Category: Counter-Heritage

What have Historians enchanted by Roman Britain ever bequeathed to us?

What have historians enchanted by the study of Romano-British

history ever bequeathed to us?
And why have they been enchanted?
I suppose it could be the Stockholm Syndrome,
The affection felt by the captive for the captor sort of thing,
Or perhaps we should call it the St Albans Syndrome,

Or the Verulamium Syndrome …
But there’s so much more, I know,

(Or is there?)

Deference, perhaps, or ‘Borrowed status’,
As the sociologists put it,

The cult of the classics in grammar schools,
The dominance of the English public school;
The cult of the nineteenth century amateur,
Antiquarian and archaeologist,
Often a country curate;

The simultaneous growth of the British Empire,
Parallels drawn with Pax Romana,
And the civilizing mission
Of ‘The White Man’s Burden’;
The tantalizing nature of the evidence
Of the Romano-British centuries:
Tangible yet numinous;

Chance finds as the country was industrialised,
New roads, new footings, foundations and factories,
Those rural curates on new railway lines,
The Ozymandian nature of it all:
‘Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair.’
The M.R. James winter ghost story trope,
The feeling that those twilight Celtic gods
Lie just beyond the veil of imagination.
The way that the history fitted in
With a British jigsaw of stereotypes:
England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland,

What have historians enchanted by the study of Romano-British

history ever bequeathed to us?
And why have they been enchanted?
I suppose it could be the Stockholm Syndrome,
The affection felt by the captive for the captor sort of thing,
Or perhaps we should call it the St Albans Syndrome,

Or the Verulamium Syndrome …
But there’s so much more, I know,

(Or is there?)

Deference, perhaps, or ‘Borrowed status’,
As the sociologists put it,

The cult of the classics in grammar schools,
The dominance of the English public school;
The cult of the nineteenth century amateur,
Antiquarian and archaeologist,
Often a country curate;

The simultaneous growth of the British Empire,
Parallels drawn with Pax Romana,
And the civilizing mission
Of ‘The White Man’s Burden’;
The tantalizing nature of the evidence
Of the Romano-British centuries:
Tangible yet numinous;

Chance finds as the country was industrialised,
New roads, new footings, foundations and factories,
Those rural curates on new railway lines,
The Ozymandian nature of it all:
‘Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair.’
The M.R. James winter ghost story trope,
The feeling that those twilight Celtic gods
Lie just beyond the veil of imagination.
The way that the history fitted in
With a British jigsaw of stereotypes:
England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland,

Some more civilized than the Celtic others.
The serendipitous way chance finds
Both pleased the Church of England,
And the new school of Social Darwinists;
The way the lauding of Roman civilization
Elided bestial bloodshed;
Slavery; hedonistic sexuality;
The way the contemporary class structure
Was equated with the Roman Conquest:
Vulgar plebs and cultured patricians;
Uncouth Britons, barbaric Celts,
A dangerous working class,

An English ruling class that knew its Classics,
And knew how to educate the masses;
And an exception that glorified the rule:
The Westminster statue of Boudicca,
Queen Victoria in all but name,
And more Roman than Briton or Iceni,
For every age rewrites history,
Particularly when the sun
Never set on the British Empire.
UNROMAN BRITAIN
And so,

What have historians enchanted by the study of Romano-British

history ever bequeathed to us?
And why have they been enchanted?

Black People here before the English
He, an Egyptian, an auxiliary;
She, secret- keeper for the Dobunni,
Had arranged to meet by the sacred oak,
Sheltered and hidden from keen Roman eyes
By dense, dark woods of smooth barked beech.
He, a skilled boatman from the River Nile,

And now, deserter from the garrison
At Kingsholm; beaten, whipped, lashed and abused

By officers for drunken amusement,
Found silent sympathy, trust and love
From this mute young woman at the wine shop;
She, like him, violated just for fun
And entertainment – forced to play the fool,
Was also a skilled, rehearsed dissembler,
For inside that apparently dumbstruck
Mind was mysterious Druidic lore,
Hidden safe within a tribal dreamscape.
She, beyond Roman suspicion and law,
Led him by the hand, as the red sun’s rays
Sank behind the high shrine to Mercury;
She, night-navigator of marshland paths,
She, sure-footed through the night-rustling forest;
They, sheltered and sleeping through the daylight hours,
They, slipping unseen past messenger posts,
Up the eastern scarp, then down to the river.
He, Nile-native, expert boatman, stared west
Across the Severn to the Silures –
Their boat eased its way with gentle paddle
Across that broad swathe of dangerous water,
Until exhausted, they breathed freedom.
Three centuries later, loyal-subjects,
Their children’s lineage, dark-skinned Britons,
Were destined to fight for Rome and Glevum
Against Anglo-Saxon invading migrants,
Who steadily renamed the landscape –

But that’s another story.

Woodchester Roman Villa

Per Ardua ad Furniture

The Paris Situationists might have cried:
‘Underneath the pavements, the beach!’,
But the Radical Stroud Situationists
See the pavements rather differently:
‘Underneath the furniture shop floor,

Not just Glevum’s Roman wall,
But also the bastion tower!’

When you walk past the Gloucester Furniture Exhibition Centre,
At the junction of Parliament and Southgate Streets,
Pluck up the courage to ask permission for a viewing,
Or even better, spend some money there,
And remember that, ‘All roads lead to Rome!’
For some nine feet down below ground level,
Beneath the medieval rebuild,
Lies the structure that stretched from the wall
Now displayed outside Boots on Eastgate Street:

Part of the Roman Colonia wall,
From circa AD 97.

It’s a shame that Boots isn’t named Sandals,
But, on the other hand, altera parte,
Perhaps our cry might be,
‘Underneath our Boots, the wall!’
‘Underneath the drawing room furniture,

The drawbridge!’

Being John Thelwall

I first opened the pages of EP Thompson’s
Making of the English Working Class
On my 21st birthday in 1972:
It seemed to sit quite easily along
With the glass bottomed pewter tankard –
A traditional 21st father-son present back then:
Key of the door and welcome at the local too;
The glass bottom so I could see the King’s shilling,
And escape enlistment in some past imperial war –

The tankard now holds used paint brushes in the shed,
But the book sits on my shelf like a Bible:
But it wasn’t just the text that changed my life,
It was the picture on the cover of the labourer,
Foregrounded in late summer contentment,
Basket of blackberries, billy cock hat,
Puffing Billy, Locomotion, or some such,
Steaming and smoking along behind …

Like any sacred text, it is a product of its time,
But today, in 2019, I return to its pages,
Church bells ringing as I sit in the garden,
Hot on the trail of John Thelwall,
Like some government spy, checking the index,
To find, initially, this strange amalgam
Of Foucaultian-Augustan-Post Modernist-self-reflexive text:
Thelwall’s record of his Privy Council interrogation,
In the presence of no lesser personages
Than Prime Minister William Pitt,
The Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor …

I first opened the pages of EP Thompson’s
Making of the English Working Class
On my 21st birthday in 1972:
It seemed to sit quite easily along
With the glass bottomed pewter tankard –
A traditional 21st father-son present back then:
Key of the door and welcome at the local too;
The glass bottom so I could see the King’s shilling,
And escape enlistment in some past imperial war –

The tankard now holds used paint brushes in the shed,
But the book sits on my shelf like a Bible:
But it wasn’t just the text that changed my life,
It was the picture on the cover of the labourer,
Foregrounded in late summer contentment,
Basket of blackberries, billy cock hat,
Puffing Billy, Locomotion, or some such,
Steaming and smoking along behind …

Like any sacred text, it is a product of its time,
But today, in 2019, I return to its pages,
Church bells ringing as I sit in the garden,
Hot on the trail of John Thelwall,
Like some government spy, checking the index,
To find, initially, this strange amalgam
Of Foucaultian-Augustan-Post Modernist-self-reflexive text:
Thelwall’s record of his Privy Council interrogation,
In the presence of no lesser personages
Than Prime Minister William Pitt,
The Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor …

‘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.
PITT. What is it? – What is it? – What? [fiercely] … ‘
The Privy Council’s record differs from the account of Thelwall’s Tribune 4th April 1795:
‘Being asked by the Clerk of the Council how he spelt his Name – Answered: He might spell it according to his own discretion for that he should answer no Questions of any kind …’

‘Whatever’ is what we might say today,
And, whatever, Thelwall was one of a dozen
Sent to the Tower and then Newgate,
With a possible sentence of hanging,
Drawing, beheading and quartering
Waiting in the wings –
And yet, with perfect complacency,
Despite some confinement in the charnel-house,
Citizen John composed a series of reflective lines,
Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate,
This Thelwallian fragment self-limns:
‘Within the Dungeon’s noxious gloom
The Patriot still, with dauntless breast,
The cheerful aspect can assume –
And smile – in conscious Virtue blest!’

