The Golden Valley
I first visited Stroud on the train in the early 1960s, pulled by a 1400 class locomotive, 1463, I think. I would study my Ian Allan trainspotter’s book or read my history books until we reached Chalford, when I would stare, mesmerized by the beauty of it all. I didn’t know, of course, that I would write the following lines, sixty years later.
‘Chalford has such a labyrinth of weavers’ walks and footpaths –
And on a winter’s day, with plumes of smoke rising from the valley,
Mistletoe in the trees, light folded in envelopes of cloud,
It’s hard to imagine that this picturesque Cotswold village
Was once hand in glove with the East India Company,
As at Sevill’s Upper Mill – now a select residential development,
With the stream, now private and sequestered,
Running between houses and a car park.
The East India Company was involved in the slave trade
In Madagascar, St Helena, Bengkulu and Angola,
Exchanging guns, gunpowder, cutlasses, cloth, and piece goods;
Bristol merchants bought textiles from the Company
To exchange for slaves in West Africa;
But the Company gained its questionable reputation,
Primarily from its depredations in India.,
Exploiting and contributing to the decline of the Mughal Empire,
And selling Indian grown opium,
To be smuggled to China, to flout the Imperial ban,
The profits paying for tea for domestic consumption …’
But let’s not forget the beauty of the Golden Valley: ‘…the high land, studded with the grey Gloucestershire houses, begins to rise at either side of the canal, it is no longer the English scenery you might expect, but like mountain villages in Switzerland, thousands of feet above the level of the sea. I have seen villages in the Apennines which reminded me of Chalford and St. Mary’s crossing. The mills and the factories with blue slate roofs make a colour against the golden distance of the Golden Valley …’ (Temple Thurston, 1912)
So, when you pass next on the railway, steal a glance at the beauty of the landscape, have a nice cup of tea –
‘These cottages clambering up the Cotswold hillsides,
This Golden Valley harmony of water, wood and stone
Was derived, in some distant degree,
From war, enslavement, racism, and opium.’