Author: Stuart Butler

Stroud Streets Walk Sunday January 21st

Some of us at Radical Stroud are giving whole hearted support to the Blue Lantern Homeless Project (led by Steve Gower of the Black Dog documentary film about homelessness). The project aims to develop sustainable temporary living accommodation for the homeless. If you fancy a walk around Stroud’s streets to discuss the history of homelessness, council and social housing; the problems of the present day and possible solutions … then we meet at the canal bridge at Wallbridge at 10.30 on Sunday January 21st. The walk will be on the level towards Paganhill along the canal and then return to town with an ascent to the old workhouse at Stone Manor. Free – but please feel free to make contributions on the day to the project or via a link that will be provided.

Fingers crossed that this does the job: just copy and paste:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-blue-lantern-homeless-pilot-project?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer

 

 

Randwick Talk Thursday January 25th

.A presentation looking at the radical history of Stroud and the local villages in the 18th and early 19th centuries with a brief look at the links between local and global history. There will also be a focus on the ‘Was Great Britain close to revolution?’ question, looking at the period from the French Revolution to the 1832 Reform Act. These contexts will then lead to a focus on the tantalising seemingly utopian experiment in Randwick in 1832. All will be revealed at Randwick Village Hall on Thursday January 25th at 7.30. £5 cash entry: cake for that as well as an hour from me.

 

Titus Okere

Titus Okere,

Once captain of Lagos Railways FC,

Made history in 1953,

When he signed for the Railwaymen

Of Swindon Town FC,

Leaving what was still a colony,

Of the British Empire,

To plough a lonely furrow down the wing,

As the first Nigerian to sign up

For a football club in the continent of Europe.

Titus had already made a name for himself

In the dour days of austerity back in 1949

And, of course, in the wake of Windrush,

When he starred on the left wing,

For what was, in effect, the Nigerian team;

But in those colonial post-war days,

The team was named the ‘UK Tourists’;

Titus also scored against Sierra Leone,

In what was, in effect, an international fixture.

After leaving Swindon in 1953,

Titus lived in the county of Kent,

No doubt, wistfully recalling his early life:

His birth in March 1929 in Ngor Okpala,

His education at the Okrika Grammar School,

His teenage athletic and football skills,

His captaincy of Lagos Railways,

The cups and trophies won by him and them,

His captaincy of the Nigerian team against the Gold Coast,

In those far off days of King George the Sixth,

And a bomb-site Britain still with its Empire …

I was just one year old when Titus joined Swindon Town,

Signing as a professional early in the year of 1953,

Before moving elsewhere in Wiltshire,

To Chippenham United,

In the summer of that Coronation year.

And what do we know of Titus Okere in Swindon?

We’re told he, ‘Struggled with the British winter’,

And found those heavy studded football boots

More of a leathered hindrance than a help

The only recollection that appeared

When I appealed for recollections:

‘I watched him play for STFC in 1953,

A fast and tricky left winger …

as I vaguely remember it.

I was only twelve’.

But Titus was the first Black professional

At Swindon Town F.C., a trailblazer

Who should be remembered publicly,

Even if he didn’t make the first team,

Just appearing twice for the reserves,

And in Gloucestershire’s Northern Senior League,

Before playing elsewhere in Wiltshire football,

Making, again, a unique contribution

To the history of ‘the Beautiful Game’

Both nationally and in the county.

Journalists such as Edgar Kail once of Dulwich Hamlet FC,

(The last amateur footballer to play for England,

Memorialised with a blue plaque)

Thought so much of Titus that it was imagined that

Titus’ skill and speed could open doors

Into almost any European football team,

But barefoot in 1949 was different

To heavy boots in 1953 …

But how did Titus end up at Swindon Town?

Here the legacy of the GWR comes into play …

How right and proper and fitting it feels,

That Titus, a clerk on the Nigerian Railways,

And captain of the railway football team,

Should meet a coach who hailed from Swindon

(Who in a case of seemingly improbable

Nominative determinism,

Bore the so-apt name of Leo Robins) …

The coach sent a letter to Louis Page,

Swindon Town’s manager,

When time and circumstance permitted

(Leo was on railway work in Nigeria as well),

Discussions followed at board room level,

A letter followed from the manager …

And Titus left the sunshine of Nigeria

For the frost and rime of winter

And a keen Wiltshire wind blowing from the east.

The journalist, Dennis Hart, was keen, too,

To cover the tale of Titus’ odyssey,

How ‘I certainly miss the’ sun of Nigeria,

‘But I’ve already made lots of friends here.

The players and the staff … have done everything

to make me feel at home, and so too, my landlady, Mrs Wakeley.’

Alas, it didn’t work out the way we hoped it would,

As we gaze back through the looking glass,

But there’s more to life than football,

And Titus returned to railway work again,

A loyal servant at Parcel Force,

Until retirement in the autumn of his days.

And this year, in the summer of 2023,

Titus left this life but left us memories,

And Swindon Town remembered Titus too,

As Francis Okere (Titus’ grand-daughter) said from Kent,

After the service at the Bluebell Hill crematorium:

‘It was a lovely service.

Swindon Town paid tribute to him and sent him a tie.’

This is the textual tribute from STFC:

‘Although he only made a few first-team appearances for Swindon Town, he was held in the highest regard by supporters and colleagues of the club alike. He had come to the club’s attention when he toured England with the Nigerian international team. An outside left, he was nicknamed “the golden boy” – – because of his ability to create chances out of nothing. The credit for signing him for Swindon must go to Mr Louis Page, the manager. He was obviously keen to sign him as in January, two Board Meetings received reports on whether or not he would arrive by January 20th before he managed to get to this country and sign on in February …’

But a heavy pitch, cumbersome boots,

Loneliness – the directors would not think

Of paying for Mrs Okere to come over

Until Titus became a first team regular –

All conspired against Titus at Swindon;

But surely the time has come for Swindon Town

To acknowledge further the importance of Titus:

Their first Black professional player:

Perhaps with a plaque at the STFC Museum?

Post-Script

‘’I recall a game against Walsall that we lost 5-0, and so it went on. Boys, like everyone else, like to be associated with winners and I was drawn into a crowd that cycled up to Blunsdon each week for the new thrills and wins at Speedway.

Football wasn’t entirely forgotten for there was ‘The Adver’ and ‘Pink’ to keep us informed so we were aware that ‘Town’ had signed the Nigerian Titus Okere. I didn’t see him play for I was into Speedway at that time – did he ever get a first team outing?

We were all aware of his nickname, ‘Nutty Slack’, given to him by the crowd which included a great many railwaymen. In those days, war-time rationing was still in place and if you worked ‘Inside’, one of the perks was coal. Coal of very poor quality made up of small nuggets of dust and bits of slate amongst it, the infamous Nutty Slack. Of course, railwaymen’s humour picked up on this and Titus became “Nutty Slack”. There was no malice in it, that’s just how it was in those days.’

‘Golden Boy’ …

‘Sunny disposition’ …

‘Nutty Slack’ …

‘That’s just how it was in those days’ …

 

 

Heritage and the GWR

What is ‘Heritage’?

We all sort of know what heritage means,

Don’t we, in a way …

Something handed down from the past,

A tradition, an inheritance,

Be it cultural, tangible,

Physical, natural,

intangible, oral, folkloric

And so on … and so on …

You know, that sort of thing;

Or as Michael Heseltine put it

When English Heritage was formed,

English Heritage will tell ‘the story of England’.

And therein lies the rub, of course:

Who tells the story?

Who makes up the story?

How reliable is the narrator?

How omniscient is the listener?

Let’s think about Isambard Kingdom Brunel:

A case study in Swindon and heritage

If ever there was one:

The half-mythologised story

Of Brunel choosing Swindon as the site

For his locomotive works,

With the tossing of a ham sandwich,

And where it fell, Swindon grew …

The subsequent lionisation

And heroization of Brunel,

The statue, the shopping centre,

A man for all seasons it would seem.

He was also a man of Bristol, of course,

Bristol: the source of so much of the capital

That financed the Great Western Railway;

He was also a man of London,

Almost losing his life in the construction

Of the Thames Tunnel when it flooded,

So, Brunel is almost a personification

Of the eventual GWR coat of arms,

With the crests of London and Bristol.

But what of its heraldic motto,

‘Domine Dirige Nos: Virtute et Industria’?

‘Lord Guide Us’: ‘Virtue and Industry’ …

The Enslaved and the Great Western Railway

Friends, railwaymen and women,

I come not to bury the Great Western Railway

But to tell you of its provenance;

To tell you how the compensation

Given to owners of the enslaved,

Led to their railway investments

From that twenty-million pounds

So generously given in 1834,

Nearly half the national budget for that year,

Billions and billions in today’s values.

