Hacks in Dover

And still they come, wave after wave of them, flooding into Dover, swarming
over the Eastern Docks and the Folkestone Road -- yes, here are the effusions of yet more feature-writers sent down to Dover for the day,
desperately seeking another 700 words of copy (with a nicely ironic final
sentence) for their editors back in London. Actually, these two pieces are
not that bad:

What has gone wrong with Dover since its bluebirds and white cliffs made our hearts swell with pride? Tim Teeman on the decline of a town that is making headlines for all the wrong reasons

It is the hottest weekend of the year, but Dover feels strangely empty.
Sure, there are families playing on the narrow band of shingle of the sea front, but the solitary ice-cream man never has a queue. The long promenade is sparsely populated with sun-worshippers. The white cliffs are blankly opaque in the heat. [Of course the cliffs are opaque. Surely he didn't expect them to be transparent! -- DT]

In less than 36 hours, the media spotlight will fall on the town after illegal immigrants are found, suffocated, in the back of a lorry in Dover docks. But on this Saturday afternoon, Market Square in the town centre is ghostly quiet. The only activity seems to be the monotonous to and fro of ferries from the docks. Even the fever of a landmark Euro 2000 football game - England v Germany - has bypassed the place.

For thousands of years Dover was the "lock and key of England": a small English town, fortified by its sheer, iconic cliffs, which safeguarded us against all foreign invaders. As our last outpost against the Hun, the pride and yearning it embodied inspired Vera Lynn's famous song, addressed to the warweary in the 1940s:

There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover,Someday, when the world is free

[Actually, the song "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover" was written, in 1941, by two American Tin-Pan-Alley writers, Nat Burton (words) and Walter Kent (music), who had never been near the place -- and were apparently unaware that the bluebird is not a species native to the British Isles -- DT]

Even in these cynical times, the town is still marketed as the birthplace of bulldog spirit, from where British commanders co-ordinated our "finest hour" during the Second World War: the evacuation of 338,000 troops from the Dunkirk beaches in 1940. [In fact the phrase "their finest hour" was not used by Churchill to describe the evacuation of Dunkirk (on 4/6/1940); he used it in a speech to the Commons (on 18/6/1940) to describe how the British ought to behave during the Nazi invasion which was then generally supposed to be imminent. Sub-editing standards are certainly slipping at The Times -- DT] A fluttering Union Jack still has pride of place on Dover sea front. Yet Dover is a town lost in time: comfortable with celebrating its glorious past; fearful of confronting its rather more complex present.

This is a port on its uppers: the docks process 22.5 million cross-Channel travellers every year, but only a tiny fraction of them bother to visit the town, which is poorly laid out and seriously neglected. The white cliffs are scarred by erosion, and at their base are outcrops of shabby streets and lowbudget hotels.

The 600-acre harbour, which encompasses the ferry ports of both both [sic -- DT] Eastern and Western Docks, is massive: the most distinctive building that faces the sea is an ugly, Fifties-style, sprawling block of flats.

Dover's boast to be "the gateway to Europe" is double edged. Bootleggers are its most regular visitors for booze and cigarette runs to the Continent. This illicit market is worth billions of pounds a year. Convoys of trucks descend en masse; Customs can't stop them all. The bootleggers drink a fair proportion of their ill-gotten profits away in town. Peter Capaldi, owner of Cruisers, the only late-opening café bar in the town
centre says: "Friday night is fight night. There's nothing here for young people, so they come out to drink. Then there are the bootleggers. You don't go out at night unless you want a scrap." He says the aggressive atmosphere has nothing to do with Dover's most vilified visitors - its asylum-seekers, uniformly cast by residents as scroungers who see Britain (and Dover) as a soft touch.

I get lost trying to find one of the few organisations which fights their corner; Migrant Helpline, located like a pin in the concrete, haystack maze of the Eastern Docks. This 36-year-old organisation counsels newly-arrived refugees in an airless eyrie beside the docks' departures lounge.

As I go up the escalator, some teenagers assume I am an asylum-seeker, obstruct my way, and shout "Tickets, please" before stepping aside, sniggering at their own wit.

Most refugees land at Dover, either claiming asylum at Customs, or hidden in the backs of lorries. However, tragedies like last week[']s raise scant sympathy among the town's 33,000 residents, who remain almost universally hostile.

"I heard that the DSS bought one of the asylum-seekers a car - cheaper than having taxis taking his kids to school ... they have everything paid for them," smiles Malcolm Skinner, 60, into the glaring sun.

"All the younger ones have mobile phones and good clothes. I'm not a racist but what about giving money to those that need it, the OAPs? Our rates have gone up. It's all to do with them."

