Category: History

Gloucestershire and the Game Laws: Part 2 of 3

Poaching and Game Laws in Gloucestershire

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.

Poaching and the Game Laws in Gloucestershire: Part One of Three

Poaching and Game Laws in Gloucestershire

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

Captain Swing

When William Cobbett visited our valleys and hills, on Tuesday, September 12th. 1826, as recounted in ‘Rural Rides’, he would have passed close to Horsley, scene of Captain Swing riots five years later:

“From AVENING I came on through NAILSWORTH, WOODCHESTER, and RODBOROUGH, to this place. These villages lie on the sides of a narrow and deep valley, with a narrow stream of water running down the middle of it, and this stream turns the wheels of a great many mills and sets of machinery for the making of woollen-cloth. The factories begin at AVENING, and are scattered all the way down the valley. There are steam-engines as well as water-powers. The work and the trade is so flat, that, in, I should think, much more than a hundred acres of ground, which I have seen today, covered with rails, or racks, for the drying of cloth, I do not think that I have seen one single acre where the racks had cloth upon them. The workmen do not get half wages; great numbers are thrown on the parish …”.

The agricultural riots, nicknamed the “Captain Swing Riots”, quickly spread across the farming counties of the South, with machine breaking, the burning of hay ricks, other forms of rural arson, the sending of threatening letters to farmers etc. The riots were caused by low wages, high bread prices, low rates of poor relief, and threshing machines, which took away crucial winter work. The neighbouring county of Wiltshire with its arable farming was a key area, and eastern Gloucestershire was notably affected by the riots, especially around Fairford.

Our nearest Swing site is at Horsley, where machine breaking took place on the 26th November 1831. Lord Sherborne and his fellow Cirencester J.P.s. hinted at a “just” response to labourers’ complaints, if there were a return to work. A wave of arrests followed, with nearly 100 labourers incarcerated in the Gloucester Prison.

Here is a typical Swing letter:

“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”

Many members of the affluent orders saw a link between drinking in beer-shops and rural crime, for example our local Reuben Hill was reported in the 1839 Miles Report that he “thinks the beer-shops injurious to society. They are sly corners for men to drink in, and often are screens for crime. He has heard at times, on the apprehension of any offender, that up to a certain hour, he was seen lurking at some beer-shop.”

That was certainly the case at the Trouble House, near Tetbury, where cavalry were despatched to surround the pub during the Swing Riots, some with swords drawn. Swing rioters tried to escape from there across the fields, with the cavalry in pursuit; twenty-three were captured.

Nigel Costley’s book, ‘West Country REBELS’ recounts this event, as well as Swing activity around Tetbury, Chavenage, Cherington and Beverstone. He tells of Elizabeth Parker, reported as exclaiming: ‘Be d—-d if we don’t go to Beverstone and break the machine!’ She was ‘one of only two women, [nationally] to be found guilty’ of Swing activity, writes Nigel; she received a sentence of seven years transportation for machine breaking.

Oh how those Swing rioters must have regretted stopping that day at the inn for beer, bread and cheese.

Recommended reading, apart from Nigel’s book, is still the classic ‘Captain Swing’ by Hobsbawm and Rude.

Also see http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/captain-swing-and-stroud-valleys.html
for an imaginative interpretation of local events.

Also see Bristol Radical History Group: ‘Tolpuddle and Swing’

Richard the Third, Prince Charles, Magna Carta: Institutionalised Deference

Thomas Pain - Rights of Man Cover

It’s a Marcusian unification of opposites thing yet again, I suppose,
The ‘One Dimensional Man’ state of neutered beatitude
That arises from an appearance of liberty and illusion of freedom:
For example, everyone beyond the ‘Mail, UKIP, the Sun and Telegraph
Is at last opposed to institutionalised racism, institutionalised sexism, et al,
But we live in a society with, to coin a phrase,
The worst case of institutionalised deference in the world:
Don’t even think about Etonians deigning to be prime minister,
Don’t even think about the House of Lords,
Don’t even, for just a moment, think about our contemporary monarchy;
Instead, let’s ponder on two historical commemorations,
And what they say about our craven nation.

First Magna Carta and 1215:
A national celebration of a document
Which formalised relations between the monarchy and the barons,
And left the masses where they were before:
One small barefoot step away from serfdom.
Whoo hoo. Bring out the flags.

