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To the Palace Cinema: May I respectfully ask you when 12-year-old children were classed as adults, please?

Twelve-year-olds do not fit the general definition of a fully grown and developed person, therefore should not be charged as one in your establishment.

This is exploitation.

At least the Broadway cinema class children as under 15.

CUSTOMER NOTICE: REMINDER Adult tickets are from 12 years and over.

Name and address supplied

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In the booklet produced by the Ramsey branch of the Royal British Legion Remembering Ramsey’s Fallen commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War the names of those who died are listed alphabetically.

The first name is Alldritt, Private John Robert, my grandfather, the father my mother never knew.

John Robert tried to enlist on two occasions but was turned down as he had problems with his feet and was considered to be unfit for service. In early September 1917 he was 39 with a wife, Amy, a 10-year-old daughter, Edith, and another baby on the way.

After the heavy British losses of 1916 and 1917 the British Army was glad to take anyone and at his third attempt John Robert was accepted for service, joined the Labour Corps and almost immediately was sent to France.

Just a few weeks later John Robert was dead. Not through a heroic death in battle but from the accidental explosion of a German bomb.

The official story was that his platoon officer was examining the bomb in the next hut, killing the officer and four others instantly and wounding 14 others.

One of the wounded was John Robert who lingered for a few days before he died on October 3.

The story his widow heard was that a drunken officer was fooling around with the bomb when it exploded.

My mother, Winifred Cavell, was born less than three months later.

It is difficult to imagine the grief and hardship the family faced and hard to understand why John Robert was so determined to enlist when he did not have to and knowing that many of his friends had not returned.

We can only think that he did it for his family and for his country.

The Ramsey War Memorial and the whole Ramsey Courthouse area, with its beautiful flowering cherry trees surrounding it has become a memorial garden for those who died.

It is unthinkable that any part of the area should be sold off to the highest bidder with the suggestion that a restaurant and café tables for the use of the customers could be a very good use of the area.

Mr Malarkey [the government minister responsible for putting the Courthouse on the open market] is apparently taken aback by the strength of feeling towards the site being sold off to a private buyer.

Where was he, where were his officers, when there was public outcry when the post office was taken out of the Ramsey Courthouse, let alone selling off the whole area including the War Memorial?

We are assured that the War Memorial access will be maintained, no doubt via the back entrance.

Mr Malarkey has stated that he does not value the Ramsey Courthouse site, nor does he appear to value the memory of those whose names appear on the War Memorial.

As for the justification for putting this on the open market that it is to get the best price for the taxpayer, it is the taxpayer who funded the £1million-plus for the regeneration work on the site.

If the private buyer cannot get planning permission for his restaurant or for fencing off the area or finds the whole thing is too full of problems he could sell it on for a couple of million.

How would this help the taxpayer?

When we go to the War Memorial on October 3 this year to commemorate the centenary of our grandfather’s death we hope that decency will have prevailed and the whole Ramsey Courthouse site will be open to the public, looked after by the people of Ramsey.

Sandra Kerrison, Jurby.

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I have to say that I was both saddened and appalled by the crass display of ignorance which constituted your column by Pullyman in the March 16 edition of the Manx Independent.

His views are both ill informed and insulting towards the many servicemen from this island who participated in the conflicts he describes.

We might not get it right every time, but by and large when Britain has gone to war it has been reluctantly and for the right reasons.

Of the Falklands he asks ‘what was all that about’? Well, in part at least it was about saving a group of innocent people, who also live on an island, from a brutal military dictatorship with a long history of torturing and murdering its own people.

The Argentine government flatly rejected a diplomatic solution brokered by Alexander Haig and preferred to fight it out. If we hadn’t gone to war, how long before the Falkland Islanders would have been among the ‘disappeared’?

As for what we achieved in Korea, well I would imagine that the people of South Korea think we achieved a great deal when they see how their neighbours in the North (who we drove out after their invasion of the South) allow mass starvation and feed political prisoners to dogs.

Pullyman dismisses the Second World War in one paragraph and follows it up by saying that we usually go to war to steal what someone else has.

No, Mr Cowin, we went to war in 1939, ill-equipped though we were, to try to help the people of Poland.

Some of my family are Polish and lived through those awful years. If you want to know what it is like to live under the jackboot of a brutal military occupation, they can tell you stories that would make your hair stand on end. Donald Trump has no bearing on any of this, Pullyman.

I remain enormously proud of what we did in 1939 as a country.

Every day that I go to work in peace and my children go to school in safety my respect for (and gratitude towards) the generation of my grandparents and of Hector Duff, who was also featured in your paper, increases.

You say in your introduction that Michael discovered writing – when is he going to discover reading?

I trust that you will allow me the same amount of space in your newspaper to air my views as you afforded to Mr Cowin.

Matthew Richardson, Cronkbourne Avenue, Douglas.