currently, only 13 of les grands mays remain in Notre Dame although all have been temporarily removed for conservation after the 2019 fire when they suffered considerable water damage.

The Visitation by Jean Jouvenet 1716

There are other art treasures in Notre-Dame. An altarpiece depicting The Visitation painted by Jean Jouvenet in1716 hung in the cathedral with six paintings, commissioned by Canon Antoine de la Ports for Louis XIV, depicting the life of the Virgin Mary, were intended for the choir. At the same time in the first half of the eighteenth century, Charles de la Fosse painted his Adoration of the Magi for the cathedral though it is now in the Louvre. Other art was initiated by the Archbishop of Paris, LouisAntoine de Noailles, who had the roof of Notre-Dame modified in 1726, renovating its framing and removing the gargoyles with lead gutters. He also strengthened the buttresses, galleries, terraces and vaults. In 1756, the Cathedral’s canons decided that the interior was too dark and the mediaeval stained-glass windows, except the rosettes, were removed and replaced with plain white glass. At the same time, Jacques-Germain Soufflot was given the task of adapting the portals at the front of the cathedral to allow processions to enter more easily.

French Revolution and Napoleon

During the Revolutionary period, atheism reigned and
Notre Dame was used as a warehouse for a time and
also became a military barracks.
Re-dedicated to the Cult of Reason in1793,
many ot its treasures
disappeared or were destroyed.

During the French Revolution, the structure of Notre-Dame was damaged, and its religious imagery vandalised while in 1789, Notre-Dame and the rest of the Church’s property in France was seized and declared to be public property.  The cathedral was re-dedicated to the Cult of Reason in 1793, and in 1794, to the Cult of the Supreme Being and during this tumultuous period, many of the treasures of Notre-Dame were either destroyed, damaged or plundered. The 28 statues of biblical kings located in the west façade, mistaken for effigies of French Kings, were beheaded and discarded within and around the building though in a 1977 excavation nearby, many of the heads were found and are now on display at the Musee de Cluny. Statues of the Virgin Mary were replaced by the revolutionary Goddess of Liberty for a period while all the other large statues on the façade, apart from the statue of the Virgin on the portal of the cloister, were destroyed but happily, the great bells of the cathedral escaped being melted down. In effect, many of the statuary adornments of the Cathedral were vandalised and vanished as the French population dramatically turned its back on religion by destroying much of the essence of Notre Dame. Astonishingly, it became a warehouse for the storage of food and for other non-religious items. This destructive period of madness lasted until 1802 when, after the Concordat of 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte was able to restore Notre-Dame to the Catholic Church, effectively on 18th April 1802. He also selected Paris’s new bishop, the powerful Jean-Baptiste de Belloy, who restored the interior of the cathedral.

The Coronation of Napoleon. Jacques-Louis Davide

The Coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of France, 1804

In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself as King of France in Notre-Dame, now back in church ownership. In crowning himself after taking the crown from the hands of the Pope during the ceremony, Napoleon was rejecting the idea of Divine Right but at the same time, exerting a similar absolute power in his own hands. And by declaring himself as monarch, he was rejecting the Republican ideals which he had struggled to establish for so long and effectively betraying the principles of the French Revolution. Meanwhile came the Napoleonic Wars from 1800-1815 which were really a continuation of the French Revolutionary Wars from 1792-1799.  Both combined to produce a prolonged period of almost 23 years of virtually constant warfare in Europe. Small wonder that there was conflict and irrationality within France itself and the prolonged negative effect on Notre-Dame’s structure, both during the wars and the following unsettled decades, was such that it fell into a state of neglect and disrepair so complete that demolition was considered. Eventually, a hero emerged! Victor Hugo, who loved the cathedral, wrote the novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, published in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, in 1831, specifically to publicise the sad state of his beloved Notre Dame. The book was wildly successful and raised a wide awareness of the decaying state of the premier Cathedral of France. At the same time, to general anger, vandals took the opportunity to attack the Cathedral’s sacristy where the priest prepared for service and stored vestments. Rioters destroyed some of the antique stained glass and damaged the Cathedral by setting fire to the archbishop’s palace next door. Amid the general turmoil, progress was slow but in 1844, at last, King Louis Phillipe ordered that the church be restored.

