Category: Counter-Heritage

Selsley 1839

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,

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!

The men and women and children,

All marching in an orderly line past our cottage;

Then when we got to Stroud, we couldn’t believe our eyes:

Serpentine lines climbing up every valley side,

There must have been thousands!

All laughing and cheering, but sore determined,

To get our rights and right our wrongs;

Bread has never been so dear and wages are down,

With long hours for those who do have work;

Then there was the Tolpuddle Martyrs,

Then there was the New Poor Law and 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

Sheepscombe, Steanbridge and Slad,

Stroud, Stonehouse, Woodchester, Uley, Wotton,

The Stanleys, Selsley, Cainscross, Minchinhampton, Painswick,

Rodborough, Stonehouse, Randwick, Ruscombe, Bisley,

Nailsworth, Avening and Horsley,

Bussage, Brimscombe and Thrupp;

Bands playing, music flowing, banners billowing:

‘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;

Equal constituencies; 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 cheers for our Chartist leaders’ names,

And then the groans for Russell’s;

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.

What If?

What if the soldiers hadn’t fired

From the shutters of the Westgate Hotel,

But downed their weapons and deserted instead,

To join the ranks of the democrats?

 

What if George Shell hadn’t endured an agonising death

Through three long hours,

But was welcomed into the Hotel instead,

To fraternise with the special constables.

What if Newport had been taken,

The iron works and collieries too,

The canals and tram roads and turnpikes,

In common ownership.

What if the mail hadn’t got through from Newport,

So that Chartists rose from all over England,

In common cause for the Charter,

And the Sacred Month of strikes.

 

What if soldiers in all their barracks and billets,

Refused to move against their comrades,

Disobeyed their officers and orders,

But made common cause instead.

What if the Charter had become law in 1839?

Whatever next?

Just as the world copied the first industrial revolution,

And copied the habits of British capitalism,

So it would have copied the first industrial revolution,

And the manners of British socialism,

The world would have followed the example of British socialism.

That is how important the Newport Rising was:

Ever Remember the 4^th of November

And those anonymous burial plots.

 

So here I am in my front room in Rodborough, Stroud;

I looked out of my front room window,

To look for John Frost’s ghost climbing up Rodborough Hill,

3,000 gathered up there on the common,

Where I so often picture them,

John Frost on the horse drawn cart,

Addressing the crowds.

I took an evening walk to gaze at Sugar Loaf,

Far beyond the silver Severn,

Thinking of Stroud’s Five Valleys,

And the valleys of Newport,

The rush of rivers,

Topography, Industry,

The rush of history …

A few days later at the Chartist Convention:

There we were, like two old Chartists

Plotting in the churchyard at St. Woolas,

John, puffing on a roll up, like it was an old clay pipe,

Me, talking scripts, John Frost, cameras and our film,

Right by the Chartist memorial plaque,

When you, Pat, suddenly appeared, smiling,

With a gift, a volume of Thomas Cooper’s

The Purgatory of Suicides,

Written in prison after the Plug Riots:

Close to a thousand Spenserian stanzas

Of ‘Prison Rhyme’,

Expressing the radicalism

Of ‘The Hungry Forties’

(‘SLAVES, toil no more!’),

Ideas that made Disraeli stop and ponder,

And influenced Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke,

Let alone thousands of Chartists by their firesides.

I was quite overwhelmed –The fading afternoon sun, The memorial, The autumnal leaves,

The setting, The generosity of the gift, The utter unexpectedness of such a gift, The sensitive symbolism of such a gift –Tears welled up in my eyes, And stayed with me though the afternoon twilight.

After I left the Chartist Convention,

I travelled by train under a Hunter’s Moon,

The Severn a floodtide of moonlight,

Wondering whose hands had first opened that book,

Whose fingers had first turned over those pages,

Whose eyes had first scanned the words by candle-light …

Reading aloud and sharing the words,

As I shall do to link space and time:

Newport and Stroud and Past and Present.

The Pubs and Inns of the 1839 Newport Rising

I sing a song of tram-roads, canals, and turnpikes,

A song of collieries, iron works and tin-works,

Of forge and smith and furnace,

Of chapel and beer house and wayside inn,

A song of club and pub and tavern

And working people’s societies,

A song of Union and Prudence and Energy,

Of horns and drums and flag and pennant.

