Bristol Doors Open Days
The Merchants’ Hall
indocilis pauperiem pati
‘One who cannot learn to bear poverty’

What did I learn about our ‘Island Story’
On a squally September rain-swept day,
At the Merchants’ Hall, and Redcliffe Caves?
Well, we formed an orderly queue at the Hall,
Bantering with the pinstriped beadle,
Before our guide escorted us to the hall,
Where our talk began.

It was informative, in a manner of speaking:
The chandeliers are cleaned every two years!
Sixty-eight people can sit at this table!
When a speaker addresses an audience here,
The chairs are moved to face the front!
Princess Anne likes the Merchant Venturers!
Here are pictures of the docks in the 18th century!
(No mention yet…)
Royal Charters galore!
Portraits galore!
One day there will be a woman on the wall!
And a female ‘Master’ of the Society,
And she shalt have the title of ‘Master’!
The voice went on about the Society’s charitable enterprises,
I glanced at a couple of their annual reports:
‘New Schools’ Trust Offers Diversity’
(Conventional trope of girl in a science lab.),
More stuff on academies, residential care for the elderly,
‘Social business’ (sic), almshouses,
The ownership of Clifton Downs,
‘Although some 460 years old, the Society
is fresh and full of vigour and purpose’;
‘ … The Society and Bristol prospered. Trading patterns changed
over the centuries, with the later years marked
by the appalling period of slave trading in the 18th century.’
It all felt a bit Kafkaesque,
An arcane, shadowy world of ruling class disinformation …
Where philanthropy and charity
Obscures the hierarchy of ruling class control…

The clock chimed the hour.
‘Well, that’s the end of the tour. Any questions?’
‘Only the inevitable question about slavery:
How did the Society benefit from slavery?’
‘Well of course, it’s no secret that individual merchants were involved in the slave trade. But not the Society itself.’
Fair enough then.
Off we went into the rain,
Out past the pinstriped bantering beadle,
And down to Redcliffe Caves:
‘Contrary to rumour slaves were never kept in the caves …
slaves were never directly traded through Bristol itself.’

Outside, ignored by most of the throng,
A fenced site, tagged edgeland tumbledown,
Demolition awaiting,
And on the side,
A searing depiction of a slave ship,
A searing work of art,
With this message about our ‘Island Story’:
‘IN MEMORY
of the ones that were
TAKEN AWAY from their
Freedom, STOLEN from
THEIR FAMILIES AND
HISTORY’
I asked an official at the caves:
‘Is this a publicly sanctioned work of art
or a guerrilla memorialization?’
‘Not sanctioned.
It appeared mysteriously overnight about nine months ago.’

It had been an old school sort of day,
So I decided to do some homework back in Stroud,
Got Madge Dresser’s Slavery Obscured down from the shelf,
Leafed through the index to discover:
One:
‘By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers, first established in 1552, had re-formed and consolidated its position as the most exclusive voice of the city’s overseas merchants. This was the very time which saw the establishment of a British presence in the Caribbean and the mainland colonies.’
Two:
‘In 1690 John Carey acted as an agent for the Merchant Venturers in London and was appointed … along with others, to draw up a petition for Parliament for “letting the merchants of this City to a share in the African trade.”’
Three:
‘In 1692, he advanced the Society of Merchant Venturers £600 towards the building of a new quay and cranes on the Bristol docks, for which he was soon reimbursed.’
Four:
‘Much Clifton property was owned by the Society of Merchant Venturers , and the eighteenth century saw the progressive development in both bespoke and speculative housing … Clifton was awash with slave-based wealth.’
Five:
‘In Bristol, the Society of Merchant Venturers, which had organized a memorial against abolition in March 1788 went on the following year to organize a group of African and West India merchants and manufacturers with related interests to rally around the anti-abolitionist cause.’

The clock chimed the hour.
‘Well, that’s the end of the tour. Any questions?’
‘Only the inevitable question about slavery:
How did the Society benefit from slavery?’
‘Well of course, it’s no secret that individual merchants were involved in the slave trade. But not the Society itself.’

Announcing “Edgelands and Industry: a look at Hidden Stroud in Space and Time” – A fringe-time walke:

We are a collaborative group unearthing the radical history of Stroud through walking and mapping the landscape, interpreting and re-imagining our local history. Following the huge success of our walk as part of last year’s Stroud Fringe we will be setting off again from The Fountain Inn, Slad Road at 4:00pm on Sunday. This year’s performative walk, ‘Edgelands and Industry: a look at hidden Stroud in space and time’ is approximately 3 hours long, (you can also join the walk at the Upper Lock Cafe at 4:30pm) ends at the The Fountain Inn at 7:00pm with some reflective performance about the walk and a well earned drink!

