Category: Walks

Woodchester Great War Exhibition and Great War Walk

This is Barbara Warnes in the Stroud News in 2014: ‘At least 174 villagers were involved…in some capacity… The names of those who died are publicly and visibly recorded, but those who survived are harder to track down. As well as soldiers, sailors and airmen, these include munitions workers, Red Cross volunteers and men in the volunteer force.’

She added:
‘The exhibition is not just about a few people who achieved fame but about the many who followed orders and left little trace behind… For example, in this parish alone we have a headmaster who died at the Battle of the Somme after winning the Military Medal, unsung heroes who volunteered but were turned back, several monks from the Dominican Priory who went to the front as Chaplains, two soldiers awarded the Victoria Cross, and a Red Cross volunteer who was awarded a Silver War badge.’

I visited the village on the day of their fete: flags, bunting,‘ trench cake’ and 50 pence each on the Great War guide books to South and North Woodchester – money well spent.
The guides are brilliant and informative: re-imagining the village as it was on the eve of warfare, before leading us around Woodchester’s 1914 present, and Great War future. This was a different approach from anything I had yet seen in the area: the exhibition in St. Mary’s was pleasing and standard, but these walking guides were an interesting innovation.

I biked out a couple of days later on a misty September Monday to St. Mary’s to follow the routes on two wheels.

It’s easy to get all dewy-eyed about the long Edwardian summer before 1914,
But the years from 1910 to 1914 also saw ‘The strange death of Liberal England’:
The Home Rule crisis, near civil war in Ireland, the Curragh Mutiny, gun running,
The Triple Industrial Alliance, Suffragettes, class conflict, constitutional crises,
An endless series of events abroad continually foreshadowing war –
The publication of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists also opened eyes,
And the walks around Woodchester bring this social history alive,
As well as providing a detailed and illuminating military history,
In a landscape and village with its pubs, grand houses, weavers’ cottages,
Mills, shops, farms, bakery, abattoir, old turnpike houses,
Old field names, railway station, level crossings (one private),
High climbing lanes, springs, wells, and a post office high street …

‘Imagine the date is around the bank holiday weekend
at the beginning of August 1914 – we stand on the eve of war.’
The headmaster of the village school will not return from the front,
There was a strike at the sawmill last year and a fire there in 1910,
There has already been a death in an RFC crash on Salisbury Plain,
Southfield House will turn into a War Hospital Supply Depot
(Run by the owner’s wife, Mrs. Allen, mother of the dead airman),
The daughters will immerse themselves in the work of the Red Cross,
And when peace is heralded in 1919, and each year afterwards,
Mr. and Mrs. Allen will hold commemorative reunions for the returned;
Down the road, it’s good to see that Charles Webb will get his print job back
At Arthur’s Press, Vale Mills, when he is de-mobbed in 1919,
But there will be sadness at Mill Cottages for John and Lucy Howell:
Their son Maurice will go missing at Passchendaele in 1917 aged 19,
While Alfred Palmer will serve at sea but die at the war’s end, of pneumonia;
Over at Grigshot House, Captain Smith will gain the military cross in 1917.
Whilst Sarah Cordwell’s work as the village postmistress at Lancaster House
Will be interrupted by news about her son, Charles, also in 1917,
When he will be awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
The Rectory will not be untouched by war either –
The Rev George Watton will become an Army Chaplain in 1917,
While Mr. Fawkes from the farm over the way will do his bit too,
As a second-lieutenant in the Volunteer Force;
Up at The Lawn and Larchgrove, Ethel and Beryl will become Stroud VAD nurses,
Gilbert Higgins, son at the Royal Oak, will join the Royal Garrison Artillery,
Minnie Wise from Oakley House will become a Red Cross stalwart,
And, of course, the churchyard will see plaques,
Solemn gatherings of family and friends,
Military gravestones and collective mourning;

