Author: Stuart Butler

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’.

A Pandemic Peripatetic

A Pandemic Peripatetic April 2021
Well, I am alone, self-isolating,
And here I must remain,
This kitchen window my prism,
Reflecting and refracting the sunlight,
But also, the past, present and future,
In a virtual peripatetic.

I start my imaginary journey
In Old yet New Corruption London,
Walking the words of Citizen John:
‘Thou, Commerce, too, monopolizing fiend!’,
Filling ‘The public streets with want’s afflictive plaint’,
Making my way to the Tower and the Old Bailey,
Picturing John Thelwall with his quill in Newgate:
‘Within the Dungeon’s noxious gloom
The Patriot still, with dauntless breast,in conscious virtue
The cheerful aspect can assume –
And smile – in conscious virtue blest!’

But, now ‘Let’s all go down the Strand!’,
To catch the words of Citizen John
(Study a poem and hear a Thomas Spence song, too),

A Pandemic Peripatetic April 2021
Well, I am alone, self-isolating,
And here I must remain,
This kitchen window my prism,
Reflecting and refracting the sunlight,
But also, the past, present and future,
In a virtual peripatetic.

I start my imaginary journey
In Old yet New Corruption London,
Walking the words of Citizen John:
‘Thou, Commerce, too, monopolizing fiend!’,
Filling ‘The public streets with want’s afflictive plaint’,
Making my way to the Tower and the Old Bailey,
Picturing John Thelwall with his quill in Newgate:
‘Within the Dungeon’s noxious gloom
The Patriot still, with dauntless breast,in conscious virtue
The cheerful aspect can assume –
And smile – in conscious virtue blest!’

But, now ‘Let’s all go down the Strand!’,
To catch the words of Citizen John
(Study a poem and hear a Thomas Spence song, too),

‘I use the term Jacobinism simply to indicate a large and comprehensive system of reform, not professing to be built upon the authority and principle of the Gothic customary’ …

While ‘The whole nation’ would be unified,

‘combined in one grand political Association or Corresponding Society from the Orkneys to the Thames, from the Cliffs of Dover to the Land’s End’.

Where to next on this dreamtime peripatetic?
Derby and past football visits to ‘Pride Park’?
What would Citizen John have made of a name like that?
As he was attacked by ‘loyalist’ mobs:
‘Sailors, armed associates … and dragoons’;
Or sitting, justifiably paranoid,
About spies and strangers and informants
In coffee house and wayside tavern:
‘Some strange but well-dressed man would seat himself on the opposite side of my box’ …

The sun has set now but William Pitt’s spies
Are still awake; pursuing Thelwall
Across the wilds of Salisbury Plain;
Citizen John, hoping for ‘philosophic amity’
With Coleridge in Nether Stowey,
Before sojourning just down the road
From this darkening kitchen window
In the summer of 1797:
‘… ye pleasant haunts! Brakes, bourns,
And populous hill, and dale, and pendant woods;
And you, meandering streams, and you, ye cots,
And hamlets, that, with many a whiten’d front,
Sprinkle the woody step; or lowlier stoop,
Thronging, gregarious, round the rustic spire …
Therefore I love, Chalford, and ye vales
Of Stroud, irriguous …
Yet must I leave
Your social haunts …’

The next day was bright and welcoming,
And so, I continued my imaginary
John Thelwall lockdown peripatetic
With a ramble and a couple of pints
At ‘the 3 Cocks in the Road to Hay’:
To glimpse Citizen John in the corner,
Composing a letter for Thomas Hardy
And London Corresponding Society colleagues;
Watching him pick up the correspondence
Untouched by Pitt’s spies and myrmidons,
Before making my imagined way to Llyswen,
To the mirror image of STC’s
‘Lime tree bower’,
Where the ‘political lecturer of Beaufort Buildings’
Works hard at ‘one end of our orchard’,
Where ‘flows a pretty little brook

Bubbling through a small romantic dingle to empty itself into the Wye; in which with hobbyhorsical industry I have built a cascade … and am making a rude hermitage (a sequestered summer study) in the dingle beneath.’

And so, to Llyswen and a virtual Excursion,
Courtesy of William Wordsworth:
‘A narrow, winding entry opened out onto a platform …
Enclosed between an upright mass of rock
And an old moss-grown wall: a cool recess,
And fanciful! For where the rock and walls
Met at an angle, hung a penthouse, framed
By thrusting two rude staves into the wall
And overlaying them with mountain sods …
and stooping down, drew forth
A book, that, in the midst of stones and moss
… swoln
With searching damp’;

And after that imagined tableau,
It was time to return to London’s old haunts:
Bloomsbury, 40 Bedford Place, in 1806:
The Institute for Oratory and Elocution,
To glimpse ‘persons of fashion’ and
‘a crowd of scientific and literary characters’,
Before making my way to 57 Lincoln Inn’s Fields,
Where I saw copies of The Champion
Tumbling along the wind-blown pavements,
Heard lectures, recitations and concerts,
Joined the weekly ‘Historical and Oratorical Society’;
Then saw you out in the streets again,
Talking of Peterloo and Lord Sidmouth,
Joining the throng to greet Henry Hunt,
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, lionised,
Just as you were in the streets,
Back in 1794,
When you were acquitted for treason at your trial …

(‘ATTORNEY-GENERAL [piano]. Mr Thelwall, what is your Christian name?
T. [somewhat sullenly]. John.
ATT. GEN. [piano still] … With two l’s at the end or with one?
T. With two – but it does not signify. [Carelessly, but rather sullen, or so.] You need not give yourself any trouble. I do not intend to answer any questions.
PITT. What does he say? [Darting round, very fiercely, from the other side of the room, and seating himself by the side of the CHANCELLOR.]
LORD CHANCELLOR [with silver softness, almost melting to a whisper]. He does not mean to answer any questions.’)

