Newport and Stroud Conjoined
So here I am in The Prince Albert,
After musing in late afternoon light
In my front room in Coronation Road,
Up the road from the Queen Victoria,
And the Lord John in Russell Street,
Reading a letter to the Home Secretary, Lord John Russell,
from Henry Burgh:
“Rodborough, March 29th, 1839, 6p.m. My Lord I acknowledge receipt of Your Lordship’s Directions this morning. I have taken measures to have them put into Execution. Some of the Chartists came to Stroud yesterday Evening, and today about quarter past two about 500 marched up Rodborough Hill by my house with 9 Flags and a strange Band of Musick…I have stopped the Beer Shops and Publick Houses…There are several policemen placed…”
Newport’s John Frost was selected as the prospective Chartist candidate for the next election in Stroud at this meeting,
Selected to oppose Stroud’s MP, Lord John Russell, the Home Secretary –
And so, my wandering through time and space
In South Wales –
The pubs, the inns and my imagination,
Had begun in my own front room:
Before I decided to walk up to the Albert,
To look for John Frost’s ghost climbing up Rodborough Hill,
3,000 gathered up there on the common,
Where I so often picture them:
John Frost on the horse drawn cart,
Addressing the crowds,
The People’s Charter within their grasp;
The sun was setting,
My favourite time,
So, I got up out of the chair for a constitutional:
An evening walk to the common,
To gaze at Sugar Loaf,
Seventy miles as the crow flies,
Far beyond the silver Severn,
Thinking of Stroud’s Five Valleys,
And the valleys beyond Newport,
The rush of rivers,
Topography, Industry,
The rush of history …
But the next day took me away from my home,
On holiday to St. David’s,
And here I walked by streams and springs and rivers,
Woodlands, orchards and pastures,
Along the raging sea’s margins,
Across rocks and cliff tops,
By holy wells and cathedral bells,
At autumn twilight time,
With red furnace sunsets,
And burnished cumulus clouds,
Like some fiery iron works in the sky,
With coal black sky-scape splashes
Down there on the far horizon
Of Storm Brian’s maelstrom,
Trying to hear, in the wind,
The footfall of colliers, smiths, foundry-men, furnace-men,
Wheelwrights, carpenters, miners,
Women from the kitchen, laundry, loom and spinning wheel;
Then tracing a finger line on a Newport OS map,
Trying to forage my way through Time,
In search of that dreamscape Silurian Republic.
A week later I scuffed through the fallen leaves,
To catch the train from Stroud to Newport,
White hills west to Wales in the early morning mist,
The first frost of the season:
I arrived in Newport before nine,
Keen to see how the Rising would feature
To the casual passer-by, in the streets,
Going about the business of the day:
I followed my Chartist Heritage Trail map,
Crossed a couple of main roads at pelicans,
Nipped through a car park and was in the centre
In a couple of minutes,
And was straight into the centre of
‘The invention of tradition’:
The Queen’s Hotel, with an imperial Victoria,
Not the young queen of the Rising;
A statue of Sir Charles Morgan of Tredegar Baronet,
A memorial ‘erected AD 1850’,
‘The man whose “benevolence they admired
and whose loss they deplore”’;
Blue plaques from the Newport Civic Trust,
Lauding architecture and design,
But the former Six Bells lies dilapidated and unrecorded,
The only cottages standing on Stow Hill
That witnessed that unique and remarkable march,
Stand mutely and unremarked,
While passers-by in the street of whom I asked directions,
(All generations and backgrounds)
Were mostly unaware of the Six Bells or the workhouse
(‘Oh! I suppose it’s where the hospital is. You’re right!’),
But the memorial at St. Woolos,
Is, of course, deeply moving and arresting,
And, like the sculptures outside the Westgate Hotel
(‘UNION’ ‘PRUDENCE’ ‘ENERGY’),
Is a late twentieth century memorial to the Rising,
Where art and the past and the here and now
Intertwine in serendipitous ways:
The Chartist mural on the hotel front door,
Colourfully recreating the scene of November 1839,
Is ripped by a real security padlock,
Which juts out through the picture,
Keeping the covered boarded up doors beneath,
Safely locked shut against any contemporary George Shells
