Category: Counter-Heritage

The View From The Rock in NYC

The sign said that you could
‘Travel anywhere free in Manhattan for ten dollars’,
The best example of Marcusian unification of opposites,
Marxian false consciousness, and oxymoronic logic
I’ve seen anywhere;
But those advertisements help soften your mind
As a sort of hors d’oeuvre to Times Square,
The Rockefeller Centre, Rockefeller Plaza
And the Rockefeller world synecdoche,
Where the present tense meets Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,
Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984,
Where a cathedral of capitalism,
A tribute to consumption
And a monument to hedonism
Transport and process the market,
Beneath the giant biblical homily:
‘Wisdom and Knowledge are the Stability of thy Times’.

Nature and the world are playgrounds here,
Playgrounds to be conquered:
An ice skating rink, the flags of the world,
Grinning shoppers clutching their bags …
Queues for the Top of the Rock,
Queue for a view,
Where you pay for a view:
A panorama for 30 dollars,
360 degrees for 30 dollars,
The Empire State Building and towering icon upon icon
(But no biblical reference to the Tower of Babel),
Air conditioning – such a term – working everywhere overtime,
Oh look! There’s Central Park,
But too high to see the wood for the trees;
ANY
Point of view,
As long as you pay for it,
As long as it’s filtered
Through the Rockefeller propaganda machine:
You wouldn’t know from your visit
That he was a Social Darwinist,
That his firm Standard Oil,
Was assailed in the courts with anti-trust suits –
Even capitalist ethics questioned his monopolistic practices,
Who would know that Standard Oil
Waged war on trade unions and the Wobblies,
For when you enter the building,
Having been assailed by Disneyfication
Meet and greet performers,
A giant information panel tells us how grateful
A trade union leader was in 1932
For the construction of the building,
It brought work to the poverty stricken victims
Of the Wall Street Crash:
Rockefeller as beneficent philanthropist:
If it wasn’t for the rich, then the poor wouldn’t have any jobs,
This is what my gran used to tell me …
Outside St Patrick’s Cathedral,
Beggars on the streets and on the subway,
An incontinent young man in a wheel chair,
Head bent down,
Travelling God knows where
And for how long past Grand Central –
If you need private health care
Here for your physical health,
What of mental health?
How many mentally ill people did we see in the streets?
Shouting at no one in particular and nothing that made sense,
At crossing ways and subway entrances;
How many did we see aimlessly pushing trolleys,
Laden with black bin bags of clothing looking for a doorway,
Or some warm shelter for the night;
How many homeless did we see queuing for a bed for the night?
Sometimes you have to be in the gutter
To see the wood for the trees,
Rather than on top of the world,
You get false consciousness up there,
It’s a Fairy Tale of New York.

So, will this fog be gone by mid-day? No, I wouldn’t think so. Won’t the sun burn the fog off? Not really. No. 

Off we go. 

Cows, pastures, more cows, and a few sheep later. I’ve enjoyed yet another day of  rainy-day walking in the local area. My guests apologize again for the bad weather but I point out that no weather is bad weather when you’re from Boston, and it’s January. Actually I’m from north of Boston. North enough of Boston to think that fog, rain and temperatures above freezing are considered nice weather. I am talking REALLY enjoyable. There’s no ice underfoot and I can feel my face. To me that’s nice weather for January. 

My first day in Stroud began with a familiar trip, straight up hill to Stroud cemetery, with my furry friend, Hector. I’d been there before of course, but I left the directions up to Hector. Which way Hector, left or right? Hector was giving me definitive answers until I asked him how old the church was. About that he was more unclear, so we both just stood there and stared for a minute. I was rather pleased because Hector seemed to really see that church for the first time, you know. We headed back in through the arch, to find a plaque. Left, no right, left, back out again. Where is the damn plaque? I sensed annoyance from Hector. You Americans! Make up your mind for goodness sake. I need to head home and check my pee mail before the fam gets back. 