Announcing a Literary, Self-Referential, Post-Modernist Pub Crawl on Thursday – starting at The Fountain at 4.

The Fountain – The Vic – The Greyhound – The Imperial – The Lord John – The Little George.

I often walk the cycle track at the bottom of Rodborough Hill,
The old Midland Railway spur from Dudbridge into Stroud,
And I often cycle the track on to Nailsworth through Woodchester,
Musing on the springs and watercourses, the ancient holloways,
The Roman villa, medieval ridge and furrow, the woollen mills,
The occasional mill chimney, still rising high into the Stroudwater sky,
And I have often walked the surrounds of Avening, Minch and Amberley,
Recreating the 1916 tragedy of Dorothy Beard and Archibald Knee,
A young woman and a young new recruit,
Drowning together in a millpond.

In short, my head is usually lost in the clouds of the past,
Where I am entranced rather than perturbed by novelty –
Unlike Scrooge, I see few phantoms that repel –
Until last night, when just before our show
Trenchcoats for Goalposts,
At the Comrades’ Club,
In Nailsworth,
Jon Seagrave mentioned a local radio history programme
About that local branch line and the First World War,
Did I know that? …

(Dictionary definition interruption:
Shoddy
Adjective:
Badly made or done.
‘We’re not paying good money for shoddy goods.’
Synonyms:
Poor-quality, inferior, second-rate, third-rate, low-grade, cheap, cheapjack, tawdry rubbishy, trashy, gimcrack, jerry-built, crude,

Lacking moral principle, sordid,

‘A shoddy misuse of the honours system.’

Noun:
An inferior quality yarn or fabric made from the shredded fibre of waste woolen cloth or clippings.)

Did I know that? …
In the First World War, the uniforms of dead soldiers
Were brought from the front, across the Channel, along the railway lines
Of southern England, and so to the Nailsworth branch line,
Where bloodstained and able to tell who knows what tale
Of carnage, confusion and pain,
This timetabled railway conveyor belt
Would deliver its constant supplies to keep alive
The endless supply of shoddy;

Jon said, just before we went on stage,
‘In my innocence I thought the soldiers would have had the dignity of a burial in their uniform, rather than be stripped bare of honour.’

I am sure there was a heartfelt justification for this:
The submarine warfare in the Atlantic,
The destruction of British merchant shipping
The consequent shortages of 1917,
The drowning of our seamen,
The need for cloth to provide uniforms
As the armed forces grew with Kitchener’ appeal,
And then with conscription after 1916,

But there was still something shocking in this tale for me,
Something that I took with me on stage,
That made me mention Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That
For the first time to an audience in this production:
I think Graves’ image of the Western Front as a ‘sausage machine’
Subliminally affected me –
I thought of his words:
‘It was fed with live men, churned out corpses,
and remained firmly screwed in place’,
As I sang the first verse of ‘Goodbyee’ at the finale…

And what of Lloyd George, Minister for Munitions?
Secretary of State for War, Prime Minister:
‘The Man who won the War’,
Keeping the front lines fed with men and shells,
Keeping the Nailsworth branch line busy with dead men’s uniforms
(‘Finding an arm or a leg still inside wasn’t that uncommon’),
Keeping the Nailsworth mills busy with the production of shoddy,
The production of shoddy for yet more uniforms,
In a Catch 22 search for the perfect uniform:
Made from an infinitely regressive shoddy,
‘Dulce et Decorum est
Pro Patria Mori,
Lloyd George – ‘The man who won the war’,
Friend of ‘the hard-faced men who did well out of the War’,
Flogging them peerages, knighthoods, medals:
The Order of the British Empire
Was conveniently and coincidentally coined in 1917,
Keeping himself in power and profit with the
‘Sale of Honours Scandal’ …

Shoddy
Noun:
An inferior quality yarn or fabric made from the shredded fibre of waste woolen cloth or clippings.

Adjective:
Badly made or done

Synonym:
Lacking moral principle, sordid,

‘A shoddy misuse of the honours system.’

Unbelievable
Adjective:
Unlikely

Synonyms:
Amazing, surprising, astonishing, revelation, shocking, thunderbolt, startling, staggering, turn-up for the book
‘That a part of some poor fellow should end up in the (relative) tranquility
of a Cotswold valley, far from the carnage.’

A performative walk starting at Stroud Brewery to christen the new Chartist porter. The walk will commence at the Brewery, with explanation, contextualisation and performance; then wend its way along the canal to Wallbridge and then along the old railway line to Dudbridge. We will then climb up to the Bell for more porter and thence to the top of Selsley Hill. The walk will be interspersed with performance, bringing the local and national Chartists to life in the landscape. Walkers make their own way back to wherever they wish to go: that’s the Chartists’ seventh point. We should be finished on Selsley by 4pm.