Category: History

The Life of Allen Davenport

Allen Davenport

Prologue

When you were there at the Hopkins Street political chapel,
Or the Archer Street chapel in Soho,
Or listening at the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields,
In those months before the Cato Street Conspiracy,
There, with Robert Wedderburn –
Your rhetoric celebrating atheism,
Denouncing Christian hypocrisy
And espousing armed sedition,
In this, the most revolutionary
Of all the Spencean and political chapels,
Did your mind ever wander madeleine-like,
To the green in Ewen where you taught yourself to read,
And where you taught yourself to write?

(‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’)

Part the First

You had been a friend of Thomas Spence,
Since you had first met him in 1804,
It was Spence’s Restorer of Society to its Natural State
That set you on the path to political prose and poetry,

Allen Davenport

Prologue

When you were there at the Hopkins Street political chapel,
Or the Archer Street chapel in Soho,
Or listening at the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields,
In those months before the Cato Street Conspiracy,
There, with Robert Wedderburn –
Your rhetoric celebrating atheism,
Denouncing Christian hypocrisy
And espousing armed sedition,
In this, the most revolutionary
Of all the Spencean and political chapels,
Did your mind ever wander madeleine-like,
To the green in Ewen where you taught yourself to read,
And where you taught yourself to write?

(‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’)

Part the First

You had been a friend of Thomas Spence,
Since you had first met him in 1804,
It was Spence’s Restorer of Society to its Natural State
That set you on the path to political prose and poetry,

Spence’s writings were an epiphany for you:
‘’Tis reason’s light – an intellectual sun,
Whose influence, none but fools and tyrants shun.
‘Tis human knowledge, and a sense of right,
That burst upon me like a flood of light’;

You would be Thomas’ biographer,
A prolific versifier and poet,
A delegate to the Shoemakers’ Union,
And in defiance of the Combination Acts,
A supporter of a general strike,
In 1813, just after the northern Luddites;
Later, a radical and revolutionary writer,
Turning towards physical force
After ‘reason’s light’ failed to sway ‘fools and tyrants’,
A government spy reported thus on the Spencean view
About the projected peaceful meeting at St Peters Fields
(When Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt famously declared:
‘Bring nought but your self-approving consciences’) –
‘They expect the Row to begin, and this they look upon as the signal to begin. They will be much disappointed if that meeting goes off quietly.’

Part the Second

There was a rush of Spencean publications
In the lead up to Peterloo:
Address of the Society of Christian Philanthropists to All Mankind,
on the Means of Promoting Liberty and Happiness’
More Plots, More Treason, More Green Bags,
But you, Allen, still remembered the quintessential
Principles of agrarianism:
‘Thus all the world BELONGS TO MAN,
But NOT to Kings and Lords;
A country’s lands the people’s farm,
And all that it affords:
For why? Divide it how you will,
‘Tis all the people’s still:
The people’s country, parish, town;
They build, defend and till’.
But, part of the web and fringe of Cato Street Conspirators,
You spoke thus in the wake of Peterloo:
‘War … has … been declared against us why then should we hesitate,
for my own part I am ready now … I compare the present time to the crisis of the French Revolution, we must arm ourselves as they did.’
A close confidante of Robert Wedderburn,
Radical atheist and physical force revolutionary,
Arthur Thistlewood ‘ says he depends more on
Wedderburn’s division for being armed than all the rest’;

Part the Third

After the failure of the Conspiracy,
In the quieter 1820s
(The decade of so-called ‘Liberal Toryism’),
You would write verse in praise of Owenism,
Extend the principles of the ‘People’s Farm’
(‘I have no doubt that it was the Agrarian fellowship in land
that presented to the minds of the ancients the idea of Paradise’),
To the wider industrial means of production
And transport infrastructure
(‘Manufacturing machinery’ should be ‘public property’),
Propose action redolent of an Amazon boycott:
‘the middle and lower classes of shopkeepers are as much dissatisfied with the government as the working people are. The plan by which I propose to form an alliance between the working classes and the lower class of shopkeepers or middlemen, is exclusive dealing’.
You would write a ‘Cooperative Catechism’,
Give lectures with fellow working class leaders,
Write for Richard Carlisle’s The Republican,
Write for the Cooperative Magazine,
Support the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge,
Become president of the Great Tower Mutual Instruction Society
At the Society for Scientific, Useful and Literary Information
(The Bowling Square chapel in Lower White Cross Street),
Support the Society for Promoting Anti-Christian and General Instruction,
Where three hundred could meet at the ‘Optimist Chapel’
(The clergy? ‘robbing the lower class of people
and not only them but the poor Farmers …
Tythes and Taxation all owing to them
by their Extravagance and Luxury’);

