Thinking outside the Box Tunnel

 

In the Beginning was the Word,

But there was also a tunnel at Box,

Near where a young child christened Wilbert

Lay awake in his bedroom, dreaming

Of steam-powered words puffed along the gradient

By straining freight trains and groaning banking engines.

I visited the Rev Awdry’s boyhood home today,

With a train to Bath and then a bus to Box,

Followed by a walk along the Box Heritage Trail:

A Wiltshire pastoral of streams and mills,

Old inns and quarries and woods and tramlines,

A breath-taking view of the western portal of Box Tunnel,

And a shared blue plaque recollection:

“There was no doubt in my mind that steam engines all had definite personalities … little imagination was needed to hear in the puffings and pantings of the two engines the conversation they were having …”

 

I tried to catch the words of 4,000 navvies,

The groans of the one hundred who perished

Down there in the subterranean depths

And thirty million bricks in Box Tunnel,

Where every week, a ton of candle wax

And a ton of explosive were used;

But the only words I could catch on the wind

Were those of the genius Isambard Kingdom Brunel,

When commenting on the 131 seriously injured navvies

Who were taken to Bath Hospital between 1839 and 1841:

“I think it a small number considering the heavy work and the amount of powder used. I am afraid that it does not show the whole extent of accidents in that district.”

 

We retraced our steps to Lorne Villa (bed and breakfast),

WILBERT VERE AWDRY 1911-1997 Clergyman and Author

Lived here 1920-1928

Just imagine! You might stay in what was once Wilbert’s bedroom!

Who knows what conversations your night-time imagination might summon!

Dudbridge to Dublin?

 

In those far-off early days before the opening of the Severn Tunnel, when the main line to South Wales ran through Gloucester, and when the 1801 Act of Union incorporating Ireland into the United Kingdom was less than fifty years old, and just as the Great Hunger – the Irish Potato Famine – began its murderous depredations, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the GWR began to dream of a South Wales and South of Ireland Railway.

 

The projected line would run from Stonehouse to reach Fretherne on the eastern banks of the River Severn, thence to Awre on the opposite bank via mile-long bridge over the rushing turbid waters of the Severn and its treacherous currents and mudbanks. A bridge over the River Severn close to where the Severn Bore can rush at its speediest downstream on a river with the second-highest tidal range in the world.

 

In the event, the Admiralty scuppered that scheme and that was the end of that. What a beautiful train ride that would have been! The Forest of Dean prominent as you journeyed west across that bridge and the Cotswolds in all their glory as you returned eastwards. But you can still take a poetic ride along the river south from Gloucester towards Newport (stops at Lydney and Chepstow to explore a preserved steam railway and a castle).

 

As you gaze out from your carriage window, musing on that so-close riverscape, looking east towards Framilode (just by Fretherne), you might like to recite these words of Ivor Gurney:

 

‘When I saw Framilode first she was a blowy

Severn tided place under azure sky.

Able to take care of herself, less girl than boy.

…With the never forgotten beauty of the Frome

One evening when elver-lights made the river like a stall-road to see.’

(The River Frome is the river that wends its way through Stroud and on to the River Severn.)

Ivor Gurney’s friend F.W. Harvey (they boated together on the river) was born at Minsterworth (not too far from the line); here are a few lines from his poem Spring 1924 about Broadoak (just by the river and right on the line):

 

‘Spring came by water to Broadoak this year,

I saw her clear.

Though on the earth a sprinkling

Of snowdrops shone, the unwrinkling

Bright curve of the Severn River

Was of her gospel first giver …’

And a few more lines from Harvey:

‘O you dear heights of blue no ploughman tills,

O valleys where the curling mist upstreams

Over fields of trembling daffodils,

And you old dusty little water-mills …’

It’s a beautiful line to South Wales from Gloucester. Site-seeing from a carriage window.

Gloucester Quays and Making the Connections

Start your walk by Phillpott’s Warehouse –

No plaque mentions that Thomas Phillpotts

Benefitted from some seven hundred enslaved people,

Nearly three hundred of whom were shared ‘investments’

With Samuel Baker of Bakers Quay fame;

Samuel Baker of Lypiatt Park, near Stroud,

Paid some £7,990 compensation

For 410 enslaved persons in Jamaica.

The compensation paid to enslavers in 1834,

Made up fully forty per cent of the national budget back then;

This gives a hint to the bounty paid to Baker and Phillpotts,

A bounty that helped lead to the development

of Baker’s Quay, and High Orchard,

The locus of Gloucester’s industrial revolution –

Not that you will find this on a plaque at Gloucester Quays.

