Two: Shrewsbury
Travellers’ views: Celia Fiennes, Daniel Defoe, William Cobbett
The town’s earlier history – Nikolaus Pevsner – Radbrook Road
My first school - Punishment
EXTRACT FROM WORKING SCRIPT FOR A TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY
NARRATOR (VOICE OVER): Many who come to Shrewsbury and see it for the first time like what they find. The art historian Nikolaus Pevsner travelled the country during the 20th century, compiling his monumental county-by-county survey of practically every building of note in every village, town or city. The resulting series The Buildings of England is without parallel. Through his detailed and unqualified enthusiasm we learn of every acroterion, castellation, feretory, metope, pendentif, quoin and volute that anyone could wish to know about – and a good deal more. The work for his Shropshire volume was mainly done during 1955. ‘It was,’ he writes, ‘in spite of a week of floods, exceptionally pleasurable’.
In this, Pevsner shares the opinions of three notable travellers who had made similar journeys centuries before him. Celia Fiennes, who rode through every county in England, often more than once, came here first in 1698 and reports: ‘. . . it’s a pleasant town to live in and great plenty which makes it cheap living.’ Daniel Defoe in A Tour through England and Wales, published in 1724, says: ‘This is indeed a beautiful, large, pleasant, populous and rich town’. William Cobbett, writing for his Rural Rides at Worcester on 18th May 1830, comments: ‘Shrewsbury is one of the most interesting spots that man ever beheld [. . .] The environs of this town, especially on the Welsh side, are the most beautiful that can be conceived.’
For all three travellers, spanning a period of over 130 years, much of England’s interior was still quite isolated and little known. Fiennes, Defoe and Cobbett all accomplished their most extensive tours long before anything much like a decent road existed anywhere in the country. Turnpikes were coming in during Defoe’s travels, and he comments on them. In reality, for him and for Celia Fiennes, the roads were mostly rough and becoming rougher as they were increasingly degraded by the expanding use of wheeled traffic. Many roads were now in worse condition than during the Middle Ages.
Celia Fiennes (1662-1747), the daughter of a Roundhead colonel Nathaniel Fiennes of Newton Toney in Wiltshire, ‘moved easily and freely between social spheres . . . and was clearly in sympathy with the new society that was coming into being.’
CELIA FIENNES: Between 1685 and about 1712, I made several separate journeys travelling the length and breadth of England on horseback, accompanied by a couple of servants and spare horses. I undertook ‘My Great Journey to Newcastle and to Cornwall’ in 1698 proceeding northwards from London to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, then south – via Shrewsbury – to Land’s End and back to London. The roads were awful, and the inns where we stayed were frequently awful, too. In one place at Ely, there were live frogs and other slimy creatures in the room where I slept.
I have little or nothing to say about villages or rural life. I focused almost exclusively on towns, cities and the houses of rich men. Quite frankly, I disapproved ‘of men without property getting into Parliament.’ At this time, I found ‘abundance of people of quality lives in Shrewsbury more than in any town except Nottingham; its true there are noe fine houses but there are many large old houses that are convenient and stately’:
The town stands low, the spires of 2 of the churches stand high and appear
eminent above the town, there is the remaines of a Castle the walls and
battlements and some towers which I walked round, from whence had the
whole view of the town which is walled round with battlements and walks
round some of which I went on; its here the fine river Severn encompasses
the greatest part of the town and twines and twists its self about; its not very
broad here, but its very deep and is esteemed the finest river in England to
carry such a depth of water for 80 or more miles together ere it runs into the
sea which is at Bristol . . .
. . . Here are three free Schooles together all built of free stone, 3 large
roomes to teach the children with severall masters; the first has 150£ a year the
second 100 the third 50£ a year and teach children from reading English till fit
for the University, and its free for children not only of the town but for all over
England if they exceed not the numbers; here is a very fine Market Cross of stone
carv’d, in another place there is an Exchequer or Hall for the towns affaires, there
is alsoe a Hall for the Welsh manufacture.
I saw little of interest or value among Shrewsbury’s old buildings ‘save the Abbey Gardens with gravell walks set full of all sorts of greens orange and lemmon trees . . . every Wednesday most of the town the Ladyes and Gentlemen walk there as in St James’s Park.’ Leaving the town, I rode past The Wrekin (‘the Reeke’). The locally held view is that it is ‘the highest piece of ground in England’. I simply contrast that limited outlook with my own knowledge of ‘the fells in Cumberland and Westmoreland soe farr beyond it in height that this would not be mentioned there.’
NARRATOR: Defoe and Cobbett were not working to the same agenda as Celia Fiennes, who made a special point of visiting Spa towns to take their waters for her health. These two investigators, examining the social and economic state of the country a century apart, both found an England experiencing change. While Defoe concentrated on towns and villages, Cobbett was really interested in conditions in the countryside. For Defoe, some fifty years before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, economic and social changes are already visible as he notes the details of the life, wealth, poverty and trades of the places he visits, many of them bustling with commerce. Cobbett, whose journeying began in 1821, finds a national landscape already changed and still changing fast as the agricultural enclosures are partnered by the growth of industrial towns and cities. His long-term purpose was to use the discoveries he made about ‘the state we’re in’ to help promote political solutions to the problems that the changes generated.
