Jackson – Page 3 – Radical Stroud

John Thelwall: Radical thoughts on Slavery, Empire and Landscape

A Pedestrian Excursion Through Several Parts of England and Wales

John Thelwall’s account of his rambles
Between the years of the naval mutinies
of 1797 and the 1801 Peace of Amiens:

‘The cottages in general, are small, wretched and dirty. Some of them are built of brick, others are plastered and may exhibit nothing but miserable mud walls, equally naked without and within. They are wretchedly and scantily furnished; and few have even the advantage of a bit of garden. To complete the catalogue of misery, there is a workhouse in the parish, in which a number of deserted infants are consigned to captivity and incessant application…’

And even though Citizen John was being pursued,
Followed and shadowed by spies,
With consequent anxiety,
Thelwall could still write that …

‘The vivacity of conversation made the miles pass unheeded under our feet. We canvassed various subjects of literature and criticism, the state of morals and the existing institutions of society. We lamented the condition of our fellow-beings, and formed Utopian plans of retirement and colonisations. On one subject, and only one, we essentially differed – America. I cannot look towards that country with all the sanguine expectations so frequently cherished. I think I discover in it much of the old leaven. Its avidity for commercial aggrandisement augurs but ill even for the present generation; and I tremble at the consequences which the enormous appropriation of land may entail upon posterity.’

A Pedestrian Excursion Through Several Parts of England and Wales

John Thelwall’s account of his rambles
Between the years of the naval mutinies
of 1797 and the 1801 Peace of Amiens:

And even though Citizen John was being pursued,
Followed and shadowed by spies,
With consequent anxiety,
Thelwall could still write that …

A visit to Wilton House led to musing
On art, gardens, the classics, literature,

And …

‘Our walk over the house and gardens had already cost us six shillings; and we flattered ourselves, that we had no more exactions to encounter. But, as we were going past the porter’s lodge, a servant stopped us with a fresh demand, informing us, in plain language, that they were all stationed there for their fees, and nobody could come in or out without paying. We accordingly submitted to be fleeced once more. I am told, that this kind of tax upon the curiosity of travellers is peculiar to this country; and surely it is somewhat surprising, that the pride and ostentation of greatness should not spurn the illiberal idea of supporting its servants on the alms of curiosity. But there is a nobleman in the county of Derby, who is reported not only to save the expense of wages by this expedient, but absolutely to make a bargain with his housekeeper for half the vails collected by exhibiting his splendid mansion.’

Before we hear of Thelwall in Wiltshire again,
Here’s another radical topographer,
Philip Alston, from the United Nations,
Commenting on the pauperisation
Of 20% of the UK population,

In the spring of 2019:

‘I think breaking rocks has some similarity to the 35 hours of job search for
people who have been out of work for months or years’:
‘A digital and sanitised version of the workhouse’,

And, here, Citizen John:

‘The daily toil of these little infants (who if they are ever to attain the vigour and healthful activity of manhood, ought to be stretching their wanton limbs in noisy gambols over the green)…’

John Thelwall and Slavery
It goes without saying that John Thelwall
Would be a committed abolitionist,
An activist, who also used his pen against slavery,
In his Jacobin novel The Daughter of Adoption,

And in this poem:
The Negro’s Prayer

(1807, commemorating the abolition of the slave trade)
‘O SPIRIT! that rid’st in the whirlwind and storm,
Whose voice in the thunder is heard,
If ever from man, the poor indigent worm,
The prayer of affliction was heard,-
If black man, as white, is the will of thy hand –
(And who would create him but Thee?)
Oh give thy command –
Let it spread thro’ each land,
That Afric’s sad sons shall be free!

…

If while in the slave-ship, with many a groan,
I wept o’er my sufferings in vain;
While hundreds around reply’ to my moan,
And the clanking of many a chain;-
If then thou but deign’st, with a pitying eye,
Thy poor shackled creature to see,
Oh thy mercy apply,
Afric’s sorrow to dry,
And bid the poor Negro be free!
If, here, as I faint in the vertical sun,
And the scourge goads me on to my toil,
No hope faintly soothing, when labour is done,
Of one joy my lorn heart to beguile;-
If thou view’st me Great Spirit! as one thou hast made,
And my fate as dependent on thee,
O impart thou thy aid,
That the scourge may be stay’d,
And the Black Man, at last, may be free…’

Here we see three of the four (sometimes five) stanzas –
The tone doesn’t do justice, perhaps,
To Thelwall’s ability to see slavery
As part of an imperial nexus –
He would have noted the links between war,
Empire, colonies, slavery, and Stroud Scarlet,
In his stay here with radical clothiers,
After his ten days at Nether Stowey
With Coleridge, Wordsworth, and a watchful spy,

In the summer of 1797…

‘Had the Maroons and negroes never been most wickedly enslaved, their masters had never been murdered.’

