Category: Counter-Heritage

Stroud Farmers’ Market: Ealing Studios

The script seemingly comes from the Ealing Studios, late 1940s or early 50s.
Over there, I can see the ‘little man’, or woman, personifying good old fashioned English virtues of independence, self-reliance and a love of the community. Oh look! Here comes the other stock in trade of this genre; it’s the overbearing council with its overweening bureaucracy and overly obedient devotion to modernity. This is Ealing Studios land: ‘Passport to Pimlico’ or ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’.
Who can forget Mrs. Pemberton’s lines in ‘Passport to Pimlico’?
“We’ve always been English and we’ll always be English; and it’s precisely because we are English that we’re sticking up for our right to be Burgundians!” Good old Betty Warren.
In the context of Stroud, the lines should probably be thus, however: “We’ve always been English and we’ll always be English; and it’s precisely because we are English that we’re sticking up for our right to be Gerbians!” Good old Gerb. Good old Stroud.
As for ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’, who can forget the Reverend Weech’s and Squire Gordon Chesterford’s famous dialogue?
RW: ‘They can’t close our line. It’s unthinkable.’
SGC: ‘What about the old Canterbury-Whitstable Line? They closed that down.’
RW: ‘Perhaps there were not men of sufficient faith in Canterbury.’

Well, there are certainly sufficient women and men of sufficient faith in Stroud.
So let’s hope for farce not tragedy in Stroud.
We want to see ‘Spinach Galore’ and Gerb starring in ‘The Rodborough Hill Mob’, followed by ‘Queue and Buy’, ‘Cabbage Hearts and Carrot Nets’ and ‘The Woman in the Boiler Suit’. We don’t want to see ‘The Market-killers’ at all.
It’s hopeless. Rubbish.

Ye Radicalle Stroudde Disquisitionne on Ye Speeche of Borisse Johnsonne

Boris Johnson’s Margaret Thatcher Lecture, with its implied contempt for people with an IQ of less than 85, and with its explicit patrician contempt for the lower orders, sharply reminded me, when travelling to work on the number 14 bus (now, what did Mrs Thatcher say about people who travelled on buses?), of Edmund Burke’s (in)famous late 18th century speech. Burke, MP for Bristol btw, used this phrase to describe the lower orders: ‘the swinish multitude’. I think you see my point.
Tom Paine was incensed by Burke’s insulting condescension: he feverishly wrote ‘The Rights of Man’ (sic) in reply. The book quickly sold 200,000 copies and, in a country of about 10 million, with an accelerating birth rate and a consequently low average age, and with low levels of literacy, and with a tradition of shared reading and discussion amongst the ‘swinish multitude’, this book was an intimidating red rag to a John Bull. An enormous number of lower class adult swine must have heard about this book and read it too. You didn’t need an IQ of 130 to understand its political analysis.
Who knows how many copies were bought and read in our local area? And who knows how many of our villagers in the Stroud Valleys, with or without second homes, are at the moment chuckling over Boris Johnson’s consummate command of all the arts of rhetoric? Who knows how many are guffawing at a speech that so ably segues from the demotic (‘amigos’) to the recondite and classical? Who knows how many of them know of our earlier radical traditions in the likes of Painswick, Bisley and Minchinhampton?

