‘It was all carousing, huzzas and celebration, when the railway came to Stroud. No more unemployment! No more Miles Reports! No more emigration! No more poverty and riots and strikes and wage cuts and short time working! No more unemployment! No more Chartism!
Cheap coal for Stroudwater! We will be masters of the cloth trade once more! Fare thee well, Manchester! Adieu, Bradford!
Well, that’s not how it looks to me down here at Wallbridge, on the Navigation. All that same poppycock was said a generation ago when the canal came to the town. And what’s happened, since? Manchester and its cotton mills; Bradford and its woollen mills? We’ll never overtake them.
Competition and steam are the problem, not the answer. That’s what’s making it hard to put bread on the table.
So, no doubt, the same will happen again in another generation. Something undreamt of will no doubt replace the iron horse and the permanent way. Steam powered automotives on new turnpike roads? Powered balloons?
For as Mr. Shelley said:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains, Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
And all I know is that my job and life as a barge hand on this Navigation is on short time. I mean life and existence. Not short time working.
As our own bard of the working woman and man put it:
‘To progress we must all submit,
A sorry plight, I do admit.’
But, now we have the Chartists and the Six Points and the Land Scheme – do you remember Mr. Harris interrupting the Anti Corn Law League meeting in Stroud a couple of years ago, or so: If “any new machinery was introduced which took away the labour of any man, that man should have a percentage allowed to him out of the income of that machinery sufficient to maintain him.”
When the People’s Charter becomes law then mechanisation will be for the benefit of all rather than the few. I hope to see that day.’
Post-script:
In 1850, the author of this piece, Charles Butler, became a grandfather. The daughter was named Emily. Some sixty years later, Temple Thurston wrote in The Flower of Gloster:
‘The whole way upwards from Stroud is deserted now. We met only one barge in the whole journey. An old lady with a capacious barge bonnet was standing humming quietly to herself at the tiller.’
That old woman was Emily.