Winterstoke Read online

  In terms of my father’s written output, Winterstoke occupies an introspective mid-point. It might be paired with The Clouded Mirror (1955), a book of four essays taking up many of the themes touched on in Winterstoke. In the vivid writing and stronger characterisations of the central sections of Winterstoke, which deal with the Industrial Revolution, we sense Tom has found his métier. This, of course, is the world he returned to in the series of engineering biographies he would go on to write and for which he would come to be perhaps best remembered. There he is both authoritative and engaged, no longer peevishly crying doom and destruction.

  I may wish my father had peopled the landscape he created in Winterstoke with some flesh-and-blood characters, but perhaps that would be to essentially misunderstand the book, undermining its rigorous purity of purpose and distracting from the harsh lesson in hand. Engaging characters and enveloping narrative storylines would not be true to its somewhat severe purpose. So Tom sketches his past with broad confident strokes, whisking us ruthlessly from era to era, to the dispiriting conclusion.

  So why read it now? Are there things we can still take from it? Certainly the central theses of the book are as valid as when it was written. Can the capitalist ethic continue to be sustained in a world of limited resources? Can the finite material world ever be reconciled with the spiritual infinite? These questions are as clearly relevant now as they ever were. Winterstoke was a plea to understand and appreciate our past as a way to enrich and inform our life decisions in the present, for all of our futures.

  My mother tells me that Tom received a glowing letter from John Betjeman saying that Winterstoke was the best thing he had written and that the book should be on the syllabus for every school. But that, of course, never happened. The books I remember from my school days were all about creating a bright modern world, not posing difficult and intractable questions; and certainly not positing the possibility of human extinction.

  Winterstoke may also shed light on Tom Rolt the man – not a very kindly light, I find. For the man revealed here is full of fear and prejudice. But, then, we must remember the time from which this book comes. The 1950s in England may have been an especially fearful and forbidding period; and the writer unconsciously and truthfully reflects this.

  Foreword

  TWENTY-THREE years ago, with the boundless optimism of youth, I sat down to write in a large exercise book a first novel which I confidently hoped would turn out to be a masterpiece. Strange Vista, as it was called, was nothing if not ambitious, one of those interminable family sagas beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing through many generations. A naïve and romantic plot, partly auto-biographical in the tradition of first novels, was set against the background of a developing industrial town. Not content with past and present, the story finally wandered off into a ‘Scientifiction’ future where aeroplanes and cars were driven by electricity broadcast from a series of enormous Power Stations, one of which was situated in my imaginary town. No more refuelling; another shilling in the meter was all that was required. There was a swift and dramatic denouement when the amount of high voltage current floating about in the atmosphere suddenly caused a mysterious and fatal brain disease. The Power Stations failed, all road traffic came to a standstill, and huge airliners tumbled pell-mell from the skies. Only my hero and heroine had had the wit to foresee this disastrous end to the industrial era and lived happily ever after in their remote arcadian refuge.

  Alas, the execution was by no means equal to the grandiose conception and Strange Vista never got beyond the covers of the exercise book. The plot was thin and irrelevant, but the basic idea—the growth of an imaginary industrial town—continued to haunt my imagination. So the ‘Wolvercroft’ of Strange Vista has become the ‘Winterstoke’ of this book with the difference that the town itself is now the main character and there is no superimposed plot or journey into the future. The object has been simply to paint a word picture of the period of industrial revolution, not forgetting the changes in thought and opinion which inspired and accompanied it. There are obvious reasons why it would be at once impracticable and highly undesirable to use the history of any actual town, even under a disguise, for such a purpose. The town of Winterstoke does not exist, and readers who seek to identify it with any actual town in the English Midlands will search in vain for clues. The quotation of the pronouncement by local justices in Chapter 2 and the criminal statistics quoted in Chapter 7 both, in fact, apply to Worcestershire, but they are merely taken as being typical of conditions in the Midlands at that time and in no respect, topographical or otherwise, does Midshire resemble that county.