The South Woodchester walk starts in Frogmarsh Lane,
It passes the Convent of the Poor Clares, which will shelter Belgian children,
As will Summerwells, while a good few monks from the Monastery
Will also serve as army chaplains, way before the Wayside Cross,
(An early war memorial) is erected in June 1917.
Up at Benwell House, Mrs. Clementina Mostyn will learn
Of her great-nephew’s bravery, when Lt. Dease is awarded the VC,
But she will also learn of his death, in just three week’s time.
Over at the Ten Bells, the latest news is discussed, while outside,
The cider press carries on its oozing of the orchard’s pears and apples –
The landlady’s grandson, Arthur Latham will sail for France within the year,
But some men will enlist but be turned down as unfit – flat feet, epilepsy,
Or, ‘weak but willing’, unlike Dick Turner of Home Farm who will gain the M.M.;
The Baptist Chapel’s congregation will be attenuated by the war,
And here too a plaque will be placed, sobering the men in the nearby Yew Tree,
George Evans of Atcombe, will end up in the Royal Engineers in Mesopotamia,
While Mrs. Evans – Minnie – will join many Woodchester women and girls,
Working down the road at Newman Hender.
Despair will continue to envelop Littleholme, where Mrs. Archer-Shee
Will grieve for her son, reported missing in two month’s time at Ypres,
While Harry Woodward, son of the village baker will be wounded next year.
There is more sadness along the High Street:
John Clift, one of four brothers in the army, will not return from France,
Nor will William Cook, young husband and father,
Although George Risbey, Royal Field Artillery, will attend the annual reunions;
Mrs. Horwood lives up at the Almshouses, up Bospin Lane,
Her remaining son, Thomas, will die just a week after the Armistice,
A prisoner of war in what would become Poland;
Walter Beard of Cross House will die in France next year;
Captain and Mrs. Bowles of Tower House will donate land in 1920,
And the village war memorial will be placed there, beyond Woodchester House,
Just past the sweet chestnut saplings (now having their centenary too in 2014),
The memorial will cost £180 by public subscription, when completed in 1920,
One of the names being that of my friend’s great-uncle:
‘Both my grand-father and great-uncle lied about their ages,
They were sixteen and seventeen. After my great-uncle was killed,
My great-grandmother wrote to the War Office:
“I’ve lost one of my under-age sons, I want the other one back.”
Her son never forgave her, even thirty years later,
When in the Home Guard on Selsley Common.’
The ghosts of Great War army huts still lie in the ground near the memorial
(‘And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds’?),
While over at the Plough Inn, one soldier will return as will William Brinkworth,
To Plough Cottage, but brother Wilfred will be a victim of the Somme,
One of so many:

I thought once more of those lines of Edward Thomas,
As I bicycled through the village, delivering ghost-telegrams,
To the grand houses, the farms, the cottages in the lanes and streets:

‘“Have many gone
From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes; a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him…”
I watched the clods tumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.’

Thanks to Mark Hewlett for the above photographs.

Prologue:

Stuart
I want to visit this spring in Painswick tomorrow.  Have you ever been there? 10. St Tabitha’s Well (SO 867 097).    Issues from the roadside halfway down Tibbywell Lane which leads to the mill in the valley bottom. A simple stone spout pours water into a small pool which then drains away under some stone slabs. The street name is an intriguing derivative of the well’s name! And here is a bit about st Tab.  Also known as Dorcas!

Commemorated on October 25
St. Tabitha was a virtuous and kindly woman who belonged to the Christian community in Joppa. She was known for her good deeds and almsgiving. Having become grievously ill, she suddenly died. At that time, the Apostle Peter was preaching at Lydda, not far from Joppa. Messengers were sent to him with an urgent request for help. When the Apostle arrived at Joppa, Tabitha was already dead. On bended knee, St. Peter made a fervent prayer to the Lord. Then he went to the bed and called out, “Tabitha, get up!” She arose, completely healed (Acts 9:36). St. Tabitha is considered the patron saint of tailors and seamstresses, since she was known for sewing coats and other garments (Acts 9:39).

The Walk

Some Notes on the Route Taken

The 63 bus from Nailsworth to Gloucester dropped us precisely on the line of the Cotswold Way at Scottsquar Hill. We crossed the road and went East, following the official route of the Way to reach Painswick.

This took us first through the old quarries of Scottsquar, revealing bands of inferior oolite , then down hill over Rudge Common Nature Reserve, across the main road by the Edgemore Inn and further down Jenkin’s Lane, towards but not actually reaching, Jenkin’s Farm. We turned left and then right across the fields to pass the curiously half way(ish) marker stone denoting (approximately) the mid point on the Cotswold Way.

Then down to the wooded Washbrook stream, eventually turning right to pass the two front doors of Washbrook Farm. One is half buried below the present ground level and bricked up. The other is elevated and up a flight of stairs. Both show a curious coat of arms on their richly carved lintels. (“a puzzling building needing more investigation” – britishlistedbuildings.co.UK.)

From there we climbed the slope of the Washbrook valley to enter Painswick.

Uncountable yet numbered yews were noted, Spencerian graffiti photographed and much needed coffee drunk.

To find Saint Tabitha’s Well we left Painswick by the diminutively named (and slightly twee sounding) “Tibbywell Lane”. Down this lane, about half way to the valley floor a simple stone spout set in a dry stone wall pours clear water into a small pool which then flows away under stone slabs. It is enchanting and quite beautiful. Quite why this spring should be named after Saint Tabitha is unknown. There seems to have been a move to secularise it in the local signage (see photograph of “Tabitha’s Well”).

Tibbywell Lane was once part of a much used ancient track way to Bisley and on to Cirencester. However, we left this route when we reached the valley floor, turning South West to follow a series of footpaths along the Painswick Valley toward Stroud.

At first the route closely followed the Painswick Stream past the sites of several old mills but eventually we slowly climbed the valley side via footpaths through Sheephouse and Hammonds Farm. The meadows here are broad and lush and cut by the deep, wooded gullies of three streams that emerge from springs below the line of Wick Street only two or three hundred yards further up the side of the valley.

