To see the picture of Stroud that has prompted the piece below, please follow this link.
It’s harvest time up towards the Heavens,
Up there, by Holy Trinity Church in Stroud:
The quiet serenity of late summer,
In the year of our Lord, 1839,
When everyone ought to know their place:
‘The rich man at his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate.’
There is a threatening bon-fire, it’s true,
Just beyond this imagined Eden,
The smoke of the recent past and near future,
Reminding us all of Paradise Lost:
The Stroudwater weavers’ riots of 1825;
The Captain Swing riots of 1830;
The Chartist mass-meeting on Selsley Common,
Just a few months before, at Whitsuntide;
The 1839 Miles Report on
‘The Condition of the Handloom Weavers’:
‘The weavers are much distressed; they are wretchedly off in bedding; has seen many cases where the man and his wife and as many as 7 children have slept on straw, laid on the floor with only a torn quilt to cover them…has witnessed very distressing cases; children crying for food, and the parents having neither food nor money in the house…These men have a constant dread of going into the Poor Houses…witness has frequently told them they would be better in the house, and their answer has been “We would sooner starve.” ‘;
The march of mill chimneys through the valleys;
The tread of the treadmill in the workhouse;
There’s a conservative mythology here,
A pictorial confabulation,
A seeming misrepresentation:
Of glowing Cotswold stone longevity,
The silver steady flow of the Severn,
The shining immanence of Doverow Hill,
The ancient tracks, bridleways and pathways,
Of this sequestered, pastoral, dreamtime,
Without a hint of industrial red brick,
Or factory, canal, turnpike, railway,
Or Darwin, Matthew Arnold, Edmund Gosse.
Quietly flow the Frome and the Severn,
Through Arcadia;
But the fires still burn,
In the hearts of the weavers,
And the hearts of the spinners,
All along the valleys and the hillsides.