Category: Counter-Heritage

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.

‘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’?

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.’

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 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.

Dear Stuart,

MY EARLY YEARS

I was born in Liverpool in 1952. It seems strange looking back but Liverpool was still a bombsite as it was only 7 years after the end of the war. We lived 300 yards from the docks and through a child’s eyes everything seemed to be in black and white. I was the second oldest of 5 children. My mother had her children before she was 21 and we lived in 2 rooms in a privately rented house.
My father was pretty useless and he preferred the company of his mates in the pub and I remember him spending time in prison but my mother told us that he was working in Butlins holiday camp during the periods of his absence.
He was a man that presented as being a good man to the outside world and he would buy anybody a pint and spend hours gambling and living the life of a single man. He had no interest in his children and he chose to spend everything he earned as a plumber on anybody except his family. He had a nickname for all of his children and mine was Gobshite.
Life was pretty tough with no luxuries but it was preferable to when my father was home because of the violence and toxic atmosphere that was around due to his drunken behaviour. On one occasion my father smashed every window in the house during one of his violent episodes and on another occasion he threw an iron fireguard at my mother necessitating her to have stitches in her eye. We were well known to the NSPPC and we were dependent on the Catholic Church for food and clothes.
When I was only 5 years old I had already been identified as a child with problems and I know I started in the infant class late because I was still wetting myself.
An early recollection of school was at the age of 8 or 9 being teased because I was so scruffy and probably smelly due to having no bathroom or parental guidance when it came to personal hygiene.
When I was about 10 there was a school medical for children of that age. I remember sitting in the class being very frightened because I knew that I would have to strip down to my underwear – which I did not have. I told the teacher that I was unwell hoping that she would leave me alone and not send me into the gymnasium with the other children. Eventually my name was called and I started sobbing but the teacher told me I was acting like a cry-baby, and that I had to go. I can’t say exactly what happened next but I know the police took me home because I ran away from the school rather than go into the medical.
When I was 10 I could not read but I knew all the countries in the world that played football by recognising the badges and colour of the shirts the players wore.
On one occasion at school the teacher set up a quiz based on capital cities. The teacher would name a country and ask what the capital was.
I could not write anything down so shouted out the answers. After about 6 or 7 that I got right she called me up to the front of the class and said that I had to shut up and that she did not know how I was doing it but in her opinion I was cheating.
I tried to tell her that I knew the answers because I knew that all the country’s football teams played in the capital city. My older brother by 2 years was a big football fan and he collected football stickers, which is how I knew so much about world football. I remember being incredibly embarrassed and upset that my little bit of glory was being taken away from me and I did not have the emotional maturity to cope.
Looking back as I have done over the years I think that experience led me to becoming disruptive and developing a sarcastic attitude to the teachers and I spent most of my time in class sitting at the back making a nuisance of myself.
When I was 11 I had to sit the 11 plus which was an absolute farce. It was well known that I could not read but I was told to go into the exam room and just put my name on the paper and leave the room if I wanted to. I was reminded not to make any noise when I left because I mustn’t disturb the other children. After I had left the exam room I was told to go to the playing fields and play football until the exams were over.
It was around this time that a letter was sent to my mother that said that I was ESN and that when I went to secondary school I would be in a remedial class. I remember being shocked to the core when I was told that ESN was an abbreviation for Educationally Sub Normal. This really reinforced what I was beginning to suspect that I was different but did not know why.
At the age of 11 both my older brother and I had an early morning milk round from 5am until 7am after which we both went on to do a paper round until 8.30am. This coupled with the home environment was a perfect storm for producing an emotionally wrecked child whose concentration was practically zero and who lived in a world of fear and anxiety.
I can honestly say I can’t remember ever sitting with a teacher and going through ABC or the cat sat on the mat. I guess I must have but all I remember is living in fear that I would get something wrong again. I must have had school reports but I can’t remember ever seeing one or my parents going to parent’s evenings.
The only joy that I can remember as a child was playing football and when I was about 10 I first heard of Bill Shankly, which ignited my love of Liverpool Football Club that has stayed with me throughout my life. At the age of 65 I have seen Liverpool live over 1,000 times and have watched them play in 20 countries.
It was around this time that I started collecting football programmes and because of this I learned some words. I knew that my favourite player was Peter Thompson. For a long time I pronounced his name THompson as I did not know that the H was silent. I found it all so confusing and did not understand about how you put sounds together. I just could not understand the building blocks of how you read and I remember being full of anxiety whenever the class had to be tested on spellings.

