SIR – The news that Southend-on-Sea has been made a city reminded me of some of my family history.
Southend was created a borough by Queen Victoria, and in 1898 this statue in the town was erected in her honour. She travelled there for the unveiling on a steam train, driven by the head driver in the area: my grandfather, Charles Simpson.
A small replica of the statue was affixed to the front of the train and, afterwards, given to my grandfather. It remained for many years in his back garden in Stratford, east London.
Dorothy Brown
Lindfield, West Sussex
Now is no time to be meddling with landlines
SIR – Recent letters (March 5) have suggested that the removal of BT analogue landlines and reliance on the internet for the “digital voice system” replacement may cause problems in the event of a power cut, and that this might be even more of a problem when there is a lack of mobile phone signal.
This is not a theoretical situation. Our village, which does not have a mobile phone signal, experienced a three-day power cut in November 2021 in the middle of a snowstorm. After the second day I saw a puzzled 95-year-old standing in the snow outside her house, wondering why she could not contact her family to ask for help. I walked a mile up the road to access a phone signal to ring the family and ask them to fetch her. Luckily, I had some residual battery power. We had similar problems after the recent storms.
When we consider the new uncertainties that our civilisation faces, access to reliable telephone communication would seem vital.
Professor Robert Kirby
Maer, Staffordshire
SIR – BT seems to be enforcing the new “wireless” broadband system already.
We lost our wired phone connection at about midday on February 18; the date by which we are told we shall be reconnected is March 25.
I and the other 40 or so people affected live within two miles of the main exchange in Axminster. The wire was cut by an Openreach engineer in the “interest of public safety”.
BT has issued me with a “mini hub” that connects to the EE mobile system. I get a speed varying between 0.6 and 1.6 Mbps. Progress indeed.
R K Webb
Axminster, Devon
Philip Larkin’s poetry transcends his politics
SIR – Simon Heffer, arguing against Philip Larkin’s cancellation, raises an important point about the poet’s politics.
I grew up loving both Larkin and WH Auden as poets. It is utterly irrelevant that one is deemed Right-wing and the other Left-wing. Their work transcends the petty cultural politics of today – and will continue to do so.
Bill Penn
Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire
SIR – Simon Heffer misses the devastating point of the ending of Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb”.
The final line of the poem, “What will survive of us is love”, can hardly be read as consoling, given that it is preceded by the qualifying assertion that this only proves “Our almost-instinct almost true”.
Uncomplicated love was too easy for a poet of Larkin’s gifts, though he perhaps gets closest, despite the “snivelling violins”, in the achingly beautiful “Broadcast”.
C J Fletcher
Stanton St John, Oxfordshire
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