The GWR:

God’s Wonderful Railway:

I do not come to bury you,

But to tell the following tale of everyday Bristol folk:

Thomas Daniel whose £70,000 + compensation

For the very partial freedom gained

By over 2,500 enslaved on his estates,

(That’s £86 million in today’s values)

Came in right handy,

For a line from London to Bristol;

Richard Bright – only £14 million

In today’s values, I know,

For his 640 enslaved,

But every little helps you become

The deputy chairman of the GWR;

George Gibbs, only £1million in today’s values

(47 enslaved),

But a future director of the Great Western Railway;

Then there’s Henry Bush (114 enslaved),

Whose £3 million in the hand,

Helped finance the Bristol to Gloucester line;

And, penultimately, let’s remember John Cave,

Another railway Master of the Society of Merchant Venturers,

But, also, Sheriff and Mayor –

But I choose to conclude with Christopher Claxton,

Zealous defender of the West Indian plantocracy,

Vigorous defender of enslavement and its triangles,

Keen to fight a duel with an opponent of enslavement,

A surname that lives on in St Kitts and Nevis,

Close confiding colleague of Isambard Kingdom Brunel,

Out there, regarding the Clifton Suspension Bridge

And Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s giant steamships,

For he became the managing director

Of the Great Western Steamship Company …

‘Friends, Swindonians, countrymen, lend me your ears:

‘Domine Dirige Nos: Virtute et Industria’

‘Lord Guide Us’: ‘Virtue and Industry’ …

Written after reading From Wulfstan to Colston –

Severing the sinews of slavery in Bristol

Mark Steeds and Roger Ball Bristol Radical History Group

This piece indicates how local history and global history are so often intertwined. The term that has been coined for this fusion of approach is ‘Glocal History’. The link below takes you to my previous research on those who gained from compensation in 1834 in Bristol, Gloucestershire and Bath. Further research would be needed from the UCL slavery database to update the list, and research how many others invested in railways in general and the GWR in particular.

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/slave-owners-in-gloucestershire-and/

Reimagining how the Railway Lies

I live in Stroud,

Home of the arch commemorating the abolition of slavery,

An arch from 1834,

Standing near a comprehensive school,

By a busy main road to Gloucester;

We are rightly and justly proud of this in Stroud –

But, of course, quite a few owners of enslaved peoples

Lived around this town,

Not to mention Gloucester, Cheltenham,

Bath, Bristol and the rural south-west.

Slave owners received the equivalent in today’s values,

Of £17 billion;

Fully forty per cent of GDP in 1834;

A great deal of this ‘compensation’

Went into railway investment and development

In the 1830s and 1840s:

The Gladstone family in the north, for example …

And, nearer to home,

Bristol merchants in the GWR,

Samuel Baker at Lypiatt, near Stroud,

I could go on and on and on …

But what is chastening to reflect upon, I think,

Is the Keynesian multiplier effect …

The consequential impact in a series of links and chains,

Tendrils and tentacles,

And Victorian Venn diagrams

Upon our ancestors …

How many of our family forebears

(Six generations of mine)

Ended up working on the revered railways

Or ran the homes and kitchen

Because of that initial injection of capital?

It’s a sobering thought,

As we reflect upon those tentacles

And tendrils of racial capitalism.

Before I move on:

Out of the £695,000 raised by subscription for the construction of the railway from Swindon through Stroud to Cheltenham, £212,000 came from the spa town of Cheltenham, home to so many beneficiaries from the abolition of enslavement.

Reimagining how the Railway Lies

The Iron Road, the Permanent Way:

Lines of steel stretch to vanishing point,

Where pale-skinned navvies with pick and shovel,

Work their way through the nineteenth century.

But wait until the steam clouds dissipate,

See how that express train changes shape –

A slave ship on the Middle Passage,

Sharks following in its crimson wake.

The station now a sugar plantation,

Manacles and shackles in the waiting room,

Signal gantries now high gallows –

For the bounty paid to enslavers,

When slavery was abolished in 1834,

Helped fuel the Railway Mania;

Like Samuel Baker up at Lypiatt,

Investing in railways in the Forest of Dean,

Or the Gladstone dynasty up in Liverpool,

Or the gentry of Bath and Bristol in the west;

Or, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire.

The Iron Road, the Permanent Way:

Lines of steal stretch to revelation point:

A colonial landscape all along the line,

That is how the railway lies.

So, what of Swindon and the surrounding villages and enslavement?
I carried out a quick and perfunctory search
Of the UCL (oh, alma mater!) enslavement data base,
To see what would turn up,
And here we are:

George Kibblewhite
Lydiard Millicent

William Kibblewhite
Lucy Sadler (nee Kibblewhite)
BENEFICIARY
Jamaica St Mary 94 (Weyhill)
£1949 7s 0d [114 enslaved]

Edmund Kibblewhite
High Street Wootton Bassett
AWARDEE [TRUSTEE]
Jamaica St Mary 94 (Weyhill)
£1949 7s 0d [114 enslaved]

Joseph Christopher Ewart
Broasleas Devizes
Antigua 86 [Long Lane Delap’s]
£2790 8s 8d [213 enslaved]

Charlotte Peach (nee Philpot)v Sarum Devizes
UNSUCCESSFUL CLAIMANT [LEGATEE]
Antigua 324 [Vernon’s]
£4906 5s 5d [329 enslaved]

Joshua Smith
Erlestoke Devizes

Anna Susanna Watson Taylor
OTHER ASSOCIATION
Jamaica Hanover 21 [Haughton Grove]
£2512 0s 3d [138 enslaved]
OTHER ASSOCIATION
Jamaica Hanover 577 [Haughton Court Estate]
£5343 19s 1d [273 enslaved]

OTHER ASSOCIATION
Jamaica St Mary 247 [Llanrumney Estate]
£5649 0s 7d [331 enslaved]

OTHER ASSOCIATION
Jamaica St Mary 26 [Montrose and Flint River Pens]
£5343 5s 6d [296 enslaved]

George Watson Taylor (nee Watson)
BENEFICIARY
Jamaica Hanover 577 [Haughton Court Estate]
£5343 19s 1d [273 enslaved]
OTHER ASSOCIATION
Jamaica St Mary 247 [Llanrumney Estate]
£5649 0s 7d [331 enslaved]

OTHER ASSOCIATION
Jamaica St Mary 26 [Montrose and Flint River Pens]
£5343 5s 6d [296 enslaved]

OTHER ASSOCIATION
Jamaica St Mary 247 [Llanrumney Estate]
£5649 0s 7d [331 enslaved]

OTHER ASSOCIATION
Jamaica St Thomas-in-the-East, Surry 457 [Burrowfield Pen]
£1711 10s 6d [99 enslaved]

Further research: if you were to type in this link for the search page on the UCL database

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/search/  and then type in Wiltshire into the county box, you would see the records of some nearly 100 individuals. Future and further research would allow us to see if any of these people invested in railways in general and the GWR in particular.

 

Football Specials and Swindon

Football Specials

 

There was, of course, a close association

Between late Victorian railways

And the formation of football clubs:

Manchester United FC grew from

Newton Heath LYR FC

(The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway):

The founders and players were all railway workers –

But we’re not bothered about that story,

Our tale is of the Robins from Wiltshire,

‘The Railwaymen’ at Swindon Town …

Salubritas et Industria …

So, this is, perhaps, a signal moment

To compile a history of ‘Football Specials’ …

 

The first football specials were run by

The Great Western Railway Company,

In 1927, from Cardiff to Paddington

(Cardiff City beat Arsenal 1-0

At Wembley in the FA Cup Final:

‘The Cup’ left England for the only time);

Over fifty trains powered through Swindon –

What a day out for the miners of South Wales

So soon after their lock-out and the General Strike,

As Welsh coal took them up to Wembley and back

On locomotives built in Swindon!

 

Even though JB Priestley waxed lyrical

About travel by coach in the 1930s,

It was still commonplace to see players,

And supporters in scarves and rosettes

Share the same trains right through to the 1950s,

But the history of football specials

Has become half-mythologised since

The days of sepia and black and white,

As memories become tarnished with time,

And supporters aren’t quite sure whether

That particular excursion was by coach or train …

Madeleine moments and Arkell’s 3 Bs …

 

But let’s kick off with a coach journey in the Cup,

To Southampton in 1948,

Courtesy of my brother-in-law:

‘My Uncle Ivor who did a bit of coach driving for Wellington Garage arranged a party of his GWR workmates to go to the match and took me along perched on a beer crate behind his driving seat. We’d only got as far as Ogbourne St. Andrew when the coach radiator leaked water and overheated. Ivor got out to get a bucket of water at a cottage which was poured in and off we went. At Southampton, he stopped to ask the way to the Dell then moved on leaving the copper in a cloud of steam. Sadly, we lost that game and also lost wing half Kaye in a tackle with Alf Ramsey. I remember the programmes were printed on one side only on a sheet of paper handed out free – must have been free for I had no money and ended up with a sheaf of them. The trip home was a boozy one with several crates of beer onboard and many stops en-route for ‘Hedge Tickets’ …

 

I now jump on nearly twenty years

To the age of mods, skinheads and diesels:

I was there as a little mod travelling

To the Swindon away games in the Cup,

Chastised by my History teacher:

‘You shouldn’t be attending this wretched gladiatorial combat.

