Author: Stuart Butler

Blackbeard the Pirate and Stonehouse?

(Edward Thache aka Blackbeard)

When you next visit Stonehouse on the train,

Take a walk down to beautiful St Cyr’s Church:

Take a seat there by the Stroudwater Canal,

And ponder on these intriguing questions:

Could the Revd Thomas Thache, rector at St Cyr’s,

Possibly be Blackbeard’s grandfather?

And could the Edward Thache, born in Stonehouse

On June 14, 1659,

Baptized two weeks later at St Cyr’s Church,

Possibly be Blackbeard’s father?

Did that Edward Thache (senior)

Move to Bristol, marry an Elizabeth,

 And have two children: Elizabeth

And the Edward who would become known as Blackbeard?

Did the family of that notorious pirate,

The legendary swashbuckler Blackbeard,

Really hail from Stonehouse?

Is St Cyr’s Church down by the canal,

Linked with the fearsome skull and crossbones,

That ploughed the waters of the Atlantic Ocean

And the Caribbean Seas?

The Blackbeard, killed near Ocracoke Island,

North Carolina, November, 1718?

The Blackbeard, pursued by Alexander Spotswood,

The Governor of Virginia?

Spotswood had authorized the expedition

That claimed Blackbeard’s head as a trophy –

So, when you visit St Cyr’s Church,

Nestling so peacefully down by the Ocean

(As that part of the canal is called),

Gaze into the azure skyscape,

And track a windblown cumulus cloud,

For you might just glimpse the head of Blackbeard –

But beware of any inexplicable light

Flashing on the limpid flowing waters:

‘Teach’s Light’, the mariners call it:

Guiding Blackbeard in the ceaseless search for his head,

Desperate that the Devil will know him still.

Think about this strange tale on your train-ride back home.

 

 

 

 

Sir Topham Hatt

(aka The Fat Controller)

And Swindon

 

2025 sees the 80^th anniversary of the first of the Rev Awdry’s stories that have become linked with Thomas the Tank Engine. The first story was entitled The Three Railway Engines: the tale of ‘Edward, Gordon and Henry who lived in the same shed and who were always boasting and quarrelling among themselves until, after a series of adventures, they found it best to be good friends and to help each other.’

 

The early stories feature a fat director. This character who we later learn is Sir Topham becomes The Fat Controller after the real-world nationalisation of the railways in 1948. But what isn’t so well-known is that the fictive Master T. Hatt started his railway career in 1894 at the GWR Works in Swindon as an apprentice. I imagine he was quite slim then. I also imagine that his father probably worked ‘inside’ in the factory and that Topham might well have been born a Swindonian. There’s food for thought as you ruminate upon social mobility.

 

According to the Rev Awdry’s narrative, Topham became close friends with Swindon-born William Stanier, who went on to an illustrious career with both the GWR and the LMS and received a knighthood (There’s food for thought as you read this, thinking about a career on the railways). But the future Fat Controller never forgot his love of all things GWR: ‘All ship-shape and Swindon fashion.’

 

Now as regards my family, I have five generations who have worked in the railway works at Swindon, starting in 1851 with Wiltshire agricultural labourers on my mum’s side who tramped in from the villages. But my great grand-father, Charles Butler, moved to Swindon from Clerkenwell in 1886 as a carpenter in the carriage & wagon works. His son, my grand-father, also became a carpenter in ‘the Works’ and my dad an electrician there.

I have the planes of my carpenter forebears, stamped with their names and the GWR insignia. I also have my gramp’s clocking-in token. These act almost as talismans, opening up the tantalising possibility that my great grand-father knew this fictive young cove, Master Topham Hatt. And, of course, correspondingly, Master Topham Hatt knew my great grand-father.

 

More food for thought as I hear the ghost of the Swindon railway works hooter on the wind…

19^th Century Railway Investment

You can see the deceptive bounty

Derived from West Indies plantations

In classical, elegant Clifton,

And the Regency spa splendour

In the streets of Bath and Cheltenham:

The honey-stone Age of Enlightenment,

Sweet reason, proportion and symmetry –

But not even these straight lines so true

Can utterly obscure the triangles

Of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade –

But it’s easier for British railway lines

To separate themselves from the West Indies:

It seems counter-intuitive to find a link,

A signal, a junction and a connection

To something so far away in space and time.

