Category: History

The Golden Fleece 1906

Stroud, like so many places a century or so ago,

Was an unconscious microcosm of the whole nation,

The sloping slate roofs of the red-bricked terraces,

The new suburban villas with their monkey puzzle trees,

The grand country houses with their uninterrupted views,

The old stone cottages with their vegetable plots,

The farms, the barns, the byres, the stables, the milk churns,

The dry stone lanes, the holloways, the footpaths,

The ginnels, the alleyways, the new name streets,

The orchards, the commons, the hedgerows, the fields,

The rivers, the streams, the springs, the brooks,

The canals, the wharves, the railway lines, the gaslights,

The bridges, the viaducts, the factories, the mills,

The forge, the furnace, the foundry, the smithy,

The pubs where the Liberal landslide general election results were discussed:

397 Liberals, 156 Conservative and Unionists, 29 Labour, 82 Irish Nationalists.

In the Golden Fleece, talk turned to reform and the hope of old age pensions,

The hope of avoiding the workhouse, the ideas of national insurance;

Optimism was in the air – no one foresaw the Home Rule Crisis,

The reactionary obstructiveness of the House of Lords,

The suffragettes’ direct action,

The Triple Industrial Alliance of miners, dockers and railway workers,

The publication of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,

Their deaths on the Western Front and in Gallipoli a decade later;

All was merriment in the Golden Fleece in 1906,

Godsell & Son Brewery:  ‘The best beer in town’,

And with free trade victorious at the general election,

Then tobacco should stay cheap,

What was there to worry about?

The navy and the Empire and cheap beer and tobacco,

This was the golden age of Edwardian Britain.

Hi Stuart,

 As far as I’m aware, there hasn’t been a great deal of work done on poaching in the Stroud Valleys, other than various references in local village or place histories or in literature (such as those in Laurie Lee’s works for example). It would be worth checking with the Museum in the Park to see if they have anything though.

 We do have lots of references to the ‘taking of game unlawfully’ in the various quarter-sessions records (such as the gaol registers and memoranda of convictions series). The trouble is you’d need to search through the online catalogue or the actual records to find instances, as they are often filed under the name of the person convicted.  Fairly typical entries would be like these entries below:

 Horsley gaol register

GA Ref:  Q/Gh/10/2 entry number 780 –

Name: John Flight, aged 30, labourer

Offence: Unlawfully entering certain inclosed land at King Stanley at night with a Gun for the purpose of destroying game.

Class: 1

Order of commitment: Three Calendar months hard labour and to find 2 sureties in the sum of £5 each or one in £10 and by recognisance himself of £10, or further imprisonment 6 cal months hard labour

Magistrate committing: Thos Kingscote Esq; A Shakespeare Esq

Commencement of term: 28 Sept 1835

When discharged: 4 Jan 1836

Remarks: 4 times before vide 641.  Taken before Thos KINGSCOTE Esq and found sufficient sureties and was discharged 4 Jan 1836

Memoranda of convictions, general

GA Ref:  Q/PC/2/49/A/74 –

Name: James Coleman of Kings Stanley, labourer, for the crime of keeping and using a bludgeon to kill game in Woodchester, dated 18 December 1829 [printed form]

H Burgh, JP, at Stroud.

James Kenyon, gamekeeper of Nympsfield, informer.

Thomas Prout, labourer of Kings Stanley, witness.

Offenders pleaded not guilty.

Fined £5 each

Crime committed 21 November 1829

There would also be lots of references to poaching in the local newspapers – the Stroud News & Journal is held at Stroud Library, but we have the Gloucester Citizen and Gloucester Journal here.

In general, I’d say the subject is under-researched, so anything on it would be useful for the future. It would be a good subject for drama or for theatre – contrasting the need for people to obtain free/cheap food then & now.

There are some references to poaching in Gloucestershire at the John Moore Countryside Museum in Tewkesbury – see the homepage of their website for an audio example:http://www.johnmooremuseum.org/

Hope this helps,

John

Enclosure and the Game Laws

Squatters and cottages with their curls of smoke
Drifting from a new roof before dawn’s first light
(‘Door shut, hearth lit and smoke coming from the chimney)’,
Were hated by 18th century agricultural ‘improvers’,
Just as the common lands were hated by them too:
‘Nests of sloth, idleness … Hovels …
Materials purloined from adjacent woods…
Idle, useless and disorderly people’,
As Charles Vancouver so succinctly put it.

Be that as it may, for many of the labouring class
The choice was whether to remain a low paid pauper,
Or augment a poor family diet as a poacher,
As enclosure and the game laws pauperised,
And criminalised the agricultural working class.

Even Arthur Young, such an enthusiast of enclosure,
Thought ‘that by nineteen in twenty enclosure bills,
they are injured, in some grossly’.
No wonder John Clare’s pen wrote that
‘Enclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights, and left the poor a slave.’
Thomas Hood wrote of Home Counties’ poachers,
And their errant, but successful, ways,
But our local version runs thus:

‘Each field is wandered inch by inch,
But when the keepers were near Stroud,
He poached and trespassed up near Minch –
His footfall never loud,
And when he went to Stroud, alas!
They often came to Horsley;
And even Avening used to wish
That he would leave quite shortly.’