Attend to your studies instead, boy!’

One Speech Day, we were isolated

In the gym, with close circuit TV,

As we were leaving early for the train

To take us to an FA Cup replay;

We were told in no uncertain terms,

That we were letting ourselves and the school down –

How we silently cheered when the guest speaker

Said how pleased he was to see so many of us

Would be leaving early to support ‘the Town’ …

 

 

We lost 3-0 as it happens …

Floreat Semper Schola …

 

O tempora! O mores!

 

The Football Special era occurred when it did,

As all the right ingredients were in place:

British Railways with surplus rolling stock;

Teenagers with surplus disposable income;

The impact of England winning the World Cup in 1966 …

But who could have foreseen what would happen,

When bescarved young men congregated in carriages?

(Who could have foreseen the semiotics

Involved in the tying of football scarves

Around The wrists rather than the neck?)

Why the smashing of windows?

Why the institutionalised hurling

Of toilet rolls out of the windows?

Then there was the incidental, sometimes

Organised, and pre-arranged, violence

Attendant and consequent to arrival

At the railway station, and the walk to the ground,

Often with an attendant phalanx of police,

Both in the days before, and after, the miners’ strike;

Police horses, too, standing sentinel:

It wasn’t a walk in the park back in those days.

 

And here are some recollections from some fans

Of ‘The Railwaymen’ of Swindon Town:

But firstly, a voice that will speak for many:

‘Not being a local and being a little younger than the football special … I’d love to see whatever is discussed …never even been on a supporters’ coach.’

 

‘Pockets full of coppers …Can’t remember a special that ever had any toilet rolls after the first couple of miles … light bulbs too! Seemed like all part of the day out in them days.’

 

‘Carlisle was mental. Burnley was mental. Witnessed some daft things on the trains – the stuff getting chucked out of windows as the train went through small stations could have seriously injured or killed someone. Always had the welcoming committee waiting at the station, never realised the volume of the away fans breaking through the police escort out of the station.’ ‘Have a soft spot for northern outposts. Much prefer them to the southern games.’

 

‘A mate of mine is a retired police officer and was on the Burnley special (Cup game) under cover and doing surveillance.’

 

‘Late 70s/early 80s went to Aldershot, Exeter, Blackpool, Liverpool, Wimbledon, Torquay, Slave Traders … Virtually everyone on the specials were young lads, pissed or glued up. Stewards taking booze off everyone and then drinking it with their mates. Lots of money won or lost in card games … The rolling stock was the absolute dregs because it had a good chance of being trashed.

Liverpool was fun. The walk to and from Lime Street. A little reception committee waiting for us after the game … I missed the Wrexham one, that was supposed to have been the one to be on.’

 

‘I missed the Liverpool cup trip when the scousers raided the train during the game and stole possessions from supporters’ luggage.’

 

‘One that sticks in the memory was the special train to Millwall (Old Den) for the night game on Saturday April 7 1970 … the scruffy old train went all the way to New Cross or New Cross Gate (forget which). There was a short walk to the ground. A very scary place in the pre-crowd-segregation days … At 2-0 down in the second half, Don Rogers scored and the Town fans were spotted by the home fans who you could see moving from the home end, heading for where we were. I went and stood somewhere else before they arrived. I headed back to the station before the end of the game and as I was walking down the road, a Millwall fan started talking to me about how good the Lions had been when there was a roar from the ground. Millwall had scored a late 3rd goal … I tried hard not to give away that I wasn’t a home fan. A memorable trip for a callow youth.’

 

‘Even now, it is great when you get a critical mass of fans on the train. Coming back from Hartlepool after the 3-0 win in the Garner season was brilliant.’

 

‘Getting to the ground and missing most of the first half wasn’t much fun. Losing to top it off absolutely took the biscuit.’ ‘Which game was that?’ ‘Wrexham away the mid-70s.’ ‘Jesus. Wrexham away. Now that was a day out.’

 

‘Off the top of my head, I remember going on these specials: Liverpool and Wrexham in 1976/77, Arsenal 1979, Spurs 1980, Reading 1982, Burnley 1983, Carlisle 1984, Bristol City and Bristol Rovers at least three times in the 80s and early 90s. Newport three times in the late 70s early 80s. Crystal Palace in 1989 for the play off.

I am sure there are a couple I have forgotten in there too, but they were great days out. The Burnley special when the window was broken in the front carriage when a passing train’s door was left open was an experience.’

 

‘As a teenager in the seventies I visited Ashton Gate regularly via the train to Temple Meads and then the delightful 2.5 mile walk to the ground. I can recall hundreds of us marching along singing … One year we arrived and found the perimeter fencing etc adorned with STFC graffiti … Attempts to pay a visit to the East End was always short lived although we did manage to actually get on the terraces one year. As for the football, the first game I saw we drew 3-3. I recall the ref gave a penalty against Rod Thomas for handball when the ball hit the bar not his hand! That’s the only time I have seen us get a point at Ashton Gate. The rivalry was far more intense with Bristol City than it ever was with Oxford in my “naughty” days as a Town fan. Still have an intense dislike for them even now.’

 

 

‘If anyone fancies passing on their Wrexham memories then all will be treated with confidentiality’ …

 

‘Hopefully a few … will talk about the football special to Wrexham in the mid 70s.

I’ve heard a few stories about it but it’s best coming from anyone who was on it.’

 

It would appear that silence is golden with regards to Wrexham …

But as regards Wimbledon:

 

‘Football in the late 70s and early 80s was still a predominantly working-class pastime and,

as such, fans were not seen as customers, but yobbos to be kept at arm’s length. It was this line of thinking which British Rail used to compose their trains to transport supporters around the country in their ‘Football Specials’. A wheezing, old, diesel locomotive was the unit normally used to pull the train. The coaches were a mishmash of old rolling stock, some of which I’m sure were in the livery of the old GWR. Heating in the coaches seemed like an optional extra and with dodgy windows, which failed to shut properly ensured that, if you chose unwisely your coach for the journey, you would be completely refrigerated by the time you got to your destination. ‘

 

 

Now as LP Hartley said:

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

And as William Faulkner put it:

‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’

(Still off to Paddington to see Swindon

Beat Arsenal 3-1 at Wembley, 1969),

And I think what we see here,

Is a generation of men looking wistfully back,

In almost startled amazement at what they did,

And the things that went on towards the end

Of the 20th century

(Sliding Doors or The Road Not Taken),

There is no glorification of it at all,

More a football fan’s detached observation

Of football scarf rather than madeleine moments,

Marcel Proust on a red and white football special,

A la recherche du temps perdu …

Toilet rolls … light bulbs … the aggro …

 

But now, to some recollections from a friend,

A fellow walking footballer,

A Liverpudlian who taught himself

To read and write with percipience

From Liverpool football programmes:

‘Between 1971 and 1976, we used to organise travel for the Liverpool supporters based in London. We used to be able to just phone up Euston and say, “I’d like to book three carriages on the 7.20 a.m. to Liverpool, travelling back at 8p.m.” We set up an account and would collect 120/150 tickets from the office and hand out tickets to the members on the concourse. I never saw one incident but had so many great journeys … The concessions we used to get were amazing. A £5 ticket would be sold to us for about £3. Great days.’

 

Now, those days are past and won’t return,

But here’s a proposal for the future

And a new type of ‘football special’,

And a new relationship between railway companies,

And football clubs and supporters:

A season-ticket supporter’s rail card;

Perhaps a family season-ticket supporter’s rail card.

Read on … here’s the outline below:

 

Season-ticket holders at football clubs

Take their I-D to a railway ticket office

Or pursue the transaction online,

And for a fee of ???? pounds

Obtain their football special railcard,

(Bearing the Give Racism the Red Card legend),

Thereby obtaining the usual concessions

For railway travel throughout the country.

