IN THE WAKE OF THE FLOWER OF GLOSTER
A Reconstruction of Temple Thurston’s Historic Canal Journey of 1911 John Kemplay
‘It was just after the end of the American war, sir. Not so many red coats were needed, and so I turned my hand to working on the new navigation.
What with springs appearing and disappearing two a penny on our steep inclines, we thought we’d have work on the canal, for ever and a day: “They’ll never keep the water in”, and “How they goin to climb the hill?” was the general talk in the Weavers’ Arms.
But we reached the heights of Daneway by 1786, I think it was; building a basin and coal-yard too, and a road as well – not as fast as a new coach turnpike, but good enough for a wagon to take the coals to Sapperton.
It was hard work, but pay was on time, victuals and beer good, and a roof over your tired head.
But all that changed with the tunnel: over two miles long, and the height of three men, I reckon; and twenty-two shafts of mortal, vertiginous descent.
We said when Jones got the contract, we’d be in trouble; we knew he was a bad un, but the Company ignored us, of course. Some of us had known him a long time; he’d been a mate as a stonemason and miner, but a mate in name only: a mate who never paid his way.
So when we hit hard rock and the Company said, “Build higher and wider”, he refused.
And we didn’t get paid for weeks.
Instead we risked our lives and bodies – and, far worse, dear mates lost theirs and we lost them – and sweated buckets down there in Hades, or shivered in the dripping damp, catching the ague.
We couldn’t pay the ferryman, as it were, sir, so we had to seek parish relief instead, for our wives and families. Harvests were bad, wheat prices were high and a quarter loaf drained the pocket.
Every brick down there could tell a tale of hardship, anguish and iniquity, if you whistled the right way. Four years of that, sir. We finished the job in the end, though: the year before the Revolution.
And it was in the summer of that year of 1788, when I was walking back towards Coates, when I had the shock of my republican life. I saw at a distance, a sumptuously dressed gentleman, admiring the tunnel’s portal and discoursing with the beech trees: “My colonies, Mr. Tree! How I yearn for the return of my thirteen American colonies! Thirteen is an unfortunate number, is it not, Mr. Tree?”
I had few coins in my pocket, but I knew that this man’s likeness lay upon them. I stayed hidden to watch what might next ensue in this strange, sylvan scene.
But His Majesty was disturbed by the sounds of footsteps on broken branches and twigs. Not mine, but a bricklayer’s.
The king took a coin from his coat, flipped it into the air, and then pressed a golden sovereign – I know it was thus, I saw the flash of light in the sun – into the hand of the itinerant.
He studied the coin. He studied his benefactor. He then fell open mouthed to the ground. Speechless.
The king said something like, “Well done, my good fellow: a most splendid tunnel, but keep this day secret, if you know what’s good for you.”
I kept it a secret too, until now. Reading Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man has made me more confident my republican notions. My wife says it’s high time we had The Rights of Women too. Well, she would.
Any road, back to the navigation, that’s what you want me to talk about isn’t it, sir? The tunnel received its watery tribute in the Revolution-year, but all was not well inside the depths. The fuller’s earth; the limestone; some of the brick work; the clay lining; the springs; the fault line … suffice it to say that the leakages we had predicted all those years ago back in the Weavers’ began to happen. The tunnel had to close for repair: back into the toil of the ‘Stygian darkness’ for us.
But when proper job done, that was me done on the canals; ‘lock, stock and barrel’, you might say, sir.
I might be a republican, but you have to feed and clothe your family, don’t you, sir? It was back to weaving for me. And back to Wallbridge and Stroud. War against the French again. Red coats and Stroud Scarlet again for me – no more inland navigations: and so that concludes my adventures of my life building the canal, sir.
This is the true and faithful account of Samuel Benjamin Butler, husband of Charlotte Alice Butler, April 1st, 1794.’