DEFOE: I found Shrewsbury ‘full of gentry and yet full of trade too; for here too, is a great manufacture, as well of flannel, as also of white broadcloth, which enriches all the country round it.’
This is really a town of mirth and gallantry, something like Bury in Suffolk, or Durham
in the north, but much bigger than either of them, or indeed than both together.
Over the market-house is kept a kind of hall for the manufactures, which are sold here
weekly in very great quantities; they speak all English in the town, but on a market-day
you would think you were in Wales.
Here is the greatest market, the greatest plenty of good provisions, and the cheapest that
is to be met with in all the western part of England [. . .] we paid here, in a publick inn,
but a groat a night for hay, and six-pence a peck for oats for our horses, which is cheaper
than we found it in the cheapest part of the north of England; all our other provisions were
in proportion; and there is no doubt but the cheapness of provisions joined to the pleasantness
and healthiness of the place, draws a great many families hither, who love to live within the compass of their estates.
I viewed there a picture of prosperity and general enjoyment of life and felt that, while perhaps not deserving the title of ‘city’, Shrewsbury was as fine as many cities and better than some. I particularly regretted that the limited time available and the length of my journey kept me from closer inspection of the ‘abundance of ancient monuments’ in the four ‘very fine churches’ in the town.
Before leaving Shrewsbury by ‘the great antient road or way call’d Watling-Street, which comes from London to this town, and goes on from hence to the utmost coast of Wales’, I remind you of two significant historical points:
This town will for ever be famous for the reception it gave to King Charles the I who,
after setting up his standard at Nottingham, and finding no encouragement there,
remov’d to Shrewsbury, being invited by the gentry of the town and country round,
where he was receiv’d with such a general affection, and hearty zeal by all the people,
that his majesty recover’d the discouragement of his first step at Nottingham, and
raised and compleated a strong army in less time than could be imagin’d [. . .]
But the fate of the war turning afterward against the king, the weight of it fell heavily
upon this town, also, and almost ruin’d them.
But they are now fully recover’d, and it is at this time one of the most flourishing towns I
n England.
But, on a less optimistic note than I have generally employed during my visit:
It should not be forgotten here, that notwithstanding the healthyness of the place, one
blot lies upon the town of Shrewsbury, and which, tho’ nothing can be charg’d on the
inhabitants, yet it seems they are the most obliged when ‘tis least spoken of; namely,
that here broke out first that unaccountable plague, call’d the sweating sickness; which
at first baffled all the sons of art, and spread itself through the whole kingdom of England:
This happen’d in the year 1551. It afterwards spread itself into Germany, and several countries abroad;
NARRATOR: Before reaching Shrewsbury, Cobbett spent some time examining the ‘tommy system’ in neighbouring Staffordshire. This was the truck system of paying workers in goods only (in some cases with meals and accommodation as well, but mostly and increasingly not), instead of money. The Truck Acts of 1831 and subsequent years were to outlaw this practice.
COBBETT: I find labourers employed under these terms often ‘miserably poor and degraded’. I see everyone involved in the system at every level afflicted by it:
It is not the fault of the masters, who can have no pleasure in making profit in this way:
it is the fault of the taxes, which, by lowering the price of their goods, have compelled
them to resort to this means of diminishing their expenses, or to quit their business ltogether, which a great part of them cannot do without being left without a penny;
Shrewsbury, despite the beauty of its surroundings, is not now the bright, buoyant, flourishing trade centre that Daniel Defoe so enjoyed a century ago. Indeed, the town provides me with an ideal illustration of the cause and effects of the wretched tommy system:
It was fair-day when I arrived at Shrewsbury. Everything was on the decline. Cheese,
which four years ago sold at sixty shillings the six-score pounds, would not bring forty.
I took particular pains to ascertain the fact with regard to the cheese, which is a great
article here. I was assured that shop-keepers in general did not now sell half the quantity
of goods in a month that they did in that space of time four or five years ago.
[. . .] Another article had experienced a still greater falling off at Shrewsbury; I mean the
article of corn-sacks, of which there has been a falling off of five-sixths. The sacks are
made by weavers in the north; and need we wonder, then, at the low wages of those
industrious people, whom I used to see weaving sacks in the miserable cellars at Preston!
Here is the true cause of the tommy system, and of all the other evils which disturb and
afflict the country. It is a great country; an immense mass of industry and resources of all
sorts breaking up; a prodigious mass of enterprise and capital diminishing and dispersing.
The enormous taxes co-operating with the Corn Bill, which those taxes have engendered,
arte driving skill and wealth out of the country in all directions; are causing iron masters
to make France, and particularly Belgium, blaze with furnaces, in the lieu of those which
have been extinguished here; and that have established furnaces and cotton-mills in
abundance. These same taxes and this same Corn Bill are sending the long wool from
Lincolnshire to France, there to be made into those blankets which, for ages, were to be
obtained nowhere but in England.
This is the true state of the country, and here are the true causes of that state; and all that
the corrupt writers and speakers say about over-population and poor-laws, and about all
the rest of their shuffling excuses, is a heap of nonsense and lies.