Part the Fourth

Speak at protest meetings at the Borough Chapel,
Support contraception on feminist grounds,
Speak for the National Union of the Working Classes,
At the ‘Finsbury Forum’
(Was it really in an old cow shed near St Luke’s,
Before moving to a house in Bunhill Row?),
But the Finsbury group was in the radical vanguard
Over the 1832 Reform Act:
‘Confiscate the estates of obdurate peers!’
It helped lead the unstamped press campaign;
It took the lead with the NUWC,
And led criticism of the new police in 1834 at Cold Bath Fields,
With AD once more in the vanguard:
‘The object of the Government was not to warn but surround and slaughter … this police mob … It behoves every friend of peace, order and good government to be on their guard against these common disturbers of peaceable society’,
Then you’re in Brighton Street at a ‘Mechanics’ Forum’,
Trumpeting the thoughts of Thomas Spence.
‘Author of the Spencean system, or Agarian Equality’
At the London Co-operative Society,
Then a founder member of the London Manufacturing Community,
Becoming its storekeeper,
But still finding the time to use your quill:
‘We manufactured boots, shoes, brushes, etc., and for a time, our little establishment inspired us with the most ardent hopes that it would realise our fondest anticipations, and convince the world of the superiority of the co-operative principle over that of competition.’

Part the Fifth

Your life bridged and fused together
So many different strands of thought,
In a span that stretched from the American Revolution
To the ‘Hungry Forties’ and Chartism:
Agrarianism; Revolution; Owenism; Secularism,
And, finally, metropolitan Chartism:
You were president of the ELDA,
And a founder member of the East London Democratic Association,
You campaigned, spoke and lectured all over London,
Your 1836 biography of the great pioneer,
Life, Writings, and Principles of Thomas Spence,
Was acclaimed by old comrades and new Chartist companions,
When you spoke on the celebration of Spence’s birthday,
Before a rerun of the rousing old songs of Spence,
And when the first Chartist Land Plan scheme
Came to fruition at O’Connorville in Hertfordshire,
You jubilantly declared that ‘The Jubilee is come at last’,
For ‘the Agrarian Revolution’ had seemingly commenced.

Part the Sixth

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

Post-script:

‘I feel I should add a few lines about just what I owed my wife. She was tireless in supporting my work as a cobbler and tireless in helping me develop as a thinker, polemicist and writer. She gave me confidence, love and a child.
When she died, my income though shoemaking plumbed the depths. She was my indefatigable partner in the industrious production of shoes, clogs and boots. And Thomas Spence was too, in a sort of numinous manner: with his dedication of some words to our patron saint, to the ‘Service of St Crispin’, after our 1812 strike failed to improve our lot in the metropolis.’

Post-post-script:

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Post-post-post-script:

Concluding Remarks on Allen Davenport
The King, or Legitimacy Unmasked, A Satirical Poem
Printed by the celebrated exponent of the Spencean burlesque,
Samuel Waddington in Oxford Street in 1819;
This poem written by the son of a weaver in Ewen,
Was bought by a government spy from Robert Wedderburn;
This boy who taught himself to read and write,
Would become a noted writer for Sherwin’s Political Register,
But when he made his last recorded visit to Wedderburn’s chapel,
So he ceased to contribute to the radical press –
The Theological Comet asked:
‘What is become of A.D.?’
Followed by Davenport’s poem,
‘Saint Ethelstone’s Day’,
Which commented upon Peterloo’s
‘Yoemanry Butchers’ who
‘hacked off the breasts of women
and then cut off the ears and noses of men’,
Then his lines about consequent Christian hypocrisy;
So let us remember Allen Davenport with his own concluding words:

‘Every man should study Politics, for my part I study them all Day. I write on them, I dream of them at Night, I stand here twice a week preaching Blasphemy and Sedition (as they call it and will continue to do so unless they rob me of my liberty.’
And, finally, his speech from October 27th 1819: “Let us prepare to knock down this system of tyranny to rush upon the Cannon’s Mouth and if we should not succeed Die gloriously in the Struggle.”

Sources used:
Artisans and Politics in Early 19th Century London John Gast and His Times
Iorweth Prothero Methuen 1979
The Life and Times of Thomas Spence P.M. Ashraf 1983
The Poor Man’s Revolutionary ed by Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong
The People’s Farm English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840 Malcolm Chase
The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport With a further selection of the author’s work Compiled and Edited by Malcolm Chase Scolar Press 1994
The Muses’s Wreath, containing Hornsey Wood and other Poems Allen Davenport
Radical Underworld Ian McCalman Clarendon Paperbacks
Radical Culture David Worrall Wayne State University

Worker’s Memorial Day Walk Remembering Allen Davenport

Remembering Allen Davenport

‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Thanks to Deborah Roberts for the above photograph.

