Sunday March 6th: First Sunday walk out on enchantment! Bath to Saltford

First Sunday walk out on enchantment! Bath to Saltford.

Richard White

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To:

Richard White <r.white2@bathspa.ac.uk>;

...

Sat 27/02/2016 14:24

Hi folks,

On Sunday 6 March I am writing to invite you to the next  walk in my year of walking out on enchantment!

This is the walk that was kind of muddied out at the start of the year and begins perhaps the development of a longer walking project reflecting on the legacy of slavery.

Short version is that its a walk out from Bath to Saltford.

10.00 Leave from outside 44AD Gallery in Bath, Abbey Street. http://www.44ad.net/

Walk mainly along the river on the old two path to Saltford.

Return about 16.00.

At Saltford you could get a bus back into to town or leave  a car ....  I'll leave you to sort that out.

I will be looping back and walking in to town on the old railway line.

In total its about 10 miles but the return 4miles along the railway is very easy...

Here is a link to the route I worked out for the project that kicked this off a couple of years back finishing at Cleveland Pools...but thats another story. This one starts and finishes at 44AD.
http://my.viewranger.com/route/details/MjcyMjY=

Back in Bath around 4 depending on how long we stop at the pub in Saltford!

I do hope you can join me, bring cameras and notepads and iphones etc Our destination is Saltford Brass Millhttp://www.brassmill.com/saltford_brass_mill_005.htm where goods were made to sell in exchange for human beings....

...so this walk begins another stage in exploring the local connections to the first leg of the Allantic Slave Trade and I hope you will help me uncover and explore the stories along this route, consider the legacy and generate resonances.

Please share this and invite others to join us. On foot and online. I'll be tweeting on the account below, then sharing  and writing up eventually on my blog.

You might be interested to check out this very quick snapshot account of the February walk in Germany I did this with Lorna Brunstein as part of our project, Honouring Esther:https://forcedwalks.wordpress.com/2016/02/06/winsen-to-belsen-walk/

See you next Sunday? 

Best wishes

Richard

-- 

Richard White

mob: 07717012790

tw: @walknowlive

web: www.walknowtracks.co.uk

The Brunel Goods Shed Maze

When you explore the Brunel Goods Shed’s maze,

You might want to reflect on the parallels

Between mazes and labyrinths and the human mind –

Amaes: Old English, delusion or delirium …

A maze:

A representation of self-analysis and mystification,

A wander through the mind so as to discover

The fundamental assumptions and determinants

Of one’s thoughts, ideas and ideology:

The a priori and the posteriori in a young life’s

Acculturation, socialization and mystification;

Mystification:

The presentation of social facts as though natural:

Inequality, austerity and capitalism, for example;

Don’t forget to take your thread with you:

A stitch in time might save your mind.

Class Conflict in Uley 1795

Uley and Michinhampton Common 1795

(1795 was a key year of national unrest, high food prices, decline in ‘deference’ and anonymous threatening letters)

O remember ye poor in distress by ye high prs of provision if not the consiquens will be fatall to a great many in all parishis round a bout here how do ye think a man can support a famly by a quarter flour for a shillin and here is a man in this parish do say the poore was never beter of as they be now a fatel blow for him and his hous and all his property we have redy 5000 sworn to be true to the last & we have 510000 of ball redy and can have pouder at a word & every think fitin for ye purpose no King but a constitution down down down o fatall dow high caps & proud hats for ever dow down we all.

One of three notes sent to the gentlefolk of Uley in July 1795 – a parish that had seen incendiarism against the houses of master clothiers.

The response was to eventually provide subsidized bread – but the quality was found wanting, and so this message was sent two months later, in mid-September:

The distress of the industerous people through the dearness of provisions calls aloud for an immediate consultation therefore a meeting is desired next Munday morning 21int by nine o clock in the morning on Hampton coman to consult what steps to take for an immediate alteration. Be pld to let more know it further. With it make no delay or else we all must starve immediately.

The response was to put troops on standby – 300 people met on Minchinhampton Common on the afternoon of that day and another, smaller crowd gathered on 5^th October.

The next local ruling class response was some detective work in Uley to ascertain who was the author of the anonymous letters – they decided it was an ‘obscure’ local tailor. The JP, the Reverend Baker, and fellow magistrates, thought a warning would suffice, but two other differently lettered, seditious, anonymous notes threatened violence: ‘expect to loase yr heads without any ado’.

In consequence, the magistrates decided to ask the Secretary of State, the Duke of Portland, for advice.

His response?

‘The person in question is in so low a situation of life … that I am inclined to think it may perhaps be the best way of preventing disturbances in future to let him know that the Magistrates are well informed of his attempts & that they have it in contemplation to proceed against him, which may possibly induce him to quit the country …’

E.P.Thompson in his chapter The Crime of Anonymity in Albion’s Fatal Tree shows how this sort of dialogue between the ruling class and the lower orders was part and parcel of the so-called Age of Deference. Gloucestershire was no exception – and just think! How many anonymous threatening letters might have been destroyed at source, or have disappeared, or remained unwritten for lack of materials or courage – or just blew away, or lost legibility, provenance and import in a night of rain?

So just as with Stroud Scarlet and slavery, we might need to go beyond the available evidence:

So how do we create a counter-narrative?