No plaque. Seriously Stroud, you need plaques. I know you have just loads of old stuff. But add a plaque for us new-worlders. Please. In America we add plaques to everything that makes it over 100 years. We’re just so excited when that happens. 

Day two. Out to dinner and then a nice walk home. In the dark. The long way around. Wow, those views are just so fantastic at night, and so little fog! A few roads are “murder-her-and-throw-the-body-in-the-woods” dark but that makes the walk more fun. I’m not going to tell anyone how cute Stroud is until I’ve bought myself a little cottage overlooking those twinkling lights of downtown. Then we can post this review and increase house values.

When I wake up my quads are a tiny bit stiff. Last time I felt that was walking the streets of San Francisco. Maybe it was all the walking in heels? I have a suitcase full of shoes but none of them appropriate for Stroud. 

Day three, headed to Cirencester to buy sensible shoes. And a shoebrush for the mud. 

Waiting For A Steed

There aren’t many Americans who can claim they have been to four, yes four events at Chavenage House. I am talking EVENTS – ball gowns, cocktail hour, formal photographs, champagne-swigging events. The whole 9-yards. I have the distinction of being the only American to have that honour. (Write-Ins entries will be accepted.) I keep waiting in the courtyard for the handsome titled Englishman to ride in, but when I wander outside I usually just get asked to have a smoke with the 20-something crowd.

Whenever I go to Chavenage I have the same experience I do when visiting a beautiful old church that has been converted into a restaurant. I wonder if somehow that old structure groans to find itself in this embarrassing position. Like an 80-year-old former high school beauty queen finding herself in the food pantry line, or foodbanks, as you call them in the UK. She had such an auspicious start in life and never pictured ending up in this sorry spot. She just figured her life would stay grand based on her looks alone. But time marches on and sadly enough, keeping up your good looks takes time and money. A facelift only takes you so far. More foundational work must be done.  The modern look changes you somehow and it’s never quite the same. Your value becomes only a link to the past. Stay cheerful, updated, and make money or no one will want you anymore.

Gentle readers may ask why I have been to four events at Chavenage, but just ask around town and someone will point out the traditional 16th century cottage where Hector lives. He has an ordinary family life, other than the blow-out party every five years. Someone’s always getting married or having a birthday worthy of dusting off the formal wear and dance shoes. Our cabby says he takes someone to Chavenage every week, and yet in his confusion we get dropped off at the stables and mistaken for the help. 

Time To Go Home 

I’m sorry. HOW much is a rail ticket to Paddington from Stroud? I blink, staring at the register. It says 101, but surely it must cost more than a pound and a pence. But it wasn’t; it was one hundred and one. I blink again. I’m sorry, don’t you have socialized, subsidized railways? What the hell? I can get into Boston for 15 bucks on the train. It’s how much? Seriously? (Looks like someone’s let the Tories back in.)

I’m sure gentle readers will remember that Monday. You know, the Monday of the tube strike, mud slide, heavy fog at Heathrow, motorcycle accident on the highway? That is how the day of Trains Planes and Automobiles started and before it ended I had a four hour journey to the airport that involved to die version buses, two full pat downs, two, take everything out, luggage searches, and one confiscated cosmetic bag.  Headed for 3 days of New York business meetings without anti-perspirant or make-up. That always impresses the NY business crowd. 20 hours later I land in New York, in eye-tearing cold with only a raincoat. At least I have sensible shoes now.

Has it been 5-years yet? 