His wife adds: "The town is absolutely chokka with them [sic -- "chocka with", from "chockablock with" (an expression from c. 1880 meaning "full of", according to Partridge's Dictionary of Historical Slang) -- DT]. Its image has definitely suffered as a result."

"Every time we get rid of 'em, another lot move in," interjects her husband. "I don't have a problem with ones who are genuine, though most of them aren't."

Karen Johnson, 34, says: "Their needs come before everyone else's. It's too scary to go out at night because they hang around in such big groups".
Jason, a 27-year-old painter and decorator, says: "You should be looking after those in your own town before you look after anyone else; they get free furniture while I have to work for my living."

Only Mike, a 23-year-old shipping company receptionist, raises a dissenting voice: "Dover is conservative, middle-class and bigoted. I support the asylum-seekers, and I am called a 'do-gooder', which is the worst insult you can throw at someone here."

The town has had a siege mentality since Caesar chose it as his entry point for invasion in 55BC, though he was discouraged from landing there "because the sea was confined by mountains so close that a dart could have been thrown from their summit to the shore".

Dover Castle, 375ft above sea level, was developed from a Norman hill fort and became a key strategic base in the Second World War. The Army abandoned it in 1956; it opened to the public seven years later and affords stunning views of the port and the Channel from its war rooms within the white cliffs.

In the 11th century Dover was made one of the Cinque Ports (along with Hastings, Romney, Hythe and Sandwich), whose task was to provide defence of the coast and cross-Channel passages.

The most revealing exhibit in the White Cliffs Experience - a newly opened, interactive museum - is a 15-minute puppet show which shows how, after Dunkirk, the townspeople cared for more than 200,000 British troops as they passed through Dover by "opening their homes and hearts". The hospital treated 7,000 casualties, the post office sent 4,000 telegrams every day. Contrast this with the reception afforded to today's asylum-seekers.

The wartime propaganda celebrating "Dover the defiant" cannot disguise the real cost of the war: almost 3,000 German bombs fell on the town; 216 local people were killed, 760 were injured; 946 buildings were destroyed.

The White Cliffs Experience ends with an airy payoff: "Dover is no longer a frontline town and the Channel is no longer a barrier." Yet here, and at the adjoining Dover Museum, there is nothing about what has happened since 1945.

Dover's centre was gutted by postwar rebuilding. Today it is an uncared-for mess, linked to the seafront by a dank underpass. A re-creation of a Victorian jail tellingly passes as a tourist attraction. Shopkeepers complain of under-investment and a council "stuck in a time-warp".

Dover's newly-elected mayor, Gordon Cowan, flags up a new budget hotel and the redevelopment of a wharf behind the sea front. He wants to build more leisure facilities: nightclubs (there are only two), a bowling alley and multiplex. "The problem is, Dover is seen as a way to somewhere else, not somewhere in its own right," he says sadly.

Dover may trade on its glory days, but today the only marches through town are by the National Front (three to date). Yet to claim, as some have, that the town is "flooded" with "scrounging asylum-seekers" is a wild exaggeration, says Tony Stickels, Dover District Council's chief housing officer. "It's a static population and we don't intend it getting any higher."

The council is no longer responsible for new refugees; since April, their accommodation and subsistence has been paid for by the National Asylum
Support Service, and accommodation allocated by a local consortium. Single adult refugees receive £36.54 in vouchers every week, which cannot be converted to cash and must be spent in one named store. While British families with two children receive £81.95 benefit, refugee families receive £57.37 and are not allowed extras such as children's milk allowance.

Adults are not allowed to work unless they have been resident here for six months. Children are allowed to go to school, though the Refugee Council reports that many are being turned away by schools frightened their league table position might slip.

For many, the situation is desperate, though the atmosphere inside Migrant Helpline is calm. Staff shuttle between Customs and the office, helping disoriented arrivals find accommodation and guiding them through the first round of form-filling. Clients and their families wait quietly in the strip-lighted reception area; a tidy mound of toys lies against the wall.
Five young Kurdish men speak urgently, but mutedly; an Indian woman asks frantically why her family cannot be housed.

A second sanctum comprises a scattering of booths where advisers and interpreters - some speaking five languages - guide refugees through the United Kingdom's Byzantine benefits system.

Nawidullah Ghezally, 33, an Afghan demoralised by not being allowed to work, says he is still determined to build a life in Britain. Handsome, dressed in T-shirt and jeans and quietly spoken, he tells (through an interpreter) how he, wife Sadigh, 24, their daughter, Tirana, six, and son Tamin, four, share one room in a guest house. They arrived four months ago and are waiting to hear if they can stay.