Eventually we crossed Wick Street (Painswick Old Road), to re-enter Stroud via the footpath above Badbrook stream.

We talked of many things on our walk from Rudge Corner through Painswick and back to Stroud: Why is Paganhill so-called? Why the maypole? We discussed the arch, the spring at Puckhole, Oolite limestone, Cotswold quarries, The Siege of Gloucester 1643, the cannon ball marks on the church tower, The parliamentarian graffiti in Painswick Church: ‘Be old but not too bold.’ The Ice Age and the path of the River Thames, hydraulic rams, Thomas Berwick lookalike oak trees flaming in the fields, Ornate, embellished depictions of Keatsian fecundity over at Washbrook House: Pediment pictures suggestive of ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness … Who hath not seen thee oft … sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep …’

We talked of 18th century food riots, weavers’ riots, skimmingtons, ghost roads, holloways, We walked past countless streams, springs and brooks, past Eyebright [Euphrasia] and, on marshy ground, Redshank [Persicaria maculosa]. Crumbling old bridges, silent mills, ghost waterwheels, redcoat ghosts, turnpike ghosts, Tollhouse ghosts, Mossy mouldering drystone walls, riven by towering beech trees, An Ozymandian valley of industry, now oozing, whispering, sighing through the leaves falling in the rain-swept breeze: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!’

We talked of Theodolites, trigonometry, chains and furlongs, the Mason-Dixon Line, Lucerne, crop rotation, Turnip Townshend and his four course with fallow, Equinoctial autumn, Thomas Hood’s November: ‘No Sun, no moon … November’, Memories of old school November frosts, Viking words like ‘hoar’ and ‘rime’, The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude and Frost at Midnight:
‘The frost performs its secret ministry unhelped by any wind’, Wordsworth in the shrouded treeline above the stream: ‘When vapours rolling down a valley Made a lonely scene more lonesome’,
How if we hadn’t had arranged this walk and tryst Then we all would have stayed in, moaning about the drizzle And would have missed all the magic of Coleridge’s Playbills: “Announcing each day the performance by his supreme Majesty’s Servants, the Clouds, Waters, Sun, Moon, Stars”, How last Saturday had been so hot, with bees in the flowers, ‘Until they think warm days will never cease’, But we know they will, and they are, as lowering, louring clouds over Stroud, (Like a limned Sutcliffe Whitby skyscape, or a tinted picture from a Claude eye glass, A heightened atmospheric picturesque, stretching along Badbrook, To its confluence with the cinema and the weavers’ strikes of 1825) Made so evident … the clock is ticking and the daylight receding, But the lessons we ignored in our schooldays still lie in our satchels, It might be William Blake now, but it’s Isaac Newton after break.
And talk of Gilbert White and his Hampshire word ‘hangar’ for woodland hanging above a coombe, And how Pitchcombe is a sort of toponymic oxymoron, And knowing when one should walk in a solitary manner or collective, With a musing over the wisdom of William Hazlitt: ‘One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room, but out of doors, Nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone … I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time …’ And the relative merits of cycling and walking and how it depends on the weather – as Edward Thomas wrote: ‘It was a still morning … But not until I went out could I tell that it was softly and coldly raining. Everything more than two or three fields away was hidden. Cycling is inferior in this weather, because in cycling chiefly ample views are to be seen, and the mist conceals them. You travel too quickly to notice many small things. But walking I saw every small thing one by one.’

‘But walking I saw every small thing one by one.’
And that’s what we tried to do today.
And that’s what we try to do on every walk.
And share our practice.
Hence this post.

Post-script:

Just to say thank you for your company on the walk today. Inspiring and amusing, as usual. I really value our socio/historical/psychogeographic expeditions.

St Mary’s Painswick, Empire & Colonies. Just came across this bit of info – Thomas Twining, tea merchant, was born in Painswick in 1675, and in 1706 set up his first tea shop at 216 Strand, London, which was to become the home of the famous Twinings brand.
Painswick etc.

Stuart, as always after a walk I am inspired to research…

nice description of Painswick in the early 1800s here –

http://places.wishful-thinking.org.uk/GLS/Painswick/index.html

Extract from Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of England, 1831.

Also this about “Shepscombe Green” in the age of Ed VI
“During the insurrections in the west and other parts of the kingdom, in the reign of Edward VI., Sir Anthony Kingston, then Knight Marshall, being lord of the manor of Painswick, caused a gallows to be erected on Shepscombe Green, in this parish, for the execution of insurgents, and gave three plots of land in his lordship, since called Gallows’ lands, for the purpose of keeping in readiness a gallows, two ladders, and halters; he likewise appointed the tything-man of Shepscombe to the office of executioner, with an acre of land in the tything, as a reward for his services; a field at Shepscombe, held by the tything-man for the time being, is still known by the appellation of Hangman’s Acre.”