How he would have enjoyed walking past Capel’s Mill,

Reflecting on coincidence,
For as Michael Scrivener has written:

‘In 1793, trying to circumvent the political repression, Thelwall spoke at a
debating club, The Capel Court Society’;

But as regards the hidden colonial landscape around us:

‘That great family of human beings, every one of which, whatever be his name, his colour or his country, is the brother of all the rest, and ought to enjoy with them a community of rights and happiness’;
‘It would be a happy thing for the universe in general, and for Britain in particular, if there were no such thing as a colony or dependency…’

Citizen John’s visit to Stroudwater
Obviously had a profound impact on him –
This landscape is remembered,
Possibly subliminally, in his slavery novel,
With the names of two of the protagonists –
He met with radical dyers and clothiers –
The Partridges at Bowbridge Mill;
The Newcombes at Bowbridge House,
And the Nortons at Nailsworth,
On that excursion from Nether Stowey,
In the summer of 1797:

There is a Newcombe in the novel and a Captain Bowbridge, too…

Conclusion

John Thelwall, the ‘Jacobin fox’,
Pursued by William Pitt’s spies,
Puts William Cobbett in the shade
With a rather more radical typography,
Straddling, as EP Thompson said,

‘The world of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the world of the Spitalfields
weaver’ –

But he straddled the ways of Socrates too,
For as Michael Scrivener has said:

‘Socrates was found, as usual, in the places of public resort – in the workshops of the artists, among the labourers in the manufactories, uttering seditious allegories, and condemning the desolating tyranny of the Oligarch’;

Or in Thelwall’s words:

‘Hence every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse’…

But there is also something of the Rimbaud
About him too – something almost synesthesic
About the motto for The Tribune:
‘To paint the voice, and fix the fleeting sound’;

His imagery also possibly
Subliminally influenced William Blake –
Blake’s ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ seem to echo
These words of Thelwall:

‘For it is better, according to my judgment, – ten times better, to be immured oneself in a Bastille, than to have the Bastille put into one’s mouth to lock up one’s tongue from all intercourse and communication with one’s heart’;

Which is partly why,
In 1832, at the age of 69,
He was the sole eulogiser
For his old LCS colleague, Thomas Hardy,
His voice carrying to some 30,000 people,
Gathered at Bunhill Fields,

For this public ceremony and act of remembrance,
A reminder of the days forty years before,
When he lectured to audiences in their hundreds…
A reminder of the time when ‘pedestrian’
Meant wandering beyond accustomed paths,
Rather than its current meaning…

‘I have been rambling, according to my wanted practice, in the true democratic way, on foot, from village to village, from pleasant hill to barren Heath, recreating my mind with the beauties, and with the deformities of nature’

(ITLIC Tribune speech, 1795),
A pedestrian who could talk readily with anyone,
A writer whose mixed-genre The Peripatetic

Would influence Wordsworth’s rather more conservative The Excursion;
An activist who connected Nether Stowey with Spitalfields,
Spitalfields with Socrates and with Stroudwater too,

And Stroud scarlet with Empire;

He challenged the cultural hegemony of the classics,
He challenged aristocratic assumptions
About culture, hierarchy, and enlightenment:
The point of reading for Citizen John,
Was not to be elegantly learned and cultured,
But – to use the idiom of our age –
To empower and give agency
To the voices of the dispossessed,
In the triumph of Democracy over the Gothick,
In the triumph of a democratic sublime

Over that of Edmund Burke,
And in the triumph of collective walking
Over the solitary subjectivism of William Hazlitt:
A radical topography based on observation,
Discussion, inquiry and critique,
In language more lyrical than Wordsworth’s.

Post-script:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

‘We were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks when I said to him – ‘Citizen John! This is a fine place to talk treason in!’ – ‘Nay! Citizen Samuel, ‘ replied he, ‘it is a fine place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!’

Being John Thelwall

I first opened the pages of EP Thompson’s
Making of the English Working Class
On my 21st birthday in 1972:
It seemed to sit quite easily along
With the glass bottomed pewter tankard –
A traditional 21st father-son present back then:
Key of the door and welcome at the local too;
The glass bottom so I could see the King’s shilling,
And escape enlistment in some past imperial war –

The tankard now holds used paint brushes in the shed,
But the book sits on my shelf like a Bible:
But it wasn’t just the text that changed my life,
It was the picture on the cover of the labourer,
Foregrounded in late summer contentment,
Basket of blackberries, billy cock hat,
Puffing Billy, Locomotion, or some such,
Steaming and smoking along behind …

Like any sacred text, it is a product of its time,
But today, in 2019, I return to its pages,
Church bells ringing as I sit in the garden,
Hot on the trail of John Thelwall,
Like some government spy, checking the index,
To find, initially, this strange amalgam
Of Foucaultian-Augustan-Post Modernist-self-reflexive text:
Thelwall’s record of his Privy Council interrogation,
In the presence of no lesser personages
Than Prime Minister William Pitt,
The Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor …

‘ATTORNEY-GENERAL [piano]. Mr Thelwall, what is your Christian name?
T. [somewhat sullenly]. John.
ATT. GEN. [piano still] … With two l’s at the end or with one?
T. With two – but it does not signify. [Carelessly, but rather sullen, or so.] You need not give yourself any trouble. I do not intend to answer any questions.
PITT. What does he say? [Darting round, very fiercely, from the other side of the room, and seating himself by the side of the CHANCELLOR.]
LORD CHANCELLOR [with silver softness, almost melting to a whisper]. He does not mean to answer any questions.
PITT. What is it? – What is it? – What? [fiercely] … ‘
The Privy Council’s record differs from the account of Thelwall’s Tribune 4th April 1795:
‘Being asked by the Clerk of the Council how he spelt his Name – Answered: He might spell it according to his own discretion for that he should answer no Questions of any kind …’

‘Whatever’ is what we might say today,
And, whatever, Thelwall was one of a dozen
Sent to the Tower and then Newgate,
With a possible sentence of hanging,
Drawing, beheading and quartering
Waiting in the wings –
And yet, with perfect complacency,
Despite some confinement in the charnel-house,
Citizen John composed a series of reflective lines,
Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate,
This Thelwallian fragment self-limns:
‘Within the Dungeon’s noxious gloom
The Patriot still, with dauntless breast,
The cheerful aspect can assume –
And smile – in conscious Virtue blest!’

