Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Pair jailed for dog row stabbing
Yobs who stabbed a 17-year-old after an apparent row over dogs have been locked up. Wearing masks and arming themselves with a machete and soldier knife, Lewis Whittington and Kenny Harmsworth ambushed their victim in public and broad daylight. The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had to be airlifted to King's College Hospital in London where he underwent surgery for a collapsed lung. Canterbury Crown Court heard had he not had specialist treatment he "could easily have died" as a result of the planned and premeditated attack at 6.45pm on August 16 last year. Prosecutor Rio Pahlavanpour said the victim had previously had a "run-in" with Whittington, then 18, and 22-yearold Harmsworth about "dogs supposedly making a mess" when they had met up at a property.
"During that argument, threats were made by both defendants, with them producing weapons to amplify those threats," hceh toopledndtahye
The boy was able to escape but the threats to kill continued when he was purportedly phoned by Harmsworth from a withheld number, added the prosecutor.
The court heard he was later walking with a friend in Beaconsfield Road, Canterbury, when a Ford Fiesta pulled up and the thugs clambered out, brandishing the "fearsome" weapons.
"They ran towards the complainant. He had a bag of shopping and tried to swing it at both to fight them off," said the prosecutor. "Whittington then used the machete, making a stabbing motion towards his chest. Both defendants ran off with Whittington bragging about what he had done. He said 'I got him, I got him, I got him in the chest'."
The injured victim ran to a passing police vehicle while his attackers escaped in the waiting Fiesta.
The court heard the boy spent a week in hospital with his injuries.
The blade penetrated at least 2cm deep and narrowly avoided his heart.
The youth explained in a victim impact statement how he n both "scared and
in a lot of pain".
He also spoke of having sleep problems, causing his health and education to suffer as a result, and even having to move house over concerns for his safety.
On his arrest, Whittington, now 19 and of no fixed address, was found to have 46 wraps of cocaine in his trouser waistband as well as a burner phone.
He later admitted causing grievous bodily harm with intent, possessing a bladed article
- the machete - and possessing class A drugs with intent to supply. Harmsworth, now 23 and of Walden Court, Canterbury, also pleaded guilty to causing GBH with intent and possessing a bladed article - the knife. Both were originally charged with attempted murder, only for the prosecution to subsequently offer no evidence in response to their guilty pleas to the GBH charge. Neither weapon was recovered but Mr Pahlavanpour
said a 50-second video found on a phone and filmed three days before the violent assault showed the pair sitting in the same Fiesta, singing, and with Harmsworth brandishing a blade.
The court was told both thugs have themselves been victims of knife crime, with Whittington being stabbed in the head and chest, and Harmsworth having fingers severed. Kim Aiken, defending Whittington, said the teenager had "no excuses" for his behaviour and wanted to apologise to the victim.
Expressing his "dreadful shame" and remorse, Ms Aiken told the court he had been "surrounded by violence" from a young age before growing up in care.
But she said the birth of his own son had given him "the determination to be a role model".
Kieran Brand, defending Harmsworth, told the court that he "could not really explain" how he became involved in the violence, other than by "surrounding himself with those who had a negative impact" when he moved from Faversham to Canterbury. Whittington, the court was told, has 11 previous convictions for 25 offences, including ones for battery, assault and attempted robbery, and was subject to post-release supervision at the time. Harmsworth has four previous convictions, including one for assaulting an autistic teenager in Faversham in December 2019.
For that attack, Harmsworth was handed an 18-month community order.
But in front of the same sentencing judge on Friday, May 3, Harmsworth was jailed for fiveand-a-half years and Whittington for seven-and-half years. Judge Simon James told the pair that although only one of them had inflicted the "grave and life-threatening" injuries, it was a joint enterprise with both intent on causing serious harm.
He went on: "Although you are both relatively young and immature, knife crime is most prevalent amongst teenagers and young men and the courts have repeated that sentences must be imposed to deter people of your age from carrying knives. That need is highlighted by the fact both of you have previously been the victims of knife crime and yet you decided to use knives to attack someone else."