SECONDARY SCHOOL EXPERIENCE
My experience of secondary school is difficult to put into words without getting angry and upset. I was an 11 year old whose life at home was pretty sad and I would have hoped that school might have been a respite from that. I can’t imagine what the report from my primary school would have said about me but the bottom line is that I went to secondary school unable to read or write other than to recognise the words Liverpool Football Club.
I was placed in a class call 1P which was supposed to identify you as a boy that would be going on after school days to work in an occupation using your hands i.e. PRACTICAL.
This was great in theory but the missing link was that to do any work in the woodwork department or metal workshop you needed to be able to do some basics maths and English. I was amongst a whole new group of peers who did not know me and teachers who did not have the will or experience to help a child that was so misplaced to be in this environment so once again I just became a nuisance and was seen as a risk to the other boys as I just messed about in these classes.
I did not have the life experience to ask for help, and life in the classroom was a torturous time. I was just crying out for somebody to help me and pick up on my strengths.
If I could get up and work for 3 hours before school and knew every player that had played for Liverpool since the forties why couldn’t somebody find time to treat me as an individual and help me. I wasn’t lazy and my love for Liverpool proved that I could be motivated.
The only time that I can remember getting attention was in an act of rebellion. I painted a red and white hat and scarf on the statue of a Saint that was in the school grounds. This incident was the talk of the school and I remember getting thrashed by the head teacher.
I did enjoy PE and was a pretty good footballer. The problem again was that I did not have football boots and the time spent in the changing rooms was very stressful, as I did not have the proper sports clothes.
I got on very well in history because I enjoyed hearing the stories but I dreaded having to write anything down on paper. I would cut out pictures and fill the exercise books with these but this was not acceptable to the teachers so as a result I just turned off and wasted everybody’s time.
Despite my failure to engage in the lessons I did go to school every day. I was not a child that did not go to school, which in some ways is more disappointing because I was there and could have been taught.
In short I don’t think I was any better equipped to face the adult world leaving secondary school than I had been 4 years before when leaving primary school.

MY EXPERIENCE OF READING AND WRITING AT SECONDARY SCHOOL
Whatever I wrote would have been illegible and I clearly remember being given back work that was a mass of red ink and whole sentences crossed out. This was very demoralising and embarrassing. In short, if I could get away with not writing then I was fine. I would engage in topics in lessons such as history and geography but once the pens came out I would retreat into myself.

MY WORK LIFE

At the age of 14 I left school 6 months early. I got a job as a cinema projectionist and life became a lot easier. The job was practical and there was very little need to be able to read or write.
On one occasion I nearly lost my job was when we were showing the children’s film Thunderbirds in the afternoon and the James Bond film Thunderball in the evening.
One Saturday evening halfway through the James Bond film I put on the wrong reel of film leaving the audience in shock because James Bond turned into Lady Penelope just as he was about to encounter with his latest conquest.
There were occasions that I put the wrong reels of film into the transit cases but by and large I got through life on my wits and I developed coping strategies to get by.
Going to work I would listen at the bus stop to people saying what bus was arriving or I would ask were the bus was going. I got to know the bus routes by the bus numbers without really understating how number sequences worked.
At the age of 15 I began listening to Bob Dylan and along with going to Anfield and standing in the boy’s pen life was good. Shankly was the father figure I had never had and the Kop became my family.
At 17 I got a job in Tescos working in the warehouse and again I made sure that any expectation that I would need to read was minimal. I became an expert in getting others to fill in my timesheet and I turned down better jobs because I knew I could not cope with anything written.
At 18 I moved to London and slept rough for a couple of years. I eventually got a job again as a cinema projectionist where once again I had strategies to enable me to manage without reading or writing anything down. On one occasion when I was sleeping rough the police arrested me as they thought I had stolen some food, which in fact had been given to me. I was asked by the custody sergeant to write down a statement of where I got the food and of course I could not. I remember getting angry with him and shouting because I did not want him to know that I could not read or write. I was threatened with another charge if I did not calm down.