Eugene Viollet-Le-Duc, French Gothic Revival 
architect. Responsible 1845-1865 for the
restoration of Notre Dame.

Public awareness and outrage seemed to loosen the regal money supply, and King Louis VII approved the decision to begin the serious restoration of Notre-Dame. The in-house architect, Etienne-Hippolyte Godde, who had overseen the maintenance of the cathedral during this period, was dismissed and two young architects, Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, who had distinguished themselves with the successful restoration of the nearby Sainte-Chapelle, were swiftly appointed [1844]. Within just one year, Viollet-le-Duc had submitted a restoration budget of 3,888,500 francs to the horror of the authorities and this was swiftly reduced to 2,650,000 francs. It was intended to cover the restoration of Notre Dame and the construction of a new sacristy, the latter involving labourers digging expensively, to a depth of nine metres [thirty feet] to establish a firm foundation.  Work began almost immediately but stopped in 1850 when the money ran out, eventually resuming and continuing to a total cost of 12 million francs. Viollet-le-Duc assembled and supervised a huge team of sculptors and glassmakers, working from original drawings and engravings, remaking or adding

Roof statue of St Thomas 
with the face of Viollet le Duc

decorations if he felt they were in the appropriate early style. Master glassmakers, for instance, meticulously copied thirteenth century styles as selected by prominent art historians such as Adolphe Napoleon Didron. One of the notable alterations during this expensive make-over was the building of a taller and more ornate fleche (spire) to replace the thirteenth century original which had been removedin 1786. The decoration around the new spire amusingly included a bronze roof statue of Saint Thomas with a face closely resembling that of Viollet-le-Duc.

Catholic martyrs during la Semaine Sanglante
[Bloody Week] in the Commune 1871.

During the Paris Commune, March-May 1871, all churches and cathedrals were closed two hundred priests including the Archbishop of Paris were taken as hostages and during ‘la Semaine Sanglante’ [Bloody Week] in May, the Communards [rebels] targeted the cathedral intending to burn it down until the arson was halted when the rebels realised that a massive cathedral fire would also burn the nearby Hotel Dieu filled with hundreds of sick patients. [The Commune was a short-lived but bloody revolutionary government that seized power in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War following the defeat of the French Army. It was a popular government, led by the National Guard, that held power for about two months.]

Notre-Dame During The 20^th Century: An Assorted List.

General de Gaulle 1944.

During the liberation of Paris in August 1944, Notre-Dame suffered some minor damage to the mediaeval glass but chiefly, it survived remarkably intact. On August 26 of that year, General Charles de Gaulle attended a special Mass to celebrate the liberation of the city from the Nazis. In 1963, to mark the 800th anniiversary of the Cathedral, Andre Malraux, the culture minister, ordered the façade to be thoroughly cleaned of the centuries of soot and grime, restoring it to the original off-white colour. On January 19, 1969, vandals placed a North Vietnamese flag at the top of the fleche and sabotaged the stairway leading up to it. In a dramatic operation, Paris Fire Brigade Sergeant Raymond Belle, cut off the offending flag from a helicopter hovering alongside the spire. On December 12, 1970, the Requiem Mass for Charles de Gaulle was held and, incongruously,
the  following year, on 26 June 1971, Philippe Pett walked across a tightrope                                                                                   

Philippe Petit on the tightrope,
26 Jun 1971

strung between Notre-Dame’s two bell towers watched by applauding thousands gathered in the square below. On May 30, 1980, Pope John Paul 11 celebrated Mass on the parvis outside the Cathedral. The Requiem Mass of Francois Mitterrand was held on 11 January 1996, the normal ceremony for French Heads of State.

