Author: Stuart Butler

The Golden Valley

I first visited Stroud on the train in the early 1960s, pulled by a 1400 class locomotive, 1463, I think. I would study my Ian Allan trainspotter’s book or read my history books until we reached Chalford, when I would stare, mesmerized by the beauty of it all. I didn’t know, of course, that I would write the following lines, sixty years later.

‘Chalford has such a labyrinth of weavers’ walks and footpaths –

And on a winter’s day, with plumes of smoke rising from the valley,

Mistletoe in the trees, light folded in envelopes of cloud,

It’s hard to imagine that this picturesque Cotswold village

Was once hand in glove with the East India Company,

As at Sevill’s Upper Mill – now a select residential development,

 With the stream, now private and sequestered,

Running between houses and a car park.

The East India Company was involved in the slave trade

In Madagascar, St Helena, Bengkulu and Angola,

Exchanging guns, gunpowder, cutlasses, cloth, and piece goods;

Bristol merchants bought textiles from the Company

To exchange for slaves in West Africa;

But the Company gained its questionable reputation,

Primarily from its depredations in India.,

Exploiting and contributing to the decline of the Mughal Empire,

And selling Indian grown opium,

To be smuggled to China, to flout the Imperial ban,

The profits paying for tea for domestic consumption …’

 

But let’s not forget the beauty of the Golden Valley: ‘…the high land, studded with the grey Gloucestershire houses, begins to rise at either side of the canal, it is no longer the English scenery you might expect, but like mountain villages in Switzerland, thousands of feet above the level of the sea. I have seen villages in the Apennines which reminded me of Chalford and St. Mary’s crossing. The mills and the factories with blue slate roofs make a colour against the golden distance of the Golden Valley …’ (Temple Thurston, 1912)

So, when you pass next on the railway, steal a glance at the beauty of the landscape, have a nice cup of tea –

‘These cottages clambering up the Cotswold hillsides,

This Golden Valley harmony of water, wood and stone

Was derived, in some distant degree,

From war, enslavement, racism, and opium.’

Citizen John Thelwall, William Cobbett, and Rural Rides on the Train

 

In the summer of 1797, when the country feared a French invasion and the Fleet mutinied at the Nore and Spithead, ‘the most dangerous man in England’, ‘that Jacobin fox’, the republican, charismatic orator, John Thelwall, stayed in the Stroud area. This was an orator and poet who had been tried for treason, with a possible sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering …

 

He made his way here after staying with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Nether Stowey in Somerset. Three local clothiers offered him hospitality in Nailsworth, Bowbridge and Chalford. You can retrace his sojourn here with a walk along the old railway line from Stroud to Nailsworth, and with a walk along the canal by the side of the GWR line from Stroud, through Bowbridge, to Chalford. (Or there is a Cotswold Green morning bus to Cirencester; you can alight at Chalford and walk back.) You can find the toponym Chalford Bottom by the lineside on the OS map – coincidentally, Citizen John Thelwall wrote a beautiful poem in 1797 entitled On Leaving the Bottoms of Gloucestershire. Here are a few selected lines:

‘… pleasant haunts! brakes, bourns,

• And populous hill, and dale, and pendant woods;
• And you, meandering streams, and you, ye cots
• And hamlets, that, with many a whiten’d front,
• Sprinkle the woody steep; or lowlier stoop,
• Thronging, gregarious, round the rustic spire …
• Nor, as yet,
• Towers from each peaceful dell the unwieldy pride
• Of Factory over-grown; where Opulence
• Dispeopling the neat cottage, crowds his walls
• …to the yoke
• Of unremitting Drudgery …
• Therefore I love Chalford, and ye vales
• Of Stroud, irriguous …’
• A generation later, William Cobbett wrote thus in Rural Rides about Stroudwater: “These villages lie on the sides of a narrow and deep valley, with a narrow stream of water running down the middle of it, and this stream turns the wheels of a great many mills and sets of machinery for the making of woollen-cloth …There are steam-engines as well as water-powers …but … Even the buildings of the factories are not ugly … ‘

Come and see for yourself with some Rural Rides on the train!

Brimscombe and Heritage

 

One night in the trenches, Ivor Gurney, the Great War poet, suddenly remembered Brimscombe: ‘One lucky hour in the middle of my tiredness I came under the pines of the sheer steep And saw the stars like steady candles gleam Above and through; Brimscombe wrapped (past life) in sleep!’ This was how Gurney recollected, in his mind’s eye, Brimscombe, with its spring-line cottages, and its mills and terraces spread along the valley floor, alongside the canal and railway and London-road …

 

And did he recall, I wonder, the station at Brimscombe, gleaming in the darkness, with its stone and slate engine shed (a 20,000-gallon water tank at the front and offices at the back) for the two banking engines that helped trains up the steep incline to the tunnel at Sapperton?

