When I was growing up it wasn’t usual for working class kids to go abroad. I was nearly 14 went I first went to France. This was to a campsite in Houlgate on the Normandy coast hired by Somerset County Council for educational visits. We weren’t even in the EU, they still used Francs and we’d only just gone decimal. 120 old pennies in an old ten bob (50p) note, two tenners’ equal a quid, a quid was 12.55 French Francs, a glass of le coca cola was 70 centimes. Yes, things were so much simpler then.
Hasta la Bisto
My dad sailed the world with the Royal Navy in World War 2. USA, USSR, India, South Africa, Malta, Gibraltar. When he returned, he never left home again. Apart from once when we went on the Llandudno to Isle of Man ferry. And even then, he had a wary eye out for Stuka dive bombers. My mum literally never left the UK but thought she had when near the end of her life went on a factory outing to the Isle of Wight. I still have the photo of her in Union Jack beach hat. I’m sure she thought she’d finally reached Torremolinos. Growing up in Leeds the only foreign interactions she’d had were when the Yanks turned up with money to flash around and when the Luftwaffe bombed her munitions factory on St Patricks night.
L’intente Cordiale
It wasn’t that long ago when what people knew about ‘abroad’ was that it was a place that we went off to fight in before they got round to bombing us. It was no surprise that after World War One there was the first stirrings of what we now call Twinnings. Now this at the time was to strengthen the Entente Cordiale -that link between Britain and France that had made sure that we’d won that war and only 22 million people had died. After 1945, when World War Two had finished and we counted 85 million dead, maybe it hadn’t worked and so people got down to even more serious twinning before the next world war (scheduled for sometime next year) sees maybe the whole of humanity wiped out and nobody left to twin with, apart from maybe a colony of radioactive penguins off the coast of Antarctica.
Bridgwater first twinned with La Ciotat in the south of France in 1957. There was a post war push to make international friendships so that kids could grow up having friends abroad and therefore wouldn’t think about hating foreigners. The Mayor of Bridgwater was passing through La Ciotat, noticed it had a docks (like Bridgwater) asked to see the Mayor and voila! We had our first twinning. Today La Ciotat docks is one of the world’s leading yacht repairing berths for the mega-rich and Bridgwater docks are in danger of falling into disrepair unless Somerset Council get around to doing something about it.
und der Krieg braucht gar nicht erst erwähnt zu werden.
By the 1980s thousands of Bridgwater kids had gone to La Ciotat on twinning trips and the council considered another twinning, this time with Homberg in central Germany. This came about as part of a Sedgemoor initiative to link with the German district of Schwalm Eder. Good choice of place-it was the Dambusters target in World War Two.
Určitě
In 1989 Communism collapsed in East Europe and I was invited to help the Czech Labour Party with their first democratic elections. I hitch-hiked there. As I did everywhere, only to find when I got there that it was actually cheaper to get the publicly subsidized and efficient train service. In 1992 we became the first town to twin with a Czech town – Uherske Hradiste. And people can thank me for not trying to name a Bridgwater street after it (we chose Moravia Close as an easier to say compromise).
Those were our first three twinning’s. We now have six. Marsa in Malta (another port town) , Priverno in Italy (just outside Rome and close to the Anzio and Monte Cassino battlefields) and Camacha on the Portuguese island of Madeira. And that’s before we mention the 13 Bridg(e)water’s in the USA.
Libereco de Movado
Today it’s a whole lot easier to travel. On the one hand. Then again Brexit set us back a bit. Anyone trying to speed through the new EES biometric testing controls will agree and I certainly remember bus driving across Europe having to stop at every border, go to 4 different windows then over an hour later being let in, and then the borders opened and we had freedom of movement, and everything was lovely. And now…we’re back to square one.
But we have these twinning’s. And if people would like to find out about them then I’d suggest coming along to the Bridgwater Arts Centre on Satuday 6th June. It’s a D-Day of friendship and loveliness and everyone’s welcome.
Until the next thing goes wrong…..