The late autumn of 1795
Saw Citizen John’s charismatic command
Of rhetoric in action again,
At Copenhagen Fields, Islington,
This time using his voice rather than pen,
To inspire and enthuse a mass-meeting
Of perhaps 100,000 souls:
‘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.’
Citizen John was at pains to keep matters peaceful,
But he was singled out after subsequent riots
(200,000 in the London streets!
‘Down with Pitt!’ ‘No War!’ ‘No King!’),
The Seditious Meetings Act and the Gagging Act followed,
And a particular and pointed clause,
Allowing the closure of lecture-rooms,
If deemed ‘disorderly houses’ –
This was aimed directly at John Thelwall …

‘The Jacobin fox’ tried to evade the hunt
By using Ancient Rome as a political allegory,
But further persecution followed,
Tribune was closed down and silenced,
Citizen John was assaulted by armed sailors,
When on a lecturing tour in East Anglia …
But who can forget sentences such as:
‘ancient abuses are not by their antiquity converted into virtues’,
Or,
‘Pitt has neglected, and by his wars and consequent taxes,
oppressed the poor, to secure his popularity among the rich’.

He had been singled out with that clause,
For from his quondam lecturing base
At Beaufort Buildings in the Strand,
And from the pages of Tribune,
His lectures fused together
The oral and the textual,
The page and the stage,
In a rather more formal version
Of Thomas Spence’s ‘free and easies’, in some ways –
Thelwall may not have been a Spencean,
But he could assert in the Rights of Nature
That there was more to changing society
Than Tom Paine’s Rights of Man:

‘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 …’

But further persecution, and a blind eye
Turned by JPs to attacks by
‘sailors, armed associates and … dragoons’,
Allied to a well justified and growing paranoia
About spies and informants in coffee house or tavern:
‘Some strange but well-dressed man would seat himself on the opposite side of my box’,
All helped lead Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To accept a visit from ‘intrepid, eloquent, and honest’
John Thelwall, to Nether Stowey,
In the summer of 1797,
‘… it would be sweet
With kindly interchange of mutual aid
To delve our little garden plots, the while
Sweet converse flow’d, suspending oft the arm
And half-driven spade, while, eager, one propounds
And listens one, weighing each pregnant word,
And pondering fit reply …’
(That’s John Thelwall, not Coleridge btw) …

But spies were hotfoot to Nether Stowey too,
Following that ‘little stout man
with dark crop of hair and … white hat’,
And so John Thelwall wrote thus:
‘Ah! let me then, far from stressful scenes of public life …
Ah! let me, far in some sequester’d dell,
Build my low cot! most happy might it prove,
My dear Samuel! near to thine, that I might oft
Share thy sweet concourse, best belov’d of friends’;

But Coleridge, feeling the hot breath of spies,
Wrote thus:
‘at present I see that much evil and little good would result from your settling here’;

Whilst, as for William Wordsworth,
He no longer found it
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven’ …
His views on the French Revolution had shifted:
‘… all was quieted by iron bonds
Of military sway. The shifting aims,
The varied functions and high attributes
Of civil action, yielded to a power
Formal, and odious, and contemptible …’

(Exeat John Thelwall)

Thelwall would visit Stroudwater
On his way to secluded, sequestered Llyswen
Where Wordsworth met Thelwall for the last time,
A meeting that would lead to the description
Of the Solitary in The Excursion –
Some Solitary!
He never forgot his earlier communal self
(This wasn’t some Et Ego in Arcadia oblivion,
He was back in London in the next decade,
Voice and pen well honed for the struggle),
And nor should we,
So we conclude with these lines from Rights of Nature 1796:

‘I adopt the term Jacobinism without hesitation – 1. Because it is fixed upon us, as a stigma, by our enemies … 2. Because though I abhor the sanguinary ferocity of the late Jacobins in France, yet their principles … are the most consonant with my ideas of reason, and the nature of man, of any that I have met with … I use the term Jacobinism simply to indicate a large and comprehensive system of reform, not professing to be built upon the authorities and principles of the Gothic customary.’

‘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.’

Thomas Helliker: the Trowbridge Martyr

Prologue

I have previously only known the name Semington from information boards on the Wiltshire and Berkshire Canal: a junction with the Kennet and Avon Canal. This is how ‘Heritage’ works: it fixes your view on space and time; it gives the past meaning. But ‘Counter-Heritage’ remembers those who are ignored, forgotten or misrepresented. It gives a different and radical meaning to the past.

Act the First

‘The orthography is irrelevant, madam.
Helliker, Hilliker, Hiliker, Elliker,
The spelling matters not a jot, madam,
Illiteracy does not mask identity,
We know who the shearman’s apprentice was
At Mr Nash’s Littleton Mill,
Semington, 22nd July 1802;
He was there in the riot, tumult and arson;
Mr. Heath says he saw Helliker brandish a pistol
And intimidate the loyal night watchman;
Mr. Heath had previous heard Helliker
Offer thanks and gratitude for the wrecking
Of honest men’s machinery and livelihoods;
And did not Mr. Heath identify Helliker
After the miscreant’s arrest in Trowbridge,
Last August the third?’

The Tale of Thomas Helliker – A Tale of Woe and Tragedy – The Trowbridge Martyr

Prologue

I have previously only known the name Semington from information boards on the Wiltshire and Berkshire Canal: a junction with the Kennet and Avon Canal. This is how ‘Heritage’ works: it fixes your view on space and time; it gives the past meaning. But ‘Counter-Heritage’ remembers those who are ignored, forgotten or misrepresented. It gives a different and radical meaning to the past.

Act the First

‘The orthography is irrelevant, madam.
Helliker, Hilliker, Hiliker, Elliker,
The spelling matters not a jot, madam,
Illiteracy does not mask identity,
We know who the shearman’s apprentice was
At Mr Nash’s Littleton Mill,
Semington, 22nd July 1802;
He was there in the riot, tumult and arson;
Mr. Heath says he saw Helliker brandish a pistol
And intimidate the loyal night watchman;
Mr. Heath had previous heard Helliker
Offer thanks and gratitude for the wrecking
Of honest men’s machinery and livelihoods;
And did not Mr. Heath identify Helliker
After the miscreant’s arrest in Trowbridge,
Last August the third?’

Act the Second

‘What say you, madam?
Helliker was the only mill hand there,
Standing in the line for Heath’s inspection,
And so, his identification was
Designed, fore-planned and inevitable?
Shut your calumnious mouth, madam.
You have been reading that wretch William Godwin’s
Scurrilous Caleb Williams, no doubt.’

Act the Third

‘Predictably, the rogue denied the offence,
I correctly and consequently informed him:
“You have been recognised and it will go bad for you.”
I told him to desist pitiful falsehood:
How convenient that he and Joseph Warren
Should inebriately lock themselves in a kitchen
And so not be present on the night of the attack!
What a tale of drunken coincidence!
More far fetched than the travels of Gulliver!’

Act the Fourth

‘Sir, even if you believe the reasons
Why Thomas could not have been present
At the Semington conflagration
To be hyperbolic invention,
He is not the felon with the pistol.
He knows full well who that person was, sir,
But his sense of honour doth mean silence;
Mr. Heath, however, values a reward
Far above any love of honour or truth;
He is the calumniator, sir,
Not Thomas Helliker.’

Act the Fifth

‘He shall be tried in Salisbury City
According to the due process of the law,
And, no doubt, be found accordingly guilty,
And sentenced to death by hanging,
Rather than transportation to Botany Bay,
Or Van Diemen’s Land, though I have no doubt
That many who share his name will make that voyage.’
Signed: Mr. Jones

Act the Sixth

‘The jury deliberated about ten minutes, during which time Helliker was in great agitation. When at length they pronounced him guilty, he appeared as if relieved from a torturing suspense, and to assume a degree of fortitude to encounter his fate and which he retained when the sentence of death was pronounced. He is a good-looking youth, only nineteen years old. He is left for execution.’

