Winterstoke Read online

  Winterstoke

  L. T. C. ROLT

  ‘When the usurer hunts the squire as the squire has hunted the peasant,

  As sheep that are eaten of worms where men were eaten of sheep;

  Now is the judgement of earth, and the weighing of past and present,

  Who scorn to weep over ruins, behold your ruin and weep.’

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction to the 2015 Edition

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chronology

  Maps

  Copyright

  Introduction to the 2015 Edition

  L. T. C. (‘Tom’) Rolt (1919–74) was famed as a pioneer in the appreciation and preservation of Britain’s canal network both as a means of transport and a source of pleasure. His 1944 book Narrow Boat inspired the founding of the Inland Waterways Association (IWA). Rolt also set up the first organisation to save and run a railway, The Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society. He was furthermore a lover of motorcar craftsmanship, and joint founder in 1934 of the Vintage Sports Car Club (VSCC).

  Rolt was a forerunner of our current green movement, with many of his written works weighing the relationship between modern technology and the natural world, in particular his 1947 book, High Horse Riderless. His other publications include a three-volume autobiography, now re-issued as The Landscape Trilogy, and many distinguished biographies of engineers, including Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1957), Thomas Telford (1958), George and Robert Stephenson (1960), James Watt (1962), and Thomas Newcomen (1968).

  Rolt was twice married, to Angela Orred (1939–51) and, in 1952, to Sonia Smith, who survived him. With Sonia he had two sons, Richard (b. 1953) and Timothy (b. 1955).

  Winterstoke (1954), the history of a fictional Midlands town, is perhaps Rolt’s most unclassifiable literary production. Writing in Landscape With Canals (1972), the third volume of his autobiography, Rolt had this to say about Winterstoke in a chapter entitled ‘The Truth about Authorship’:

  While Sonia and I were living in Laurel Cottage, the little furnished house we took at Clun, I conceived the idea of concentrating a number of actual historical happenings in the English Midlands upon one imaginary industrial town. The book would present the story of the growth of this archetypal town and the fortunes of its chief families from the days of the first monastic mill on the river to the present day when the presence of an atomic research establishment on the outskirts of a huge blackened town struck a new apocalyptic note. The book ended with the bewilderment of the town’s ‘labour’ inhabitants on finding that, despite the fact that their elected representatives had nationalised the basic industries, the gap between wages and process had continued to widen until the prospect of starvation became very real.

  It had always struck me that, despite its overwhelming importance in the story of mankind, far too little attention had been paid to the Industrial Revolution in the worlds of literature and art. I was resolved, in my small way, to remedy this deficiency, my object being not to glorify but to explain and to awaken understanding. It seemed to me that with this book I had hit upon an ideal vehicle to give the whole course of the Revolution a concise and dramatic shape. I called my imaginary town, and the book about it, Winterstoke. I invented the name because I felt it had a suitably dour and foredoomed ring to it; it was only subsequently that I discovered there was a real Winterstoke in Somerset, near Taunton, but no matter.

  I began by drawing two maps (which eventually appeared as endpapers) of Winterstoke, one c.1790 and the other modern. I lived with those maps for six months and during that time Winterstoke, which was in fact an amalgam of Stoke-on-Trent and Coalbrookdale with bits of Wolverhampton and Derby thrown in, became intensely real to me. I walked its shabby streets, the towpaths of its blackened canals or the bank of its stinking river, the Wendle. I smelt its acrid polluted air, I knew its pretentious Victorian buildings and statuary, and was equally familiar with its every colliery, ironworks and factory. I hoped I could make my readers share this knowledge with me and see Winterstoke for the terrifying urban monster it was, typifying what English history over the past three hundred years had all been about. But such hopes proved in vain. For although I thought, and still think, that the book rang wholly true and that what I wanted to say could not have been said in any other way, the fact remains that it fell between every kind of stool, being neither fact nor fiction. As the reviewer in the Daily Telegraph justly observed:

  Fictionalised history is ninety-nine times out of a hundred productive of fallacy; either by the subordination of fact to the requirements of the plot, or by over-simplification, or by gross partisanship on the side of the hero. But Winterstoke, by L. T. C. Rolt, is the hundredth case.

  This was very nicely put, but unfortunately the hundredth case only went to prove the rule. I had not any great expectations, for although I knew that Winterstoke was one of the best things I would ever write, I also knew that it would be a difficult book to sell. But I was unprepared for the catastrophic result. Sales were so minimal that they did not even cover the paltry £100 advance on royalties which I had received. I do not believe that the book was even remaindered; I think it was mercifully pulped into oblivion, a kindlier fate for an author’s brain-child in such circumstances. I was later told that the book had been shortlisted for a well-known literary award but a miss is as good as a mile and this was cold comfort. The happiest outcome of this melancholy publishing episode was that Winterstoke brought me my best friend in the world of publishing, John Guest of Longmans. John wrote me a genuine fan letter when he had read the book, suggesting a meeting in London. I write ‘genuinely’ advisedly and with emphasis because letters from publishers’ readers are often designed, by flattery or otherwise, to attract new authors to their publishers’ lists. In John’s case this was not so, although he had cast bread upon promised waters, for it would not be long before I should beat a path to Longmans’ door.

