History

Why No Hoboes Over Here?

by | 8th September 2026 | Counter-Heritage, History | 0 Comments

I’m writing this after rereading Kenneth Alsopp’s classic Hard Travellin’ after a gap of some nearly fifty years. It is, needless, to say, a book of its time but what a poetic piece of extensive research it is. It’s a piece of Americana but the book also opens up the question in the title above. I suppose ‘riding the rails’ has happened in an almost obscure and virtually unrecorded way in this country with children and trainspotters. Steve McQueen’s film The Blitz features children and evacuees sort of stowing away and my mate has written down his memories of ‘riding the rails’ in his A Film Called Happiness    by Jon Seagrave / Jonny Fluffypunk ‘You are fifteen years old. It is 6 in the morning and it is February; it is pitch dark and freezing cold, and you are huddled foetal, shivering in a thin sleeping bag on the seat in a compartment of an ancient railway carriage parked up for the night in the deserted, unlit platform at Thurso station. The end of the line, the far north of Scotland, the most northerly point of the British railway network. And don’t you know it- the sky is blacker than black, the windows of the carriage rimed with ice, inside and out. There are four of you. You broke into this train at midnight; four fifteen-year-olds, full of chips and glowing from under-age beer drunk in a pub that couldn’t care less, in possession of a purloined carriage key. You came up here yesterday, across the vast and empty moorland on this train, and you will head back south on this train at daybreak, and now you are sleeping on this train, or trying to sleep in the bitter...
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Sapperton after the Great War

by | Jun 26, 2025 | , | 0 Comments

Sapperton in the 1920s   My grand-dad served throughout the Great War from 1914 to 1918. He was made redundant in 1919, in London, so he and his family moved back towards my grandmother’s home of Stroud. They lived in a Nissen hut by Minchinhampton Aerodrome (today’s...

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STEAM Museum Swindon

by | Jun 25, 2025 | , | 0 Comments

Dear Famous Five, If you want a great day out then you ought to come to the STEAM Museum in Swindon. Because this is what I saw when here today on holiday:   A gift shop, a fire engine, giant locomotive wheels, name plates and numbers, signals, holiday haunts...

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Capel’s Viaduct Stroud

by | Jun 25, 2025 | , | 0 Comments

History at Capel’s Viaduct It’s a great walk down to Capel’s Viaduct, Past old ridge and furrow and tenterhook hedgerows, Teazles here and there to raise your nap, Imagining the patchwork quilt of fields of two centuries ago, Field-names such as Bacon Slad, Calves...

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A Stroud Valleys and Canal Walk

by | Jun 25, 2025 | , | 0 Comments

A Stroud Valleys Railway and Canal Walk   At first glance, it might seem a bit odd to link old railway stations and halts near Stroud with Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. But if I give some famous lines a Dr Beeching tweak then I think you’ll know what I mean: ‘Look...

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The Gauges at Gloucester

by | Jun 25, 2025 | , | 0 Comments

Gloucester ‘On Monday, the Great Western line was opened throughout from London to Gloucester … 114 miles … four hours and a half distance reckoned by time … by ordinary trains; but there is an express train to and fro each day which performs the distance in five...

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