 

This, of course, boosts the coffers of all:

Railway companies, football clubs and supporters,

And, it gets people off the roads and motorways,

Using public transport and boosting fitness,

With walks to and from station and football ground,

With consequent public health benefits,

And climatic ones too …

It can also help change the old gendered link

We used to associate with railways,

Football supporters and travelling:

Families, women, men, boys, girls,

And any choice of personal pronoun,

All aboard!

It’s a win-win-win-win-win-win situation,

With the ‘Football Special Railcard’:

Just look at the Swindon Town FC badge …

Remember the heraldic motto

‘Salubritas et Industria’.

 

 

 

Post-script

I think what we see here,

Is a generation of men looking wistfully back,

In almost startled amazement at what they did,

And the things that went on towards the end

Of the 20th century

(Sliding Doors or The Road Not Taken),

There is no glorification of it at all,

More a football fan’s detached observation

Of football scarf rather than madeleine moments,

Marcel Proust on a red and white football special,

A la recherche du temps perdu …

Toilet rolls … light bulbs … the aggro …

So why did it happen?

And before we condemn …

Jude the Obscure Supporter

Now I’m not sure if there’s a debate here about determinism and free will,
Or whether there’s just some sort of reflection on 60 years spent going to the match,
That LS Lowry feeling of being lost in a crowd,
That loss of sense of self that meant that strangers were friends
And friends were never strangers,
For all was empathy and understanding,
And the boot was never on  the other foot.
And you can talk as much Sociology, Psychology or Philosophy as you like,
But the reason you trudged fortnightly to the game
Was because you enjoyed it and because, really,
How could you do anything different?
Who would do anything different?
You went because you loved the game,
And because you had loyalty to your mates,
And because you had a loyalty to your home town,
And because you had loyalty to your team,
And because the team was your town and your town was your team,
And because really your team was you and you were your team
And so you were your town and your town was you
In a syllogistic spiral that counted for nothing when you put your scarf on. –
For the minute wage differences that existed in a one industry town,
And the fact that footballers didn’t earn much more than anyone else,
Meant that a happy commonality and solidarity suffused the town of Swindon!
And so you never imagined that your carefully choreographed movement
To and from the ground through the red-brick terrace streets of England
Was like some sort of scene from The Wasteland,
Nor did you see it as some sort of extension
Of typical male industrial working class historic traditions,
So that even when you were wearing the height of mod fashion,
You were in fact an anachronism,
For who would think like that?
Nor did you think, when you carefully read your programmes at half time,
Or when you re-read them at home,
Or swopped them, or used them,
So as to build up a store house of memory and fact and knowledge
About every facet and aspect of the game of Football
That you were, in fact, following in the footsteps of working class autodidacts,
The people who caught a glance at the classics within the rhythm of the pistons,
Or studied art or poetry or philosophy behind the foreman’s back
Or beneath the chief clerk’s nose or by the ganger’s shovel,
Or by the candle in the attic;
And now just think, how many brilliant minds there were,
In that faceless crowd of so-called untutored intellect,
Living lives that The News Of The World never ever dreamed of.
Where are they now?

 

Radical Road Trip

Radical Antiquarians on Tour
The Antiquarians’ Road Trip
Plus ca change

Look! There’s Mr Jingle and Mr Pickwick in Stamford,
A town astride the Great North Road,
All tortuous turnpikes and honey stone,
Coaching inns and listed buildings:
‘GOOD STABLING AND LOOSE BOXES’;

And beyond Stamford, heading east?
There’s John Clare revenants walking the roadside,
And channels and rivulets and watercourses,
With high embankments above the roads,
And a cloud filled sky that meets the fields
In a cumulonimbus towering clasp
Across a dark shadowed numinous dreamscape;

But there, leaping out of the flat lands’ fastness,
The vaporous tower of Ely cathedral,
And all around, the oozing of the fens:
Tick Fen; Langwood Fen, Great Fen, ChatterisFen,
Ouse Fen, Mildenhall Fen, Burnt Fen …
And all around, the waters of rivers and dykes,

And a boatyard down below the cathedral,
Constant trains rattling across the freight line rails,
As twilight softness gathers around the streets,
And swifts soar high above the Maltings,
And high above the roof of Oliver Cromwell’s house,
Just as their seventeenth century ancestors did,
When Cromwell strode forth with his righteous bible,
Imagining a New Model Army
That would vanquish Charles Stuart’s Royalists,
While swifts screeched and eavesdropped high above,
And a parliament of rooks observed and noted.

Radical Antiquarians on Tour
The Antiquarians’ Road Trip
Plus ca change

Look! There’s Mr Jingle and Mr Pickwick in Stamford,
A town astride the Great North Road,
All tortuous turnpikes and honey stone,
Coaching inns and listed buildings:
‘GOOD STABLING AND LOOSE BOXES’;

And beyond Stamford, heading east?
There’s John Clare revenants walking the roadside,
And channels and rivulets and watercourses,
With high embankments above the roads,
And a cloud filled sky that meets the fields
In a cumulonimbus towering clasp
Across a dark shadowed numinous dreamscape;

But there, leaping out of the flat lands’ fastness,
The vaporous tower of Ely cathedral,
And all around, the oozing of the fens:
Tick Fen; Langwood Fen, Great Fen, ChatterisFen,
Ouse Fen, Mildenhall Fen, Burnt Fen …
And all around, the waters of rivers and dykes,

And a boatyard down below the cathedral,
Constant trains rattling across the freight line rails,
As twilight softness gathers around the streets,
And swifts soar high above the Maltings,
And high above the roof of Oliver Cromwell’s house,
Just as their seventeenth century ancestors did,
When Cromwell strode forth with his righteous bible,
Imagining a New Model Army
That would vanquish Charles Stuart’s Royalists,
While swifts screeched and eavesdropped high above,
And a parliament of rooks observed and noted.

And so, we strode through Ely’s eely dreamscape,
Shapeshifting in the gathering dusk,
To claim food and drink at the Prince Albert;

Then dreaming of the cathedral,
‘The ship of the Fens’, moored with an anchor
Whose foundations rest on clay and sand,
And a water table higher
than that that of the nearby river,
Until the morning’s ganglion of railway lines
And succession of level crossings:
‘That’ll be the Ely north avoider loop at Queen Adelaide. Enables trains to run direct from Norwich to Peterborough, and vice-versa, and for Kings Lynn freight traffic to head to/from the yards at March. Really tight curves. Ely is a junction for five directions.’ (Jon Seagrave)

We drove on past giant fields of barley and wheat,
Right next to equally giant fields of flowering potatoes
(‘Its only bondage was the circling sky’),
Past where the agricultural rioters of 1816
Would have congregated, voicing demands
For a moral economy with fair prices and wages,
Before marching on to Ely and Littleport:
The response was transportation and execution;

And all the while, embankments and water,
And Will Kemp’s actor-ghost Morris-dancing his way,
In a forlorn attempt to prove that he
Was more popular than William Shakespeare,
Until we reach the flint city of Norwich,
To witness the cathedral’s taking of the Eucharist,

And, outside, Robert Kett’s Rebellion of 1549,
Hand to hand combat along cobbled Elm Street,
Betwixt two flint churches at either end,
The Earl of Warwick’s army guarding the Bishop’s Gate,
Right there where the Red Lion now stands,
And there, by the thick girth black poplar,
Just where we stand and gaze and imagine,
The rebels swimming the shallow waters by Cow Tower
(Built to hold hand held cannon and bombards),
To try and outflank the massed armed ranks on the bridge;

We wandered past the proud Kett memorial plaques,
Past the pub called Lollards Pit
(Mutter that you can find God in your own conscience.
You don’t need an archbishop’s hierarchy),
(Lollards: the link between the Peasants’ Revolt,
Kett and co and then the Diggers and Levellers.
Lollards Pit: the place of execution:
The faggots piled high for the burning
Of these religious radicals.),

Then up Kett’s Hill, past Kett’s Bakery,
To Mousehold Heath where at least 10,000 rebels
Camped high above the city, and its authorities,
Both ecclesiastical and secular,
And where their memory lives on, not just
With plaques and ruins and information panels,
But also, with an assertion of commonality
And historic rights of estover,
For here signs tell us to help ourselves to wood,
And timber and fuel from the felled trees:
Robert Kett’s moral economy
And opposition to enclosure lives on
In its quiet, understated manner
Up here, still, on Mousehold Heath.

I picked up a stone as a keepsake
As we descended back towards the city:
‘Oh, whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad.’
I’ve now placed it in the backroom fireplace,
Awaiting my whistle on some dark winter night.