NARRATOR: This strident complaint about industries being moved abroad to countries with lower costs than in Britain is increasingly familiar to our ears today. Some 2,000 jobs are expected to be lost in the Prime Minister’s own constituency during 2004 as a large company there decides to relocate its manufacturing operations in Prague – and who has not been on the receiving end of unsolicited sales approaches from telephone call centres based in India?
COBBETT: Even so, I was immensely satisfied with my visit to Shrewsbury. It was the only town in England that I visited where I knew no one at all beforehand. Assuming on this basis that very few would have heard of me before, I expected little audience for my public meeting, and ‘doubled the price of admission, in order to pay the expense of the room’. In fact, as it turned out:
To my great surprise I had a room full of gentlemen, at the request of some of whom I repeated the dose the next night: [. . .] I saw not one single person in the place that I had ever seen before; yet I never had more cordial shakes by the hand; in proportion to their numbers, not more at Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Halifax, Leeds, or Nottingham, or even Hull.
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FIRST DRAFT OF ‘BRIEF HISTORY OF SHREWSBURY’ FOR A NEW EDITION OF THE TOWN’S GUIDE BOOK
Pevsner, Cobbett, Defoe and Celia Fiennes are among Shrewsbury’s notable visitors in recent centuries. They were not here long but were largely satisfied, at times even delighted, with what they found. Their motives were entirely peaceable and their intentions humane, characterised by a keen sense of enquiry and a mission to inform. Shedding light on the town’s architectural, economic and social structures, they left it as they found it.
Early visitors
The Shrewsbury they found was the way it was because much earlier visitors had had rather more pragmatic purposes: settlement, occupation, destruction, defence, commerce. The Domesday record of 1086 specifies a town of over 250 dwellings, four parish churches and about 1,000 inhabitants. Here it is called Sciropesberie, from the Saxon Scrobbesbyrig meaning a settlement (possibly fortified) among the scrub (or shrubs). But whatever you called it and however you pronounced it (it was pronounced ‘Schrōsbury’ by the 14th century), some kind of township had been in place here centuries before the Norman Conquest.
The town’s location owes much to both geography and geology. The Romans had established Viroconium (Uriconium) at present-day Wroxeter during the first century AD, intending it as the base for their thrust into Wales. It was one of the most important and powerful administrative and trading centres in Britain for nearly two hundred years, with a large Romano-British population. It existed, though in a much less prosperous condition, for at least two centuries more. Invading Angles and Saxons practically destroyed what remained of it in the 6th century. They eventually set up their local capital at Shrewsbury, the Britons having fled to take refuge in the Celtic kingdom of Pengwern. Details are rather sketchy on these ancient Welsh border and Midlands kingdoms. The Kingdom of Pengwern (meaning ‘knoll of alders’) was on the eastern edge of Powys and an antique map suggests that it covered the whole of today’s Shropshire, probably with pieces of adjoining counties as well.
One of the three Pengwern ‘sub-kingdoms’ was centred on Caer Guricon (formerly Viroconium), and one of its defensive outposts, called Din Guricon, may have been the hill fort on top of the Wrekin. These are the times of leaders such as Cyndrwyn Fawr (known both as the Great and the Stubborn), Llywarch Hen and Caradog Freichfras, names that only rarely appear in our mainstream history textbooks. The name Pengwern appears around the town. For example, the Pengwern Boat Club on the south bank of the Severn across from The Quarry was founded in the late 19th century. Pengwern Road, off Porthill Road, leads past the end of Woodfield Avenue across to Copthorne Road, another of the arteries leading up and out of the town’s centre.
Within the greater area of ancient Pengwern, Cyndrwyn’s son Cynddylan probably established his capital Llys Pengwern on the site of the former Saxon town of Shrewsbury. Now we can see the part geology plays in determining the enduring popularity of this location for use as a settlement. The rounded hill that the town stands on is almost completely surrounded – thus defended – by the great loop of the River Severn. The town could command any of the nearby river crossing points and provide defence against attackers, including potential aggression from the Vikings. The narrow neck of land to the north of the town could be defended easily. So Shrewsbury became a fortified town and when Roger de Montgomery was granted Shropshire after the Norman Invasion he built his first wooden castle on that thin strip. Today’s stone castle was built later on exactly the same spot.
Rather than coping with Viking raiders, the town became a frontier defence against frequent incursions from Wales during the 12th and 13th centuries. The year 1282 illustrates one of the contemporary conventions of warfare and justice. Following capture, the heads of both Llewellyn II and his son David were severed in Shrewsbury, and then taken down to London to be impaled on spikes outside the Tower. But challenges from the Welsh could not compete with the Black Death. It reached Shrewsbury in 1349 and killed well over a third of its inhabitants. The mass plague graves were dug across the river in Kingsland. Despite this, Shrewsbury’s population and trade resumed their growth later and, by the 1380s, supported workers in leather, metals, horn, stone and cloth. By the end of the 14th century, Shrewsbury was one of the twelve wealthiest towns in England.
The Tudors and after
With the Tudor dynasty came a peaceful settling down. Many fine buildings were developed in the town and river trade on the Severn was extremely prosperous. Shrewsbury Grammar School (later to become the famous Shrewsbury School) was founded in 1552 by (or on behalf of) the young King Edward VI, who was then about 12. By 1586 it was claimed to be the largest school in the country, and certainly among the grandest. It moved to its present magisterial site overlooking the river opposite The Quarry in 1882, having previously occupied the present Shrewsbury Library building near the Castle.