Samuel Baker’s bounty also helped his railway investments:

The Gloucester and Dean Forest Railway –

Only seven or so miles long to Grange Court,

But a conduit to the coal and iron industries in the Dean

(You travel on it today on the line to Newport);

He also invested in the not-to-be Grand Connection:

The Gloucester, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway,

And in the Hereford, Ross and Gloucester Railway

(Originally broad gauge even before it was taken over by the GWR).

You can relive and reclaim this hidden history

With a train trip to Gloucester

And a walk along the docks at the Quays;

You could also get the Newport train from Gloucester –

Alight at Lydney and a five-minute walk

Will take you to the preserved Dean Forest Railway.

North-west Africa, and the so-called ‘Middle Passage’

Across the crimson Atlantic Ocean to the sugar plantations of Jamaica,

Will seem impossibly distant and disconnected.

But remember Samuel Baker.

And you’ll make the connections.

Old King Coal

My generation of boys saw steam as a hobby:

We grew up with Ian Allan loco-spotting books,

Gazing in wonder at the wreathes of smoke

Curling through countryside and town,

Enjoying November fogs:

‘No sun, no moon,

No hint of noon …’

And we took a certain boyish pride

In British know-how, ingenuity,

Innovation and practicality:

We were the first country to industrialise!

‘The Workshop of the World’!

Weren’t we lucky to have all those advantages,

And benefits of nature, such as coal?

Obviously, the advent of feminist history,

And more recent decolonising of history

Have critiqued this Old School history,

But the climate crisis now creates

A new urgent and drastic review of the

Old School of Old King Coal.

You can still smell the consequences today

(And I’m not talking preserved steam lines here),

You can taste it in the air,

Hear it in the thunder clouds,

Touch it in the dry river beds

And flash flood fields and valleys

And for those with eyes to see it,

In what some term ‘The Age of the Anthropocene’.

And one small gesture we can make

Is to make more journeys by train rather than car,

And walk or bike or use the bus to get to the station,

And for generations younger than mine:

Why not think about a career on the railways?

Those male train drivers are getting older:

It would be good to see more diversity in more ways than one

In the cab, driving the trains to a greener future …

 

 

 

 

The Golden Valley

I first visited Stroud on the train in the early 1960s, pulled by a 1400 class locomotive, 1463, I think. I would study my Ian Allan trainspotter’s book or read my history books until we reached Chalford, when I would stare, mesmerized by the beauty of it all. I didn’t know, of course, that I would write the following lines, sixty years later.

‘Chalford has such a labyrinth of weavers’ walks and footpaths –

And on a winter’s day, with plumes of smoke rising from the valley,

Mistletoe in the trees, light folded in envelopes of cloud,

It’s hard to imagine that this picturesque Cotswold village

Was once hand in glove with the East India Company,

As at Sevill’s Upper Mill – now a select residential development,

 With the stream, now private and sequestered,

Running between houses and a car park.

The East India Company was involved in the slave trade

In Madagascar, St Helena, Bengkulu and Angola,

Exchanging guns, gunpowder, cutlasses, cloth, and piece goods;

Bristol merchants bought textiles from the Company

To exchange for slaves in West Africa;

But the Company gained its questionable reputation,

Primarily from its depredations in India.,

Exploiting and contributing to the decline of the Mughal Empire,

And selling Indian grown opium,

To be smuggled to China, to flout the Imperial ban,

The profits paying for tea for domestic consumption …’

 

But let’s not forget the beauty of the Golden Valley: ‘…the high land, studded with the grey Gloucestershire houses, begins to rise at either side of the canal, it is no longer the English scenery you might expect, but like mountain villages in Switzerland, thousands of feet above the level of the sea. I have seen villages in the Apennines which reminded me of Chalford and St. Mary’s crossing. The mills and the factories with blue slate roofs make a colour against the golden distance of the Golden Valley …’ (Temple Thurston, 1912)

So, when you pass next on the railway, steal a glance at the beauty of the landscape, have a nice cup of tea –

‘These cottages clambering up the Cotswold hillsides,

This Golden Valley harmony of water, wood and stone

Was derived, in some distant degree,

From war, enslavement, racism, and opium.’