The late autumn of 1795
Saw Citizen John’s charismatic command
Of rhetoric in action again,
At Copenhagen Fields, Islington,
This time using his voice rather than pen,
To inspire and enthuse a mass-meeting
Of perhaps 100,000 souls:
‘The whole nation’ would be unified:
‘Combined in one grand political Association, or Corresponding Society,
from the Orkneys to the Thames, from the Cliffs of Dover to the Land’s End.’
Citizen John was at pains to keep matters peaceful,
But he was singled out after subsequent riots
(200,000 in the London streets!
‘Down with Pitt!’ ‘No War!’ ‘No King!’),
The Seditious Meetings Act and the Gagging Act followed,
And a particular and pointed clause,
Allowing the closure of lecture-rooms,
If deemed ‘disorderly houses’ –
This was aimed directly at John Thelwall …

‘The Jacobin fox’ tried to evade the hunt
By using Ancient Rome as a political allegory,
But further persecution followed,
Tribune was closed down and silenced,
Citizen John was assaulted by armed sailors,
When on a lecturing tour in East Anglia …
But who can forget sentences such as:
‘ancient abuses are not by their antiquity converted into virtues’,
Or,
‘Pitt has neglected, and by his wars and consequent taxes,
oppressed the poor, to secure his popularity among the rich’.

He had been singled out with that clause,
For from his quondam lecturing base
At Beaufort Buildings in the Strand,
And from the pages of Tribune,
His lectures fused together
The oral and the textual,
The page and the stage,
In a rather more formal version
Of Thomas Spence’s ‘free and easies’, in some ways –
Thelwall may not have been a Spencean,
But he could assert in the Rights of Nature
That there was more to changing society
Than Tom Paine’s Rights of Man:

‘I affirm that every man, and every woman, and every child, ought to obtain something more, in the general distribution of the fruits of labour, than food, and rags, and a wretched hammock with a poor rug to cover it; and that, without working twelve or fourteen hours a day … from six to sixty. – They have a claim, a scared and inviolable claim … to some comfort and enjoyment … to some tolerable leisure for such discussions, and some means of or such information as may lead to an understanding of their rights …’

But further persecution, and a blind eye
Turned by JPs to attacks by
‘sailors, armed associates and … dragoons’,
Allied to a well justified and growing paranoia
About spies and informants in coffee house or tavern:
‘Some strange but well-dressed man would seat himself on the opposite side of my box’,
All helped lead Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To accept a visit from ‘intrepid, eloquent, and honest’
John Thelwall, to Nether Stowey,
In the summer of 1797,
‘… it would be sweet
With kindly interchange of mutual aid
To delve our little garden plots, the while
Sweet converse flow’d, suspending oft the arm
And half-driven spade, while, eager, one propounds
And listens one, weighing each pregnant word,
And pondering fit reply …’
(That’s John Thelwall, not Coleridge btw) …

But spies were hotfoot to Nether Stowey too,
Following that ‘little stout man
with dark crop of hair and … white hat’,
And so John Thelwall wrote thus:
‘Ah! let me then, far from stressful scenes of public life …
Ah! let me, far in some sequester’d dell,
Build my low cot! most happy might it prove,
My dear Samuel! near to thine, that I might oft
Share thy sweet concourse, best belov’d of friends’;

But Coleridge, feeling the hot breath of spies,
Wrote thus:
‘at present I see that much evil and little good would result from your settling here’;

Whilst, as for William Wordsworth,
He no longer found it
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven’ …
His views on the French Revolution had shifted:
‘… all was quieted by iron bonds
Of military sway. The shifting aims,
The varied functions and high attributes
Of civil action, yielded to a power
Formal, and odious, and contemptible …’

(Exeat John Thelwall)

Thelwall would visit Stroudwater
On his way to secluded, sequestered Llyswen
Where Wordsworth met Thelwall for the last time,
A meeting that would lead to the description
Of the Solitary in The Excursion –
Some Solitary!
He never forgot his earlier communal self
(This wasn’t some Et Ego in Arcadia oblivion,
He was back in London in the next decade,
Voice and pen well honed for the struggle),
And nor should we,
So we conclude with these lines from Rights of Nature 1796:

‘I adopt the term Jacobinism without hesitation – 1. Because it is fixed upon us, as a stigma, by our enemies … 2. Because though I abhor the sanguinary ferocity of the late Jacobins in France, yet their principles … are the most consonant with my ideas of reason, and the nature of man, of any that I have met with … I use the term Jacobinism simply to indicate a large and comprehensive system of reform, not professing to be built upon the authorities and principles of the Gothic customary.’

‘Monopoly, and the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands … carry in their own enormity, the seeds of cure … What-ever presses men together … though it may generate some vices, is favourable to the diffusion of knowledge, and ultimately promotive of human liberty. Hence every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.’

