Less Talk and More Action

Protest is very much in the news at present with the occupation of St. Andrew’s Square in Edinburgh linked in to similar protests elsewhere across the world.  There are many opinions about direct action, whether it is needed, whether it is effective, but it is a route that has sometimes led to major social changes, particularly when it has been able to galvanise popular opinion to challenge powerful institutions and structures on issues of injustice and civil rights.

People in Wester Hailes had limited routes in which to highlight the problems they faced.  Throughout the early years in particular, there was a history of protest using direct action to tackle the lack of facilities, the faults in the buildings and the increasing cuts to already limited services.  People took direct action by attending meetings, joining in with petitions, demonstrations and sit-ins.  Public meetings attracted large turn outs as local residents sought to make their voices heard.   

Cuts in housing maintenance by Edinburgh District Council in 1980 led to large local meetings at which there were calls for “less talk and more action”.  The meetings fed into a city wide campaign where it was agreed to have a Mass Day of Complaints” with as many people as possible registering their individual complaint on the same day.  There was also a series of protest actions planned. 

In 1982, residents from Dumbryden demonstrated outside the City Chambers before the Edinburgh District Housing Committee was due to meet to discuss the findings of the McData report.  £5 million worth of building faults had been discovered and local tenants were angry that more was not being done to address the issues.  They felt their voices were not being heard during the investigative process which did not record tenants’ comments or allow space for them to be consulted.  You can read more about this story by clicking here on Sentinel February 1982.

When local concerns continued to be answered only with official excuses of there being insufficient money in the budget to provide the repairs needed, Wester Hailes tenants staged a sit- down protest at a full District Council meeting. 70 tenants sat down in the main council chamber and refused to leave.  The police were called and the demonstration left peacefully, carrying on the protest outside.  You can read more about the protest by clicking here on Sentinel May 1982.

The buildings in Wester Hailes had many faults needing rectified but one in particular, the drying screens, seemed to represent the frustration of local residents and their feelings that their voices were being ignored and their needs marginalised.  In April 1981 the District Council discovered that the drying screens were made of potentially hazardous material.  Cheap plastic with a low fire rating had been used instead of the required fire-retardant grade.  4,324 homes were affected and all the drying screens needed to be replaced.  In June 1981, the council decided to remove the drying screens, but had no apparent plans or schedule in place to replace them.  Contractors began to remove screens in a seemingly arbitrary and random way.  Tenants who refused to allow the removal of the screens faced legal action.  Stories started to emerge of clothes being stolen or vandalised, tenants failing to receive compensation, and altercations breaking out with the contractors.  You can read this story by clicking here on Sentinel July 1981. 

Nobody disagreed that a fire hazard should be removed, but there was no indication that any replacement was on offer.  Tenants took their protest to the City Chambers, demonstrating outside and hanging up washing there.  By August 1981, the situation was still unresolved, with a debate at the District Council being characterised with laughter over the issue from the Tory benches.  You can read this story by clicking here on Sentinel August 1981. A report provided five possible replacement options that the Council were investigating.  With budget constraints, it was thought that replacement work would not begin until the following summer.  It is to the credit of local residents in the face of this response that they did not give up but continued to campaign for better living conditions.

Tales, Technology and Totem Poles

What would you like to see on the Wester Hailes Memory Pole?  Workshops are being held at WHALE Arts Centre on Friday 4th November from 2PM to 4PM and at the Gate 55 Centre on Monday 7th November from 1.30PM to 3.30PM.

These sessions are a chance for you to share your memories of Wester Hailes, to find out how memories can be stored on the internet and on a totem pole as part of an exciting new project!

The sessions are open to anyone who has a story to tell, an interest in learning IT skills, or wants to know why a totem pole will be appearing in Wester Hailes?!?

To find out more or to book a place, contact Allan Farmer at WHALE Arts on 0131 458 3267

THE END OF AN ERA

1988 marked a turning point in the history of Wester Hailes. A phase in its evolution ended, quite suddenly, with the mass extinction of a unique form of community life – “The Huts”. In March 1989 Susan Dalgety wrote a piece in the Sentinel entitled THE END OF AN ERA which was both a sad farewell to these locally-run neighbourhood centres and a celebration of what they had been and had achieved.

