A People’s History
A People’s Local History I am hoping to stimulate a collective writing of a People’s History: a textual tapestry of life, work and landscape around Stroud, the Five Valleys and the county in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Once that is complete then we will focus...
read moreCreative Writing Guide
A GUIDE TO WRITING YOUR OWN If you fancy it, here’s a practical easy guide to creative writing. (If any readers are into the intellectual side of all this slipping through wormholes of time stuff, and fancy some prompts about psychogeography, Radical walking and the...
read moreAn A to Z of the Jobs of those transported from Gloucestershire
An A to Z of People at Work in Gloucestershire in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries: The professions and jobs and sometimes status Of those who were transported When I look out of my window I descry The following on their way to Van Diemen’s Land and to New South...
read moreRodborough Ridge and Furrow
Just over the road at Rodborough Glebe allotments, In Rodborough Fields, beyond Kings Road, Castlemead Road and Arundel Drive, You can see a clear pattern of ridge and furrow (‘Like corrugated fields or waves in a land-sea’), Particularly on frosty...
read moreRadical Road Trip
Radical Antiquarians on Tour
The Antiquarians’ Road Trip
Plus ca change
Look! There’s Mr Jingle and Mr Pickwick in Stamford,
A town astride the Great North Road,
All tortuous turnpikes and honey stone,
Coaching inns and listed buildings:
‘GOOD STABLING AND LOOSE BOXES’;
And beyond Stamford, heading east?
There’s John Clare revenants walking the roadside,
And channels and rivulets and watercourses,
With high embankments above the roads,
And a cloud filled sky that meets the fields
In a cumulonimbus towering clasp
Across a dark shadowed numinous dreamscape;
But there, leaping out of the flat lands’ fastness,
The vaporous tower of Ely cathedral,
And all around, the oozing of the fens:
Tick Fen; Langwood Fen, Great Fen, ChatterisFen,
Ouse Fen, Mildenhall Fen, Burnt Fen …
And all around, the waters of rivers and dykes,
And a boatyard down below the cathedral,
Constant trains rattling across the freight line rails,
As twilight softness gathers around the streets,
And swifts soar high above the Maltings,
And high above the roof of Oliver Cromwell’s house,
Just as their seventeenth century ancestors did,
When Cromwell strode forth with his righteous bible,
Imagining a New Model Army
That would vanquish Charles Stuart’s Royalists,
While swifts screeched and eavesdropped high above,
And a parliament of rooks observed and noted.
Stroud and Abolition Aftermath
Stroud and Abolition after 1834
(Derived from a reading of Slave Empire
How Slavery Built Modern Britain
Padraic X. Scanlon)
I’m sure you know the arch near Archway School in Stroud:
ERECTED TO COMMEMORATE THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
IN THE BRITISH COLONIES THE FIRST OF AUGUST, A.D. MDCCCXXXIV
Four year later, as the author tells us:
‘On 1 August 1838, more than 800,000 people were finally free.
But their freedom was circumscribed’.
Apprenticeship not Freedom
Traineeship Training Period Studentship Novitiate Initiate
Probationary Period Trial Period Indentureship
Direction Discipline Guidance Lesson Preparation
Teaching Training Coaching Drilling Tutelage
Apprenticeship not Freedom
So perhaps I should say,
On 1 August 1838, more than 800,000 people were finally ‘free’.
British hypocrisy does not stop there, of course;
I’m not talking about cups of tea
Constantly sweetened with sugar from
Slaveholding Brazil, Cuba, and Louisiana,
Although we could;
But something more fundamental
In the growth of British economic power:
The global dominance of ‘King Cotton’,
The nineteenth century dominance
Of Manchester and Lancashire –
That could not have happened, of course, without
Slavery in the cotton growing southern states of the USA.