  Many incidents, such as the drowning of the old village church in the lake in Winterstoke Park, are based on historical occurrences in different parts of the Midlands, while I have introduced a few real figures of national importance, such as James Brindley, into the story. Also, but to a very limited extent, the earlier industrial achievements of my Leeds family are based on those of the famous Darbys of Coalbrookdale. In their lives and thought, however, there is no resemblance. All the other local characters, the Winters, Hanmers, Blenkinsops and Fosters, are entirely imaginary and do not bear any relation whatsoever to any actual persons, living or dead.

  For certain details of the early iron industry I am indebted to Dr. Raistrick’s book on the Darby family, A Dynasty of Ironfounders, and to the quite invaluable Transactions of the Newcomen Society.

  L.T.C.R.

  Chapter One

  THE CISTERCIAN ABBEY of Winterstoke is to-day remembered only by scholars. Its cloisters were once the scene of the labours of that indefatigable medieval historian Ambrosius, but parchment has outlived stone, for of this great church no trace remains.

  In the earlier pages of the celebrated Chronicles of Ambrosius history and legend are inextricably mixed. His only sources were those heroic tales and ballads told or sung in the smoky firelight by generations of itinerant storytellers and musicians. And when the cups went round, when the harp sounded, the veil between substance and shadow, between mortals and immortals, wavered and shifted like the leaping reflections of the firelight. Gods became men and men like Gods; chieftains and petty kings became identified with heroes and magicians as old as time. So it is that Ambrosius can add little to our knowledge of those men who once dug the vallum of High Hanger Camp and who now sleep their eternal sleep in the long barrow on Summersend Hill. They were hidden from him by the mists of two thousand years, whereas a mere six centuries separate us from Ambrosius. Yet the world of this monastic historian, working in his small stone cell or pacing on sandalled feet from shadow to shafted sunlight in his quiet cloister seems to us remote indeed. In our world we effect greater changes in a decade than occurred in any one century of the Middle Ages. If Ambrosius returned to Winterstoke to-day he would find his familiar valley changed beyond recognition, yet the men of the ages of Bronze and Iron would have had no difficulty in recognizing the Winterstoke of the Cistercians.

  From his fortified settlement at High Hanger, from his lofty burial place on Summersend or from the ancient trackway which followed the contours of the Emberley Hills, iron age man looked down over the treetops of the wooded hill slopes into a deep valley which was impassable except in times of summer drought. For through it the river Wendle looped its way lazily seawards in a wild wilderness of marshlands and shallow, reedy meres of brackish water. Although Winterstoke is over thirty miles from the sea at Westerport, high spring tides then flowed unimpeded far inland, and if they happened to coincide with a land flood, then the opposing waters drowned the whole valley until it resembled a long arm of the sea. No wonder the first men of Winterstoke kept to the high ground. This does not mean to say that they never frequented the valley. It was a source of food far too valuable to be neglected. We may guess that they developed the skill of the fowler, for mere and marsh teemed with duck of many species, with wild swans and migrant geese, with piping curlew and innumerable snipe flickering and glancing overhead
in drumming flight. From their eyries in the hills the peregrine falcon took their toll, stooping out of the high air with the speed and precision of avenging furies upon the arrow flights of widgeon or greylag. Bitterns boomed in the deep reed beds, herons stood sentinel by the shallow pools, while the swift ‘fish hawk’, the grey osprey, nested upon the inaccessible islands of the marsh. For fish there were in abundance, including the noble salmon which came up the Wendle in great numbers to spawn in tributary streams such as the Lob which has carved the narrow valley between Summersend and High Hanger hills. While early man’s skill as a fowler can only be conjectured, we know for certain that he was an accomplished fisherman, because dredging operations on the Wendle have discovered his net weight rings of stone and bronze. Thus the abundant wild life of the Wendle valley provided the first men of Winterstoke with an unfailing food reservoir; a welcome addition to the resources of their flocks and herds and of those first tentative experiments in cultivation which we may still trace in the close turf of the hills.

  Even in Saxon England, where life begins to emerge from the shadows of myth and conjecture, the primitive landscape of the Wendle valley had changed scarcely at all. Those changes which the men of the Iron Age would remark, had they returned in the lifetime of the monk Ambrosius, began when the Norman, Hugh Fitzwinter, built his castle keep on the higher slopes of the Emberley Hills facing the mouth of the little valley of the Lob. Hugh Fitzwinter had been a staunch supporter of the Conqueror and his master had rewarded him with great estates. Except for the fact that the source of his worldly power was the strength of his sword arm and not a cheque-book, Hugh might be described as the Norman equivalent of the commercial tycoons with whom we are familiar. To us, therefore, his story sounds scarcely credible.

