A MISCELLANY OF HISTORY
A TEXTUAL WEAVING OF A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
A TEXTUAL SAMPLER
Chapter Ten
Riots remembered:
Hello Stuart
Good to see you on Wednesday. I promised to send you something about the wonderfully named ‘ Mid-Gloucestershire Historical Pageant of Progress’ acted out at Fromehall Park in the late summer of 1911. My mother (ringed on the attached photo page) was almost nine years old and, as you can see, was pretending to be a corn and machinery rioter! The personnel for episode V111 were drawn from the Nailsworth area. The performance text was entirely in rhyming couplets and lasted two and a half hours – surely the largest event numerically produced in the Stroud area since its cast numbered 1100!
Hope this is of interest.
Best wishes
Howard
Episode VIII. Corn Law Riots, AD 1846
Enter a crowd of unemployed and starving weavers and workpeople complaining of the dearness of bread and the cruelty of the Corn Laws. A band of rioters come up singing. They attack a baker’s cart and seize the bread. They are then setting out for the mills to destroy the new machines but are stopped by a mill-owner, who explains that it is the Corn Laws and not the new machines that cause unemployment. A messenger brings news of the repeal of the Corn Laws. General rejoicing.
Epilogue
The Spirit of Progress returns and thanks the audience for all being ‘friends of progress’. She declares that, in the two thousand years of the pageant from Romans to the present, ‘we’ve grown to be a mighty nation, civilized and free’, with Cotswold making its own contribution to the good of England. She then proposes that the good work should continue, and that crime, disease, want, war, and misery should be banished in favour of virtue, peace, and happiness.
I helped out early doors at the Stroud Show today (July 2026) putting up Stroud Local History Society’s exhibition of Howard’s presentation about the above. We are so lucky to have the Stroud Local History Society and its members and leading lights.