But I conclude this imagined peripatetic at Bunhill Fields,
Citizen John, there, in 1832,
Sole eulogiser at the funeral of Thomas Hardy,
His old LCS colleague,
With a voice that compelled 30,000
Into a silent, rapt attention,
‘To paint the voice, and fix the fleeting sound’,
As the old motto for The Tribune put it,
A voice that straddled, as Thompson said,
‘The world of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the world of the Spitalfields weaver’,
And a voice that still speaks to us today,
To the gig economy world
Of Amazon and Deliveroo and Uber et al:

‘Monopoly, and the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands … carry in their own enormity, the seeds of cure … What-ever presses men together … though it may generate some vices, is favourable to the diffusion of knowledge, and ultimately promotive of human liberty. Hence every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.’

All still true even for those working from home,
Some atomised and alienated,
Lacking collective support and empathy,
Some facing fire and rehire and isolation,
Many losing a sense of mutuality,
Instead ploughing a lonely furrow;
But just as I pursued a peripatetic from home,
So as to reach out for the words of John Thelwall,
So, John Thelwall’s words can reach out
To those at home in the knowledge economy,
And to those at work in the gig economy.
The ‘Jacobin fox’ may have been
the most dangerous person in the country
Two hundred years ago and more,
But his is still a relevant voice today:
‘To paint the voice, and fix the fleeting sound’ …

‘I affirm that every man, and every woman, and every child, ought to obtain something more, in the general distribution of the fruits of labour, than food, and rags, and a wretched hammock with a poor rug to cover it; and that, without working twelve or fourteen hours a day … from six to sixty. – They have a claim, a scared and inviolable claim … to some comfort and enjoyment … to some tolerable leisure for such discussions, and some means of or such information as may lead to an understanding of their rights …’

Virtual Walking for Foodbanks

WALKING THE THAMES TO LONDON #9-#13
Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust
In association with the cyclists’ group from The Prince Albert
Wallingford to Cholsey
Sunday March the 15th

Beware the Ides of March – but I’m a long way from the tidal reach of the Thames – Wallingford Castle – High Street – Thames Street – St Leonards – a glimpse of the Chilterns in the distance – Littlestoke Ferry – the Papist Way – Ferry Lane – Cholsey – 5 miles.

Springtime on the Thames

When is spring not a spring?

When Edward Thomas went in pursuit of spring,
When spring’s advance was slower,
Compared with today’s two miles an hour,
In that so-called Golden Age before the Great War,
He hadn’t endured biblical floods,
And a seeming apocalyptic pandemic,
A pandemic that has arrived in this country
After a forty-year post-Thatcherite zeitgeist,
A zeitgeist that foregrounds charity,
And emphasizes individualism,
Rather than welfare state collectivism.

And the consequence of this zeitgeist?
Panic buying, hoarding, selfishness,
And a consequent diminution
In charitable donations,
Thereby indicating the fragile
Efficacy of charity …

The Guardian 11th March, Robert Booth, Social affairs correspondent:

‘Food banks in Britain are running out of staples including milk and cereal as a result of panic-buying and are urging shoppers to think twice before hoarding as donations fall in the coronavirus outbreak.’

Patrick Butler, Social policy editor:

‘Mental health charities and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have called for an independent inquiry into the deaths of vulnerable people who were reliant on welfare benefits.’ There has been ’69 cases of suicide linked to benefit issues in the last six years’.

How will Universal Credit/Universal Cruelty,
And the five-week wait help in this crisis?
When the Department for Work and Pensions
Reply to criticisms
Highlighted by the death of Errol Graham,
Who starved to death,
Has this sentence within:
‘We always seek to learn lessons where we can’.
‘Where we can’ …

WALKING THE THAMES TO LONDON #9-#13
Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust
In association with the cyclists’ group from The Prince Albert
Wallingford to Cholsey
Sunday March the 15th

Beware the Ides of March – but I’m a long way from the tidal reach of the Thames – Wallingford Castle – High Street – Thames Street – St Leonards – a glimpse of the Chilterns in the distance – Littlestoke Ferry – the Papist Way – Ferry Lane – Cholsey – 5 miles.

Springtime on the Thames

When is spring not a spring?

When Edward Thomas went in pursuit of spring,
When spring’s advance was slower,
Compared with today’s two miles an hour,
In that so-called Golden Age before the Great War,
He hadn’t endured biblical floods,
And a seeming apocalyptic pandemic,
A pandemic that has arrived in this country
After a forty-year post-Thatcherite zeitgeist,
A zeitgeist that foregrounds charity,
And emphasizes individualism,
Rather than welfare state collectivism.

And the consequence of this zeitgeist?
Panic buying, hoarding, selfishness,
And a consequent diminution
In charitable donations,
Thereby indicating the fragile
Efficacy of charity …

The Guardian 11th March, Robert Booth, Social affairs correspondent:

‘Food banks in Britain are running out of staples including milk and cereal as a result of panic-buying and are urging shoppers to think twice before hoarding as donations fall in the coronavirus outbreak.’

Patrick Butler, Social policy editor:

‘Mental health charities and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have called for an independent inquiry into the deaths of vulnerable people who were reliant on welfare benefits.’ There has been ’69 cases of suicide linked to benefit issues in the last six years’.

How will Universal Credit/Universal Cruelty,
And the five-week wait help in this crisis?
When the Department for Work and Pensions
Reply to criticisms
Highlighted by the death of Errol Graham,
Who starved to death,
Has this sentence within:
‘We always seek to learn lessons where we can’.
‘Where we can’ …

WALKING THE THAMES TO LONDON #10
Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust
In association with the cyclists’ group from The Prince Albert
Tuesday 17th March Cholsey to Tilehurst 12 miles
Sunrise 6.08 Sunset 18.08
Carbon count: 414.24
Pre-industrial base: 280
Safe level: 350

I posted this today on to the Global Walking Artists Network:

Hello there

As some of you know I have been walking the Thames from source towards London to raise funds for the Trussell Trust and food banks but the public health crisis requires a change of approach. Please see below if you are interested in how I am going to rethink and de-walk:

I’ve reached the conclusion that individual, family and public health considerations mean that I will now walk the Thames in a virtual/pretend way.

How will I do this?

By laying out the route-map for the day and by measuring the required distance on my phone. I will walk within my home and within my immediate locality, but far from the madding crowd: 19 corvids rather the COVID-19, as it were.

By using imagination and memory rather than observation.
By following my usual practice of blending reflections on topographical, historical, and contemporary contexts, with the Trussell Trust and food banks always in focus.

