Counter-Heritage

Some of you may remember Peter Griffin, the Kings Stanley historian. If it wasn’t for his wonderful generosity, I wouldn’t have written what follows below and you wouldn’t be reading it. I think it would have been around 2011 or so when I came home to discover three or four supermarket bags crammed with papers in the porch. Peter had generously dropped off loads of photocopies and print-outs of primary sources about local history: Chartism, in particular. These were the fruits of his meticulous research.  It would be a labour of love to shape all of this into some sequential order. But it would take some doing. What exactly was there? How would I find the time to read all this, let alone make handwritten notes after laboriously underlining and highlighting and then create a structure of coherent narrative and focussed analysis, with hours spent in back-breaking lucubration typing at a computer at a table? Well, this is how it happened … I took papers with me, piecemeal, to work on the bus and studied the texts as much as I could before I felt queasy on a bus going around village lanes and bends; highlighting and underlining and then filling a notebook and then typing it all up. This paragraph only hints at the ocular pain involved. I wrote a few original pieces to post on the Radical Stroud website but completely forgot about the below until the last few days. So, what you are about to read is hardly hot off the press but it is about to enter the public light of day for the first time. It’s not all honed yet by a long chalk: I just don’t have the time, energy or...