Sunday 20 August 2010

Arthur Clark, an Honorary Member of the Chelmsford Table Tennis Club, recently appeared in the Essex Chronicle as he is now the longest serving Essex County Council Employee at 53 years and counting. Please see below an exert from the report from This is Total Essex:

NO-ONE knows the roads of Essex quite like Arthur Clark. For more than half a century, the 69-year-old has worked continuously for Essex County Council, mainly in the highways department. Every bend, bypass and drainage ditch he has crafted sticks in his memory. He is a walking encyclopaedia on everything roads, and, at 53 years and counting, is the authority's longest-serving member of staff. When he joined the council straight from school at the age of 16, the A12 was a single carriage road meandering through the Essex

towns and villages it now bypasses. The tools of road design were a sharpened pencil and a set square.

But it was a busy time for highways with post-war construction projects underway and a growing population of car owners.

"I know the roads of Essex like the back of my hand," said Mr Clark, the son of a farm worker. "I do feel proud. I can look at a road and I know I was involved in deciding where that road was." Born in 1941 on his grandmother's kitchen table in Woodham Mortimer, Mr Clark went to the local school, before Chelmsford Technical High School, where teachers got him an interview at County Hall.

(Image and text taken from www.thisistotalessex.co.uk)

To view the full report at www.thisistotalessex.co.uk , please click here.

Report written by Ryan Pitt
General Secretary for Chelmsford Table Tennis Club