Act the Seventh

‘Sir, he was not quite nineteen at his trial.
They hanged him on the day of his nineteenth birthday.,
The 22nd March 1803.
We went to Fisherton Gaol in Salisbury,
To bring his body home to Trowbridge,
To St James’s Churchyard;
All the way over Salisbury Plain we carried him,
That cart was never accompanied
By such solemnity and ceremony, sir,
As on that long, arduous and melancholy journey.
May God have mercy on Thomas’ soul.
And God will.
He is a martyr.
The Trowbridge Martyr.
But Mr. Jones, Mr. Heath, and the judge at Salisbury Assizes,
And the gentlemen of the jury, and the executioner
May not find God so merciful.
God may not bestow his mercy upon their beleaguered souls.
Did you not all think that this good-looking youth
Ill-fitted the description issued by
R. Bowsher, Solicitor of Bath,
August 10th 1802?

Viz: “middle-sized, black eyes, thin face, teeth large in front and wide apart, sharp nose, black hair tied behind and dressed in a blue jacket.”

A description whose provenance lay
In fleeting glimpses of figures rushing
In disguise, through smoke and flame-filled flashes
Of blinding, disconcerting light.
Or a description whose provenance lay
In the realms of an imagination
Curdled by the lure of sovereign reward.’

Act the Eighth

‘Dear Father and Mother and Brothers and Sister and all my Relations, this is my Last Night. In the middle of the Last night I write this letter. Give all my love to my Uncle George – and all the Best of his family and dear Father. I think some have been the Ruin of my Body, but I hope the Lord will save my soul and that they will put up a tomb stone at my grave – to be a warning to All young men. To be a warning against bad Advice, which has been my fate. And for my Brothers to be good to you both, for it is a Bad thing to forget you. When you read this I hope my soul will be At Rest for ever and ever. Remembered me to Mrs. Baily and Mr. Townsend and W Flicker. Dear Father and mother, this give my Brothers Joseph and think of me when he swears and I hope in God it may Do good to him to leave of fear – well for ever and ever yours, Thomas Hiliker
March-21-1803, My Dear Brothers I hope this will Be A warning to you _ consider my untimely Fate Being cut off in the prime of which I hope will be A Warning to All young men like me and for the Love of God Almighty let my fate Be Always in your memory. To think that before I knew what life was, [I] was out of to Everlasting, I hope, happiness. I thank God I find myself very easy in mind and I hope the Lord God will Receive my Soul. So more Remember my Last Fate Thomas Hiliker, March 21st 1803’

Act the Ninth

‘Sacred to the memory of THOMAS HELLIKER. The thread of whose life was cut off in the bloom of youth. He exchanged mortality for immortality March 22 1803 in the 19th year of his life.
The fatal catastrophe which led to this unfortunate event is too awful to describe suffice it to say that he met death with the greatest fortitude and resignation on mind; considering his youth he may be said to have but few equals. He died a true penitent. Being very anxious in his last moments that others might take a timely warning and avoid evil company.
This tomb was erected at his earnest request by the cloth making factories of the counties of York, Wilts, and Somerset as a token of their love to him and veneration for his memory.’

Act the Tenth

‘This tomb was formerly placed over the remains of
Thomas Helliker
At a time of great disturbance throughout the manufacturing towns of this county. He was
condemned for an offence against the law of which he was afterwards believed to be innocent
and determined to die rather than give testimony which would have saved his own life, but
forfeited the lives of others.
Some of the cloth-workers of this town being so desirous to perpetuate the remembrance of such
an heroic act of self sacrifice have restored this memorial in the year of our Lord 1876.’

Act the Eleventh

Thomas’ final letter can be viewed at Trowbridge Museum. It was one of one hundred objects chosen in the BBC-British Museum A History of the World project.

Epilogue

I have previously only known the name Semington from information boards on the Wiltshire and Berkshire Canal: a junction with the Kennet and Avon Canal. This is how ‘Heritage’ works: it fixes your view on space and time; it gives the past meaning. But ‘Counter-Heritage’ remembers those who are ignored, forgotten or misrepresented. It gives a different and radical meaning to the past.

Broadstairs and Charles Dickens: Heritage and Counter-Heritage

‘Charles Dickens never lived here’
Is a standout plaque on a cottage wall,
Down towards the harbour in Broadstairs –
Must take some courage to ironise
The Broadstairs branding of itself …

He first came here in 1837,
The year of Victoria’s accession,
And a year of gathering Chartist momentum,
To lodge in the High Street at number twelve,
To complete the last few monthly numbers
Of Pickwick Papers, and make so much money
That he bought the imposing cliff top house,
Fort House, built some thirty odd years before,
Where he penned his pages of labyrinthine plots,
And Pickwickian old time wistful nostalgia,
And critical observations of modern times:
Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist,
Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop,
Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit,
Dombey and Son, David Copperfield;

‘Charles Dickens never lived here’
Is a standout plaque on a cottage wall,
Down towards the harbour in Broadstairs –
Must take some courage to ironise
The Broadstairs branding of itself …

He first came here in 1837,
The year of Victoria’s accession,
And a year of gathering Chartist momentum,
To lodge in the High Street at number twelve,
To complete the last few monthly numbers
Of Pickwick Papers, and make so much money
That he bought the imposing cliff top house,
Fort House, built some thirty odd years before,
Where he penned his pages of labyrinthine plots,
And Pickwickian old time wistful nostalgia,
And critical observations of modern times:
Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist,
Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop,
Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit,
Dombey and Son, David Copperfield;

Fort House is now named Bleak House:
‘Experience beyond expectations the grandeur and delights
Of Charles Dickens’ former home Bleak House …
Little Dorrit’s Bedroom with king-sized bed,
Charles Dickens suite with private bathroom.
The decadent Copperfield Suite with its luxury bathroom
complete with double bath.
The Nicholas Nickleby three bedroom apartment …’
But despite this kitsch and faux marketing,
It is impossible not to feel a thrill,
Standing beneath windows that jut out to sea,
The ebb and flow of the tide echoing
The scratch of a quill across some parchment,
As Dickens gazed out on a moonlit sea,
Or paused, pen in hand, as a new dawn
Ushered in a new chapter and character,
And some relief, respite and rejuvenation
From all that fervent lucubration:
‘The radiant sails … gliding past the shore,
shining on the far horizon …
the sea is sparkling, heavy, swelling up
with life and beauty, this bright morning’ …

Meanwhile, mythology pervades the town:
‘Happy Birthday Mr. Dickens!
A birthday celebration with a Cream Tea,
Grand Raffle and a performance
by the Dickens Declaimers …’
And then, as it were, Fake Mews (!):
Bill Sykes Cottage, Bumble’s Antiques,
The Old Curiosity Shop cafe,
Dickens Cottage, Barnaby’s Lodge …
But down by the front stands a museum,
Dickens House,
The inspiration for Aunt Betsy Trotwood –
Chasing donkeys – and refuge for Mr. Dick
(On the road to Dover, in the novel),
And the bourne of David Copperfield:
‘” If you please, aunt. I am your nephew.”
“Oh Lord!” said my aunt.
And sat flat down on the garden path.’

Well, what a Dickens of a place Broadstairs is!
And how many places do this sort of thing,
To get the tourists in to spend their money …

Is it any different from our practice
At Radical Stroud, with our stress upon
The recreation of anonymous voices:
Those subject, to the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’?
As we go beyond the empirical,
Beyond the documented,
With our ‘Guerrilla Memorialisation’.

In short,
Is there such a chasm of difference
Between ‘Heritage’ and ‘Counter-Heritage’?

The National Trust, Counter-Heritage and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Heritage and Counter-Heritage: Are They So Very Different?

