Salisbury & District U3A Meetings Report
June - September 2008
Members have enjoyed a varied programme at the monthly meetings over the summer months – entertaining, informative, and at times challenging. In June Bill Bache spoke about courts martial of soldiers accused of mistreatment. As a long-standing court martial practitioner and deputy coroner for Wiltshire he had a fund of inside knowledge. He focused on the prosecution of members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment for mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq in 2003. The mass media, he pointed out, is not in a position to give the finer details of a case, but needs to simplify and précis for the general public. Further, much of the press coverage of this case had been over-sensational. And so he aimed to give a balanced account both of the events that led up to the charge and of the court case. The difficult military situation in Iraq at the time, the requirement for the military to gather intelligence (normally a civilian exercise) and the consequent strain on overworked soldiers, the lack of clear guidelines from above on acceptable treatment of prisoners under interrogation, the wall of silence from colleagues who declined to give evidence all led to one soldier in particular, Corporal Paine, being convicted of war crimes. Paine was demonised by the press, despite a previously blameless army record. Speaking from his knowledge of the case, Bill enabled his audience to see that this soldier, whom most people had been led to believe to have acted with sickening brutality, might have been unjustly convicted. At the August meeting our preconceptions were again challenged. Sue Dewey gave a presentation on the Plains Indians of North America, in particular the Sioux. Those whose ideas about American Indians were shaped by Wild West films learned that, far from being savage warmongers, the Sioux are a peace-loving people with a rich and varied culture and a long history, as Sue has discovered through many visits to the Sioux. She displayed a wealth of Sioux artefacts including clothing, footwear, jewellery and intricate beadwork. She also brought a familiar feathered headdress, explaining the meaning woven into the finely wrought headband, which shows the honour and status of the wearer. And, yes, each feather stands for an act of bravery. The Sioux may be peaceable, but they greatly value courage. By contrast, the July meeting was devoted to a talk on Abbotsbury Gardens in Dorset, by their curator Stephen Griffiths. He explained how the gardens developed from a kitchen garden established in 1765 by the first Countess of Ilchester to the magnificent 20 acre gardens we can see today filled with exotic plants from all over the world. Today Abbotsbury, internationally famous for its camellias and magnolias, displays a variety of formal and informal gardens and areas of woodland. Stephen conveyed an infectious enthusiasm and love of the gardens, born of years of work there. If anyone who heard him was not initially a garden lover, he had converted them by the end of his talk! At the most recent, September, meeting, Mark Cook, founder of a locally based charity, Hope and Homes for Children, recounted how he had been inspired to begin this work after coming across a bombed-out orphanage in Croatia whilst serving in the army during the Balkan war. At first the charity’s aim was to provide orphanages for children of the Balkans, orphaned and vulnerable through war. Soon the vision widened “to give hope to the poorest children in the world – those who are orphaned, abandoned or vulnerable – by enabling them to grow up within the love of a family and the security of a home.” The charity is now active in central and eastern Europe and Africa. Mark spoke frankly of ways in which its workers adapted from providing what they believed to be needed to asking the children what they most wanted. And so today, instead of building orphanages, the emphasis is on giving the children a home, whether with a foster family or by painstakingly tracing their parents or wider family and reuniting them. The charity is also active in persuading governments to close institutional orphanages in favour of finding homes in a family environment. So moved was the audience that a spontaneous collection was organised for the charity. |
| Details of future outings can be found under Outings News. |
