Support for crash memorial

I have just come across the story about Mrs Emma West (‘Memorial for victims of tragedy’, KE, November 2) and the memorial for the 49 victims of the Hither Green train disaster of November 5 1967.

Like Mrs West, I also lost my brother, Terence (Terry) Cronk, aged 19, I was 16. He was home, which was and still is Nettlestead near Wateringbury, for the weekend from Rugby, where he had gained a place with AEI (Associated Electrical Engineers) and was working for his BSc.

Most weekends he travelled on his BSA motorbike, but this particular weekend he travelled by train. Having visited his girlfriend, he boarded the train at Tonbridge.

Mrs West states her brother’s luggage did not have a scratch on it and I have my brother’s briefcase in the loft, which is also unscathed.

We are a railway family: our father, four uncles, grandfather and great-grandfather all spent their working lives working on the railway as signalmen and drivers, and my father was a goods guard and then passenger guard. My brother was an avid train spotter in his younger years and travelled all over the place gaining ‘numbers’. Our father was on duty on this fateful night and was taken off and bought home.

Sadly, by the next morning, it was confirmed that we had lost Terry. We never gave up on the trains, and our father went back to work until his retirement in 1982.

I attended the memorial service on Sunday November 5 at Hither Green Station and St Mildred’s Church, Lee, and from this I understand that a permanent memorial plaque with all the 49 names listed is being organised to be sited at Hither Green Station.

In 2007, on the anniversary of the Lewisham train crash, a few people said that they were thinking of me and I had to correct them and say it was Hither Green and not Lewisham, and I feel that is why Hither Green has not been heard of much.

I would very much like to see a memorial set up and support Mrs West in this quest. Yvonne Cronk Nettlestead at wheel’ (KE, November 9), I might point out that the combined figure of 823 for men and women stopped by police for unlawfully using a telephone whilst driving equates, when applied against the 13 operational police divisions in Kent and Medway, to slightly more than one a week in each division.

The article does not reveal whether the figures apply to actual prosecutions or a combination of verbal warnings and prosecutions.

I am unimpressed by the propaganda trotted out by the police when it is quite obvious that there is no real effort anywhere in the county to control the antics of lawbreakers on the roads, which someone described as the ‘wacky races’.

And as far as speeding is concerned, research by Kent Police some years ago revealed that the residents of Kent routinely break the speed limits, which anyone travelling the roads will know.

There is no effective traffic enforcement in the county. Alan Walford Caesar Avenue, Ashford