Grotesques/Gargoyles

The stone masonry of the cathedral’s exterior had deteriorated during the 19^th and 20^th centures due to the increased air pollution in the city, accelerating the erosion of decorations and discolouring the stone. By the late 1980s several gargoyles and turrets had loosened or fallen off and the decision was made to instigate a decade-long programme of renovation, beginning in 1991. Much care was given to retaining the authentic architectural elements of the building and a discreet system of electrical wiring, invisible from below, was also installed on the roof to deter pigeons. The cathedral’s pipe organ was upgraded with a computerised system to control the mechanical connections to the pipes. The West face was cleaned and restored in time for the millennium celebrations in December 1999.

And during the 21^st Century ….

Three new bells, awaiting installation Nov 2024. 
Centre bell is the one rung at the Paris Olympics 2023.

December 2024. The newly-restored Notre Dame.

Notre-Dame’s 21^st century story is marked by both devastation and restoration. In 2013, the set of 19^th century bells at the top of the northern towers of Notre-Dame were melted down and recast into new bronze bells to celebrate the 850^th anniversary of the building. The devastating fire in April 2019, the
cause of which was probably an electrical malfunction in the attic of the spire, damaged the wooden roof and spire and sparked global efforts to rebuild. The subsequent restoration aimed to preserve the historical character of Notre-Dame while incorporating modern techniques for fire prevention, rainwater management and structural support. Its reopening in December 2024, marked by a Mass led by the Pope as  part of a global celebration, symbolises the preservation of cultural heritage and the enduring spirit of restoration. The replenishment of the interiors of the North and the South Towers took a little longer and were opened in September 2025 with shining new staircases, much admired by the French President as he officially declared the towers open to the public. It is estimated that it will take the average visitor 45 minutes to climb to the top of one of the towers from ground floor level.

The golden rooster being hauled aloft in 2024

A new staircase for the South tower.

Le desastre. Avril 2019 [Le Figaro]

National Service for Retirees

 

Teaching respect for Nature

An interesting article by Rachel Cunliffe in last week’s New Statesman caught my attention with its sub-title, ‘Could national service for retirees be the answer to generational inequality?’ I thought that this approach to considering ageing was a refreshing change from the everlasting, ‘What can we do to help the aged?’

There has indeed been a steady increase in life expectancy in recent decades. In 1999, around one in six people in the UK were 65 years and over, [15.8%] and this had increased to around one in five people by 2019, [18.5%]. The Office for National Statistics has projected that this figure could rise to one in four people in the UK [23%] by 2039. However, there has not been a corresponding increase in healthy life expectancy at birth. The Darzi report [the Independent Investigation of the NHS in England] suggested that our ageing population is the most significant driver of increased healthcare needs while this is compounded by a reduction in public funding for                                                                                        social care despite demand. SO, with the over 65s consuming more of the civic healthcare cake, as it were, perhaps it is past time to discuss payback!

How to fish.

This background information while offering much scope for research on improving healthy life expectancy, does not detract from the fact that there are millions of retirees in the UK who are healthy enough and [from my own observations] enthusiastic enough to give more to civic society. At the same time, there is widespread generational inequality as the younger generation endures eye-watering levels of rents, rising living costs and a steadily climbing higher education economic outlay. Parental wealth is often tied to home ownership, and this provides a significant advantage for young people from wealthier backgrounds and, to an extent, limits the upward mobility of the less fortunate. The fact that ‘twas ever thus’ does not detract from the serious extent of both inter-generational wealth inequality and Government policy which ‘gives’ generously to the over 65s [the famous triple-lock] partly funded, at least, by younger taxpayers. The public sector debt which seems to increase inexorably, will be tackled /endured/inherited by the younger generation! Meanwhile, it is incredibly difficult for the Government to reform benefits for the elderly, say like the triple-lock; witness the uproar over its attempts to reframe the winter fuel allowance!

Teaching calligraphy.

