Category: Counter-Heritage

Football Gone Rogue

I went searching for the soul of Forest Green,
Wandering intuitively, ad hoc
Inferentially, without any
A priori knowledge or insight:
It was a tabula rasa wander.

Northfields Road smacked of enclosed fields
(‘Its only bondage was the circling sky’),
And Eighteenth century food riots,
With Captain Swing riding over in Horsley,
While dark satanic mills in the valleys
Stood where weavers once combined for justice.

I crossed the threshold of a century,
Past chapel, school, and blacksmith’s workshop,
Through labyrinths of handloom weavers’ paths,
Along a valley far below the flood threat
Of countless springs and teeming brooks and streams,
Along The Rollers, Chestnut Hill, Star Hill,
And so to the Jovial Foresters,
Where the players used to change for the match,
(Victorian post box in its roadside wall),
Past a blue plaque to Private Charles Marmont,
Died of wounds 21st May 1918,
Aged 20,
Buried Forest Green Chapel Graveyard,
And so to where Joseph Weight used to work
(A Nailsworth Conscientious Objector),
Before he faced the tribunal’s judgement
On whether he really had a conscience.

I went searching for the soul of Forest Green,
Wandering intuitively, ad hoc
Inferentially, without any
A priori knowledge or insight:
It was a tabula rasa wander.

Northfields Road smacked of enclosed fields
(‘Its only bondage was the circling sky’),
And Eighteenth century food riots,
With Captain Swing riding over in Horsley,
While dark satanic mills in the valleys
Stood where weavers once combined for justice.

I crossed the threshold of a century,
Past chapel, school, and blacksmith’s workshop,
Through labyrinths of handloom weavers’ paths,
Along a valley far below the flood threat
Of countless springs and teeming brooks and streams,
Along The Rollers, Chestnut Hill, Star Hill,
And so to the Jovial Foresters,
Where the players used to change for the match,
(Victorian post box in its roadside wall),
Past a blue plaque to Private Charles Marmont,
Died of wounds 21st May 1918,
Aged 20,
Buried Forest Green Chapel Graveyard,
And so to where Joseph Weight used to work
(A Nailsworth Conscientious Objector),
Before he faced the tribunal’s judgement
On whether he really had a conscience.

read more

Why Is There an L in Samon?

Dear Stuart,

MY EARLY YEARS

I was born in Liverpool in 1952. It seems strange looking back but Liverpool was still a bombsite as it was only 7 years after the end of the war. We lived 300 yards from the docks and through a child’s eyes everything seemed to be in black and white. I was the second oldest of 5 children. My mother had her children before she was 21 and we lived in 2 rooms in a privately rented house.
My father was pretty useless and he preferred the company of his mates in the pub and I remember him spending time in prison but my mother told us that he was working in Butlins holiday camp during the periods of his absence.

Dear Stuart,

MY EARLY YEARS

I was born in Liverpool in 1952. It seems strange looking back but Liverpool was still a bombsite as it was only 7 years after the end of the war. We lived 300 yards from the docks and through a child’s eyes everything seemed to be in black and white. I was the second oldest of 5 children. My mother had her children before she was 21 and we lived in 2 rooms in a privately rented house.
My father was pretty useless and he preferred the company of his mates in the pub and I remember him spending time in prison but my mother told us that he was working in Butlins holiday camp during the periods of his absence. read more

The Historical Symbolism of the FVR Football Shirt

Lines of Green: the hills and vales of the Five Valleys;
Lines of Red: Stroud Scarlet stretched on tenterhooks;
Lines of Black: Denotes strength and clarity of vision
And the slave trade and its abolition

History, topography, politics and football,
All conjoined in the design of the FVR football shirt,
A revolutionary shirt,
In nature, design and intention:
An inclusive shirt,
Not just for Stroud,
But for the Five Valleys too,
And the wide world beyond,
A shirt from the People’s Republic of Stroud:
Art of Clay.

Lines of Green: the hills and vales of the Five Valleys;
Lines of Red: Stroud Scarlet stretched on tenterhooks;
Lines of Black: Denotes strength and clarity of vision
And the slave trade and its abolition

History, topography, politics and football,
All conjoined in the design of the FVR football shirt,
A revolutionary shirt,
In nature, design and intention:
An inclusive shirt,
Not just for Stroud,
But for the Five Valleys too,
And the wide world beyond,
A shirt from the People’s Republic of Stroud:
Art of Clay.

read more

Saint Lawrence

Saint Lawrence

Lawrence, according to Wikipedia, originally came from Valencia in Spain. He was a young deacon in Rome under Pope Sixtus II, before Christianity became the established religion, at the time when the Emperor Valerian launched a persecution against the early church. In 258 Sixtus was beheaded while celebrating the liturgy and Lawrence was ordered to hand over the church’s treasured possessions. He asked for three days to gather them, over which time he distributed the precious things amongst the community before presenting himself with a delegation of marginalised and disabled people.

Saint Lawrence

Lawrence, according to Wikipedia, originally came from Valencia in Spain. He was a young deacon in Rome under Pope Sixtus II, before Christianity became the established religion, at the time when the Emperor Valerian launched a persecution against the early church. In 258 Sixtus was beheaded while celebrating the liturgy and Lawrence was ordered to hand over the church’s treasured possessions. He asked for three days to gather them, over which time he distributed the precious things amongst the community before presenting himself with a delegation of marginalised and disabled people.

read more

Bunyan, Blake, Wordsworth and Forest Green

Blake, Bunyan, Wordsworth and Forest Green

And lo, it came to pass that when the Forest Green fans sang
‘Stand up for the Forest Green’,
All fans throughout the ground and stands,
Stood up.
And when the Forest Green fans sang
‘Sit down for the Forest Green’,
All fans throughout the ground and stands,
Sat down.