Remembering Allen Davenport

‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Concluding Remarks on Allen Davenport
The King, or Legitimacy Unmasked, A Satirical Poem
Printed by the celebrated exponent of the Spencean burlesque,
Samuel Waddington in Oxford Street in 1819;
This poem written by the son of a weaver in Ewen,
Was bought by a government spy from Robert Wedderburn;
This boy who taught himself to read and write,
Would become a noted writer for Sherwin’s Political Register,
But when he made his last recorded visit to Wedderburn’s chapel,
So he ceased to contribute to the radical press –
The Theological Comet asked:
‘What is become of A.D.?’
Followed by Davenport’s poem,
‘Saint Ethelstone’s Day’,
Which commented upon Peterloo’s
‘Yoemanry Butchers’ who
‘hacked off the breasts of women
and then cut off the ears and noses of men’,
Then his lines about consequent Christian hypocrisy;
So let us remember Allen Davenport with his own concluding words:

‘Every man should study Politics, for my part I study them all Day. I write on them, I dream of them at Night, I stand here twice a week preaching Blasphemy and Sedition (as they call it and will continue to do so unless they rob me of my liberty.’
And, finally, his speech from October 27th 1819: “Let us prepare to knock down this system of tyranny to rush upon the Cannon’s Mouth and if we should not succeed Die gloriously in the Struggle.”

 

A Prehistory Trip to Stroud Museum

‘Museums make you more aware:
Give You
Sense
Sensibility
Knowledge
A foothold in time
Make you feel a part of it all’

It’s a right regular education
When you visit Stroud Museum,
To process through the rooms,
On a trek to a prehistoric age:

For here’s a cabinet of curiosities:
Twenty-four exhibits, including
The tooth from an ancient Minchinhampton crocodile,
A coral from Newmarket, Nailsworth,
A Nautilus from Rodborough …
The Paris Situationists’ slogan
‘Underneath the pavements, the beach!’
Is displaced by this vista of the vastness of Time:
‘Over our heads as we walk the Stroudwater valleys,
The limitless ancient ocean!’

Stroud Museum and Prehistoric Stroud

‘Museums make you more aware:
Give You
Sense
Sensibility
Knowledge
A foothold in time
Make you feel a part of it all’

It’s a right regular education
When you visit Stroud Museum,
To process through the rooms,
On a trek to a prehistoric age:

For here’s a cabinet of curiosities:
Twenty-four exhibits, including
The tooth from an ancient Minchinhampton crocodile,
A coral from Newmarket, Nailsworth,
A Nautilus from Rodborough …
The Paris Situationists’ slogan
‘Underneath the pavements, the beach!’
Is displaced by this vista of the vastness of Time:
‘Over our heads as we walk the Stroudwater valleys,
The limitless ancient ocean!’

.
And here is another cabinet of curiosities:
A cabinet of ammonites and molluscs
A mixture of the extinct and the extant:
Long gone species such as the ichthyosaur,
But ‘Incredibly, the Lingula bracheopods have existed for some 500 million years’:
It’s enough to blow your mind as you muse on the ineffable nature of Time,
Here by the cabinets in Stroud Museum.
And there within a cabinet,
Carefully labelled and dated
By some fossicking antiquarian,
Lie the exhibits with their discovery date:
May 1939,
That last innocent spring
Spent in ruminative discovery,
Before the Age of Blitzkrieg and Holocaust.

Visitors wander along chatting about the exhibits,
Two plan excursions to fossil sites,
A young mum educates her child,
Friendly staff chat to me about what I am doing,
Another two people pass me,
Talking about Cotswold long barrows,
And here, a board with artists’ impressions
Of a Mesolithic landscape at Stroud,
The Neolithic long barrow at Nympsfield,
And the Iron Age fort at Uley
And here, a photo of Uley Bury in the here and now,
Together with a reconstruction of way back then,
Together with text about Crickley Hill,
And Neolithic arrowheads found there,
And slingstones and arrowheads found at Uley Bury
(built c.300 B.C.)
Then a large cabinet full of old bones,
Including – possibly – the bones
Of a Neolithic hunting dog
Found at the ‘so-called “Soldier’s Grave”,
a Neolithic round barrow at Frocester’,
And here, copper and bronze axes from the Bronze Age,
And Neolithic flint flakes
And Iron Age slingstones
In another cabinet of curiosities,
When along came Ian, a Museum volunteer,
Who told me how he often stands by the Romano-British altars,
And the funerary exhibits,
Reflecting on life, death and the genius loci
OF time and space locked behind the glass doors of the cabinets,
It all felt a bit M.R. James ghost story-like:
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ …
I wouldn’t dare whistle here if I were you …

For here is a cabinet with a boy’s skull and a beaker,
A Bronze Age cinerary urn
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ …
There, a Neolithic trephined skull from Bisley,
This is a copy. The original is in the British Museum.
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ …

Well, tempus fugit and all that,
It was time for me to go;
Sense, sensibility and knowledge all augmented,
Horizons broadened,
Educated, informed and entertained
In the true traditions of public service.
I bought some polished ammonites before I left the museum,
A present for my wife on her birthday,
To help her reflect on the nature of time and mortality,
And walked out into a windswept mad March day,
Feeling slightly wired by what I had seen and read,
Slightly ever so pantheistic,
Aware and part of it all:
The robin singing in the blossom blackthorn,
The rising, rushing Painswick stream by Tescos,
No bow and arrow or slingshot,
But the corvids still cried in alarm.
Clacking and fluttering in the trees on Rodborough Hill
As I ascended the hill to home,
Just as they did five thousand years ago.

