Reply to comment

SOMEONE at the Town Hall had a bright idea six months ago for the council to take over the renewal of Freedom Passes.
Now, I suspect, they are having second thoughts.
My enquiries show the council is facing a race against time to renew the passes in time for the March 31 deadline.
If they fail, elderly people in the borough could end up without them.
For years people quite happily renewed their passes at a local post office. Within a few minutes the job would be done.
Then came someone who ­decided it could be done better in Judd Street.
I understand that although a ­special council department started working on the renewal of Freedom Passes in the autumn, it has only processed about 8,000 at the most – that is, only one quarter of the total number required.
However, there are only eight weeks to go before the passes  have to be renewed – or else the holders will have to face normal bus or Tube fares like younger travellers.
For some reason, probably to do with finances, Camden, along with Barking and Kensington local authorities, decided to take over the scheme from the Post Office. So while in other boroughs users go to the post office as usual, in ­Camden, users first apply to the Town Hall to “process” their applications which are then sent to the London Councils organisation to convert them into new ­electronically thief-proof passes. These are then posted back to the applicants.
Good, as an idea.
But the signs are that Town Hall officials didn’t calculate their logistics on the basis that 30,000 passes would be needed in ­Camden. 
Either no one thought the ­problem through, or they hoped all would be well in the end.
This may prove to be wishful thinking.
Unless someone in authority at the Town Hall takes this problem by the horns, elderly people may be without their passes by the end of March.
For the politicians, with one eye on the coming local elections, this could not have come at a worse time considering the “grey” vote is so important at the polling booths.

Author’s lessons from Mr Godowski

A GOOD teacher always lives on in our memories and this was very much brought home to me this week when one of my colleagues pointed out that the dedication in a new biography of John Ruskin was made out to a certain Mark Godowski .
My colleague recalled an English teacher of that name at William Ellis in the 1980s, and spoke to the author Kevin Jackson to see if it were one   and the same.
It so transpires that it was the popular teacher, but Kevin was not one of his pupils – though they were best friends at college.
“I had never met anyone who knew so much about architecture and the visual arts as Mark,” recalled Kevin, a fact that anyone fortunate enough to have been a pupil of Mr Godowski will testify to.
“I felt for the first time I was in the presence of someone who really knew how to ‘see’ – a talent he shares with John Ruskin,” added Kevin.

An opportunity to remember Signor Rossi

IT was one of those unbelievable coincidences, but while at Central Station in Glasgow I found myself standing next to an elderly woman with a familiar face I couldn’t place.
Then she called my name – and I discovered that she was Adelia, sister of Charlie Rossi, a one-time rat catcher for Camden Council who became a prominent London politician in the 80s as vice-chairman of the Greater London Council, a body disastrously dissolved by Mrs Thatcher. 
Adelia had been visiting her sister in Glasgow. The Rossi family, from a long line of Italian immigrants, lived in a three-bedroom Glasgow tenement in the early part of the last century – the parents and their 11 children!
In the search for jobs some joined the exodus to England.
After serving in the infantry in the Second World War, Charlie came to London where I got to know him in the 1970s. At that time he lived in Mornington Crescent.
Larger than life, he was a gifted man – a good public speaker, a passionate Labour man, and one with a glorious singing voice. He’d often sing at the end of a public meeting.   
A keen opera fan, he was offered a box at the Royal Opera House for a Pavarotti concert in recognition of his great office. 
As the world-famous tenor entered the stage he appeared strangely uncertain of himself.
Cheekie Charlie yelled out in perfect Italian: “Don’t worry Signor Pavarotti – you’ve got a wonderful voice.”
Surprised, Pavarotti looked up at the box, gave a little bow, and thanked Charlie in Italian.
Sadly, we could do with more political characters like Charlie, who died 20 years ago.
Part of his legacy, and that of another Camden Town campaigner, Terry Hargrave, is the flourishing Mornington Sports Centre which, until they intervened, was destined to be demolished or transformed into offices.

Letting go of babies

SEDUCTION, rape and infanticide are the not so light-hearted themes explored in an exhibition of ­Portuguese artist Paula Rego ­opening at the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square this week.
Rego – whose studio is in Camden Town – has sold work to celebrities including Madonna, and is joined by Tracey Emin and Mat Collishaw, in the museum’s first ever exhibition.
All the pieces are linked to the ­story of what was the then Foundling Hospital, Britain’s first home for abandoned children, depicting the pain and anguish of 18th-century orphans who were abandoned by their mothers because they couldn’t live with the stigma of keeping an illegitimate child.
Rego’s life-size figures of waif-like girls and babies portraying the ­violation and fall of young women are particularly disturbing.
Mr Collishaw will be hosting a personal tour at the museum on ­Friday February 19 at 6pm.
The exhibition runs until May 9.