YEP Letters: April 26

Surprised at Camilla documentary

Edna Levi, by email

Never having been an admirer of Prince Charles’ wife, Camilla, I watched the recent documentary on her life and was pleasantly surprised at what it revealed.

This lady has received very bad publicity because of the sad background involving Princess Dianna but regardless 
of that, she has been involved with many worthy causes involving children, sick people and various others, without any publicity.

And it was so obvious how happy Charles is with (as he calls her) “my darling wife”.

I have now deleted her from my dislike list!

T N Balmer, Sicklinghall, Leeds 22.

MY wife and I bought tickets for Russell Watson’s concert last Friday at Harrogate’s Royal Hall.

The programme was well thought out but the evening was a huge disappointment for us and many others in the audience because of the totally unacceptable noise levels from the Hall’s amplification system.

At the interval I complained to a helpful-looking usher in the dress circle. He sighed and said he had already had a number of complaints and had relayed them to the sound team.

However no action seemed to have been taken and the level during the finale bordered on the pain threshold. This was not a pop concert, at a guess the average age of the audience must have been 60-plus.

I was amused afterwards to see many of the audience around me fumbling to replace their hearing aids and my wife told me that noise was the sole topic of conversation in the ladies’ loo at the interval – serious indeed!

Our beautiful Hall was built before loudspeakers arrived and Caruso and Nellie Melba had no problems.

Surely the Hall’s management can publish their recommended and maximum sound levels depending upon the nature of the concert, the age profile of the performers and their expected audience?

Council’s transport plan

M E Wright, Harrogate

Leeds City Council has announced that it has “opened the tendering process for a contract to deliver its transport masterplan by 2021”.

Does this mean wheels and infrastructure by 2021 or, again simply something to be chewed, spat out, revised and revisited?

To recap: it took the council 30 years to acknowledge that their grandads had made a mess of things with their cheapjack, “all bus” masterplan. They submitted plans for tram reintroduction to Tory and Labour governments.

Both denied funding on a questionable “value for money” basis. The council crumbled, threw away £70m and – of far greater value – 10 years wasted on their abortive trolleybus fiasco.

We are now asked to accept the LCC ‘lightbulb’ moment: basically, subject to better seats and wifi, grandad was right all along. Why have those silly people in mainland Europe and elsewhere in the UK been wasting money on tube and tram investment when the obvious answer was under their noses?

Disunited kingdom?

John Fisher, Menwith Hill.

UNTIL we receive details of our final deal to leave the EU, there is no point in making plans for our future outside.

Scotland has stated that a bad deal would not be acceptable to Scots who voted decisively to remain.

A fast-tracking deal for Scotland to remain or rejoin the EU is a distinct possibility, and this would create a lot of problems for the UK.

The UK Government appears to think it can talk its way out of the hard border with Ireland and many of the other problems.

We have now accepted that the UK will definitely leave the EU, but what is becoming uncertain is if Scotland and Northern Ireland will be happy to join us.

Windrush must have left paper trail

Mike Smith, Huddersfield

IT SEEMS unreasonable that our present Government is catching all the blame for the Windrush affair when surely any blame for that rests with different governments and immigration authorities going back to 1948.

Except for the distress caused to the original immigrants involved, which needs sorting immediately, it must puzzle many why establishing their legitimate citizenship should ever have been a problem.

When the Windrush left the Caribbean, it would have a full passenger list, as required in maritime law for the obvious purpose of accounting for all passengers in the event of a disaster. Those records are definitely still available.

When they disembarked with their landing cards, which we must assume were collected at the port, they 
were surely issued with some form of citizenship identity, either passports or other documents. If not, why not?

If any such documents were issued but later expired or became lost over time, it is hard to believe there were no records to facilitate their renewal.

If the landing cards were the only permanent records available, then whoever authorised their destruction without first checking the implications was guilty of gross incompetence.

There should be no shortage of records for Windrush immigrants to establish their legitimate citizenship.

It is nevertheless easy to imagine an individual needing access to that information would not get much help 
from the sort of tick-box officialdom we often encounter these days.

On a final point for those interested, the Empire Windrush, to give her her full name, later sank in the Mediterranean in 1954 following a fire while serving as a troop ship.

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