So what of Stroudwater and its hills and valleys?
Did the collectivism of an industrial workforce
Mean that individual acts of poaching were the norm?
A sort of rural anachronism?
Or did the traditions of food and wage riots by weavers
Mean that our locality saw organised, collective acts of poaching?
There is no reason not to think so, a priori.

The Berkeley Vale is only just down the road,
And we have seen what happened there in 1815 and 1816;
The Captain Swing riots kicked off in the county, too,
So Gloucestershire doesn’t appear to be that deferential –
Were there poaching wars here?
‘Pheasant versus Peasant?’
We just don’t know.
There is research needed.
Collective research.
This is an unwritten story.

William Cobbett, 1823: ‘ The ill-blood created by these game laws is beyond the power of description. There are no bounds to it. The heart-burning is incessant …’ ‘The sight of so many hundreds of Englishmen dragged to prison, and so many thousands of women and children reduced to pauperism … The transporting or hanging of their husbands, sons, brothers and friends … ‘
Lord Byron, 1823: ‘ For what were all these country patriots born?
To hunt, and vote, and raise the price of corn.’
The Annals of Sporting, 1828, reporting about Gloucestershire and other nearby counties: ‘a man who is even suspected of being a poacher is treated as an outlaw… ‘
John Bright: ‘ tens of thousands of the peasantry have been sent to gaol, and hundreds of them have been transported … and scores have been sacrificed that game might thrive…’

The first three verses of Robert Burns’ ‘Westlin Winds’

Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns
Bring autumn’s pleasant weather,
The moorcock springs on whirring wings
Among the blooming heather,
Now waving grain, wild o’er the plain
Delights the weary farmer,
And the moon shines bright as I rove at night
To muse upon my charmer.

The partridge loves the fruitful fells,
The plover loves the mountains,
The woodcock haunts the lonely dells,
The soaring hern the fountains,
Through lofty groves the cushat roves,
The path of man to shun it,
The hazel bush o’erhangs the thrush,
The spreading thorn the linnet.

Thus every kind their pleasure find,
The savage and the tender,
Some social join and leagues combine,
Some solitary wander,
Avaunt away! The cruel sway,
Tyrannic man’s dominion,
The sportsman’s joy, the murdering cry,
The fluttering gory pinion.

1815 and all that,
Waterloo and Wellington,
But also indigent Gloucestershire labourers,
Forced to poach, where spring guns lay ready
To kill Tom Till, and leave a wife and two children
In a parish of poverty and sorrow.
Even the castle chaplain thought
‘Colonel Berkeley had run the matter of game so hard’,
That tit for tat and Tom Till would follow.

So it was, that some twenty Berkeley Vale men
Swore revenge, taking a solemn oath
‘Not to peach on each other, so help me God’.

A bloody battle ensued, with death and wounding,
But the cudgel wielding colonel exacted feudal revenge,
For the jury’s tearful ‘Guilty’, meant transportation,
And execution for two poachers:
‘Launched into the presence of that
Being whose laws they had so impiously outraged’,
As the Gloucester Mercury put it.

Berkeley’s Doctor Jenner of smallpox fame saw it differently:
‘My intention is to quit this place, rendered dreary by the scene …
About to be acted on the horrid platform tomorrow.
They certainly did not go out with the intention to commit murder.’
Colonel Berkeley was reviled but obdurate to the end,
He hung a painting of the battle in his breakfast room.

Ah, the Stately Homes of Olde Englande.

Source: The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars in Britain 1760-1914 by Harry Hopkins

I interviewed Ron about late twentieth century and early new millennium history in October 2011, at J Rool café. He started the story with the Stratford Park Tree Campaign; this ran from late 1988 to January 1990. It was the first national occupation of trees so as to stop the construction of a road.
The trees were occupied night and day for 6 weeks from 24th August, with a minimum of two people on duty all the time with an “ancient” mobile phone to call for help if needed. This was because Stroud District Council tried to bring in a tree cutting company on the night of the 23rd August. The campaigners “got wind of this and were there at midnight before the company arrived.” There was a group of “70 hard core activists” who turned out on the first night and made up the main rota. The group also formulated a petition that quickly gained 10,000 signatures and was handed into the council.
So why was there such a furore?
A road was planned “to satisfy Tesco with its planned opening of its new store” and Tesco needed to buy some of Stratford Park. The District Council hoped to get “about 250,000 quid for a quarter of an acre” and this stimulated the opposition, a group with a wide spectrum of motivation. For some, says Ron, the main concern was for the trees; for others, it was the scrutiny of council decision-making; for others it was that “OUR PARK” was being interfered with secretly and unconstitutionally.
Ron said that “if it hadn’t been in our park”, there may not have been so much support, but “from the very first night that the campaign became public, it attracted a lot of people who had never questioned authority before and who had never protested or campaigned against anything.” Ron added that born and bred Stroud folk still stop and talk to him about it in the street even today; he added that one of the best things that may have resulted long term from the action was that peoples’ attitudes to authority changed for good – “even Daily Mail readers.”
Ron went on to summarise this event, thus: “This was the first traffic calming scheme in the county, and according to the council figures, accident rates went down by 50%, so we didn’t just save the trees, we saved a lot of pain.”
Ron had more to say on trees – this time, the action to save the hornbeam in the forecourt of the Subscription Rooms. The SDC wanted to refurbish the building, saying it wanted to change the edifice into an arts centre, with the aid of Lottery Funding. This would involve performance on the forecourt and “someone” saw the plans at Ebley Mill sans hornbeam; at that time (1997-98) this was the only mature tree in the town centre, says Ron. Stratford Park stalwarts joined in and supported Ron with a petition by the bus stop, “and people used to shelter under the hornbeam waiting for their bus.” Between 2 and 3,000 signatures were garnered within a fortnight, but Ron felt that more pressure was needed to be exerted upon the council, and so an anti-proposal was sent off to the National Lottery and the result was victory for the hornbeam.

