paul1867The police oath
I, … of … do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve the Queen in the office of constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people; and that I will, to the best of my power, cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people and property; and that while I continue to hold the said office I will to the best of my skill and knowledge discharge all the duties thereof faithfully according to law.
http://metpolicewatchlondonboroughs.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/police-oath.html
paul1867Anybody can make a bankruptcy petition to a court if they are owed a minimum of £750 or have a share in money owed exceeding £750. You are declared bankrupt by the court when a petition has been received and processed.
I have seen similar cases where the costs rise very, very quickly due to solicitors, court and bailiff fees. The size of the debt would indicate to me that this has been going on for some time.
paul1867Anybody can make a bankruptcy petition to a court if they are owed a minimum of £750 or have a share in money owed exceeding £750. You are declared bankrupt by the court when a petition has been received and processed.
I have seen similar cases where the costs rise very, very quickly due to solicitors, court and bailiff fees. The size of the debt would indicate to me that this has been going on for some time.
paul1867Thanks for the comments, much appreciated.
The man evicted owned the property and owed a council around £6,000 in business rates. The council made him bankrupt in order to recover their money and I believe that process has increased his debt to something in the order of £60-70K.
paul1867Thanks for the comments, much appreciated.
The man evicted owned the property and owed a council around £6,000 in business rates. The council made him bankrupt in order to recover their money and I believe that process has increased his debt to something in the order of £60-70K.
paul1867The value of anything is related to the demand for it, whatever our subjective opinion of the value is.
I think your remarks about the total lack of interest in “working art” as opposed to “fine art” are true. But there should be a place for both and I disagree with those who hold a philistine view of the value of the arts in society.
Charlie
Firstly, although having used the word myself, I had to look up philistine and then culture, and then “the arts”!!
I tend to take the OED as definitive in these matter.
Whilst a good rule in life is to stop digging when the hole starts getting too deep in fact the definitions do actual underline what the difficulty is that I and others perceive.
The OED defines a philistine as
A person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts:
But the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary states
a person who does not like or understand art, literature, music, etc.
culture is not included.
I am certainly not indifferent to culture nor do I dislike or not understand all art etc. Thus I was mistaken in using the word philistine. I used the word because I do dislike classic literature, most opera and the works of such people as Emin and Hirst. Oh and that pottery, Troika, ugly stuff.
So now that I think I understand properly all that I will come to the point.
Clearly beauty is in the eye of the beholder and therefore subjective. Value in the area we are talking however is a different matter and I am finding the semantics difficult as they appear to cross. The actual value of an item in the arts word is, in the main fairly negligible, where I am defining the value as the costs of materials and labour. The worth of the item is what it will fetch on the open market. Sorry about this I am not commenting on how you used the words you chose but I needed to use two different words to make my point.
Thus in the terms I have used the items worth is what it can obtain on the open market. My problem with this is that markets are manipulated and created especially in the arts world. What is the real reason that Emin’s bed has sold for £2M5? She sold it to Saatchi for £150K. Mr. Saatchi is of course famous in the art world so if he bought it it must be the up and coming thing and therefore a good investment. I wonder if Mr Saatchi was aware of this and thought he may be able to turn a profit. A painting you can hang on the wall, but a bed? The new owner Count Duerckheim has the solution. He has given it to the Tate so that he doesn’t have to look after it while it’s value accrues. Fortunately the Tate couldn’t afford to buy it for the nation. I’m just waiting for the little boy to come along and say “hey the king has got no clothes on.”
So with fashion designers. Remember the Nike stripe track suits. One strip first year, two the next so everybody had to go out and buy those and then three the next. Football clubs even got criticized for repeatedly changing the design of their strips to produce more income for the club. Fashion, all change every year, what colour is it this year, what length skirt, shorts, trousers or culottes, sporty wear. Changed every year by the designers to sell more clothes. I read that bras are “out” this year, I shall have to mention that to my wife.
So the point I was making was not that there was no value in “fine art” but it’s worth was greatly inflated and of little educational value. When public money is involved considerably more of the pot should go to “working art” by which I hope you mean this countries industrial, engineering and architectural artefacts which is also educational this being a major feature when applying for any grant. So yes of course both.
Just sufficient money to save these artefacts from total loss would be a start. In many cases actual money is not needed just time by not making a sale to the highest bidder.
