Category: Events

Stations like Stroud (and Macbeth)

 

They’re great theatre, railway stations, don’t you think? The platform as the stage with Life and Existence itself in the limelight. For it’s almost as if a state of beatitude is attained whilst sitting on that platform, regarding one’s fellow travellers. A temporary, fleeting, unification of opposites.

 

For there we sit and stand: colleagues on a platform about to share the same train and the same direction in life. And for that moment, as we glance at each other, assessing and guessing who we might be (our station in life as it were), we are unified by time and space.

 

But at the very same time, we are also cognisant of the fact that this unity is absolutely temporary – who knows where we are all eventually going, stopping and alighting? Who knows who we really are? What strange and ephemeral unity is this?

 

And then we stare at the platform opposite. All those people going the opposite way on a different train at a different time. We are divided by time and space: two railway lines divide us and a timetable too. Yet those passengers on the opposite platform are experiencing the same sort of epiphany too.

 

Somewhat perturbed by these earl morning philosophical reflections, I think a cup of tea might be just the ticket.

I glance in the mirror in the café and see Macbeth behind me, there in a chair, clutching a cup of coffee, whispering:

 

‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.’

 

An A to Z of Women’s Past Work: the GWR in Peace and War

A is for acetylene cutter and assembler and dismantler of automatic instruments and acetylene welder

B is for booking clerk and brass lacquerer and bridge-keeper and blinds puller and boilersmith’s mate

C is for charwoman and carriage cleaner and clerk and cellar & page girl and carter and cloak-room attendant and crockery collector and carver and carriage fitter and carriage cleaner and chargehand and crossing-keeper and conductor

D is for draughtswoman and drop stamper and dining car attendant and drilling gang

E is for engine-cleaner and electric truck driver and electric welder and electric plater and electrician’s assistant and enquiry clerk

F is for ferry attendant and fitter’s mate and forewoman and fitter

G is for goods porter and gatekeeper and gardener and goods clerk and general labourer and gatewoman and gate-opener and guard

H is for hotel staff and horse-cloth & sack repairer and horse-keeper and hotel porter and harness cleaner and hammer driver and hammer girl and horse-drawn delivery driver and holder-upper and housekeeping

I is for issuer

L is for laundress and labourer and letter-sorter and luggage-room porter and lift attendant and lining woman and linesman’s assistant and lamp-lady

M is for machinist and messenger and motor van driver and munitionette and machine grinder and machine setter and machine miller and machine turner

N is for number-taker and nut-scragger

O is for oiler and office painter and overhead crane driver

P is for porter and parcels clerk and platform porter and parcel porter and painter and printer and plate layer and passenger guard and polisher

R is for rivet hotter and restaurant car waitress and railway policewoman and railway hotel staff and railway saleswoman

S is for shorthand typist and stewardess and signal cleaner and stores issuer and shed labourer and signalwoman and sewer and station ‘master’ and shunter and storeswoman and station refreshment room staff and supervisor

T is for trimming shop and typist and telephone and telegraph exchange operator and ticket collector and train-attendant and train information attendant and tracer and telephone attendant and train announcer and tube cleaner and tea lady and telephone and communications maintainer

V is for van guard

W is for waitress and washerwoman and waiting-room attendant and workshop woman and weighing-machine attendant and wagon-repairer and wharfingers and flag maker and women’s room attendant

 

Derived from The Fair Sex Women and the Great Western Railway

Rosa Matheson Tempus Publishing Ltd

The Refreshment Rooms at Swindon

The next time you stop at Swindon and grab a coffee, you might be astonished to discover that the refreshment rooms at Swindon were both famous and infamous (also possibly remind yourself of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias with a quick search on your phone).