Note from the editor:

Many thanks to Mel for penning this – btw, I think Chalford is about 100 miles from Paddington by rail. Mel’s one way ticket would cost her about a £ a mile …

It was the most perfect equinoctial evening,
But with the six o’clock sun in drivers’ eyes,
I decided to walk rather than cycle – for a change,
And chose to walk to Rodborough Church,
Rather than straight up the hill to the common;

I sauntered along Spillmans to reach the church gate,
Where, placed carefully within the clambering ivy,
Was a lost shopping list, a middle class preparation
For a dinner party: precisely categorized calligraphy,
Upper case black ink, detailing the requirements:
APPLES BANANAS TOMATOES AVOCADOS CORIANDER LIMES CELERY SALAD
EGGS BAGELS BREAD WRAPS
COLD CHICKEN MINCE SAUSAGES BACON SMOKED SALMON
YOGHURTS SOUR CREAM then four items I couldn’t read shrouded by the branches and leaves of the ivy (Why didn’t I move the branch? I dunno. I think it’s because it felt as though I were regarding an exhibit in a gallery or museum, or perhaps it was the memory of a Christian upbringing …)
MAGAZINES
KiDNEY BEANS
TINNED TOMS
NACHOS
APRICOTS
then another couple of ivy covered items
FROZEN PEAS

Someone had scrawled across this notelet in blue biro,
Poshy doshy – a young hand, condemnatory and judgmental,
Turning the world of class and deference upside down
In an inter-textual, meta-textual sort of way;
It was though Life itself had become the writer
In this churchyard of embedded narratives;

I felt compelled to record this postmodernist happenstance –
So penned these lines, sitting on a gravestone,
In the evening sunshine, imagining
That I would place the scrap of exercise paper
Next to the shopping list in the ivy;

But when I turned the church’s shadowed corner,
I came across this notice:
This is NOT a rubbish bin. Please take all flower wrappings, pots, wreaths and your graveyard rubbish home with you. Thank you

As Louis Armstrong put it in High Society:
‘End of story.’

THE SPECKLED MONSTER
Born in 1749, Edward Jenner lived
In that time of calendrical change:
A Julian age of Pope and happenstance
(Where African slaves were mocked
For their
Creole medicine and smallpox cures),
And a Gregorian world of
Science, Revolution, Reason and Experimentation
(Of Tyburn Tree skullduggery,
Where even necrophiliac surgeons
Would baulk at payment for smallpox victims),
And walking the enclosed hedgerows, he would
Have heard the shouts and cries:
Pockmarked mechanics and labourers,
Whose right to roam was balked by the new hedges and fences,
Together with the retort of property’s muskets:

Indigent Berkeley labourers,
Forced to poach, where spring guns lay ready
To kill Tom Till, and leave a wife and two children
In a parish of poverty and sorrow:
Even the castle chaplain thought
‘Colonel Berkeley had run the matter of game so hard’.

So it was, that some twenty Berkeley Vale men
Swore revenge, taking a solemn oath
‘Not to peach on each other, so help me God’.
A bloody battle ensued, with death and wounding,
But the cudgel-wielding colonel exacted feudal revenge,
For the jury’s tearful ‘Guilty’ verdict meant transportation,
And execution for two poachers:
‘Launched into the presence of that
Being whose laws they had so impiously outraged’,
As the Gloucester Mercury put it;
Doctor Jenner saw it quite differently:
‘My intention is to quit this place, rendered dreary by the scene …
About to be acted on the horrid platform tomorrow.
They certainly did not go out with the intention to commit murder.’
Colonel Berkeley was reviled, but obdurate to the end,
He hung a painting of the battle in his breakfast room.

But, a careful student of farm and field,
Doctor Edward Jenner saw how the smallpox
Killed one in ten in town and village,
And saw how it disfigured survivors
With blindness and itinerant beggary,
And he studied the epidemic
Of King George’s first strange madness year,
And he listened to the farmyard yarns
Of the protective power of cow-pox, and these
Rustic milkmaid tales convinced this thinker,
That vaccination, as he would call it,
Could save the nation’s health; and in the years
When the “Rights of Man” spread its virus
Through the common swinish multitude
(To the alarm of Pitt’s body politic),
Edward Jenner listened to Sarah Nelmes:
‘My cow Blossom has recently had the cowpox, sir’,
Examined the rash on her hand,
Took cowpox from the dairy,
And gave it to the 8 year old James Phipps,
Who gained, as this iconoclast forecast,
Resistance to the ubiquitous smallpox;
Now, two centuries after such success:

“It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice.”
[Edward Jenner, 1801, on Vaccination (with cowpox)]

Smallpox is secreted in arsenals,
A scientific threat of germ warfare;
How this country doctor and poet,
How this coiner of neologisms,
Would have despised a term like germ warfare:
The Speckled Monster.