 

Twenty or so years later, the GWR introduced a new heritage: the famous Cheltenham Flyer powered by the new Castle class steam engines, breaking records as it hurtled west from Paddington. Passengers, perhaps, catching a glance of The Meadow (the home of Brimscombe F.C.), with its bank all covered in celandine, dock, and cowslips and that memory of the handloom weaver and spinner: teazels. An unconscious memory of the trenches, too, with dug-outs signposted Home and Away.

 

The heritage is different today. Smokeless mill chimneys and forgotten mill ponds; bus shelters with murals of a lost world; light engineering a ribbon along the canal-side, and the former King & Castle (not that the powerful King class steamed along this valley) now the Pavilion. But there, about a hundred miles from Paddington: the social enterprises and shared economy at the Long Table, Brimscombe Mill: ‘share what you can, take what you need.’ And there, about a hundred miles from Paddington, by the canal and by the railway line, the Stroud Brewery with its organic beer and sustainability awards and an unconscious echo of the Brimscombe engine shed: ‘we harvest rainwater off our roof to flush our toilets’.

 

And there, at the Meadow, the home of Brimscombe & Thrupp AFC, Peter Baxendale, rightly declaring: ‘There’s no finer sight in football than a winger flying down the touchline as trains from Paddington make their way down the valley to Cheltenham.’

 

It’s a mercurial thing, Heritage.

Stroud Time

It’s a funny thing, Time, isn’t it, when you stop to think about it. And I’m not talking Einstein. Just that we measure it in so many different ways: watch, clock, phone, analogue, digital, sun, moon, religion, the seasons, calendar, years, decades, eras, aeons … and yet it all seems so straightforward.

 

But do you remember 1752 when we switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and lost 11 days? The day after September 3 was September 14: ‘Give us back our eleven days’ became the cry with the fear of loss of wages and reported riots in Bristol. Imagine losing 11 days …

 

And in that age before industrialisation and the capitalist adage that ‘Time is Money’, there was a tradition of ‘St Monday’, when handloom weavers, for example, would take the day off if they were on top of their work. But the development of the factory system with attendant clock and hooter and clocking-in and clocking-out literally put paid to that. But it wasn’t until the railways developed that time became nationally uniform.

 

The definition of time according to the sun meant that noon at Stroud, for example, was nine minutes later than noon at Greenwich (Stroud being ninety miles west of the meridian). But time carried on much as it had done before for the first twenty years or so of railways in this country, despite the confusion this could cause with the railways growing so rapidly (from 25 miles of line in 1825 to over 2,000 in 1844; that doubled in four years and nearly trebled by 1851). For example, just as gauges varied at Gloucester, so did time: three clocks gave different times: the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway operated on Birmingham time; the Bristol & Gloucester Railway went for Bristol time, whilst the GWR ran on London time. What price, Bradshaw?

 

The GWR had adopted London time throughout its railway in November 1840 and five years later came Greenwich Mean Time: Railway Time. But there was some idiosyncratic stubbornness hither and thither – some town clocks in the west country had two different minute hands so as to indicate both local and London time. Stroud was particularly obdurate, ‘being among the last 2% of towns to alter its public clocks’.

 

But help was at hand: a clock set up in 1858 at the top of Gloucester Street, with GMT (You can see it at the Museum in the Park in Stroud). A clock, showing GMT, had been in town since 1845, but it was not a truth universally acknowledged: insouciant canal horses, bargees and officials weren’t alone …

Life in a Railway Factory: Alfred Williams, the Hammerman Poet

Born close to Brunel’s broad gauge at South Marston,

While Richard Jefferies measured the red brick growth

Of New Swindon’s terraced street advance,

You studied express trains from farm and field,

Hammering on their way to Paddington,

Dreaming of forge and furnace and steam hammer:

And when you first walked through the tunnel,

Fourteen years of age, a rivet hotter,

A frame builder’s boy, a furnace boy,

A self-taught student of poetry, folklore and the classics,

You walked without any condescension,

Through a factory of ten thousand men:

Stampers, painters, watchmen, carpenters,

Carriage finishers and upholsterers,

Washers down, cushion beaters, ash wheelers,

Wagon builders, storemen, smiths, turners,

Boilermen, platers, riveters, labourers,

Fitters, firemen, drivers and cleaners,

Pattern makers, moulders, bricklayers, clerks.