I’ve now reached Wallingford in the real world and have also done London bits towards the end, but if anyone wants to join me in a pretend section for the duration, let me know. I’m ‘doing’ Wallingford to Cholsey and then on to Tilehust today btw …

Best wishes,

Stuart

Walking to work, walking at work,
Walking home, walking at home,
Up and down the apples and pears,
Walking to the allotments,
Digging the allotment plot,
Up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire,
Takes me all the way to Tilehurst,
In a manner and manor of speaking,
Imagining some of the following:

Littlestoke ferry point – Cholsey Marsh – Offlands Farm – Moulsford – Ferry Lane – The Beetle and Wedge – Cleeve Lock – Goring Lock – Streatley Church – Goring (ancient ford and meeting point of the Icknield Way and the Ridgeway) – Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s GWR bridge – Gatehampton Ferry Cottage – Hartslock Farm – Whitchurch – The Greyhound – Whitchurch Mill – Church Cottages – the Toll House – Whitchurch Bridge – Pangbourne – Mapledurham (Mapledurham House as in The Forsyte Saga and the inspiration for Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows) – 78 and a half miles to London – Purley – Kentwood Deep – Tilehurst.

BBC Football Gossip:

‘With the Premier League currently suspended, Liverpool players, staff and fans have stepped in to offer support and donate cash to a foodbank, which relies on donations on match days. (Liverpool FC)’

WALKING THE THAMES TO LONDON #11
Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust
In association with the cyclists’ group from The Prince Albert
Tilehurst to Shiplake 10 miles
Thursday March 26th
Sunrise 5.48 Sunset 18.24
Carbon count: 414.34
Pre-industrial base: 280
Safe level: 350

Along the virtual towpath; imaginary Chiltern hills; half-remembered GWR line; signage: ‘Welcome to Reading’; ‘Thames Side Promenade’; remember Oscar Wilde on his release from Reading Gaol, May 1897: ‘Oh Beautiful World!’; more bridges over these troubled times: Caversham Bridge; Reading Bridge; on to Caversham Lock (down); King’s Meadow; the conjoining of the Kennet and the Thames (Kennet, my brother’s ‘House’ at school); Horseshoe Bridge (bring us luck, please); Sonning Lock (down); Sonning Bridge (How I loved Sonning Cutting on the train as a child!); Jerome K. Jerome on Sonning:’ It is the most fairy-like nook on the whole river … more like a stage-village than one built of bricks and mortar. Every house is smothered in roses … bursting forth in clouds of dainty splendour’; Shiplake Lock (down); onomatopoeic Lashbrook; Lower Shiplake; The Baskerville Arms; Shiplake.

Chief Executive of the Trussell Trust, Emma Revie:

‘We welcome the extra financial support announced, particularly the £500m hardship fund for local councils, which can play a key role in anchoring us all from poverty.

But as coronavirus unfolds, more people could need this safety net than ever before – especially those who aren’t eligible for sick pay or have unstable jobs. For many of these people the five-week wait for a first Universal Credit payment could cause real hardship, despite measures announced in today’s Budget. We know the five-week wait is already pushing people to food banks, trapping many in debt and making issues with housing, ill health, disability and domestic abuse worse …

As more people look likely to move onto Universal Credit as a result of the outbreak, the most effective way to help would be to end the five-week wait for a first Universal Credit payment by giving people grants, rather than loans that have to be paid back further down the line. We can prevent more people being locked into poverty as the outbreak develops by ending the wait now.’

The Trussell Trust’s #5WeeksTooLong campaign is calling for an end to the 5+ week wait for Universal Credit.

About the Trussell Trust:

• We’re here to end the need for food banks in UK.
• We support a UK-wide network of more than 1,200 food bank centres and together we provide emergency food and support to people locked in poverty, and campaign for change to end the need for food banks in the UK.
• Our most recent figures for the number of emergency food supplies provided by our network: https://www.trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/
• You can read more about our work at trusselltrust.org

WALKING THE THAMES TO LONDON #12
Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust
In association with the cyclists’ group from The Prince Albert
Shiplake to Marlow 11 miles
Tuesday March 31st
Sunrise 6.37 Sunset 19.32
Carbon count: 415.68
Pre-industrial base: 280
Safe level: 350

Bolney Ferry – Marsh Lock (down) – Mill Lane – Mill Meadows – The Angel on the Bridge – Henley Bridge – Remenham Church – Temple Island – Hambledon Lock (down) – Hamledon Weir – Aston Ferry – Ferry Lane – The Flowerpot – Medmenham – Medmenham Abbey (the Hellfire Club) – Frogmill – Danesfield – Hurley Lock (down) – Hurley – the Olde Bell – Temple footbridge – Temple Lock (down) – Temple Island – Bisham Abbey – Bisham Church – Marlow – where Mary Shelley completed Frankenstein and Percy Shelley penned A Proposal for putting Parliamentary Reform to the Vote (which included a proposal for annual parliaments – the one point of the Chartists’ eventual Six Points that didn’t become into eventual actuality).

‘Time and again over the past decade, food banks across the UK – aided by a generous public who have donated time, food and money – have stepped up to protect people on the lowest incomes in our communities. But with the spread of coronavirus we all now face an unprecedented challenge and uncertain future. It is possible that food banks will face increased demand as people lose income, at the same time as food donations drop or staff and volunteers are unavailable, due to measures rightly put in place to slow the spread of infection. All of this comes when food banks are already dealing with a record level of need for emergency food.

We’re working with our network on how best to support people as the situation unfolds. Wherever possible, food banks will continue to provide the lifeline of emergency food to people unable to afford the essentials and we encourage the public to continue donating after checking with their local food bank what items are most needed.

We welcome the Department for Work and Pensions’ measures that will not penalise or sanction people for self-isolating, but we ask our government to go further and consider additional measures they could take to ensure everyone has enough money for essentials at this challenging time. Ending the five week wait for a first Universal Credit payment would be one such measure that could help significantly.’