The next day saw us in the Norfolk Broads,
Driving past Three Hammer Common,
And the parish of Barton Turf, with a verger,
Who looked as though he were from a Pre-Raphaelite painting;
Discovering fern and nettled footpaths
Behind massive churches distant from any village,
To reach lonely staithes down on the river bank,
And wander close to a causeway on a pilgrimage
To an isolated red brick windmill,
Built upon the site of St Benet’s monastery,
Where a spectral monk sometimes surveys
His haunting ruins and landscape:

A seeming labyrinth of watercourses:
Sails gliding by just above one’s head,
Yachts and wherries making their way
Parallel with our pilgrimage,
Lanyards clangourous in the breeze,
Skylarks ascending, ducks keening,
Osiers and sedges and willow and aspen
All rustling in the gathering wind,
Sunlight glistening on the rippling waters,
An elemental harmony of air, earth and water,
And fire, too.

For where we were standing and musing,
Just in front of the abbey gateway,
Was where abbey documents detailing
Bonded work, were burned by villeins
In the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.
Right where we stood.
What happened to them, I wonder,
Out here in this watery world.
Did the words of King Richard the Second
Condemn them to a worse servitude?
Or death?
‘You wretches detestable on land and sea; you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were, and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we livewe will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal. Choose now which course to follow.’

By strange and unhappy happenstance, by the way,
Six hundred and forty years ago on this day,
John Ball was hanged, drawn and quartered:
‘When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?’

The next day saw us homeward-bound –
But antiquarian detours were necessary:
Wymondham, first, and this proud plaque:
‘Seeking a fairer society in Norfolk,
Robert Kett, supported by his brother William,
led a rebellion of more than 15,00 people in 1549.
The rising was crushed and over 3,000 died.
On 7th December 1549 Robert was hanged for treason
at Norwich Castle and William from Wymondham Abbey’s
west tower. This plaque was erected in 1999 to remember
the man and his struggle for a more just society in Norfolk.’

Chastened by the image of William,
Dangling, broken-necked, from a rope
Attached to the Abbey’s soaring high west tower,
We made our final East Anglian call at Bury St Edmunds.
Yet another abbey. Yet another memorial.
This time about Magna Carta; placed there in 1847.
‘THE 25 BARONS APPOINTED
TO ENFORCE THE OBSERVANCE OF MAGNA CHARTA
AT BURY St EDMUNDS NOV 20th A.D. 1214’
A detailed list follows;
And, on an adjacent wall, another memorial
To signify Victorian admiration
For this precursor to Runnymede in 1215;
In Gothic rhyming couplets too …
‘WHERE THE RUDE BUTTRESS TOTTERS TO ITS FALL,
AND IVY MANTLES O’ER THE CRUMBLING WALL …’

Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 And All That
Came along some eighty years later;
Here are a few salient points
from their subversive 1930 classic:
‘1. That no one was to be put to death, save for some reason – (except the Common People)
2. That everyone should be free – (except the Common People)
3. That everything should be of the same weight and measure
throughout the Realm – (except the Common People)
4. That the Barons should not be tried except by a special group of other Barons who would understand …
Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England, and thus a Good Thing for everyone –
(except the Common People).’

Well, we had to get home and live like common people,
And so, we called in, as everyone,
apart from barons, do,
At a motor way service station;
This one was on the M6, newly opened near Rugby,
And there I read in the Morning Star
(Bought in the Co-op in Wymondham)
Of a strike at the Weetabix factory in Kettering,
Over pay for working unsocial hours …

Plus ca change …
We still seek that elusive moral economy …
The barons are doing okay though.

Plus ca change.

Radical antiquarians on tour.
(Stuart Butler)

AA [Antiquarians Association]

RAC [Radical Antiquarians Collective]

East India Company Walk

The information boards at Chalford intrigue,
Because of the lack of information:
At Chalford Vale and along the canal,
We are told about the local links
With the East India Company,
But we are not told about the practice
Of the East India Company;
The information boards are products of their time …
Times change and context is needed.

We start this contextualisation
Revealing a hidden colonial history
Within this leafy Cotswold landscape,
With a heat-wave peripatetic.

We start at Seville’s Mill in Chalford,
‘Today I would like to acknowledge
The Tory new mantra for History:
‘Retain and explain’,
Coupled with their ‘Culture Wars’ assertions:
‘You can’t change and airbrush history’,
And ‘The British Empire was a Good Thing’,
By letting the ‘Past Speak for Itself’,
From the pages of Jack P. Greene’s erudite tome,
Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism
in Eighteenth-Century Britain’:

The information boards at Chalford intrigue,
Because of the lack of information:
At Chalford Vale and along the canal,
We are told about the local links
With the East India Company,
But we are not told about the practice
Of the East India Company;
The information boards are products of their time …
Times change and context is needed.

We start this contextualisation
Revealing a hidden colonial history
Within this leafy Cotswold landscape,
With a heat-wave peripatetic.

We start at Seville’s Mill in Chalford,
‘Today I would like to acknowledge
The Tory new mantra for History:
‘Retain and explain’,
Coupled with their ‘Culture Wars’ assertions:
‘You can’t change and airbrush history’,
And ‘The British Empire was a Good Thing’,
By letting the ‘Past Speak for Itself’,
From the pages of Jack P. Greene’s erudite tome,
Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism
in Eighteenth-Century Britain’:

The East India Company?
‘those shameful triumphs over unwarlike and defenceless nations, which have poured into the laps of individuals the wealth of India … and driven us to plunder and destroy harmless natives fixed so deep a stain on the English name, as perhaps cannot be expiated.’

‘changed, contrary to the intentions of its institution, from a commercial, into a military corporation’, so that India – a ‘country, late so famous for its commerce, whose rich manufacturers brought to it immense wealth from every corner of the tributary world, and whose fertile plains supplied millions of its neighbours with grain’ is ‘unable now to yield itself the bare necessities of life. The loom is unemployed, neglected lies the plough; trade is at a stand, for there are no manufacturers to carry it on’; multitudes are ‘perishing for want of food.’

‘a revenue of two millions in India, acquired God knows how, by unjust wars … their servants came home with immense fortune obtained by rapine and oppression.’

‘and indeed it is clearly proved, that the East India Company is rotten to the very core. All is equally unsound; and you cannot lay your finger on a single healthy spot whereon to begin the application of a remedy. In the east, the laws of society, the laws of nature, have been enormously violated. Oppression in every shape has ground the faces of the poor defenceless natives; and tyranny has stalked abroad. The laws of England have lain mute and neglected and nothing was seen but the arbitrary face of despotism. Every sanction of civil justice, every maxim of political wisdom, all laws human and divine, have been trampled underfoot, and set at nought.’

‘Pride and emulation stimulated avarice, and the sole contest was, who should return to that home … with the greatest heap of crimes and of plunder.’

‘Asiatic plunderers’, ‘they had for many years been disgracing us as a nation and making us appear in the eyes of the world, no longer the once-famed generous Britons, but a set of banditti, bent solely on rapine and plunder.’

‘executions, oppressions, blood-shed, massacres, extirpation, pestilence and famine.’

‘Instead of our fleets crowding our ports freighted with the precious commodities of the East … we have … the importation of the fortunes of splendid delinquents, amassed by peculation and rapine.’

Parallels with the Roman Empire?
‘the dominions in Asia, like the distant Roman provinces during the decline of the empire, have been abandoned, as lawful prey, to every species of peculators; in so much that many of the servants of the Company, after exhibiting such scenes of barbarity as can be scarcely paralleled in the history of any country, have returned to England loaded with wealth.’

Clive of India?
‘utterly deaf to every sentiment of justice and humanity … this insatiable harpy, whose ambition is unparalleled, and whose avarice knows no bounds.’

America and India Conjoined?
‘We have abused and adulterated government ourselves, stretching our depredations and massacres not only to the Eastern, but Western world … the guilt of murder and robbery … now crying aloud for vengeance on the head of Great Britain.’

‘How melancholy is the consideration to the friends to this country that in the East and in the West, in Asia and America, the name of an Englishman is become a reproach’, and in ‘Europe we are not loved enough to have a single friend … from such a situation there is but a small step to hatred or contempt.’

We make our way up and through Chalford Bottom,
Remembering the great radical John Thelwall,
Who stayed here in the summer of 1797:
‘Therefore I love, Chalford, and ye vales
Of Stroud, irriguous:[i] but still more I love
For hospitable pleasures here enjoy’d,
And cordial intercourse. Yet must I leave
Your social haunts …’

And so, we made our way to Hyde and Minchinhampton,
Collectively reading from this link:
https://radicalstroud.co.uk/stroud-and-a-hidden-colonial-landscape-number/

We then processed by lane and footpath to Box,
And then descended to Longford’s Mill,
Where we had a reading from Amplify Stroud:
https://amplifystroud.com/2021/02/18/clothing-colonialism-stroud-and-the-east-india-company/
Then it was past Iron Mills and the Weighbridge Inn,
With an unhappy glance back at the Great War:
https://radicalstroud.co.uk/archibald-knee-and-dorothy-beard/
And so, along the lanes and through the woods
To reach Nailsworth and another reminder
Of the local landscape and a colonial history
(See towards the end of this link):
https://radicalstroud.co.uk/stroud-and-a-hidden-colonial-landscape-number/

We started the day with the bus to Chalford
And we end this peripatetic with a bus back to Stroud.

