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Sentinel

Local Matters

Sandgate

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November 2021

This magazine is compiled and edited by David Cowell who is totally responsible for content. If you do not wish to receive these magazines please email UNSUBSCRIBE to him at david@thesentinel.org.uk

The Sandgate Market provides three types of produce offerings: 1. Local produce: veg, cakes, honey etc 2. Local made: jewellery, soft toys and furnishings etc

3. Local enterprise: local residents running a a local business but selling products not necessarily produced locally but that you might just like to buy for yourself or as gifts

Local made

Local produce

Catherine Jordan Cakes

Valentin Bakery

Anji's Interiors

Usher's fruit and veg

Marsh soap

Pauline's hand Gill Thompson made toys Jewellery

Arkwrights Pantry

Local enterprise

There will not be a CAFE at the Market although the Dog House is offering Market attendees coffee or tea at £1. Please collect your voucher at the Market

...and a chance to win £20,000

Our thanks to the Sandgate Parish Council and the Community Gardeners for allowing us to reproduce this diary page. We hope to make this a monthly feature in the magazine but you can read all the diary entries by clicking on this box. We have always agreed in our garden WhatsApp group that should it be blowing a hooly or tipping down with rain on one of our designated gardening days then we would throw in the towel and not turn up. On Saturday it was blowing and tipping at the same time, so that was that. The site being rather exposed, at the far end of the park with no shelter or even anywhere nearby to take cover and wait until the worst passes, means you have to take the plunge and make a decision when the weather is dodgy. All the same, the garden is always open for anybody to access from dawn till dusk and so if the gardening urge is too great to resist, then some of our gardeners can be found therapeutically weeding or deadheading whenever they feel compelled to do so. Happily, the Wednesday session was reasonably fair, and there was a great number of volunteers making short work of our ‘to do’ list. We picked kale, salad leaves, chard, spinach, winter radishes and leeks, moved compost around to prepare some of the empty beds for re-planting, and the leaf compost bin got emptied. The leaf compost was collected last autumn – fallen leaves were raked up from the grass and picked up from the plot and the pond, to be left to rot down for the year in the assigned compost area. This seems to be the first week that the autumn colours have started to show on the trees, that is the leaves that are left, as there are few leaves to compost so far, most seem to have been blown away! Someone somewhere must be piled high with our leaves wherever they have been blown to, and we may not have many to compost this year. The climate is quite different at Fremantle Park, with shelter from the wind, and the ground seems to collect more moisture sitting within a dip. All the gardeners that volunteer there met up last Sunday to weed and tidy the plots and pathways, put Fremantle big tidy up 4

fresh compost down and share which crops did well for them. It was interesting to find we have a phantom planter, as nobody confessed to establishing a line of fabulously flowering osteospernum plants along the outer path edge. So obviously we have a secret and shy gardener who would be welcome to join us if they made themselves known! We are still establishing the slope within Fremantle Park, and gradually removing brambles and shrub runners as they try to reappear, with the view to putting some fruit Nothing to do with this week, bushes and more flowering plants there in 2022. but the celeriac is swelling! The strip of annuals we planted in the spring have made a lovely display and on looking to see if it needed cutting back and removing, although a trifle battered, was still full of flower and alive with bees, so we have left it and probably will not remove anything now until the first frost or the plants give up the ghost themselves, whichever comes first. Rita, our queen of plant propagation and flower seed sowing, planted some donated iris roots and perennial wallflower plants she had grown from cuttings – something the bees just love! Talking of donations, the Hyth Hops group got in touch with offerings of free beer from Hopfuzz and Docker brewery, a can or bottle from each brewer to all hop growers to say thank you for the donated hops grown within the collective. In true community spirit, all the gardener names were entered into a lucky dip, and two were chosen to be the lucky recipients. There are cans of ‘red-green hop’ available in the Sandgate village shop if you are still yet to sample some of the fresh ‘green hop’ brews. Still on the subject of donations and especially community spirit, we are pleased to advertise and take part in an event on Saturday 20th November 11am to 3pm at the Radnor Park Bowls Club, called ‘Disco Soup’. The idea is to take part in transforming surplus food into a community feast, and activities will include apple pressing, learning how to fement food in jars, and various craft stalls. A great day for the family, and a wonderful way of using food which may otherwise have gone to landfill. See the poster below for more information and how to take part. What’s next? • Dismantle the fringe exhibition • Start planting the broad beans • See if there is space available for other things • We have bulbs to plant for the spring • Keep checking on the plants in the cold frames Still weeding and cutting back to be done 5

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All now available in paperback and on Kindle Set in Folkestone in the heady days of the late 60s. They say if you can remember it, you weren't there!

Two plays. One an imaginary meeting between Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan in a Fitzrovia pub. The other is Caitlin Thomas reminiscing after the untimely death of her husband.

This is the tale of Hana, a young girl who moves from where she was born in London, to the Kent coast. They discover a wonderful area called Prince's Parade which is full of amazing animals, has a beautiful canal and is right next to the sea too! By buying this book you will be helping to protect it. All profits from it will be donated to the Save Prince's Parade campaign which aims to halt plans to develop the area into a housing estate. Very funny, and surreal story about a man and a woman on their first date: Bolton Brady and Veda, set in London, November 2001. Bolton is forty, not into assets, has never lived with a woman and looked into the future and seen loneliness. So he decides to do something about it. He advertises in a lonely-hearts column, and receives six replies, but after experiencing one disaster after another only Veda remains between him and his sanity. As the day unfolds the line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred, building to a surreal, yet poignant, conclusion. 16

This walk through the history of Sandgate to the present day was first performed at the Chichester Hall a decade ago on Wednesday, 9th June. It is now available on Kindle or in paperback.