Next, the jaw dropping hullabaloo surrounding
The burial of you know who –
‘King Richard, may you rest in peace …
Welcome … back to Leicester, now greeted by us with honour and dignity’
(Don’t mention the two and a half million quid it all cost).

Next, the heir to the throne,
Who thinks he should have the right to intervene in the affairs of state
Of a democratically elected government with secret letters –
Letters that should remain secret, his cronies argue,
Otherwise his constitutional impartiality would be tarnished.
If this isn’t an oxymoron, I don’t know what is.
(Don’t mention the 300 million quid.)

Really, the general election is almost a side show.

Oral History: Stratford Park Trees (and beyond)

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.

The Lodger: History and Sociology

I can’t remember where I once read a piece about ‘the lodger’ as an archetype within British society, but I think I can recall the sociological and historical essentials: ‘the lodger’ sits squarely within late Victorian society, and then stretches his/her legs through the next one hundred years, until the swinging nineteen sixties, before disappearing into owner occupation. Parallel with that, ‘the lodger’ had a shelf life as a sub-genre of crime fiction, specifically of murder fiction.

Lodgers existed in agricultural British/English society before the gentrification of yeoman farmers during the ‘Agrarian Revolution’ of the 18th century, but lodging was to become an urban trope, with the industrial revolution. The 1842 report into urban sanitary conditions revealed the almost unimaginable over crowding in the slums of our new industrial cities, but this was mostly family multi-occupancy. The novels of Charles Dickens do, it is true, portray individuals, who lodge within the homes of other families, but it was the rise of white collar service industries in the late nineteenth century which put the lodger on his armchair pedestal.

Shabby-genteel clerks, commercial salesmen, shop assistants, typists, secretaries, and so on, were occupations that accelerated in number in the heyday of Victorian and Edwardian imperialism. You got a wage but you needed a room to rent – and you lodged with families who were themselves struggling with bills. It’s how the working class lived: and familiarity bred superciliousness, suspicion and snobbery, with the intrusion of strange lower middle class lodgers into the diction of ‘This is a respectable ‘ouse, I’d ‘ave you know.’

It was a world of suburbs and back streets and tube lines and railway yards and hissing gas mantles. It was a world illuminated by elementary education and ‘Penny Dreadfuls’. It was not the rural milieu of Mayhem Parva and Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers (‘snobbery with violence’); instead, it was the world of George Orwell’s essay on the Decline of the English Murder. It was the world of the News of the World: of poison, money, sex, melodrama, social class and domesticity.

All this makes ‘The Lodger’ sound as antiquated as John Betjeman, or a WH Smith railway station kiosk’s fiction stand, or Ealing Studio’s ‘The Ladykillers’, or Joe Orton’s ‘Entertaining Mr. Sloane’, and yet …

History is not always linear, there are sometimes circularities: the era of the masses buying their own home or having a council house is over; that heyday that started between the wars has gone … Three or four generations, that’s all, before the market economy took it away.

The market economy also changes dictionaries (Farewell Bluebell! Good morning Broadband!): the word ‘lodger’ is rarely used nowadays, it’s more ‘multi-occupancy’, I suppose. The lexis might alter, ‘but the memory lingers on’, and, indeed, that liminal figure is now reappearing in this zero hours, intern, new, freelance, capitalist paradise.

You have been warned …

By the way, it’s a bit foggy tonight, isn’t it?

Who’s that at the door?

Stroud Film Festival launch
with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger and live score from Minima
 Friday 13 March
Launch 6pm, Film Screening: 7pm 
Goods Shed, Stroud GL5 3AP

I was borne in Stroude in 1602, the fifth sonne of Charlotte Alice Bingham and Samuel Benjamin Bingham.

This is my laste depositionn ande statemente. I was borne in Stroude in 1602, the fifth sonne of Charlotte Alice Bingham and Samuel Benjamin Bingham. I have lived inne the reignnes of a queenne, three kings and a commonwealth.

My storyye starts whenne the Archbishop Laud did commande the railing offe of altars in the kingdomme. This causedde sorre grievance in Stroudwaterre. We railed inne oure turne at this papist sacrilege and kinglye ordinance. I joined inne withoutte fully knowinge the whye and wherefore. The tendere greenness of youthe.