By the 1600s, Shrewsbury’s population had reached about 5,000. Prosperity, as always, was tremendously reliant on the Welsh wool and cloth trade - and on the river. The two-way Severn-borne traffic between Shrewsbury and Bristol made a major contribution. Southbound trade included lead, wool, cheese and other local and Welsh produce; northbound from Bristol came chiefly wines, tobacco and spices. In this convenient way, the town’s exports financed the luxury imports that added pleasure to the lives of its increasingly wealthy traders.
Shrewsbury’s role as a fortified town continued until after the Restoration. The outer defences were finally removed in 1686. During the Civil War the town was firmly for the King and became a Royalist garrison when Charles I himself stayed for some three weeks on a recruiting and training mission in 1642. However, the fortifications failed to resist William Reinking’s 1,200 Parliamentarians who seized the town with the loss of only eight men on each side. Shrewsbury remained in Roundhead hands until the Restoration. Three years later, Charles I handed the town over to Sir Francis Newport.
Like so many important English towns, Shrewsbury’s history from the seventeenth century onwards includes, among other things, elegant merchants’ houses and grand commercial and civic buildings, some of them bi-products from the expanding stagecoach routes. Developments along the nearby Severn Gorge provide some of the earliest and most intensive evidence of the Industrial Revolution, and Shrewsbury became a significant railway town in the 19th century.
According to Pevsner
During his ‘extremely pleasurable’ stay in 1955, Nikolaus Pevsner naturally discovered good and bad in the town’s architectural heritage. Despite modern developments and ‘the smelly confusion of motor vehicles’ he found that:
. . . the spell of the Tudor town remains. A small market square with the old market house;
no straight streets; the most attractive and curious courtyards and alleyways. Street names as
tempting and mysterious as Shoplatch and Murivance, Wyle Cop and Dogpole, and then,
between the centre and the park, to the south, Belmont, a name reflecting later tastes and
snobberies and instead marking a street whose best houses are William and Mary, Queen Anne and later.
A handful of Pevsner’s examples will illustrate both his forthright integrity and the range of architectural history still available to be seen in the town. Shire Hall, The Square (Smirke, 1836-7) is ‘Large and dignified, though cool rather than warm’. Still in The Square, he mentions the Old Market House with its typically open ground floor. Of the Library and Museum at Castle Gates, he observes:
This is the building of Shrewsbury School, founded in 1552 . . . The new buildings [1590s]
are astonishingly stately. Few schools other than Eton and Winchester had such extensive
and lavish premises . . . In front of the building seated statue of Charles Darwin
(H. Montford, 1897).
And of The Royal Salop Infirmary, St Mary’s Place (Haycock, 1826-30):
A noble and ambitious building . . . It is a pity that the fussier brick building of 1908-10
stands to its left, and a greater pity that the additions on the river side are so presumptuous
and forgetful of the town as a whole and its skyline. Here they pretty well ruin the view of Shrewsbury from the river.
On the other hand, and in the same vicinity, The Quarry provides ‘twenty five acres of grass-land along the river – an infinite blessing to the town . . .’ The relatively newer development Belmont, mentioned already:
. . . was apparently the fashionable new street of the early 18th century. That constitutes
its interest . . . Houses built here overlooked the lawns down across the walls to the river,
and their architectural attractions can indeed not be exhausted from the street but have to
be seen from the Town Wall or the tennis courts below.
Castle Street has a relative wealth of interesting buildings, some like the Water Gate (off Castle Street down Water Lane) as early as the 13th century, with others representing every century between that and the nineteenth. Included here is the Old Council House of 1502, the meeting place of the Council of the Welsh Marches. However, No. 31 rather lets things down. In Pevsner’s view:
. . . one of those regrettable black-and-white imitations which have done so much harm
to what is genuine at Shrewsbury. Imitation as such is no worse when applied to black-
and-white than to Georgian, but the tendency has been to this day to make the new black-
and-white bigger than the old. The danger is especially to increase height beyond the
highest original buildings.
By contrast, Ireland’s Mansion, High Street, is ‘ . . . the only timber-framed house in Shrewsbury to which one might grant grandeur. It was built c.1575 by Robert Ireland, a wool merchant.’ Rowley’s House, another notable and free-standing timber-framed building, also illustrates the prosperity the town enjoyed through the wool trade, but Pevsner regrets:
Shrewsbury has treated it cruelly. It is surrounded on three sides by bus bustle and car
and lorry noise. Roger Rowley came to Shrewsbury shortly before 1600 and started
business as a draper dealing in Welsh cloth, and at the same time brewer and maltster.
Even worse is Boots the Chemists on Pride Hill:
. . . another awful warning how not to carry on the Shrewsbury tradition. This building
was put up in 1907 and 1920, at a time when enlightened firms ought to have known
better than so blatantly to outdo the proudest of the original buildings.
Henry Tudor House, Wyle Cop is ‘an extremely interesting house of the early 15th century, with an original four-light traceried window on the first floor . . . Henry VII stayed in this house in 1485 before Bosworth.’ Finally Frankwell, a street in what Pevsner calls ‘outer Shrewsbury’ across Welsh Bridge:
has preserved more 16th and 17th century timber-framing than any other of Shrewsbury.