‘Museums make you more aware:
Give You
Sense
Sensibility
Knowledge
A foothold in time
Make you feel a part of it all’

A Wiltshire Town and Peterloo

I travelled on the GWR,
Built not long after the Orator’s death,
Passing through a mill-scape valley
Known well by quondam colleague, William Cobbett,
On past antique ridge and furrow fields,
To Swindon, a town that I am sure
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt would have admired,
A new industrial work-town,
Full of mechanics and artisans and questioning,
Thence by the 49 bus across the windswept Downs,
Through a leafless Captain Swing landscape
On a Captain Swing late November rain-swept day,
To take my leisure at the Bear in the town square,
Where – against every grain – Henry Hunt took his wife:
‘How this betrothing came about I must now inform my readers, I had often
heard my father speak in very high terms of Miss Halcomb, the daughter of his
old acquaintance, Mr. Wm. Halcomb, who kept the Bear Inn at Devizes, well
known to be one of the very best inns between London and Bath.’

I travelled on the GWR,
Built not long after the Orator’s death,
Passing through a mill-scape valley
Known well by quondam colleague, William Cobbett,
On past antique ridge and furrow fields,
To Swindon, a town that I am sure
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt would have admired,
A new industrial work-town,
Full of mechanics and artisans and questioning,
Thence by the 49 bus across the windswept Downs,
Through a leafless Captain Swing landscape
On a Captain Swing late November rain-swept day,
To take my leisure at the Bear in the town square,
Where – against every grain – Henry Hunt took his wife:
‘How this betrothing came about I must now inform my readers, I had often
heard my father speak in very high terms of Miss Halcomb, the daughter of his
old acquaintance, Mr. Wm. Halcomb, who kept the Bear Inn at Devizes, well
known to be one of the very best inns between London and Bath.’

I travelled on the GWR,
Built not long after the Orator’s death,
Passing through a mill-scape valley
Known well by quondam colleague, William Cobbett,
On past antique ridge and furrow fields,
To Swindon, a town that I am sure
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt would have admired,
A new industrial work-town,
Full of mechanics and artisans and questioning,
Thence by the 49 bus across the windswept Downs,
Through a leafless Captain Swing landscape
On a Captain Swing late November rain-swept day,
To take my leisure at the Bear in the town square,
Where – against every grain – Henry Hunt took his wife:
‘How this betrothing came about I must now inform my readers, I had often
heard my father speak in very high terms of Miss Halcomb, the daughter of his
old acquaintance, Mr. Wm. Halcomb, who kept the Bear Inn at Devizes, well
known to be one of the very best inns between London and Bath.’
Middle England was at its elevenses
In the hotel when I arrived,
But there were drinkers in the bar,
Faux Pickwickian coaching scenes everywhere,
No mention of the Orator, of course,
And no mention of him in the square,
Despite the mother and father of all coincidence,
And irony, paradox, juxtaposition and antithesis –
For right opposite the Bear stands a memorial,
A memorial to Lord Sidmouth
Member of Parliament for Devizes,
The hated rather than revered Lord Sidmouth,
He of Peterloo and reactionary infamy,
The repressive Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth,
Operator of spies, informers and agents-provocateurs,
Reviled by Shelley in The Masque of Anarchy*,
The arch-reactionary who congratulated the magistrates
And the yeomanry after the Peterloo massacre,
And who was, in more than just a sense,
Responsible for Hunt’s imprisonment
And consequent solitary confinement:
*’Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by …
Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’

Swinish Multitude

Edmund Burke‘s Statue, Bristol, December 2018

Edmund Burke on the lower orders – ‘ a swinish multitude’ –

‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude … ‘

Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790

Edmund Burke ‘s Statue

Paid for by a Bristol tobacco baron,
We look on your works and despair:
You stand there, commanding Bristol’s heights,
Your ancien regime condescension
Masked by this deceptive commemoration:
“I wish to be a member of parliament to have my share
of doing good and resisting evil.”
Far more truthful if the plinth were etched
With this memorialization:
‘I regard all you common people,
Passing me by on your trivial tasks
As nothing more than a swinish multitude.’

