Why do we do it? Let the people decide who is to be the
leader of the free world, that is. Perhaps it would be better if we first
selected only the sensible people and then let them vote? Some are more equal
than others.
Time to bring out Winston Churchill
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried
in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or
all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of
Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to
time.…”
It was a funny old thing you know, two candidates both aged
around 70, with about half the electorate not so much voting for who they
wanted to win, but voting against who they didn’t. You can tell the Americans
got their system from us British.
Here in the bookshop it looks like we could be going to have
a record bad day and I am putting it down to the American election and not down
to the forecast for rain all day or the actual rain itself.
Political effects on bookshops are strange – the recent
Brexit one caused the pound to crash which made our book exports rise, mind you
if the Trump effect is that the dollar crashes then I suppose that will be
reversed.
Local pictures next and oh yes sorry about that you didn’t really
want my thoughts on the American election did you. I promise to try and stick to East Kent local issues.
There is a local story related to this picture, which may be only a half truth.
This building was for a telescope, which may have been
Pugin’s as it was next to his house or it may have belonged to the monastery –
for viewing the heavens. It was situated on the middle of what now, is the
entrance to the duel carriageway road on top of the Westcliffe here in
Ramsgate.
Now if it wasn’t us British who invented elections then it
was the Roman Catholic Church, they started electing popes about a thousand years
ago and here in Ramsgate they also – the monks that is elected and abbot –
probably like the Americans, that is by choosing which of the monks aged around
70, that most of them didn’t like much, should be their leader.
I think in the senior end of the god bothering world, you
would need a certain type of individual to handle any big red buttons that suddenly
turned up.
The abbot of the monastery, Erkonwald (?) Egan, installed
the war memorial on the wall of the Pugin? observatory in the early 1920's. As
you can see, this included a crucifix, which was vandalized one night. A letter
was then sent anonymously to a local newspaper, stating that "local
protestants" objected to the "public idolatry" of the crucifix.
Apparently the abbot replied, saying that he would replace the crucifix (he
never did).
There are two rumours attached to this. One, the abbot
already knew that the Westcliff Promenade was going to be built, and hoped to
stop work on this by putting the war memorial in the way. Two, those who were
going to benefit financially from the Westgate development arranged for the
vandalism, not any Protestants (who were never traced, apparently, neither
could anybody guess who they could have been).
There was a strong feeling back then that the Westgate
development involved serious collusion and corruption between the then town
council and developers, but all those in the know must now be dead.
This one is of J W Gurney Poulterer and Pork Butcher 1 Hawley Street Margate C1900John Henry Iles bought the site in November 1919. JH Iles took over the existing Hall By The Sea, a seafront dance hall and pleasure garden, originally opened in the 1860s by circus showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger, initially renaming it Dreamland Hall before opening the famous amusement park to the public on July 3 1920.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.