We associate Fascism with late nineteenth century ideology,
And twentieth century practice in Europe and South America:
The cult of the leader; control of the media; control of the economy;
The cult of war; of racism; of the survival of the fittest; of the military;
Of masculinity; of femininity; of the corporate state; of the nation state –
And a sort of grainy, generalised One Nation, One People, One Leader sort of thing,
Be it Falangist, Poujadist, Peronist, Allende, Greece, Brazil, Panama,
Hitler, Mussolini, Portugal, et al,
And so on and so on and so on and on and on and on.

Another characteristic of the fascist state is the use of plebiscites and referendums,
State control of the media makes it easy to control the minds of the populace
(Hitler used three),
And didn’t Goebbels say that if you’re going to tell a lie, then tell a big one,
And if you tell it often enough then the people will end up believing it.
When the Daily Mail and Daily Express tried to control Stanley Baldwin
(Just before Hitler destroyed Weimar democracy),
He commented in his characteristically masculine pipe smoking way:
‘What the proprietorship of these newspapers is aiming at is power, but power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’
And now we have had Farage’s Breaking Point poster,
And Arron Banks, multimillionaire UKIP funder, saying,
‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.’
What else?
A Leave.eu Facebook video, visited over a million and a half times,
‘Are you concerned about the amount of crime committed in the UK by foreign nationals?
Isn’t it time to take back control?’
(With mood music suggested by a hypnotist, btw.)
What else?
The 500% increase in hate crimes,
‘The genie let out of the bottle’,
Farage’s comments since the referendum,
About the ordinary decent people fighting a successful war
Against the banks and multinationals
(What’s his ‘job’ again?),
Then his rant at the European Parliament
(He is becoming increasingly bellicose and histrionic, is he not?
Those hand movements, when interviewed,
A subliminal gestural reminder of the Third Reich)),
While Le Pen simpered in admiration:
‘Look how beautiful history is.’

I thought of John Heartfield’s late-Weimar agit-prop,
Showing big business originally pulling Hitler’s strings –
And how we might now have a 21st century variant on the old model of fascism:
One where a liberal-democratic free press all pull the same strings,
All at the same time, all in the same right wing direction,
At the behest of the proprietorship:
A 21st century mass media fascism –
And just as Herbert Marcuse wrote of ‘One Dimensional Man’,
Where liberal-capitalist society gives the illusion of freedom,
So as to maintain and manipulate overall control –
The late 20th century example being ‘Penguin Marxism’,
So we have social media hefts today …

In the twentieth century, fascism used referendums to legitimise decisions:
Fascism was the cause of the referendums;
But what if fascism can now be the consequence of a referendum?
What if Farangism – like Hitler – takes control of the strings?
When negotiations for access to the single market end the street dream,
The street dream of ‘controlling our borders’,
When ‘Stop Immigration, Start Repatriation’
Doesn’t happen,
When anger erupts on the streets …

It won’t be ‘The first time as tragedy,
The second time, as farce’,
It will be a catastrophe –
Farage might have resigned as leader of UKIP,
Farage might have seemed to have gone,
But Faragism is still strong:

A poll shows 16% of Brexiteers supporting repatriation.