I suspect Shepscombe Green is Bull’s Cross, rather than the rather out of the way green in present day Sheepscombe. What do you think?

and this is a lovely page about old tracks and roads around Painswick. Fancy walking the Bisley Path from Painswick to Bisley sometime?
http://www.painswickusers.org.uk/plhs/history/histroads.htm

Summer is back today! But would yesterday’s walk have been so memorable without the mist and clouds over the hangers and Selsley?

Thanks to Richard Styles and Kel Portman for the above photos.

Sometimes a walk is as powerful as a play or film or football match,
You can’t sleep afterwards,
Your mind keeps revisiting snatches of conversation,
Or landscape technicolour pictures appear in your head,
Or memories of moments but they’re not memento mori,
It’s all alive and vital,
Not Coleridge’s Lime Tree Bower My Prison,
Instead, a diorama of recollection:
We talked, inter alia, of the following:
The Sublime, the Gothick, the Picturesque,
The unacknowledged ubiquity of slavery money,
And its Keynsian multiplier effect,
Both immediate, delayed or submerged;
Slavery:
‘The Shame that dare not speak its Name’;
Alexander Pope, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
King Arthur, fable, myth, memorialisation,
The invention of tradition,
Heritage and Counter-Heritage,
The Grand Tour,
‘Rule Britannia’;
A Celtic monk’s marginalia as we passed a puddle:
‘In the water’s canvas bright sunshine paints the picture of the day’;
Tobias Smollett, Daniel Defoe, Tristam Shandy, Ozymandias,
Sapperton Tunnel, the source of the Frome, the Slad Brook,
The watershed at Miserden,
The edgelands around the Thames and Severn Canal,
King George the Third’s visit to the tunnel,
18th century sight-seers,
Inland navigators, canal leggers, bricklayers;
Ecophilia, Topophilia, Logophilia,
Ocular-centred walking and the visually impaired,
Podcasting and the recording of …
The senses when out walking,
The squelch and oozing of water beneath one’s boots,
The fragrance of spearmint,
The cry of a buzzard,
The taste of spring-water,
The sharp touch of a nettle,
Learning how to describe what we see when we see …
The Blake-like vision of the universe within the palm of one’s hand;
Or remembering Caliban:
‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.’
We talked of different walking practices:
The pre-researched, the contextualised, the informed,
The drift, the derivee, the detournement,
The unexpected, the ad-lib spontaneous extemporised,
The performative, the collective, the democratic, the led,
How Kel practises a 5,000 pace rhythm,
With a mix of the random and the rendezvous,
Collecting keepsakes from the flotsam and jetsam
Of the landscape,
Material for ambulatory art;
Taking readings of elevation and distance,
The mensuration of a trip through a botanist’s eye,
Eye Bright, and clumps of autumn crocus;
Musing on the duality of meanings of ‘folly’,
Its etymology;
The search for the hidden narrative of slavery,
Triangular metaphor in a landscape,
Viewed through a Claude Glass gaze,
Then cross-examining the practice of walking,
Methodology and form rather than content:
How eight to twelve is just the right number,
There is no dilution of experience for anyone then,
But there is a critical mass to generate the diverse and heterodox,
And the walk can operate collectively and democratically,
A psychogeographical/mythogeographical/performative
Anarcho-Syndicalist Collective,
Sharing thoughts and observations,
Ambling through cycloramas and panoramas
Of space and time,
Even if the path lies straight in front of your nose.

The Tempest and Sapperton Church

Introduction

I am not saying there is a direct link between the Jacobean panelling in St Kenelm’s and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I am merely pointing at the way they are connected by the zeitgeist of ‘The Age of Exploration’, and its consequent mix of ‘the exotic’, imperialism, slavery, the engendering of an ideology of racism, and Christianity’s attitude towards the ‘heathen’.

The Tempest was probably written in 1610-11; the panelling is Jacobean. Neither came out of thin air. The late 16th century saw Elizabethan expeditions to ‘the New World’ (Raleigh, Roanoke etc.), whilst a colony was successfully founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Tobacco production and the fabled tale of Pocahontas followed in its Jacobean wake.

As regards Africa, and the Americas, Sir John Hawkins’ slaving voyages gained the royal backing of Queen Elizabeth as early as the 1560s. This inter-continental new world now meant that England – and Gloucestershire – were now situate within the broad reaches of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’. We have an early parish record entry to confirm this: in 1603, on the 22nd November, in Bisley, John Davies, ‘ye black’, was buried.

Yet despite Hawkins’ predatory slaving on the African coastline, and despite exploitative English protestant attitudes towards first nation peoples in the Americas, a considerable body of evidence points to the 18th century Age of Enlightenment as the crucible for the development of an ideology of racism. Not the 16th or 17th centuries. So what did the figures on that 17th century panelling mean to those who commissioned them? And how were they first ‘read’ by those who first viewed them? And how have those readings changed over time? And how do we read them now?

Before we think about that, however, we have to think about the memorial in the church to Henry Poole, who died in 1616. It includes the ‘head of a black man’. The Poole family were wealthy landowners before the reign of King James, and even though Henry became even wealthier, are we going too far in seeing the black head as symbolic of the source of a new treasure chest?