Seeking ingress by the Vaping Poundland empty shops,
In some sort of indeliberate trompe l’oeil;
Chartist drapes and tapestries fluttered in the wind,
On the side of the Baltica Lounge,
Opposite Argos:
‘GET WHAT YOU WANT TODAY’, ‘WE’RE NEVER FAR AWAY’
‘WE’VE MOVED’
While a solitary dog, tied up in the porch of the hotel,
Provided a mis en scene mirror
To the dog in the mural fleeing the gunfire,
The bloodshed echoed by the ketchup
On the wrappings strewn on the pavement;
Shoppers scurried past, seeking their bargains,
On past the pawnbrokers and BET FRED,
Past the maps of the shops at John Frost Square:
No memory here, nor near his birthplace or draper’s shop,
But back near the Westgate Hotel,
On the hotel side of H. Samuel’s clock,
Time stood still – the clock face lacked its hands –
But pointed the way to beyond the veil:
‘It was said of one man that he lay dying under the portico of the mayor’s house for up to one and a half hours, pleading for help and receiving none. Until the authorities in the Westgate decreed it otherwise, time stood still.’
(David J. V. Jones),
So, I sat down by the banks and the mobile phone shops,
Reading David Jones’ book on the Newport Rising,
Seeing the occasional grandparent stop to point at the mural,
Stop to explain the sculptures to another generation,
On the first day of the half term,
Walked back up past the Pen and Wig,
To study the memorial to the Monmouthshire Regiment,
Heroes of Ypres,
Wondering how many of those men did not have the vote …
And then met Pat, who showed me the milestone in the street:
To Downing Street 145 miles,
And talked of the plans to develop Stow Hill,
With Chartist and Citizenship memorials;
We walked and talked,
Had a cup of tea,
And I returned home on the train,
To scribble up my notes,
And develop my pub pilgrimage ideas
About an Ale Trail Constitutional,
A recreation of a Rising march,
That could have changed the constitution.
Thursday December 17th saw me back on the GWR,
Rain-streaked carriage windows and leafless trees,
Bedraggled sheep, pasture and hedgerows,
Sodden brown earth ploughed arable fields,
Commuters checking weather reports about Storm Caroline –
But the sun was out when we got to Newport,
Sheets and towels billowing on the line
In the back gardens of the terraced streets;
I caught the X24 to Pontypool,
Drivers bending the rules and not charging me:
‘It’s an English pass. We’re supposed to charge.
But no worries mate. On you get.’
Young men behind me discussing drugs, prison,
Rehabilitation and Universal Credit,
And avidly reading books too:
‘There’s worse hobbies innit?’
I made my way to the excellent museum
(‘We have papers in our archive library showing that the Kings Head was in Crane Street; unfortunately it was not possible to pin-point the exact location. Trade directories merely indicate Crane Street, with no indentifying number. The Kings Head disappears completely from the Trade Directories in the 1870w’)
Just down from the UKIP offices –
‘I didn’t know we had a museum in Pontypool.’
And if those young men didn’t know of the museum,
Then how difficult it is to create for them
A parallel Chartist universe
Of rain-swept men marching through the night,
Through what is now a present tense landscape
Of roundabouts, dual carriageways,
Traffic jams, queues and traffic lights –
This is not a landscape for a pedestrian,
Let alone an ambulant dreamer:
Cars run past the signs tied to the lampposts:
‘NEED WORK? £450!’
This question of how to recreate and present
Our Chartist heritage so as to engage,
Inform, educate and entertain,
Preoccupied me when I returned to Newport,
Walking past the betting shop offering
Forty pounds’ worth of free bets,
Walking past the beggars in the shop doorways,
Walking past the sites of the Chartist ghost pubs,
For Commercial Street is for Christmas presents today,
And the Ghost of Christmas Present,
Not the Ghost of Chartism Past:
The traffic warden issuing tickets
Just near where George Shell fell …
‘”Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.” “Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge. “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again. “And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge.’