Chief Executive of the Trussell Trust, Emma Revie:

That note from Emma Revie is from two weeks ago; I am reading The Guardian at the moment on March 30 2020. Here’s a few snippets from Rebecca Smithers’ report today: ‘The supermarket chain Morrisons is to distribute £10m worth of food to the UK’s food banks during the corona virus outbreak … The UK’s food banks have been struggling to meet demand at a time when the number of volunteers, typically older people, has slumped because of self-isolation. It is estimated that the outbreak of Covid-19 has led to a 40% reduction in donations to community foodbanks …’

WALKING THE THAMES TO LONDON #13
Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust
In association with the cyclists’ group from The Prince Albert
Friday 3 April Marlow to Windsor 14 miles
Sunrise 6.30 Sunset 1937 Carbon count: 415.68

Marlow Bridge – Seven Corner Alley – All Saints Church – St Peter Street – Two Brewers – Marlow Lock (down) – Marlow Mill – Quarry Wood – Winter Hill – Spade Oak Ferry Cottage – Spade Oak Farm – Bourne End – Cock Marsh – Cookham Bridge – Cookham churchyard – Holy Trinity – Churchgate – Tarry Stone – The Bell and Dragon Inn – Royal Exchange – Stanley Spencer memorial gallery in the restored Methodist church – four channels downstream from Cookham Bridge – My Lady Ferry – Cliveden – Boulter’s Lock (down) – Ray Mill Island – Maidenhead Bridge and Brunel and Turner – Bray Lock (down) – Summerleaze Bridge – Dorney – Thames Field – Dorney Court – Oakley Court – St Mary Magdalene – Boveney – Boveney Lock (down) – Etonian bathing place – Brocas Meadow – Windsor Castle (partly built of Cotswold stone brought down the Thames) – The Waterman’s Arms – Eton High Street – Windsor.

He has been voted the second greatest ever Englishman (sic) in a Sunday Times poll:

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a special constable during the Bristol Riots of 1831 when “he was heard to complain that his fellow constables did not hit the rioters hard enough”.

A few years later, we find him surveying a different line where he had, it seems, an ambiguous attitude towards the lower orders and bodily harm – 131 navvies were taken to Bath hospital between September 1839 and June 1841 with serious injuries: ” I think it a small number considering the heavy work and the amount of powder used. I am afraid that it does not show the whole extent of accidents in that district.”

Indeed, it doesn’t. Over 100 navvies were killed in the subterranean depths of gunpowdered Box Tunnel.

A hundred years after the GWR was commenced, Bertolt Brecht wrote this poem –

Questions From a Worker Who Reads

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates
?
In the books you will read
the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps
of rock ?

And Babylon, many times
demolished,
Who raised it up so many times
?

In what houses of gold
glittering Lima did its builders
live ?
Where, the evening that the
Great Wall of China was
finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal
arches.
Who erected them ?

Over whom did the Caesars
triumph ?
Had Byzantium, much praised
in song, only palaces for its
inhabitants ?

Even in fabled Atlantis, the
night that the ocean engulfed
it,

The drowning still cried out for
their slaves.

The young Alexander
conquered India.
Was he alone ?

Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook
with him ?

Philip of Spain wept when his
armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep ?

Frederick the 2nd won the 7
Years War.
Who else won it ?

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the
victors ?

Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill ?

So many reports.

So many questions.

Dear Stuart Butler

Thank you for your kind donation of 50.00.

With your help we are committed to providing emergency food and support to people in crisis. The food banks distributed over 1.6 million three-day emergency food supplies last year and even before the current crisis were seeing an increase in demand.

As the Coronavirus outbreak develops, more people than ever are needing our help. The teams are working tirelessly to ensure that food banks are able to remain open and have the necessary stocks to respond to this crisis.
We have been overwhelmed by the generosity of so many people. Your support means we can respond to the changing situation and continue to provide this vital lifeline.

You will appreciate that in the current climate we are having to adapt to working in different ways, with most staff working from home. Please do accept this email as an official thank you as we are unable to send postal acknowledgements at this time. If you need a written receipt please email supportercare@trusselltrust.org.

If you would like to hear more about our work and how you’re helping us fight hunger in the UK, why not sign up to our e-newsletter? Or if you’d like to find out more about what we do, including our latest campaign actions, please visit our website.

Thank you for helping to create a future without food banks.

The Trussell Trust team

WALKING THE THAMES TO LONDON #8

Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust
Abingdon to Wallingford

Abingdon to Wallingford March 12th 2020
Sunrise 6.20 Sunset 18.00
Carbon count: 413.78 Pre-industrial base 280 Safe level 350
14 miles Start 11.20 Arrival 15.25

The day after the budget the day before
(Hedge funds versus food banks),
On a train to Didcot and then a bus to Abingdon,
Past Didcot Power Station edgelands,
Pat business park daffodil roundabouts,
And a stream of greenwashing lorries,
Until I walk beneath the bridge at Abingdon,
Past medieval alms houses
(A Foodbank Pilgrimage),
Splashing through big sky open fields,
Past dovecots and manor houses,
Past bridges and weirs and locks and ferries,
Past thatch and pub and hills and woodland,
Following the line of pill boxes,
With magnolia in bloom in Shillingford,
Blackthorn and hawthorn in blossom too,
Hawk, heron, corvid, swan and skylark,
A rainbow over the church at Dorchester,
Half drowned trees and silvered puddles,
And all the time,
The relentless flow
Of the quickening, wide and turbid Thames,
Past Neolithic, Iron Age and Romano-British remains,
Past Paul Nash’s Wittenham Clumps,
Until I at last reach Saxon Wallingford,
And a bus back to Didcot,
And a train back to Stroud.

Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust
Abingdon to Wallingford

Abingdon to Wallingford March 12th 2020
Sunrise 6.20 Sunset 18.00
Carbon count: 413.78 Pre-industrial base 280 Safe level 350
14 miles Start 11.20 Arrival 15.25

The day after the budget the day before
(Hedge funds versus food banks),
On a train to Didcot and then a bus to Abingdon,
Past Didcot Power Station edgelands,
Pat business park daffodil roundabouts,
And a stream of greenwashing lorries,
Until I walk beneath the bridge at Abingdon,
Past medieval alms houses
(A Foodbank Pilgrimage),
Splashing through big sky open fields,
Past dovecots and manor houses,
Past bridges and weirs and locks and ferries,
Past thatch and pub and hills and woodland,
Following the line of pill boxes,
With magnolia in bloom in Shillingford,
Blackthorn and hawthorn in blossom too,
Hawk, heron, corvid, swan and skylark,
A rainbow over the church at Dorchester,
Half drowned trees and silvered puddles,
And all the time,
The relentless flow
Of the quickening, wide and turbid Thames,
Past Neolithic, Iron Age and Romano-British remains,
Past Paul Nash’s Wittenham Clumps,
Until I at last reach Saxon Wallingford,
And a bus back to Didcot,
And a train back to Stroud.
The end of self-isolation and social distancing,
The end of losing myself in time and space,
Back to the coronavirus anxiety,
Back to the lack of help for the gig economy,
Back to the land of the five-week wait,
Back to the land of hedge funds,
Back to a land of Cummings and going,
To a land of survival of the fittest,
To a land of ‘herd immunity’,
Now more than ever convinced of the need
For our Food Bank Pilgrimage,
But that’s not the reason why all those pill boxes
Were constructed along the banks of the Thames.
It was to stop the survival of the fittest.

I once walked out into a rain-blossom Thames Valley morning,
Feeling ever so slightly wired
And ever so slightly pantheistic,
That feeling aware of it all,
And feeling a part of it all sort of thing:
The robin singing in the cherry tree,
An Anglo-Saxon springtime song of joy,
No spear or seaxe, sword or shield,
No warrior-cry or smote-shout,
No blood-red stain in the rain-splash gutters,
But the corvids still cried in alarm,
Clacking and fluttering in the trees,
As I walked this watery defensive barrier,
A Dark Age storm-sheet rain cloud,
Enveloping the new-green land.

But later, the sun was shining
As I reflected on the Victorian cult of King Alfred,
That cult of Englishness and cult of imagined democracy,
When in fact we would have a 95% chance of being a peasant,
And a one in four chance of enslavement
A feudal, hierarchical society:
Monarch; ealdormen (jarls, earls); theigns;
geneats, cottars, geburs, boors (villeins); slaves …
‘Each boor must give 6 loaves to the herdsman of the lord’s swine
when he drives his herd to the mast-pasture …
When death befalls him let the lord take charge of what he leaves.’

STATE OF HUNGER RESEARCH:
PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN
REFERRED TO A FOOD BANK
HAVE A HOUSEHOLD INCOME
THAT WAS ABOUT THE SAME
AS THEIR HOUSING COSTS

Stroud Scarlet and William Cuffay: An Exploration

We have written before about Stroud Scarlet, the slave trade, and triangles of conjecture. (See point 5 at https://sootallures.wixsite.com/topographersarms/post/a-community-curriculum )

But what of William Cuffay?

William’s mother, Juliana Fox, was born in Kent, whilst his once enslaved father, Chatham Cuffay, made it to Kent from St Kitts. William Cuffay, of mixed-heritage, born in 1788, became a famous Chartist leader in the mid nineteenth century and then an activist after transportation to Tasmania. ( See https://sootallures.wixsite.com/topographersarms/post/william-cuffay for an imaginative reconstruction of William’s life.)
William is one of the first working-class leaders of colour, and possibly the most famous. There is a campaign for a memorial to honour him in the Medway area of Kent:

‘Hi Stuart …
We are working with Medway Afro-Caribbean Association to get a plaque for Cuffay in Medway, hopefully in time for Black History Month. They need at least £3000 and have been talking to Medway Council who have only offered them £1500. This is something the Trade Union Movement could (and should) easily pay for and we will be approaching local branches and national unions for support. It might even encourage them to think about some sort of memorial to Cuffay in London.

There is much more to Cuffay’s story than can be put on a plaque so we are also looking to organise some sort of annual event so that Cuffay and the Chartists, a key part of both Black and working-class history, become much better known.’

We have written before about Stroud Scarlet, the slave trade, and triangles of conjecture. (See point 5 at https://sootallures.wixsite.com/topographersarms/post/a-community-curriculum )

But what of William Cuffay?

William’s mother, Juliana Fox, was born in Kent, whilst his once enslaved father, Chatham Cuffay, made it to Kent from St Kitts. William Cuffay, of mixed-heritage, born in 1788, became a famous Chartist leader in the mid nineteenth century and then an activist after transportation to Tasmania. ( See https://sootallures.wixsite.com/topographersarms/post/william-cuffay for an imaginative reconstruction of William’s life.)
William is one of the first working-class leaders of colour, and possibly the most famous. There is a campaign for a memorial to honour him in the Medway area of Kent:

‘Hi Stuart …
We are working with Medway Afro-Caribbean Association to get a plaque for Cuffay in Medway, hopefully in time for Black History Month. They need at least £3000 and have been talking to Medway Council who have only offered them £1500. This is something the Trade Union Movement could (and should) easily pay for and we will be approaching local branches and national unions for support. It might even encourage them to think about some sort of memorial to Cuffay in London.

There is much more to Cuffay’s story than can be put on a plaque so we are also looking to organise some sort of annual event so that Cuffay and the Chartists, a key part of both Black and working-class history, become much better known.’

We intend to raise funds for the memorial by taking some Stroud cloth alongside the Stroudwater Navigation from the slavery abolition arch at Paganhill to Framilode; thence alongside the Severn to Bristol Docks.
We will then ‘sell’ the cloth to ship owners before its imagined eighteenth century journey to north-west Africa.

We shall create triangle poems to leave on our journey so as to recreate the possible consequences of this cloth’s voyage to Benin. These reconstructions of the triangular trade will reflect voyages to Benin, the Americas and thence back to Bristol – and Stroud. The triangles are below.

And who knows? Perhaps Stroud cloth enslaved Chatham and William’s ancestors and took them from the Door of No Return across the crimson-splashed Black Atlantic Archipelago.