Because

Railways after the 1825 Stockton and Darlington,

And after the 1830 Liverpool and Manchester,

Seemed to herald a steam powered modernity:

Coal and iron and steel and speed and farewell

To the Regency age of the coach and the ostler,

And farewell to the barge, towpath and canal.

The Age of the Railway Mania, however,

With all those speculative investments,

Needed money from somewhere –

It might not grow on trees … but it did on sugar cane …

And an examination of the records

Of the great and the good who gained so much

From the abolition of slavery in the British Empire,

Reveals hundreds of great investments

Made in railways in the United Kingdom

By those who gained so much from abolition:

There is the signal, junction and connection.

The £20 million paid by the British Government after abolition was a colossal amount: some 40% of the annual income of the Treasury. More than 40,000 enslavers benefitted. Over 800,000 enslaved people received nothing.

Miles and Furlongs and Chains and Links and Springs

Have you ever looked at the distance posts along the railway line from your carriage window or ever studied the measurements painted on a railway bridge? We all know what a mile is – but a chain?  There are, as many of you know, 10 chains to a furlong and 8 furlongs to a mile. A chain comes in at 22 yards (66 feet). There are 80 chains in a mile. A square chain equals 484 sq. yards. 10 square chains equal an acre. A chain, as a unit of measurement, owes its provenance to a 17^th century actual chain with its integral links: 66 feet (22 yards long): a surveyor’s chain used to establish horizontal distance.

So here we are in the 21^st century with our railway journeys defined by a surveyor’s instrument perfected in 1620. Isn’t there something beguiling about that? An almost strangely lateral way of viewing the world through a prism of linear rationality: take a trip on the railway! And here’s a report from 1845 to help us take that trip: the euphony of mathematics and history and toponymy.

 

The parish of Tarlton to Kemble 31 chains, Thames and Severn Canal Viaduct 1 mile 68 chains, Tarlton to Coates 1 mile 78 chains, Frampton Viaduct 5 miles 54 chains, Frampton to Chalford 5 miles 65 chains, Cowcomb Lane 6 miles 39 chains, [Chalford] Slip Viaduct 6 miles 55 chains, Stroud to Cirencester turnpike 7 miles 5 chains, Chalford to Hampton turnpike 7 miles 34 chains, St Mary’s over Thames & Severn Canal 7 miles 61 chains, Chalford to Toadmore turnpike 8 miles 37 chains, Bourne over Thames & Severn Canal 8 miles 48 chains, Brimscombe to Hampton turnpike 8 miles 72 chains, Bowbridge to Rodborough turnpike 10 miles 41 chains, Capel’s Viaduct 10 miles 60 chains

Thames and Severn Canal 10 miles 68 chains, Stroud to Gloucester turnpike 11 miles 15 chains, Watt’s Viaduct 11 miles 21 chains, Stratford Viaduct 11 miles 31 chains, Paganhill parish 12 miles 4 chains, Cainscross Viaduct 12 miles 10 chains, Cainscross to Randwick parish 12 miles 22 chains, Stroud to Gloucester turnpike 14 miles 16 chains

And all the while as you travel this part of Gloucestershire by train or bike or foot or car, you also pass the genius loci of this place: springs.

 

Here are just a few of the names that reveal a strange and haunting history:

Toadsmoor Brook, Blanche’s Bank, Baker’s Pool, Frogmarsh Lane, Snakeshole, Puckshole, Derryhay, Tankard’s Spring, Be-Thankful Fountain, Well Hill Spring, Bubblewell, Troublewell, The Bubbler, the Blackgutter, Sweetwater Spring, Millbottom, St. Tabatha’s Well, Ram Pitch Spring, Double Spout …

 

There is a poetry in the landscape and in the place names of these hills and valleys: just gaze out of the window, and take a trip on the railway.

Do you remember that lazy afternoon?

Back in August 1958?

Well, I bloody well do mate.

We were sitting on the bunker

At the end of platform four,

Just by the giant semaphore signal,

When 5050 ‘The Earl of St Germans’

Came steaming, Brunswick green and brass dome gleaming,

To a shrieking, whistling halt;

And you showed me how to record the numbers,

In a three-penny red memo book

(Weights and measures on the back),

And how to underline name and number

In my half-crown Ian Allan train book,

And you opened the door to magic:

Happy years at the Iron Bridge, the Greenbridge,

And the Bunky Bridge on the Highworth line,

And on Vickers Armstrong outings with our badges,

After you trapped your thumb in the leather strapped door,

And the milepost says it’s seventy-eight miles and a furlong

From Swindon Junction to Paddington;