So, in response to Mr Johnson’s rewriting of recent history, let us go back a bit further in time. We’ll start by remembering the 1658 Quaker burial ground in Painswick: at that time, Quaker beliefs were very close to those of the Levellers and the Diggers. And there was a very sizeable Quaker community in Painswick. A sizeable proportion of the community held beliefs completely at variance with those proclaimed in the Thatcher lecture; short shrift for Boris, therefore, in 17th century Painswick.
Now we’ll skip a couple of centuries and have a look at the Miles Report (1839) on Bisley and Minchinhampton. Erasmus Charlton, Police Serjeant at Hampton, wrote to Wm. Augustus Miles: “The weavers are much distressed; they are wretchedly off in bedding; has seen many cases where the man and his wife and as many as 7 children have slept on straw, laid on the floor with only a torn quilt to cover them…has witnessed very distressing cases; children crying for food, and the parents having neither food nor money in the house…These men have a constant dread of going into the Poor Houses…witness has frequently told them they would be better in the house, and their answer has been “We would sooner starve.”
The Reverend Jeffreys wrote thus about Bisley: “ Beggarly Bisley has long been a proverb, and the improvidence of the people has been as conspicuous in the way they have married young in spite of this, and also the way in which they have kept their children at home hanging on to a miserable and uncertain pittance, in preference to sending them out to work for their bread elsewhere. The way in which parents keep their grown-up children at home to this day is quite vexatious…”
“ In the winter, you must remember the frost hinders their work very much, for they cannot afford fires in their shops and working by candle-light, which they are forced to do for a full six of their sixteen hours…takes a good deal from their earnings.”
”The last few years of extreme distress seemed to have caused an alteration…and many of the young people now go out to service, though not before they were clean starved out.”

I am reading the ghost stories of MR James at the moment on the bus, as the dawn comes up. So many academics, antiquarians and ancient piles are haunted by revenants and ghosts stirred up by research into the past in his tales. Perhaps this forgotten and ignored past will do something similar and haunt the lanes of our villages. The present day is a Shelley ghost-scape: ‘Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know.’
And glancing out of the window, at a late November apology for sunrise:
‘Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’
Posted by Stuart Butler at 11:11

A Stroud Broadsheet

A Stroud Broadsheet

In the year of our Lord, 1649,
England became a republic,
And that word: ‘Commonwealth’,
(‘In the beginning was the Word’)
Another mistaken step on the road
To constitutional monarchy
And parliamentary democracy,
Or so the Whig history books tell us;
That quintessential English evolution,
From King John 1215 Magna Carta,
To Votes for Women in 1928:
A line of presumed continuity,
And peaceful, reforming contiguity;
And even when the history books mention
That un-English word ‘revolution’
With a political denotation,
It is the ‘Glorious Revolution’
Of 1688, which merely guaranteed
A Protestant rather than Catholic monarch.
,
But there is another optic to use
When scrying this Whig history:
See how the possession of property
Was a prerequisite for liberty,
See how the Law was used to impose
The tyranny of wage slavery
On those with no property and liberty,
And all in the name of the Law,
Rather than rack-renting and usury.

Whipping and branding for the motley ranks
Of vagabonds, beggars and tramps
In dear olde Merrie Englande –
‘Kicked to and fro like footballs in the wind’;
Families torn apart by press gangs –
Such ‘Hearts of Oak’ –
‘For who are so free as the sons of the waves’?
Enclosure robbing cottagers and squatters –
‘Without a class of persons willing to work for wages,
How are the comforts and refinements
Of civilised life to be procured?’
And transportation of child paupers to the colonies:
‘Britons never never never shall be slaves’.

The loom. The mill. The factory. The clock.
Clocking in. Clocking out. Wage-slavery.

But we shall rescue this past perspective
‘From the enormous condescension of posterity’,
And instead of kings and queens and admirals:
Robin Hood! Poachers! Smugglers! Dick Turpin!
The gypsy liberty of John Clare’s vision!
Democratic pirate ships! Free Man Friday!
Free-born Forest miners! The Diggers! The Levellers!
Quakers! Stroud hand loom weavers!
Outside the law but not outlaws!

As Gerard Winstanley said in 1649:
‘Quietly enjoy land to work upon,
That everyone may enjoy the benefit of their creation
And eat their bread by the sweat of their brow.’