[Nos. 29-40 constitute] one of the most ambitious houses of Shrewsbury, dated 1576 . . .
Then, almost as interesting, opposite on the corner of Drinkwater Street, No 92, a perfectly
plain nondescript brick cottage from the front, but from the side revealing cruck construction –
the most instructive example of the technique at Shrewsbury.
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FROM THE MEMOIR
For me, aged anywhere between nought and twelve, Shrewsbury’s history was unknown. It was simply the place where I lived. Pengwern Road was called that because that was its name. I saw it every time I went up and down the steep Porthill with my mother. I knew we lived quite near Wales, but was never aware of the misty background of the early Celtic Kingdoms, though the name Caradoc usually got a mention when we were in the Shropshire Hills. Shrewsbury School was a group of large buildings on a high place above the river, and it was probably many years before I knew that it was a famous ‘public school’ and what that meant. When I was eventually old enough to explore independently, I did begin making some sense of a picture much larger than my own immediate world. Then the Roman remains, the Castle, Town Walls, the statues of Clive and Darwin and all the other artefacts and natural features in my early childhood gradually came to occupy their essential and valued places in my expanding personal history.
Leaving the Boat House, where the two photographs were taken, you walk up Porthill and along Porthill Road until you reach the roundabout. Here you meet the old A5. Straight across the roundabout is Radbrook Road. We moved here during 1940 and this was home for my mother, father and me for the next eleven years. The first house on the left was a large corner property with part of its frontage on Roman Road. The owners were called Mitchell, and Marjorie Mitchell was a tall soprano who practised her scales and other vocal exercises in the bathroom at the rear of the house. As our gardens abutted, I was often treated to these strange warblings and garglings when I was playing in the back garden. While my own response was largely one of mystification, my parents quietly made fun of it. They were considerably younger than the Mitchells and had no closer contact with them than limited neighbourly chatting between the two wives. The biggest distinguishing feature of all was that the Mitchells had a car, which, in those days, put them in a very different league from my parents. It wasn’t until I was 14 or so that my father bought his first second-hand car, a black Vauxhall Wyvern, registration ABG 355.
A bungalow called ‘Selkirk’ came next, becoming the centre of my world as I progressed through the earlier stages of child development. It was rented from a Mr Skull. I learned this detail through repetition. Whenever my father received a letter announcing a regrettable but necessary rent increase, he would always utter contemptuously the single word ‘Skull’ with all the guttural force he could generate.
I’ve generally felt there was something slightly sinister about bungalows. This single storey seems to be the top layer of a real house, crouching down behind its bank of front lawn and peering inquisitively and suspiciously at passers-by. Perhaps they are just shy. Fortunately, Selkirk was different, built on a raised hollow platform, which created a sort of shallow cellar at ground level. This made it taller than a conventional bungalow and more like a house. There were several steps up to both front and back doors, and the roof space was a magical loft full of enticing things my parents had discarded but couldn’t bear to part with, or had stored there for the future. This is how many people use their lofts, eventually throwing most of it away when they move house. Among the treasures I played with up there were a couple of gas masks and, inexplicably, a wooden cigarette vending machine.
For arcane reasons, the house had been built back-to-front. Facing the road and the front garden was the back door into the kitchen, my bedroom and the bathroom. A veranda took you round the side of the house to the back garden where the true front door, with its small window of leaded stained glass, opened into the hall. On either side of the hall were the single combined sitting and dining room and my parents’ bedroom.
The curved bay window of this living room gave onto a large (to me then) semi-circular lawn with flower beds bounded by thriving mature fruit trees, different breeds of apples, pears and plums, with loganberries growing along one fence. There was an almond tree and enough room along one side of the house for small-scale cultivation, which included raspberry canes and strawberry plants. A cherry tree stood outside my bedroom window. The front garden boundary by the gate was guarded by a tall poplar tree, a laburnum and purple and white lilac on one side, and a luxuriant flowering tree on the other. All through my early life I was aware of flowers. Both parents were enthusiastic gardeners and roses, lupins, phlox, delphiniums, wallflowers, daffodils, antirrhinums, arabis, forget-me-nots and nasturtiums had their seasonal places in my intimate landscape.
Radbrook Road takes you away from Shrewsbury to the southwest. After the intersection with Ridgebourne Road and Oakfield Road, it became quickly rural and agricultural like most of Shropshire. For miles then it was simply a country road leading towards Montgomeryshire, bounded only by fields, punctuated here and there by a farmhouse or a hamlet at a minor crossroads. The road followed the general direction of the Severn’s tributary, the Rea Brook, through the villages of Hanwood, Pontesbury and Minsterley. This was also roughly the route of the short branch line from Shrewsbury to Minsterley used by the London, Midland and Scottish (LMS) and the Great Western Railway (GWR).
From a particular spot on Radbrook Road you could see the hill at Pontesford known as the Lion, after its shape of a crouching lion with its mane a single line of trees, possibly Scots pines, coming down its back from the head. On clear days in winter we could see the first dusting of snow on the Lion’s head and, as kids, we always took this is the sure sign that good big snow was on its way to us. It was sometimes an abundantly accurate indicator but too often more of a profound disappointment.