You ate your snap in solitude, though,

Composing a poem within the piston’s din,

Wary of the foreman’s workshop power,

Two omniscient but differing narrators:

You saw the molten burns, the short-time working,

The union men sidelined by the piles of ingots,

The speed-up of machines in stifling smoke and steam,

The piece rates cut in the coal and the dust …

You walked out past the old iron rails and the ballast,

Past carriage and wagon, axle, wheel and tyre,

Past mountains of coal, pig, bar and cast iron,

Past the rolling mill, the block, the dies, the tar,

The gleaming steel, the shearings, clippings,

Wheelbarrows, ash pits, pinchings, drillings,

The clinker, the canal, and the clocking out;

You then walked four miles home to South Marston:

See to the garden; sit with Mary at twilight;

Compose your verse; translate the classics;

Study the stars, and the household accounts;

And the next day, before the factory hooter’s call,

You would walk four miles into ‘The Works’,

The Hammerman Poet composing verse and clocking in again.

From Stroud to Swindon for a Football Match

(Brunel All the Way)

Start your journey at the Platform One Café,

Coffee and croissants and Katie and Rick,

3 tables, 6 chairs, a trunk, 15 railway puzzles

(Always one on the go for travellers with a brief encounter),

Sundry model engines and railway memorabilia,

A library, greetings cards, two clocks,

A mannequin budgerigar in a toy cage,

(A real one would put all Heaven in a rage),

A mirror to enhance atmosphere,

A muffled Radio 4, a rustle of newspapers,

A quiet scratch of pen on crossword.

Alight at Swindon to walk along the Heritage Trail,

Find the Mechanics Institute in the Railway Village,

And close by is what was once a draper’s shop in 1847,

Then a beer-house, then the London Stout House

(William and Arabella Thomas took it over in 1863;

Their son Thomas then ran it until 1946,

When it officially became by name, the Glue Pot).

 

George Orwell wrote a famous essay about the perfect pub: The Moon Under Water: “If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere’.” He goes on to say that this perfect pub doesn’t exist, of course, but if “anyone knows” of such licensed premises, “I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.”

 

This essay appeared in the Evening Standard in 1946. In 2025, The Telegraph voted the Glue Pot the best pub in Wiltshire: “It’s an easy-going street-corner pub, handsome in an understated way, and as good for cider as it is for beer. The world has changed, but sometimes a really good pub doesn’t … “

I drop in on an LS Lowry match-day:

 A few red and white Swindon scarves wrapped around shoulders,

But also, the different accents of the opposition fans,

While I write a letter to George Orwell,

Letting him know that I have found the Moon Under Water.

The Glue Pot

I always like visiting the Glue Pot,

I like its position in the Railway Village:

A sentinel of Swindon’s heritage,

With open doors to the pavement

To welcome local and visitor alike.

I like visiting the Glue Pot in springtime:

Lengthening light around the Mechanics

Streams through the pub’s old draper’s windows,

With new hope for the Institute’s rebirth.

I like a summer pint in the Glue Pot,

With a choice of ten different ciders:

It’s like an infusion of Thomas Hardy,

With every novel you’ve ever read

Returning like a Native.

I like autumn drinking in the Glue Pot,

When mists and mellow fruitfulness

Greet a home win for the Railwaymen,

While others play chess or cribbage in the twilight.

I like a winter porter in the Glue Pot,
Imagining those glue pots simmering on the stove,

Until the factory hooter summons my family

Back to the carriage and wagon shop,

When this pub was called The London Stout House.

I like the seating in the Glue Pot,

The way the bar room echoes a railway carriage,

With the feeling of going on a journey

Through time and space on the Great Western Railway.

I like the book club and the library in the Glue Pot,

And I like the clay pipes and the saw mounted on the wall,

And the railway memorabilia and the pictures,

And I like the sale of postcards in the pub:

‘Money in the Guide Dog on the Bar, please’.
I like the sign above the bar:

‘An Oasis of Calm and Civility’.

It’s like the Orwell pub of his dreams,

The elusive Moon Under Water,

And it will always be the perfect pub for me,

Past, present and future all intertwined,

‘An Oasis of Calm and Civility’:

Welcome to the Glue Pot.

Sapperton in the 1920s

 

My grand-dad served throughout the Great War from 1914 to 1918. He was made redundant in 1919, in London, so he and his family moved back towards my grandmother’s home of Stroud. They lived in a Nissen hut by Minchinhampton Aerodrome (today’s Aston Down). Dad used to wander down to watch the trains. His sister, my Auntie Kath, had a different lens on the landscape.

For My Brother

When we were young

And full of fun and all our days were carefree,

Do you remember that September

We climbed the old pear tree.

The finest crop grows at the top,

The bramble jam we ate,

Our mother made and carefully laid,

On shelves with name and date.

We took a stick and went to pick

The biggest blackest berries,

Pulling down to the ground,

Clusters hung like cherries.

Remember the gate where we used to wait

For the early morning light,

To show in the field the wonderful yield

Of mushrooms, gleaming white.