Peterloo-Wiltshire Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt Walk

Peterloo Memorial Walk 2019
About thirty of us braved Manchester weather on August 16th on a performative walk around Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt’s birthplace in Wiltshire. Pictures here tell the picture of the day.
We carried out a dialogue between 2019 and 1819 as we processed: the poem below from Robin Treefellow gives a flavour of how memorialization of Peterloo can reach out to the new Extinction Rebellion generation.

Chalk and Treason

To the chalk
we must go walk.
On the chalk where vipers bugloss brightens
we must go to rebel, debate, and reinvent
This green island
owned by a small land owning minority.

So depart that moribund Houses of Parliament
mired in out-dated oppositional bun throwing.

To the high dreamy chalk we must go like the bees to nectar
discovering what Britain dreams:
dreams like a giant with ammonites in its beard.
When we have lost our way,
when the ways are all privatised,
when society is manacled to linear profit centred greed:
to the chalk we must go walk.
In walking by the yellow of toadflax and melliot
there is waking,
with waking we can change.
This green island where feudalism has gone on too long,
equality,
the earth common to all,
we must learn from the biotic knit of ground sward
and abandon the tenure under our hidden landlords.
For Britain dreams!
The land will be free of chemicals,
to breath and flourish.
So shall our life return
Rude and willed,
modernisation discarded by the road where mugwort grows.
O Albion calls us all
to remember!
freedom, green of leaf and brown of root.
freedom, bright as flowers by the way.

Chalk and Treason

To the chalk
we must go walk.
On the chalk where vipers bugloss brightens
we must go to rebel, debate, and reinvent
This green island
owned by a small land owning minority.

So depart that moribund Houses of Parliament
mired in out-dated oppositional bun throwing.

The text below is about how we put this walk together, with a recce in the spring of 2019. It contains a guide to the walk and aims to stimulate discussion about Hunt might be memorialized in Wiltshire. There is a post-script with a list of flowers and grasses seen on our second recce in early July.

How Henry Hunt is not memorialized in Wiltshire
And how Captain Swing almost is

Henry Hunt’s onetime associate,
Rural Rides’ William Cobbett,
Came down this way in late August 1826:

‘The shepherd showed me the way … and a most beautiful sight it was! Villages, hamlets, large farms, towers, steeples, meadows, orchards, and very fine timber trees, scattered all over the valley … downs, very lofty and steep in some places, and sloping miles back in others … From the edge of the downs begin capital arable fields generally of very great dimensions … After the corn-fields come meadows on each side, down to the brook or river … I sat upon my horse and looked over Milton and Easton and Pewsey for half an hour, though I had not breakfasted…’

We travelled by the cherry red
Swindon-Salisbury double-decker,
To alight at Enford to view the church
At 10.45 at the end of February 2019:
‘Above the arch is the COAT OF ARMS of King William 1V dating from 1831. Royal coats of arms were much in vogue in this period to display the parish’s loyalty and to add colour to the church …’
But obvs no mention of Captain Swing
Or the threat of revolution at this time …

But we went left to the crossroads.
For the lane towards Littlecot
And East Chisenbury and the Red Lion,
Thatched cottages and inns,
Flint and red brick and whitewash,
Just as in Cobbett’s and the Orator’s day;

A left hand turn on a footpath followed,
And so to the crossing of the main (turnpike) road,
Where we turned left along the verge to a stile on the right,
Where a footpath sign on a gate showed us our way up the hill;
We walked where Hunt no doubt took his horse,
A parliament of rooks democratically nesting
Below us on our left hand side,

Lichen splashing the track-way hawthorn,
The big sky landscape bare branched etched,
A solitary signpost standing to show our path
Across the lonely windswept downs,
Now resounding with ordnance,
Beyond the red flags down to Salisbury Plain:
An echo of the musket fire from the days of Swing,

Skylarks ascending to sing the spring,
While finches arced their way across the ploughed fields,

Barns with the ghosts of their threshing machines,
Boot-prints once down there in the oozing mud,
Cries of ‘Bread or Blood’ still there in the air,
The ashes of burnt hayricks and letters,
Once scattered across the nearby valley farms and fields,

The sun now gleaming on the puddled track-ways,
And on the white horse hillside to the south;
While, beyond, lay Hampshire and misty Dorset,
Where Captain Swing once rode on his white horse.

We wandered on to skirt a high Iron Age enclosure,
And so descend along a curving lane,
Past the birthplace of Henry Hunt on our right,
Widdington Farm:
‘I was born on the 6th November 1773, in Wiltshire, at Widdington Farm, not within a mile of any other habitation, near Upavon. Widdington Farm lies about a mile from the turnpike road … a lone farm, in a valley upon the downs.’
But no mention of the Orator today,
Instead:
‘WIDDINGTON SHOOT
WILTSHIRE
CLAY SHOOTING GROUND
OUR NEXT COMPETTION IS …’;

And this is how Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt,
And Wiltshire’s radical history is memorialized,
Mute and invisible in the Vale of the Avon,
Unless you use your imagination –
But, wait, in St Timothy’s Church in Upavon,
There is a brief but welcome reference to Captain Swing
On the information board:
‘In the beginning of the nineteenth century agricultural workers in general, and those of Wiltshire in particular, had been reduced to abject misery, and The Vale was a focal point of the agricultural unrest known as the Swing Riots of 1830.’
‘Abject misery’ is daring and arresting …
But the next sentence and paragraph
Guides the reader’s understanding thus:
‘By far the most important development was the Vale’s emergence as a transportation corridor … the Kennet & Avon Canal …’

‘By far the most important development …’
The subliminal suggestion …
Old fashioned Swing …
The modernity/progress transportation trope …
The modernity of ‘corridor’ …
The world of ‘abject misery’ has been left behind …
Mute and invisible,
Like Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt.

