34 Faringdon Road
Stand in the kitchen and imagine this isn’t a kitchen but an open back yard. That’s how it was when this cottage was built in 1846-47. The kitchen was added towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, around 1890. And this cottage is presented as though it is in that latter time. But before you drift down a wormhole of time to 1890, let’s slip further back to when this cottage was built: the years 1846 and 1847. But wait! Before we do that, let’s recreate, in our mind’s eye, this landscape before these cottages were built. Close your eyes, then open them and stare around, and then close them again and imagine … and now read on …
Before this railway village was built, the fields here were divided by the hedgerows typical of the time of enclosure when the large open fields and commons shared by ordinary people were legally acquired for private ownership. Hedgerows and fences divided up fields that were once shared. But let’s try to conjure up what these fields were like before enclosure came along and parcelled up the common land and the big open fields.
The poet John Clare might have lived on the other side of the country but we can envision this landscape before enclosure through his eyes perhaps…
‘Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering sceneNor fence of ownership crept in betweenTo hide the prospect of the following eyeIts only bondage was the circling sky’ …
The land here underneath where these cottages stand and where you stand is a thick clay. Richard Jefferies described it thus: “the poorest in the neighbourhood; low-lying, shallow soil on top of the endless depth of stiff clay, worthless for arable purposes, of small value for pasture, covered with furze, rushes and rowen”. This land might have been unproductive for farming but furze could be a valuable fuel for the poor before the age of enclosure, however, and before the age of coal and steam. So, picture those shadowy figures out there. Collecting furze for the fire in some misty, wintry age of yore … and then return to the 1840s …
But here we are again. Eyes open. Back in that decade nicknamed ‘The Hungry 40’s’ in a Great Britain of periodic boom and slump with consequent slumps in wages and employment. In a Great Britain of a decade of speculation in the building and planning of railways: a time of boom and slump in railway construction nicknamed ‘The Railway Mania’. In the United Kingdom, in Ireland, around one million die and one million emigrate during the Potato Famine: ‘The Great Hunger’. Even so, corn would continue to be exported from Ireland; some of it to the new warehouses at Gloucester Docks; Gloucester, on the branch line from Swindon.
And here, on these unstable clay foundations, Swindon stone and Corsham stone will travel thence, some of it courtesy of the nearby Wilts and Berks Canal, to be fashioned and shaped and chiselled into a village of some three hundred cottages. A GWR railway works will be born, a railway station will appear at a railway junction, and New Swindon will sit and nestle below the hill that takes you up to rural, agricultural Old Swindon. A new railway town would announce itself to the nation and the world almost overnight!
The 1840s was also a remarkable decade for novels and literature: famous publications include A Christmas Carol, Wuthering Heights, Jayne Eyre, Vanity Fair. Dombey and Son was serialised too, where Charles Dickens, in chapter six, described railway construction around Camden Town. But his depiction could conceivably – if we are slightly fanciful – apply to the area around us where we stand now …
‘The first shock of a great earthquake … rent the whole neighbourhood … deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up … Here, a chaos of carts … there confused treasures of iron … bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were thoroughly impassable … towers of chimneys … fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks … the glare and roar of fires … mounds of ashes…’
But the railways provided jobs and a wage and particularly so in Swindon: so skilled workers migrated from the industrial areas of this country to settle in these new houses. New houses that had no furniture. A railway village of three hundred houses without a shop. What a clamour of complaining voices there must have been with such a variety of accents and dialects. This village was a melting pot. And so was the railway works. Here’s Charles Dickens again writing about a half-real, half-fictive ‘Railway Terminus Works’ in An Unsettled Neighbourhood (Household Words 11 November 1854:
‘The Railway Terminus Works … look confused … with an air as if they were always up all night, and always giddy. Here, is a vast shed that was not here yesterday … there, a wall that is run up until some other building is ready; there, an open piece of ground, which is a quagmire in the middle, bounded on all four sides by … houses … we are, mind and body, an unsettled neighbourhood … luggage in perpetual motion…’
Well, as we all know, Swindon wasn’t a terminus; it was a junction. A fine station with famous (and infamous) refreshment rooms. You don’t know about the refreshment rooms, you say? Well, read on for a moment and recollect your last visit to the railway station at Swindon (and possibly remind yourself of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias with a quick search on your phone).