 

Here’s the Devizes & Wiltshire Gazette 1842 with its description of the refreshment rooms (the contract for the building of the station specified that every passing train had to stop at Swindon for a potentially lucrative refreshment break): ‘… the station itself is the handsomest we have yet seen … there are four large refreshment rooms, two on each side of the road, of noble proportions, and finished in the most exquisite style … walls panelled … fireplaces … beautifully painted ceilings. Such rooms cannot fail to improve greatly the taste of every one who enters them… ‘

 

The refreshment stop was for just ten minutes, however, which did not contribute to improvement of taste; here is a textual depiction of the mad dash at Swindon from Doyle and Leigh in 1849 that went alongside their cartoon Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe: ‘Before we had half finished, the Guard rang the Bell, and my Wife with a Start, did spill her Soup over her Dress, and was obliged to leave Half of it; and to think how ridiculous I looked, scampering back to the Train with my Meat-pie in my Mouth! To run hurry-skurry at the Sound of a Bell, do seem only fit for a Gang of Workmen; and the Bustle of Railways do destroy all the Dignity of Travelling; but the World altogether is less Grand, and do go faster than formerly’.

 

Let’s finish with Charles Dickens again, From The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. 1857; it’s not about Swindon but it certainly captures the atmosphere of a busy railway station at a junction with a railway works.

 

‘It was a Junction-Station, where the wooden razors … shaved the air very often, and where the sharp electric-telegraph bell was in a very restless condition. All manner of cross-lines came zig-zagging into it … and, a little way out of it, a pointsman in an elevated signal-box was constantly going through the motions of drawing immense quantities of beer at a public-house bar. In one direction, confused quantities of embankments and arches … in the other, the rails soon disentangled themselves into two tracks, and shot away under a bridge and curved round a corner. Sidings were there, in which empty luggage vans and cattle-boxes often butted against each other … and warehouses were there… Refreshment-rooms were there; one, for the hungry and thirsty Iron Locomotives where their coke and water were ready … the other, for the hungry and thirsty humans … who might take what they could get…’

 

 

The Rodborough GWR Bus Service

 

The GWR experimented with some local bus services in the 1920s around Painswick, Cainscross, Chalford, Kingscourt and Rodborough. I recorded some residents’ memories of Spillmans off Rodborough Hill a few years ago: red brick terraces above the mills on the busy Bath Road, betwixt two pubs and with an old Co-op and a jug and bottle. More LS Lowry than chocolate box Cotswolds: a mill town in the Cotswolds.

Irene Connor remembered Old Tom

You knew all the horses,
Pulling the carts with their heavy loads
Over the cobblestones of Rodborough’s roads;
Coal and milk and spuds and beer and bread,
And, of course, the fishmonger,
With his basket on his head,
“What have you got for me today?”
They asked, whilst you watched
The horses and the dray;
But your favourite was good old Tom,
Good old Tom, loved by children –
But adults looked in horror, as Tom, once more,
Lowered his head over fence, hedge or wall,
To munch approvingly on such rich pickings,
As cabbages and lettuces and leeks
And the green tops of turnip, swede and parsnip,
Then the especial delight of a rich, ripe carrot;
All those houses with veg not cars in the front garden,
Good old Tom thought they were growing it just for him.

Irene also remembered a cobbler in a hut, below the alley-way in Spillmans,
Hammering away, nails into leather, Silver whiskers, bushy brows, Mutton chops of snow,
You’d creep by, Peer through the cracked door, Standing slightly ajar, Then tap politely, yourselves, You, the little elves, “A sprig for my top, Mister Marmot?” He’d raise his head from his hammering, Like a little gnome, himself, Rat a tat tat, rat a tat tat, This man born before the Crimean War, Still mending boots between our two wars, Tapping away as his pocket watch ticked on, Rat a tat tat, rat a tat tat, Until, one day, He was there no more.
And you were no longer elves. Catching the bus instead.

Spillmans in the 1920s

More LS Lowry
Than rus in urbe:
Steam whistle hooters,
Gas hiss in mantles,
Rain streaks on the window-panes.
Flat caps bob in unison,
Stout boots clatter on the cobbles,
Bread and marg in your pocket,
A small army on the march,
Wife at the washing,
Spillmans Pitch,
Early Monday morning.

As the bus trundles up the hill.

800101 and Andy and Steve

800101 stood gloomily at Gloucester station. His mood was worsened every Monday morning (and Monday mornings were bad enough anyway) by the excited chatter of two men who should know better at their age. Every Monday morning, they awaited his arrival, happily carrying their football kit. At their age!

And every Monday morning, they alighted at Stroud station, swinging their boots as they walked past the old mill: “Monday again, Steve.” “So it is, Andy. The best day of the week. Our walking football day at Stratford Park.”

