A MISCELLLANY OF HISTORY
A TEXTUAL WEAVING OF A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
A TEXTUAL SAMPLER
Chapter two
Hello Stuart
I haven’t forgotten about The Stroud Tapestry.
I still hope to add a section about John Gay, maltster, and his wife Anna Maria, turnpike gatekeeper, but thought I’d send you what I have completed so far, including some new paragraphs about the Harrison family – stonemasons.
Best wishes
Penny
In 1669, my 9 x great grandfather, Henry Gay of Stroud, married Judith Clissold, daughter of Thomas Clissold and Judith Clutterbuck.
The Clutterbucks were weavers …
Weaving was then a cottage industry, with the continual clack of looms filling the air and whole families at work. While wives were busy washing and drying fleeces, children sat patiently carding the wool into fluffy cocoons ready to be spun into yarn and dyed ready for weaving. Husbands and fathers then set up the warp and worked the weft. The huge looms, with heddles and shuttles always at the ready, would have filled a whole room in many a cramped honey-coloured Cotswold stone cottage.
The Clissolds became mill owners …
Stroud grew to be particularly famous for its scarlet cloth, used to make the red coats proudly worn by several British regiments, including the Grenadier and the Scots Guards. The fields of the Five Valleys were festooned with lengths of bright broadcloth hung out on tenter hooks to be dried and stretched to the required width in the fresh air and sun.
By 1830, Stroud had become the centre of the clothing trade, with mills every few hundred yards on every river. In the census of 1821, the parish had 7,097 inhabitants.
* * *
My 3 x great grandmother, Anna Maria Harrison, married John Gay (a direct descendant of Henry Gay and Judith Clissold) in Stroud, in 1813.
The Harrisons were stonemasons …
In 1745, Anna Maria’s great grandfather, Thomas Harrison, acquired the lease of a stone quarry on Selsley Hill and many of the buildings still to be seen in Stroud today were built by Thomas’s grandsons and great grandsons.
Following his first marriage in Stonehouse in 1785, Anna Maria’s father, Thomas Harrison, built a row of houses at Westrip, one of which became known as The Old Off Licence, and, after his second marriage in 1800, he set to work on building a stone cottage nearby, in Randwick.
His four sons and three daughters, all born before 1800, would almost certainly have looked forward to taking part in the May Day Randwick Wap, when three large Gloucester Cheeses would be decked with flowers and carried in procession through the village. After being blessed, these were rolled around the Church ‘mystically and anti-clockwise’ before being divided up and distributed amongst the villagers.. If the superstition held true, then eating a piece of cheese ensured fertility and therefore many future generations of ‘Runickers’ – the local name.
In the 1820s, while still a young man, Charles Harrison (Anna Maria’s older brother) built the row of houses known as Rowcroft in Stroud, and two of her younger brothers, Thomas and Henry are known to have worked on several buildings in Stonehouse during the middle years of the 19th century
The foundation stone of Stroud Subscription Rooms – built by Anna Maria’s eldest brother Charles Harrison, with the help of his Kings Stanley cousins, Daniel and George – was laid on the 9th March 1833 and the building was sufficiently completed by October 1834, when it was officially opened in the presence of 700 people. At that time all three men were amongst the Harrison clan living in Stonehouse and Kings Stanley. The final payment for the Subscription Rooms was made to builder Charles Harrison on the 29th January 1836. Over the previous three years he had received a total of £2,721 10s.
In 1836, Daniel and George Harrison went on to build the Gothic-style Amberley Church. More than twenty years later, George Harrison (possibly one of the next generation) would be working on the masonry of Selsley Church, completed in 1862.
… And from 1879 until 1906 – more than 150 years after his ancestor, Thomas Harrison, had acquired the lease of a quarry on Selsley Hill – one of his great, great grandsons, Frederic, was still working as a stonemason in Kings Stanley.
* * *
John Gay (1792 – 1829), husband of Anna Maria (Harrison), was a maltster …
The reason he chose to take up the occupation of malt-making, when his father was a stonemason and his ancestors before that had been weavers, must surely be linked to the development of a new industry in Stroud at the time he was growing up.
The Stroud Brewery is said to have been founded in 1760 by Peter Leverage in a malthouse adjoining his house at Middle Lypiatt. Leverage later went into partnership with Joseph Grazebrook and Henry Burgh, and in 1793 they acquired new premises for the business at the bottom of Rowcroft, in the lower part of the town.
The ready supply of good water was key to its success and this site, at the heart of local rivers and streams and near the recently-completed Stroudwater Canal was ideal, both in terms of the brewing process – and then, when the business expanded (and before the building of the railway in 1845), as an early solution to the important question of transportation.
The coming of Stroud Brewery at a time when the cloth industry was about to enter a decline proved to be a significant factor in the town’s continued growth. Many were employed in the brewing process itself, but there was clearly also a good living to be found in malt-making.
In 1822, there were no fewer than eight malsters in Stroud and one of them was certainly John Gay, who lived in Lower Street.
But in September 1829, John Gay died, leaving his widow with seven sons to care for.
* * *
Following her husband’s death, his widow, Anna Maria Gay (1789 – 1854), became a turnpike gatekeeper at the Bourne Tollhouse, near Brimscombe …
To begin with, when previously established highways became designated toll roads, the turnpike trusts either adapted existing cottages or built temporary shelters for ‘pikemen’.
By the early 1800s, with the introduction of completely new toll roads and a steady increase in traffic, it became clear that more permanent accommodation at the main turnpike gates was needed so that someone would be at the gate all day and night to collect the tolls. It was also decided that, wherever possible, a tollhouse should be large enough to house a family, so that there was always someone to keep watch while the gatekeeper rested. The Bourne tollhouse would have been established in 1815 when the Stroud to Cirencester Turnpike Road was opened to the public.
In practical terms, Anna Maria Gay could not have found a job better suited to her needs. It provided a very substantial roof over her head, reasonable accommodation for herself and her family, as well as an adequate wage. And although it would have been a demanding and challenging twenty-four hour and seven-days-a-week job, it was work that could be carried out at home in conjunction with her chief role in life, which would surely have been caring for her sons.
The 1841 census confirms that the Bourne tollhouse was then still occupied by Anna Maria Gay, then aged 52, her eldest son Leonard (25) and her two youngest sons, Matthew (13) and John (11).
But plans for a new railway had already been afoot for some time:–
‘And we are now in constant expectation,
That we shall someday have a Railway Station;
Which will, ’tis hop’d, improve the Borough trade,
And Stroud, the central town, must take the lead;
Then farewell horses, coaches, grooms, coach makers,
Inns, victualling houses, Turnpikes and toll takers;
For we shall fly by steam, with presto speed
A hundred miles and no refreshment need.’
From ‘Stroudwater’ by William Lawrence: 1843
Stroud’s local organist and music teacher
On Whit Monday, 12th May 1845, the new railway line between Swindon and Gloucester was officially opened. There were four intermediate stations – Tetbury Road, Brimscombe, Stroud and Stonehouse, the station at Brimscombe being sited very near the Bourne tollhouse.
It would have been an historic day and it is not difficult to imagine that Anna Maria and several of her sons might have been there to watch in amazement as the train steamed along the embankment and over the bridge just in front of their tollhouse. However, certainly by then, the turnpike house that had provided the family with a home and livelihood when it was most needed would have ceased to have a purpose.