Two recent visits to ‘historic’ houses and a recent walk have made me question the usual binary opposition of heritage and counter-heritage, and got me thinking that perhaps they lie rather more on a continuum.
A visit to Dennis Severs’ house
https://radicalstroud.co.uk/dennis-severs-house/,
A counter-heritage disenchantment walk https://radicalstroud.co.uk/colonial-countryside-disenchantment/,
and a visit to the National Trust cottage of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Nether Stowey have set me a-thinking.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/coleridge-cottage

It struck me at Nether Stowey, that the National Trust quite-right wish for visitor-enchantment, involved counter-heritage practices too … and if the National Trust does that …

The Coleridges’ Cottage: Samuel and Sara

It sits in Lime Street, Nether Stowey,
Just off the old Minehead turnpike road,
Opposite a pub called the Ancient Mariner:
(The inn sign has no picture, just the words:
THE ANCIENT MARINER in upper case,
With a tiny inset top left: Lyrical Ballads)
The cottage of Samuel Taylor Coleridge –
The home and workplace of Sara Coleridge,
Now a National Trust Museum –
Involves an imaginative re-creation
Of how the cottage might have looked in 1797,
In that year of poetic wonderment;

Heritage and Counter-Heritage: Are They So Very Different?

Two recent visits to ‘historic’ houses and a recent walk have made me question the usual binary opposition of heritage and counter-heritage, and got me thinking that perhaps they lie rather more on a continuum.
A visit to Dennis Severs’ house
https://radicalstroud.co.uk/dennis-severs-house/,
A counter-heritage disenchantment walk https://radicalstroud.co.uk/colonial-countryside-disenchantment/,
and a visit to the National Trust cottage of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Nether Stowey have set me a-thinking.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/coleridge-cottage

It struck me at Nether Stowey, that the National Trust quite-right wish for visitor-enchantment, involved counter-heritage practices too … and if the National Trust does that …

The Coleridges’ Cottage: Samuel and Sara

It sits in Lime Street, Nether Stowey,
Just off the old Minehead turnpike road,
Opposite a pub called the Ancient Mariner:
(The inn sign has no picture, just the words:
THE ANCIENT MARINER in upper case,
With a tiny inset top left: Lyrical Ballads)
The cottage of Samuel Taylor Coleridge –
The home and workplace of Sara Coleridge,
Now a National Trust Museum –
Involves an imaginative re-creation
Of how the cottage might have looked in 1797,
In that year of poetic wonderment;

Volunteers – one in period costume –
Speak with enthusiasm and solicitude,
And this, together with the guidebooks,
The texts on the walls
And the folded messages on the furniture,
Together with the re-created garden
And its lime tree bower fabrication,
All help contribute to a studied wander
Through that year of poetic wonder;
It may not be authentic,
But it’s certainly atmospheric.

The museum, apparently old school,
With the costume and the written texts,
Is, in fact, new wave in its approach to the past,
Going way beyond dusty fly blown empiricism,
And the mice-ridden mildewed damp of 1797,
With imaginative reconstructions and recreations:

The National Trust’s definition of Heritage
Here in Nether Stowey,
Uses the approach of Counter-Heritage:
Heritage and Counter-Heritage
Are not always in binary opposition,
They can be nuanced positions on a spectrum …
One seeking to rescue the ignored poor from
‘The enormous condescension of posterity’-
Those whose lives appear only in the judges’ ledgers,
Those we have to conjure into life and voice
Through historical legerdemain,
The other, the more typical voices and lives
Presented by the National Trust,
Those for whom there is a plenitude
Of documents, ledgers, speeches and artefacts,
But for whom, the Trust might still exhort us,
To ‘Imagine’, with a series of historical conceits …

Seven pages in the guidebook are headed:
Imagine
In italicized font,
Seven pages of Imagination,
Alternating with those of factual description,
And holding their own in moment and status,
Fact and ‘fiction’ conjoined …

Imagine!
Their arrival with their possessions in the cart
On New Year’s Eve, 1796,
Imagine!
Them sitting here, writing here, cooking here,
Entertaining here, discussing here, arguing here,
Thinking here, creating here, imagining here,
Taking tinctures of opium here,
Having visions here,
Child rearing and caring here,
Being spied on by a government agent here,
In that invasion scare year!
Being disturbed by a knock on the door
From a visitor from Porlock here!
Here in these very rooms!
Imagine!
The quill scratching across the parchment!
The guttering candle!
.
‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea…’

‘The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate…’

‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock…’

‘It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me…’

‘Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm’d mine eyes to blindness…’

This experience of enchantment is and isn’t unlike a visit to Dennis Severs’ house in Folgate Street in Spitalfields, where you pass, as it were, into the canvas of a painting for a sensory experience:

‘It’s like History on Acid,
A Raphael Samuel Magical Mystery Tour,
Not Seven Rooms of Gloom,
But ten rooms which haunt and hex:
The dead still alive,
Watching us trip through space and time,’

And as they say at the house:
‘You either see it or you don’t.’

And let’s not forget, that any of our heritage experiences are conditioned by Coleridges’s ‘Playbills’ …

‘Playbills’: ‘announcing each day the performance by his supreme Majesty’s Servants, the Clouds, Waters, Sun, Moon, Stars.’

JANUARY 25 1798
The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seem to cleave asunder, and left her in the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp. Their brightness seemed concentrated (half-moon).
Dorothy Wordsworth

JANUARY 26 1798
Walked upon the hill-tops; followed the sheep tracks till we overlooked the larger coombe. Sat in the sunshine. The distant sheep-bells, the sound of the stream; the woodman winding along the half-marked road with his laden pony; locks of wool still spangled with the dew-drops; the blue-grey sea, shaded with immense masses of cloud, not streaked; the sheep glittering in the sunshine.
Dorothy Wordsworth

FEBRUARY 1 1798
The wind blew so keen in our faces that we felt ourselves inclined to seek the covert of the wood. There we had a warm shelter, gathered a burthen of rotten boughs …The sun shone clear … The trees almost roared, and the ground seemed in motion with the multitudes of dancing leaves …Still the asses pastured in quietness under the hollies … Full moon. She rose in uncommon majesty over the sea, slowly ascending through the clouds. Sat with the window open an hour in the moonlight.
Dorothy Wordsworth

FEBRUARY 3 1798
Gathered sticks in the wood; a perfect stillness. The red-breasts sang upon the leafless boughs. Of a great number of sheep in the field, only one standing. Returned to dinner at five o’clock. The moonlight still and warm as a summer’s night at nine o’clock.
Dorothy Wordsworth

FEBRUARY 14 1798
The young birch trees of a bright red, through which gleams a shade of purple.
Dorothy Wordsworth

FEBRUARY 17 1798
A deep snow upon the ground … We walked through the wood into the Coombe to fetch some eggs. The sun shone bright and clear. A deep stillness in the thickest part of the wood, undisturbed except by the occasional dropping of the snow from the holly boughs; no other sound but that of the water, and the slender notes of a redbreast … the bright green moss was bare at the roots of the trees … The branches of the hollies pendent with their white burden, but still showing their bright red berries, and their glossy green leaves.’

FEBRUARY 22 1798
Coleridge came in the morning to dinner. Wm. and I walked after dinner to Woodlands; the moon and two planets; sharp and frosty. Met a razor-grinder with a soldier’s jacket on, a knapsack upon his back, and a boy to drag his wheel. The sea very black, and making a loud noise as we came through the wood, loud as if disturbed, and the wind was silent.
Dorothy Wordsworth

FEBRUARY 17 1798
The sea like a basin full to the margin; the dark fresh-ploughed fields; the turnips of a lively rough green.
Dorothy Wordsworth

FEBRUARY 27 1798
The sea big and white, swelled to the very shores, but round and high in the middle. Coleridge returned with me, as far as the wood. A very bright moonlight night. Venus almost like another moon.
Dorothy Wordsworth

MARCH 23 1798
Coleridge dined with us. He brought his ballad finished [The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere]. We walked with him to the Miner’s House. A beautiful evening, very starry, the horned moon.
Dorothy Wordsworth

MARCH 24 1798
The spring continues to advance very slowly, no green trees, the hedges leafless … Some brambles I observed today budding afresh … The crooked arm of the old oak tree points upwards to the moon.
Dorothy Wordsworth

APRIL 2 1798
A very high wind. Coleridge came to avoid the smoke; stayed all night. We walked in the wood.
Dorothy Wordsworth

APRIL 6 1798
Walked a short distance up the lesser Coombe, with an intention of going to the source of the brook, but the evening closing in, cold prevented us. The Spring still advancing very slowly. The horse-chestnuts budding, and the hedgerows beginning to look green, but nothing fully expanded.
Dorothy Wordsworth

APRIL 6 1798
Walked to Stowey, a fine air in going, but very hot in returning. The sloe in blossom, the hawthorns green, the larches in the park changed from black to green in two or three days.
Dorothy Wordsworth

APRIL 12 1798
The Spring advances rapidly, multitudes of primroses, dog-violets, periwinkles, stitchwort.
Dorothy Wordsworth

‘Playbills’: ‘announcing each day the performance by his supreme Majesty’s Servants, the Clouds, Waters, Sun, Moon, Stars.’