And so, to the idea of a National Service for the over 65s. Apparently this has been already advocated in Germany by Marcel Fratzscher of the DIW [the German Institute for Economic Research] who advocates first a non-intergenerational gesture with the emphasis on less re-distribution of wealth from young to old, and more on re-distribution from rich to poor within the baby boomer generation. And an even more eye-catching idea is his proposal for a year of mandatory social service for all recent elderly retirees. He points to the worker shortage in Germany and other European countries including the U.K. in sectors particularly important to/for the elderly. Here the gaps in personnel could be filled by elderly volunteers; after all, it is older people who are at least partly responsible for these manpower shortages now, by having reduced family size in earlier times. He suggests that this idea promotes solidarity between the generations because economic and demographic trends have advantaged the so-called ‘baby boomers’ while the prospects of the present younger generation have dramatically diverged from those who enjoyed earlier civic and social advantages.

How to ride a bike.

Looking around, one can see grandparents stepping in when needed; baby-sitting; looking after schoolchildren in the hours before parents finish work; funding school trips; providing holidays and covering for parents when needed, in parts of the main school holidays. But these are not mandatory, and we are not all grandparents! A compulsory first year of retirement when people are usually fit enough in their mid-sixties, could soon settle into part of the accepted pattern of life and does seem attractive. One can see a whole little industry developing here, with official volunteer lists of sufficiently qualified and willing gardeners; decorators; admin assistants in clinics and hospitals; school readers [translated as volunteers timetabled to go into schools to hear children read or improve their reading]; sports assistants; scientists; the list could go on. This is an idea to improve and assist civic cohesion with the responsibility to tackle demographic challenges on the whole range of society rather than on the younger generation who have inherited the problem. It also goes without saying, that a job done well, for which a person has volunteered, does give a warm glow of satisfaction to the do-gooder!

Listening to Grandpa.

Armed and ready for tidying up!

Nana's Memories of WW2 for Eloise

 

 The following memories of a small child during WW2, have been gathered because my young grand-niece, Eloise, asked to interview me about my recall, for a school project. The language below is aimed at a child's understanding of a strange situation, hence the occasional explanations of wartime life.

My sister, Esme, and I in our front garden
Possibly taken in 1938/9

My family lived in a little semi-detached house on Lindhurst Lane in Mansfield in Nottinghamshire in the 1930s and 1940s. There were quite a few houses, mostly quite big, on either side of the lane, which was rutted and rough, then became rural, with just countryside around. In WW2, a barricade was built across Lindhurst Lane “to stop the Germans.” It had a small gap between a huge block of stone/brick, about 8/9 feet tall, to permit cyclists, pedestrians and tractors through to continue their journeys but there was no way for any car or lorry or tractor to go through. Quite often, my sister, Esme, and I would climb up on to the top of the barricade and pretend it was a stage where we would give a concert consisting mainly of us singing and dancing! We were also the audience.

 On the ‘top field’ near our house was an American army camp. One of the cooks used to steal tins of food, put them in a sack, 

Four American soldiers, WW2.

 and bring them to give to us at night, from time to time. I have no idea why; perhaps he had met my father in a pub somewhere, though wartime food was short for ordinary people and there was lots of food in the American camp!  Quite often, individual American soldiers would walk past our gate, and I used to run to the gate and shout, “Got any gum, chum?” which an American soldier had taught me to say! Quite often, they would stop and give me a stick of chewing gum wrapped in silver paper! And sometimes, a little piece of chocolate which I loved as we never had any! One Christmas we received a food parcel from America, from a soldier’s family who had heard of the food shortages in Britain. We were thrilled to see tinned fruit cake, tinned butter and tinned cheese for the first time.

Evacuees begin their journey to safety

Next-door to us for a year an evacuee was living with the family there though she wasn’t related to them. I think her family lived in London where there was a lot of bombing and she was one of thousands of children taken from their families and ‘evacuated’. [That is, she went to live without her parents, with people she didn’t know, who lived in a safer part of England] She was called Lally, and she and I became great friends. She left after about a year and I missed her a lot!!

 Buildings were not allowed to show any light through the windows at night. There were inspectors called Wardens who would knock on your front door if even a little chink of light was showing to demand you put out your light immediately. People did as they were told about the chinks of lights showing as they didn’t want to help the German aeroplanes know where they were!

This looks exactly like the ration books we had.