Or sneaking on to the station

When you couldn’t afford a platform ticket,

Staring at the Five Boys Chocolate,

And the machine that stamped your name for a penny,

Or watching the trains from the Milk-bank,

Or a signal box with its clunking, clanking levers,

Then taking me inside the Railway Works

On a school holiday Wednesday afternoon,

Queuing to walk through that hallowed entrance,

Then along the tunnel into a Wonderworld

Of mechanics, machines, girders, cranes and grease,

And odd bits of steam engines, with the numbers

Chalked on steam-pipe, or funnel, or wheel,

And it counted as a cop –

You told me it wasn’t wagging and so it wasn’t!

And do you remember the men pouring out

From the Works and Pressed Steel at lunch time,

A river of men on bikes in full flood

In a frantic rush for grub and a fag;

And do you remember seeing 70030,

‘William Wordsworth’, strain and slide

In snorting steam on ice cold winter days?

Or seeing sunlight’s shimmer, gleaming

On endless heat-hot railway lines,

Until they at last disappeared

In far off main line vanishing point;

Or waiting for the Cheltenham Flyer,

Studying the semaphore signal

In the sun haze squinting distance;

And you showed me all of this Ian Allan

ABC world of names and numbers,

This alphabet of railway alchemy:

You showed me the right way: the rail-way,

The Permanent Way –

So, you’ll always be sitting beside me

On that wooden fence near Standish Junction,

As Jubilee Class 45609,

‘Gilbert and Ellice Islands’ steams into sight:

Railway Time,

Keith and Stuart Time,

Brother Time.

 

Golden Valley Days

(Keith’s reply)

We walked lanes of hope and expectation

From Stone to Steam Age

And from a Frocester fence we saw as far

As the Gilbert and Ellis islands

Learnt the language of Jubilees and patriots

To count in black fives

Retelling myths of coal hurling battles

But the best days ….

Book and pencil in pocket

Fare clutched in hand for

Stonehouse to Gloucester

Learning from Ian Allan’s ABC

As easy as 1423

To see

Copper crowned Kings and their Castles

Counties of halls manors and granges

Stroud, the Five Valleys and the Globe

 

A painting from about 1785 shows Stroud scarlet cloth stretched out on tenterhooks in Rodborough Fields – these fields lie just beyond platform two. Stroud scarlet cloth links this area’s history with that of the world in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. There’s more to this than meets the eye.

 

The cloth was traded with the Iroquois by the Hudson Bay Company; ‘strouds’ were traded with Native Americans beyond the Mississippi; mills at Chalford and Avening served the East India Company, and, of course, Stroud scarlet clothed the British Army in the periodic great power struggles and constant colonial conflicts of that era. There was a lot of demand for Stroud scarlet.

 

But when times were hard, local weavers often took strike action. Colonel Wolfe (before he became General Wolfe, killed in his redcoat storming the Heights of Quebec in 1759) expressed sympathy for the weavers in 1756, even though he had to quell any disturbance: “The poor half-starved weavers … beg about the country for food … the masters have beat down their wages …” These weavers helped make the redcoats worn by Colonel Wolfe’s troops …

On the other side of the globe, in the West Indies, red coats did another job, for it was said that enslaved persons “generally avoided anyone wearing a red coat, like those worn by grenadiers” and, in consequence, “some Gentlemen put on a coat of that Colour when they Travell …”

 

When slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, a handful of local residents gained ‘compensation’, including Samuel Baker, up at Lypiatt, with his claim for 410 enslaved persons in Jamaica. This helped fund Baker’s Quay as an industrial hub at Gloucester Docks and fund investment in railways around Gloucester, the Forest of Dean and the Midlands.

 

About half a mile from the railway bridge at Paganhill in Stroud, however, you can find the oldest antislavery memorial in the country: the unique Abolition Arch from 1834, just by Archway School.

ERECTED TO COMMEMORATE THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE BRITISH COLONIES THE FIRST OF AUGUST A.D. MDCCCXXX1V

This unique source of pride is only a couple of miles’ walk from Stroud Station and you can walk along the Stroudwater Navigation for much of the way. You can also visit Rodborough Fields to see the site of the Stroud scarlet stretched on tenterhooks and you can see the painting from c. 1785 down at Walbridge, on the canal, just below the station. There’s more to this than meets the eye …

Navvies and Legerdemain: Who Built the Railways?

