Category: History

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.’

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 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.

‘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!’

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.

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.