Blake, Bunyan, Wordsworth and Forest Green

And lo, it came to pass that when the Forest Green fans sang
‘Stand up for the Forest Green’,
All fans throughout the ground and stands,
Stood up.
And when the Forest Green fans sang
‘Sit down for the Forest Green’,
All fans throughout the ground and stands,
Sat down. read more

Sub. Rooms: Theatre of Memories

Public buildings are not just about accounts, ledgers and money,
They are also about what Raphael Samuel called ‘Theatres of Memory’,
Where varying conceptions of ‘Heritage’ can collude, collide, or elide:
If each of us could walk alone through the Subscription Rooms,
Alone in memory, reverie and seasonal darkness,
As the clock, Jacob Marley-like, chimed through the night,
What a miscellany of ghosts of Stroud Subscription Rooms’ past
Would be invoked!
Those concerts, those bands, those exhibitions, those meetings,
Those queues, the café, the bar,
Tickets for shows and the National Express bus …

Public buildings are not just about accounts, ledgers and money,
They are also about what Raphael Samuel called ‘Theatres of Memory’,
Where varying conceptions of ‘Heritage’ can collude, collide, or elide:
If each of us could walk alone through the Subscription Rooms,
Alone in memory, reverie and seasonal darkness,
As the clock, Jacob Marley-like, chimed through the night,
What a miscellany of ghosts of Stroud Subscription Rooms’ past
Would be invoked!
Those concerts, those bands, those exhibitions, those meetings,
Those queues, the café, the bar,
Tickets for shows and the National Express bus …
read more

Dennis Severs’ House

It’s like History on Acid,
A Raphael Samuel Magical Mystery Tour,
Not Seven Rooms of Gloom,
But ten rooms which haunt and hex:
The dead still alive,
Watching us trip through space and time,
Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard outside,
Peering through the window panes,
Observing us in our candle-lit dream,
Clocks ticking away the century
Until it’s the time for Jacob Marley
To makes his visitation and warning,
Not just to Ebenezer Scrooge,

It’s like History on Acid,
A Raphael Samuel Magical Mystery Tour,
Not Seven Rooms of Gloom,
But ten rooms which haunt and hex:
The dead still alive,
Watching us trip through space and time,
Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard outside,
Peering through the window panes,
Observing us in our candle-lit dream,
Clocks ticking away the century
Until it’s the time for Jacob Marley
To makes his visitation and warning,
Not just to Ebenezer Scrooge, read more

The Glade

In The Glade

Anne Creed has transformed the derelict waste land off Nelson Street into a place of beauty, special to many. A broken piece of roofing slate on the corner of the Golden Fleece carved with the word glade in Tom Perkins style marks the entrance and points to the cracked pool table inscribed with ‘Song’ by Ivor Gurney.

Only the wanderer knows England’s graces

Or can anew see clear familiar faces

And who loves joy as he who dwells in shadows

Do not forget me, quite, O Severn meadows

Gurney wrote it on the Western Front in the spring of 1917 before the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) where he was gassed. Broken in two, the slate was dumped in a skip. The break could represent the breakup of Europe in the First World War or the subsequent break down of his mental health.

“No it’s the River Severn,” a friend said.

In The Glade

Anne Creed has transformed the derelict waste land off Nelson Street into a place of beauty, special to many. A broken piece of roofing slate on the corner of the Golden Fleece carved with the word glade in Tom Perkins style marks the entrance and points to the cracked pool table inscribed with ‘Song’ by Ivor Gurney.

Only the wanderer knows England’s graces

Or can anew see clear familiar faces

And who loves joy as he who dwells in shadows

Do not forget me, quite, O Severn meadows

Gurney wrote it on the Western Front in the spring of 1917 before the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) where he was gassed. Broken in two, the slate was dumped in a skip. The break could represent the breakup of Europe in the First World War or the subsequent break down of his mental health.

“No it’s the River Severn,” a friend said.

read more

Before The Luddites

Before the Luddites Custom, community and machinery in the English woollen industry, 1776-1809

Adrian Randall CUP

This wonderful book opens with an exploration of the pejorative use of the term ‘Luddites’ – they were right weren’t they? Wages did fall and goods could deteriorate – and how they ‘could little have imagined the linguistic legacy they were to bequeath to posterity.’ Randall points out that a focus upon direct action – rioting and so on – does not ‘accentuate’ the ‘atypical’: ‘riots often provide historians with our only point of access’ into the past values, attitudes and traditions of custom-held rights. And this point of access reveals that ‘Resistance to machinery was multiform … peaceful petitioning, appeals to the courts … negotiations … strike action, intimidation and riot.’ Randall shows how this resistance echoed 18th century Gloucestershire food riots – ‘Just as food riots reveal order, discrimination and a clear moral economy, so do the community-based riots against the jenny and scribbling machine.’

Before the Luddites Custom, community and machinery in the English woollen industry, 1776-1809

Adrian Randall CUP

This wonderful book opens with an exploration of the pejorative use of the term ‘Luddites’ - they were right weren’t they? Wages did fall and goods could deteriorate - and how they ‘could little have imagined the linguistic legacy they were to bequeath to posterity.’ Randall points out that a focus upon direct action - rioting and so on - does not ‘accentuate’ the ‘atypical’: ‘riots often provide historians with our only point of access’ into the past values, attitudes and traditions of custom-held rights. And this point of access reveals that ‘Resistance to machinery was multiform … peaceful petitioning, appeals to the courts … negotiations … strike action, intimidation and riot.’ Randall shows how this resistance echoed 18th century Gloucestershire food riots – ‘Just as food riots reveal order, discrimination and a clear moral economy, so do the community-based riots against the jenny and scribbling machine.’

read more