Edmund Burke‘s Statue, Bristol, December 2018

Edmund Burke on the lower orders – ‘ a swinish multitude’ –

‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude … ‘

Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790

Edmund Burke ‘s Statue

Paid for by a Bristol tobacco baron,
We look on your works and despair:
You stand there, commanding Bristol’s heights,
Your ancien regime condescension
Masked by this deceptive commemoration:
“I wish to be a member of parliament to have my share
of doing good and resisting evil.”
Far more truthful if the plinth were etched
With this memorialization:
‘I regard all you common people,
Passing me by on your trivial tasks
As nothing more than a swinish multitude.’

Thomas Spence:
Pigs’ meat; or, lessons for the swinish multitude: Published in weekly penny numbers, collected by the poor man’s advocate (an old veteran in the cause of freedom) in the course of his reading for more than twenty years. Intended to promote among the labouring part of mankind proper ideas of their situation, of their importance, and of their rights. And to convince them that their forlorn condition has not been entirely overlooked and forgotten, nor their just cause unpleaded, neither by their maker not by the best and most enlightened of men in all ages.
London: printed for T. Spence, at the hive of liberty, No. 8, Little-Turnstile, High Holborn

Edmund Burke Statue Haiku

Swinish multitude?
Remember Mr. Shelley –
Ozymandias!

All Hail Thomas Spence!
We’re no ‘swinish multitude’!
Pig’s Meat! People’s Farms!

Tokens issued by Thomas Spence and on display include
‘PIG’S MEAT PUBLISHED BY T * SPENCE LONDON (depicting a boar trampling upon the symbols of monarchy, parliament and the established church), and
PIG’S MEAT PUBLISHED BY T * SPENCE LONDON (a boar, once more, trampling upon symbols of authority: coronet, crozier and staff).

So you stand there on this Christmas Sunday,
Regarding the yuletide shoppers and beggars,
Most, oblivious to the hypocrisy
Of your words (and your pocket borough past) –
But just once in a while someone walks by,
Muttering ‘Swinish multitude, indeed.’
For they know of the anger caused by Burke,
They know of the radical consequence:
An Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude
Pearls Cast before Swine by Edmund Burke Scraped together by Old Hubert
Hog’s Wash, later renamed Politics for the People or a Salmagundy for Swine
One Penny’s Worth of Pig’s Meat,; Pigs’ Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude
A Rod for the Burkites by One of the Swinish Multitude
Peas for the Swine and Grapes for Citizen
Husks for the Swine, Dedicated to the Swine of England, the Rabble of Scotland, and the Wretches of Ireland by one of the Herd
The Grunter’s Ode, or, an Heroic Poem, by a Swine … dedicated to Mr Burke, Godfather of the Swinish Multitude
The Rights of Swine
A New Catechism for the Use of the Swinish Multitude to be had in all Sties

Sources used:
Shelley and Burke’s Swinish Multitude Roland Bartel Keats-Shelley Journal Vol 18 (1969)
The Poor Man’s Revolutionary ed by Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong

The Kings and Kingdoms

The hollow roll of dates
chronicling the tired litany of monarchs.
Their dusty bones never sleeping
gasping their phantom moans to every generation:
To keep on fighting for the kingdom.
To never forget king and kingdom comes first.
You are its living instrument
that the dead summon to serve and die buried under the hollow drum roll of dates and kings.
Piling their bloody victories, plundered wealth and the crotch grasping posture of destruction over the thousands of corpses that had to die.
To die like an insignificant fly for the dusty bones and stones cut with the deeds of one homicidal dynasty after another.
Oh but the blood must run, it must run!
The young have to die.
The women will birth our soldiers.
For I can hear the dry bones of old kings and their old wars
drumming in today’s march into oblivion.

The hollow roll of dates
chronicling the tired litany of monarchs.
Their dusty bones never sleeping
gasping their phantom moans to every generation:
To keep on fighting for the kingdom.
To never forget king and kingdom comes first.
You are its living instrument
that the dead summon to serve and die buried under the hollow drum roll of dates and kings.
Piling their bloody victories, plundered wealth and the crotch grasping posture of destruction over the thousands of corpses that had to die.
To die like an insignificant fly for the dusty bones and stones cut with the deeds of one homicidal dynasty after another.
Oh but the blood must run, it must run!
The young have to die.
The women will birth our soldiers.
For I can hear the dry bones of old kings and their old wars
drumming in today’s march into oblivion.

The skeletons return to fight
their wars that do not grow old.
Their yellowed bones
clack under dulled battle gear.
The youth of the living
called again and again
to be sacrificed fresh lambs for the
glorious slaughter.

The skeletons are replenished by our warring
but it is to the black eyes of death
the fighting belongs.
So another generation is harvested
blood and flesh feeding the ridden earth
to fruit skeletons
and masterful ravens,
those wit is the mirror of all our destruction.

