Peter Rhodes on the future for Woolworth, budget fishing kit and plans to conscript a 'citizen army'
There's speculation that Woolworth stores, managed by Woolworth Germany, may reappear on British streets. May I be the first old curmudgeon to complain that the new Woolworths will be nowhere near as good as the old Woolworths?
My happiest memory of dear old Woolies is its own-brand angling equipment, marketed as Winfield. It was cheap and cheerful but it got millions of kids hooked, so to speak, on the sport. A quick trawl through cyber-space today reveals a nostalgic community who still feel fondly about their Winfield days. I've still got my Winfield bass reel, bought in 1974, which works perfectly but, over the past 50 years, has never caught a single bass.
Organisers of a survey are surprised that Brits have voted Martin Luther King's 1963 speech “I have a dream” as the most inspirational ever, with Winston Churchill's “We shall fight on the beaches” (1940) taking second place. But is it surprising? Thanks to decades of imported culture, millions of Brits are steeped in American history but know damn-all about their own.
The head of the Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, points to the growing danger from Russia as he calls for a “citizen army” to be formed. The irony is that we had a perfectly fine volunteer citizen army until the 1990s but decimated it in the name of the “peace dividend.” At its peak, the Territorial Army was 70,000 strong and could, on exercise, deploy 20,000 soldiers to Germany within 48 hours. The TA provided a quarter of the Army's manpower for about five per cent of its budget.
But after the Berlin Wall came down, the TA was cut savagely and with indecent haste. My TA troop's old drill hall was demolished and replaced with a housing estate but only after the MoD, in the finest traditions of Whitehall, had spent £2 million refurbishing it. Today's Army Reserve, as the TA has been renamed, is about 25,000 strong, useful for reinforcing the Regular Army overseas but far too small to defend the UK homeland. And so Whitehall is mulling the possibility, if war seemed likely, of mobilising Britons into the armed forces. Would today's young people fight for King and Country? I wouldn't put money on it. More on this tomorrow.
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