We hope to address this mute invisibility
On the 16th of August 2019,
The bi-centenary of Peterloo,
With a Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt performative walk:
Meet at the church in Enford at 10.45:
The walk will end at Upavon after about three hours,
A bit up and down and one bit by the main road;
Park at Enford and get the bus back from Upavon,
Or get the bus from Swindon to Enford and back from Upavon.

Post-script:

Wild flowers seen on July 11th on this walk:
Agrimony

Bird’s Foot Trefoil Black Medick
Bladder Campion Bramble
Broomrape
Buttercup
Burdock
Bush Vetch

Chicory
Clematis
Cleavers
Common Centaury Common Knapweed Common Toadflax Creeping Thistle
Cut Leafed Cranesbill Daisy
Dandelion
Dock
Dog Rose
Dogwood
Dove’s-Foot Cranesbill Elder Flower
Evening Primrose

Fairy Flax
Field Bindweed
Field Scabious

Goats Beard
Great Mullein
Great Willowherb Greater Knapweed Ground Ivy

Hedge Bedstraw Hedge Woundwort Hemp Agrimony
Herb Robert
Hoary Plantain Hogweed
Hop Trefoil

Ivy Leafed Speedwell

Lady’s Bedstraw

Marjoram
Meadow Cranesbill Meadowsweet Meadow Vetchling

Melilot
Milkwort
Mousear
Mousear Hawkweed Mugwort

Musk Mallow

Nipplewort

Oxeye Daisy

Pignut Pineapple Weed Poppy

Purple Toadflax Pyramidal Orchid

Quaking Grass

Ragwort

Red Bartsia
Red Clover
Rest Harrow
Red Valerian Ribwort Plantain Rock Rose
Rosebay Willowherb Rough Hawkbit

St. Johns Wort Salad Burnet Sanfoin
Selfheal Shepherds Purse Silverweed Small Scabious Sorrel Sow Thistle
Spear Thistle Speedwell
Spindle Tree

Teasel
Tufted Vetch

Vipers Bugloss

Watercress
Water Forget-Me-Not Weld

White Bryony White Campion Wild Carrot White Clover White Deadnettle Wild Basil
Wild Mignonette Wild Parsnip Wild Thyme Wood Avens

Yarrow
Yellow Rattle Yellow Vetchling

Re memorialization, readers might also want to look at the link below:
http://radicalstroud.co.uk/a-wiltshire-town-and-peterloo/

Oakridge Walk February 23rd 2019

‘When vapours rolling down a valley
Made a lonely scene more lonesome’,
Wrote Wordsworth in The Prelude –
Well, we weren’t lonely, a group of ten
Walking through early morning mists and fog,
Discussing enclosure of Oakridge common land,
A death-threatening letter for the squire,
Demeaning shouts of ‘Who stole the donkey’s dinner?’
Loud following him on his daily rounds
Past Lilyhorn Farm and Bournes Green.

A watery sun shone vaporous
As we stopped at a spectral crossroads,
Cogitating upon the Roman villa,
Down in the nearby fields of Bakers Farm,
Then processing Neolithic track-ways,
Past a field of sheep and hidden long barrow,
The sun now silvering the streams that run
Down to the Frome and thence to the Severn.

With thanks to Charlotte Rooney for the above photos.

Oakridge Walk February 23rd 2019
(Qui feratus est asinus est scriptor prandium?)

Spring was in the air: blossom and catkins,
While on the ground, snowdrops and primroses,
Celandine, daffodils, and wild garlic,
Autumn’s crab apple windfalls perfectly
Preserved, still, in bare branched woodland.

We sat down at Strawberry Bank,
A butterfly arcing through the air,
Just where a Battle of Britain dogfight
Brought down a Junkers 88 bomber,
In the field right behind our resting backs;
We climbed up to St Bartholomew’s Church,
Thence to Wear Farm, the birthplace and home
Of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line:
We drew lines on our own maps of the past,
To take our varied ways back into the present,
But knowing if we whistle loud and clear,
Then we shall all be able to hear
‘Qui feratus est asinus est scriptor prandium ?
’
Wherever we are and wherever we go.

Qui feratus est asinus est scriptor prandium ?
See?

No Barriers

No Barriers: In the Wake
A Game of Two Halves

First Half

So much of our language and discourse,
So many of our idioms and metaphors,
Have their provenance in our imperial past,
A maritime, sea faring history
(Slavery and buccaneers too),
The littoral not literal but figurative:
Figurehead, in the wake, becalmed, in the doldrums,
Above board, cut of one’s jib, even keel, foul up,
First rate, go overboard, groundswell, know the ropes,
Keelhauled, not enough room to swing a cat,
Overwhelm, pipe down, taken aback, take the wind out of your sails,
Three sheets to the wind, tide over, toe the line, true colours,
Try a different tack, under the weather,
Warning shot across the bow,
Windfall …