I went to the Lion one summer afternoon with one of my friends who lived nearby. His mother was much younger than her husband and courted from time to time by extremely handsome men much nearer her age. We inquisitive small boys observed the interesting comings and goings quite closely. I would meet him in his garden and learn whether it was Lionel or Peter this week, or whether Stuart was in or out of favour again. Sometimes we two received clear indications, possibly even small bribes, to keep away from the house on certain afternoons.
My friend’s mother and her escort of the day drove us out to Pontesford and, after the picnic lunch, let us loose there for the entire afternoon while they pursued their own agenda. Imagining that this would involve just a lot of walking about, we concluded that they would have had a fairly dull time. When we reported back to the car to go home, they asked us how we had spent our time. We told them how we had enacted fantasy battles among the rocks and woods, and particularly how we successfully defended ourselves against an attack from behind. At this, mother and boyfriend exchanged glances and smiled, and he said: ‘Well, we’ve been more interested in attacking from the front, haven’t we?’ He rightly judged that this little witticism, a grown-up joke that meant nothing whatsoever to us, would go completely over our heads. In fact, it’s a fine example of the dissonance between the subtleties of the adult world and the artless innocence of the child’s. LP Hartley’s The Go-Between is the classic text. Recalling the incident years later, I knew immediately what he’d meant.
Radbrook Road was one of several roads that brought the countryside into the town. Every week on market day, farmers drove their herds of cattle, decorated with ribbons and rosettes, down the road from the outlying farms, past our house, across the A5 and down the hill into Shrewsbury. Our daily milk came from one of those farms. A girl arrived every morning, driving a small horse and cart loaded with shiny silver coloured milk churns. My mother would take a mixing bowl down to the garden gate where the girl measured the milk into it with graduated ladles. Mr Griffiths the baker came up to us from town delivering bread from his horse and cab, a large, dark green vehicle with two huge wheels and a carriage lamp on either side. He never remembered his customers’ names and saved himself the trouble by just calling them all ‘Mrs. –er’.
The names of most of the people living up the road escaped me. Small children have other things to occupy them. They do take notice of other people when they’ve spotted something unusual about their appearance, or when they want to draw attention to themselves. Apparently, at one stage my contact with others involved hanging over the front gate as they walked past and shouting ‘Any more for the funeral?’ I do know there was another family called Evans almost opposite, with a son David whom I hardly ever saw. He was older than me and probably at a boarding school. On our side, the Mitchells were always there, but the next-door neighbours on our ‘up-the-road’ side changed two or three times while we lived there. I never really knew who they were, except that they always seemed to me to be ‘old’ people. At that phase of my life, most people were. It could have meant anything between 25 and well over 60.
Just before Michael Evans’s house further up was another of similar design, owned by Mr Richards, a builder, who had designed and built both houses, one to live in and one to sell. Beyond the Evans’s lived Harold and Rene Fowlkes and their daughter Juliette. I knew no other names until the latter part of the road, towards Ridgebourne Road, where two boys of my age, Bill Morris and Greville Madin, lived. Looking back now, the size of most of the houses and their substantial gardens suggests that many of the inhabitants of Radbrook Road must have been quite well off. We weren’t, and for the rest of their lives my parents never found sufficient funds at the right time to provide a good deposit on a house, or to finance the repayments on a mortgage without noticeable discomfort. I fancy they took the view that you need some ready funds for a moderately enjoyable social life and would not want to compromise that for the sake of bricks and mortar. In any case, the tendency for owner-occupation was not yet very widely developed. Of course, if you could afford the spare cash for living as well as owning a house, so much the better.
Opposite Bill Morris’s house were two significant features for me. One was the extensive spread of playing fields going right across to Kenwood Road and belonging to my future grammar school. A recent aerial photograph (courtesy multimap.com) shows that they remain a welcome open space sixty years later. The land attached to schools is a major benefit to many towns all over the country, though Government has encouraged some to sell it off since the 1980s. The ownership and influence of Shrewsbury School is no doubt partly responsible for the fact that the land opposite The Quarry hasn’t become a car park, a retail business park, a housing estate or a sewage farm.
Next door to those playing fields was a double-fronted house with a much more potent place in my early life. This was Pengwern House School, the small private primary day school I went to when I was approaching five. The headmistress was Miss Toddington, stern and strict but ultimately humane, who taught the top form. Her deputy and partner in the enterprise was Miss Gates who was stern and strict and just plain frightening, and taught the penultimate form. They both lived on the premises. Beyond their back lawn was our playground, once probably covered with grass but now reduced to bare hardened earth by the compacting effect of hundreds of small feet over the years. In the top form, Miss Toddington groomed us for the 10-plus examination (‘the scholarship’) that would determine our future in the grammar or the secondary modern school for at least the next six years. She also undertook to teach us as much French as she could in the available time, so that we had a head start in the language when we began our secondary education. I can say it worked for me.