The nuts we found so full and round

And filberts, too, so rare,

That lovely autumn on Sapperton Common,

What joy we used to share.

Wild harvest brings a host of things,

Mushrooms, nuts and fruit,

But best of all, with every Fall,

Comes memory, absolute.

Dear Famous Five,

If you want a great day out then you ought to come to the STEAM Museum in Swindon. Because this is what I saw when here today on holiday:

 

A gift shop, a fire engine, giant locomotive wheels, name plates and numbers, signals, holiday haunts posters, maps, lamps, shovels, buckets, navvies, ropes, notice boards, texts and pictures and photos and videos, the recreation of the railway works in picture and print and mannequin, the work of office clerks,

 

clocks, varnished tables, documents, filing cabinets, type writers, the drawing office, the factory stores, the factory hooter, a fire appliance, the Roll of Honour, the foundry, the medical fund, bicycles, trolleys, barrows, ingots, iron machines, pattern makers, treadles, belts, ladders, boxes, the carriage shop,

 

blacksmiths, cabinet makers, polishers, upholsterers, painters, signwriters, the sewing shop, tool boxes, the machine shop, lathes, drills, saws, gears, accidents, the boiler shop, war, the role of women, the noise, DANGER MEN WORKING OVERHEAD, The Cheltenham Flyer, 120 tons, walking beneath 4073 Caerphilly Castle, Box Tunnel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, why Swindon was chosen by Brunel, geology, toll boards, maps, seals, tokens, broad gauge and ordinary gauge, wagons, locomotives, carriages, platforms, a signal box, a brake van, boxes and suitcases, a milk churn, a tank engine, a lorry, a horse drawn van, shunting, trucks, a goods yard, carters, a tractor, a trailer, a station,

 

The Bristolian, 6000 King George V, 82c, GWR platform seats, inter-war refreshments, City of Truro 3717, machines for platform tickets, Queen Victoria’s carriage, a buffet car, 2818 freight locomotive, the Cornish Riviera, GWR The Holiday Line, Alfred Williams ‘The Hammerman Poet’, an air raid shelter, Trip Week, GWR ships and steamers, slot machines, the seaside pier, ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’, GWR buses, GWR camping carriages …

 

Dear Famous Five,

I see your advertisements taking you here, there and everywhere on today’s GWR – but why not make your next trip to Swindon to the STEAM Museum? You’d absolutely love it. Then take a walk through the railway village and have a picnic in the old railway park with a view of the water tower and, of course, lashings of ginger beer!

 

Wish you were here,

‘Ann Thusiast’

 

History at Capel’s Viaduct

It’s a great walk down to Capel’s Viaduct,
Past old ridge and furrow and tenterhook hedgerows,
Teazles here and there to raise your nap,
Imagining the patchwork quilt of fields of two centuries ago,

Field-names such as Bacon Slad, Calves Close, Sheep Furlong,

Little Chapel Hill, Freeze Land, Side Long Piece, Fir Tree Ground, Wheatlands,

Cobbs Acre, Spout Leaze, Home Ground, Old Well Close, Dye House Mead, Sweetmead;

Each name a toponym with a history and euphony.

The only names we now know and use are ‘Rodborough Fields’.

You pass an old oak sentinel to reach the River Frome

When walking down from Rodborough

(Where the Rev Awdry of railway story fame used to live),
Railway viaduct and river-bridge close at hand,
And there is the dell that once was Capel’s Mill:
Trees clambering down the steep riverbank to shroud the waters,
The remains of a mill sluice quickening the river’s pulse,
Rusting iron work still visible,
The steady drip down from the railway arches,
Sometimes, wild swimming in season,
Sometimes, picnics on high days and holidays,
Sometimes the turquoise flash of a kingfisher,
The splash of an otter or the curve of a dipper;
It’s hard to imagine that spinning jennies once clanked away,
With spinners clocking on and clocking off,
Clerks frowning at the figures in the ledgers,
As the world kept revolving and turning;
But a Spinning Jenny could only stand still at Capel’s Mill,
And watch the steam powered spinning world go by,
As the wooden Capel’s Viaduct was erected by the GWR,

To be succeeded by the brick structure you now see,

Towards the end of the 19^th century.

Some years later, a picture postcard scene

Portrays an elegant Edwardian lady

Clutching the rustic fencing on the river’s bridge,

Just by the old mill site and new-brick viaduct,

Staring at the waters with a detached composure,

As land is sold for the building of the houses where I now live:

“Near the GWR and Midland Railways”,
And the well-known “health resort” of Rodborough Common.

Think of that as you make your way past river and canal,

With Stroud town on your left, Rodborough Common on your right,

And history all around your carriage window,

Waving at you on your way to London.