Gloucester Quays and Making the Connections

Start your walk by Phillpott’s Warehouse –

No plaque mentions that Thomas Phillpotts

Benefitted from some seven hundred enslaved people,

Nearly three hundred of whom were shared ‘investments’

With Samuel Baker of Bakers Quay fame;

Samuel Baker of Lypiatt Park, near Stroud,

Paid some £7,990 compensation

For 410 enslaved persons in Jamaica.

The compensation paid to enslavers in 1834,

Made up fully forty per cent of the national budget back then;

This gives a hint to the bounty paid to Baker and Phillpotts,

A bounty that helped lead to the development

of Baker’s Quay, and High Orchard,

The locus of Gloucester’s industrial revolution –

Not that you will find this on a plaque at Gloucester Quays.

Samuel Baker’s bounty also helped his railway investments:

The Gloucester and Dean Forest Railway –

Only seven or so miles long to Grange Court,

But a conduit to the coal and iron industries in the Dean

(You travel on it today on the line to Newport);

He also invested in the not-to-be Grand Connection:

The Gloucester, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway,

And in the Hereford, Ross and Gloucester Railway

(Originally broad gauge even before it was taken over by the GWR).

You can relive and reclaim this hidden history

With a train trip to Gloucester

And a walk along the docks at the Quays;

You could also get the Newport train from Gloucester –

Alight at Lydney and a five-minute walk

Will take you to the preserved Dean Forest Railway.

North-west Africa, and the so-called ‘Middle Passage’

Across the crimson Atlantic Ocean to the sugar plantations of Jamaica,

Will seem impossibly distant and disconnected.

But remember Samuel Baker.

And you’ll make the connections.