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OFF TO SCHOOL, SIXTY YEARS AGO
It was another day the boy would never forget. In the summer of 1943, aged four-and-a-half, his mother took him for the selection interview with Miss Toddington. They sat in her private sitting room doubling as the office, he and his mother together on the big settee. The key accomplishments to be tested were some reading, some counting, telling the time and reciting the alphabet, or part of it. He managed these tasks to the necessary standard and was accepted for the following term. Then came the bit he’d been looking forward to most of all – being measured for his first school cap. Miss Toddington dived down behind the settee and came up with a bag full of blue caps for him to try. He was under the mistaken impression that, if none of the caps fitted, he would not be accepted. With the slightly uncomplimentary comment, ‘He does have rather a long head’, Miss Toddington declared one of the caps to be a good fit and that was that. She relieved his mother of the price of the cap and he was ready to go to school.
The school population was a mixture. There were children from the farms and villages up the road in the country, but the majority came from the various suburban localities on their side of Shrewsbury. Daily life in any school is largely very repetitive and many stories about school focus on a particular exceptional event or prank, beginning ‘Do you remember the time when . . .?’ In the event, he recalled very little, including the several teachers he’d experienced before reaching the top two forms. There was a Miss Jones when he was about six who struck him as young and very pretty, but not much more remained. Out in the playground they swapped things for other things, played marbles a good deal, and the kids from the country brought in things like a dead may bug in a matchbox or part of a wasp nest. In the summer, they trooped down Porthill to the Baths for swimming lessons, where everyone’s efforts to teach him to swim failed spectacularly. His father eventually engaged an instructor to teach him on Saturday mornings. This austere, unbending, professional approach soon frightened him into getting his foot off the bottom and actually swimming.
Miss Toddington believed in the three great annual school events: the nativity play, sports day and the summer concert with afternoon tea. The success of each depended on the enthusiastic attendance of most of the parents, nearly all mothers as the fathers were lucky enough to be at work during the afternoons. The younger teachers organised the play and the sports day, with Miss Toddington handing out the prizes at the end. She herself conducted the summer concert.
From the mothers’ point of view, the concert was the most excruciating of the three events. The nativity play was mercifully fairly short, and consisted of kids who either knew their parts by heart or read them unashamedly from bits of paper. All lines were spoken in a monotone, suggesting correctly that the child-actors understood nothing of what they were saying. One or two of the younger ones nearly always cried at some point. Sports day was held on the Priory playing field next door. Nearly all the events involved running, with some jumping and a bit of ball throwing. Even when events were officially taking place, all an observer could make out would be dozens of children all running around at the same time in different and inappropriate directions. One or two teachers blew whistles at them and tried to determine winners. It was an afternoon of delightfully unmanageable but harmless mayhem that enabled the mothers to sit in the sun and have a chat, applauding their athletic offspring occasionally in a random way when they thought something had happened.
The concert was different. The mothers had to sit on Miss Toddington’s back lawn on the miniature school chairs, listen to the music and applaud at the end of each tune. The school musical instrument stock consisted entirely of percussion. There were snare drums with a string that went round your neck, pairs of cymbals that you clashed together and single cymbals that you clouted with a stick. There were wooden handles with a bell on each end, hand-bells, tambourines and triangles. If they had any rehearsals, it made no real difference in the end. They all queued up to choose their instrument and those at the back always ended up with the triangles which no-one could hear over the racket of all the others.
The old upright piano now stood on the lawn and the musicians stood in a semi-circle beside it, facing their audience, either looking hard at their mother or not looking anywhere near her. One of the young teachers played a selection of tunes on the piano and the percussion band bashed and crashed in time to the music under Miss Toddington’s direction. That was the theory. In reality, practically every player’s objective was simple and uncompromising: to play their instrument as loudly as they possibly could, preferably louder than anyone else. As the competitive edge began to bite, any idea of keeping to the beat or playing together was progressively abandoned. While the pianist churned out well-known tunes in different styles and tempos, the musical vandals indulged themselves in their own anarchic free-form cacophony. When Miss Toddington judged that this spontaneous creativity had gone far enough, she put down her conductor’s baton and led the mothers in a last round of grateful applause. Finally she thanked them for sending their children to her for yet another year, looked forward to seeing them again after the holidays, and regretted the need to raise the termly fees again. Teas were served with the help of the pupils in the top form, the chatting eventually concluded and they all went home.
The Sunday School was held next door in the Priory School’s splintering wooden sports pavilion. As every sensible parent knew, religious or not – and his most definitely were not – Sunday School was the heaven-sent method of achieving uninterrupted peace and quiet for yourselves for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon. Lunch is over, the washing up done, possibly not. It’s a period of armistice when, whatever you might consider discussing or rowing about, you tacitly agree to leave until later. You sprawl in an armchair by the fire, the newspaper spread out across your face. One or the other, or both, may quietly drift off. The truth is that, at his house, eyes closed shamelessly. The child was sent to sit on a hard bench and sing songs about sunbeams, lambs and All Things Bright and Beautiful.
They were sorted into teams or work-groups, played their improving games with paper, crayons, scissors, and glue and collected the sticky stamps handed out in return for their weekly subscription. The driving missionary issue at that time was leprosy in Africa. One of his strong memories is of small photographs of African children with this terrible disease. They each received one of these photos, and were asked to keep it, as though, somehow, they had personally adopted this poor, suffering child. They were asked to show the photos to parents at home. This was to encourage them to contribute money to the leprosy charity. Someone from a missionary group came to talk to them about it once, and leprosy remained their central Sunday School theme for as long as he could recall. Despite their immense distance from it, they probably came to recognise the horror of the disease and its effects. They could never have understood much about what or where ‘Africa’ was, or what ‘charity’ really meant. They were definitely not in a position to suggest that perhaps this was all something the colonial administrators might be best placed to do something about.