  A little distance to the west of the castle where what we now call the Winterstoke brook formed a small and sheltered valley before becoming lost in the Wendle marshes, there stood at this time a ruin. A small and roofless rectangle of unbonded stone, it was reputed to have been the cell of the Celtic Saint Cenodoc in the days of the Saxon Kingdoms. What happened on that bright, far-distant morning when Hugh Fitzwinter chanced to ride past this ruined cell in the course of a hunting expedition no one will ever know. Doubtless even Hugh himself would have been at a loss to explain what occurred to him in that moment. Naturally the occasion became the subject of legend. Some said that Hugh saw the Saint at prayer in his ruined cell; others that a vision of Our Lady appeared before him and that at sight of her his impatient charger stopped in its tracks and bowed its head. But whether we believe or disbelieve these old stories really matters little; for the consequences are a sufficiently miraculous measure of the significance of the spiritual event. For at this one stroke the proud and hard-bitten Norman warrior renounced all temporal power, surrendered his estates to his son and became for the remainder of his days a contemplative recluse. With the help of his chaplain he rebuilt the Saint’s cell, and this was the origin of the little Norman church of Saint Cenodoc. As he laboured at his building or sat in silent meditation in the solitude of the woodland glade, the grizzled old knight must have appeared a figure wild and strange indeed. For it is said that he never put off his suit of chain mail. As the links, once so bravely burnished, rusted away, they became a symbol of the transience and vanity of the life he had foresworn.

  Hugh Fitzwinter’s dramatic renunciation (which was by no means unique in his time) is sometimes described as ‘giving up the world’. The description is misleading unless we define more exactly the nature of the sacrifice. It is true in so far as this great Norman gave up the world of men, of material wealth, of principalities and jealous powers. It is not true to say that he turned his back upon the natural world, upon those beauties created by God for man’s enjoyment. Although we cannot fathom his mind at this distance of time, we may be sure that he would have regarded such a rejection as blasphemous in its ingratitude. It would also have been highly illogical, for we cannot doubt that the beauty of the natural world was an instrument of his conversion. Indeed there may have come to him no vision in mortal shape; only a sudden overwhelming realization that this sunlit woodland glade, bright with new leaf and loud with birdsong, was man’s lost Eden. But he did not fall into the fatal primitive (and neo-primitive) error of identifying the creator with his creation, and so it is not as a pantheist that we should see the builder of Winterstoke’s first church.

  Hugh Fitzwinter’s vision was destined to have far-reaching results. Influenced by his father’s example, William Fitzwinter made a substantial grant of lands in the valley of the Wendle to the reformed Benedictines of Citeaux. To our eyes this gift might have appeared somewhat backhanded, for although it represented a considerable acreage, the greater part of it, as we have seen, consisted merely of salt marsh and shallow mere. But, disregarding any motive of piety and judging William’s grant solely from the practical aspect of land reclamation and development, it is clear that his action was a very wise one. For these monks were dedicated by their rule not only to poverty and prayer but also to labour which was, according to their founder, a form of prayer if rightly carried out in humility of spirit. This rule of labour had made them, as William Fitzwinter probably realized, the most accomplished husbandmen and craftsmen in Europe, men who devoted themselves to making fruitful such waste places.

  From the day that the followers of the rule of St. Bernard and Stephen Harding established themselves in comfortless temporary huts a little to the east of Hugh Fitzwinter’s oratory and laid the foundations of their first church the primeval landscape of the Wendle valley began to change. We, with all our powers of steam, electricity and internal combustion to command would have felt daunted by the magnitude of the task which these men set themselves. That they were quite undaunted was due to an attitude towards the work in hand so utterly different from our own that it is difficult for us to comprehend. Sometimes we regard work as an end in itself; much more commonly it is merely a means, frequently uncongenial, to a material end; to secure a larger profit or a heavier wage packet; to gratify personal vanity or ambition in the acquisition of power, influence or reputation. The members of this first humble but stalwart community at Winterstoke looked for no such rewards. Their work was neither a means to a material end nor an end in itself since they believed that to labour truly was a form of prayer, and true prayer seeks no reward. Prayer is the means whereby the created acknowledge and praise the creator; it is not directed towards, neither does it either foresee or presuppose any finite end. Similarly, by equating work with prayer, this first religious community of Winterstoke cheerfully embarked upon an immense task whose end they could not foresee and whose fruits they knew they would not live to enjoy. It occupied them for centuries, and in this brief epitome of their labours we who have changed the face of the earth in a hundred years, must bear this spacious time-scale in mind.