‘You either see it, or you don’t.’

A Nine Mile May-time Walk around Nailsworth

With thanks to Bob Fry for the prologue and Robin Treefellow for his stream of consciousness imagery.

Dusty spikes of blue Bugle
Sanicle.
Yellow Archangel.
Hemlock Water Dropwort.
White Deadnettle.
Cow Parsley and May Blossom, shining white in the green hedgerows, everywhere.
Early swallows skimming the air above the buttercup meadows (where Robin recited his poems)

*

The Dream of Nailsworth

The waters’ intonation
washed in Nailsworth.

Before the cloth mills,
before the cars brought their disquiet
the waters sang among alders.

The world was a flicker of a fish
hiding from the heron.
Nailsworth knew nothing of Egypt’s pyramids
or the fall of Carthage.

Softly persisting to go where its water went,
Nailsworth bred dreams and spawned thousands of little worlds in marshy meadows.

With thanks to Bob Fry for the prologue and Robin Treefellow for his stream of consciousness imagery.

Dusty spikes of blue Bugle
Sanicle.
Yellow Archangel.
Hemlock Water Dropwort.
White Deadnettle.
Cow Parsley and May Blossom, shining white in the green hedgerows, everywhere.
Early swallows skimming the air above the buttercup meadows (where Robin recited his poems)

*

The Dream of Nailsworth

The waters’ intonation
washed in Nailsworth.

Before the cloth mills,
before the cars brought their disquiet
the waters sang among alders.

The world was a flicker of a fish
hiding from the heron.
Nailsworth knew nothing of Egypt’s pyramids
or the fall of Carthage.

Softly persisting to go where its water went,
Nailsworth bred dreams and spawned thousands of little worlds in marshy meadows.

A lush sap soaked mind prevailed
as Nailsworth wrapped woods about its hills,
it was all you could hear: the pulse of sap to water to sap.
Rolling inward like a vortex
drawing a secret power.

Unknown to the world
Nailsworth in its valley
singing other times.
Flashing dragonflies,
coughing deer,
the animals are gods in Nailsworth’s bosky gospel.

 

Nailsworth

Where is the nail?

In the bend about water running

going up the boggled lane

through the settled crease of one cottage

a throw of luck stone

towards the moon’s dying corner

where is the nail?

in places snickering with froxsome springs

where delving badgers are between

the meadows once here with roots under gone
to weaving whereabouts to dreams in soil deep

of worms singing to butter tub moons

I know by irksome way and fiddly path

the nail is here.

there in the creak croak of fulling mill,
rumbling wheel rolling water

the clatter whack of loom frame in a damp walled hug slope cottage

in crying out owls from mouldy heart ash trees

by slippery sliding road ice

the nail is here.

Jingling in pennies and knotted in travellers joy.

in the places, the lostings and found things, today and yesterday,
moon lamped and in the going, the staying.

the nail is what put it together.

the nail is what had the cockerels crowing.

(Robin Treefellow)

The Famous Five, Windrush, Walter Tull and Enoch Powell

The Famous Five and Enoch Powell and Walter Tull

What an extraordinary coincidence,
That on the fiftieth anniversary
Of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech,
Our railway stations should be awash
With ‘Five Go on Holiday’ GWR posters;
Four children – well adults really – and a dog,
Escaping to a whitewashed cottage,
In a West Country all white fastness,
Where BBC received pronunciation,
Snobbish condescension,
And lower class deference
Keep everyone in their place,
Abetted by kindly constables on the beat,
Who will willingly tell you the time.

The Famous Five and Enoch Powell and Walter Tull

What an extraordinary coincidence,
That on the fiftieth anniversary
Of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech,
Our railway stations should be awash
With ‘Five Go on Holiday’ GWR posters;
Four children – well adults really – and a dog,
Escaping to a whitewashed cottage,
In a West Country all white fastness,
Where BBC received pronunciation,
Snobbish condescension,
And lower class deference
Keep everyone in their place,
Abetted by kindly constables on the beat,
Who will willingly tell you the time.

And in the real world far away from cliffs and coves,
Far away from picnics, cream cakes and ginger beer:
Youth services, early intervention, Sure Start,
And imaginative initiatives are being cut,
Young men and women are dying in the streets,
Their faces appearing only in a newspaper,
Not on a railway station advertisement
That portrays a holiday westwards
As an escape from the present tense;
And other black faces appear in the newspaper,
The children of the Windrush generation,
Now applying for pensions,
But threatened with deportation,
Even though they have worked hard here all their consequent lives:
What an extraordinary coincidence,
That on the fiftieth anniversary
Of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech,
Our railway stations should be awash
With ‘Five Go on Holiday’ GWR posters –
So let’s hope the new memorialization of Walter Tull,
Professional footballer and the army’s first black officer,
2nd Lieutenant Walter Tull,
Once a printer, grandson of a slave, orphaned son of a joiner,
KIA 25th March 1918, aged 29,
Eulogised by his Commanding Officer,
“The battalion and company have lost a faithful officer
and personally, I have lost a friend”,
And so popular with his men,
That they repeatedly tried to get him back,
As he lay dead in No Mans’ Land,
Let’s hope the new memorialisation of Walter,
Can contribute to the saving of young lives,
And the ending of Windrush heartbreak:

Otherwise his life was lost in vain.

Walter Daniel John Tull (28 April 1888 – 25 March 1918)

‘We are positioned in the knowledge that we are living
in the afterlives of slavery, sitting in the room with history …’

Christina Sharpe In the Wake On Blackness and Being
Duke University Press 2018

Counter-Heritage Weekend Programme

STROUD COUNTER-HERITAGE WEEKEND FEBRUARY 3rd-4th

The Centre for Science and Art,
Lansdowne,
Stroud

SATURDAY
10am Doors open

The following events are timetabled, but there are events running throughout the day. Scroll down until you see the heading

EVENTS RUNNING THROUGHOUT THE DAY

10.30: The People History Forgot to Remember: tour of Stroud cemetery with Angela Findlay, artist & cemetery resident
Using poetry, diary extracts and performance to explore attitudes to death from the 1850s onwards, the hidden symbols used in gravestones, the fate of those deemed ‘paupers’ & workhouse life.

Meeting point: Lower Cemetery Lodge, 114 Bisley Road, GL5 1HG, just inside the gates of the cemetery
Tickets available at location – some parts of the walk are not wheelchair accessible, but many parts are.

STROUD COUNTER-HERITAGE WEEKEND FEBRUARY 3rd-4th

The Centre for Science and Art,
Lansdowne,
Stroud

SATURDAY
10am Doors open

The following events are timetabled, but there are events running throughout the day. Scroll down until you see the heading

EVENTS RUNNING THROUGHOUT THE DAY

10.30: The People History Forgot to Remember: tour of Stroud cemetery with Angela Findlay, artist & cemetery resident
Using poetry, diary extracts and performance to explore attitudes to death from the 1850s onwards, the hidden symbols used in gravestones, the fate of those deemed ‘paupers’ & workhouse life.

Meeting point: Lower Cemetery Lodge, 114 Bisley Road, GL5 1HG, just inside the gates of the cemetery
Tickets available at location – some parts of the walk are not wheelchair accessible, but many parts are.

10.30 The Soldier & the Snaggles: Children’s story time with John Bassett
A lively interactive story-telling session from Spaniel in the Works featuring one of Stroud’s best-loved landmarks.

The Snaggles are coming!! But what is a Snaggle?  How can they beaten? Only the soldier knows how but can he stop them in time?

