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.

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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.

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!