In the mid-1980s, an advert regularly appeared in newspapers across the country. It read: “On DHSS? Living in poor conditions? Why not live by the sea in Margate? Pleasant hotel, own key”.
The hotel in question was in Cliftonville - a part of Margate which was once the town’s plush upmarket tourism hub; a pleasure palace for the wealthy middle classes. In 1984 and 1985, when those adverts appeared, it was reduced to appealing nationwide for the unemployed to come and spend their dole money amid its crumbling, former splendour. How things had changed.
As one veteran Kent MP puts it, the area became dubbed “Dole-on-sea”.
And it was far from alone. The actions of that hotel - the long since defunct Roxburgh - prompted others to follow suit; not just in Kent but other coastal towns trying to make the sums of a wealth of legacy guesthouses and hotels add up in an age and destination where few wanted to spend any longer than a day. They would fail.
So how did our seaside towns fall so heavily? Why did the rot set in and, perhaps more significantly, why did it take decades before they would once again spark back into life? For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll focus on perhaps Kent’s two most historic hotspots - Folkestone and Margate.
The key lies in the answer to a simple question: If you had a choice, would you rather splash about in the greeny-brown waters of the English Channel, or North Sea, beneath ominous skies, or the warmer, clearer Mediterranean as you look up at unrelenting blue skies? The answer is, almost certainly, the latter for the vast majority of us. And that, in a nutshell, is what ripped the very heart out of so many of Kent’s biggest coastal resorts. After decades of boom stretching from the 18th century to the mid-20th - a bust was, perhaps, inevitable. So heavily reliant on tourism - it was the economic backbone of the vast majority - the introduction in the 1960s of the cheap foreign package holiday was like a cancer to our seaside resorts - slowly growing over the next 30 to 40 years and suffocating their economic and social lifeblood. To fully understand the decline, you need to remind yourself of the history of our It had become synonymous key seaside towns. with the arrival and departure Debt Emotional
For the most part they of troops to the killing fields had boomed courtesy of Athdeviceof France andsbueplgpiuomr.tand London holidaymaker. They it had taken in thousands had benefitted from paddle of refugees fleeing northern steamers bringing thousands Europe. out of the capital and down The local authority knew its the Kent coast for decades and prosperity hung on tourism then further capitalised with so invested heavily after the the coming of the railways. guns stopped. The Leas Cliff The riches they reaped saw Hall, East Kent Pavilion and them expand - attractions, the ornamental Kingsnorth guesthouses, ornate gardens Gardens were all created in
- all designed to pull in a bid to lure back the crowds. the tourists and extract as As well, coincidentally, as the much money as possible. Marine Gardens Pavilion later Entertainment venues sought to become the town’s La to pull in off-season crowds. Parisienne nightclub.
Yet, for some, the package And, to a degree, it worked. holiday was the final, By the 1930s the crowds were lingering, killer blow which returning in their droves. But had started years before. then came the Second World “After the First World War,” War and the town was once reflects Alan Taylor, chairman again on a war footing. of the Folkestone & District “There was a post-war boom Local History Society, “people once it ended,” adds Mr Taylor, didn’t come back to the town 87. “There was extensive in the numbers they once did. bomb damage to the town, but So the council invested heavily where people hadn't been on in a bid to win them back.” holiday for years, the town was Folkestone, once a crowded.” powerhouse of domestic Worth noting is that it was in tourism, had been a town 1948 that Sidney De Haan and transformed by the Great War. his wife moved to the town buying the Rhodesia Hotel. Concerned at how little custom they had during the winter months, they hatched upon the idea of marketing both their hotel - and then others in Folkestone - as the ideal discount off-season holiday location for older folks. Saga Holidays was born and it made a big difference.
By the early 1950s, not only Folkestone was benefitting, but the likes of Margate and Eastbourne too. Suddenly the seasonal trade on which they relied rolled year-round.
So it was perhaps ironic that another form of holiday would come to threaten Kent seaside towns’ new all-year-round