No Barriers: In the Wake
A Game of Two Halves

First Half

At last!
We’ve made land now:
We can see the wood for the trees,
Barriers too:
Barricade, blockade, boundary, fence, hurdle, impediment,
Limit, obstacle, wall, bar, confine, ditch, enclosure,
Moat, gully, palisade, rampart, trench, obstruction, restriction,
Stumbling block, check, encumbrance, trap, bias, bigotry, chauvinism,
Discrimination, injustice, enmity, preconception, sexism,
Misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, ageism, antipathy, aversion,
Contemptuousness, snobbery, narrow-mindedness, partiality,
Unfairness, prejudice …

But as times change and words change meanings,
So we seek to create a society with No Barriers,
A level playing field,
Where all can achieve in a world of equal opportunities,
And where you put a metaphorical
Red line through all the negativity above,
And instead add your thoughts below,
As to how we create No Barriers:

Second Half
The half kicks off with some thoughts of Y7s at Archway School:

Don’t get distracted by I-phones and a selfie selfish world,
But think of others as a way of overcoming your and others’ barriers;

Overcome fear, anxiety, shyness,
And work to the best of your ability;
Believe in yourself;
Achieve your dream;
Grab your wheelchair;
Find your Utopia;
Be a helper for the World;

‘Dark … I will never be free …
Not good enough, not worthy,
Trapped in a fortress filled with gloom and dusk.
Never free.
One day, I will climb mountains, swim channels.
I’ll wave to my neighbour and smile to myself,
Oh this happy day.
Distant though …
A glimmer of light catches my eye …
I wish, upon my star,
For a life with no barriers.’

Extra Time: No Penalties

First up, Neville Southall, once of Everton and Wales,
Now at a special needs school, in Ebbw Vale:
‘It’s all about uniting people …
If you unite all LGBT people, there are millions.
If you do the same with the mental health people
And all the charities came together,
It would be powerful …’

Secondly, Danny Rose of England,
And how keeping depression to oneself might not be the best thing:
‘I was diagnosed with depression which nobody knows about …
my mum was racially abused …
I haven’t told my mum or dad,
and they are probably going to be really angry
reading this, but I’ve kept it to myself until now’;
Next up: Colin Grant in his review
Of The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephania:
‘Zephania confirms that art can serve as an instrument of change.
The people’s poet has written himself out of the life that was mapped out for him.’
Bejamin Zephaniah:
“I don’t believe the glib sentiment that if you simply ‘follow your dreams’ you’ll make it.
Maybe if your talent matches your expectations you’ll make it but you might not.
There might be cultural or class barriers stopping you.
And if you don’t make it, you’ll need your own internal sense of self-worth to fall back on.”

Now we’re off to Dunfermline with its new playground:
An inclusive playground for differently-abled children:
No barriers, instead, swings and roundabouts for everyone,
Just as it should be for the Windrush generation,
There should be no bureaucratic barriers
And stumbling blocks and injustice;

Next up, Stan Collymore, an echo of Walter:
‘My dad’s from Barbados, my mum’s white …
Now is the time for the Rooney Rule,
Guaranteeing minorities
Proper consideration for positions’;

Now for Daniel Bell-Drummond and the Platform Initiative,
To widen involvement in county cricket:
Daniel, from the inner-city, and just one
Of the handful of mixed race or black cricketers today:
‘Going to Dulwich Prep and Millfield
has played a massive part for me.
Those are big advantages.
It’s definitely more a class thing.’

Now over to Arts Council England,
And its report on the arts and diversity:
‘there remains a large gap between organisational aspiration and action’;
And Penguin Random House:
‘Giving a platform to more diverse voices will lead
to greater richness of creativity and stories rather than stifling them’;
As was observed in the wake of Lionel Shriver’s Spectator feature:
‘Equality and quality are not exclusive”,
That’s worth repeating, I think:
Equality and quality are not exclusive”;
Now for Jay Clarke after his Wimbledon debut:
He is hopeful that his performance and will result in kids from working class backgrounds,
And BAME backgrounds, trying to follow in his footsteps and overcome the barriers,
That stand as metaphors alongside tennis nets on tennis courts;

Inclusivity is key to our local football team, too,
Forest Green Rovers, with its Community Stand,
‘A covered standing terrace’, where
‘FGR supports local schools, uniformed groups, sports clubs & community groups
With discounted/free tickets to matches;
School children and if appropriate their teachers receive free tickets to a match.
Community Parents, family members and siblings are welcome too, with half price tickets;
U11s can attend matches for free all season’;
And who can forget last spring at FGR’S New Lawn?
REFUGEES WELCOME EFL;

Inclusivity too, we hope after the World Cup:
We now have fewer people playing sport in our country
And more obesity in our country than before the Olympics,
Women’s football is booming so well done the women,
So many barriers they have had to vault,
Let’s hope others can follow after them;

And well done Stuart Langworthy,
England Over 60’s Walking Football manager,
Talking about his local team down the road in Gloucester
And their attitude to No Barriers:
‘We have players with a hip replacement,
One with a triple heart bypass,
Three players who have had heart attacks,
Several players with diabetes,
A great many who are differently abled,
And a player with Alzheimer’s,
Who all who once a week are learning how to play
The beautiful game, with no barriers.’

So let’s finish there,
Seeing the wood for the trees,
As we did at the end of the first half:
But the view, like the game,
Is beautiful now:
Where are the barriers?