So, perhaps you would like to sponsor us on our sixty-mile trip to Bristol?
We would forward the money straight away to Medway Trades Union Council as explained above.
In Solidarity,
Stuart Butler and Bob Blenkinsop

The
Stroudwater
Canal and Navigation

A link
Betwixt Stroud
And the River Severn at Framilode

The
River Severn,
A link from Framilode to Bristol Docks

Was
Stroud Scarlet
A cloth-link betwixt
Stroud and Bristol Docks?

Was
Stroud Scarlet
A cloth-link betwixt
Bristol and north-west Africa?

Was
Stroud Scarlet
A cloth-link betwixt enslavement,
Africa, the West Indies and the Americas?

Was
Stroud Scarlet
A cloth-link betwixt enslavement,
Tobacco, sugar, cotton, rum, the West Indies,
Bristol, Clifton, Bath, refinement, and the Age of Elegance?

Stroud
Scarlet,
A cloth-link from
Bristol Docks and on to Stroud?

The
River Severn,
A link from Bristol Docks to Framilode.

From Framilode,
The Stroudwater Navigation,
The canal, wends its way to Stroud,
Past Stroud Scarlet stretched on tenterhooks.

And so
Triangles of speculation
Complete their conjectural voyage,
Where they began, at the slavery arch in Paganhill.

‘All
Ship-shape
And Bristol fashion’:
With river, canal and turnpike,
Cloth could be carried down to Bristol, bound for
Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Benin, Angola, Gambia.
 Then
The Door
Of No Return:
 The Middle Passage,
 Nevis, Barbados, Jamaica,
Virginia, Haiti and South Carolina.
They fill the hold with sugar, cotton, tobacco:
Commodities that still cast a ship-shape shadow. 

From
Where else
Did this nation’s
18th century boom time come?

War,
Slavery,
Enclosure,
Exploitation
Mechanisation,
And the British Empire,
But the most lucrative of all
Was the shark’s feeding frenzy. 

And
Stroud lies
Hidden within the
Long decayed ledger books
Of Bristol merchants at their quayside,
Stroud Scarlet bought and sold in the damp
Teasled mill air of the tenter hooked Five Valleys,
Before exchanging use and life for human life and death
On the Middle Passage for the West Indies and the Americas.

Stroud and a Hidden Colonial Landscape Number

Chalford and the East India Company

Updated: Jul 7

Chalford has such a labyrinth of weavers’ walks and footpaths –
And on a mid-winter’s day, with plumes of smoke rising from Chalford Bottom
Mistletoe in the trees, light folded in envelopes of cloud,
It’s hard to imagine that this picturesque Cotswold village
Was once hand in glove with the East India Company,
As at Sevill’s Upper Mill,
Now a select residential development,
With the stream, now private and sequestered,
Between houses and a car park.

This landscape was once a fretwork of
‘Scarlet, Crimson, Blue and a variety of other delightful colours’,
A fretwork of profits and prices and exports and wages
And strikes and patterns of trade slumps and booms,
Linking the Thames and Severn Canal and the River Frome –
With the Ganges Valley, Bengal, Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Canton,
And with Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, the Marquess Wellesley,
And with muskets, cannon, Stroud Scarlet, slavery, opium, cotton, coffee and tea:
‘Gloucestershire seems to have had
almost the sole custom of the East India Company’.

Chalford and the East India Company

Updated: Jul 7

Chalford has such a labyrinth of weavers’ walks and footpaths –
And on a mid-winter’s day, with plumes of smoke rising from Chalford Bottom
Mistletoe in the trees, light folded in envelopes of cloud,
It’s hard to imagine that this picturesque Cotswold village
Was once hand in glove with the East India Company,
As at Sevill’s Upper Mill,
Now a select residential development,
With the stream, now private and sequestered,
Between houses and a car park.

This landscape was once a fretwork of
‘Scarlet, Crimson, Blue and a variety of other delightful colours’,
A fretwork of profits and prices and exports and wages
And strikes and patterns of trade slumps and booms,
Linking the Thames and Severn Canal and the River Frome –
With the Ganges Valley, Bengal, Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Canton,
And with Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, the Marquess Wellesley,
And with muskets, cannon, Stroud Scarlet, slavery, opium, cotton, coffee and tea:
‘Gloucestershire seems to have had
almost the sole custom of the East India Company’.

Contemporary websites project a multicultural,
Almost spiritual, perspective, however:
On Stroud cloth and the East India Company:
‘Red is a colour of great symbolic importance to many cultures. …
Indian rulers copied the red coats of the East India Company,

Or
‘The indigenous communities trading with the Hudson’s Bay Company and the East India Company adapted the cloth and integrated it into their own traditions of material culture.’

There is no hint of oppression, imperialism, asymmetrical power, war,
Or the ideology of racism,
But rather more a projection of fair exchange and mutuality,
No hint of the fact that ‘trading and political power were closely interlinked’,
Nor that the East India Company was also involved in the slave trade
In Madagascar, St Helena, Bengkulu and Angola,
Exchanging guns, gunpowder, cutlasses, cloth, and piece goods,
No hint that Bristol merchants bought textiles from the Company
To exchange for slaves in West Africa,
No hint of the fact that the East India Company, in effect,
Governed on behalf of the British government,
For over a century,
Exploiting and contributing to the decline of the Mughal Empire,
No hint of the fact that the Company sold Indian grown opium,
To be smuggled to China, to flout the Imperial ban,
The profits paying for tea for domestic consumption;

Instead a comforting emphasis on: “Trade in spices, pepper, cloth, cloves, nutmeg,
Cinnamon, silks, tea, cotton, coffee, and so on”,
Instead a typical information plaque in Nailsworth:
‘Gigg is so small and tucked away that it is hard to imagine that it was once the generator of great wealth. In the 1790s John Remmington bought it and other mills. From the profits he added a sumptuous wing to his house up the hill at Barton End. His cloth was bought by the East India Company for sale to China.
An entry in the Company books briefly records the final settlement
after his retirement:
December 1811 Broadcloth J Rimmington £180

But our conclusion acknowledges a different final settlement:
These cottages clambering up the Cotswold hillsides, this Golden Valley harmony of water, wood and stone is derived, in some degree, from war,
slavery, racism, opium and imperialism.