  The first task before these monastic husbandmen was to control the river Wendle. Only then would it be possible to reclaim and improve the valley lands. For several winding miles the banks of the river were raised by from three to five feet, the necessary earth being the spoil from the drainage dykes which were cut behind them. When this work was finished and the latest length of embankment had been consolidated by time, a weir was built across the river at the downstream end of the embanked reach. This naturally raised the level in the reach, but it also slowed down the rate of flow and therefore reduced the rate of bank damage by erosion. But the greatest advantage of the new weir and the real reason for its construction was that its height had been nicely calculated from the experience of long observation to exclude the highest of spring tides. It was essential that the reclaimed lands should be thus protected from the menace of brackish water. Although these monastic engineers (for such they undoubtedly were) were concerned to exclude tidal waters, they did not attempt altogether to prevent fresh water flooding. Experience had taught them that the fertility of their fields was improved by periodic flooding provided the
waters were checked so that they could deposit their rich silts and not tear uncontrolled over the land when they would inflict great damage. The method by which the marshes and meres were drained was by cutting dykes and protecting their outfalls through the heightened river banks by means of wooden sluices or ‘clows’. But when after many years had passed fertile fields replaced marsh and mere it was realized that these old dykes could serve a new purpose. Fresh dykes were cut and flood banks thrown up between field and field to form an elaborate system of flood control. As the Chronicles of Ambrosius and other ancient records reveal, there were, periodically, great floods on the Wendle which no man-made banks could withstand. But in the case of the average winter or spring flood, or the sudden spates after summer storm the system worked well. By means of the sluices the floodwaters could be turned at will into this embanked field or that, to be released again when the river level fell to normal. Not only did these fields gain fertility from such controlled flooding; they acted as valuable ‘wash lands’, safety valves, in other words, which by relieving the pressure of the waters, prevented or lessened unwelcome flooding elsewhere.

  This matter of the control of the river Wendle has been mentioned first and at some length because it was quite literally the material foundation upon which the community of Winterstoke built and prospered. But once again the time factor must be stressed. The work described covered a long period; it was a process which did not so much precede as accompany the growth of the Abbey. The work of drainage had other results besides transforming a wilderness of marshland into fertile fields. When the Cistercians came to Winterstoke the valley was still almost entirely without communications. Travellers on foot or horseback moving from east to west across the country avoided it, using either the prehistoric trackway which wound along the contours of the Emberley Hills or the straight Roman way which skirted Deepforest to the south on the further side of High Hanger and Summersend hills. There was, it is true, an ill-defined track along the valley, but it was passable only in high summer. The same is true of the north to south track which branched away down the hillslopes from the ancient road in the neighbourhood of Emberley Castle, forded the Wendle near St. Cenodoc’s cell and then climbed away towards Deepforest up the western flank of the Lob valley. But with the progress of the drainage works and the growth of the Abbey the ancient ridgeway to the north became at first unfrequented and later disused as the easier valley roads became more passable and more important. The effect of the new weir was to deepen the water over the old ford and necessitate the construction of an underwater causeway, but at the beginning of the thirteenth century St. John’s Bridge was completed to replace the ford. This beautiful many-arched bridge of stone has been fated by history to be the only substantial work of the monks of Winterstoke to survive practically intact in our own century. To-day, after nine hundred years, the massive cut-waters, each shaped like the prow of a ship, still cleave the waters of the Wendle. Close beside this bridge was the Abbey gatehouse and the hospice for wayfarers which was later to become the Bridge Inn. Opposite, on the downstream side adjacent to the weir, stood a corn mill whose great breast-shot water-wheel harnessed the power of the pent-up river to drive three sets of stones. A little distance below this mill’s tailrace was St. John’s Wharf.