Proust, T.S. Eliot and a Municipal Rubbish Tip in Swindon
I’d written the following for the Bristol Radical History Festival April 2026 for a scheduled talk:
‘A Railway Town and the General Strike: Nine Days in Swindon in May 1926
Swindon was a proud GWR town with 14,000 workers ‘inside’ the railway works’ 310 acres. But the GWR ‘railway servants’ were anything but servile during the General Strike. Hear the fascinating tale of the mock funeral cortege where ‘coffins’ decorated with weeds for nine strike-breaking footplatemen were symbolically cremated on the municipal rubbish tip. The police even cleared the streets of traffic for the cortege … Only in Swindon …’
On a fresh spring day towards the end of March
I thought I might revisit the General Strike back home …
Only nine drivers broke the strike in Swindon.
Fireman Taylor had the idea of treating them as though they were dead, having a mock funeral procession
and cremation on the Corporation rubbish tip.
And so, in a Swindonian version
Of the old Skimmington cavalcade,
Whereby transgressors of a local moral code
Were lampooned in effigy and with rough music,
Some strike breakers were honoured with a procession:
A mock funeral cortege that wound its way
To the council rubbish tip for ‘cremation’;
The coffins, made by firemen, were embellished,
By wives, mothers, daughters, grand-mothers and aunts,
With curtains or cloth, and wreaths of nettles
And dandelions for floral decoration;
The cortege was followed by some thousand people,
While every street showed its approbation:
‘Of course, when we called with a coffin all the neighbours came out.
They were delighted! We had no trouble with any of them;
almost everyone in those streets had someone on strike themselves.
We had the whole population with us in the demonstration.’
With the police granting permission
And controlling the traffic
Around ‘Manchester Road, the Centre and down by The Ship’;
Traditional rough music:
The death knell created with an iron monger’s shop sign,
a trowel and a four-foot long set square.
A mock undertaker in top hat, long tail coat,
black gloves and striped trousers led the cortège
A derisive cacophony and pandemonium,
Greeted the cortege on its way to Morris Street,
And mock funeral service and cremation:
‘At each home [of a strikebreaker] when we knocked we told them we’d come to take them for a ride, and that if they didn’t come with us we’d have the pleasure of burying them.’ ‘A woman came out of her shop to give them two gallons of paraffin for the cremation. Joe Baldwin, a train driver, borrowed a white table cloth from a lady in the street, and dressed in this as a surplice he said a burial service over the nine coffins.
As he set fire to them his last words were
‘May the wind blow their remains to the corners of the earth,
And to hell with them all’.
It was an eldritch sort of spring blossom day –
You know the sort of day when time is all over the place –
The present haunts the past and the past haunts the present
In a bewitching simultaneity.
It started straightforwardly enough,
Walking by the old platform bay at Stroud Station,
Gazing down at the nettles, weeds and dandelions,
Down by the old mouldering sleepers and points lever
(It was only later that I recalled the funeral cortege:
Wreaths of nettles and dandelions for floral decoration);
I was off to Swindon to the railway museum
For the 40th anniversary of the closure of the railway works,
And, on impulse, decided to walk to Morris Street,
Following in the ghost steps of that 1926 cortege,
Along busy traffic filled Rodbourne Road,
Trying to find the spot where that mock funeral took place,
On the site of the old municipal rubbish tip.
My walk was accompanied by a variety of lorries
Collecting rubbish in the railway village and Rodbourne:
It was bin -day, rubbish collection day,
Young men at work now vaping rather than dragging on a Woodbine,
High vis jackets and baseball caps rather than flat caps and waistcoats.
But it was a decidedly odd feeling:
A ghost road walk to a former rubbish tip
In the company of today’s collectors of bins,
But such is the nature of coincidence, I suppose.
I decided to walk without map or phone so as to ask the way,
To have conversations in the street,
Perhaps even mention the nature of my quest,
So as to bring the past alive,
And a friendly resident pointed me in the right direction,
Showing me the map on his phone,
And so, I eagerly made my way to and then along Morris Street.
The houses were, as I expected, Victorian redbrick terrace,
But then petered out with 1930s and post-war houses,
With a footpath public park and playground
At the end beyond the trammelled River Ray,
A tributary stream of the River Thames.
So, the only question for me seemed to be:
‘Did the cursing take place where the newer houses now stood,
Or over the small bridge over the stream and into the park?’
I started chatting with a man cleaning his car,
And he told me that opposite where we stood,
Was once a poultry farm,
And where we were standing in the middle of the road,
Was once a circular cycle speedway track.
His eyes widened when I told him about the cortege
That would have ceremonially passed down the street,
Right there opposite where his house now stood –
It’s good to share stories rather than stick to a phone,
And he reciprocated with tales of the closure of the railway works.
I made my way back to the railway station,
Gazing up to Radnor Street cemetery,
Where Jimmy Thomas of General Strike fame
Gazes down upon the Great Western Railway,
Then walked past the site of the Co-op building from 1912,
A hub during the nine days and more in May 1926,
To reach old platform four where I learned the art of train-spotting,
Only partly resisting the urge to jot down class 66 train numbers …
I took out my phone to ask my sister
If her husband, Rod, who pretty well knows everything
There is to know about Swindon’s history,
Knew anything about the Morris Street municipal dump –
And not even he knew anything,
So here I go now with an internet search …
The search tells me where Swindon’s current recycling centre is …
And also directs me to words I have written
About Morris Street and the funeral Cortege.
And there was nothing else.
Only me in the past.
It was that sort of day.
Circular time not linear:
Madeleine moments at Morris Street erstwhile municipal tip,
Or as T.S. Eliot put it:
‘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.’