135. Walking back To Happiness? Hardly!

As part of the unwanted (by me) celebration of my recent “big” birthday, Caroline arranged for us to visit Lowestoft, for me to relive childhood memories.  We stayed in what is probably the best room in what may possibly, be the best hotel in the area.

It is the first time that I have ever spent the night in a hotel room with a plaque on the door, not a number.

The Queen Suite is really very nice with all the facilities that a really nice hotel room should have but for one thing: having spent thousands of pounds on the bed, the furniture, the en-suite bathroom, the fluffy towels, the carpets and the television, why did the owners save money by having thin, unforgiving, firm pillows?  A minor grumble but one I felt obliged to make on checkout.

My family moved to Lowestoft, a coastal town in Suffolk, when I was six and Lowestoft was my home for the next 19 years.  Lowestoft was a prosperous place during that time.  It isn’t now.

Recent studies show that, generally, seaside towns have greater levels of deprivation than the rest of England.  It wasn’t always so.  In Dickens’ novel published in 1850, Peggotty told David Copperfield that Yarmouth, a town 10 miles to the north of Lowestoft was:

“upon the whole, the finest place in the universe."  

It certainly isn’t now.

I was slightly upset by the shabby, unkempt appearance that seems to have afflicted a lot of north Lowestoft.  Most of the 19^th century artisan cottages that gave much of the north of the town its character have been demolished and as far as I could see, have been replaced by a landscape of wide, soulless one-way roads with few houses.  If only those cottages in the Hemplands had been renovated and upgraded.  The people I knew who lived there 50 years ago had a real sense of community.

In Lowestoft, as in Great Yarmouth and most coastal towns, old industries are disappearing, unemployment is high and the quality of education in the schools is low. 

I can understand why the schools are bad.  If I were beginning a teaching career now, I certainly wouldn’t want to live somewhere like Lowestoft.  Along with unemployment, the level of child poverty in some parts of the town is significant, at close to twice the national average.  In 2014, three of the four secondary schools in Lowestoft were put into special measures by Ofsted.

When I was at school in the sixties, there was a thriving fishing industry and there were several engineering companies, many of which were associated with fishing.  Unemployment rates were so low that there were hundreds of student jobs available every Christmas and summer vacation.

From the 1970s, however, the EEC “common pond” policy meant that more and more European vessels were fishing for ever-decreasing fish stocks and inevitably, those stocks dwindled.  Lowestoft’s fleet was hit so hard that it disappeared. 

EU quotas effectively curbed not just the Lowestoft trawlermen but even the longshoremen too.  Continental, European boats were literally vacuuming everything up off the seafloor. 

The fishing industry declined rapidly once the rot set in.  The number of people employed in the fishing industry has dropped from thousands then, to tens now.

When it was a thriving fishing town, many people were attached to fishing in some way, from engineering companies that would maintain the engines for the boats, to diesel fitters, chandlers and merchants.  There were more than 150 trawlers based in Lowestoft harbour sixty years ago.  In those times, each trawler had a 10 or even a 12-man crew.  Currently, there are about a dozen small inshore fishing boats regularly operating from the harbour at Lowestoft. 

Activity/Company	Function	Closed	Jobs
Deep Sea Fishing	Fishing	From 1965	2500+
Ross Fish	Fish freezing	1981	310
Eastern Coach Works	Bus construction	1987	1400
Brooke Marine	Shipbuilding	1987	550
Mortons	Food canning	1988	300
Bally	Shoe manufacture	1990	350
Richards Shipyards	Shipbuilding	1994	500
CWS	Food canning	1994	1100
Shell Operations	Oil exploration	2003	120
Pye (later Sanyo)	Televisions	2009	800
Boulton and Paul	Manufacturing	2000	200
Jeld-Wen	Timber	2010	190
Blundeston Prison	Correction centre	2014	300

No wonder Lowestoft voted for Brexit!  The voting was 63% “leave” and 37% to remain.  The decline in employment in Lowestoft in the past 50 years has been dramatic.

Around 9000 jobs were lost and this all happened without an immigrant to be seen, nor a Romanian to be blamed.

It wasn’t the fear of numbers of foreign immigrants that made people vote that way.  Lowestoftians aren’t very keen on people from Norfolk! 