800101 turned and glowered.

————————————————

He was about to commence the part of the journey to Paddington that he disliked the most. He quite liked St Mary’s Crossing near Chalford where he cheerily tooted his horn as he passed the cottage and the gates, and Isaac and his mum would give a cheery wave,  but then, without fail, the self-doubt returned. How he loathed the climb up the incline and the agony of the tunnels at Sapperton!

What had stuck in his mind was the nightmare he once had whilst dozing in the sidings at Old Oak Common. His restless sleep was disturbed by the haunting presence of a silver-haired clergyman talking about how in the old days a train needed banking engines to get up that incline from Chalford and through those tunnels at Sapperton.

———————————————

 

He recalled how he had awoken with a start! What if he ran out of power climbing up the hill and slipped backwards? Or ran out of power in the tunnels and came to a dead stop? A cold sweat dripped down his cab window.

He had tried therapy. He had listened to old diesels. He had even listened to the wisdom of old steam engines. He had looked at websites and entered chatrooms. He had even tried AI. All to no avail …

Every time he left St Marys behind, the nightmare returned … “I’m not sure I can do it, I’m not sure I can do it …”

————————————–

The following Monday, 800101 was delayed by a signal at Gloucester. The two men decided to enjoy the fresh air on the platform rather than ensconce themselves in a carriage. The two men chatted away whilst 800101 eavesdropped with a quite overwhelming sense of complete and utter joyousness.

It turned out that these two walking footballers used to work on the railway. They were reminiscing about how they used to maintain the track, the tunnels at Sapperton, the gates at St Mary’s and how regular inspections ensured tip-top safety; they then walked down the platform to stand and admire 800101: “A perfect example of the high-speed 800 class”, said Andy. “None better. Perfect way to travel”, replied Steve.

————————

The signal changed to green and off they went with 800101 proudly passing Standish Junction to cheerfully stop at Stonehouse and then Stroud where Andy and Steve alighted once more.

800101 gave a cheerful toot on the horn; Andy and Steve turned round where in surprise they saw a great big grin and a wink. “Have a great game, boys, score one for me. But make sure you walk and don’t run. You know the rules. But I’ll be running up the incline today. I CAN DO IT! I CAN DO IT!”

Thanks to Andy and Steve, the nightmares have gone. Without doubt, 800101 is now the happiest member of the 800 class that you could find anywhere on the line.

And every Monday at Stroud station you can see three thumbs raised.

View from a Carriage Window: Fields of Ridge and Furrow near Minety

Gaze out of your window between Kemble and Swindon,

Look left and right between Purton and Minety,

And you will see a clear pattern of ridge and furrow

(‘Like corrugated fields or waves in a land-sea’),

Particularly on frosty midwinter days:

A glimpse of a world before enclosure

Parcelled up and privatised the landscape

With fences and gates and hedgerows;

A time before the tyranny of the clock and pursuit of profit.

For out there in those fields was a community

Based upon sharing and mutuality:

Sharing out of the strips of arable land in the open fields;

Gleaning together, grazing cows together, rabbiting together;

Collecting fruits, nuts and berries in season too;

The exchanging of surplus so as to just get by;

The lending or borrowing of tools;

The sharing of fuel – wood, turf, furze, bracken:

A community of reciprocity, sharing, mutuality,

With consequent arranged or happenstance meeting

In field, lane, pathway, holloway, baulk or common –

And ‘wasting time’ didn’t mean laziness:

It might have been incomprehensible to the elite,

But the lower orders could have an eye for the picturesque too,

You didn’t have to be educated to have an eye for the sublime:

John Clare textualized what many saw and felt:

‘How fond the rustics ear at leisure dwells

On the soft soundings of his village bells

As on a Sunday morning at his ease

He takes his rambles just as fancys please…’

Glance to your left and glance to your right:

Let your imagination run free

As you pass the ridge and furrow

Frozen in time and space in the pasture;

Watch the ghosts at their toil and at their joyful recreation,

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”

In the fields around Minety and Purton in Wiltshire.

Barbados and Stroud and Stroud and Barbados

At the solstice, on the longest day of the year,

I traced long lines across the Atlantic archipelago

From Stroud to Africa, from Africa to Barbados,

And from Barbados to Stroud railway station.

I visited Risée Chaderton-Charles’ exhibition:

Caribbean Atlantean at Stroud Valley Arts,

A multi-layered fusion of art and archive

A ‘visual voyage’ to commemorate

Those kidnapped Africans who chose death in the carmine deep

Rather than enslavement in the plantations.

I exchanged emails and ideas with Risée,

Before discussing with Jo Leahy at SVA

How we could artistically collaborate

On presenting the history of our railways.

And when I got home, I dug out my notebooks:

The 1835 Prospectus for the Cheltenham & Great Western Union Railway:

‘Cheltenham and its Vicinity, embracing not only a large resident population, but also a constantly varying population of Visitors, to a great extent.’

Cheltenham and its spa attractions:

Home to so many enslavers and visited by so many too;

The records show how many were ‘compensated’ in 1834 –

But those records do not always tell the whole story:

Charles F. Sage became chairman of the Cheltenham & Great Western Union Railway,

A member of the plantocracy, he briefly owned Bennett’s estate in Barbados,

Married Frances Gibbes and they had three children there,

Before selling the estate four years before abolition;

Apart from the railway, he also became a partner in the Great Western Cotton Company;

He didn’t die anonymously pursued by sharks in the wake,

But lived to a ripe old age and left a fortune.

Reimagining how the Railway Lies

The Iron Road, the Permanent Way:

Lines of steel stretch to vanishing point, Where pale-skinned navvies with pick and shovel,

Work their way through the nineteenth century. But, wait until the steam clouds dissipate,

See how that express train changes shape –A slave ship on the Middle Passage,

Sharks following in its crimson wake. The station, now a sugar plantation,

Manacles and shackles in the waiting room, Signal gantries now high gallows –

For the bounty paid to slave owners, when slavery was abolished in 1834,

Helped fuel the Railway Mania in its wake.

The Iron Road, the Permanent Way:

Lines of steal and steel stretch to revelation point:

A colonial landscape all along the line,

That is how the railway lies.

What’s in a Name?

 

Roger Lloyd in his 1951 book The Fascination of Railways wrote thus about engine names: ‘On the Great Western we have an endless series of castles, halls, courts and granges. The Southern specialises in admirals and shipping companies … also in the heroes and villains of the Arthurian legends, many of whom have quite unpronounceable names … Except for the “Patriot” class, the L.M.S. has been hardly more imaginative, and has given us little but regiments, dominions, colonies, battleships and admirals …

Now what is the purpose of giving names to railway engines? It is not merely to distinguish them, for their numbers do that. It is partly to make them more interesting, partly to pay compliments to people, places or institutions, partly to perpetuate bits of railway history, and partly to help in giving the impression of speed or power … but the purely complimentary nomenclature, though reasonable in itself, runs into absurdity when the class of engine becomes more numerous than the possible candidates for flattery.’

 

Well, these are good observations, all. But, even so, you can learn a good deal about history from the naming of a ‘class of engine’. For example, the GWR Atbara class: this class was named at the time of the Boer War when ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’ (and in the words of the Chartist poet, Ernest Jones, ‘but the blood never dries’). This was just after the British army began to wear khaki rather than the red uniforms associated with Stroud scarlet cloth; just after Kipling had written his poetical tribute to the ordinary British soldier: Tommy, and just before the government began to switch from a policy of ‘splendid isolation’. All the names reference colonial battles, places or famous persons of Empire (Atbara was the site of a battle in the Sudan War).

 

So, here are a few names of the engines to remind you of Britain’s imperial past: Atbara, Baden Powell, Kitchener, Khartoum, Kimberley, Ladysmith, Mafeking, Omdurman, Roberts, Sir Redvers, Pretoria, Cape Town …

 

And here are a few lines from Kipling and Tommy to remind you of that era:

 

‘I went into a public ‘ouse to get a pint of beer,

The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here” …

They sent me to the gallery or round the music-‘alls,

But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! they’ll shove me in the stalls! …

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep

Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap …

Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?

But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes,” when the drums begin to roll.’

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.