Shortwood United versus Port Vale: 18th Century Rural Direct Action versus 19th Century Industrial Capitalism

A normal feature of my teenage years
Was hours spent queuing for football tickets,
But this autumn’s trip down memory lane
Was not through Swindon’s red brick terraces,
But up high to bosky, sylvan Shortwood –
With an 1883 OS map for guidance.
Shortwood United versus Port Vale FC,
Handloom weavers and water powered mills
Against the myth of Arnold Bennett’s ‘Five Towns’ –
A forest of giant kilns and chimneys;
Meadowbank, home of Shortwood United,
Against Vale Park, ‘The Wembley of the North’,
Port Vale of the Potteries, Tunstall and Burslem,
A club not named after town or city
Against a club named after a hamlet,
But both part of our working class heritage;
‘The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, all netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the chill blues of the chequered sky. Beauty was achieved, none saw it’;
Bennett also described a ‘Bursley’ match:
‘Around the field was a wide border of infinitesimal hats and pale faces, rising in tiers, and beyond this border, fences, hoardings, chimneys, furnaces, gasometers, telegraph-poles, houses and dead trees.’
How can Shortwood battle against this heritage?
What chance can this quaint Cotswold backwater have?
Well, remember 1766,
When the esteemed Sheriff of Gloucester,
A master-clothier, wrote of that year’s riots,
The locals, he said, had shown ‘wantoness and excess; and in other instances some acts of courage, prudence, justice, and a consistency towards that which they profess to obtain’
(That consistency was affordable food),
and how ‘On Friday last a Mobb was rais’d in these parts by the blowing of Horns &c consisting entirely of the lowest of the people such as weavers, mecanicks, labourers, prentices and boys &c… cutting open Baggs of Flower and giving it & carrying it away.’
What chance can Port Vale stand against such traditions?

Belle Vue Road Lament

An autumnal Edwardian apple tree,
Melancholy remnant of an orchard
And market garden in the centre of town,
Now razed to the ground ready for houses,
Its last crop of ripening apples,
Spread like tears across the sloping hillside.

Hardhats and machines doing their business –
The first steps towards brand new terraces,
While below the surface, badgers in their setts
Sniff an air that is changing faster than the seasons,
And feel a tremor louder than a landslide,
As red brick Stroud moves above their home.

Everyone has to live somewhere, I know,
And this pattern is one that has housed us all,
With Cotswold stone and Stonehouse best red brick,
Stretched across the valleys and the hillsides,
In industrial waves of development,
Now deemed to be postcard picturesque.

But every time we lose that rus in urbe
Green lung, open-space, Stroud-sensation –
Every time we lose some forgotten space,
Some edgeland with a revenant tree-scape
Standing sentinel through the seasons,
Then memory replaces the senses.

This is the paradox of modernity.

Captain Swing and the Stroud Valleys

I’m sitting by the fireside, poking the ashes,
Ghost-thoughts and fears rising with the smoke,
Reawakening all my memories
Of those dark days back in 1830;
They threshed the corn by hand back then,
Flailing in the barn in the winter months,
Until the farmers brought in those damned machines;
What with 7 shillings a week for our wages,
High bread prices and low poor relief,
Then the news of Captain Swing in Wiltshire –
We met in ——— ————‘s cottage in November.
We smashed the damned Horsley machines the next day,
————— left a note by the church door:
‘This is to tell all you gentlemen that if you don’t pull down them infernall machines then we will you damnd dogs. An yew mus rise the marrid mens wages tow and sixpence a day an the single tow shillins or we will burn your hay ricks.
From Swing.’
I lost my nerve and stole back in the night,
To hide that note safe within my bible;
But some of the men went on to Tetbury,
Up through the lanes near the Troubled House Inn.
Lord Sherborne sent in the cavalry,
The men tried to escape across the fields,
But they arrested twenty-three good friends;
That wasn’t the end of it by any means –
There was more trouble then at Cherington,
Tetbury, Chavenage and Beverston;
Poor Elizabeth Parker got seven years:
‘Be d—-d if we don’t go to Beverston to break the machines!’
Is what she cried out and was condemned for;
May all their souls rest in Van Diemen’s land,
And may this letter die with the fire.