Mark Hewlett wrote to me after a visit to the church:
‘It seems that the Poole memorial may not have been constructed until circa 1730, more than 100 years after his death.  I am not sure why it took so long.  This may make the inclusion of the head of the black man even more obscure. The head is set in the wall at the side of the monument.  It clearly seems to relate to the memorial but not to be an integral part of it.  See the attached pic – head is on the wall on the right. It is difficult to know what to make of it.  Is it a depiction of a slave? Is it a black servant?  The head seems to be represented in a classical way. Is that a laurel wreath?  The person depicted seems to wearing a purple (?) garment… not really very slave like?  Possibly not really very servant like. Why did the maker of the monument include the head of a black man (more than 100 years after the death of Thomas Poole)?’
The information booklet in the church tells us: ‘To the right, on the wall, is a bust of a black man. Maybe the Pooles had West Indian plantation connections. At any rate they were clearly very fond of this man, presumably a retainer.’ Well, well.
Now to the Jacobean panelling: this was, of course, originally in the secular setting of Sapperton Manor: the Atkyns family bought the manor house from the Pooles in 1661; the first Earl Bathurst then acquired it before demolishing it in 1730. The panelling was then donated to the church.
So with a nod to post-colonial studies and to historical phenomenology, what do those figures on the panels tell us about attitudes towards ‘race’, ‘the exotic’, wealth, slavery, the ‘noble savage’, Christianity, ‘the heathen’, ‘The Age of Exploration’, and ‘The Age of Empire’? What can we disentangle with minute observation? And can we be value-free in our minute observation and consequent description?
The figures, male and female, reveal bare torsos, often with necklaces, or charms or amulets. The aureoles on the female breasts are accentuated. Legs and genitalia are concealed behind a panel decorated with sinuous tendrils, cornucopia, and feline, demonic heads. Hair and headdresses adorn faces that show a variety of expressions, through differing positions of lips and mouth, together with direction and type of gaze. One male shows alarm and anger, with his hand clutching his chest – has his necklace or amulet been stolen from him? The beards on the males are more suggestive of Jacobean, European fashion.

How does Caliban and The Tempest fit into all of this?

‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and mad’st much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in ‘t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less,
That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee,
And show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you,
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island.’

‘You taught me language, and my profit on ‘t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!’

‘No, pray thee.
[Aside.] I must obey. His art is of such power
It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,
and make a vassal of him.’

‘I’ll swear upon that bottle to be thy true
subject, or the liquor is not earthly.’

‘I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island,
And I will kiss thy foot. I prithee, be my god.’

CALIBAN [sings]
‘No more dams I’ll make for fish,
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring,
Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish .
‘Ban, ‘ban, Ca-caliban
Has a new master. Get a new man.
Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom!
Freedom, high-day, freedom!’

‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.’

‘I say by sorcery he got this isle;
From me he got it. If thy greatness will,
Revenge it on him, for I know thou dar’st,
But this thing dare not.’

‘As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed

With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both. A southwest blow on you
And blister you all o’er.’

PROSPERO
‘For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins
Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee. Thou shalt be pinched
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made ’em.’

CALIBAN
[aside] ‘These be fine things, an if they be not
sprites. That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquor.
I will kneel to him. ‘  He crawls out from under the
cloak.

‘As I told thee before, I am subject
to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath
cheated me of the island.’

How does ‘Ye Black’ buried at Bisley in 1603 fit into all this?

That terse parish record entry:
‘John Davies, ye Black, buried 22November 1603 Bisley’,
Can blow your mind when you pass the village,
Cycling to Oakridge and Sapperton,
On the trail of the Mason-Dixon line,
Africa, and America,
And the sugar plantations
In the West Indies;
It’s high up, Bisley,
The wind blows cold, the rain sweeps in,
The snow can settle,
And ‘vapours rolling down a valley
Make a lonely scene more lonesome’;
So how do we rescue you, John Davies,
‘From the enormous condescension of posterity’?
How do we recreate your life to give voice to you?
These questions might be rhetorical,
They might be existential and ontological –
What was your real name?
Why John Davies?
How did you end up in Bisley?
Where were you born?
How long was your life in Bisley?
Did the weather quickly kill you?
Had you no immunity against the common cold, flu and so on?
Could you speak English?
Did the locals point at you, laugh and mock?
Were you a slave?
A servant?
A fashion accessory?
Were you baptised into the Christian faith?
Were you buried in consecrated ground?
Did you cry yourself to sleep?
How did your mind cope with this exile?
And with this stolen identity and stolen self?
Did you die of melancholy?
Was death a blessed release?
How can we memorialise you?
‘John Davies, ye Black, buried 22November 1603 Bisley’,
How should we memorialise you?

And now to ‘The Enlightenment”: How does that fit into all of this?