  *

  The author’s widow, Sonia Rolt, recollected in 2014 the following conditions and circumstances around the writing of Winterstoke.

  Tom and I were leading a nomadic life with baby Richard. It was not yet possible to come to the family home with the hope of occupation as our home. Tom’s mother, Mima, was still very much alive, and as with Tom when he was a baby, Mima had not found a way to accept with any degree of comfort, let alone any delight or hope, what is commonly regarded as normal family life.

  We were quite cheerfully accepting the open door from those on my side who were prepared to welcome us, chiefly my aunt Peggy. But we felt we should be on our way. So our great friends the Trevors – Meriol, Tudor and their mother – offered help. Tudor had recently finished building a house of many rooms, Aller Park at Welcombe, on top of a high shoulder above Marsland Mouth on the North Devon Coast. It was in a most spectacular position. One little room became Tom’s writing room. It seemed to suit him down to the ground and he wrote under the window gazing away and away down the great flank of the valley; grass on one side, matched by woods of dense oak on the other, the trees low and cropped by the great Atlantic gales into something with the appearance of sheep’s fleece.

  Winterstoke was hugely important to Tom – a summing up of all he knew and had learnt, expressed in this way. He was happy in spite o
f life’s difficulties; he had a companion – me – he had a son – Richard – he had friends, who loved us and were happy for him to write and work in their place.

  That’s why it was so terrible when, many months later, standing by the kitchen door at Stanley Pontlarge, we opened the post together to find the first royalty statement from Constable for the new book. It was not just the money – it was as if all that he could do and had done had been rejected. I have not fully understood it till now. I offered to go at once to work in Cheltenham – fatuous on my part.

  We picked ourselves up and the phrase, ‘Of course, Constable could never sell my books,’ came to be currency – which takes us on to Tom’s association with Longmans and John Guest. But that is another story.

  *

  The author’s second son, Tim, reacts to Winterstoke from the vantage of 2014:

  Winterstoke was written between May and September 1953 when my father was forty-three and had just become a parent for the first time. In 1944 Tom had experienced unexpected success with his first published book Narrow Boat. Nine years later he might already have had intimations that Narrow Boat would be the book with which he would forever be associated. His intervening books had not sold in anything like the quantity of his debut. He had also endured a tangled and bruising human experience when the nascent canal organisation, the Inland Waterways Association, to which Narrow Boat had given direct rise, blew up in his face. The politically volatile and strife-torn IWA had expelled Tom, along with many others, in what came to be known as the first of three ‘civil wars’ within the young and conflicted organisation. Tom’s first marriage had also broken up and his days of living on the canals had ended when his boat Cressy was found to be irreparably rotten.

  Tom had moved on from waterways to railways, starting the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society, the first organisation of its kind set up to save and run a railway with a mainly volunteer workforce. Tom had worked as the manager for the Talyllyn for the first two critical and successful seasons of this enterprise, but had, in the autumn of 1952, decided to focus once again on his writing career. Even so, while setting up and running the Talyllyn, he had found the time to write two books: Railway Adventure, an account of his time with the Talyllyn, and Lines Of Character, a kind of Proustian celebration and evocation of small, remote, mostly defunct or soon-to-be-defunct railway lines.

  Winterstoke would mark a first (and only) venture into long-form fiction. Eschewing the dominant psychological forms of narrative fiction, the book instead takes more the form of an essay, or even, one could say, a Brechtian Lehrstück or lesson play; it is a book of ideas and by no means a conventional narrative. More accurately it is a book that attempts to make sense of the material world and the British landscape as my father saw it in 1953.

  In order to accomplish this, he looked back – initially, at a youthful, handwritten and unpublished effort of his that he had entitled Strange Vista. This narrative he had written in direct response to his experiences as an engineering apprentice in Stoke-on-Trent in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Witnessing and experiencing first hand the bankruptcy of the steam-engine builders to whom he was apprenticed, also the wider and devastating economic effect of the 1929 financial downturn, had a profound impact on the young Tom. He sought to give this some kind of literary form in Strange Vista and with Winterstoke he turned again to this idea.

  Now he imagined every detail of an imaginary Midlands town and fleshed it out with maps and a detailed geography. Rather than providing rounded-out characters and a psychologically based narrative, the book takes the form of what we might now call socio-economic history. My father looked further back, deep into the past, to pre-Reformation England before land enclosure. He imagined a complete world and followed it, diligently, over time. The book traces the story of a single town over nine centuries.

  There is rigour and a depth of thinking to create the world of the town over such a span. In taking us through this ebb and flow of human endeavour, my father, who had left school at sixteen to pursue an engineering apprenticeship, proves himself to have an enormous depth of understanding and an intuitive sense of history. But he also reveals his prejudices, politics and peccadilloes. In the first chapters the writing is sketchy and idealised. By the time we reach the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there is more flesh on the bone and it feels like this is the epoch with which the writer most strongly identified.