We put on our best blouses, aprons and hats

I’ll never forget last Tuesday, even if I live to seventy.
We all woke up so excited, never eaten porridge so fast.
We put on our best blouses, aprons and hats
(We mightn’t have looked as fine as Miss Austen’s ladies,
But it’s not as though they’ve got the vote either),
The men shaved their chins, put on their caps,
Moleskin trousers and fustian waistcoats,
And out we strode into the lane.
Such a sight you never did see!
Hundreds of working men, women and children,
All marching in an orderly line past our cottage,
And serpentine lines climbing up every valley side,
There must have been thousands!
All laughing and cheering, but sore determined,
Determined to get our rights and right our wrongs.
Just think about what’s happened since the last campaign –
High price of bread. Wages down. Short time working.
Long hours for those who have work.
Tolpuddle Martyrs. The Poor Law. The Workhouse.
The Bible tells us to nurture each other in sickness and in health,
But the Workhouse rents us all asunder!
So it was such a joy to see them all,
See them all streaming from Stroud, Woodchester, Uley, Wotton,
The Stanleys, Selsley, Cainscross, Minchinhampton, Painswick,
Rodborough, Stonehouse, Randwick, Ruscombe, Bisley,
Slad, Steanbridge, Nailsworth, Avening, Horsley,
Bands playing, music flowing, banners streaming:
‘ Liberty’; ‘Equal Rights and Equal Laws’;
‘For a Nation to be Free it is Sufficient that She wills it’.
Then the banners from the Working Men’s Associations,
And the Radical Women’s Associations,
Then the handbills and placards listing our six points:
Universal Suffrage; Secret Ballot; Payment of MPs;
Abolition of the property qualification for MPs;
Payment of MPs; Annual Parliaments;
Then the speeches up there on top of the common:
‘We must have the 6 points’;
‘Peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must’;
‘Those damnable Poor Law Bastilles are worse than prisons’;
‘May the Almighty inspire the people with vigour and energy’;
Then the cheers for our Chartist leaders and groans for Russell’s name;
It was such a day and life will never be the same again:
Russell says we do not understand the laws of capital and wages –
But we do my Lord. We do.

Stroud’s Aboriginal Dreaming Songline

On Friday August 2nd, I followed some old holloway from Woodchester into Water Lane, up through shadowed woodland and so to Selsley Common. As we (Walking the Land) climbed the common, we began to wonder if our seemingly modern path could be a continuation of the previous holloway, broken horizontally by the Stroud – Uley road. This led to conjecture: how many of our Stroud Valleys’ tracks and holloways might be part of a prehistoric network, interlinking the barrows on the hilltops and valley sides?
Tim Copeland, in his ‘Archaeological Walking Guide – The Cotswold Way’, writes about ‘the importance of the River Severn in the landscape’, when viewed from the Cotswold Way: ‘The River Severn, the Roman Sabrina, must have been of special mystical significance due to its surge wave or ‘bore’ …the effect on people in the prehistoric past must have been dramatic.’ That’s still the case even today, in some ways.
With so many barrows in our area (‘Neolithic long barrows are a haunting feature of the Cotswold Way. Of the 500 examples in England and Wales there are 200 in the Cotswold/Severn region, of which at least 20 lie along the route of the National Trail or in the parishes alongside it.’), it will be an autumnal delight to take out the OS maps, locate prehistoric sites, and find interconnecting paths. We have a lot of prehistoric sites to interconnect: Randwick, Woodchester, Selsley, Nympsfield, Minchinhampton, Avening, Horsley, King’s Stanley, Leonard Stanley, Uley, and so on.
The long barrow on Selsley Common would seem to be the consequent ideal spot for some mythopoeic musing. The sublimity of the Severn sunset cloudscape; the sweeps of light across ‘the enigmatic shapes of the hills’; the majesty of the Black Mountains – all conspire to shift modern consciousness and take us to another time. And this is where the Aborigines come in.
On the day after our walk the Guardian carried a report from Sydney (Bridey Jabour and agencies) about a mining firm that was guilty of ‘desecrating and damaging an Aboriginal sacred site’ …’estimated to be tens of thousands of years old.’ ‘Community representative Gina Smith said the site was part of a dreaming songline.”Like a railway line, each sacred site represented a different station along the way,” she said.’
Perhaps we have a dreaming songline right on our Cotswold Way doorstep, up there on Selsley Common, or Painswick Beacon or Haresfield.
Imagine.