Now available on Amazon. Great evocative yarns of worldly travels.

A Loose Cannon tales of a lapsed activist

Ted Parker

The title of the book hints at how, as a ‘loose cannon’, Folkestone born Ted’s risk-taking got him into trouble on a number of occasions whilst being a considerable advantage in his working life.

As a young journalist, Reg Turnill met most of the prewar political personalities and later became the BBC's space correspondent being the only one in the press room when the historic Houston we have a problem message came from Apollo 11. 17

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People talk

an occasional feature

We would like to thank SEnine magazine for allowing us to reproduce this article which appears in the November edition of their magazine. You can view this article and previous editions of the magazine at: senine.co.uk

Now happily settled in suburban Eltham, Ted Parker has been looking back to his rebellious past. He speaks to John Webb about his book, A Loose Cannon. Where did your story begin? I was born during the War on 31 October 1943 in Folkestone which was being shelled by Germans from the French coast. My mother's tales of the bravery of the Battle of Britain pilots made a deep impression on me Was your father in the War? Yes, as a motorcycle despatch rider, part of the Allied Still a loose cannon? invasion forces and afterwards in occupied Germany. His recollections of what was revealed when the Allies encountered the Nazi concentration camps also affected me. Sadly, he died from cancer when I was only six, soon after he returned home. When did your rebel years begin? I didn't do well at grammar school and left at 15 with four 'O' levels. After school, I joined the RAF aged 16 as an electronics apprentice. I was intensely patriotic. However, I was training to work on Britain's nuclear bomber fleet, the V bombers. tt was the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the closest the world had come to nuclear war. Rightly of wrongly, after a lot of soul-searching I was drawn to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, together with an RAF colleaque, Mike McKenna, wrote to Peace News to propose that a CND branch should be formed im the Forces. How did that go down with the RAF? We were court martialled, given eight months in custody and discharged with ignominy! We were sent to Her Majesty's Prison and Detention Barracks, Shepton Mallet, a tough miltary prison built in 1610. Reggie and Ronald Kray had served time there in the early 19505 whilst evading national service, There was a double gallows there until 1967, four years after I arrived Your next rebellion? I continued with CND whilst getting a steady job with Radio Rentals back in Folkestone but, in a life-changing episode, followed Mike Mckenna in taking A levels and getting into the prestigious London School of Economics. At LSE, I played a leading 24

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role in the student unrest sparked by left wing causes such as opposition to racial oppression in South Africa and the war in Vietnam. And an undercover mission to apartheid-run South Africa? In 1967 whilst at LSE I was approached by a member of the African National Cangress (ANC), the main political voice of black South Africa, which had been banned there and its leader, Nelson Mancela, jailed for life. I volunteered for a mission to go into South Africa, smuggling literature and ANC banners which I and a colleague managed to display from a public building as part of an ANC publicity campaign. If arrested, we would have been in for a long and unpleasant spell in prison, All this is documented in an excellent book Londen Recruits - fhe secret war against aparthed by Ken Keable, shortly to be the subject of a feature length film. And the Battle of Lewisham? After LSE. I took a Cert Ed at Garnett College, Roehampton, which led to a job at Woolwich College, bringing me to south east London. I had retained my involvement in left wing politics and became an active member of the Anti-Nazi League when it was standing up against the National Front. The NF undertook a series of provocative marches to build support for its racist policies. The most bitterly contested was in Lewisham in 1977 when we managed to block them from entening Lewisham High Street. I believe it was a turning point and the NF gradually declined into obscurity. You thrived at work? Yes, after 13 years at Woolwich College and spells at colleges in Brixton and Acton I became principal at Barking College in 1992 and spent a happy and fulfilling 17 years, retiring in 2008 Some noteworthy achievements included opening the Broadway Theatre as an exciting performance venue in Barking Town Centre in partnership with Barking Council, building the Centre for Engineering & Manufacturing Excellence (CEME) in partnership with Ford of Dagenham, and creating the largest facility in London for Construction Training, providing employment opportunities for thousands of local people And your life now? | retired in 2008, and I enjoy volunteering at the Bob Hope Theatre, rambling with the Sidcup Rumbles (yes, that’s how they spell it}, singing with Rock Choir and seeing the progress of my children and grandchildren, One day I bought two of them, aged 5 or 6, ice-crearns when I had been told not to, One of them described me as a loose cannon — still a rebel! it seemed a good title for my book

You can buy Ted's book A Loose Cannon: tales of a lapsed activist in Kindle, paperback and hardback formats on Amazon 25

If you would like to submit an article or letter please email it to me. I will print almost anything as long as it’s not libellous, racist or unkind. Name must be supplied but can be withheld if requested. Please put your articles etc in plain text or Word and images should be in .jpg, .tiff or .png. My contact details are: Address: Clyme House, Hillside Street, Hythe, Kent CT21 5DJ

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