Long Marston is a huge opportunity lost to the developers and should have been sold to the NRM for £1. Airframes and warships for the cost of moving them out of the way. Yes they may rot away but destroying them guarantees their loss. Who ever thought we would bring the Great Britain back from the Falklands or that the Adelaide would eventually be saved despite many attempts to have her broken up. Or be recovering the stones from the canal into which they were dumped to rebuild the Euston Arch. We do not know what the future may bring but past history tells me that we will want some of what we are destroying today.
So more of the pot for creative works of art like a steam engine (look at the criticism that the NRM recives for its expenditure to bring the two A4s over from North America or what they have spent on the Flying Scotsman.), vehicles, buses, trams, cars, engineering in general, buildings, oh and of course aeroplanes, did I not mention aeroplanes.
Paul
paul1867The value of anything is related to the demand for it, whatever our subjective opinion of the value is.
I think your remarks about the total lack of interest in “working art” as opposed to “fine art” are true. But there should be a place for both and I disagree with those who hold a philistine view of the value of the arts in society.
Charlie
Firstly, although having used the word myself, I had to look up philistine and then culture, and then “the arts”!!
I tend to take the OED as definitive in these matter.
Whilst a good rule in life is to stop digging when the hole starts getting too deep in fact the definitions do actual underline what the difficulty is that I and others perceive.
The OED defines a philistine as
A person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts:
But the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary states
a person who does not like or understand art, literature, music, etc.
culture is not included.
I am certainly not indifferent to culture nor do I dislike or not understand all art etc. Thus I was mistaken in using the word philistine. I used the word because I do dislike classic literature, most opera and the works of such people as Emin and Hirst. Oh and that pottery, Troika, ugly stuff.
So now that I think I understand properly all that I will come to the point.
Clearly beauty is in the eye of the beholder and therefore subjective. Value in the area we are talking however is a different matter and I am finding the semantics difficult as they appear to cross. The actual value of an item in the arts word is, in the main fairly negligible, where I am defining the value as the costs of materials and labour. The worth of the item is what it will fetch on the open market. Sorry about this I am not commenting on how you used the words you chose but I needed to use two different words to make my point.
Thus in the terms I have used the items worth is what it can obtain on the open market. My problem with this is that markets are manipulated and created especially in the arts world. What is the real reason that Emin’s bed has sold for £2M5? She sold it to Saatchi for £150K. Mr. Saatchi is of course famous in the art world so if he bought it it must be the up and coming thing and therefore a good investment. I wonder if Mr Saatchi was aware of this and thought he may be able to turn a profit. A painting you can hang on the wall, but a bed? The new owner Count Duerckheim has the solution. He has given it to the Tate so that he doesn’t have to look after it while it’s value accrues. Fortunately the Tate couldn’t afford to buy it for the nation. I’m just waiting for the little boy to come along and say “hey the king has got no clothes on.”
So with fashion designers. Remember the Nike stripe track suits. One strip first year, two the next so everybody had to go out and buy those and then three the next. Football clubs even got criticized for repeatedly changing the design of their strips to produce more income for the club. Fashion, all change every year, what colour is it this year, what length skirt, shorts, trousers or culottes, sporty wear. Changed every year by the designers to sell more clothes. I read that bras are “out” this year, I shall have to mention that to my wife.
So the point I was making was not that there was no value in “fine art” but it’s worth was greatly inflated and of little educational value. When public money is involved considerably more of the pot should go to “working art” by which I hope you mean this countries industrial, engineering and architectural artefacts which is also educational this being a major feature when applying for any grant. So yes of course both.
Just sufficient money to save these artefacts from total loss would be a start. In many cases actual money is not needed just time by not making a sale to the highest bidder.
Long Marston is a huge opportunity lost to the developers and should have been sold to the NRM for £1. Airframes and warships for the cost of moving them out of the way. Yes they may rot away but destroying them guarantees their loss. Who ever thought we would bring the Great Britain back from the Falklands or that the Adelaide would eventually be saved despite many attempts to have her broken up. Or be recovering the stones from the canal into which they were dumped to rebuild the Euston Arch. We do not know what the future may bring but past history tells me that we will want some of what we are destroying today.
So more of the pot for creative works of art like a steam engine (look at the criticism that the NRM recives for its expenditure to bring the two A4s over from North America or what they have spent on the Flying Scotsman.), vehicles, buses, trams, cars, engineering in general, buildings, oh and of course aeroplanes, did I not mention aeroplanes.
Paul
paul1867Andy
I certainly wouldn’t dispute that. Although you didn’t specifically say, I am assuming that she was happy with the sale.