I joined in too but withe more understandinge and withe right goode reasonne, when Prince Rupert stole our cloth, yarne, woole, canvas and buckram for the making of uniforms. It was difficultte to find a spinner or weaver with a goodlie worde to say about the kinge throughout the Stroudwater, in consequence, inne those ungodlyye times. Bute we did note knowe what was to followe. We did note knowe that this was juste a foretaste.

Fore oure livings worsened when the King’s armie marched through Steanbridge and up to Painswicke. We stoode with our hattes in our hands but with hate in our heartes as the horse and dragoones passed bye. This was in the summerre of 1643 before the Siege of Gloucestere.

Bute Parliamente’s victory there brought scante releiffe to us. The Kinge’s menne made a continuous habitte of stealinge our victuals to feede their garrisonnes in the aftermath.

The goodlie Colonel Massey rode out from the citye to helpe stoppe this malfeasance in the springe of the following yeare. He placed a garrisonne at Painswicke, but this onlye brought forthe a royal cannonade. The doores of St Marys were sette ablaze ande the towere was struck with shote.

A multitude of Parliamentaryye prisoners suche as mye younge self were kepte there. Good Richarde Foote etched an inscriptionne on a church pillare during our incarcerationne. ‘Be bolde, be bolde, but not too bolde.’ I resolvede to be as bolde as needs mustte.

It was in the Mayye time of that yeare that the boldenesse of Parliamente at laste brought us more lasting relieffe from the bondage of Royalist terror. The capture of Beverstonne Castle at last putt an ende to the depredationnes in the Stroudwater Valleys against the mastere clothiers, and the poore weavers and spinneres. This leftte me more time for the studyye of the Bible and for conversationes with rantering sisters and brothers whom I mette in the fields and lanes betwixtte Stroude and Painswicke.

It was at the Christmastide before the meting out of justice for the kingge when I firste encountered Ezekiel the Ranter. He tolde me of the Diggeres and Levelleres and Quakeres and how the riche ‘havve too muche earthe, which by fraudde, deceitte, and oppressionne they have gotten together, and exalte themselves above our fellow creatures, and grinde the faces of the poore, and they are as slaves.’ This opened mine eyes. I askede for more suche lessons.

I was a good pupile ande hearkened Ezekiel to make me learnne the Digger words of Gerard Winstanley offe by my hearte. I have them stille close bye me nowe by my bedde side. ‘Every one shall lookke upon each other as equalle in the creationne. We are all the sonnes and daughterres of Gode and Adame and Eve.’ ‘Governmente that gives liberty to the gentry to have all the earthe, and shutte out the poore commoners from enjoying any partte, ruling by tyrannical laws. This is the governmente of the Antichrist.’

Whenne I hearde that the Diggers had commenced the creationne of the rule of Godde with a commune at Slimbridge downe by the Severne, I made my waye alonge the Frome to reache the widde river and thence to Slimbridge. It was a welcome to meete with so manye fellowe Diggers. We tore down fences and enclosures so as to sow, till, ploughe and harveste in commone.

Alas. Just as the true borne leveller soldiers were shot down by Cromwell’s armie at the church in Burforde, so our Eden was to be laide waste bye his menne too.

I escaped with a bloddied heade ande made my waye to the Quakerres at Painswicke. Here I knewe I woulde receive succourre. The Grande Juryye of the Countyye spoke of our communitye as ‘Ranters, Levellers and atheists, undere the name of Quakerres’. This to uss was praise. I stayed some goode yeares there and witnessed the praiseworthie practicse of namelesse internmente. The beliefe was in equalityye in deathe as in life. We used noe titles. Alle were thou to a goodlye Quakkerre.

It was at this time whenne I beganne to smoke a pipe. I founde the tobaccoe of the countyye most conducive to visions of heavenne. Virginia tobaccoe from the colonyes was notte to my likinge. So my ittinerancce ledde me to Winchcombe and the tobaccoe plantationnes there.

We driede the leaves in oure gardenes and stored them in oure cottes, before secretinge the tobaccoe on its pathe to Londone. We disguised this nicotiana rustica as Virginia but ite gave thou heavenlye vision as no Virginia tobaccoe did. The smuggling and illicte trade attracted the attentionnes of Colonel Wakefield, the Governoure of Gloucester, and troopes were despatched to brake oure plantationes.