For the Love of a Chartist

PRESS RELEASE

FOR THE LOVE OF A CHARTIST

STROUD THEATRE FESTIVAL

Chartism was a working class movement of the 1830s and 40s that wanted to establish democracy in the country, at a time when only the aristocracy and middle class men had the vote.
It was based upon 6 points: the secret ballot so there could be no intimidation; payment of MPs so that working people could stand; same-size constituencies to prevent the old rural aristocracy lording it over the new industrial towns; ending the ownership of property rule to become an MP, so that working people could stand; votes for all men over 21 (there were Chartist groups in favour of votes for women even back then, however); annual parliaments so that governments would keep their promises.

All but one of these is now the law, of course, but you could easily end up in prison in Chartist times for supporting these ideas … lose your freedom, your job and home for wanting a democratic government…

It’s time to remember these freedom-fighters, and rescue them from what EP Thompson called, ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.
And so this show – our counter-heritage rescuing of two special working people from the enormous condescension of posterity: George Shell of Newport and Charlotte-Alice Bingham of Stroud.

PRESS RELEASE

FOR THE LOVE OF A CHARTIST

STROUD THEATRE FESTIVAL

This performative presentation was commissioned by the Chartist Convention to commemorate the 1839 Newport Rising, in general, and the death of George Shell, in particular.
Parts might be repeated, again, on the anniversary of the Rising next November, when we might perform by candle light in the graveyard of St Woolas Cathedral in Newport.
It was there that the dead insurrectionaries were secretly buried at night by the army to prevent any public displays of grief with consequent martyrdom. So circumspect was this military procedure, that all the horses’ hooves were muffled…

Stuart Butler
07923489663
stfc12@hotmail.com
www.radicalstroud.co.uk

STROUD RADICAL HISTORY: ALTERNATIVE HERITAGE WALK – Friday 18 May 2018

Two years ago an Alien landed in Nailsworth, unnoticed by the Stroud Valleys folk. Since its arrival after fifty years temporarily rooted on Planet Essex, this strange being has immersed itself in the Gloucestershire soil, attempting to make sense of its move here “for a change, and it ticked more boxes than anywhere else”.

See how a creature far from home has struggled with unfamiliar territory; intensively exploring its new homeland on foot, or by bicycle, guided by its ‘Ordnance Survey Explorer 168’, Gloucestershire ‘Pevsners’, and Wikipedia.

Join a naive explorer for a circular walk, as this being shares with you its Outsider Views on the Stroud Valleys heritage, as it attempts to blend-in with its new people.

The seven mile route takes in the stories of Negelsleag, as well as Forest Green, Newmarket, Shortwood, Rockness, Washpool, Barton End and Avening. We will share stories from the Jurassic period, Long Barrows, stone mines, mills and cloth, Nonconformity, the arrival of the railway, the football clubs, Quakers and bacon.

There will be a couple of readings from Essex exile, Fred Slattern, a poem exorcising his Essex ghosts and embracing his Celtic fringe, and his mercifully short prose piece about a lost soul and a meeting at the Crossroads, where we might meet the ghost of Shipton, high above Nailsworth.

There will be contributions on tangential themes from other members of Radical Stroud. If YOU have any stories to share, bring them along.

Meet at 9:30 at Cossack Square, Nailsworth, opposite the Britannia, a hundred yards south from the Nailsworth bus station. (You could catch the 9:08 Number 63 ‘Forest Green’ bus from Stroud Merrywalks.)

No need to book for the walk, just turn up. Allow five hours. Bring refreshments. There will be a short stop at a pub for a drink, en route, and the option for food and drink after the walk at The Brittania.

More information from sootallures@yahoo.co.uk

Harvest Festivals and Changing Times

Times change don’t they?

“Are there no prisons?”
“Are there no workhouses?”
Asked Mr. Scrooge back in the decade
Known as ‘The Hungry Forties”,
When asked to assist with charity,
A charity that was mostly Christian rather than secular.

Times change don’t they?
‘’We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land
And it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand’…
I grew up singing that as a schoolboy,
Not knowing then, that it was a hymnal retort
To Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species …
Times change don’t they?

And when I sang that as a schoolboy,
We collected and distributed the fruits of the harvest
To senior citizens in the area,
Many, I suspect, widowed in the Great War,
And our posh head-teacher would not allow
Anything as common as tinned food
To sully the cornucopia in the hall,
Times change don’t they?

Times change don’t they?

Then we started thinking of ‘The Third World’,
As it was known then,
Charity no longer started at home,
In the boom-time 1960s,
But when beggars returned to the streets
In the 1980s,
Tins were needed at home,
Times change don’t they?

And now, in a new century,
In the last two weeks,
I have fed the homeless in the streets around Kings Cross,
Written lessons about Mr. Scrooge –
And his redemption –
Written lessons about the cruelty of Stroud’s workhouse,
And now I am searching for the tins again,
For families,
For Stroud’s Food Bank,
For charity, once more, begins at home.
Times change don’t they?
Do they?

Stroud Fringe Walk: Place, Space and Time

Beneath the pavement, the beach! For here we have a line of houses called Streamside, And up there, beyond the Fountain pub, Lies Springfield Road and a plethora Of constant, subterranean springs, Springs! The genius loci of Stroud …

We walked down Lansdowne, To cross the Slad Brook, at Mill House, In search of the edgelands, Puddles, brooks and panel beaters, Car dealers, buddleia, car parks and cinemas, Past the Dickensian Omar L. Cottle, Monumental mason, The nominative determinism of a park, Named after a Park, Past strange continuities in the street: The chemist’s on the corner, Where in 1872, A chemist by the name of Joseph Banks Campaigned for a farm workers’ trade union, And no more payment in truck: ‘In sterling money, not fat bacon …or a couple of swedes’,

Then to Badbrook and weavers’ riots, ‘We had been working ever longer time for ever cankered pennies all the year. Something needed doing. So we laid our shuttles and looms to rest and joined the Stroud Valleys Weavers Union. This is my true and faithful account. I cannot dissemble. The Good Book tells us that we should get our bread by the sweat of our brow. We had the sweat but no bread. What could we do?’