I think we are witnessing a peculiarly English/British form of Fascism –
We have the civilised classical Johnsonian face,
The Govian exhortation to ignore the ‘experts’,
The atavistic appeal to emotion,
Farage and his decent, ordinary people
Fighting without bullets against the multinationals,
For a bright new dawn where tomorrow belongs to him,
Together with: ‘F*** Off, Europe, We’re voting out’,
From some England football fans at the Euros;
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail seems back in the 1930s,
When it supported Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts;
Once more, it feels as though the toffs
Are mobilising and diverting the masses,
With carefully fostered nationalism
And carefully calibrated xenophobia;
We have seen how dragon’s teeth have been sown
For over a generation by Conservatives, New Labour,
Liberal Democrats and a relentlessly right wing press:
Now the vilification of ‘socialism’ brings its harvest of hatred:
If the working class has been informed that it mustn’t vote socialist,
Then it votes nationalist and Brexit:

So much for the Third Way.

What next?

Two pieces – firstly a performance piece for Stroud Valley Arts and An Evening with Elvis; secondly a more discursive piece for the page.

A tale of why I loathe Ye Archers
By William Shakespeare

Archers!
Vile Archers!
Noisome effusion of middle England on the airwaves,
Pestilential vapour of Ambridge enclave,
Coddling of the mind so that even a monarchy
Doth seem less imposition and ivy-clad parasite,
But rather more Merrie Englande of fair pageant and heritage –
For if the citizens of this fair land do believe in the fairy tales and fictions
Of Ambridge and Borsetshire,
Then how couldst they reject a monarchy’s addiction?

Our very rulers do tell us that this imagined ruralia
Is ‘the nation’s favourite radio drama’
And ‘the soundtrack of our lives for over six decades’,
But tis infantilising and embarrassing and deceiving:
Forsooth, it once killed off a character because, in real life,
She argued for trade union representation and Equity wage rates,
But it allowed the real Dan and Doris Archer
To go round jollily opening Tory summer fetes,
Forsooth, tis the aural cousin of the Daily Mail,
The Daily Telegraph and the Countryside Alliance:
Our land is now more reactionary than it was before the birth
Of this accursed invention:
Who in their left mind can possibly deny that these two events are causally linked?
There will be no improvement in our real lives
Until we get rid of this excruciating piece of fiction –
Or, until, ye fellow minstrels and troubadours,
My comrades and cooperatives of this fair audience
Verily decide to write our own scripts:
If the tale of Helen’s plight can raise £75,000 for Refuge,
Then verily just think of how we could take control of our whole land and nation
If we take control of The Archers,
And occupy Ambridge.
Ye subjects of the airwaves!
Arise from your slumbers and become free citizens!
Become thee, the scriptwriters!
My esteemed and wondrous audience,
Seize thee the quill!
Overturn the Ambridge Village Fete!
‘Expropriate the expropriators’:
Listeners of Radio 4 unite.
Ye have nothing to lose but your chains on the airwaves of your minds.