That is,

“A performative counter-narrative, what we might call a ‘guerrilla memory’”,

Or “Lieux de memoire, sites of history, torn away from the moment of history” (Pierre Nora),

Memorialisation that moves beyond ‘obsessional empiricism’

 and ‘the fetishisation of surviving historical documents and sources’,

To a counter-heritage, a counter-memorialisation.

O remember ye poor in distress by ye high prs of provision if not the consiquens will be fatall to a great many in all parishis round a bout here how do ye think a man can support a famly by a quarter flour for a shillin and here is a man in this parish do say the poore was never beter of as they be now a fatel blow for him and his hous and all his property we have redy 5000 sworn to be true to the last & we have 510000 of ball redy and can have pouder at a word & every think fitin for ye purpose no King but a constitution down down down o fatall dow high caps & proud hats for ever dow down we all.

How a Cotswold Village Memorialises Itself: Uley

In 1795, anonymous threatening letters were left for gentlemen of the parish,

Sufficiently disturbing for the local JPs to contact London for advice,

And sufficiently noteworthy for inclusion in national historical studies,

So, having done the reading, I decided to hop on the number 35 bus,

The timetable giving me a clear hour’s run before the return to Stroud,

In an attempt to take a few photos of how Uley presents its history

To itself, its residents, plus tourists and visitors.

The Uley Millennium Green notice boards

For People and Nature, And Breathing Spaces,

Make no mention.

There is a brass plaque in The Street:

Uley Community Stores

Officially opened by HRH The Prince of Wales

On the 22^nd February 2013;

There is a detailed large map of Uley and Owlpen,

But again, no mention of 1795;

The church has several grand 18^th century gravestones,

Master clothiers remembered,

But, alas, no ‘Village-Hampdens’:

‘Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.’

Stroud and the Black Atlantic

Thoughts derived from a reading of

Creating Memorials Building Identities The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic

(Alan Price Liverpool University Press 2012)

Doors of No Return,

Historic, documented, liminal places,

Not gone with the wind, but both visible and invisible,

Spaces and places in the black Atlantic archipelago

With messages and mementoes from the slaving past,

Open doors to the truth -

But we too have landscapes that require re-reading,

Reinterpretations that acknowledge a history

That might be interwoven with the triangular trade,

But whose messages are obscured or buried -

The home of Stroud Scarlet, for example;

So how do we create a counter-narrative?

That is,

“A performative counter-narrative, what we might call a ‘guerrilla memory’”,

Or “Lieux de memoire, sites of history, torn away from the moment of history” (Pierre Nora),

Memorialisation that moves beyond ‘obsessional empiricism’

 and ‘the fetishisation of surviving historical documents and sources’,

To a counter-heritage, a counter-memorialisation.

Well, Nelson Street lends itself well to this:

(A maritime name – but our narrative ignores Trafalgar,

And instead remembers Horatio Nelson’s commander in the Spanish Main,

Colonel Edward Despard, executed as a republican in 1803:

‘Fellow Citizens, I come here … to suffer death upon a scaffold … a friend to truth, to liberty, and to justice … a friend to the poor and the oppressed’,

And the African-Caribbean Cuba Cornwallis,

who in 1780 carried and nursed the delirious Nelson

All the way downriver through Nicaragua, and so saved his life.)

A pub called the Golden Fleece,

A clock called the Blackboy Clock, with an explanatory plaque,

That foregrounds horology rather than slavery -

Indeed, there is absolutely no reference whatsoever to the Age of Enlightenment,

And the engendering of an ideology of justificatory racism,

Nor to the symbolism of the black boy being the relentless slave of Time …

Perhaps we could have a window display somewhere,

Of sugar loaves, tobacco, rum, fragments of Stroud Scarlet,

Seeds from the West Indies and Africa fashioned into a triangle,

Images of the infamous slave ships,           

Collages of images and text and poems and statistics,

To leave as counter-heritage calling cards,

At welcoming pubs and cafes;

Counter-heritage calling cards listing local residents and addresses

of those who benefitted financially from the 1834 abolition of slavery,

A Stroudwater Slavery Trail,

Connecting the Blackboy Clock, the abolition arch, Sheepscombe and Lypiatt,

(where residents owned slaves in the West Indies)

With performance and interpretations of the walk for exhibition,

Then different visits each year to country houses, stately homes and so on,

Buildings and landscapes with hidden slavery connections,

For further reinterpretations, as we move art and monument

From object to process

And from ‘noun to verb’,

As we create museums of the past, present and future.

See http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/stroud-and-triangular-trade.html

Stroud and the Triangular Trade

18^th

Century

Sea Dog Doggerel:

A 21^st Century Shadow.

‘All

Ship-shape

And Bristol fashion’:

With river, canal and turnpike,

Cloth could be carried down to Bristol, bound for

Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Benin, Angola, Gambia.

 Then

The Door

Of No Return:

 The Middle Passage,

 Nevis, Barbados, Jamaica,

Virginia, Haiti and South Carolina.

They fill the hold with sugar, cotton, tobacco:

Commodities that still cast a ship-shape shadow. 

From

Where else

Did this nation’s

18^th century boom time come?

War,

Slavery,

Enclosure,

Exploitation

Mechanisation,

And the British Empire,

But the most lucrative of all

                             Was the shark’s feeding frenzy. 

And

Stroud lies

Hidden within the

Long decayed ledger books

Of Bristol merchants at their quayside,

Stroud Scarlet bought and sold in the damp

Teasled mill air of the tenter hooked Five Valleys,

Before exchanging use and life for human life and death

On the Middle Passage for the West Indies and the Americas.