When I was at school, I was proud to have played football and cricket for Suffolk schools, but because Lowestoft and Yarmouth Rugby Club was affiliated to Norfolk, I kept quiet about playing rugby for Norfolk schoolboys.  When we lost to Suffolk I was actually quite pleased.

The decline continues.  There was a possibility that The Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) laboratory or the “Fishlabs” as it is known, could be moved away with a loss of 400 jobs.  It wasn’t but Lowestoft Hospital is to be closed as is the County Court.

The major employers in the town now are in tourism and the wholesale and retail sectors.  The future may be in renewable energy.

After the decline of the fishing industry, tourism became and still is the number one industry in Lowestoft, with over a million tourists visiting every year.

But, if the intention is to further develop tourism in the town, there is work to be done.  I haven’t lived in Lowestoft for 45 years and it, with the surrounding districts of Oulton Broad and Pakefield, has changed considerably. 

Caroline asked what we could do on a cold, wet, windy, overcast Wednesday in February.  Apart from a walk along the seafront, I couldn’t suggest much else. 

I went to Google where I found the “Oulton Broad Celebrity Walk”.  I was intrigued.  If it is anything like the Hollywood and Miami Celebrity Trips, where tourists are driven in a bus past the houses of famous film stars, singers and business moguls, it could be a fun way to spend the morning even though I couldn’t think of any celebrities who had ever lived in Oulton Broad.

I read a synopsis of the walk and found that “Oulton Broad has been home to some surprisingly famous faces….”  Who could those “famous faces” be?  I didn’t know of any.  I was very curious.

It clearly wouldn’t be a long walk as there are only 5 waypoints marked.  The first of these is the starting point in Everitt Park and the second is a lock 400 yards away that keeps Oulton Broad’s water separated from the salty water to the seaward side.  No celebrities yet with two-fifths of the walk done and only three points of interest to go.

Point of interest #3 is The George Borrow Hotel.  George Borrow was a nineteenth-century traveller and writer who towards the end of his life lived somewhere in Oulton Broad village but he never visited the hotel that bears his name. 

It’s not as if there is a record of the landlord ever saying, “Come on George mate, I want to shut up for the night.  You’ve been propping up the bar all evening and you need an early night.  Your missus tells me you’re off on another trip to Spain tomorrow.”

The hotel's name commemorates the man and nothing more.  He was hardly a famous face, anyway.

There are now only two waypoints to go and I hoped that they were saving the really famous faces until last. 

Waypoint #4 was Commodore Road.  Justin Hawkins once lived on this road.  (Justin Hawkins? I had to Google him.)  Apparently, he led a rock band called The Darkness that had success some ten years ago but then he spent £150,000 in three years on cocaine.   

#5, the last point of interest on this trip among the luminaries and their famous faces, is something that doesn’t have a face at all.  It is a pub called The Commodore where you may, “stop for a bite to eat before you continue back over the lock bridge to Everitt Park” where this rather pathetic, sorry really pathetic ‘Celebrity Walk’ began.

However, what the organiser of this doleful expedition doesn’t know, is that The Commodore really does have an actual place in history because it is the first pub in which I ever had an alcoholic drink.  It was after a Sunday League football match on Normanston Park and aged 16, I drank half a pint of shandy.  There should be a blue plaque on the wall.

But, there may be more to the pitiful Oulton Broad Walk than there is to the “Kessingland Celebrity Walk”. 

Kessingland is a village five miles south of Lowestoft and the highlight of its ‘Celebrity Walk’ is that it passes a point close to The Grange, the house once owned by H Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines.  It was here, we are told, that Haggard entertained his friend, Rudyard Kipling.

However, walkers cannot actually see The Grange because, unfortunately, The Grange fell into the sea as a result of coastal erosion many years ago.  The guide suggests that you may like to stand on the clifftop today and gaze over the waves at where it once may have stood.  Really?

I hope that the Local Tourist Boards are suitably embarrassed by these farragos of laughable “alternative facts”. 

As it turns out, there isn’t much to do after all in Lowestoft on a cold, damp, windy, dull Tuesday in February except to remember, wistfully, how wonderful it used to be - and then to drive to Norwich.