Two thousand miles of bucket-lift airshafts,

A million men in diseased shanty towns,

Or lost on the tramp in city or county,

No Navvy’s Head or Arms in the country,

A damp clay embankment instead for a bed –

Or cutting or brickworks, a bridge or a wagon,

A platform, a tunnel, a claypit or trench;

Then making the running up Sonning’s deep Cutting:

A forty-foot climb with barrow and earth,

Two miles of running and landslide bone-crushing,

With pick and with shovel, gunpowder and shot;

Tunnelling through the mud and flood water,

Conned by contractor and ganger and truck,

Calumnied by the press and the pulpit –

We travel today on their muscle and sweat,

And trains now today tell of white-collar fame,

But who can remember a navvy’s true name?

Their fustian skill and anonymous strength

Built so many lines on their steam power length,

But it’s hard to discover a navvy’s true name

In railway history ledger’s domain.

But as regards our local line …

 

There is a photograph of what was probably the replacement of the timber Wyatt’s Viaduct (Merrywalks Viaduct) with brick, showing men at work – some forty-five years after the Railway Mania.

You can see over 50 men standing or squatting somewhat precariously upon and within the struts and scaffolding. Proud of their labour, skill and fortitude.

But no names.

 

And as regards Sapperton Tunnel …

 

Let us remember a representative fragment: George Freeman and Henry Stokes crushed to death, Edward Harrap who died after three tons of matter fell on him, and George Dratsy who lost an eye in an explosion. And William Rice who fell 160 feet yet rose virtually unscathed, physically. But  what did that do to his mind …?

Who Built the Railway?

Everyone knows the name Isambard Kingdom Brunel;

And everyone knows that sepia photograph:

The top hat, the waistcoat, the cigar,

And the giant chain-link in the background –

The busy preoccupied self-assured pride

Of the foremost Victorian engineer:

The man of the moment:

Proud of his steam-ship leviathans,

Equally proud of his Great Western Railway –

The dignified certainty of genius –

Knowing that his 120 miles of long line

Would run all the way from Paddington,

And London time to Bristol Temple Meads

With a mean gradient of just 1 in 1,380,

Just as his drawing board intended.

But where are the names of those who built it?

Where are the names of the women

Who cooked and cared in the camps along the way?

Where are their Fox Talbot portraits?

Where the memorials to those

Whose picks and shovels and slide rule discipline

And one hundred deaths,

Carried the line through Box Tunnel?

Where the tribute to their collective anonymity?

(Box Tunnel is where Wilbert Awdry, as a boy, imagined conversations between engines as they laboured through the night time darkness.)

“There was no doubt in my mind that steam engines all had definite personalities … little imagination was needed to hear in the puffings and pantings of the two engines the conversation they were having …”

 

 

If you stand on Stroud station and gaze up to the clutch of red brick buildings on the hillside to the right of the tall red brick mill, you are looking at the area where the Rev Wilbert Awdry of Thomas the Tank fame lived and wrote for the last thirty years or so of his life. His house was named Sodor.

 

He had a great view of the Brunel Goods Shed from his garden and became Patron of the Goods Shed Appeal after British Rail removed the roof in 1984: decay and demolition loomed for the 1845 Cotswold stone gem …

 

This beautiful and unique Brunel building (‘Tudor Gothic revival style’) stands some 120-150 yards from the station on the up-line. The lettering on the side from the golden age of railway posters and advertising reads

GWR STROUD STATION EXPRESS GOODS

TRAIN SERVICES DAY TRANSITS

BETWEEN IMPORTANT TOWNS

 

Thanks to the efforts of the Stroud Preservation Trust and the Goods Shed Appeal, the Goods Shed is now used by Stroud Valley Arts as a performance, exhibition, film and cultural space: indeed, this year, the 180^th anniversary of the building, will see the official transfer of the building to Stroud Valley Arts.

 

Try and look at that lettering the next time you pass it on the train and reflect upon its history: its uniqueness and yet its symbolism: from an economy based upon steam and manufacturing to one based upon services: Industry to Art:

 

 

An Easter shower of cumulus rain:

But sunlight gleamed through the lazy raindrops

On the carriage windows of my Stroud-bound train –

When Isaac Newton’s spectral alchemy

Flashed raindrops silver quick as mercury

Across my reflection on the window pane.

A rainbow arced over Brunel’s Gothic Goods Shed:

Signalling a future – risen from the dead.

Industry and Art

Art and Industry

(A cycle of change and continuity)