We congregatede as a multitude againste the soldiers who were armede withe cocked pistoles. But our resolutionne was steadfaste and our two hundreds forcede the calvalrye backke whence they came.

Theyye triede againne that yeare butte the tumulte ande determinationne of whatte nowe numbered five or six hundredes of our goddlie menne and womenne sentte them awaye and backke to Gloucester once more with theirre tailes betweene theire legges.

Bute whene the lamentende Commonwealthe did ende, so oure woes increased. The newe kinge sent more soldiers to ruine ourre croppes and ride downe oure plantationnes.

I have ite on goodly authoritie that Samuel Pepys did evenn write aboute us ate Winchcombe.
‘It seems the people there do plant contrary to law, and have always done, and still been under force and danger of having it spoiled, as it hath been oftentimes, and yet they will continue to plant.’

Sow we doe, Mister Pepys.

And nowwe I shalle take a pipe ande peruse once more ourre colonyye’s sharedde Bible and Pilgrimmes Progresse. Forre thisse is the last depositionne and last statementte that I shall make about the tumultuous times of my liffe.

Signede,
Esau Bingham

Two names in a landscape, two names on a map,
Two recusant affirmations of faith,
Near Knapp House Barn, where travelers gathered
To journey through metaphor and field,
From Purgatory to Paradise,
From a copse at Slad to Painswick pastures.
But I came as a Puritan, not Pardoner,
On my personal Pilgrim’s Progress,
To walk these redemptive hills and valleys,
In search of dispensation and indulgence.
Our throng of allegory was all there:
Evangelist, Obstinate, Help, Pliable,
Wordly Wise, Good Will, Despair, Faithful,
Legality, Civility, Ignorance, Hopeful,
All climbing through glades of wild garlic,
Sweet meadow-seas of Timothy,
Cock’sfoot, Sweet Vernal and Bugle,
(The Wicket Gate, Slough of Despond,
The Hill of Difficulty, the Shining Light)
Along Civil War holloways, steeply
Banked with diffident Honesty,
(The Valley of Humiliation, Vanity Fair,
House Beautiful, Mount Clear)
Past Swift’s Hill, Elcombe, Steanbridge,
Trillgate Farm, Bull’s Cross, Longridge,
Damsell’s Farm, sluice and weir and Damsell’s Mill,
By witches’ broom and yellow archangel,
(The River of Death and Delectable Mountains)
Up shaded streamside bedrock paths,
To reach Paradise and mythic Celestial City,
There in a thistledown cow pat field,
Below a hidden lane beneath the A46,
Where Paradise House does indeed have many rooms,
And CCTV too.

The history of the Stroud Football Poets and www.footballpoets.org

The recent media interest in the possible loss of digitalized memories, whether textual or visual, and the forthcoming publication of Lewis Dartnell’s book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World After an Apocalypse did make me think a bit … (What will happen to all this memorialization that lies in the laps of the website providers, rather than in our diaries, scrapbooks or photograph albums? We can’t keep it in the attic.) But his piece in the Guardian on February 17th reminded me of something I had forgotten about Stroud’s recent history: to wit, the British Library’s archiving of selected websites.

One of these websites includes www.footballpoets.org Now, this is something that fills me with pride, and I thought a short piece about how this prestigious archiving came about might be a half decent idea. How did a website cobbled together on the never-never achieve this accolade?

Dennis Gould takes the credit first. It must have been back in November 1995 when I was full of woe in the Duke of York, as I lamented to Dennis that a knee injury had just put paid to my football playing days. He told me to stop moaning and told me to write about the game instead and showed me some of his booklets of football poems. That got me going – and friends duly joined in. We performed in pubs around and in Stroud; Trish had Stroud Football tee shirts produced (now collectors’ items) and within a year, we were performing at literature festivals and so on.

We caught the Nick Hornby zeitgeist, but with a fanzine style left wing anti-Murdoch anti-Sky anti-capitalist ‘People’s Game’ nostalgia, together with a practical collectivist approach to writing and performing, as well as a political and cultural determination to re-appropriate the myth of Englishness from the Right. We were there at the beginning of Kick it Out.