We have written before of Raphael Samuel’s point that Heritage and Tradition can too easily morph into ‘an expressive totality … projecting a unified set of meanings which are impervious to challenge … a fixed narrative which allows neither subtext nor counter-readings’; but, ‘History is an allegorical as well as … a mimetic art … like allegorists, historians are adept at discovering a hidden or half-hidden order. We find occult meanings in apparently simple truths.’

Stroud and a Hidden Colonial Landscape Number 5

Stroud and strouds and the Atlantic Archipelago

Updated: Jul 5

From Stroud to Strouds:
The Hidden History of a British Fur Trade Textile
Cory Wilmott
Textile History Journal November 2005
These rough notes are derived from this article and this section of the article is derived from Samuel Rudder, 1779.
Stroud scarlet’s ‘inland trade’ also included cloth sold to merchants who sold the cloth to ‘our colonies and other foreign markets’.
These merchants included those in London and Bristol.
Cloth also clad the British army and was also sold to the East India Company.
Questions derived from reading this article:
1. The article focusses upon the fur trade. But if we go beyond the confines of this article and think. Cloth went to ‘our colonies’. London and Bristol were the chief slaving ports involved in the triangular trade in southern England.
2. It would be counter-intuitive to think Stroud cloth wasn’t involved with the slave trade.
3. Turnpike to Bristol? Colin Maggs in The Nailsworth and Stroud Branch: ‘…cloth manufacturers found their trade hampered by the high cost of road transport to ships at Gloucester and Bristol. It is recorded that in 1763 Daniel Ballard ran stage waggons to both these ports’.
4. Stroudwater Navigation to the Severn and thence to Bristol? Thames & Severn Canal and then the Thames to London?
5. We need empirically minded historians with the time to research the unique archive of the Stroudwater Navigation. See the prose-poem below:

Stroud and strouds and the Atlantic Archipelago

Updated: Jul 5

From Stroud to Strouds:
The Hidden History of a British Fur Trade Textile
Cory Wilmott
Textile History Journal November 2005
These rough notes are derived from this article and this section of the article is derived from Samuel Rudder, 1779.
Stroud scarlet’s ‘inland trade’ also included cloth sold to merchants who sold the cloth to ‘our colonies and other foreign markets’.
These merchants included those in London and Bristol.
Cloth also clad the British army and was also sold to the East India Company.
Questions derived from reading this article:
1. The article focusses upon the fur trade. But if we go beyond the confines of this article and think. Cloth went to ‘our colonies’. London and Bristol were the chief slaving ports involved in the triangular trade in southern England.
2. It would be counter-intuitive to think Stroud cloth wasn’t involved with the slave trade.
3. Turnpike to Bristol? Colin Maggs in The Nailsworth and Stroud Branch: ‘…cloth manufacturers found their trade hampered by the high cost of road transport to ships at Gloucester and Bristol. It is recorded that in 1763 Daniel Ballard ran stage waggons to both these ports’.
4. Stroudwater Navigation to the Severn and thence to Bristol? Thames & Severn Canal and then the Thames to London?
5. We need empirically minded historians with the time to research the unique archive of the Stroudwater Navigation. See the prose-poem below:

A cabinet of curiosities,
and an almost infinite, irresistibly unique, archive:
Ledgers and Journals of Imports and Exports
Books of Tonnage at Brimscombe and Wallbridge,
Rent Account Books, Traffic records,
Cash Books and minutes of Arrival
and Dockage and Departure of Vessels,
Correspondence,
Wharf accounts from the Severn to London,
Repair Books and Journals from boat yards,
Memorandum Book, Letter Books, Coal Books,
Workmen’s Ledgers, Poor Rates, Land Tax etc.
Payments received from boat owners for freights:
where from, where to, master’s name, tonnage,
Land and Petty Ledgers, Disbursements, Plans,
The Thames and Severn Canal Plan Book, Maps,
Acts of Parliament, Surveys, Shares, Bye-Laws,
River Thames, Acts and Reports, Lechlade Wharf,
Relationships with the Severn and Wye Railway,
The illusory Thames and Severn Canal,
Local Mills, the Wilts and Berks Canal,
Manchester and Southampton Railway,
Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway,
Swindon and Cheltenham Extension Railway,
The Stroudwater Canal,
Agreements, Deeds,
Shares, Certificates,
Bonds of Indemnity,
Contracts for purchase of land for the Canal Navigation, Debentures,
Acts of Parliament.
A cabinet of curiosities,
and an almost infinite, irresistibly unique, archive …
A democratic and inclusive archive
For academics, scholars, schools, historians,
Story tellers, family historians, and weavers of fables.

Stroud and a Hidden Colonial Landscape Number Four

Decolonising Gloucestershire’s Landscape

Gloucester Docks:
Revealing a hidden Colonial Landscape and Waterscape

It was pouring February rain,
When I visited Gloucester Docks:
The Severn was swollen and turbid,
But the bell of the Atlas was silent
In the strengthening Severn wind;
The Atlas, a voyager to China and India –
For the East India Company,
The plaque told us on the warehouse wall –
But no mention of slavery, war or opium
(Standard East India Company practice),
Or the Stroudwater-East India Company nexus;

The Maritime Walk, as it is termed,
Takes you on past Phillpott’s Warehouse,
And the unmentioned Thomas Phillpotts:
Owner of some seven hundred enslaved people,
Nearly three hundred of whom were shared ‘investments’
With Samuel Baker of Bakers Quay fame;
Samuel Baker of Lypiatt Park, near Stroud,
Paid £7,990 compensation
For 410 slaves in Jamaica.

The compensation paid to slave owners in 1834,
Is close to £17 billion in today’s values,
Fully forty per cent of the national budget back then,
The interest on which we have only just ceased paying –
This gives a hint to the bounty paid to Baker and Phillpotts,
A bounty that led to the development
of Baker’s Quay, and High Orchard,
The locus of Gloucester’s industrial revolution;

Decolonising Gloucestershire’s Landscape

Gloucester Docks:
Revealing a hidden Colonial Landscape and Waterscape

It was pouring February rain,
When I visited Gloucester Docks:
The Severn was swollen and turbid,
But the bell of the Atlas was silent
In the strengthening Severn wind;
The Atlas, a voyager to China and India –
For the East India Company,
The plaque told us on the warehouse wall –
But no mention of slavery, war or opium
(Standard East India Company practice),
Or the Stroudwater-East India Company nexus;

The Maritime Walk, as it is termed,
Takes you on past Phillpott’s Warehouse,
And the unmentioned Thomas Phillpotts:
Owner of some seven hundred enslaved people,
Nearly three hundred of whom were shared ‘investments’
With Samuel Baker of Bakers Quay fame;
Samuel Baker of Lypiatt Park, near Stroud,
Paid £7,990 compensation
For 410 slaves in Jamaica.

