Nailsworth, Shortwood and Forest Green
Have proud radical traditions:
William Winterbotham, Shortwood minister,
Spent four years in Newgate in the 1790s:
Incarcerated after sermons deemed near seditious:
‘First of all, government originates with the people.
Secondly, The people have the right
to cashier their governors for misconduct.
Thirdly, The people have a right to change the form of their government if they think it proper to do so.’
‘The people make the laws and the laws were made for kings.’
Attendance at Shortwood Baptist Church grew and grew:
A Pilgrim’s Progress up the hill to the Celestial City.
And there, in the burgeoning congregation,
One Thomas Burchell,
Just five years old when William arrived.
But so inspired by the developing and enveloping Word,
That his Pilgrim’s Progress would take him
Across the Black Atlantic archipelago
And thence to Montego Bay, Jamaica;
A Baptist missionary, but, abolitionist, too,
Not just promoting chapels and schools
And free villages for the enslaved,
But also campaigning for abolition,
And while Lord John Russell contemplated the vote,
As the United Kingdom tottered on the edge of revolution
In ‘The Days of May’ in 1832,
Thomas Burchell’s Baptist colleague,
Samuel Sharpe, would face execution
In a summary wave of judicialized racialised hangings,
And worse,
After the so-called ‘Baptist War’.
No white Baptists were executed.
You can find Samuel’s image on a Jamaican bank note;
You can find a memorial to Thomas in Nailsworth,
At Christ Church,
And at Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington.
Of course, the Stroudwater valleys also saw
Food riots, threatening letters,
Weavers’ strikes, and Captain Swing action at Horsley;
And then the gathering of 5,000 Chartists
Up there on Selsley Common in 1839.
A couple of months before that meeting,
Up there on Rodborough Common
John Frost was selected as prospective
Chartist candidate for the next Stroud election,
To stand against Lord John Russell;
He would later become the mayor of Newport,
And the leader of the 1839 Newport Rising:
‘the last armed insurrection on British soil’.
Four thousand marched; over twenty were killed;
They were secretly buried in unmarked graves
(The hooves of the soldiers’ horses were muffled
On the night of this ghostly entombment)
To prevent martyrdom and obsequy.
John Frost, with others, was charged with treason;
He faced hanging, drawing and quartering,
After his trial and conviction;
Protests at this sentence erupted
All over the country; a key meeting
Was held just down the road in Wotton-under-Edge.
So, whatever the results of the play-offs,
Remember the common history too;
And whether victorious or down and out,
Whether Wembley bound or Swindon Town,
Remember to slip down a wormhole of time,
Up there on Rodborough Common,
Or on Selsley Hill,
Or in the Lord John,
Or outside the Westgate Hotel in Newport.
And toast our common radical history.