THE TURNING POINT
I completed a 2-year community and youth work course at Goldsmiths College in which I had a dispensation to use a Dictaphone to record my lectures and also present my essays. I also had to hand write them but the grammar and the presentation looked like somebody had dropped a bottle of ink on the paper. The College knew that I could not read or write but they treated me with great respect and supported me throughout the 2 years.
Goldsmiths had great experience of working with mature students and they gave me a platform to air my views and express myself in a way that I had never had. I remember the thrill of being in a class and believing that I should be there and knowing that I wasn’t a Gobshite.
Fast forward 8 years and I am married to a wonderful woman who was a head teacher in a North London school. I was working in a children’s home as a residential social worker. I could still not read but apart from always having to make sure that I was on a shift with somebody that would do the case notes I was getting along as well as I could have expected.
Saying that there was always a tension just below the surface and simple things like signing a cheque, following a cookery recipe, reading to my daughter or writing a note to the milkman was impossible for me which was very stressful and embarrassing.
My wife was unwell and we both knew that her eyesight was deteriorating and that the day would soon come when she could no longer drive. It was this fact that galvanised me into making a decision to try and learn to read because I would need to be able to read road signs and be safe in the driver’s seat.
In about 1985 I attended adult literacy lessons at Catford Boys School. This was once a week for 2 hours but there was plenty of homework that had to be done.
The class was made up of about 10 older people 30+ and I did this for 2 years. A very strange sensation happened once when I wrote a very short piece of work. The teacher referred to me as having an unusual writing style. I was in shock to think that I even had a writing style.
One morning I arrived at work and sat in the overnight handover. The notes were read out recording what had happened the night before. I felt a surge of pride when I realised the notes were mine and that I had built up the courage to write them down; nobody laughed; nobody corrected the grammar or checked the spelling. The notes were nowhere perfect but they were mine.

As my reading began to get better I started reading my football programmes and after having some of them for years it was lovely to see them in a different light. I started buying a newspaper and I remember feeling grown up (I was about 32) because I could converse with my workmates on issues in the newspaper.
My reading now consists of football biographies as well as music biographies. I am reading a book at the moment of a young Muslim man who was radicalised and who has recorded how this happened and the message he sends is very powerful and stark.
At the age of 50 I went back to university to qualify as a social worker having spent 25 years working with people but not having a social work degree.
None of this would have been possible without Catford Boys adult literacy class and none of it would have been necessary if years before I had been valued and helped by the education system.
My message to young people would be seek out good people because they are there. Value yourselves and others. Try and see the best in others and be the best you can.
Life can be shit but it can also throw up opportunities but you have to be responsive and remember that no one is better than you but they might have made better use of their opportunities.
A good attitude can get you a long way, which is how I managed to make a living and make a life while not being able to read or write.
Pete

Hello Stuart,
Further to our meeting today here is the outstanding information we spoke about. In 2001 an educational psychologist regarding my struggle with English assessed me in Chelsea. The sessions were over 2 days and consisted of visual, auditory, and balance tests.
I was given a diagnosis of having dyslexia and was told that it was no surprise that I found it impossible to read at all well and could not cope with handwriting. My diagnosis came as a relief to me and explained to a certain degree why I had never been able to engage in mainstream education. With this information I was able to get help in my workplace to have a computer that met my needs and this made it possible for me to able carry out my duties.
After a couple of years I went on to qualify as a social worker and was able to produce work of a higher enough quality to pass all the modules and graduate.
I still to this day cannot hand write anything and I still experience high levels of anxiety if I am asked to write anything down.

There are the books that I have enjoyed in recent years.

Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee Dee Harris
A Million Little Pieces James Frey
Chronicles Bob Dylan
No Blacks no Dogs no Irish John Lydon
Shankly Steve Kelly
Stoned Alone Bill Wyman
Animal Farm Orwell
The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell
Catcher in the Rye Salinger

Pete.