I sing a hymn to all your Chartist Lodges,

And a hymn to all your Chartist pubs:

The Greyhound at Pontilanfraith,

The King Crispin at Brynmawr,

The Prince of Wales, Commercial Street, Newport,

The Star in Dukestown,

The Miners Arms near Nelson,

The Navigation Inn at Crumlin,

The Royal Oak at Blaina,

The Coach and Horses at Blackwood,

The King’s Head at Pontypool,

The Ship and Pilot at Newport,

The Bush Inn, Newport,

The Bristol House, Pontypool,

The Rolling Mill Inn, Blaina,

The Colliers Arms, Llanfabon-Llancaich,

The Colliers Arms, Nelson,

The Globe Inn, Tredegar,

The Horse and Jockey, Dukestown,

The Angel, Maesycwmmer,

The Maypole, Crosspenmaen,

The Boot, betwixt Ystrad Bridge and the Rhymney tram-road,

The Lamb and Flag beer-house at Blackwood,

The Old Bridge, Risca,

The Welsh Oak, Pontymister,

The Welch Oak, on the outskirts of Newport,

The Bush, Nantyglo,

The Six Bells, Stow Hill,

The Red Lion, Tredegar,

The Wyvern Inn, Sirhowy,

The Coach and Horses, Brynithel.

The Waterloo, Newport,

The Royal Oak, Mill Street, Newport,

The Trewythen Arms Hotel, Llanidloes,

The Red Lion, Sirhowy:

This is the song I sing.

Newport and Stroud Conjoined

So here I am in The Prince Albert,

After musing in late afternoon light

In my front room in Coronation Road,

Up the road from the Queen Victoria,

And the Lord John in Russell Street,

Reading a letter to the Home Secretary, Lord John Russell,

from Henry Burgh:

“Rodborough, March 29^th, 1839, 6p.m. My Lord I acknowledge receipt of Your Lordship’s Directions this morning. I have taken measures to have them put into Execution. Some of the Chartists came to Stroud yesterday Evening, and today about quarter past two about 500 marched up Rodborough Hill by my house with 9 Flags and a strange Band of Musick…I have stopped the Beer Shops and Publick Houses…There are several policemen placed…”

Newport’s John Frost was selected as the prospective Chartist candidate for the next election in Stroud at this meeting,

Selected to oppose Stroud’s MP, Lord John Russell, the Home Secretary –

And so, my wandering through time and space

In South Wales –

The pubs, the inns and my imagination,

Had begun in my own front room:

Before I decided to walk up to the Albert,

To look for John Frost’s ghost climbing up Rodborough Hill,

3,000 gathered up there on the common,

Where I so often picture them:

John Frost on the horse drawn cart,

Addressing the crowds,

The People’s Charter within their grasp;

The sun was setting,

My favourite time,

So, I got up out of the chair for a constitutional:

An evening walk to the common,

To gaze at Sugar Loaf,

Seventy miles as the crow flies,

Far beyond the silver Severn,

Thinking of Stroud’s Five Valleys,

And the valleys beyond Newport,

The rush of rivers,

Topography, Industry,

The rush of history …

But the next day took me away from my home,

On holiday to St. David’s,

And here I walked by streams and springs and rivers,

Woodlands, orchards and pastures,

Along the raging sea’s margins,

Across rocks and cliff tops,

By holy wells and cathedral bells,

At autumn twilight time,

With red furnace sunsets,

And burnished cumulus clouds,

Like some fiery iron works in the sky,

With coal black sky-scape splashes

Down there on the far horizon

Of Storm Brian’s maelstrom,

Trying to hear, in the wind,

The footfall of colliers, smiths, foundry-men, furnace-men,

Wheelwrights, carpenters, miners,

Women from the kitchen, laundry, loom and spinning wheel;

Then tracing a finger line on a Newport OS map,

Trying to forage my way through Time,

In search of that dreamscape Silurian Republic.

A week later I scuffed through the fallen leaves,

To catch the train from Stroud to Newport,

White hills west to Wales in the early morning mist,

The first frost of the season:

I arrived in Newport before nine,

Keen to see how the Rising would feature

To the casual passer-by, in the streets,

Going about the business of the day:

I followed my Chartist Heritage Trail map,

Crossed a couple of main roads at pelicans,

Nipped through a car park and was in the centre

In a couple of minutes,

And was straight into the centre of

‘The invention of tradition’:

The Queen’s Hotel, with an imperial Victoria,

Not the young queen of the Rising;

A statue of Sir Charles Morgan of Tredegar Baronet,

A memorial ‘erected AD 1850’,

‘The man whose “benevolence they admired

and whose loss they deplore”’;

Blue plaques from the Newport Civic Trust,

Lauding architecture and design,

But the former Six Bells lies dilapidated and unrecorded,

The only cottages standing on Stow Hill

That witnessed that unique and remarkable march,

Stand mutely and unremarked,

While passers-by in the street of whom I asked directions,

(All generations and backgrounds)

Were mostly unaware of the Six Bells or the workhouse

(‘Oh! I suppose it’s where the hospital is. You’re right!’),

But the memorial at St. Woolos,

Is, of course, deeply moving and arresting,

And, like the sculptures outside the Westgate Hotel

(‘UNION’ ‘PRUDENCE’ ‘ENERGY’),

Is a late twentieth century memorial to the Rising,

Where art and the past and the here and now

Intertwine in serendipitous ways:

The Chartist mural on the hotel front door,

Colourfully recreating the scene of November 1839,

Is ripped by a real security padlock,

Which juts out through the picture,

Keeping the covered boarded up doors beneath,

Safely locked shut against any contemporary George Shells

Seeking ingress by the Vaping Poundland empty shops,

In some sort of indeliberate trompe l’oeil;

Chartist drapes and tapestries fluttered in the wind,

On the side of the Baltica Lounge,

Opposite Argos:

‘GET WHAT YOU WANT TODAY’, ‘WE’RE NEVER FAR AWAY’

‘WE’VE MOVED’

While a solitary dog, tied up in the porch of the hotel,

Provided a mis en scene mirror

To the dog in the mural fleeing the gunfire,

The bloodshed echoed by the ketchup

On the wrappings strewn on the pavement;

Shoppers scurried past, seeking their bargains,

On past the pawnbrokers and BET FRED,

Past the maps of the shops at John Frost Square:

No memory here, nor near his birthplace or draper’s shop,

But back near the Westgate Hotel,

On the hotel side of H. Samuel’s clock,

Time stood still – the clock face lacked its hands –

But pointed the way to beyond the veil:

‘It was said of one man that he lay dying under the portico of the mayor’s house for up to one and a half hours, pleading for help and receiving none. Until the authorities in the Westgate decreed it otherwise, time stood still.’

(David J. V. Jones),

So, I sat down by the banks and the mobile phone shops,

Reading David Jones’ book on the Newport Rising,

Seeing the occasional grandparent stop to point at the mural,

Stop to explain the sculptures to another generation,

On the first day of the half term,

Walked back up past the Pen and Wig,

To study the memorial to the Monmouthshire Regiment,

Heroes of Ypres,

Wondering how many of those men did not have the vote …

And then met Pat, who showed me the milestone in the street:

To Downing Street 145 miles,

And talked of the plans to develop Stow Hill,

With Chartist and Citizenship memorials;

We walked and talked,

Had a cup of tea,

And I returned home on the train,

To scribble up my notes,

And develop my pub pilgrimage ideas

About an Ale Trail Constitutional,

A recreation of a Rising march,

That could have changed the constitution.

Thursday December 17^th saw me back on the GWR,

Rain-streaked carriage windows and leafless trees,

Bedraggled sheep, pasture and hedgerows,

Sodden brown earth ploughed arable fields,

Commuters checking weather reports about Storm Caroline –

But the sun was out when we got to Newport,

Sheets and towels billowing on the line

In the back gardens of the terraced streets;

I caught the X24 to Pontypool,

Drivers bending the rules and not charging me:

‘It’s an English pass. We’re supposed to charge.

But no worries mate. On you get.’

Young men behind me discussing drugs, prison,

Rehabilitation and Universal Credit,

And avidly reading books too:
‘There’s worse hobbies innit?’

I made my way to the excellent museum

(‘We have papers in our archive library showing that the Kings Head was in Crane Street; unfortunately it was not possible to pin-point the exact location. Trade directories merely indicate Crane Street, with no indentifying number. The Kings Head disappears completely from the Trade Directories in the 1870w’)

Just down from the UKIP offices –

‘I didn’t know we had a museum in Pontypool.’

And if those young men didn’t know of the museum,

Then how difficult it is to create for them

A parallel Chartist universe

Of rain-swept men marching through the night,

Through what is now a present tense landscape

Of roundabouts, dual carriageways,

Traffic jams, queues and traffic lights –

This is not a landscape for a pedestrian,

Let alone an ambulant dreamer:

Cars run past the signs tied to the lampposts:

‘NEED WORK? £450!’

This question of how to recreate and present

Our Chartist heritage so as to engage,

Inform, educate and entertain,

Preoccupied me when I returned to Newport,

Walking past the betting shop offering

Forty pounds’ worth of free bets,

Walking past the beggars in the shop doorways,

Walking past the sites of the Chartist ghost pubs,

For Commercial Street is for Christmas presents today,

And the Ghost of Christmas Present,

Not the Ghost of Chartism Past:

The traffic warden issuing tickets

Just near where George Shell fell …

‘”Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.” “Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge. “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again. “And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge.’

 

 

We are planning to hold a ‘Chartist Festival’ on May 17/18 as a fundraiser for the Heavens and the Trinity Rooms.

As many readers know, in 1839, the last armed insurrection on British soil took place: the Newport Rising of 5,000 Chartists, led by John Frost. He had been selected earlier in the year to be the prospective parliamentary candidate for the Chartists in Stroud at a meeting on Rodborough Common.

Each November, a torchlit procession at the cathedral in Newport commemorates the uprising and aftermath.