Ron then went on to talk about the campaign to save the Hill Paul building from demolition, at the tail end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the new millennium. He said that concerned citizens became aware that this landmark building was threatened with demolition, days ahead of an English Heritage report saying that it shouldn’t be demolished. These “concerned citizens” then contacted the owner of the building and also appealed to the public in an attempt to stop demolition. The appeal raised about a “165 000 quid” over about six months and shares were sold. This was enough to show an expression of intent to the owner, so demolition was forestalled and in due course the building was sold on to a developer, who turned it into flats, “and so the building is still there today.”
This was the result, says Ron, of an alliance of “The usual suspects and people who wouldn’t normally get involved but who put up a lot of money. The meaning of that building is that you can see it every time you come in on the train and it is also the place where so many people worked and they had very warm feelings about it as a workplace and a living environment. It fuses old and contemporary Stroud.”
Ron talked of – and emphasised – “the infamy of the SDC”; he said the building had existed for 150 years and “the day after we bought it, the very next day, the SDC put a closure order on it because they said it was dangerous”; Ron described that as “an act of spite —they wanted a new landmark building there.”
There was further variety of action, apart from that described earlier. For example, on the day when the man came in with the big ball and chain, about 10 people physically obstructed him; then there was the old trick of the protestor on the roof with a number of different hats, so as to make it seem as though there were more than just his solitary self; amazingly this thwarted them on the ball and chain day and gave time to get the money together. “Surprising how little you had to do to stop things happening – now you would be picked off like flies”, mused Ron.

Ron’s discourse then moved on to the decision of SDC to knock down the John Street offices and build a supermarket on the site, so as to move to new offices at Ebley Mill with a new swimming pool at Dursley. Ron comments that there was some “very unusual horse-trading” between councillors with a “very unusual” decision that there would be a vote whereby councillors had to vote for everything as a complete package, “Yes or No.” Ron went on to say that years earlier, Marples/Ridgeway, as it once was, had started buying properties in the town centre; the council was planning to expand its offices and held an exhibition to show different developments of the site; the council then awarded the contract to Marples/Ridgeway, as was, but then known as ARC, as it had become.
It was then that Stroud Anti-Apartheid discovered that ARC was owned by Consolidated Goldfields and so contacted influential people, including the Stroud Council of Churches, and in due course, the contract was taken away from ARC – “ a major triumph for Anti-Apartheid”, said Ron.
I then asked Ron about the area outside Greggs, where the Shambles meets the High Street, and asked him if he felt or thought that this particular locale had an individual radical feel? He replied: “It’s not far from where John Wesley preached, which was pretty radical in itself”; Ron mused further: “It’s also opposite the Swan Inn, a coaching inn, which must have distributed all sorts of communication”.
My mind began to wander into psycho-geographical continuities until I heard Ron comment: “The area only became buzzy when the Subscription Rooms forecourt stopped being buzzy…about twenty years ago; then we had a new epicentre.”
I then asked Ron about some of his silent protests by the Shambles. He talked of his “moral campaigns”; he started these at the Shambles “about 1991, at the time of the first Iraq war; it was a way of protesting about involvement – there was a vigil every day, then weekly, then numbers dropped”, so for the last year or two, it has just been Ron: “I have chosen just to draw peoples’ attention to British involvement in wars”. “Years ago, I used to get abuse – but for the last decade the amount of abuse has been very, very small”; “even squaddies have spoken to me and said they agreed with me.”
Ron then moved on to the selling of white poppies in the lead-up to Remembrance Day. He said that when he first started selling white poppies 20 odd years ago: “There was a huge furore but now nobody seems to bat an eyelid.” At the conclusion of the interview, Ron gave me a disc with a film clip about the 24th August 1989 and began to reminisce about the tension of that morning, when after 5 hours’ waiting: “They actually started tearing people away.”
Ron’s eyes grew watery and he cried a little, as he recalled the tension of that occasion – he added that there was something about that campaign that made him tearful and he had been susceptible to that ever since. Such is the power of oral testimony, together with a passionate commitment to justice. Thank you, Ron.