Here’s the Devizes & Wiltshire Gazette 1842 with its description of the refreshment rooms (the contract for the building of the station specified that every passing train had to stop at Swindon for a potentially lucrative refreshment break): ‘… the station itself is the handsomest we have yet seen … there are four large refreshment rooms, two on each side of the road, of noble proportions, and finished in the most exquisite style … walls panelled … fireplaces … beautifully painted ceilings. Such rooms cannot fail to improve greatly the taste of every one who enters them… ‘
The refreshment stop was for just ten minutes, however, which did not contribute to improvement of taste; here is a textual depiction of the mad dash at Swindon from Doyle and Leigh in 1849 that went alongside their cartoon Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe: ‘Before we had half finished, the Guard rang the Bell, and my Wife with a Start, did spill her Soup over her Dress, and was obliged to leave Half of it; and to think how ridiculous I looked, scampering back to the Train with my Meat-pie in my Mouth! To run hurry-skurry at the Sound of a Bell, do seem only fit for a Gang of Workmen; and the Bustle of Railways do destroy all the Dignity of Travelling; but the World altogether is less Grand, and do go faster than formerly’.
Let’s finish with Charles Dickens again, From The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. 1857; it’s not about Swindon but it certainly captures the atmosphere of a busy railway station at a junction with a railway works.
‘It was a Junction-Station, where the wooden razors … shaved the air very often, and where the sharp electric-telegraph bell was in a very restless condition. All manner of cross-lines came zig-zagging into it … and, a little way out of it, a pointsman in an elevated signal-box was constantly going through the motions of drawing immense quantities of beer at a public-house bar. In one direction, confused quantities of embankments and arches … in the other, the rails soon disentangled themselves into two tracks, and shot away under a bridge and curved round a corner. Sidings were there, in which empty luggage vans and cattle-boxes often butted against each other … and warehouses were there… Refreshment-rooms were there; one, for the hungry and thirsty Iron Locomotives where their coke and water were ready … the other, for the hungry and thirsty humans … who might take what they could get…’
Right! That’s got the picture, I think. Let’s turn our attention back to number 34. We’ll start by looking at the information sheet.
1. First of all, read the Introduction. You will notice that each of the streets in the railway village is named after ‘a station along the GWR line’. At the end of your visit, walk through the village and make a list of all the stations. I wonder if all these places still have railway stations … do they?
2. Now stand in the kitchen. Read the two paragraphs about the kitchen and look around. How many items do you see that involve ‘Washday Monday’?
3. Think about the condensation, the water vapour, the heat, the physical labour, the difficulty of drying the clothing, the amount of washing involved with a family of eight children. The heat, the steam, the smoke. The occasional difficulty with breathing, the coal dust …Think about your five senses. You could write a list poem about Washday Monday with a line or two about each of the senses if you are in the mood.
4. On top of all that, think about and list all the other jobs that the mother of eight children would have to do on Washday Monday.
5. Before the kitchen was built, there was no ‘Range’ for cooking; cooking had to take place on an open fire. What would the pots and pans be made of? How difficult would cooking be and why? What meals do you think would be easy to cook? How nutritious do you think such a diet would be? If times were hard, who do you think would get the lion’s share of a meal and why?
6. Glance at the picture of the man on the wall. Know who he was? That was William Ewart Gladstone. He was prime minister four times in the 19th century and known as a reformer. In his early days in parliament, however, he spoke against the abolition of slavery. His father gained more in ‘compensation’ when enslavement was abolished in 1833 than anyone else in the country. A great deal of the investment in railways in the north and midlands originated with the Gladstone family. And that money came from ‘owning’ enslaved persons. The occupants here would not have known that of course.
7. Even though the prime minister’s picture is on the wall, the occupants then would not have been allowed to vote in general elections. Can you guess why? Do you know when the men and women who lived in these houses would have gained the vote?