Appearances for Philosophy Football followed at the Festival Hall for Euro ’96 and the 1998 World Cup. We established – much to our surprise and without any deliberate effort – a national media profile. This included, of course, the media frenzy about my dog Basil almost getting the England manager’s job.

All this was under the name of the Stroud Football Poets. But www.footballpoets.org owes its birth to Dave Cockcroft and a meeting with me at the Golden Fleece. Dave gave a lot of his time to establish the website, and as I wandered off into writing No Pasaran! and radio ballad style productions about the history of the Co-op and the life of WH Davies and so on, so Crispin Thomas took over the reins of www.footballpoets.org Crispin deserves the plaudits, alongside Dave, for the longevity of the website, alongside its idiosyncratic brilliance, as well as its archiving as a website which tells a story about British culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Well done Dave and Crispin; well done Dennis Gould.

The Face that launched a thousand Chips

Conversation up the Albert on a Friday night turned to the great question: the mystery of the chip machine in Bath Road. Could there really have been such a thing? If so, how did it work? Who stocked it? When was it? And so on and so on … we then heard from someone who remembered it … it cost half a crown, he thinks … all else lost in the mists of time … I have contacted Remembering Rodborough and Stroud Local History Society for further information … but in the interim, I have written the below as an act of homage to what might have been the only chip machine in the world … btw, my reference to a picture at the end of the piece is about the need for a proper portrait, not a Banksyesque creation …

Is it a phantom, or is it a dream?
Could there really have been a chip machine,
Down there in Rodborough, on the Bath Road,
Not in the days of warriors and woad,
But back in the Sixties, in ‘Sixty Four,
When you paid in your money, and out of the drawer
Came the hot manna, you all licked your lips,
A bag all wrapped warm, and all full of chips.

A half crown was dear, we all know that’s true,
But where else in the world could the dream come through?
Not just mere money at a hole in the wall,
But a great bag of chips – so let’s all heed the call,
And all gather around, by Frome Hall Lane,
On Friday nights, again and again,
Down by the Bath Road’s old Language School,
Let’s pay the chips homage, won’t that be cool?
And laud the person who invented these chips,
By painting a picture of head, nose and lips,
With a caption that daintily flutters and trips:
‘The face that launched a thousand chips.’

William Webb Ellis

WIlliam Webb Ellis, The Prince Albert

In the year of Our Lord, 1800 and 23,
William Webb Ellis invented rug-bee,
He was playing football, when just for fun,
He picked up the ball and away did run;
At a fee-paying school, the pupils are master,
The teachers all cried: “Good show, Ellis, just run faster!
Carry the ball and use your hands to pass,
This game shall be for the ruling-class!
The Oiks might think you’ve gone off your rockah,
But we’ll play ruggah, they’ll play soccah.”
And so William Webb Ellis achieved his fame,
By inventing a brand new top toff game –
But just imagine he’d been a Socialist,
And liberated money, not ball, with his bourgeois fist,
Just imagine when he went off his rocker
That he emptied all his teammates’ lockers,
And then gave the poor all his team mates’ money,
And just imagine that the masters found that funny;
It means that chauvinist tournament called the 6 Nations,
Would today see acts of financial liberation,
Two sets of teams, both scoring points,
By redistributing wealth to all us oiks
,
Stealing money from merchant and from banker,
And if they didn’t, the crowd’d cry “——”
Passing money to the poor would be the aim
Of all these televised rugby games,
The BBC clean round the bend,
In its new role as the peoples’ friend;
And so William Webb Ellis, you so nearly could
Have been a latter day Robin Hood,
You could have been a modernist Marxist icon
Of proletarian liberation;
But you show that anarchy is not just destruction,
It can be an act of imaginative invention –
And so the next time you see rugby on TV,
Just reflect on what might have been,
And hope that some modern day William Webb Ellis
Will reshape upper class Ascot, Henley, Wimbledon and tennis,
And then in a final act of resurrectionist rage,
Reverse the rules of the Stock Exchange,
By leading all the toffs of the world in this millenarian strain:

“It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the rich wot now gets the blame,
It’s the poor wot now gets the treasure” …

Now wouldn’t the redistribution of wealth through football,
Really be: “The People’s Game”?