Captain Swing in Gloucestershire

‘And lo and behold! Here I am!’

It was a perfect autumn day for a bike ride,
Mournful golds and russets and crimsons,
Sun dappled and splashed as I climbed the wolds,
To leave the pastoral valleys behind,
And so reach the wide, open, brown-ploughed fields,
Up above Avening, on the high, back lanes
Around Chavenage and Cherington and Beverstone,
On my cyclo-geographical trip to the Troubled House inn;

Back in the winter of 1830,
These lanes were thronged with anxious farm hands:
Families were hungry with bread prices high,
With wages low, and winter indigence
Threatened by these new threshing machines;
And so the Captain Swing riots had made their way
From Wiltshire to Gloucestershire –
Smashing threshing machines, burning hay ricks,
Penning threatening letters to farmers, signed by
The half-mythologised gentleman on a white horse,
The impossibly ubiquitous Captain Swing:
“this is to inform you what you have to undergo gentelemen if providing you Don’t pull down your meshenes and rise the poor mens wages the married men give tow and sixpence a day the single tow shillings or we will burn down your barns and you in them this is the last notis
From Swing”

‘And lo and behold! Here I am!’

It was a perfect autumn day for a bike ride,
Mournful golds and russets and crimsons,
Sun dappled and splashed as I climbed the wolds,
To leave the pastoral valleys behind,
And so reach the wide, open, brown-ploughed fields,
Up above Avening, on the high, back lanes
Around Chavenage and Cherington and Beverstone,
On my cyclo-geographical trip to the Troubled House inn;

Back in the winter of 1830,
These lanes were thronged with anxious farm hands:
Families were hungry with bread prices high,
With wages low, and winter indigence
Threatened by these new threshing machines;
And so the Captain Swing riots had made their way
From Wiltshire to Gloucestershire –
Smashing threshing machines, burning hay ricks,
Penning threatening letters to farmers, signed by
The half-mythologised gentleman on a white horse,
The impossibly ubiquitous Captain Swing:
“this is to inform you what you have to undergo gentelemen if providing you Don’t pull down your meshenes and rise the poor mens wages the married men give tow and sixpence a day the single tow shillings or we will burn down your barns and you in them this is the last notis
From Swing”

He came to Horsley at the end of November:
Threshing machines were dutifully broken,
Lord Sherborne rallied the J.P.s of the shire,
And appealed to the agricultural labourers:
Return to your labours and we will listen to your complaints,
But the promise of a ‘just’ response
Was the jailing of nearly a hundred labourers
In the prison at Gloucester …

The cavalry were dispatched to the Trouble House,
Surrounding the inn, with their swords drawn
(‘I’ll give them “Bread or Blood”, be damned’),
The farm hands pausing for some bread and cheese,
Escaping out the back door, into the rain,
Pursued by the cavalry through the plashy fields,
Near two dozen captured in the mud and mire,
Drenched to their skin and bone in their threadbare coats …
The nearby lanes and farmyards were frantic too,
Tetbury, Chavenage, Cherington and Beverstone,
All so surface upper crust these days,
But over a hundred gathered then on the Beverstone Road,
‘Be damned if we don’t go to Beverstone and break the machine!’
Sledge hammers, picks, staves all carried
Under the tutelage of Elizabeth Parker,
To the farm of Jacob Hayward,
To smash that damned threshing machine,
A signal moment for Gloucestershire
In ‘The Last Labourer’s Revolt’ …

And what echoes did I hear today?
What ghosts did I see in the fields and lanes?
(As I cycled past Princess Anne’s Gatcombe Park
But then the home of the economist, Mr Ricardo,
Whose speculations on the labour theory of value,
Would be turned upside down and revolutionised
Within a generation by Chartists and Karl Marx.)
And, more pertinently, perhaps,
How was this event memorialized
Within the here and now quite posh Troubled House?

A framed newspaper cutting from the last century
Recounts stories of “troubles’ at the inn,
Including

‘MEMORY OF A RIOT

About 120 years ago, when disturbances broke out among agricultural workers and there was frequent rioting, owing to manual labour being displaced by new farming machinery, the old inn, then known by the name of the “Wagon and Horses”, was the scene of one such outbreak.
So intense had grown the feeling of workers on the land in these parts that farmers who had become possessed of any of the new “contraptions” were obliged to keep them in hiding.