8. ‘Open the door and have a peek into the pantry’: what rodents could be a concern to a family? Any other hygiene concerns?
9. Read the section about the initial lack of shops in the railway village. How far would it be there and back to the shops up the hill? Was there a dry path? How long do you think such a journey took? How often do you think it would happen in a week? The persons who undertook the task would vary according to the size and ages of a family – but list what you think a family of eight might need day by day through the week. I wonder what weight of shopping would need to be carried?
10. The Wiltshire shopkeepers would hear so many different accents with so many people moving to Swindon from far away industrial areas of Great Britain and rural areas of the United Kingdom too. Swindon’s heritage is based upon migration. The census returns of the mid-nineteenth century would reveal this pattern of migration. You might want to look that up when you get home.
11. How do you think railways could improve the diet of a working-class family? List as many ways as you can.
12. Read the section on the Back Yard. What was a privy? Why do you think it got that name? What is/was a cess pool? Think about all the public health problems that could be caused within this alley. Imagine walking through there at night. Which one of your five senses would be most affected do you think? This country was affected by a disease that affected the water supply in this country in the 1840s that many people mistakenly thought was spread through the air (a miasma). Have you any idea of the name of this disease?
13. What is/was a copper?
14. Read the section about the living room. Then look back at question five for a reminder. Then imagine sitting here as a child, trying to learn to read and write by candle light. Then imagine sitting here as an older adult, with declining eyesight, trying to read the newspaper by candle light. And remember! Candles weren’t cheap then and there were all those other things to buy for a large family with a tight budget.
15. Why is the fireplace and hearth larger than those in the parlour? What is a hearth? How does the word suggest home and love do you think? What is a range?
16. Can you see the ‘the evidence of the gas lighting on the ceiling’? Imagine how your senses would have been affected by gas lighting. Which senses in particular? How did the gas reach the houses and how was it stored? Picture for yourself in your mind a town before electricity: gas and coal and steam and smoke. Look up the lyrics to ‘Dirty Old Town’.
17. Read the text about the front parlour and enter the room. Using text and your observations, list as many ways as you can to show the formality of this room. Why do you think formality was so important to the families who lived here? A popular and common Victorian saying about family life was that, ‘Children should be seen and not heard’. I wonder what the Halls and Margaret Dodds talked about on census day, April 7th, 1861 … I wonder what the children were thinking as they sat there silently …
18. An old saying: ‘It’s bad luck to pass on the stairs.’ Think about the number of people in this house in 1861; now you can see the practicality rather than mere superstition involved in that old saying.
19. Count how many different items you can see in the children’s bedroom. Which one surprises you the most? Now think about how many children might be in this room at one time. List the problems that might result. Then list the ways in which you think families could overcome those problems and turn problems into opportunities.
20. Walk into the front bedroom. About what per centage of the pay of a GWR employee went on rent in the railway village? When would a railway family consider taking in a lodger? List the things you can see in this room. How many suggest that the lodger would be male? List the problems and benefits brought to a family by having a lodger in the house. Then do the same for a lodger: list the benefits and problems involved in lodging in a railway village cottage.
21. Now walk into the back bedroom. List the items you can see. Now think about clocks in the house: how many have you seen. The railway hooter could summon GWR workers into the factory but an engine-driver or fireman could have a shift starting at any hour. Now think about the impact of such shift-work upon the mother, father and children. What problems would it cause? How would a family try to overcome those problems? Who do you think had the hardest life: mother or father? And how hard do you think children’s lives might have been? What would have been the recreations for mother, father and children? Think about the importance of being able to read …
22. The Mechanics Institute would provide recreation for men (as would the public house) while schools would eventually assist children in broadening their abilities and outlooks – but what of the woman of the household? What opportunities do you think there might have been for the women of the railway village to share knowledge and experience and so avoid isolation?
23. Conclusion: please take a moment to read the text at the end of the information sheet about the Mechanics Institution Trust – and then take a walk around the railway village and enjoy the fresh air. And return to question one … it’s your return journey…