The genesis of this phenomenon came about in the late nineteen seventies when Laurence Demarco, Lothian Regional Council’s local Area Liaison Officer at the time, came up with a bold new idea. He arranged for transportable classroom units which had become surplus to requirements to be brought to Wester Hailes to provide the premises for community initiatives controlled and managed by local volunteers. Before long every area had at least one of these huts providing residents with a social centre, a base for local campaigning and a spur for further construction projects such as the creation of adventure playgrounds. By the time the first community map of Wester Hailes was drawn up by the Rep Council in 1983, there were fifteen or more of these self-built initiatives including a cafe, community workshops, a nursery, a play hut, a youth hut, four adventure playgrounds and half a dozen neighbourhood centres.

Susan described her article as “a personal view” and in it she recounted how her first introduction to community activity was attending an AGM  in the hut which housed the Clovenstone Adventure Playground and Tenants Association. “If it had not been for the Huts”, she wrote, “I would have remained a lonely and bored housewife, concerned only with the price of bread and the latest knitting pattern. I owe them.” Within six weeks she was the Chairperson of CAPTA and that led on to involvement with the Sentinel (subsequently becoming editor), the Rep Council and “meeting scores of people who were all working hard to make the area a better place to live in”.

In the early eighties, the Huts gained access to much larger amounts of grant through the Manpower Services Commission’s Community Programme. For the first time it became possible to employ paid workers to deliver services and the scale of operations expanded significantly. At the peak of their activities there were some Huts projects employing a dozen or more workers. But, at the same time, they remained the centres of local social life. They were the places “where wee Johnnie had his birthday party, where the Halloween party was held and where the adults had their parties”.

However, according to Susan, the seeds of destruction had also been sown. Projects became dependant on the funding provided through the Community Programme and other fundraising more or less ground to a halt. Then, when the Community Programme was replaced by Employment Training scheme at the end of 1987 it became apparent that funding would no longer be available for the local Huts and their projects.

The end came quickly. Like a species totally dependant on just one type of food the Huts were unable to adapt and survive the sudden withdrawal of the funding lifeblood they had come to expect and rely on. One by one during 1988 nearly all of them closed down. Some premises simply lay empty and mouldered away others were taken over by the big new beast on the block, the Wester Hailes Management Training Agency set up under the auspices of Employment Training.

Susan concluded her own personal valediction thus:

“I wonder if we will ever recreate that atmosphere that was unique in the Huts…when I am in the middle of an ever-so serious discussion about the sub-processes and strategies that now seem to take up the whole of Wester Hailes Community activity, I often remember a Halloween party in the Clovie Hut. There I was, dressed as a Bunny Girl, getting pelted with treacle and monkey nuts by thirty or so boisterous youngsters and I loved every minute of it.”

“I can’t imagine that ever happening in a Partnership meeting. And without an outlet for the less serious things in life, which the Huts did their best to provide, then I think this community’s spirit will be that much poorer.”

Pages From The Past

This week we’re going back twenty six years to October 1986.  The headline story featured problems with young people throwing stones at buses.  The front page also also highlighted the arrival of cable television in the area which would offer an additional 11 channels a week for what would have been quite a steep price then of £7 per week. 

Other stories include

• The opening of the first drive in takeaway in Scotland, the Hot Potato
• A report on the activities happening at the Westburn Hut
• Dumbryden disco dancers sweeping the board winning prizes at a competition in Fife
• An interview with The Thompson Twins
• Sentinel Sports Personality For October

You can read these articles and others by clicking here on October 1985

The Road Runner

The Sentinel was great at highlighting local achievements and achievers who would otherwise not have got the recognition they deserved.  There are names that appear across the years and Ernie Plimmer from Westburn was one of these.  The Road Runner as he was also known came to fame late in life for his sprinting, made the more remarkable as his running started him winning races in his fifties.  The Sentinel covered his remarkable running career and featured an interview with him in 1985 when he was sixty eight.  By then he had already won the veteran’s New Year Sprint in 1981.  Ernie’s achievements were not only well known because of his age, but also because he was registered blind, having only partial eyesight.  This never seemed to hold him back and he was a well known figure locally as he trained round the Wester Hailes paths.  You can read the full interview by clicking here on Ernie Plimmer. 