Stuart Butler 22nd July 2021

Jesse James and Kings Stanley

At first glance, any connection between Kings Stanley,
Near the Cotswold mill town of Stroud,
And Jesse James of Wild West infamy,
Would seem improbable, to say the least;
But I was told by Ade Blair
(with comments from Otto Didakt),
That Jesse James’ great-grandfather,
William James, was born in Kings Stanley in 1754,
‘And is buried in St George’s churchyard’,
Dying in 1805, the year of Trafalgar.

Seems improbable, it’s true,
For here we are in landlocked locked down Stroud,
A long way from the Atlantic Ocean,
And the ‘Wild Missouri’,
And yet …
Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line,
Was born just down the River Frome in Sapperton;
An American historian believes that Edward Thache,
Aka ‘Blackbeard’, the notorious pirate,
Was born in Stonehouse;
The eighteenth century was an age
Of martial and maritime and slaving expansion,
Press gangs and ships’ crews,
And a busy River Severn just down the River Frome …
Stroud Scarlet cloth went all over the world,
The East India Company,
Traded with the Iroquois,
‘Strouds’ were traded deep within First Nation lands,
Way out west beyond the Missouri river;
Redcoats were out there, of course,
before and during the American Revolution
(Or American War of Independence as we were taught);
Bristol, the eighteenth century foremost slaving port,
Was just down the road and river;
The Atlantic Archipelago
Saw many migrants go west and saw some return –
So, it seemed quite conceivable, initially,
That William James went to America,
Only to return to die in Kings Stanley in 1805,
Having left a family way out west …

At first glance, any connection between Kings Stanley,
Near the Cotswold mill town of Stroud,
And Jesse James of Wild West infamy,
Would seem improbable, to say the least;
But I was told by Ade Blair
(with comments from Otto Didakt),
That Jesse James’ great-grandfather,
William James, was born in Kings Stanley in 1754,
‘And is buried in St George’s churchyard’,
Dying in 1805, the year of Trafalgar.

Seems improbable, it’s true,
For here we are in landlocked locked down Stroud,
A long way from the Atlantic Ocean,
And the ‘Wild Missouri’,
And yet …
Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line,
Was born just down the River Frome in Sapperton;
An American historian believes that Edward Thache,
Aka ‘Blackbeard’, the notorious pirate,
Was born in Stonehouse;
The eighteenth century was an age
Of martial and maritime and slaving expansion,
Press gangs and ships’ crews,
And a busy River Severn just down the River Frome …
Stroud Scarlet cloth went all over the world,
The East India Company,
Traded with the Iroquois,
‘Strouds’ were traded deep within First Nation lands,
Way out west beyond the Missouri river;
Redcoats were out there, of course,
before and during the American Revolution
(Or American War of Independence as we were taught);
Bristol, the eighteenth century foremost slaving port,
Was just down the road and river;
The Atlantic Archipelago
Saw many migrants go west and saw some return –
So, it seemed quite conceivable, initially,
That William James went to America,
Only to return to die in Kings Stanley in 1805,
Having left a family way out west …

And it seemed quite conceivable that he would want to emigrate:
America: beacon of freedom;
America: land of opportunity;
The West Country:
Economic hardship …
Food riots;
Anonymous threatening letters;
Luddism before the Luddites;
Emigration;
Transportation …

But before we speculate further,
On motives and consequences,
A bit more on the dialogue between Adie and Otto:
William James ‘lived in, and is buried in Kings Stanley’;
‘Is there a headstone?’
‘As far as I know there is but I haven’t been to see it myself.
He’s buried in St George’s churchyard.’
‘I heard the story from a couple of friends, on the same day this week.
It’s mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on Kings Stanley.
Also, on Wikipedia it says that William James moved to
Goochland County, Virginia, in the late eighteenth century.
He had a son called John M James (1775-1827)
Whose son, Robert Sallee James, was born in Logan County,
Kentucky, on July 17th 1818,
And was Jesse and Frank’s father.
It also says that William moved to the USA from Pembrokeshire
So how he ended up in Kings Stanley remains a mystery.’

I was captivated and joined the discussion:
Did he emigrate from Pembroke via Ireland?
Did he have connections with Bristol and the triangular trade?
Slaves, cotton, rum, sugar, tobacco, textiles?
What was his social status?
Merchant or artisan or labourer?

Ade’s thoughts were as follows, in May 2020:
‘Or the Pembrokeshire information was a mistake.
A little voice tells me that he was somehow involved
With the whole slaves, tobacco thing …’

I decided to walk to Kings Stanley along the canal,
To have a recce of the churchyard,
What would the headstone signify?
Merchant or artisan or labourer?
There was spring in my step:
I pictured William having a last tankard in the King’s Head,
Before sailing the next morning, sometime in 1774;

But before I talk of that,
Here’s a bit of context about Stroud and the Five Valleys,
Back in the late eighteenth century –
What was William leaving behind?
Here’s Adrian Randall in his seminal study of our area:
‘Resistance to machinery was multiform …
Peaceful petitioning, appeals to the courts …
Negotiations … strike action, intimidation and riot’;
‘Just as food riots reveal order, discrimination and a clear moral economy,
So do community-based riots against the jenny and the scribbling machine’;

A few miles up the road from Kings Stanley,
In the village of Uley, this letter was penned in 1795:
‘No King but a constitution down down down
A fatall dow high caps and proud hats
For ever dow down we all’;
Sir George Paul observed:
‘The cry of want of bread … forms a body of insurgents,
Amongst them are mixed a number of seditious persons’;

The Earl of Berkeley observed:
‘A vein of bad materials runs through the lower orders
In the clothing part of the county which still continues
To study Tom Paine with a few political clubs
and of the very dregs of Tom Paine’s cash’;

I arrived at St George’s in early June;
A welcoming information board proclaimed:
‘What are You Looking For?
Come and See!
John 1 38-9’;
But it was impossible to find William James’ headstone:
A needle in a haystack in a churchyard:
Too many grand monuments and headstones had mouldered away,
The soft ooilitc limestone no match for rainswept cumulus;
Inscriptions now indecipherable,
Lichen glowing in the hot June sun,
And no William James headstone in the 1805 area.

Not despondent,
This might just mean he was not of merchant stock, I thought;
Times were hard round here with food riots:
‘On Friday last a Mobb was rais’d in these parts by the blowing of Horns
& consisting entirely of the lowest of the people such as weavers, mechanicks,
Labourers, prentices and boys &c’;
That’s what led him to leave, I thought.

I sat down on a bench and googled John 1 38-9:
‘Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked,
“What do you want? …
Come … and you will see.”
So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him.
It was about four in the afternoon.’
Well, in fact, it was mid-day,
And friends joined me for a physically distanced chat:
Becky Thomas told me that some of the Wikipedia entry
Had been deleted:
William James was no longer buried in St George’s churchyard.

Becky wondered if he had been a Baptist …
I had read that Jesse James’ father had been a Baptist minister …
There had been a thriving Baptist church in the village …
Zak led us up past the King’s Head –
If William James was a Baptist
would he have had that tankard before emigrating?
We wandered footpaths over streams to the church;
The churchyard was overgrown.
An enjoyable meander but mission impossible.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
Asked the man who lived next door to the church;
I explained my quest,
Talked about his grandfather’s World War One diaries,
And then made for home,
Reflecting that I was on the track of a bushwhacker,
A Confederate White Supremacist,
In the wake of the death of George Floyd,
Here in the south-west of England,
Home to so many slave-owners and beneficiaries from compensation;
Kings Stanley and the USA were now seeming more conjoined …

Particularly when I discovered that William James
Emigrated in 1774 – one year before the start of war.

Was he a democrat and a free thinker?
Did he know that war was brewing?
Within a year, Stroud Scarlet redcoats
would be fighting in his new homeland,
Against his new countrymen and women;
How did he deal with that dissonance?