Thanks to Peter Bruce for the above images.

On past the culverted brook, Mcdonald’s, (Who owns the brook?) Edgelands car park signage, Underneath the dirty old town railway viaduct, Along the canal, past old turnpike gates, Behind Lodgemore Mill, past sluice gates and leats, Listening to the voices of the dispossessed, ‘I was baptized Josephine, but I call myself Joe now: I never felt comfortable in a woman’s clothes … a professional legger, An inland navigator of sorts, a sort of hybrid, My sex hidden by fustian, and the subterranean Depths, down there where the fossils remind us Of Noah, the ark, the deluge, and the dove of peace.’ Past old mill buildings – there a self storage centre – Past fences with endless toppings of rolled barbed wire, Past Springfield Cottage, along the Cainscross Road, Skirting the site of the toll house riots, Along suburban footpaths that could be Saxon, Or even prehistoric in provenance, Linking lines of hills and valleys, An edgelands liminal palimpsest … Past more streams and springs at Puck’s Hole, To reach Bread Street and hear of the 1766 food riots, ‘Many that are under sentence of death thought they were doing a meritorious act at the very moment they were forfeiting their lives’,

And so down dale and uphill to sit for study (A silent group gathered on the pasture) Randwick’s 1832 experiment of dispensing with money; Gazing up to the village’s labyrinth of footpaths, Built in exchange for raiment, food, bibles and tokens, ‘Personal Decency promoted, AND IMMORALITY CHECKED, Exchanging Men’s idle time for the Blessings of Food and Raiment. Randwick 1832.’ And thence past Callowell, (so many watery names!), More springs, And the ghost of a turnpike bar at Salmon Springs, Through Stratford Park, past its museum, And narrow gauge railway, To exchange addresses and reflect on Rebecca Solnit – The meaning of our pilgrimage: ‘We think space is about place, in fact it is really about time.’

Thanks to Mark Hewlett for the below image:

Not Bad for a Village Team

Tranmere –
The name suggests a crossing of the waters,
A ferry across the Mersey,
A crossing of the River Rubicon,
Or for us, the River Thames –
On the 9.55 Football Poets Special,
Speeding through the Golden Valley,
Past Swindon’s railway works,
The Vale of the White Horse,
Then on through Sonning Cutting,
Sequestered Berkshire,
Suburban Middlesex,
Old Oak Common,
To Paddington.

We sat in an overcrowded carriage:
Richard, now ready, having scoured Stroud,
And all villages and hamlets of the Five Valleys,
Until at last finally securing an FGR scarf,
Chewing on his bacon and egg sandwich,
But worried that he’d left the gas ring on,
Stuart, with a stone in his shoe from his yesterday walk,
Seeing it as a pilgrim’s scruple,
The retention of which would be necessary for victory,
For only the scrupulous would be triumphant,
After enduring self-flagellation,
Crispin, now ready, after tirelessly badgering
Wembley Stadium about his treasured, magic drum –
More of that later.

But there we were,
At Wembley,
Like a village gawping at the big city,
Just 3,500 souls,
Thirteen charabancs only
(Six from FGR, 4 from Stroud, 3 from Stonehouse),
Like some Laurie Lee
Cider with Rosie day out revisited,
A Last Supper of the Season,
While the massed ranks from Birkenhead and Liverpool
Numbered 15,000 and fifty coaches,
Confident of victory,
Against this rustic outfit.

But Crispin had a plan –
Crispin Thomas, like Oscar,
The clairaudient in The Tin Drum,
Worried that Wembley would ban his drum:
‘the day will come …
oh how I pray
for my white drum’,

Eventually receiving this email from Wembley Stadium:

Hello Crispin,

I hope you are well. This isn’t a problem and the staff are aware of you and your drum.
Please make your way to the accessible entrance at the turnstile and they will check the drum and they will let you in.
Many thanks,

Crispin, now ready,
Crispin,
Now revelling in his clairaudient condition,
Obtaining a ‘singing end’ for FGR,
Joining ranks with the other FGR drummer,
To wave his arms in the air to draw the FGR crowd
From their numbered, specified seats,
And so amplify the support, noise and chants,
With supporters standing en masse behind the goal,
Despite the tickets stating in bold:
Persistent standing is not allowed.

But we were allowed,
Because all fans behaved themselves responsibly –
But many thanks to Wembley’s staff for their dispensation,
For this concentrated noise
Gave succour to the team on the pitch
Throughout the whole ninety minutes:
The support was continuous.

And at the end,
After all the chants of
‘On our way, on our way,
To the football league we’re on our way’,
And,
‘Not bad for a village team,
Not bad for a village team’,
The man from the Met. came up to Crispin,
Congratulated him on his drumming,
Congratulated FGR’s three and a half thousand
For outshouting Tranmere,
Adding,
‘I had a tear in my eye at the end.
I was so pleased for you.’

Not bad for a village team,
A team at the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere.