Category: Events

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.

The Glue Pot

I always like visiting the Glue Pot,

I like its position in the Railway Village:

A sentinel of Swindon’s heritage,

With open doors to the pavement

To welcome local and visitor alike.

I like visiting the Glue Pot in springtime:

Lengthening light around the Mechanics

Streams through the pub’s old draper’s windows,

With new hope for the Institute’s rebirth.

I like a summer pint in the Glue Pot,

With a choice of ten different ciders:

It’s like an infusion of Thomas Hardy,

With every novel you’ve ever read

Returning like a Native.

I like autumn drinking in the Glue Pot,

When mists and mellow fruitfulness

Greet a home win for the Railwaymen,

While others play chess or cribbage in the twilight.

I like a winter porter in the Glue Pot,
Imagining those glue pots simmering on the stove,

Until the factory hooter summons my family

Back to the carriage and wagon shop,

When this pub was called The London Stout House.

I like the seating in the Glue Pot,

The way the bar room echoes a railway carriage,

With the feeling of going on a journey

Through time and space on the Great Western Railway.

I like the book club and the library in the Glue Pot,

And I like the clay pipes and the saw mounted on the wall,

And the railway memorabilia and the pictures,

And I like the sale of postcards in the pub:

‘Money in the Guide Dog on the Bar, please’.
I like the sign above the bar:

‘An Oasis of Calm and Civility’.

It’s like the Orwell pub of his dreams,

The elusive Moon Under Water,

And it will always be the perfect pub for me,

Past, present and future all intertwined,

‘An Oasis of Calm and Civility’:

Welcome to the Glue Pot.

Sapperton in the 1920s

 

My grand-dad served throughout the Great War from 1914 to 1918. He was made redundant in 1919, in London, so he and his family moved back towards my grandmother’s home of Stroud. They lived in a Nissen hut by Minchinhampton Aerodrome (today’s Aston Down). Dad used to wander down to watch the trains. His sister, my Auntie Kath, had a different lens on the landscape.

For My Brother

When we were young

And full of fun and all our days were carefree,

Do you remember that September

We climbed the old pear tree.

The finest crop grows at the top,

The bramble jam we ate,

Our mother made and carefully laid,

On shelves with name and date.

We took a stick and went to pick

The biggest blackest berries,

Pulling down to the ground,

Clusters hung like cherries.

Remember the gate where we used to wait

For the early morning light,

To show in the field the wonderful yield

Of mushrooms, gleaming white.

The nuts we found so full and round

And filberts, too, so rare,

That lovely autumn on Sapperton Common,

What joy we used to share.

Wild harvest brings a host of things,

Mushrooms, nuts and fruit,

But best of all, with every Fall,

Comes memory, absolute.

Dear Famous Five,

If you want a great day out then you ought to come to the STEAM Museum in Swindon. Because this is what I saw when here today on holiday:

 

A gift shop, a fire engine, giant locomotive wheels, name plates and numbers, signals, holiday haunts posters, maps, lamps, shovels, buckets, navvies, ropes, notice boards, texts and pictures and photos and videos, the recreation of the railway works in picture and print and mannequin, the work of office clerks,

 

clocks, varnished tables, documents, filing cabinets, type writers, the drawing office, the factory stores, the factory hooter, a fire appliance, the Roll of Honour, the foundry, the medical fund, bicycles, trolleys, barrows, ingots, iron machines, pattern makers, treadles, belts, ladders, boxes, the carriage shop,

 

blacksmiths, cabinet makers, polishers, upholsterers, painters, signwriters, the sewing shop, tool boxes, the machine shop, lathes, drills, saws, gears, accidents, the boiler shop, war, the role of women, the noise, DANGER MEN WORKING OVERHEAD, The Cheltenham Flyer, 120 tons, walking beneath 4073 Caerphilly Castle, Box Tunnel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, why Swindon was chosen by Brunel, geology, toll boards, maps, seals, tokens, broad gauge and ordinary gauge, wagons, locomotives, carriages, platforms, a signal box, a brake van, boxes and suitcases, a milk churn, a tank engine, a lorry, a horse drawn van, shunting, trucks, a goods yard, carters, a tractor, a trailer, a station,

 

The Bristolian, 6000 King George V, 82c, GWR platform seats, inter-war refreshments, City of Truro 3717, machines for platform tickets, Queen Victoria’s carriage, a buffet car, 2818 freight locomotive, the Cornish Riviera, GWR The Holiday Line, Alfred Williams ‘The Hammerman Poet’, an air raid shelter, Trip Week, GWR ships and steamers, slot machines, the seaside pier, ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’, GWR buses, GWR camping carriages …

 

Dear Famous Five,

I see your advertisements taking you here, there and everywhere on today’s GWR – but why not make your next trip to Swindon to the STEAM Museum? You’d absolutely love it. Then take a walk through the railway village and have a picnic in the old railway park with a view of the water tower and, of course, lashings of ginger beer!

 

Wish you were here,

‘Ann Thusiast’

 

History at Capel’s Viaduct

It’s a great walk down to Capel’s Viaduct,
Past old ridge and furrow and tenterhook hedgerows,
Teazles here and there to raise your nap,
Imagining the patchwork quilt of fields of two centuries ago,

Field-names such as Bacon Slad, Calves Close, Sheep Furlong,

Little Chapel Hill, Freeze Land, Side Long Piece, Fir Tree Ground, Wheatlands,

Cobbs Acre, Spout Leaze, Home Ground, Old Well Close, Dye House Mead, Sweetmead;

Each name a toponym with a history and euphony.

The only names we now know and use are ‘Rodborough Fields’.

You pass an old oak sentinel to reach the River Frome

When walking down from Rodborough

(Where the Rev Awdry of railway story fame used to live),
Railway viaduct and river-bridge close at hand,
And there is the dell that once was Capel’s Mill:
Trees clambering down the steep riverbank to shroud the waters,
The remains of a mill sluice quickening the river’s pulse,
Rusting iron work still visible,
The steady drip down from the railway arches,
Sometimes, wild swimming in season,
Sometimes, picnics on high days and holidays,
Sometimes the turquoise flash of a kingfisher,
The splash of an otter or the curve of a dipper;
It’s hard to imagine that spinning jennies once clanked away,
With spinners clocking on and clocking off,
Clerks frowning at the figures in the ledgers,
As the world kept revolving and turning;
But a Spinning Jenny could only stand still at Capel’s Mill,
And watch the steam powered spinning world go by,
As the wooden Capel’s Viaduct was erected by the GWR,

To be succeeded by the brick structure you now see,

Towards the end of the 19^th century.

Some years later, a picture postcard scene

Portrays an elegant Edwardian lady

Clutching the rustic fencing on the river’s bridge,

Just by the old mill site and new-brick viaduct,

Staring at the waters with a detached composure,

As land is sold for the building of the houses where I now live:

“Near the GWR and Midland Railways”,
And the well-known “health resort” of Rodborough Common.

Think of that as you make your way past river and canal,

With Stroud town on your left, Rodborough Common on your right,

And history all around your carriage window,

Waving at you on your way to London.

A Stroud Valleys Railway and Canal Walk

 

At first glance, it might seem a bit odd to link old railway stations and halts near Stroud with Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. But if I give some famous lines a Dr Beeching tweak then I think you’ll know what I mean:

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair:

No railway halt remains. Round the decay

Of those halts and crossings, and stations too,

The lone and level lines stretch far away.’

But a May time may blossom walk along canal and footpath and pavement, with teazels, marsh marigolds, iris, cow parsley, swans, ducks, a robin and a heron for company, brought the railway past back to life. And even though the construction of a railway represented the acme of Victorian modernity, there is something quite hauntingly liminal about the positioning of these lost sites. The halts and crossings and stations lie where footpaths and holloways used by handloom weavers and packhorse wayfarers cross the valley floor, thence up and down the hillsides. And some of these tracks by the lineside could well be Neolithic: climbing up to ancient sites such as long barrows on the Cotswold scarp. In short, this railway landscape is older than it appears.

 

We started our exploration through time and space with a walk up from Ebley Mill on the Stroudwater Navigation to locate Ebley Crossing Halt (103 miles 52 chains from Paddington) and then followed a footpath to reach the site of Cashes Green Halt (103 miles 23 chains) where we stopped to chat with two residents out for a walk: “Oh, yes. I remember the halt in the old days. I used to use it now and then. You’ve reminded me now. It was just over there. The good old days. Lovely old steam trains.”

 

Walk down the hill back to the canal and turn left, then leave the canal at a bridge and cross the road at a pelican to reach Beard’s Lane and the site of Downfield Crossing Halt (102 miles 72 chains) where a footbridge now stands; then return to the canal to Walbridge, near Stroud Station, then past Capel’s Viaduct (scaffolding and maintenance happening), on to Bowbridge Crossing Halt (101 miles 37 chains) and so to Ham Mill Crossing Halt (100 miles 64 chains). A milepost on the Thames & Severn Canal, near Ham Mill, tells us that we are one and a half miles from Walbridge and twenty-seven and a quarter-miles from Inglesham, where the canal meets the Thames near Lechlade and so on to London.

 

When you reach the Ship just by what was once the second largest inland port in the country at Brimscombe, take a short detour up the hill on the pavement to reach Brimscombe Bridge Halt (99 miles 74 chains) and peer over the sides to look at what was once a busy scene. As it was today, with trackside clearance – did the workers know what was once here, I wondered. Retrace your steps and turn right to reach a red brick canal bridge and turn left to reach a crossing opposite some flats and Ali’s Kitchen (Indian restaurant): this is the site of what was once the furiously busy Brimscombe Station (99 miles 24 chains) with banking engines to assist trains up the steep incline to Sapperton.

 

There’s still a line of old railings along the roadside – once GWR chocolate and cream, I imagine. And two bus stops nearby on the busy A419 in a kind of unconscious memory of the past. As William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. It is not even past yet.”

 

Gloucester

‘On Monday, the Great Western line was opened throughout from London to Gloucester … 114 miles … four hours and a half distance reckoned by time … by ordinary trains; but there is an express train to and fro each day which performs the distance in five minutes under three hours. On Monday last, this train accomplished the 114 miles in two hours and forty minutes … The newly opened portion of the line passes through a most beautifully picturesque country, opening to travellers some of the choicest scenery in Gloucestershire.

Gloucester Journal 17^th May 1845

 

Two gauges met at Gloucester: Brunel’s GWR broad gauge (only about 10% of the national railway) and the more usual gauge of four feet eight and a half inches, coming down from the north on its way to Bristol. The government had set up a committee to examine the gauge question with the power to make recommendations. Evidence (possibly contrived against the GWR broad gauge) was gathered at Gloucester and the observers from the Parliamentary Gauge Committee, according to this later comment, ‘were appalled by the clamour arising from the well-arranged confusion of shouting out addresses of consignments, the chucking of packages across from truck to truck, the enquiries for missing articles, the loading, unloading and reloading …’

 

Such notorious chaos was famously depicted in The London Illustrated News – and that journal’s illustrations did not always reflect a carefully observed reality. But these are its words: ‘It was found at Gloucester that to tranship the contents of one wagon full of miscellaneous merchandise to another, from one gauge to another, takes about an hour, with all the force of porters … bricks are miss-counted … slates chipped … cheeses cracked … ripe fruit and vegetables crushed … chairs, furniture, oil cakes, cast-iron pots, grates and ovens all more or less broken …’

 

The consequences of this confusion went way beyond freight, of course, with missed connections for passengers. But in the age before standardised time across the nation – ‘Railway Time’ (GMT) – when time was set according to the sun, three different railway companies met at Gloucester and used three different clocks: the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway used Birmingham time; the Bristol & Gloucester used Bristol time, and the GWR used London time …

No surprise that Parliament decided in favour of broad gauge in 1846; our line to Swindon was converted to ordinary gauge in 1872, whilst the GWR converted its overall system piecemeal, often putting in a third rail too, until the complete end of GWR broad gauge in 1892.