I had to pop up to the Crown & Sceptre,
When I got back to Stroud for some groceries,
And mentioned my Jesse James quest to Rodda:
‘I’ve been to his home,’ he said …
In the evening I went on Ancestry.com,
Carried out a bit of triangulation,
To feel contented with this assertion:

William James b 1754 Kings Stanley m Mary Hines 1774
Hanover, Goochland, Virginia
(Mary Hines b 1755 Hanover)
Willam d 1805 Lickinghole Creek, Goochland Co, Virginia
Mary d 1805 Lickinghole Creek, Goochland Co, Virginia

The son to watch of their progeny:
Rev John Martin James b 1774 Hanover
d 1827 Clay County, Missouri

The son to watch of his progeny:
Robert Sallee James b 1818 Whipporwill Creek, Logan, Kentucky
d 1850 California

Father of Jesse Woodson James b 1847
d Kearney, Clay County, Missouri 1882

So, now we know why I couldn’t find
William James’ headstone in Kings Stanley.
He never came back.

It seemed as though William and Mary died on the same day,
I wondered what Lickinghole Creek was like;
An artisanal brewery over there replied:
Hello Stuart,

I am sorry that we cannot be of much help. We are named after the creek that runs through our property. You can learn more about our where we developed our name on our website: https://www.lickingholecreek.com/about and https://www.lickingholecreek.com/brand.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks,

I wrote to Hanover Local History Society,
But no reply, and life is so busy …
So, Wikipedia it had to be:

Goochland originally included all of the land from Tuckahoe Creek, on both sides of the James River, west as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains.[1]

The county was named for Sir William Gooch, 1st Baronet,[7] the royal lieutenant governor from 1727 to 1749. The nominal governor, the Earl of Albemarle, had remained in England. As acting royal governor, Gooch promoted settlement of the Virginia backcountry as a means to insulate the Virginia colony from Native American and New France settlements in the Ohio Country.[8]

As the colonists moved into the Piedmont west of Richmond, they first developed tobacco plantations like those of the Tidewater. After the Revolution, tobacco did not yield as high profits as markets changed. In Goochland, as in other areas of Virginia, many planters switched to growing wheat and mixed crops. This reduced their need for labor. In the early nineteenth century, some planters sold slaves in the domestic slave trade, as demand was high in the developing Deep South where cotton plantations were developed.
was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.[9]

Revolutionary War[edit]

During the early part of 1781, Lord Cornwallis marched his sizable army through the boundaries of Goochland. They occupied and thoroughly destroyed Elkhill, a small estate of Thomas Jefferson, slaughtering the livestock for food, burning barns and fences, and finally burning down the house. They took 27 slaves as prisoners of war, and 24 died of disease in the camp.[10]

HANOVER

In 1774 Hanover citizens assembled at the Courthouse and adopted the “Hanover Resolutions”, stating that “we will never be taxed but by our representatives.” These resolutions became an early flashpoint in the American Revolution.

Well, that seemed to suggest that land attracted William James,
And it also seemed to suggest that the area was for Independence,
And also, that William would have seen Stroud Scarlet redcoats
In action in the area of his new homestead;
I talked this over with Jon Seagrave
In Kings Stanley churchyard,
The links between this village and Jesse James,
A Confederate bushwhacker,
Days after the killing of George Floyd,
Days before a BLM artwork,
At Sainsburys roundabout
Would be scrawled over with KKK;
I read this piece from Afua Hirsch to Jon:
‘The British government could have had the humility to use this moment to acknowledge Britain’s experiences. It could have discussed how Britain helped invent anti-black racism, how today’s US traces its racist heritage to British colonies in America.’

It was sort of serendipitously appropriate, wasn’t it?
The next day, I started on a biography:
Jesse James Last Rebel of the Civil War
Written by T.J. Stiles,
And according to my interpretation of my notes:
A self-styled Robin Hood,
With a penchant for performative robbery and violence,
A murderous, robbing thug,
A racist Confederate bushwhacker and nightrider,
Who sported KKK vestments on occasions;

His father, a Baptist preacher,
His mother, Zerelda, independent and resolute,
Both hailing from Kentucky,
Before moving to Clay County, Missouri,
Where Robert Sallee James was a preacher:
‘His manner of speaking was sublime’,
While his ‘exhortations were inimitable’,
Was the view of a Clay County resident;
But he kept slaves, despite his Christianity,
And rejected abolition;
Frank was born in 1843,
Jesse in 1847;
Robert Salle James died in California in 1850,
A victim of the California Gold Rush,
Having written to Zerelda, en route:
‘Train up your children in the … admonition of the Lord …
Kiss Jesse for me and tell Frank to be a good boy and learn fast’.

Zerelda would marry again, twice,
But she was more than capable of running any show herself,
She could run the farm, boss the slaves,
Stand tall for the Confederacy,
When Frank went off to war,
Later joined by Jesse as a bushwhacker at the age of 16,
Where his first guerrilla action was reported thus:
‘Men were slain before the eyes of their wives and children’,
These were civilians who supported the Union;
Later they would scalp Union soldiers,
In a ‘carnival of blood’,
With scalps tied to their saddles as trophies.

But that didn’t stop Jesse joining the Southern Baptist Church,
After the Civil War ended –
It was a fiercely secessionist, anti-abolitionist church,
In Clay County, Missouri –
Before turning his hands to bank robberies,
Subverting Reconstruction,
Intimidating northern carpetbaggers;

But as the price on his head grew,
So, he was mythologised by John Newman Edwards:
‘There is always a smile on his lips, and a graceful word
or compliment for all with whom he comes into contact’;
And as editor of the Kansas City Times,
Newman collaborated with James:
‘As soon as I can get a just trial, I will surrender myself’;
‘It is true that during the war I was a Confederate soldier,
And fought under the black flag but since then I have lived a peacable citizen’;

But, sure as night follows day,
So, bank robberies followed this 1870 declaration,
But that didn’t stop Edwards, with an editorial:
‘The Chivalry of Crime’,
With an Arthurian round table allegory;
While James began to see himself as a Robin Hood figure,
With the false claim that ‘we rob the rich to give to the poor’,
Forgetting that he also said:
‘There is no use for a man to try to do anything when an experienced robber gets the go on him, if he gives the alarm, or resists,
or refuses to unlock, he gets killed’;
And on the railroads:
‘If you don’t open the safe or give me the key,
I’ll blow your brains out’.

Once he lost Edwards’ patronage,
The spelling and grammar deteriorated;
But James married; became a father;
And the days of the railroad revolution
Were leaving the days of the Confederate guerrilla behind,
So, by the late 1870s, even erstwhile admirers
Would be inclined to see James as nothing but a robber;
Kansas City Times 1881:
‘They continued the war after the war ended … But as time passed on the war, even to them, was a thing of the past …
they … became the outlaws they now are.’
While as for his enemies …
‘I consider Jesse James the worst man, without exception, in America.
He is utterly devoid of fear, and has no more compunction about cold blooded murder than he has about eating his breakfast.’
(Robert A. Pinkerton Richmond Democrat 1879)

In consequence, the reward on his head,
and brother Frank’s
Climbed to $10,000 each.
It had once been $300.
Old comrade, Charley Ford, decided the time was right:
‘My brother and I made up to kill him …
I would not try it when he had his arms on.’
Bob Ford:
‘We waited a long time to catch Jesse without his revolvers’;

But in early April, 1882, Jesse James found the day so hot,
He took off his coat and vest and gun belt and revolvers …
And that was the end of Jesse James,
Although not the end of the mythology:
Some have claimed, said Ade Blair,
That Jesse James fabricated his death,
And lived to the ripe old age of 101,
A quiet and forgotten Texan centenarian,
Living into the Cold War atomic age.

Seems improbable doesn’t it?

No.

Impossible, more like.

Surely.

Post-script:
Jesse and Frank James, The Family History Phillip W. Steele
‘William James, believed to have been born in 1754 in Pembrokeshire, Wales, came to America with his family at an early age, originally settling lands in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. He later moved to Virginia where he settled near Lickinghole Creek in Goochland County. Records also indicate that William also owned land in nearby Fluvanna and Louisa counties. It was there he married, on July 15th 1774, to Mary Hines, who was English-born … the ceremony in Hanover County.’
‘The lineage of Jesse and Frank continues with John and Polly Poor James, paternal grandparents of the famous brothers …John and Polly … settled lands in Logan County, Kentucky, alongside Whippoorwill Creek’. John James was a minister and the fifth child, Jesse James’ father, was born on July 17th 1818. Robert Sallee James’ unusual middle name ‘was given him in honour of a Baptist minister from Kentucky, Rev. Sallee, whom his parents admired’.

Two conclusions I draw from this:
1. A genealogical trawl for William James might well bring forth quite a few infants named William James in Pembrokeshire in the mid eighteenth century. Is that what happened with the above family history? Which conclusion do we jump to? Kings Stanley or Pembrokeshire?
2. The strong Baptist that runs through the James generations is interesting. There was a thriving Baptist church in Kings Stanley. So, do we plump for Kings Stanley?