This lively 30 minute interactive storytelling session for under 7’s explores the five senses using lots of participation including music and dance.    Suitable for everyone, perfect for under 7s.

Location: Centre for Science & Art, Lansdown – Blue Room

11.30 Be a part of the new film Days of Hope: Call for extras

A NEW film telling how a 5000 strong mob descended on Selsley Hill for a mass Chartist rally in 1839 has been awarded funding (with thanks to Stroud Festival)

  • 11.30 Signing the Chartist petition as part of the film
  • 1.30 – 3.30 for the centre filming of petition paragraphs – “Be a part of Days of Hope – the Chartists in Stroud”
  • ALSO SCROLL DOWN TO SEE A CHARTIST WALK FOR THE FILM ON SUNDAY – MEET AT THE CAFÉ ON THE CANAL AT WALLBRIDGE 10a.m.

11.30am Wild Boar Gin Lounge totally preposterous family quiz about Stroud
Do you know your adjustable spanner from your elbow?  Can you name every single one of the 5 valleys? In Spanish? The WBGL ladies will lead you a merry dance with music, history and general knowledge. As well as questions that only children will be able to answer.

Some light-hearted family fun, which promises to be based almost entirely on actual facts. Probably. And wonderful prizes too!

Location: Centre for Science & Art, Lansdowne – Blue Room

12.30 Children’s story time with Tracy Spiers: The tale of Uley Blue
Talented author and illustrator will be reading the wonderful tale of Uley Blue – a little hare with a big imagination who turns a visit to Museum in  the Park into a magical adventure.

Tracy will enchant a family audience with tales of tea with ammonites, riding mammoths across Cainscross roundabout, paintings coming to life, and dancing statues.

Location: Centre for Science & Art, Lansdowne – Blue Room

12.45 Conscientious Objectors WW1 Walk with Jon Seagrave
A short walking tour linking war memorials in town with a presentation about the forgotten history of the area’s conscientious objectors.

Questions to consider: How should this forgotten history remembered? Have you got stories to share?

Accessibility: There are steps up into the church from Lansdowne, but wheelchair users can reach the church via the High Street and the Shambles.

Meet at Centre for Science & Art, Lansdowne

12.45pm – 2.15pm (in Woodchester) Roman Villa walk – Robin Treefellow

A walk to the site of the Orpheus Mosaic & Woodchester Villa along the cycle track (no arduous slopes, a possibility of mud) where Robin will explain what life would have been like in the valleys when it was inhabited with wealthy Roman families.

There were temples to Roman gods perched on top of local hills, and up to a down other villas, which are buried beneath our feet.

Robin will point out areas of historical interest, answer the questions you’ve always wanted answered (What did the Romans ever do for Stroud?) plus there’ll be snacks passed around that would have been typically eaten by wealthy families at the time.

2pm Alice Jolly reads from her new book
Centre for Science & Art, Lansdowne

3pm – 4.30pm The Dangerous Woman of Stroud walk & talk 

Discover the women that helped shape our town, and our political landscape. This gentle stroll around the town centre will touch on some of the key figures, and locations, from the suffrage movement.

Our very own ‘Dangerous Woman’ Margaret Hill will take centre stage!

And of course, your guides Chas Townley and Jacqui Stearn will be on hand to recount key moments in history, answer your questions and encourage you to look at the familiar streets and buildings in a whole new way.

Stroud Alternative Histories – After Dark (Not recommended for children under 14 – parental discretion advised.)

7pm – 1am – Jonny Fluffypunk MC’s our after dark activities – Not recommended for children under 14 – parental discretion advised.

7.45 Uta Baldauf – counter heritage poetry performance 

8.30 Little Metropolis Adam Horovitz and Joe Reeve

9.45 Muddy Summers & the DFWs

11 – 1 Ben Vacara & Mr Mulatto of Situation Sounds 

EVENTS RUNNING THROUGHOUT THE DAY

Deborah Roberts & Stuart Butler – A People’s Museum – Blue Room – How to make your own museum – Collect fun counter-heritage tasks for the streets of Stroud

Jonny Fluffy Punk – An alternative memory map 

Wild Boar Gin Lounge Presents: Alternative Family Fun

    • Colouring and family quizzes throughout the day
    • Dress up as a suffragette and have your photo taken (male or female)
    • Family friendly treasure hunt and selfie tour of Stroud
    • Games of “consequences” about Stroud
    • Films of raves, protest etc of Stroud
    • Prizes for all the above will be a lucky dip.

Blue Room (1st floor) Centre for Science & Art, Lansdowne

Tickets available from the Centre for Science & Art, Lansdowne

Sunday 4th February 

A two to three hour performative Chartist walk to Selsley Common, meeting at the Lock-keeper’s Café at Wallbridge at 10 o’clock. The walk will be filmed for the Days of Hope Chartist film.

Counter-Heritage

People’s Heritage

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD
Introduction and Explanation

We are all used to blue plaque heritage for the rich and famous, but this is a day for the chip plate ordinary people.
Collect a People’s Heritage Card and complete your People’s Heritage Task. Take pictures! Write up an account in any genre!

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER ONE

A suburban home means as much a stately home, so …

Put posters in your window: “EVERY HOME A HERITAGE SITE’,
Invite people around and give them a guided tour –
You could even issue tickets and rope off PRIVATE AREAS.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWO

Leave counter-heritage notes in envelopes addressed to HERITAGE: THE TRUTH and insert them in the gaps between official plaques and the surfaces to which the plaques are attached,
For example:
the Black Boy clock in Nelson Street needs a different contextualization, one which foregrounds slavery,
rather than a clock.

People’s Heritage

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD
Introduction and Explanation

We are all used to blue plaque heritage for the rich and famous, but this is a day for the chip plate ordinary people.
Collect a People’s Heritage Card and complete your People’s Heritage Task. Take pictures! Write up an account in any genre!

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER ONE

A suburban home means as much a stately home, so …

Put posters in your window: “EVERY HOME A HERITAGE SITE’,
Invite people around and give them a guided tour –
You could even issue tickets and rope off PRIVATE AREAS.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWO

Leave counter-heritage notes in envelopes addressed to HERITAGE: THE TRUTH and insert them in the gaps between official plaques and the surfaces to which the plaques are attached,
For example:
the Black Boy clock in Nelson Street needs a different contextualization, one which foregrounds slavery,
rather than a clock.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THREE

Walk a thirty metre stretch of hedgerow and estimate its age
(1 species for every 100 years along this 30 metre walk)
Declaim some lines from John Clare about enclosure,
For example:
‘Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky.’

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER FOUR

Visit Hetty Pegler’s Tump (or other such) and stand by the information board.
Think of all the people who questioned why such constructions were necessary,
but were forced to dig and delve and hew.
Make their feelings politely known with pen and paper
and pencil and voice.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER FIVE

Visit buildings associated with slave owners who received compensation for the abolition of slavery in 1834,
For example, the Rev. Joseph Duncan Ostrehan, who owned slaves in Barbados and lived at Sheepscombe Parsonage,
A memorial in the church eulogizes him:
‘In faithfully preaching Christ he gave prominence to the Blessed Truth that His sheep should never perish, neither should any man pluck them out of His hand.’

Make your feelings politely known with pen and paper
and pencil and voice.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER SIX

Hold a ribbon in your hands and stand at the top of the High Street,
Where the street surface is subsiding
as the numerous subterranean springs endlessly flow,
Have a placard: ‘UNDERNEATH THE PAVEMENT THE BEACH:
WELCOME TO THE STROUD BRANCH OF THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL AND THE REASON FOR STROUD’S EXISTENCE AND ITS SUBSIDENCE: SPRINGS’.
Cut the ribbon, remove the placard and re-open the spectacle of normality.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER SEVEN

Look for where ‘the past is poking through’,
For example, the Slad Brook in front of Macdonald’s. Try and make the invisible visible,
Rescue the anonymous poor from
‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ –
Invent people, invent names, invent stories,
Re-imagine the 1825 weavers’ riots.
(For ideas, visit https://radicalstroud.co.uk/these-are-my-memories-of-what-i-saw-and/ )

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER EIGHT

Talk to Mr. Holloway’s statue and ask him why he was so opposed to the socialist co-operative movement if he was such a friend of the working class. You might have to use a megaphone so as to ensure he hears you above the traffic’s din. It gets busy by the railway bridge. The information board reads thus: ‘He was the founder of the mid-Gloucester working men’s Conservative Association Benefit Society and represented this division in Parliament from 1886 to 1892. For nearly forty years he took a leading part in every political and social movement for the welfare of Stroud. This statue was erected by the members of the above society and other admirers MDCCCXCIV’. But you call out from the past with a performative walk using some relevant script from Fair Shares For All. (attached script available.)