The ideology of ‘race’ developed more forcefully and systematically in the 18th century, alongside the slave trade. The associated rise of capitalism with associated ideas of individualism, self-help, and property, were also part of the mix contributing to the development of racial ideology. In consequence, slaving and slave ownership were seen as quick and obvious ways to gain honest wealth.

Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett:

Smollett’s descriptions of a surgeon’s life on board ship in the Royal Navy are much trumpeted. But there is much – forgotten or ignored – on slaving too, at the end of chapter LXV and the beginning of chapter LXV1:

‘In less than a fortnight after our separation, we made the land of Guinea, near the mouth of the River Gambia, and trading along the coast as far to the southward of the line as Angola and Bengua, in less than six months disposed of the greatest part of our cargo, and purchased four hundred negroes, my adventure having been laid out in gold dust.
Our complement being made up, we took our departure from Cape Negro, and arrived in the Rio de la Plata in six weeks, having met with nothing remarkable in our voyage, except an epidemic fever, not unlike the jail distemper, which broke out among our slaves and carried off a good many of the ship’s company; among whom I lost one of my mates, and poor Strap had well-nigh given up the ghost. Having produced our passport to the Spanish governor, we were received with great courtesy, sold our slaves in a very few days, and could have put off five times the number at our own price; though we were obliged to smuggle the rest of our merchandise, consisting of European bale goods, which, however, we made shift to dispose of at great advantage.’

CHAPTER LXV1

‘Our ship being freed from the disagreeable landing of negroes, to whom, indeed, I had been a miserable slave since our leaving the coast of Guinea, I began to enjoy myself… I calculated the profits of my voyage, which even exceeded my expectation; resolved to purchase a handsome sinecure upon my arrival in England, and, if I should find the squire as averse to me as ever, marry his sister by stealth … ‘

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Commentaries usually centre on Crusoe’s relationship with Man Friday and his key capitalist values of practicality, self-improvement and self-help. But we also see those values applied to slaving – ‘negroes’ have become commodities and an easy passage to wealth and status.

‘You may suppose, that having now lived four years in the Brazils, and beginning to thrive and prosper very well on my plantation, I had not only learned the language, but had contracted acquaintance and friendship … and that in my discourses … I had frequently given them an account of my two voyages to the coast of Guinea … how easy it was to purchase upon the coast for trifles … negroes, for the service of the Brazils, in great numbers …

It happened being in company of some merchants and planters of my acquaintance … three of them came to me the next morning … the question was, whether I would … manage the trading part upon the coast of Guinea, and they offered me that I should have my equal share of the negroes without providing my part of the stock.’

Disenchantment: The Picturesque Cotswolds and ‘Colonial Countryside’
A Walk in the Park

David Olusoga: ‘Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from Britain’s “island story”.’

The following descriptions from the internet describe the beauty of Cirencester Park. There is no mention of something else … more of that, later.

1. ‘Cirencester Park is a superb example of a forest-style garden, occupying 3,000 acres branching out from Cirencester. The park is privately owned, but it is open to the public free of charge, by kind permission of the owner, Lord Bathurst..’
2. ‘Cirencester Park and Estate: At the end of Park Street you cannot help but notice a very tall hedge, the tallest yew hedge in the world. This marks the beginning of the precincts of the Bathurst estate, or Cirencester Park … Provided that you are out of the park by 5pm, you can walk through the park from Cirencester to Sapperton, watching the church, in direct line with the avenue, gradually recede into the distance. THE ESTATE: The park is essentially an early 18th century creation, the great era of English landscaping, the result of a collaboration between the 1st Earl Bathurst and the poet and landscaper, Alexander Pope, who was a frequent visitor to Cirencester
3. “Perfect Cotswold countryside wander.”
4. ‘Alexander Pope, a fellow Tory and leading figure in London gardening and architectural circles, was a good friend of the 1st Earl and a frequent visitor to Cirencester. Bathurst and Pope became collaborators and together they planned the pinnacle of Bathurst’s life’s work – the creation of a sublime landscaped park … Lord Bathurst was a great believer in seasonal colour, something that is standard in gardening design today, but was rare and expensive to achieve in the 18th century. He spent a great deal of time and trouble choosing the species of trees to be planted and it is thanks to his extraordinary foresight that the park still boasts some of the most stunning vistas in England. Lord Bathurst was an early proponent of the Gothick Revival style …

That Missing Something Else

The church at Sapperton is outwardly modest and yew tree shadowed,
But inside is a huge rococo stone effigy to Sir Robert Atkyns
(Once of this Frome valley parish at Pinbury Park);
His father owned and lived at Sapperton Manor,
‘A very grand building, rather overpowering’,
According to Alan Pilbeam in Gloucestershire 300 Yeas Ago.

A 1712 picture of the house and grounds is engrossing:
It shows umpteen bays, finials, gables, chimneys and trees,
And a vast estate of sylvan straight-line avenues,
Progressively receding into far distant vanishing point.

A bowling green stands in the foreground of this landscaped geometry,
With three diminutive figures triangulated in leisured sport –
Their pose captured forever like a draughtsman’s contract.
And as these figures went about their contracted play,
Sir Robert completed The Ancient and Present State of Glostershire
Before dying of dysentery – his book published posthumously.