Why I Hate The Archers

I hate The Archers
Because the very name is feudal and militaristic:
The massed ranks firing their longbows under the tutelage of King and barons,
This sceptred isle,
An illusion of equality created by a nationalist, Shakespearian trope,
Nomenclature as false consciousness;
I hate The Archers
Because the programme came along in 1951,
When the toffs began to fight back against the new welfare state and nationalisation,
With the familiar complaints about red tape, bureaucrats, loss of competitiveness,
Loss of tradition, loss of individuality, loss of self-reliantly standing on your own two feet:
The Archers’ conception and birth lies firmly within this ideological context –
A deeply reactionary programme that leads the most sane left-wing people
To completely suspend all disbelief, and talk about these characters
And their petty fictional lives ad nauseam and all the time and at the drop of a hat;
I hate The Archers
Because the programme has now risen beyond satire in this deeply reactionary modern age
(With Cameron and country suppers and Chipping Norton and Rebekah Brooks, dogs and horses),
Even though it was parodied, fifty years ago by Tony Hancock,
Guying a nation held in thrall to a fictional world of ruralia –
as though it were a more authentic time and place than the real world,
It’s no wonder then that we have a monarchy when adults believe country fairy tales,
Programmes like The Archers just soften up the populace for the real thing,
It’s like subliminal Goebbels on the BBC.
And I hate the way Middle England reimagines itself in a knowing sort of way,
With a nudge and a wink that we don’t really believe in the cartography of Ambridge:
Borsetshire, Fawcett Magna, Loxley Barrett, Penny Hassett, Manderton Cross et al …
I know Thomas Hardy did the same with Wessex,
But his were tales of the harshness, struggle, and futility of life,
The unrelenting exploitation of poor rural workers, men, women, boys and girls,
As opposed to the cosy fictions of what the BBC calls,
‘The nation’s favourite radio drama’;
It’s infantilising and embarrassing:
Who cares about how Phil Archer proposed to Jill?
Why would anyone in their left mind want to remember
When ‘Jennifer Aldridge learned of Brian’s affair with Siobhan and met their son Ruairi’;
Or recall ‘When Walter Gabriel’s monster marrow, grown for the
Annual Flower and Produce Show, exploded over Tom Forrest’;
Or ruminate over ‘when the Grundys were evicted from their family home, Grange Farm’.
BBC Books tell us that the programme
‘has been the soundtrack of our lives for over six decades’;
It has revered and has been revered by the monarchy,
It killed off a key character because she was pro trade union and Equity,
While Dan and Doris Archer went round jollily opening Tory summer fetes,
It is the aural cousin of the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Countryside Alliance:
Our political, economic and social capitalist system is now more reactionary
Than it was before the Archers’ birth:
Who in their left mind can possibly deny that these two events are causally linked?
There will be no improvement in our real lives until we get rid of this excruciating piece of fiction,
Or until we write our own scripts:
If the tale of Rob and Helen and the story of Helen’s plight can raise £73,000 for Refuge,
Then just think of how we can take control of our nation if we take control of The Archers,
Become the scriptwriters!
Revolutionise the Ambridge Village Fete!
‘Expropriate the expropriators’,
Listeners of Radio 4 unite.
You have nothing to lose but your chains on the airwaves.

When the weather’s against you, you have to explore inside the house:
Psychokitchenography/Mythokitchenography

When you stay in a converted barn worth a million pounds,
A weathered old long red brick structure: The Threshing Barn
(‘Sleeps 12. Large barn conversion, on the edge of the village
overlooking open countryside and Horton Tower,
fitted to a high standard in a contemporary style.
The house has 6 large bedrooms and 4 bathrooms.’),
And your extended family drive out in their cars
To share National Trust membership cards,
You choose to stay to wander the lanes in the high Easter wind,
Passing a newly thatched cottage:
‘R. Hayward and Sons -Thatchers since 1780’ –
And it’s easy, when you return to the empty house,
To imagine the discussions in the winnowing dust
Of the hard, harsh winter of 1830,
Right there in the kitchen where you sit writing these lines,
Listening to the rhythmic thrash of the flails,
Watching the drift of the choking chaff,
Eavesdropping the muffled talk of threshing machines,
The burning of hayricks, the messages passed along the village lanes:

‘Who will write a letter like they have all over Wiltshire?’
‘Let’s ask for eight shillings a week,
And no damn threshing machines to come here.
We can sign it Captain Swing, like the other villages do.’
‘And if farmer won’t pay us, then we’ll damn well burn down his hayricks.’

But other voices speak of the gallows, the gaol, the squire,
The yeomanry, transportation, Van Diemen’s Land …

They eat their bread and cheese,
Smoke their pipes, burn the letter,
And pledge their selves to secrecy.

But

‘Who hath not seen thee oft amid they store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.’

Phil Smith’s On Walking … and Stalking Sebald Axminster: Triarchy Press (2014):

‘Multiplicity is the key mythogeographical principle, the principle of multiplicitous narratives and many histories, disrupting the established narratives not only to introduce subaltern ones, but … to invent our own’.