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER NINE

Magic small-scale representations of the past in the landscape, with small-scale representations,
For example, take a model train and signal down to the old
Nailsworth branch line,
Take pictures and write a poem.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TEN

Hold show and tell afternoons with tea and scones,
With short talks from exhibitors about their re-creations,
Especially with reference to how passers-by reacted;
Create a shop in your kitchen with pencils, rubbers and fridge magnets for sale.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER ELEVEN

Take photographs of incongruities in the landscape,
Surreal or jarring juxtapositions,
Visual and/or historical oxymorons and/or juxtapositions,
Such as ?

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWELVE

When you are looking for the past poking through,
Look for urban palimpsests,
But transform industrial archaeology into social history,
By leaving invented first person recollections or fabulous but credible statistics,
Declaim and record them as the wind blows cold,
These can be your counter heritage calling cards.
For example,
https://www.facebook.com/100009938981619/videos/pcb.2372736622951837/534860346855260/?type=3&theater

https://www.facebook.com/100009938981619/videos/pcb.2372736622951837/534860333521928/?type=3&theater

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTEEN

Choose an unobtrusive, seemingly mediocre spot, a place with apparently nothing to recommend it,
Reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary,
A William Blake vision of the universe within a drop of water or a grain of sand,
Record and/or photograph and/or write down your thoughts
About this exact spot on the first day of each month throughout the year,
And share your Miniaturist’s Almanack with friends and family
On each successive New Year’s Eve.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER FOURTEEN

Take pre-decimal old money into your favoured public house,
Try to buy beer at old prices but with good humour,
And with clichéd sallies,
Treat the pub as a historical theme park –
Choose a year beforehand,
And conduct all conversation is if it is that year,
For example: ‘The Day when War broke out’.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER FIFTEEN

Conduct a peregrination involving a deconstruction
Of the iconography of pub signs,
You could sketch an alternative one and proffer it to the publican.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER SIXTEEN

You should also ensure that your ramble includes a deconstruction
Of street names: you might want to point at a name such as King Street,
And maintain a street discussion about whether it might be renamed
Citizen Street – draw passers-by into your colloquy,
As you make your pilgrimage around the names of streets.
You might want to take a wax crayon and plain paper and make rubbings for a show and tell
In your own domestic museum.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER SEVENTEEN

Such an urban activity lends itself well to the countryside,
You could informally name footpaths and holloways,
And delicately mark this new nomenclature upon your own OS maps;
You could also create a new space-time matrix by cutting up photocopies of old OS maps,
And sticking them carefully onto a modern map,
So as to create a new utopian world.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER EIGHTEEN

Visit the Oxfam Shop and the bookies in Gloucester Street,
This used to be the Golden Hart – a pub with a bowling green -,
Where Henry Vincent, the charismatic Chartist speaker,
Raised the roof and the masses in 1839,
So stroll into the bookies and mime some bowling of ninepins,
Then collect some betting slips and fill in the Six Points
As the names of your horses in six different races:
Universal Suffrage; Payment of MPs; Equal Electoral Districts; Secret Ballot; Annual Parliaments; Abolition of the Property Qualification for MP.
You might do this just the once.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER NINETEEN

If the television is on, and a period costume drama comes on,
Turn it off,
And visit the Farmers’ Market instead,
Count how many times you hear or see the words ‘artisan’ and ‘artisanal’
Used in an entrepreneurial false consciousness bourgeois sort of way.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY

Take a walk across fields threatened with development on a frosty morning,
Take photographs of your footprints,
Then listen to the drone of the traffic,
Then imagine the sound of clogs, shoes, hooves and bare feet;
Re-create the conversations of past centuries,
By finding wormholes that will transport you through time,
For example, the alleyway in Stroud’s High Street linked to Walker’s Bakery.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY ONE

Stand in front of some CCTV cameras,
Clad in historical costume,
And recreate some famous events from the past,
With a series of historical tableaux.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY TWO

Create your own lexis and vocabulary,
As in Robert Macfarlane,
For example: ‘Severnset’,
A word to describe the sun setting over the Severn,
When viewed from Rodborough Common,
Or ‘frost-furrow’ and ‘rime-ridge’,
To describe the re-appearance of a medieval landscape,
On a winter’s day.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY THREE

Conduct conversations with imagined ghosts whilst out walking,
Or create an Edward Thomas imagined alter ego – ‘The Other’,
And unlike Thomas, who spurned the use a map when out walking,
Photograph a keepsake when you cross those lines on the map:
Eastings and Northings,
Create a miniature museum of these keepsakes pictures.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY FOUR

Rename constellations in the heavens
With names from radical history.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY FIVE

Photocopy banknotes and substitute radical faces for the monarch’s,
Just as Thomas Spence used to create a radical coinage
in the reign of King George the Third,
So you could make wax crayon rubbings of coins,
But replace the circumferential Church and State fidelities,
With radical slogans and assertions.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY SIX

Your house might begin to so overflow with your memorabilia,
That you might feel obliged to designate a room in your home
As ‘The Museum of Counter-Heritage, Counter-Tourism,
And Guerrilla Memorialization’

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY-SEVEN

Visit the Shambles and read the heritage plaque about the food riots. Notice how quickly the text moves so quickly into imperial history.
Look at https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-1766-food-riots-and-the-hangmans-noose/
And write a new information plaque for the Shambles.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY-EIGHT

Visit Bisley church and look at the emigration display just inside, beyond the door. Have a look, also, at https://radicalstroud.co.uk/emigration-from-stroudwater-in-the-1830s-and-40s-prologue/
Try to imagine the scene of melancholy as the carts arrive to take people to Bristol, and thence to NSW. Write a few lines, a poem or haiku.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER TWENTY-NINE

Study these entries about ‘ye black’ of Bisley: https://radicalstroud.co.uk/pre-windrush-gloucestershire-paris/
And then scroll a long way down at https://radicalstroud.co.uk/walking-and-podcasting-the-tempest-sapperton-cirencester-and-walking-practices/
Until you find John Davies again. Write a few lines, a poem or haiku from the viewpoint of ‘John Davies’.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY

Visit the Black boy Clock in Nelson Street; study these BAME Gloucestershire parish register entries: https://radicalstroud.co.uk/pre-windrush-gloucestershire-paris/
And then the story of Thomas Jubiter at https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-last-words-of-thomas-jubiter/
Write a few lines or a poem or haiku so as to recreate the life of a person from the BAME parish register entries.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY-ONE

Visit the Black boy Clock in Nelson Street; study this entry https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-black-boy-clock/
Ponder on forced migration and asylum seeking in the contemporary world – write a few lines or a poem or haiku about this.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY-TWO

Visit the commemorative arch in Paganhill. Take pictures of it and the plaque. Return to the High Street or the farmers’ market and carry out a survey with three questions: What is this? Where is it exactly? Have you been there to visit? Record your findings.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY-THREE

Up to Butterow to the toll house: ‘It stands where the 1825 road crosses the older hillside track from Rodborough to Bagpath’; it was a sweetshop and tobacconist in 1967; ‘Mr Holbrow of Watledge told the writer that his wife’s grandmother, whose family kept the pike, could remember when young seeing the legs of a man hanged on the gallows dangling out of the cart on the way down the hill.’ Take a picture and write a few lines, a poem or haiku contrasting that scene with the one you see today.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY-FOUR