"We were persecuted by the Taliban, we had to leave to save our lives. I had a good job in an auto-parts shop and want to work again. My family is sleeping in two beds. My wife and children are ill, the showers don't work where we stay. All I want is for my family to be able to learn English and live here properly.

"People here are mainly friendly, although we occasionally get abuse," Ghezally continues, as his children look quizzically up at me. "We have been called names because we have dark hair. Some people shout at us: 'Why have you come to England, what do you want?' My main priority is to ensure the children have an education."

Hawny, a 29-year-old Kurd who has escaped from Iraq, won't meet my eyes. Dishevelled, emaciated, pale and disconsolate, it has been only an hour since Customs officers uncovered his hiding place in the back of a lorry newly arrived from Turkey.

He has been on the road for ten days - a little water and a bread roll his only sustenance. It was a dark, uncomfortable and draining journey. He haltingly reveals that he is too scared, tired and hungry to speak - he looks stunned to be alive, ready to drop.

"They would not let me work in Iraq. I must get a job and send money back to my family," he says sadly. "I think I will be treated fairly here. I must make something of myself. I couldn't in my own country. I want to learn English." And he is led away to fill in the first of many forms.

Hawny may not be successful. Out of a total 500 refugees living in Dover (the figure peaked at 1,200 last August), many will have their applications for asylum turned down. The "containment centre" just outside town has 140 places. New arrivals stay there for seven days before being "dispersed" to other parts of the country. No new asylum-seekers are being housed here.

The Rev Norman Setchell, who runs a weekly drop-in advice surgery at Dover's United Reformed Church, is angry at the treatment afforded to the refugees. "The Government seems to have forgotten that it signed up to a United Nations convention on refugees. It is now making life impossible for those we have an obligation to help. This is the ethnic cleansing of Kent."

He is suffering from "a degree of compassion fatigue": fed-up with confronting bigots, depressed that the children of his more prejudiced parishioners "are echoing their parents' ill-informed views".

PC Norman Liggins, Dover police's community liaison officer, says: "There is frustration when two communities who are unfamiliar with each other meet for the first time." He denies that it is a racist town. "We need to make people understand that most refugees are fleeing their country of origin for genuine reasons. They're not spongers. Why on earth would somebody want to strap themselves on the underside of a lorry for 15 days if he or she wasn't desperate?"

Yet despite the work of Migrant Helpline, Norman Setchell and Kent Refugee Action Network, which is run by doughty volunteers, prejudice rather than acceptance remains this declining town's defining characteristic.

Before going to the station, I walk to Folkestone Road, past drunken football fans celebrating "Inger-land's" victory over Germany. When I finally get to the stretch of run-down flats and B&Bs, the very few asylum-seekers about are buying papers or chatting in twos and threes. The atmosphere is far from hostile.

Ironically, the last thing I see as I leave Dover is the sign outside its Quaker meeting house: "In human diversity lies the creativity of God."

Independent on Sunday
25 June 2000

Dover counts the cost

Emotions are running high in the port where 58 illegal immigrants were found dead in a lorry last week

By Cal McCrystal in Dover

Not for the first time, the ancient town of Dover finds itself in a condition approaching disequilibrium.

Following last Sunday's discovery of 58 dead Chinese in a Dutch lorry that had arrived on one of the cross-Channel ferries, its people are touchy, avoiding wherever possible the scrutiny of outsiders, and desperate for distraction from their unique woes. Two events catch my eye.

The first is the unusual entertainment Dovorians (as they insist on spelling it) allowed them- selves yesterday. They celebrated midsummer by having Father Christmas hand out Easter eggs from a pink Cadillac Eldorado of 1959 manufacture, while a man called Jack Hewitt MBE, sang a revolting song about eating worms.

The second is a confrontation with one of the port's sorely beleaguered customs officers five days after his colleagues were traumatised by the Dutch truck's grisly contents.

On seeing a photographer colleague, he approaches from the customs shed on the eastern docks, his eyes bloodshot with fatigue, and says: "You cannot begin to know what it's like here or the amount of crap we take.

"I have been followed home and I have been assaulted [by racketeers bootlegging cheap tobacco and alcohol from Calais]. My colleagues have been assaulted. Our families have been identified and assaulted, or threatened with assault.

"We cannot afford to be photographed. If our faces appear on television or in the press, we're marked men. Even if we avert our faces to let you photograph us at work, that means a reduction in our concentration, so we're not doing our job properly.

"Accordingly, if you try to take a picture of customs officials at work, I'll have to ask the police to escort you away from here."