We in Stroud have done much to commemorate the mass meetings of Chartists in the Stroud area in 1839. There has been a community film. I received a commission from Newport to write a booklet and the textual piece has been performed both in Stroud and in the cathedral and a pub in Newport.

The links do not stop there: the Stroud Red Band were part of the Newport procession in November 2024 – and that visit has led me to the proposal below. A joint fundraiser for the Trinity Rooms and the Heavens.

An exhibition/festival starting with a morning walk to and along Selsley Common to commemorate the May 1839 Chartist meeting held there, attended by 5,000 people. Katie McCue to read up there in situ.

In the afternoon up The Prince Albert: the community film running continuously (people dropping in as and when).

Posters and photographs and words around the walls to contextualise, inform, educate and entertain. The Big Red Band.

An evening performance – poems and song before the main event: The commissioned Newport-Stroud performance piece.

Invitations have been and will be sent out to Newport and Bristol to build further links too.

We imagine, at the moment, that entry will be donations/pay what you can rather than ticketed.

Sunday will  feature Chinese Burn and The Forgetting Curve: both have recorded songs about the Selsley Hill meeting (Chinese Burn in situ) and both will, no doubt, include these in their sets. Their two Chartist songs were based on original Chartist songs and hymns.

More to come as time’s winged chariot does its usual job.

Take a Walk in my Boots

Stroud Walking Football Club

(SWFC)

 

History doesn’t have to be about the great and the famous and the extraordinary. It can be about ordinary people too. For it’s true to say that ordinary lives are extraordinary too: it’s how you look at it – as William Blake said: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.’

Well, at ‘Take a Walk in my Boots’ at Broady’s in the High Street in Stroud, we don’t reveal a life and a history in an hour, but we do something similar in 40 minutes or so per person.

But what is this ‘Take a Walk in my Boots’ of which I speak, I hear you say or think.

The idea is that a member of SWFC takes the stage and a mic with another player who has a mic: one asks the questions and the other answers to reveal the backstory of their life. And what’s so weird and wonderful about that you ask? Hasn’t the format of This is your Life been on television since the distant days of two channels in black & white? Doesn’t contemporary television cosset itself and its viewers with the chat show format?

Well, this is what makes it different: we are a group of some thirty or so people who are all at least fifty; mostly in their sixties, with a smattering of over seventies. And we all play walking football at Stratford Park in Stroud with the Stroud Walking Football Club. This was originally set up to assist people with their mental and physical health – but like Topsy …

Some us play three times a week; some twice and some just the once. Some individuals are connected with others by family, the past and the Venn diagram of seven handshakes, but, in the main, people only know each other through the medium of the football match and a chinwag before and after playing. Thus, knowledge of another player is almost literally and metaphorically skin deep.

We are, in a sense, a company of strangers.

So, opening up about our lives before an audience is revelatory.

When I witnessed the first presentation on November 6^th 2024 from the audience and then when I witnessed the audience from the viewpoint of the questioner, I felt as though I and we were in a Ken Loach film where ‘ordinary’ people do the acting or in a Channel4 documentary of yore. It felt almost like a hyperreality and that was nothing to do with the lager I was sipping. It really was a People’s History William Blake moment: this truly was the much-vaunted beautiful game: but, oh so different from the usual meanings invoked by that trope.

And as I sat there as an interlocutor: listening and questioning and responding and extemporizing, whilst also studying and reacting to the audience, I began to think that this oral and consequently ephemeral personal history should be given some textual permanence. It was too valuable to lose: it was a Blakean moment where a world was seen in a grain of sand.

Hence this piece that you are reading at the moment.

In conclusion, so as to give all of this a bit of intellectual and historiographical heft, a few insights from Jonathan Meades’ An Encyclopaedia of Myself on the subject of memory and recall:

‘Every time I write once upon a time I am, anyway, already exhuming the disputable, conjuring a photocopy of a faded print made from a detrited negative. I am striving to distinguish the original from its replays. So why add to the store of the provisional? The forms and shades of what used to be are already hideously mutable, every act of recall is both an erosion and an augmentation. I remember therefore I reshape.’

My reply to that question: ‘So why add to the store of the provisional?’ is that we are recalling the past collectively and actively in the moment. This is no archival studious exploration in some candle-lit garret. This is individual recall as a collective experience. It’s epiphanic. It’s hyperreality.

In Broady’s. In the High Street. In Stroud. On a Wednesday night.

And as Raphael Samuel put it in Theatres of Memory Past and Present in Contemporary Culture,

‘…history is not the prerogative of the historian, nor even, as postmodernism contends, a historian’s “invention”. It is rather, a social form of knowledge…’

Penultimately, here’s Hilary Mantel on that hoary old chestnut, ‘What is History?’ ‘… history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.’

Finally. William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It is not even past yet.”

So, take a walk in our boots and see what happens.