Citizen John Thelwall, William Cobbett, and Rural Rides on the Train

 

In the summer of 1797, when the country feared a French invasion and the Fleet mutinied at the Nore and Spithead, ‘the most dangerous man in England’, ‘that Jacobin fox’, the republican, charismatic orator, John Thelwall, stayed in the Stroud area. This was an orator and poet who had been tried for treason, with a possible sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering …

 

He made his way here after staying with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Nether Stowey in Somerset. Three local clothiers offered him hospitality in Nailsworth, Bowbridge and Chalford. You can retrace his sojourn here with a walk along the old railway line from Stroud to Nailsworth, and with a walk along the canal by the side of the GWR line from Stroud, through Bowbridge, to Chalford. (Or there is a Cotswold Green morning bus to Cirencester; you can alight at Chalford and walk back.) You can find the toponym Chalford Bottom by the lineside on the OS map – coincidentally, Citizen John Thelwall wrote a beautiful poem in 1797 entitled On Leaving the Bottoms of Gloucestershire. Here are a few selected lines:

‘… pleasant haunts! brakes, bourns,

• And populous hill, and dale, and pendant woods;
• And you, meandering streams, and you, ye cots
• And hamlets, that, with many a whiten’d front,
• Sprinkle the woody steep; or lowlier stoop,
• Thronging, gregarious, round the rustic spire …
• Nor, as yet,
• Towers from each peaceful dell the unwieldy pride
• Of Factory over-grown; where Opulence
• Dispeopling the neat cottage, crowds his walls
• …to the yoke
• Of unremitting Drudgery …
• Therefore I love Chalford, and ye vales
• Of Stroud, irriguous …’
• A generation later, William Cobbett wrote thus in Rural Rides about Stroudwater: “These villages lie on the sides of a narrow and deep valley, with a narrow stream of water running down the middle of it, and this stream turns the wheels of a great many mills and sets of machinery for the making of woollen-cloth …There are steam-engines as well as water-powers …but … Even the buildings of the factories are not ugly … ‘

Come and see for yourself with some Rural Rides on the train!

Brimscombe and Heritage

 

One night in the trenches, Ivor Gurney, the Great War poet, suddenly remembered Brimscombe: ‘One lucky hour in the middle of my tiredness I came under the pines of the sheer steep And saw the stars like steady candles gleam Above and through; Brimscombe wrapped (past life) in sleep!’ This was how Gurney recollected, in his mind’s eye, Brimscombe, with its spring-line cottages, and its mills and terraces spread along the valley floor, alongside the canal and railway and London-road …

 

And did he recall, I wonder, the station at Brimscombe, gleaming in the darkness, with its stone and slate engine shed (a 20,000-gallon water tank at the front and offices at the back) for the two banking engines that helped trains up the steep incline to the tunnel at Sapperton?

 

Twenty or so years later, the GWR introduced a new heritage: the famous Cheltenham Flyer powered by the new Castle class steam engines, breaking records as it hurtled west from Paddington. Passengers, perhaps, catching a glance of The Meadow (the home of Brimscombe F.C.), with its bank all covered in celandine, dock, and cowslips and that memory of the handloom weaver and spinner: teazels. An unconscious memory of the trenches, too, with dug-outs signposted Home and Away.

 

The heritage is different today. Smokeless mill chimneys and forgotten mill ponds; bus shelters with murals of a lost world; light engineering a ribbon along the canal-side, and the former King & Castle (not that the powerful King class steamed along this valley) now the Pavilion. But there, about a hundred miles from Paddington: the social enterprises and shared economy at the Long Table, Brimscombe Mill: ‘share what you can, take what you need.’ And there, about a hundred miles from Paddington, by the canal and by the railway line, the Stroud Brewery with its organic beer and sustainability awards and an unconscious echo of the Brimscombe engine shed: ‘we harvest rainwater off our roof to flush our toilets’.

 

And there, at the Meadow, the home of Brimscombe & Thrupp AFC, Peter Baxendale, rightly declaring: ‘There’s no finer sight in football than a winger flying down the touchline as trains from Paddington make their way down the valley to Cheltenham.’

 

It’s a mercurial thing, Heritage.

Stroud Time

It’s a funny thing, Time, isn’t it, when you stop to think about it. And I’m not talking Einstein. Just that we measure it in so many different ways: watch, clock, phone, analogue, digital, sun, moon, religion, the seasons, calendar, years, decades, eras, aeons … and yet it all seems so straightforward.

 

But do you remember 1752 when we switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and lost 11 days? The day after September 3 was September 14: ‘Give us back our eleven days’ became the cry with the fear of loss of wages and reported riots in Bristol. Imagine losing 11 days …

 

And in that age before industrialisation and the capitalist adage that ‘Time is Money’, there was a tradition of ‘St Monday’, when handloom weavers, for example, would take the day off if they were on top of their work. But the development of the factory system with attendant clock and hooter and clocking-in and clocking-out literally put paid to that. But it wasn’t until the railways developed that time became nationally uniform.