Animus jostles with angst. In the office of Mike Webb, Dover's town-centre manager, he and his Folkestone opposite number, Ian Parker, discuss last Tuesday's church service for the Chinese dead.

Mr Parker: "Hardly anyone went to it."

Mr Webb: "Because it wasn't advertised."

Mr Parker: "And because people have become hardened."

A hard-pressed immigration officer on his way home engages my arm in a grip of steel on Cannon Street.

"There's too much sensationalism about Dover," he says, "but I won't deny it can be a bit daunting. Here we see law-breaking hooligans exiting for the Continent and Euro 2000, and illegal immigrants coming in by the coachload; often the same ferry taking the first bunch out and bringing the second bunch in. Meanwhile we're worked off our feet, with hardly time to draw breath."

He relaxes his grasp and pats my elbow apologetically. "We have two major problems here," he says. "One, the local reaction to the refugees, who seem on the whole to be good, decent people who've got a rotten deal from life; two, the Government doesn't have the will to tackle the thing properly."

All around this, the busiest passenger port in the world, whose soaring white cliffs are an enduring symbol of island Britain, are powerful reminders of two millennia of incomers: a lighthouse bequeathed by the Romans; the Saxon Church of St Mary-in-Castro; the 13th-century Maison Dieu founded by Hubert de Burgh as a hospice for pilgrims from all lands; an air-raid warning bell from Antwerp presented to Dover by the Belgians.

On a High Street corner, two newly arrived African men with baggage address passers-by: "Excuse me, where is the London Road?" About 20 local shoppers bustle past, ignoring them. When I give them directions, they regard me suspiciously.

On Old Folkestone Road, streams of refugees from eastern Europe, north Africa and beyond make their way to Dover's hostels and dingy bed-and-breakfasts, lugging blue plastic bags of groceries.

A young Dovorian who runs Hall's newsagents observes them and says approvingly: "They help me make a living, though I don't take vouchers more trouble than they're worth."

Inside the shop, copies of the Dover Express lament the presence of incoming chroniclers, declares itself "fed up" with people thinking the town is a "black hole" for "illegal immigrants, bootleg booze and fags, cheap B&Bs and dispersal programmes".

It complains about the fact that the 58 Chinese who suffocated in an unrefrigerated truck are now being "stored in refrigerators set aside for meat shipments" at the dockside.

But it is impossible to stroll here without reminders of Dover's hospitality to past writers. In 1852, at 10 Camden Crescent, Dickens read Bleak House to Wilkie Collins and Augustus Egg. In 1884 Henry James lodged on Marine Parade where he wrote the first part of The Bostonians. Waiting here for a favourable wind to remove him from his creditors, Byron remained for two days, his last in England.

It may take some time before we shall again appreciate on Dover Beach, as Matthew Arnold did from the window of his honeymoon lodgings, "the sweet night air". Without doubt, however, "the eternal note of sadness" he detected rings specially in our ears today.

Some locals, such as a cobbler on High Street, decline to discuss Dover's problems. Others do so informatively, if anonymously. "Many people here feel the Government isn't doing enough," says a person with immigration and legal connections. "There's a desperate shortage of immigration and customs officers on the ground. They need 50 per cent more to cope."

It seems that when coaches carrying refugees come off the ferries every available officer is so "overwhelmed" by asylum claimants that they often "just nod some people through". Customs officers are being hampered in their job of catching drug-dealers.

A Dover bookseller who comes from Cliftonville (currently nicknamed "Kosoville") up the coast says one of his favourite customers is a Sierra Leonean refugee.

"But he is upset because most of the 20 other people in his accommodation are not genuine asylum claimants like him." And on High Street, Pamela Christie, knitting on a sofa outside her furniture shop, complains: "The town has gone down. You have all sorts of nationalities here taking over the shops.

"If I had my way, I'd have left years ago. My husband and I were going to live in Spain because it's cheaper. But he died on me."

In the absence of any clear and urgent international direction on immigration, Dover's civic conscience seems, at times, fatally embarrassed.
It doesn't take long chatting to some Kentish citizens before one begins to marvel at how many ardent patriots have a sudden desire to weed "the Garden of England".

Yet the true voice of Dover may be that of two elderly men, Lynn Sangster (67) and Alfred Willson (72), defending their birthplace on Market Square.
"We are tolerant here," the former says.

"We welcome genuine refugees. Our hearts go out to people in need. Dover is no black hole." The latter adds: "The media want to turn us into a hard-hearted people. We're absolutely not."

Near by, the sun picks out words engraved on a granite trough. "Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy."

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)