 Ernie won two gold medals in the British Veteran Athletics Championships in 1984, These were his first championships and he went on to win the 100 metres to become the British Champion in the 65-69 age group.  He then won the 200 metres, leaving the opposition floundering.  You can read about his achievements by clicking here on Sentinel August 1984.  In 1985 he produced a crowd raising performance at the Braemar Highland Games, being narrowly beaten into fourth by competitors decades younger than himself.  The crowd of 20,000 then demanded that Ernie take a lap of honour. 

 Ernie continued to compete and in 1987 at the age of 70, he won another 3 gold medals in Glasgow, winning the 100, 200 and 400 metres races.  You can read this report about Ernie by clicking here on Sentinel 1987.

Pat McHat

Continuing the sporting theme, the Sentinel had a regular sports column in the 1990s, Pat McHat, who provided opinion, commentary and often a humorous take on what was happening in the world of sport.  Although the column does take in other sports, its main focus is football.  That’s maybe not the best of themes for Scottish fans this week but hopefully Pat’s comments may raise a smile or two! 

Here’s a selection of columns

December 1994: Raith win the Coca Cola Cup.  The page also features winners in the annual Club 85 sports championships. 

September 1997: Will Scotland qualify for the World Cup Finals in France? 

June 1998: The real battle in the World Cup, ITV versus BBC, with an assessment of the main contenders.

 July 2000: Controversially, Pat suggests the Scots fans lend England some support in Euro 2000.

Information For All

We are in an age of instant information with the online world only a click away.  Google is now a verb as much as a noun with its own entry in the Oxford Dictionary.  Whatever you want to know, there are usually thousands of results to trawl through and there seems to be no question that hasn’t got an answer.  Communication is equally instant and it seems hard to remember a world before mobile phones, emails, twitter and of course Facebook, now the world’s 3^rd largest country in population size. 

 Yet of course there was a time when information was much harder to access and it much more difficult to know what was going on even in your own area let alone across the world.  Publications like the Sentinel were key in keeping the community informed and in bringing to life the full story around issues and concerns that may otherwise not have been given any official publicity.  The Sentinel also recognised the need for detail and did not shy away from explaining complex matters in order to ensure local residents were informed. 

Sentinel November 1983

 In 1983 Granada TV’s World In Action programme featured the Bison Wall Frame system, raising the concern of building defects and shortcuts affecting the living conditions and safety of properties built using this system.  As a result, the Scottish Development Department wrote to 16 housing authorities asking them to check their stock for potential hazards to the public.  The programme caused much concern in Wester Hailes where six of the blocks in Hailesland Park were Bison built.  The Sentinel responded by producing a four page report full of detailed information and background explanations.  They managed to get interviews with many of the key officials and organisations involved including Bison Concrete UK, MacData, Frank Mears and Partners (local architects for Wester Hailes), and local councillors.  The newspaper also highlighted the efforts being made by the Hailesland Tenants Association in their quest to determine the truth about their homes and whether anything was going to be done to improve their situation.  The special report is comprehensive, technical and wide-ranging.  Today, this information would probably have been across the internet.  Twenty eight years ago, local people’s only source of proper reliable information in this instance was the community paper.  In an age when so much news seems to be in sound bites, it is refreshing to read a piece of well researched detailed journalism that doesn’t assume its readers aren’t interested in the wider implications of the issue .  You can read the whole report by clicking here on Bison Report 1983.

 The Sentinel retained its investigative brief with regard to the condition of the blocks, keeping readers up to date with the progress of the campaign to achieve improvements.  For example in 1984, it highlighted a new report produced by Edinburgh District Council on high-rise living in the city, publicising its recommendations for Wester Hailes.  You can read this report by clicking here on The Need For Change 1984.