Stand in front of Stroud Bookshop and imagine …
This building is now The George and the year is 1756;
The month is October and times are hard,
And here canters Colonel Wolfe on his way to Horsley,
With six companies of foot soldiers,
Sufficient, he says ‘to beat the mob of all England’;
He delights in the picturesque perspective:
‘The face of this country is different from anything I have seen in England. Numberless little hills, little rivulets running in all the bottoms; the lower parts of the hills are generally grass, the middle corn, and the upper part wood and innumerable little white houses in all the vales, so that there is a vast variety; and every mile changes the scene, and gives you a new and pleasant prospect.’
The colonel has sympathy for the weavers:
‘The people are so oppressed, so poor and so wretched, that they will, perhaps, hazard a knock on the pate for bread and clothes’;
‘The Gloucester weavers and I have not yet come to blows
nor do I believe we shall’;
It is now November:
‘The poor half-starved weavers…beg about the country for food…
the masters have beat down their wages too low to live upon,
and I believe it is a just complaint’;
‘Those who are most oppressed have seized the tools and broke the looms of others who would work if they could’;
He goes on to say that he is worried that such direct action might lead ‘the magistrates to use our weapons’;
‘This would give me a great deal of concern’.
Strange irony!
The weavers make the redcoats for the redcoats
Who will break their strike for a moral economy;
The weavers will make the redcoat for General Wolfe,
Who will die three years later,
Storming the Heights of Quebec.