These are my memories of what I saw and did, together with others in the Stroudwater Valleys in 1825

These are my memories of what I saw and did, together with others in the Stroudwater Valleys in 1825. I know I am supposed to show remorse but I cannot dissemble. I have no remorse. My name is Charlotte Alice Ayliffe Bingham and I am 25 years old.
It was after Eastertide, at the end of April, when we had enough of not having enough. Me and my sisters Sarah and Elisabeth and my mother are spinners. My brothers, Tom and Sam, and my father are weavers. We had been working ever longer time for ever cankered pennies all the year. Something needed doing.
So we laid our shuttles and looms to rest and joined the Stroud Valleys Weavers Union. I straightway joined 50 others at a congregation at Ham Mill. There was 700 of us the next day. We threw the clothier Marling in the brook.
We all joined the next assembly a few days later. 200 of us congregated at Vatch Mills. There were 3,000 of us by the following evening. We baptised more strike breakers and master clothiers’ men in Mr. Holbrow’s fish pond. I won’t name names but the same happened at Woodchester, Minchinhampton, Frogmarsh, Chalford and Bisley. It was all over Stroudwater. The stone masons then joined in. They were angry about the Combination Acts. The carpenters and millwrights joined them too.
So the gentry swore in special constables. Then the Hussars rode in a couple of days later. When we re-congregated they read the Riot Act. So we threw stones at them. They dispersed us with horse and swish of sabre. A friend was arrested for selling ‘The True British Weaver’, so more congregations followed: Break Heart Hill near Dursley, then 3,000 on Stinchcombe and then 6,000 on Selsley.
If anyone broke the strike then we stuck them backwards on a horse and paraded them through the lanes while we all beat pots and pans in a cacophony of rejection. I think they stuck them on beams from looms in Chalford and then pushed them in the canal and brook. They read the Riot Act there too.
We kept it going though. The next big congregation was in Stroud at the end of August. We called for the release of our friends in prison. But that was nothing compared to what was going on in Wotton-under-Edge. The leader of the weavers there mocked the Hussars by calling himself ‘General Wolfe’. He led several congregations in the open air and in the Swann. Then they set cloth and loom beams ablaze. Stones were thrown and windows smashed. The clothiers replied with muskets.
This is my true and faithful account. I cannot dissemble. The Good Book tells us that we should get our bread by the sweat of our brow. We had the sweat but no bread. What could we do?

(As EP Thompson said, it’s all about rescuing people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. Some of my direct ancestors were Ayliffes and Binghams and were handloom weavers and spinners. This imaginary account from an imagined voice is based on sources used by John Loosley in his ”The Stroudwater Riots of 1825”. I also used “Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865” by Urdank.)

Stroud Scarlet

Colouring the Globe Stroud Scarlet Red

 

You can see the strange fruits of slavery
In classical, elegant, Clifton:
All ship-shape and Bristol fashion,
Honey-stone Age of Enlightenment,
Reason, proportion and symmetry –
But not even those straight lines
Can hide the triangles of trafficking,
Empire, expansion and aggrandisement;
And whether trade followed the flag
Or flag followed trade is immaterial
To the story of capital expansion,
In the 18th century’s Grand Tour,
When Britannia Ruled the Waves,
Thanks to press-ganged jolly Jack Tars,
Stroud Scarlet, Uley Blue and Berkeley Yellow.
Watch those explorers canoeing Canada,
Trading Stroud Scarlet with the Iroquois,
When fair exchange was no robbery
For the Hudson Bay Company,
Or for the East India Company too;
See that Stroud Scarlet cloth,
Stretched out on tenterhooks in our fields,
Eventually shipped down to West Africa,
Its folds concealing any human cargo.
Admire General Wolfe and his red coats,
Up there on the steps of Quebec,
A few short years after riding down
Stroud Scarlet weavers in the streets and fields:
“Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves,
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”