It would seem that not everybody is as from that article,
“The VC had been in Pte Godley’s family since he received it from King George V at Buckingham Palace in 1919. When he died in 1957, he left the VC to his wife, Ellen, who handed it down to their son, Stanley, who in turn passed it to his own son, Colin, 16 years ago. But Colin Godley’s decision to sell the medal, which went to a private and unidentified collector, split the family and left the war hero’s daughter, Eileen Slade (nee Godley), “totally devastated”.
Mrs Slade, 89, from Clacton, Essex, said it was “like losing one of the family” and has been inconsolable since learning of the sale. Her son, Andy Slade, told the Telegraph: “It could have killed her, to be blunt about it. She is beside herself. She wanted the medal to go either to the Royal Fusiliers Museum or stay in the family. She didn’t think anyone should be making any money out of it, simply be because of how it was won.””
Malcolm and Wings43 and Snapper
This is certainly the present situation and, of course, one should be free to dispose of ones property as one sees fit. The award of a medal is how the nation acknowledges the service given to this country and the recipient has a tangible artefact which can be displayed should the recipient wish. It is not intended that any monetary value is attached to the physical medal at the time of the award although certain awards do also attract financial benefits, I am sure we would all agree these are wholly inadequate. The IWM state “The Victoria Cross was deliberately intended to have little actual value. Its value lies in what it stands for and what people do to earn it: be extremely brave.”
Why would any recipient want to sell their medals? Presumably only because they need the money. However, this only becomes a viable option, by which I mean a meaningful amount, to a certain class of awards and the existence of collectors.
I wonder how many recipients actually want to sell their medals if they could meet their financial needs in some other way. Over the last decades many groups have fought for the recognition that they deserved to be recognised by the making of an award. I am fairly sure this was not done with one eye on the financial value that these medals may one day acquire.
Snapper raised a very valid point, and my father was also one of the “millions” and did not “claim” his medal(s). However, it is the market that determines these things and this thread is about the VC of which, relatively speaking, very few have been awarded. To many collectors the attraction may be the scarcity of an item with an eye on the future value increasing, this is certainly true of most “collectables”, although fashion has a say as well. So why would someone other than a museum or military unit whose interest are obviously not monetary based, want to buy a VC?
Some VCs have been bought by individuals and then loaned to museums, many have been bought by Lord Ashcroft who has also funded the display of his collection at the IWM.
This website has a large amount of information regarding the auction and location of VC medals.
http://www.victoriacross.org.uk/vcross.htm
The obvious fact is that with the nature of the award and its scarcity together with the existence of collectors the prices will continue to rise and after the first sale the benefactor is no longer the recipient or the family of the recipient.
Further complications also arise.
On a number of occasions an award has been made to a group, such as to Q ships and for the Zeebrugge Raid. Here individuals receive the medals on behalf of a group. I do not know about these specific medals but clearly an issue could arise. As Andy pointed out in an earlier post there are occasions when two people are awarded individual VCs but others who were with them were not. This gives rise for debate and obviously this becomes worse if significant amounts of money become involved.
The original Royal Warrant allowed for the award to be forfeited however in 1920 King George V felt strongly that “no matter the crime committed by anyone on whom the VC has been conferred, the decoration should not be forfeited. Even were a VC to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear his VC on the scaffold.” Although the warrant has not been amended no further forfeitures have occurred, but then maybe none were warranted either. I doubt that Queen Victoria considered that this medal would acquire the value it has today or maybe the Warrant would have been worded differently. Nor is any recipient likely to foresee the motivation for selling his medal several generations down the line. Look how society and its values has changed just in our lifetime. Many of our laws need modifying to bring them up to date to cope with modern life.
All these problems can be avoided by doing exactly what the Americans do with the Medal of Honor. In the USA it is illegal to sell a Medal of Honor or to wear one or claim you have been awarded one if you have not.
For once I think the Americans have got it right, along with the other benefits that go with that award.
Paul
paul1867Not forgetting the killer Porsche.
How about that all medals remain the property of the Crown and when the recipient dies the medals automatically pass to the recipient’s unit museum or another suitable museum.
In the case of posthumous awards these would be for the lifetime of the receiving relative.
paul1867I am sorry Lincoln.7 but I seem to have given you the wrong idea.
If it wasn’t for Google Bletchley Park may well have succumbed to the developers which I understand was the plan in 2011. Google stepped in with considerable amounts of money to save the place for us and the world and create the museum.
My comment was that the latest notebook auction was won by an unknown bidder and that I am hoping that winner will turn out to be Google who will hopefully donate the notebook to Bletchely Park museum.