Visit the toll house at Cainscross – there was a riot here in 1734 – “On Sunday night, the 19th June 1734, whilst in a house situate near the turnpike at Cainscross, a tumultuous company of disguised people sounding a horn, and playing a fiddle, and armed with firearms and other weapons, came up to the turnpikes and commenced hewing with axes; and when deponent [William Bennet, innholder] looked out about two hours after, he saw that the turnpikes were utterly demolished.” You might want to recreate this scene through role-play or you might want to take a picture and write a few lines, a poem or haiku contrasting that scene with the one you see today.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY-FIVE

Public hangings used to take place at crossroad gallows. There is no evidence that such hangings took place at Tom Long’s Post – but it can be a haunting spot. Visit the spot after studying https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-1766-food-riots-and-the-hangmans-noose/ Reimagine such a scene. You might want to recreate this scene through role-play or you might want to take a picture and write a few lines, a poem or haiku contrasting that scene with the one you see today.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY-SIX

Walk down an average suburban street in Stroud. Rescue these streets from the condescension of bohemia. Reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary. Capture the pulse and rhythm of the street with picture, prose, poem or haiku.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY-SEVEN

Visit the street called ‘Brimley’ in Leonard Stanley. Find some post-WW2 prefabs. Take a picture and write a few lines about the history and purpose of these prefabs. Recreate that time of shared People’s History’.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY-EIGHT

Visit Minchinhampton Common and Minchinhampton, and https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-1766-food-riots-and-the-hangmans-noose/ Scroll down to read about the advance of the crowd across the common towards Cirencester, and of the fracas in Minchinhampton itself. Reimagine such a scene. You might want to recreate this scene through role-play or you might want to take a picture and write a few lines, a poem or haiku contrasting that scene with the one you see today.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER THIRTY-NINE

Take a walk along the canal near some new buildings, and also visit https://radicalstroud.co.uk/locks-and-crime/ and https://radicalstroud.co.uk/reflections-derived-from-a-reading-on-a-train/ Imagine you are Richard Musto: recreate his mole catching life through role-play or you might want to take a picture and write a few lines, a poem or haiku contrasting that imagined scene with the one you see today. Or discuss why people might have broken canal lock gates and risked transportation. Write a few lines, a poem or haiku. https://radicalstroud.co.uk/spreadsheet-a-chronicle-of-emigration/.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER FORTY

Visit Painswick Beacon and also visit https://radicalstroud.co.uk/painswick-beacon-and-botany-bay/ and also https://radicalstroud.co.uk/spreadsheet-a-chronicle-of-emigration/

Choose one of the emigrants and write a few lines, a poem or haiku.

PEOPLE’S HERITAGE CARD NUMBER FORTY-ONE

Visit Stroud railway station and study the information boards in the forecourt near the taxi rank, on the right as you look at the station. Also look at https://radicalstroud.co.uk/isambard-kingdom-brunel-gwr-and/ Write a few lines, a poem or haiku, about the life of the area when the navvies arrived, from the point of view of a navvy or a resident.

Heritage and Counter-Heritage

Heritage and Counter-Heritage in Stroud and the Five Valleys

The text below is what I think is important when considering SDC’s consultation on Stroud’s ‘Heritage’:

‘I think it is important to reflect on the whole notion of counter-heritage, too. By that, I mean a practice that goes beyond the visible and the archived: following the EP Thompson/Raphael Samuel historiographical process of giving a voice to the forgotten, ignored or marginalised, and not just foregrounding the ‘drum and trumpet’ outlook. Any new heritage strategy should consider this – for example: Stroud’s current heritage boards: the one in the Shambles gives a brief mention to food riots, with no contextualisation and explanation, and then we’re away on the ‘Great Man’ view of the past and naval war.

This counter-heritage should not just be about the lower orders – women and men – of Stroud: the spinners and weavers confronting the march of technology rather than just submitting to it; the Chartists; the poachers; Captain Swing and so on; it should also raise questions about the possible involvement of Stroud scarlet in the slave trade. It is vital that Stroud addresses and presents a multicultural history in the 21st century.

The heritage board near Lechlade, by the canal/Thames interchange at Inglesham , implicitly mentions this – nowhere in Stroud does.

A few slave owners in the district received compensation when slavery was abolished in 1834 – and that injection of capital helped fuel the industrial revolution. The Keynsian multiplier effect from the East India Company – opium, tobacco, slaving – also helped transform our landscape. The Bathurst slavery link also contributed to what is called a ‘colonial countryside’.

Heritage and Counter-Heritage in Stroud and the Five Valleys

The text below is what I think is important when considering SDC’s consultation on Stroud’s ‘Heritage’:

‘I think it is important to reflect on the whole notion of counter-heritage, too. By that, I mean a practice that goes beyond the visible and the archived: following the EP Thompson/Raphael Samuel historiographical process of giving a voice to the forgotten, ignored or marginalised, and not just foregrounding the ‘drum and trumpet’ outlook. Any new heritage strategy should consider this – for example: Stroud’s current heritage boards: the one in the Shambles gives a brief mention to food riots, with no contextualisation and explanation, and then we’re away on the ‘Great Man’ view of the past and naval war.

This counter-heritage should not just be about the lower orders – women and men – of Stroud: the spinners and weavers confronting the march of technology rather than just submitting to it; the Chartists; the poachers; Captain Swing and so on; it should also raise questions about the possible involvement of Stroud scarlet in the slave trade. It is vital that Stroud addresses and presents a multicultural history in the 21st century.

The heritage board near Lechlade, by the canal/Thames interchange at Inglesham , implicitly mentions this – nowhere in Stroud does.

A few slave owners in the district received compensation when slavery was abolished in 1834 – and that injection of capital helped fuel the industrial revolution. The Keynsian multiplier effect from the East India Company – opium, tobacco, slaving – also helped transform our landscape. The Bathurst slavery link also contributed to what is called a ‘colonial countryside’.

Such counter-heritage memorialisation could also be active, with performative walks that deal in ‘bottom up history’ rather than ‘top down’. That looks at the links with the outside world – imperial, military, trade and slavery – in a questioning rather than drum and trumpet manner. This is the sort of history we re-create on radicalstroud. ‘

Apologies for any typos – I found the font size and shading difficult.

The prose-poem below recounts my search for the information board at the Thames-canal confluence at Inglesham:

This Country

I arose like a lion after slumber
After riding on the buses numbered
54 and 77,
On a public transport shanks’ pony
Percy Shelley Lechlade pilgrimage,
Journeying through the country of This Country:
The tragi-comic landscape of the dispossessed,
The alienated, the ignored and/or indulged,
And High Toryism, as well, of course;

I alighted at St Lawrence’s to pay my respects
To the revolutionary atheist,
Then crossed the halfpenny bridge
(Erected in 1792: ominous year!),
Where foot tolls were ended in 1839
(Another ominous year for the ruling class!),
To reach my other goal,
The heritage board at the canal-river confluence,
The one that states that Stroud cloth went to Africa
(With all that that implies),
And was shipped down to Bristol
(With all that that implies),

The following is from the opening scene of Freedom’s Arch, a commission about Stroud’s arch commemorating the abolition of slavery. This 2003 play was performed at Archway.

FREEDOM’S ARCH

SCENE 1 – ship setting; also rolls of cloth/cotton/chains etc

Young slave: Granny Judith said that in Africa, when she was a girl, they had very few pretty things. Then one day some strangers with pale faces came and dropped a small piece of red flannel on the ground. The cloth came from somewhere called Stroud in England. All the black folks grabbed for it. The strangers dropped more and more pieces of the red cloth, leading the whole village down to the riverbank. When they got there, they saw a ship with many more brightly coloured things on the deck. They rushed forward in excitement, but when they turned round, the gate was chained up and they could not get back. That is how Granny Judith said she got to Jamaica. If that’s true, then she was the lucky one; no musket, sword, chains or facemask for her. But I’m speaking nonsense – how can you be lucky when you’re stolen from your homeland in Africa and sold into slavery far across the ocean?

The following is from a contemporary tweet:

Now I grew up all over the place thanks to my dad’s job so I don’t have this fight-or-flight reaction built in but I do have memory triggers
And one of those triggers is red uniform coats. Those are linked to the mass killings in the mango orchard. And very much linked to horror
My grandmother used to sing old folk songs about the horrors inflicted by the ‘red coats’ (PhD idea for an ethnographer/musicologist btw)

The horror referred to involves a series of hangings in the mango orchard. The year was 1857.