We had ration books, one each, and we couldn’t buy any food without coupons being clipped from our books. Several items such as tinned goods, dried fruit, cereals, sweets and biscuits were rationed using a ponts system. Each person was only allowed a very small amount of meat and sausages each week. Priority allowances of milk and eggs were given to those most in need, including small children and expectant mothers.  Not all food was rationed. Bread was never rationed during the war but strangely, became rationed in 1946, a year after the war had ended! All food rationing stopped in 1954, nine years after the end of WW2 when I was 20!!  Fruit and vegetables were never rationed but were often in short supply especially tomatoes, onions and fruit from overseas like bananas. My little sister Heather was born in 1940, and she saw her first banana when she was five; she tried to eat it without peeling it as she didn’t know what to do!

As shortages increased, long queues became commonplace. Often, a person could reach the front of a long queue only to find out that the item they had been waiting for had just run out! There were no supermarkets then, just specialist shops like bakers, grocers and butchers. The Government encouraged people to grow vegetables in their own gardens or allotments, and often areas in parks were made into communal vegetable plots! The Government publicised this as Dig for Victory!!

Small evacuee, already missing Mummy.

 

Queues, often for food,, were an everyday feature of life during the war.

Other items which were rationed during the war were petrol in 1939, clothes in 1941and soap in 1942. So, by the time I was eight, people could only buy very few clothes, so my mother used to knit a lot; she seemed to specialise in multi-patterned cardigans and jumpers and the knitting patterns were called ‘Fair-isle’; these were very complicated with differently coloured wools sort of woven together on the reverse side of the garment. My mother was skilled at this and sometimes knitted an occasional garment for a neighbour who would pay her. My mother taught me to knit when I was about six and I do remember knitting for my new baby sister, Heather, a little clover pink cardigan with blue aeroplanes flying around the bottom edge! I remember Mum showing it to people and saying I had made it which I had though I didn’t knit the little blue aeroplanes which decorated it; Mum did! All my clothes were passed down to my sisters as I grew out of them! This included underwear. Besides the usual vest and knickers, in winter we also wore what was called a ‘liberty bodice’, a thick, quite stiff, white, extra sleeveless layer over the vest.

The much-hated gas mask

In the early days of the war, which began in September 1939 when I was five, like all schoolchildren, I had a little gas mask which I hated because when I put it on over my head to cover my face, it smelled strange, and I felt I couldn’t breathe properly. I had to take it to school every day, and we used to
practice putting it on and off quite often in class. Also at school, once a week I think {but not sure!] we used to line up and walk from school, over the nearby allotments to the nearest air raid shelter. We all hated the shelter because it was dark, dank and smelly but we had to sit there until the ‘All clear’ sounded. This was a sort of siren playing a special tune to show us that there was no longer any danger from German bombs, then we lined up again and couldn’t wait to get back to school!

WW2 ended in Europe on May 8th, 1945, three  months before 

V.E. Day street party in Nottingham

I was 11. There was a super street party for children on Woodland Drive, off Lindhurst Lane where we lived, to celebrate that the war was over, and absolutely everyone went. I do remember being amazed at just how much food was there. Sometimes one of the Mums would shout at one of the dads to stop eating the children’s food! There was a second, similar, street party for children soon after August 15th, 1945, when the war with Japan finally ended, with all the kids in the area sitting at this long, long table in the street eating sandwiches and jelly!  My mother said I must wear my new school blazer as I had passed the 11+ and was due to go to the Brunt’s Grammar School in Mansfield in September and she wanted everyone to know! I had a long photo of all the kids at each party but both seem to have disappeared!

The Holocaust. Nazis set out to kill all European Jews

It was around this time that I saw, in the Daily Herald newspaper that came every day, pictures of Jews in Europe, millions of whom had been killed by the Nazis. There were also stories and pictures of the war in my Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper which my mother bought for me every week during the war. The newspaper pictures showed concentration camps where millions of Jews had been imprisoned and tortured then killed. The surviving Jews were often so very thin that they were like living skeletons and these photos were very frightening for me at the time. We all thought how wicked the Germans were.

European Jews en route to extermination camps.