Reimagining how the Railway Lies
I live in Stroud,
Home of the arch commemorating the abolition of slavery,
An arch from 1834,
Standing near a comprehensive school,
By a busy main road to Gloucester;
We are rightly and justly proud of this in Stroud –
But, of course, quite a few owners of enslaved peoples
Lived around this town,
Not to mention Gloucester, Cheltenham,
Bath, Bristol and the rural south-west.
Slave owners received the equivalent in today’s values,
Of £17 billion;
Fully forty per cent of GDP in 1834;
Taxpayers only stopped paying the interest on this
In David Cameron’s premiership in 2015
(His family benefitted btw);
A great deal of this ‘compensation’
Went into railway investment and development
In the 1830s and 1840s:
The Gladstone family in the north, for example …
And, nearer to home,
Bristol merchants in the GWR,
Samuel Baker at Lypiatt, near Stroud,
I could go on and on and on …
But what is chastening to reflect upon, I think,
Is the Keynsian multiplier effect …
The consequential impact in a series of links and chains,
Tendrils and tentacles,
And Victorian Venn diagrams
Upon our ancestors …
How many of our families
ended up working on the revered railways
Or ran the homes and kitchen
Because of that initial injection of capital?
It’s a sobering thought,
As we reflect upon those tentacles
And tendrils of racial capitalism.
Before I move on:
Out of the £695,000 raised by subscription for the construction of the railway from Swindon through Stroud to Cheltenham, £212,000 came from the spa town of Cheltenham, home to so many beneficiaries from the abolition of slavery.
Reimagining how the Railway Lies
The Iron Road, the Permanent Way:
Lines of steel stretch to vanishing point,
Where pale-skinned navvies with pick and shovel,
Work their way through the nineteenth century.
But wait until the steam clouds dissipate,
See how that express train changes shape –
A slave ship on the Middle Passage,
Sharks following in its crimson wake.
The station now a sugar plantation,
Manacles and shackles in the waiting room,
Signal gantries now high gallows -
For the bounty paid to slave owners,
When slavery was abolished in 1834,
Helped fuel the Railway Mania;
Like Samuel Baker up at Lypiatt,
Investing in railways in the Forest of Dean,
Or the Gladstone dynasty up in Liverpool,
Or the gentry of Bath and Bristol in the west;
Or, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire.
The Iron Road, the Permanent Way:
Lines of steal stretch to revelation point:
A colonial landscape all along the line,
That is how the railway lies.