MENACING CROWD

One day a carter was attempting to convey, with as much secrecy as possible, a hay-making machine to a certain farm in the Tetbury neighbourhood. He had it covered up on a wagon, but as he was passing through a quiet side street of Tetbury it was detected by the wife of a farm worker.
Quickly she spread the news about and within a few minutes an infuriated crowd had gathered with menacing cries of “Down with machinery!”
The carter and the hay-making machine were surrounded and bundled outside the town to a lonely spot, where the horses were unharnessed. Bundles of straw were fetched, piled up, and the wagon and the hay-maker burned out.
Having thus whetted their appetites for destructiveness, the mob proceeded to various farms in the locality and destroyed other machines which they found in hiding.
So serious did the sabotage become that the authorities sent post-haste for a company of horse-soldiers stationed at Dursley. By the time the military arrived, the mob had reached the “Wagon and Horses” Inn, and it was here that the struggle between the rioters and the soldiers took place.

ARRESTED AT THE INN

Needless to say, the military soon gained the upper hand and a number of the rioters’ men – and women – were arrested and taken to Gloucester to await trial. Some were eventually liberated, but the ring-leaders were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.’

There is another framed, yellowing newspaper cutting,
Over on the wall towards the toilets,
Another litany of Trouble House woes,
With the unnamed Captain Swing Riots
Featuring once again, similar in tone,
But with slightly different facts to the other narrative:
‘New machine’
This time the ‘new fangled machine’ is for mowing,
Hidden as before, but now ‘brightly painted’,
It could cost ‘ten men their livelihood’;
‘Fire Raisers

A possee was waiting for the carter as soon as his wagon had cleared the town.
The men unhitched the horses and fired the wagon and its hated load. Their success as they watched the bonfire blazing whetted their appetite …
The mob were quenching their thirst at Trouble House when the mounted soldiers overtook them. It was a short struggle with victory for the military never much in doubt.
Men and women fire-bugs were arrested and hauled off to stand their trial at Gloucester Assizes.’

I took photos and cappuccino,
Rather than small beer and bread and cheese,
But the ghosts of the twenty-three were there,
Out in the October autumn-brown
Large-spread new ploughed fields,
And as I cycled home along the old back lanes,
Who should I see but a man upon a white horse?

‘What a coincidence!’ I cried.
‘Why? What coincidence?’
I explained about Captain Swing and his white horse.
‘And lo and behold! Here I am!’

The Burial Chamber

It stands at the end of a street
(Bungalows, cars, caravans, camper vans,
Children playing in the road and on the driveways),
There, behind a gate and beyond the signposts.

A six thousand year old burial chamber,
One giant stone forty-five degrees athwart
Another four, in a suburban enclosure,
Precarious yet adamantine-firm;

Cremated bones were found here.

It stands at the end of a street
(Bungalows, cars, caravans, camper vans,
Children playing in the road and on the driveways),
There, behind a gate and beyond the signposts.

A six thousand year old burial chamber,
One giant stone forty-five degrees athwart
Another four, in a suburban enclosure,
Precarious yet adamantine-firm;

Cremated bones were found here.

We fingered the stones’ provenance.

A bat flew through the twilight,
Geese cried their plangent nightlight summons,
Rooks gathered in a silhouette roost,
Just as they did when these stones were lifted,
And the bones of an excarnated body
Were laid to embered rest.

And that night, when awake,
An owl called to me across space and time.

Nevern, near Newport, Pembs

Faith, Time and Tide

We wandered windfall pilgrims’ paths,
Past hedgerows bright with sloe and crimson haw,
Swallows, too, following their autumnal call,
While murmurations of starlings,
And flocks of melancholy geese,
Patterned a darkening estuarine sky,

The ghost-church at Cwm-yr-Eglwys
Tolled an ancient knell of parting day,
A sea-storm squall shifted drowned sailors’ bones,

But we slipped past circles of stone,
Past Carn Ingli – the Hill of Angels -,
To seek penance and resurrection,

Faith, Time and Tide

We wandered windfall pilgrims’ paths,
Past hedgerows bright with sloe and crimson haw,
Swallows, too, following their autumnal call,
While murmurations of starlings,
And flocks of melancholy geese,
Patterned a darkening estuarine sky,

The ghost-church at Cwm-yr-Eglwys
Tolled an ancient knell of parting day,
A sea-storm squall shifted drowned sailors’ bones,

But we slipped past circles of stone,
Past Carn Ingli – the Hill of Angels -,
To seek penance and resurrection,

A scrupulous dappled procession,
On the high narrow path above the roiling waters,
Past a sacred yew with bleeding stigmata,
Past Celtic cross tracery and Ogham script –
For three pilgrimages to St David’s
Will earn eternal salvation,
As much as one to Jerusalem –

We joined the joyous throng of ghosts,
Some solemn, withdrawn and pentitential,
Some hiding their womanhood beneath their tunics,
To reach the Pilgrims’ Cross, inscribed in rock,

Where we placed our feet in perfect symmetry,
In the well-worn indentations of the soles
Of our ancestors, marching for centuries
West towards the setting sun,
Their footfalls perfectly preserved
In the shadowed wet-soak slate and gleaming rock,

High above the motte and castle ruins at Nevern,
A numinous reminder of the power,
Of Faith and Time and Tide.