The compensation paid to slave owners in 1834,
Is close to £17 billion in today’s values,
Fully forty per cent of the national budget back then,
The interest on which we have only just ceased paying –
This gives a hint to the bounty paid to Baker and Phillpotts,
A bounty that led to the development
of Baker’s Quay, and High Orchard,
The locus of Gloucester’s industrial revolution;

Now Gloucester Quays,
Where modernity and heritage coalesce,
And where plaques abound on warehouse walls,
But where there is no mention of the provenance
Of the money that paid for the initial development,
Where there is no mention
Of a hidden colonial landscape and waterscape.

When I got home, I contacted www.bakersquay.com
(‘Waterside luxury at its best’;
‘Founded on the spirit of affordable luxury’;
‘It is the final piece of the jigsaw in the regeneration of the City’s Docks’),
To ask if it might be possible to put up a plaque,
To remember the source of Baker’s and Phillpott’s money,
And to connect Maritime Walk with the seas of the world,
To reveal a hidden colonial landscape and waterscape,
For that would be a fundamental piece
In the jigsaw of the history of the ‘City’s Docks’,
And only then would the jigsaw be fully complete,
With Maritime Walk and Heritage,
With Maritime Walk and History,
With Maritime Walk and the oceans of the world,
All fully interlocked together,
At Bakers Quay.

No reply.

WALKING THE THAMES TO LONDON #7

Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust

In association with the cyclists’ group from The Prince Albert

Oxford to Abingdon 11 miles

A swollen, turbid, fast flowing river; blackthorn blossom; osiers, rushes and willows half-drowned; many trees down with the recent storms. Flooded mediaeval water meadows; rain at twilight.

I had companions today, including a food bank volunteer for Stroud. Here are some observations from a weekly commitment:

‘Stroud Foodbank has two outlets in Stroud town and a few others in the District. I help run the Nailsworth one. We don’t have much demand, so we don’t have weekly drop-in sessions in a centre. But, of course, there are some individuals in our little town who can benefit from what the Foodbank offers. They can contact the Foodbank office and obtain a voucher through the usual channels, and we arrange a Foodbank delivery to their home.’

‘I volunteer at Stroud Foodbank on Fridays, usually this is the busiest session of the week. We never know who might turn up on the day. We have a wide range of customers. A few we see every now and then who have longer term issues, others are just one-offs, caught out by temporary problems – job losses, benefit delays, health issues, work with unreliable hours etc.’

‘Although we are there mainly to help them with food parcels, we try to engage with our clients on other matters. Our experience is that the local agencies work well together, but we check that our clients haven’t slipped through the net regarding other help that could be out there for them.’

Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust

In association with the cyclists’ group from The Prince Albert

Oxford to Abingdon 11 miles

A swollen, turbid, fast flowing river; blackthorn blossom; osiers, rushes and willows half-drowned; many trees down with the recent storms. Flooded mediaeval water meadows; rain at twilight.

I had companions today, including a food bank volunteer for Stroud. Here are some observations from a weekly commitment:

‘Stroud Foodbank has two outlets in Stroud town and a few others in the District. I help run the Nailsworth one. We don’t have much demand, so we don’t have weekly drop-in sessions in a centre. But, of course, there are some individuals in our little town who can benefit from what the Foodbank offers. They can contact the Foodbank office and obtain a voucher through the usual channels, and we arrange a Foodbank delivery to their home.’

‘I volunteer at Stroud Foodbank on Fridays, usually this is the busiest session of the week. We never know who might turn up on the day. We have a wide range of customers. A few we see every now and then who have longer term issues, others are just one-offs, caught out by temporary problems – job losses, benefit delays, health issues, work with unreliable hours etc.’

‘Although we are there mainly to help them with food parcels, we try to engage with our clients on other matters. Our experience is that the local agencies work well together, but we check that our clients haven’t slipped through the net regarding other help that could be out there for them.’

From our customers.

‘When my husband was made redundant it took a bit of time before the money came through from his new job. We just needed some help to bridge that gap. We were so pleased that the people of Stroud had given so much nice food. And not just food, there was shampoo and toilet rolls too, and a bit of pet food! It made a difficult time for our family a bit easier.’

‘I was a bit scared when I first needed the Foodbank. Going into a room and feeling a bit like a beggar. But the volunteers were so friendly to me. They were kind to me, and made me feel comfortable, before we went through the food parcel. I’m a vegetarian, and they managed to help me, which was great.’

And this from Robin Treefellow:

The Thames
Was a country
thick and fast flowing
through the gizzard of Oxford’s streets.

By canal, over bridge, we tramped after the great swilling of Thames
and the thrashing tail of Cherwell.

The mud ground slipping, the land finding river,
and the geese clamouring ghosts,
honking grey-barred spirits of the Thames:
their wings beat at the air.

Oxford left behind,
the marshy seat of scholars and professors:
all gone.
Oxford with its well-bred students in costly gowns, or panting up and
down the canal to maintain a well-bred outline:
never here.

Here is: Poplar trees, reeds, birch, sedge,
the citizenry of the Thames path,
the river in the thoughts of everything, absorbed, drunk up.

Existence is the river flowing on through the low fields
where I cannot see a tarmac road or a house.
Hinksey, Iffley, Radley: the powers to summon
on this day.

I walked as fish stride,
ahead there’s more water and more water
to welcome us back to the visceral earth.

As ants scream in summer,
as the Thames roars in winter,
as our hearts tremble in our skins.

The path by the river was all the land left
between us and the primordial ordinance of water way
whirling and going on.

Human
not long lasting:
the river is always.

The Thames
completed what I couldn’t.

Treefellow 2020 February