I agree entirely about your comments about works of “art” although even a Philistine like me wouldn’t actual classify Constable as a blobs painter. I was thinking of starting a thread when Tracey Emin’s bed sold for £2.5 M. Er yes that’s over two and a half million pounds. that’s £2,540,000. Now just think what engineering heritage could be saved with that and actually have some educational value and meaning.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/01/tracey-emin-my-bed-sale-auction
Apparently this was Emin’s seminal work and I think that the Japanese customs had the right idea.
paul1867I am sorry Lincoln.7 but I seem to have given you the wrong idea.
If it wasn’t for Google Bletchley Park may well have succumbed to the developers which I understand was the plan in 2011. Google stepped in with considerable amounts of money to save the place for us and the world and create the museum.
My comment was that the latest notebook auction was won by an unknown bidder and that I am hoping that winner will turn out to be Google who will hopefully donate the notebook to Bletchely Park museum.
I agree entirely about your comments about works of “art” although even a Philistine like me wouldn’t actual classify Constable as a blobs painter. I was thinking of starting a thread when Tracey Emin’s bed sold for £2.5 M. Er yes that’s over two and a half million pounds. that’s £2,540,000. Now just think what engineering heritage could be saved with that and actually have some educational value and meaning.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/01/tracey-emin-my-bed-sale-auction
Apparently this was Emin’s seminal work and I think that the Japanese customs had the right idea.
paul1867Hi Andy, tried the link got error messages about timing out so I hope you don’t mind.
This is what you had in mind
Museum Development Manager
Vacancy Details
Summary
Salary: £34,737 – £37,632 (BR13)
Location: Bromley Civic Centre
Job Type: Full Time Temporary
Vacancy Group: Management
Closing Date: 26/04/2015
Date Posted: 10/04/2015
Reference: 0000005082
Description
This is a very exciting opportunity to be a key member of the team developing the new Biggin Hill Memorial Museum. The Museum Development Manager will have the opportunity to lead on and be involved with all aspects of this project from business planning to interpretation. This is a one year fixed term post with the possibility of extension.
Bromley Council is seeking to appoint an exceptional person to this role, with an eye for detail, combined with a pragmatic and organised approach to work, and good networking skills.
The appointed person will manage the development of the Trust governing body, business model, and the on-going securing of funds. They will also support the development of interpretation planning and exhibitions, and support the development of the capital scheme.
The new Biggin Hill Memorial Museum scheme has been in development since 2014 with the primary objectives of safeguarding the future of, and preserving for the benefit of the nation, St George’s RAF Chapel, and advancing the education of the public by establishing and maintaining an associated museum exhibiting the story of WW2 and the Battle of Britain.
Equal Opportunities Statement
We are committed to achieving equal opportunities in employment and service delivery.
We offer a generous package including competitive pay, final salary pension scheme, flexible working practices and the Bromley REAL benefits scheme; Childcare Vouchers, Cycle2Work and a wide range of unique discounts.
paul1867[QUOTE=DazDaMan;2217805 The Hillary family are/were reluctant to allow the story to be made into a film, lest it be “Hollywood-ised”.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]236748[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]
I can certainly sympathise with that.
But presumably there is no money other than from Hollywood.
paul1867…..not forgetting LAC Reynolds in the back of Garland and Gray’s Battle and for whom there was no VC and scant recognition!
That is exactly the trouble with the issue raised by Paul178. Sorry for the omission, Thanks Andy I will correct it.
I did include Sgt Fison though.
paul1867Paul178, whilst it is true what you say about all the others the Bader story is exceptional because of his life challenge and the other film was about one whole specific operation not just one man otherwise it would have been called Enemy Coast Ahead. (My copy is 1957 so I see I now need to read the uncensored edition. I note that Amazon list this as Historical fiction! Hopefully a typo.)
There have been a number of other films that depict the heroism of aircrews in general.
Of course it doesn’t matter if they were killed on their first time up, as so many where, or were an ace or survivor of several tours they all deserve our respect and gratitude and should be honoured. However, without being amusing in any way, they would be very short films if they only featured one aircrew member.
As for candidates for a film around a single person I am sure there are many. Richard Hillary comes to mind which could also feature the incredible work of Archibald McIndoe and the controversial return to flying resulting in Hillary’s death and that of Wilfred Fison. James Nicolson VC, Donald Garland VC , Thomas Gray VC and LAC Reynolds the later three in the same Fairey Battle. Of course, there are more and as you say it does feel disrespectful to pull out just a few names.
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