WHAT in heaven?s name is going on in the planning department of West Devon Borough Council?

I cannot believe that Cllr Dilwyn Hughes can be anything but outraged by his fellow colleagues? decision to refuse the installation of a stained glass ?Peace? window at Milton Abbot School.

If a statement in art form cannot be presented to the young of Milton Abbot or for that matter any school and all young people throughout the world, then pity the generations that follow.

There is no excuse for planners and councillors to be hidebound by rules and regulations. Common sense at times has to prevail.

Local government is capable and guilty of creating precedents time and again, usually in their own interests. It?s time to awake to the realities of this world, a planet torn apart by war, brutality, and discord which breed starvation and death of the innocent.

And someone, somewhere wishes to make a statement.

Milton Abbot School is a fine example of early Victorian natural stone architecture in the Gothic manner. Whilst the Tavistock Parish Church is far older, stained glass windows have been added throughout its life, and the William Morris window, representing modernist art of its time against the antiquarian art of earlier generations, has never been criticised.

Stained glass and natural stone are as synonymous as strawberries and cream. I am not usually at odds with Cllr Mathew, but his faux pas are not greeted with anything but disdain here.

Enhancement, dear Roger, leaving behind not only a message of peace but an item of craft that tells those in the future that the 21st century actually took place in Milton Abbot.

No one is damaging a building, in fact enhancing it would be more precise.

Whatever happened to the ribbon that encircled the

symbolic BBC?s globe when I was young: ?Nations shall speak Peace unto Nations?, has certainly faded into distant memory.

If I could have but just one day?s dictatorship of the world I would pass laws that saw dovecotes installed in every government building in every nation of this world.

A symbolic gesture maybe, but install and be damned. I would happily suffer at the hands of planners.

Is there a better place to start than with the adults of the future? Let Milton Abbot School become a living testimony to peace.

Install and be damned.

That wonderful prayer that begins? ?Peace in our time, O Lord? ? not a hope as long as elected people continue to bury their heads in the ground.

Robin Fenner

Tavistock

IT was with some dismay that I learned from your report (November 14) that our application for the installation of a stained glass window

depicting world peace had been turned down.

My dismay turned to annoyance when reading the reasons given. It would be, to quote the officer, ?of interest and beauty?. I would add that it would replace a window that is admitted not to be totally original ? in fact, it is also ugly.

Cllr Mathews felt moved to remark that ?this is a planning committee and not a peace committee?.

Thank God that there are people in the world who can take a wider view, otherwise there would be no progress.

Your paper, in the same edition that contains the report, published photographs of people paying their respects on Remembrance Day.

How sad that an effort to connect our young people to an ethos of peace should be thwarted by the council?s decision.

N W Hurn

Chair of governors

Milton Abbot County

Primary School

?DISGUSTED? ? of course I am. West Devon Borough Council planning committee refused the application by Milton Abbot School to install a ?Window of Peace? in the school.

The Window of Peace was launched worldwide by Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbochov, John Hume and David Trimble, all Nobel Prize winners.

The window has the full support of the Duke of Bedford, whose ancestors in 1829 endowed the school.

In years to come this window will be looked on as a beautiful addition to the school, so I ask how can we refuse the request from the school?

I will give the school my full support to overturn the council?s decision,

I ask you all to join me in this. Again, I repeat, I am ?disgusted?.

Dilwyn Hughes

West Devon Cllr

Lifton