Right. That’s it. I’ve had enough of Jesse James now. I leave the story to more empirically minded historians. Perhaps this piece will stimulate some further research into the presumed Kings Stanley connection. William James: Kings Stanley or Pembroke?

Rodborough and Jamaica 1840

Rodborough and Jamaica, 1840:
Reimagining Peter Hawker

There are several strands and a good few facts
In this tale of Peter Hawker and Caroline Stephenson
Of this parish of Rodborough near Stroud.
But how did this tale come about?

Well, I thought I had compiled an accurate list
Of Stroud area residents who gained
So much ‘cankered coin’ from the abolition
Of slavery in the colonies;
I had carefully examined my alma mater
UCL database and thought I had bagged the lot.

But a few years later I came across:
AWARDEE Peter Hawker
Jamaica St Andrew 111 (Liberty Hall Pen) £699 17s 8d [26 enslaved]]
Absentee slave-owner by virtue
of his marriage to Caroline Stephenson
In Rodborough, Gloucestershire, 26/05/1823.
She was heiress of George Stephenson
of Liberty Hall, St Andrew, Jamaica.

I wonder what life was like for George Stephenson?
Well, in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald
And his ‘documentary fiction’,
I let the past speak for itself,
Courtesy of the pages of Jack P. Greene’s erudite tome,
Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism
in Eighteenth-Century Britain …

Rodborough and Jamaica, 1840:
Reimagining Peter Hawker

There are several strands and a good few facts
In this tale of Peter Hawker and Caroline Stephenson
Of this parish of Rodborough near Stroud.
But how did this tale come about?

Well, I thought I had compiled an accurate list
Of Stroud area residents who gained
So much ‘cankered coin’ from the abolition
Of slavery in the colonies;
I had carefully examined my alma mater
UCL database and thought I had bagged the lot.

But a few years later I came across:
AWARDEE Peter Hawker
Jamaica St Andrew 111 (Liberty Hall Pen) £699 17s 8d [26 enslaved]]
Absentee slave-owner by virtue
of his marriage to Caroline Stephenson
In Rodborough, Gloucestershire, 26/05/1823.
She was heiress of George Stephenson
of Liberty Hall, St Andrew, Jamaica.

I wonder what life was like for George Stephenson?
Well, in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald
And his ‘documentary fiction’,
I let the past speak for itself,
Courtesy of the pages of Jack P. Greene’s erudite tome,
Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism
in Eighteenth-Century Britain …
One 18th century critic asserted that Georges

‘know no Medium in Things; a Man with you must either be either absolutely a Slave, or licentiously free, free from all Restraints of Law.’

Another opponent of enslavement wrote thus:

‘The negroes in our colonies endure a slavery more compleat, and attended with far worse circumstances, than what any people in their condition suffer in any other part of the world, or have suffered in any other period of time.’

And another wrote of Georges:

‘Cruel Task-masters … petty tyrants over human freedom … sincere Worshippers of Mammon … civilized violators of humanity …’

And to conclude:

Their days are full ‘of Idleness and Extravagance … habituated by Precept and Example, to Sensuality, Selfishness, and Despotism … at the Expence of the poor Negroes who cultivate their lands.’

But enough of ‘documentary fiction’,
I contacted Stroud Local History Society,
With an email in February 2020:

Hello there,
I’ve just discovered another local recipient of slaver compensation – does anyone know where Peter Hawker might have lived in Rodborough in 1834?

And then, life being what it is,
I forgot all about Mr Peter Hawker,
Until I received an email in May 2021:

‘Hello Stuart

Did you get anywhere with finding out about Peter Hawker?
I have been looking at the Hawker family

Peter Hawker 1797-1840 was a lawyer. He married in 1823 Caroline Stephenson. She died 1830.’

Before I show anymore of the content of the email,
I have to say at a first quick reading
Of these deceptively beguiling lines,
I felt something of a suggestion
Of the Gothic horror genre and novel:
Death, decay, family curse, madness etc.;
Perhaps a curse for ill-gotten gains,
Arising from enslavement compensation;
Perhaps a curse for marrying into such money …
Shades of Jane Eyre after some sort of fashion,
Or Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea,
Or some sort of conjoining of two cultures:
Obeah and the ghost stories of M.R. James …
Or even George Orwell’s Decline of the English Murder:
Domesticity, bourgeois respectability,
Bankruptcy, money … poison …

But I know I shouldn’t think or speak
Or conjure or write ill of the dead;
And so, we banish all these wild flights of fancy,
Engendered by too much midnight reading,
And return to the plain, unvarnished facts
About these eminently respectable people:
Back to the email:
There followed an extract from the

Cheltenham Journal and Gloucestershire Fashionable Weekly Gazette. 22 February 1830:
‘Same day, at Stroud, aged 35, universally esteemed whilst living, and lamented in death, Caroline, the beloved wife of Mr. Peter Hawker, of that place.’

An entry for Trade Directories followed:
Peter Hawker was an attorney
In the High Street in Stroud in 1820/22;

Mr. Hawker had come up in the world by 1830:

‘Hawker & Fryer, Rowcroft, attorneys; clerks to the magistrates and commissioners of taxes for the hundred of Whitstone’;

And even higher nine years later:

‘Hawker & Fryer, King St, attorneys; clerks to the magistrates and commissioners of taxes for the hundred of Whitstone; clerks to Wheetinghurst Union’;

The Gloucestershire Chronicle 26 September 1835
Advertises their services and acumen
In a straightforward manner,
As does the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard
29 September 1838,
About ‘Mr. Friar, of Stroud’;
But then description becomes more tantalising:
‘and his partner, the modern Roscius,
Mr. Peter Hawker’;
Roscius? I had to look that up.
Turns out he was a Roman actor,
And in the early nineteenth century,
It was a popular classical synonym…
But what might the description connote?
Theatricality? Dissimulation? Pretence?
Whatever.

Just over a year later, we find this:
Gloucestershire Chronicle 11 January 1840:

‘SUDDEN DEATH of Mr. PETER HAWKER. – On Saturday evening, the 4th instant, an inquest was held at the George Hotel, Stroud, before J. G. Ball Esq., coroner, on view of the body of the above gentleman, who was found dead in his bed early that morning, at the home of his father, George Hawker, Esq., of Wallbridge, in this town. It is well known that the deceased had been in a state of mental and bodily debility for many months past. The evidence of a servant who had constantly attended him was to that effect, and also proved that on Friday evening he retired to bed without any apparent alteration to his health, and was found in the morning quite dead in his bed. Mr. Uthwatt, his medical attendant, corroborated the statement with regard to his health, and added that the event was expected by him, knowing that the nature of his complaint was such as to render it extremely probable that his death would occur in the manner it did. Verdict – “Died of apoplexy.”’

The email gave me more facts:

‘His father’s house’ was the ‘Canal HQ Wallbridge’;
‘His father was George Hawker b 1762’,
‘he was a clothier at Fromehall Mill in 1805’,
‘and at Lodgemore Mill 1808,
As tenant in both but was bankrupt in 1808’;
So, ‘George became Clerk (= manager)
Of the Stroudwater Canal and lived
At the headquarters at Walbridge’.

Stroudwater Canal archives: Minutes Tue 21 Jun 1814

Mr George Hawker elected as new Chief Clerk with a salary of £120 per annum free of taxes
‘He died in 1843.’
‘George’s father was Rev Peter Hawker
of Woodchester died 1730.’

I conclude this piece of ‘documentary fiction’,
In the manner of W. G. Sebald,
With a final reference to Mr. Peter Hawker, aka ‘Roscius’,
As we finish our slip down wormholes of time,
With a bit of the Bard:
‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts …’
So, as I said earlier, on a first quick reading
Of the email’s deceptively beguiling lines,
I felt something of a suggestion
Of the Gothic horror genre and novel:
Death, decay, family curse, madness etc.;
Perhaps a curse for ill-gotten gains,
Arising from enslavement compensation;
Perhaps a curse for marrying into such money …
Shades of Jane Eyre after some sort of fashion,
Or Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea,
Or some sort of conjoining of two cultures:
Obeah and the ghost stories of M.R. James …
Or even George Orwell’s Decline of the English Murder:
Domesticity, bourgeois respectability,
Bankruptcy, money … poison …

But I know I shouldn’t think or speak
Or conjure or write ill of the dead,
And so, we banish all these wild flights of fancy,
Engendered by too much midnight reading,
And return to the plain, unvarnished facts
About these eminently respectable people:

Peter Hawker 1797-1840 was a lawyer. He married in 1823 Caroline Stephenson. She died 1830

Thank you for listening. Goodnight.
And remember,

‘There are more things in heaven and earth,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio’.