Stroud And The Inuit

Stuart

We are off on holiday soon so wanted to share the information
I was relating this info whilst stewarding at Landsdown gallery on the weekend.

I am Canadian living in the UK and while doing the Diploma in stitched textiles at East Berkshire college many years ago, used the Art and caribou skin clothing of the Inuit in Baker Lake as my main theme of research and work.

I had read in an article in Piecework magazine from the USA about the women in Baker Lake using what was described as a wool/felt material called Stroud to make their colourful naive wallhangings that are still being made today.

The co-operative was set up in the 70’s by the Canada Council to encourage Inuit women to continue sewing (the nomadic families were being brought into communities in the 1950’s, 60’s because of severe winters, education for children and malnutrition).

There was a concern that they would stop sewing the caribou skin clothes (for hunter husbands) and lose sewing skills (which were evident in the applique and beadwork on their amauti coats.)  They thought they would be more attracted to modern winter wear.
This did not happen because man made cloth garments were not warm enough.

Stuart

We are off on holiday soon so wanted to share the information
I was relating this info whilst stewarding at Landsdown gallery on the weekend.

I am Canadian living in the UK and while doing the Diploma in stitched textiles at East Berkshire college many years ago, used the Art and caribou skin clothing of the Inuit in Baker Lake as my main theme of research and work.

I had read in an article in Piecework magazine from the USA about the women in Baker Lake using what was described as a wool/felt material called Stroud to make their colourful naive wallhangings that are still being made today.

The co-operative was set up in the 70’s by the Canada Council to encourage Inuit women to continue sewing (the nomadic families were being brought into communities in the 1950’s, 60’s because of severe winters, education for children and malnutrition).

There was a concern that they would stop sewing the caribou skin clothes (for hunter husbands) and lose sewing skills (which were evident in the applique and beadwork on their amauti coats.)  They thought they would be more attracted to modern winter wear.
This did not happen because man made cloth garments were not warm enough.

So this co-operative in Baker Lake came about and brought in bolts of felted wool – often very colourful to make the wallhangings that are sold in galleries in many places in N/ America.  The women had stories to tell and would applique shapes onto the cloth and add intense embroidery stitch.

The dense felted wool material was referred to as Stroud.   I had not come across that term of wool fabric, and asked about, when I visited Winnipeg – the curator of the Museum  there (it has a huge collection of caribou skin clothing and a large Hudson Bay archive collection) if she knew the term, she did not.  But in chatting further, she said that the wool material that originally came to Canada through the Hudson Bay Company for the RCMP red uniforms was a similar wool and perhaps when it arrived and the crates were marked ‘stroud’ the material was called this  –  the place it came from.   I guess similar to way we call vacuum cleaners ‘hoovers’.

This seemed to solve the mystery for me.     I don’t really know who actually first called it stroud and would think that the uniform material has been sourced elsewhere for many years.  There were from the turn of the century plenty of wool and cotton mills in Canada as well.

The wood felt today that the women sew with is like a blanket material and very colourful.  I expect the end of bolts are donated as they never know what colours they will be working with.  The wallhangings are often on a dark background.  I would expect they come from somewhere in N. America.  I was able to purchase two large wallhangings when I was there.

So that is the extent of my knowledge.
I spent 3 weeks in two communities in northern Canada some years ago.
The women never stopped making caribou skin clothing and they prefer and depend on the animal for everything – meat, skins, sinew.  Still today.  They may ride around the community in snowmobiles but it is still so cold in the winter  -50F that two layers of Caribou skin is the warmest clothing.  Grocery stores abound and they can get most all Canadian goods but it is very expensive so mostly caribou and Arctic Char is eaten.

Hope this has been informative.

Sandra Meech

—
Sandra Meech
artist,author and teacher
www.sandrameech.com
http://sandrameech-art.blogspot.com

Attached are two images of Inuit wallhangings.
The first will have to be nameless as I don’t have the maker’s name.
The 2nd is by Irene Avaalaaqiaq and you can google her name and see more pieces.

The hangings tell stories – often half man half animal motifs, or a day in the life of a community – animals, hunters etc.
I hope the new hangings being produced are still as naive as these were.  Some with heavy embroidery stitch – stranded cottons used.

I have one of Irene’s and met her (can’t find my images at the moment and they are wrapped up in the attic at the moment). Mine is bright red and white but you can see the ‘red’ in many of her pieces.
I don’t know where they source the rolls of wool felt. When I asked the helper, at the co-op in Baker she didn’t know.

I am not sure if it is still running, but the women did see it as a way of earning extra money so will be still ‘making’ I am sure.
The art/prints and textiles from Baker Lake, Rankin Inlet and other communities is quite sought after in some circles.