The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 11

the daily telegraph WEDNESDAY MARCH 15 2000 11 NEWS Village votes to honour soldier shot for desertion Parents rely more on granny for child care By Richard Eden By David Sapsted LK EXT REMES Li- AvfcuXOW SAT THE 'CEO SR ON THE HI LI -nu'SE sVHO CAV! TttFH? LJVu' TlitjjR: fcWtiS Dairy farm exodus threat to the By David Brown Agriculture Editor THE traditional is threatened by a on dairy farms which are receiving their lowest prices for 30 years a report warns today So many loss-making farmers are abandoning the dairy sector that the remainder may not be able to supply the 2-86 billion gallons a year (13 billion litres) needed to meet demand including the doorstep pint of milk it says The report by the National Union of England and Wales blames the power of supermarkets and processors for forcing prices down and Government policies for making the problem worse Farmers who say Britain is now to imported milk from other European Union countries are demanding a larger share of the price paid by consumers For every 34 pence spent by consumers on a pint of milk farmers receive less than lOp on average Britain is forced into importing milk from abroad because the dairy industry has been left to collapse it would be a national disaster for the public as well as Ben Gill president of the NFU said last night Mr Gill who will lead a dairy farm protest in Parliament Square today before lobbying MPs said: dairy farming is facing Militant farmers plan to halt supplies to supermarkets and doorsteps next week by blockading processing plants and dumping millions of gallons of milk Over the past four years 4200 farmers 16 per cent of the total have quit the industry and the exodus is worsening the report says A VILLAGE poll yesterday came out overwhelmingly in favour of adding the name of Thomas Highgate the first British soldier to be shot for desertion in the First World War to the local war memorial Emotions on both sides had been running high in Shoreham near Sevenoaks Kent since it was first last year that the name be added to the 51 already there Now in a poll organised by the vicar the Rev Barry Simmons the villagers have voted by a majority of 170 to 46 in favour The final decision on whether to add Highgate a farm labourer to the memorial which is being refurbished now lies with the parish council and the local branch of the Royal British Legion which itself is divided on the issue Highgate fled from the West Kent Regiment after less than two weeks of action in the Battle of Mons He was found hiding in civilian clothes in a barn and told his captors: want to get out of it and this is the way I am doing Within days he was found guilty of desertion at a court martial and was shot at dawn on Sept 6 1914 He was the first of 268 British soldiers to be executed for desertion during the Great War Mr Simmons 67 said: Highgate was purely and simply a young soldier who was so terrified he deserted I think that what a little village like ours thinks is probably representative of what the rest of the country thinks on a difficult Mr wife Barbara who joined her husband in voting to add name said: think people in the village thought it was a very harsh form of justice was so young and maybe he just could not take it mentally It would be nice for him to be on the memorial: whatever his faults he But Maj Michael Green president of the Royal British Legion in Shoreham who served throughout the Second World War with the 1st Airborne Division remained implacably opposed to name being added He said: very sorry for this chap and I hope he will be pardoned but I think we should rewrite history of the people who voted have no idea of what like to be in battle and to be let down by a Alan Thompson a solicitor whose garden is adjacent to the war memorial said: served through some very nasty times but I am sure that Above the war memorial in Shoreham village and below the Rev Simmons posting the referendum results in the shop window about 15 per cent of grandparents were involved in looking after children with the current young grandparents it is more like a third of he said The one-day conference which was organised by the Family Policy Studies Centre also heard details of a study that found that 80 per cent of women with a child under the age of five had regular help from their own mother According to research by Emily Grundy and Lynda Clarke of the Centre of Population Studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine grandmothers in Britain kept in regular contact with their eldest grandchild Those seeing them once a week included 60 per cent of grandparents in their fifties 50 per cent of those in their sixties and a third of those above 70 More than half of all grandparents in their fifties were found to live within half an drive of their eldest grandchild Although the picture was found to change as the grandchildren grew up and moved away from home 30 per cent of grandmothers aged between 70 and 79 were still found to be living less than half an hour away the research said It also discovered that women generally became grandparents earlier than men and grandparenthood came around four years earlier for those from manual social groups compared with those from non-manual groups The conference contrasted the research findings with similar studies from the United States where grandparents were seen to be an increasingly important force for social change GRANDPARENTS are increasingly bearing the brunt of child care because of the rise in the number of couples who split up a leading expert claimed yesterday Maternal grandparents in particular felt that they were being forced to look after grandchildren because of the lifestyle choices that their daughters had made Prof Geoff Dench of the Institute of Community Studies in London said They also resented their children's irresponsible parenting and unstable relationships he told a national conference in London held to explore the role of grandparents in the 21st century Prof Dench said: fact that the highest rates of grandparental child care are done where parents are separated provides the main evidence for this these cases the needs of the child and of the mother are so great that the grandparents feel they have to do it is a feeling among many of the grandparents who are doing a lot of child care that they are carrying the consequences of the lifestyle choices of their children grandparents feel that the mothers have a duty to do a large part of the child care and that they should be arranging their lives in a way that gets support of husbands and partners and not dumping it all on the Increasing rates of divorce separation and single parenting had led to more grandparents taking over some of the child care claimed Prof Dench He said the number of grandparents looking after grandchildren had more than doubled in the last 20 years 20 years ago everyone else who also served would have liked to have bolted But they did not and he Both the parish council which owns the memorial and the Royal British Legion will now reconsider their positions in the light of the vote Thomas Highgate: he was found hiding in civilian clothes in a barn and told his captors want to get out of it and this is the way I am doing Picture: Northants Press Agency East European buskers threaten Tube driver Police delivery Two policemen called to assist Matthew Flavell 26 of Rowley Regis West Midlands who became stuck in traffic while driving his pregnant girlfriend Sharon Edwards 30 to hospital helped to deliver the baby in a pub car park afterwards that she had no money despite having four gold teeth Pauline Kvec 35 of Acton west London denied getting her son to beg in Oxford Street on March 9 but changed her plea to guilty at Horse-ferry Road court yesterday Lorna Pickering prosecuting said that Kvec was walking up and down Oxford Street with her son A GANG of East European buskers threatened a London Underground train driver with a knife after he warned passengers over the intercom not to hand over money The three men jumped off the Tube train at Cross and ran to the front then banged on the door transport police said yesterday When the driver turned round Radu 11 who ran up to people holding out 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