The house was demolished some twenty years later,
But you can walk to its ghosts down the track by the side of the church:
‘A grassy mound of rubble below the church marks its former site …
The unusually flat surface beside the mound was the bowling green’ –
We descended to this spot to recreate and limn the bowlers’ triangle,
In a draughtsman’s liminal contact, contracted through time,
Surveyed with scales of justice.

The Sapperton estate was acquired by the Bathursts
(Patrician beneficiaries of the profits of slavery),
Who promptly demolished the grand house
(The Age of Elegance and Reason),
And though Alexander Pope might wander through this valley,
Augustan couplet praise, two a penny,
As surveyors completed their triangulations …

A
Slaving ship from Bristol,
The Middle Passage to the West Indies,
And a healthy profit back across the Atlantic …

Meant a different triangle …

Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst

‘The Sense to value Riches, with the Art
T’enjoy them, and the Virtue to impart,
Not meanly, nor ambitiously pursu’d,
Nor sunk by sloth, nor rais’d by servitude;
To balance Fortune by a just expence,
Join with Oeconomy, Magnificence;
With splendour, charity; with plenty; health;
Oh teach us BATHURST! yet unspoil’d by wealth!’

That Missing Something Else

The English Heritage publication Slavery and the British Country House, edited by Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann can put you right, however. Madge Dresser writes that ‘Commercial considerations as well as political ones may have reinforced the tendencies of private proprietors of stately homes to offer the public an even more deracialised version of their past history, when that history is offered at all. Take, for example, a grand country house belonging to the Bathurst family and one associated now more with horses than slavery.’

It’s true that the third Earl (a member of Lord Liverpool’s ‘Repressive Tory’ cabinet) supported abolition by the 1820’s – and that’s what comes up on a Google search for ‘Bathurst and Slavery’. You don’t get a mention of Benjamin Bathurst’s late 17th century Deputy Governorship of the Leeward Islands, nor his Royal African Company’s position and shares. He died in 1704 and the house at Cirencester Park was built ten or so years later ‘for his son, Alan, the first Earl … the grounds designed with the help of Alexander Pope.’

The estate itself, is vast: when you wander through the Arts and Crafts village of Sapperton, or visit Coates, or Pinbury Park, or innocently follow the River Frome, or search for the source of the Thames, try to connect this sequestered Cotswold pastoral with the Atlantic ocean and shark-shadowed ships on the Middle Passage to the plantations.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

– T. S. Eliot

‘The stately homes of England
How beautiful they stand
To prove the upper classes
Still have the upper hand’

‘Heritage’:
Grandeur, wealth, stability, beauty, power, art, culture, landscaped gardens,
Arcadia, follies, the classics, aesthetics, elegance, manners, the Grand Tour,
The Augustan Age of Elegance,
The Age of Enlightenment –
This is the overt heritage of the English Stately Home.

But what of the covert heritage of some of these august piles –

Plantations, sugar, tobacco,
The triangular trade,
Slaving,
Slavery,
Slavery compensation,
Colonial office in the West Indies,
A concealed Keynsian multiplier effect,
A hidden Venn diagram link …
Or innocent coincidence on the journey
From the counting house to the country house …

So let us walk together, with our map.
To reflect on the cult of the picturesque …
Alexander Pope,
A triangular cultural trope:

The

Cult of the Sublime,
The Romantic Imagination,
The fashion for the Gothick,
The Shakespearian trope of this ‘sceptred isle’,
The lyrical self-contained world of the stately home,

Think about Goldney House in Clifton,
Where as Roger H Leech put it, wih M Leone:
“The setting out of these elite falling gardens can be seen as forming part of the process called ‘Georgianisation’, in this instance the ‘ideology of naturalising the hierarchical conditions of social life through landscape architecture’.

And that means we have to leave the insular world of the stately home,
Within this ‘sceptred isle’,
And think about The Tempest,
Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban,
Especially the representation of poor Caliban,

For ‘heritage’, like ‘charity’, does not always begin at home.

Thoughts derived from a reading of
Creating Memorials Building Identities The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic
(Alan Price Liverpool University Press 2012)

Doors of No Return,
Historic, documented, liminal places,
Not gone with the wind, but both visible and invisible,
Spaces and places in the black Atlantic archipelago
With messages and mementoes from the slaving past,
Open doors to the truth –
But we too have landscapes that require re-reading,
Reinterpretations that acknowledge a history
That might be interwoven with the triangular trade,
But whose messages are obscured or buried –
The home of Stroud Scarlet, for example;

So how do we create a counter-narrative?
That is,
“A performative counter-narrative, what we might call a ‘guerrilla memory’”,
Or “Lieux de memoire, sites of history, torn away from the moment of history” (Pierre Nora),
Memorialisation that moves beyond ‘obsessional empiricism’
and ‘the fetishisation of surviving historical documents and sources’,
To a counter-heritage, a counter-memorialisation.
18th
Century
Sea Doggerel
21st Century Shadow

‘All
ship-shape
and Bristol fashion’:
Stroud Scarlet and trade expansion,
Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Benin, Angola, Gambia.