  When we reach the 1950s, the then present, the writer really reveals himself – and not in the best of lights. The full extent of his prejudices and ‘small-c’ conservative politics are harshly exposed. I found reading the conclusion dispiriting and depressing: so this was how my father thought. How very much at odds he must have been with the times he was living in. It seems amazing that I am even here to relate this. Yes, there may be some truth in what he has to say about the ‘nanny state’, the soul-less nature of 1950s Winterstoke and the pessimistic outlook for the future post-nuclear world. But from a 2014 perspective it seems such a prejudiced, blinkered and partial view; it has the effect of lessening the impact and authority of much of what has gone before. I guess my father was trying to write something that would stand outside time, yet he only succeeds in writing something so very much of its time – the cold war dread of nuclear annihilation hangs very heavily over the book.

  At the heart of Winterstoke there is a deep yearning for a way of life that has been lost. I think it is a truism that as we get older we start to view the world around us through the lens of our own finite life. Our fast-changing world can all too easily be seen to be set on a misguided path and bound for inevitable destruction, when in fact what we may really be experiencing is only our own approaching demise.

  I feel in Winterstoke my father is grappling with this sense of his own finite time. When he writes of a world in danger of going off the rails, he may really be writing about his own impending mortality. The nuclear bomb casts an indelibly dark shadow over the narrative of Winterstoke. When I spoke with my mother in 2014, she confirmed that the November 1952 test explosion in the Pacific of the first hydrogen bomb had an especially powerful effect on my father’s outlook. This book is filled with foreboding for the future.

  Yet there may be a hope in it too. If there is a sense of it being an elegy for a lost time, there is also the sense of the book being the writer’s honest and thorough attempt to understand the past – a long hard look into the past as a way to understand the present. Remember, this was a book written in the aftermath of the Second World War when people were very much looking forward, building new worlds and knocking down the old. The rhapsodic Narrow Boat may unwittingly have provided the foundations of a looking-back mentality and set in motion the wheels that would save the canal network.

  Winterstoke does not provide a single simple message; rather, the book illustrates an intractable dilemma – how spiritual life and the material world may or may not be reconciled with one to another. There may be no easy answer to this, but just by setting down the question Tom provides a hope. Winterstoke’s revisiting of the past holds out the prospect that our real-life choices for the future can be made with an enhanced and fuller understanding. The author is asking that we value the past, and learn from it. We certainly do not have to come to the same doom-laden conclusions that his book offers.

  It now is no surprise that the book was so resoundingly unsuccessful on its publication. It was so much against the current of the times. Now we can regard Tom as a seer in many ways, but then he must have seemed a voice crying out in the wilderness, spectacularly out of sync with the 1950s zeitgeist.

  The world has certainly turned since it was written. Now, arguably, our country is beset by a ‘looking-back’ mentality. Heritage Britain is everywhere. Sixty years on, what would my father make of this? Would he see it as a good thing? Or would he scorn it as no more than a nostalgic and vain attempt to turn away from the present into a safer and cosy, but essentially unreal, past. (Poundbury, anyone?) What would
he make of ‘new’ developments such as ‘sustainable energy’ windfarms or genetically modified crops? Much of what preoccupied him in Winterstoke is, of course, very much still with us: his ‘sinister wired enclosure of the Atomic Research Establishment’ might have shut down in the 1980s, the premises now occupied by a new business (a heavily grant funded biotech research start-up, perhaps?), but the nuclear question lives on. We have an ageing generation of nuclear power stations and an ongoing and ostensibly ever more pressing debate about how to provide energy for our ever more precarious seeming future – the holy trinity of ‘clean’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘safe’ being the current misnomers of choice within our twenty-first-century lexicon.

  Taking a cue from the two maps in the book, it might be amusing to imagine a map of Winterstoke as it could be today. The railway line now turned over to a cycle path? Or, more appositely, some part of the railway revived as a volunteer-run tourist steam line? (With an attached bookshop selling a choice few titles by L. T. C. Rolt.) Newly completed ramparts and concrete dams enclosing and channelling the River Wendle after recent catastrophic flooding? A controversial and much-fought-over wind farm on High Hanger Hill, while nearby banners protest about proposals for a fracking plant?

  Throughout the town, mobile phone masts are likely dotted here and there? Perhaps a struggling volunteer-run town museum and library, with fading exhibits detailing some of the illustrious deeds and doings from the past? And servicing the town’s changing spiritual needs, a yoga and meditation centre housed in the former ironworks? Next door, one of three successful private gyms? (Two of which might be located in former church buildings?) A popular and thriving mosque housed in another far less prepossessing former industrial building? Emberley Old Hall now a tourist attraction with an annual ‘sealed knot’ re-enactment of the 1645 sacking? An artisan cheesemaker located in one of the much-restored outlying farms? (His cheese Old Blue Wendle, ‘tangy, zesty, with just a hint of smoke’.) A heritage-themed architect-designed retro village of bespoke, high-specification detached houses expanding on the former Emberley village? The deep colliery now all gone, turned into a landscaped skate and recreation park? And dotted round the outer limits, at least a Tesco or two (or is this more of a Waitrose place?), along with the all-night petrol station and the burger franchises on the dual carriageway?