Uley and Michinhampton Common 1795

(1795 was a key year of national unrest, high food prices, decline in ‘deference’ and anonymous threatening letters)

O remember ye poor in distress by ye high prs of provision if not the consiquens will be fatall to a great many in all parishis round a bout here how do ye think a man can support a famly by a quarter flour for a shillin and here is a man in this parish do say the poore was never beter of as they be now a fatel blow for him and his hous and all his property we have redy 5000 sworn to be true to the last & we have 510000 of ball redy and can have pouder at a word & every think fitin for ye purpose no King but a constitution down down down o fatall dow high caps & proud hats for ever dow down we all.

One of three notes sent to the gentlefolk of Uley in July 1795 – a parish that had seen incendiarism against the houses of master clothiers.

The response was to eventually provide subsidized bread – but the quality was found wanting, and so this message was sent two months later, in mid-September:

The distress of the industerous people through the dearness of provisions calls aloud for an immediate consultation therefore a meeting is desired next Munday morning 21int by nine o clock in the morning on Hampton coman to consult what steps to take for an immediate alteration. Be pld to let more know it further. With it make no delay or else we all must starve immediately.

The response was to put troops on standby – 300 people met on Minchinhampton Common on the afternoon of that day and another, smaller crowd gathered on 5th October.

The next local ruling class response was some detective work in Uley to ascertain who was the author of the anonymous letters – they decided it was an ‘obscure’ local tailor. The JP, the Reverend Baker, and fellow magistrates, thought a warning would suffice, but two other differently lettered, seditious, anonymous notes threatened violence: ‘expect to loase yr heads without any ado’.

In consequence, the magistrates decided to ask the Secretary of State, the Duke of Portland, for advice.

His response?

‘The person in question is in so low a situation of life … that I am inclined to think it may perhaps be the best way of preventing disturbances in future to let him know that the Magistrates are well informed of his attempts & that they have it in contemplation to proceed against him, which may possibly induce him to quit the country …’

E.P.Thompson in his chapter The Crime of Anonymity in Albion’s Fatal Tree shows how this sort of dialogue between the ruling class and the lower orders was part and parcel of the so-called Age of Deference. Gloucestershire was no exception – and just think! How many anonymous threatening letters might have been destroyed at source, or have disappeared, or remained unwritten for lack of materials or courage – or just blew away, or lost legibility, provenance and import in a night of rain?

So just as with Stroud Scarlet and slavery, we might need to go beyond the available evidence:

So how do we create a counter-narrative?
That is,
“A performative counter-narrative, what we might call a ‘guerrilla memory’”,
Or “Lieux de memoire, sites of history, torn away from the moment of history” (Pierre Nora),
Memorialisation that moves beyond ‘obsessional empiricism’
and ‘the fetishisation of surviving historical documents and sources’,
To a counter-heritage, a counter-memorialisation.

O remember ye poor in distress by ye high prs of provision if not the consiquens will be fatall to a great many in all parishis round a bout here how do ye think a man can support a famly by a quarter flour for a shillin and here is a man in this parish do say the poore was never beter of as they be now a fatel blow for him and his hous and all his property we have redy 5000 sworn to be true to the last & we have 510000 of ball redy and can have pouder at a word & every think fitin for ye purpose no King but a constitution down down down o fatall dow high caps & proud hats for ever dow down we all.

How a Cotswold Village Memorialises Itself: Uley

In 1795, anonymous threatening letters were left for gentlemen of the parish,
Sufficiently disturbing for the local JPs to contact London for advice,
And sufficiently noteworthy for inclusion in national historical studies,
So, having done the reading, I decided to hop on the number 35 bus,
The timetable giving me a clear hour’s run before the return to Stroud,
In an attempt to take a few photos of how Uley presents its history
To itself, its residents, plus tourists and visitors.

The Uley Millennium Green notice boards
For People and Nature, And Breathing Spaces,
Make no mention.

There is a brass plaque in The Street:
Uley Community Stores
Officially opened by HRH The Prince of Wales
On the 22nd February 2013;

There is a detailed large map of Uley and Owlpen,
But again, no mention of 1795;

The church has several grand 18th century gravestones,
Master clothiers remembered,
But, alas, no ‘Village-Hampdens’:
‘Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.’