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 …
The Council would watch, aghast, through the windowpanes,
As innumerable spectres flew through the air,
A murmuration,
Soaring, sweeping and circling the sky,
Till one spirit slipped through a frosty casement
To take the auditor in chief by the hand,
High over the rooftops to Stroud town workhouse,
(‘Are there no treadmills?’
The accountant asked,
‘Are there no prisons?
Who are these beggars in the doorways?’)
Then on to Paganhill’s anti-slavery arch,
Then up to the Chartist meeting on Selsley Common,
Then over the empty homes in the streets, lanes and villages,
Stroudwater families making their way to Bristol Dock,
And the emigration ships bound for New South Wales.
So my memory is a recreated one – I wasn’t there,
But it’s my contribution to Stroud’s Theatre of Memory,
It’s my ghost:
The middle-class Anti-Corn Law League held a meeting there in 1841 –
Working class Chartists believed the League wanted free trade,
And abolition of the protectionist corn laws,
Just because cheaper foreign corn and consequently cheaper bread,
Would give mill-owners an excuse to cut wages –
A Chartist agitator took the stage and disturbed the formality of the proceedings,
“shabbily dressed, (he) forced himself upon the platform
And with the cheers of the crowd made himself joint-chairman”.
The Quaker, Mr Fewster, then took the floor
After Anti-Corn Law League speakers were shouted down:
“ Perhaps they thought the clothiers were selfish people—(“yes they are”) —perhaps they thought farmers were selfish
And that the upper classes were selfish (“yes, yes”) …
A local employer, Mr. Hooper then spoke:
Opposition to mechanisation in the textile industry was delusional,
He affirmed …
The Chartist, Charles Harris replied
That when the People’s Charter became law,
Mechanisation would be for the benefit of all –
Any worker who supported the Anti-Corn Law League
Was a “willing slave” or a “hired fool” –
The League “wanted cheap bread only because they wanted cheap labour…”
Btw, 3.7 thousand people signed up for the 1842 Chartist petition in Stroud
Out of a population of some 10,000 …
And as Lindsey German and John Rees point out in A People’s History of London,
Nationally, 3.3 million people signed up for the 1842 Petition:
“Over half the adult population of Britain.”
These are my ghosts and my contribution to
Stroud Subscription Rooms’
Theatre of Memories –
What are yours?