The
Door
of No Return:
Atlantic Middle Passage,
Nevis, Barbados, Jamaica,
Virginia, Haiti, South Carolina.
Fill the hold with sugar, cotton, tobacco –
Still casting a ship-shape triangular shadow.

The Thames and Severn Canal History and Guide by David Viner

The first Earl Bathurst was an early supporter of the canal idea,
to link the Severn and the Thames,
imagining the union of the two great rivers
on his estate;
Cirencester Park would see a
‘Marriage … which would be the
Admiration of Posterity’,
wrote Alexander Pope.

Bunce Island in Sierra Leone was once an early British slaving headquarters: ‘In exchange for slaves and other valuable commodities the British offered glass beads, bundles of cloth, gunpowder, European metal goods, tobacco pipes, bottles of liquor and European weapons. Until a few years ago the ground was … littered with tiny glass beads and fragments of pottery … Most of these grim souvenirs have been hoovered up by tourists … but many more relics of the trade lie beneath the soil, along with iron nails used to attach shackles and chains to African arms …’ Black and British A Forgotten History – David Olusoga

The Thames and Severn Canal History and Guide by David Viner

‘The prosperity of the Stroud woollen industry between 1690 and 1760’
also stimulated proposals for the canal.
(This also coincided with the Bristol boom-time for slaving profits
– how much of that cloth that was bartered
for slaves in Sierra Leone and beyond
came from Stroudwater,
I wonder.
We are allowed to wonder.)

The placid waters of the Stroudwater Navigation and the Thames and Severn Canal; the rustic banks of the Severn, and the meads by the Thames, all deceive the senses. Our senses should be alarmed, like Scrooge with Marley, with apparitions of coats of arms, purses, chains, links, cash boxes, keys, ledgers, deeds and padlocks. And spectral sharks might appear to leap from the bloodied inland waters. Think of that at Bathurst Meadow Lock.

Finally, terra firma and permissive rights of way:

From 1967: Near the Round Tower, Cirencester Park S0 998026
‘A row of deserted cottages stands near the Ewepens, on the ‘Bisley Path’, the former main road from Cirencester to Bisley and Painswick, and Gloucester. At this point the road branched off for Minchinhampton and Coates, through what is now Cirencester Park … ‘this road became the private property of Earl Bathurst’ in 1818.

Property is Theft: a Masque
‘Town and Gown’
In Cirencester;
And in the shire:
‘Smock and Crown’.

Despite the high walls, we are allowed to walk the estate …
(The post-modernist illusion of equality;
Marcuse’s ‘Repressive Tolerance’;
Gramsci’s cultural hegemony;
The ‘we’re all in it together’ illusion.)

Conclusion

David Olusoga: ‘Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from Britain’s “island story”.’

Thanks to Mark Hewlett for the above photos and below comments.

Credit To Deborah Roberts for the above photos.

9.3 % Swing

A red island in the sea of Cotswold blue
A red outcrop in these blue remembered hills
We’re not 25 grand smug shepherd’s huts
We’re red brick, spit and sawdust, woollen mills

A red rose amidst the snarling thorns of May
A red flag sewn from Stroudwater Scarlet
We’re not the headmistress’s blue-rinse smile
We’re the crimson kiss of a wanton harlot

We’re not Farrow & Ball “complacent blue-tit”
We’re not weekend waxed-jacket and tweed knickers
We’re not honey-dipped, chocolate-box bollocks
We’re not mimsy-boo-boutique more tea vicars

We’re anarchist printers, poets and painters
We’re the ghosts of Huguenot weavers
We sing protest songs up a hornbeam tree
We’re the New Lawn vegan-green believers

We’re not Johnnie Boden, we’re Jonny Fluffypunk
We wield pen and brush not polo mallet
We steer to the left through canals of Budding beer
A splash of vermilion from art’s rich palette

We don’t twitch the curtains of seething disapproval
A Little Metropolis, we think out loud
Welcome mat unfurled, we’re citizens of the world
We’re the People’s Republic of Stroud

by elvis mcgonagall, june 2017

Credit To Mark Hewlett/Bob Fry for the above photos.

Jo Cox Commemorative Walk Saturday June 17th: 4 miles or so, around Nailsworth; meet by the clock near Hobbs at 10 o’clock. A performative walk: referencing FGR’s success; David Drew’s success; Jo Cox’s first speech to parliament: “We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us”, and, finally, working class local history. Please wear FGR colours or red or whatever. I have prepared some materials – if anyone would like to read/perform, then please contact me. You may wish to read/perform something of your own – again, please contact me. I would particularly be pleased if anyone would like to read something from their heart about Jo Cox. I do not have the time to count numbers – just turn up, but it would be helpful if you could let me know if you are going. Many thanks, Stuart.