 

The definition of time according to the sun meant that noon at Stroud, for example, was nine minutes later than noon at Greenwich (Stroud being ninety miles west of the meridian). But time carried on much as it had done before for the first twenty years or so of railways in this country, despite the confusion this could cause with the railways growing so rapidly (from 25 miles of line in 1825 to over 2,000 in 1844; that doubled in four years and nearly trebled by 1851). For example, just as gauges varied at Gloucester, so did time: three clocks gave different times: the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway operated on Birmingham time; the Bristol & Gloucester Railway went for Bristol time, whilst the GWR ran on London time. What price, Bradshaw?

 

The GWR had adopted London time throughout its railway in November 1840 and five years later came Greenwich Mean Time: Railway Time. But there was some idiosyncratic stubbornness hither and thither – some town clocks in the west country had two different minute hands so as to indicate both local and London time. Stroud was particularly obdurate, ‘being among the last 2% of towns to alter its public clocks’.

 

But help was at hand: a clock set up in 1858 at the top of Gloucester Street, with GMT (You can see it at the Museum in the Park in Stroud). A clock, showing GMT, had been in town since 1845, but it was not a truth universally acknowledged: insouciant canal horses, bargees and officials weren’t alone …

Life in a Railway Factory: Alfred Williams, the Hammerman Poet

Born close to Brunel’s broad gauge at South Marston,

While Richard Jefferies measured the red brick growth

Of New Swindon’s terraced street advance,

You studied express trains from farm and field,

Hammering on their way to Paddington,

Dreaming of forge and furnace and steam hammer:

And when you first walked through the tunnel,

Fourteen years of age, a rivet hotter,

A frame builder’s boy, a furnace boy,

A self-taught student of poetry, folklore and the classics,

You walked without any condescension,

Through a factory of ten thousand men:

Stampers, painters, watchmen, carpenters,

Carriage finishers and upholsterers,

Washers down, cushion beaters, ash wheelers,

Wagon builders, storemen, smiths, turners,

Boilermen, platers, riveters, labourers,

Fitters, firemen, drivers and cleaners,

Pattern makers, moulders, bricklayers, clerks.

You ate your snap in solitude, though,

Composing a poem within the piston’s din,

Wary of the foreman’s workshop power,

Two omniscient but differing narrators:

You saw the molten burns, the short-time working,

The union men sidelined by the piles of ingots,

The speed-up of machines in stifling smoke and steam,

The piece rates cut in the coal and the dust …

You walked out past the old iron rails and the ballast,

Past carriage and wagon, axle, wheel and tyre,

Past mountains of coal, pig, bar and cast iron,

Past the rolling mill, the block, the dies, the tar,

The gleaming steel, the shearings, clippings,

Wheelbarrows, ash pits, pinchings, drillings,

The clinker, the canal, and the clocking out;

You then walked four miles home to South Marston:

See to the garden; sit with Mary at twilight;

Compose your verse; translate the classics;

Study the stars, and the household accounts;

And the next day, before the factory hooter’s call,

You would walk four miles into ‘The Works’,

The Hammerman Poet composing verse and clocking in again.

From Stroud to Swindon for a Football Match

(Brunel All the Way)

Start your journey at the Platform One Café,

Coffee and croissants and Katie and Rick,

3 tables, 6 chairs, a trunk, 15 railway puzzles

(Always one on the go for travellers with a brief encounter),

Sundry model engines and railway memorabilia,

A library, greetings cards, two clocks,

A mannequin budgerigar in a toy cage,

(A real one would put all Heaven in a rage),

A mirror to enhance atmosphere,

A muffled Radio 4, a rustle of newspapers,

A quiet scratch of pen on crossword.

Alight at Swindon to walk along the Heritage Trail,

Find the Mechanics Institute in the Railway Village,

And close by is what was once a draper’s shop in 1847,

Then a beer-house, then the London Stout House

(William and Arabella Thomas took it over in 1863;

Their son Thomas then ran it until 1946,

When it officially became by name, the Glue Pot).

 

George Orwell wrote a famous essay about the perfect pub: The Moon Under Water: “If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere’.” He goes on to say that this perfect pub doesn’t exist, of course, but if “anyone knows” of such licensed premises, “I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.”

 

This essay appeared in the Evening Standard in 1946. In 2025, The Telegraph voted the Glue Pot the best pub in Wiltshire: “It’s an easy-going street-corner pub, handsome in an understated way, and as good for cider as it is for beer. The world has changed, but sometimes a really good pub doesn’t … “

I drop in on an LS Lowry match-day:

 A few red and white Swindon scarves wrapped around shoulders,

But also, the different accents of the opposition fans,

While I write a letter to George Orwell,

Letting him know that I have found the Moon Under Water.