The other big thing was the annual Christmas present. Every child received one, but not everyone received the same thing. This led to a frantic, scrambling unwrapping, then a free-for-all as they charged around the room seeing what their friends had been given, and finding out whose present they preferred. After that, a limited amount of surreptitious swapping took place. He recalls clearly a large format book called The Bright Sunday Hour. He was less than excited about it compared with some of the others but failed to swap it. The contents were organised in monthly chunks, each with a short story, a poem, a seasonal nature photograph, an activity to do and a verse from the Bible. Like so many books in his life then, he read it and read it, over and over again, drew on it, coloured bits of it in and came to know most of it off by heart. It was another book that became a kind of undemanding companion long after its initial impact.
A bi-product of Sunday School was his mother’s being badgered regularly by the Rev. Kenneth Toms. He was the pastor of the new prefabricated modern church that was built just behind the pavilion. It was styled ‘Interdenominational’ which meant that pretty well anyone was welcome. The Sunday School moved in there and they enjoyed warmth, light and comfortable chairs. Those who were now getting older were recruited into the Crusaders. Here keen and stimulating adults put them into ‘houses’ named after legendary British explorer-heroes like Burton, Mallory, Livingstone and Scott, and gave them much more serious work to do.
The Rev. Toms naturally got to know the parents who were apparently genuine believers because they went to the Sunday morning church services. His parents did not. Toms clearly had an evangelical mission to convert those in the locality who needed it, and would arrive at their house during a weekday afternoon quite frequently. His mother would be alone, doing something in the garden or the kitchen and, over the inevitable cup of tea, Toms would engage her in religious argument from a variety of angles. She didn’t object because arguments like this cropped up periodically during her WEA philosophy classes. She took him on as a genuine opponent and he seemed to enjoy the intellectual exercise as much as she did. He must have realised early on that here was one nut he would never crack, but evidently found it more stimulating than mumbling the routine platitudes with many of his more acquiescent parishioners.
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Did corporal punishment occur at Pengwern House? Probably not, though the very thought of Miss Gates giving you a bad time verbally was the mental equivalent. At the front of Miss Toddington’s classroom was a fireplace with a high mantelpiece where she kept a short ebony ruler. When one of her pupils played up, she would stand on tip-toe, reach for this instrument and bear down on the offender, brandishing the ruler like a truncheon. The simple fact of her moving towards the mantelpiece was often enough to deter further misbehaviour. They certainly saw her stand over someone with her cosh raised though never saw it in action. In appropriate hands, the threat of a punishment is a quite sufficient deterrent without the need to inflict it.
They were discussing this issue on the radio recently. There are proposals to create legislation forbidding parents and child-minders from smacking the children in their care. The question of how you successfully enforce such a law seemed to evade them. Thinking back to life at home as their parents dealt with them in their different ways when they misbehaved, he was never conscious of any of his friends being generally slapped, smacked or beaten as a matter of course. It may have been happening, though they would probably have known something of it if any of them were seriously suffering in this way. On the other hand, there must have been plenty of occasions in everyone’s experience when a quick smack did the trick and nothing more was said. More interesting is the frequency of misbehaviour that went more or less unpunished. Although you imagined you’d got away with it, you had not. Your parents simply thought it not worth the upset to make anything of it.
In his house, the threat was present much more than the delivery. It took two forms. One was his father speaking to him when he returned from the office. This was quite enough to pull him back into line and leave him quaking for the rest of the day, dreading his return. By this time, he frequently discovered that his mother had decided not to mention it after all. As she rightly judged, the two or three hours of anticipatory dread had been punishment enough. When she did tell him, he would summon the boy into the living room on his own for a brief and fearful inquisition.
If his father ever struck him, he had no memory of it. But there was a second string to the parental control-and-punishment mechanism. A strong, white stick stood in one corner of the greenhouse, as thick as an average bamboo cane. This was the ultimate weapon. When he had been especially naughty, either parent would suggest that if he ever did this again, ever, ever again, even once, his father would cane him on the backs of his legs with this stick. They used this threat very sparingly to preserve its force and, presumably, it worked. The stick was never used.
There was something else that could resemble punishment at times. This was the unwitting power over the child’s life at home inflicted through their parents’ choice of radio programmes. In their house, on their radio, they listened to the programmes they wanted to hear. ‘Children’s Hour’ was the exception when children had nearly an hour to themselves. This complete control over listening, and later over viewing on the single television in the living room (though they never had one when he was young), no longer applies. Today, most children have their own radio, CD player, television set or electronic device in their own room. No-one’s likes or dislikes impinge on anyone else. But at that time having your own radio and perhaps record player was a dramatic move forward into independence. It detached you from your parents and their listening and meant you could decently stay away from them in your room. It was part of growing up, making decisions for yourself and doing things on your own.
Those days of only one radio in the entire household had a profound effect on those children. Put a group of them together now, born during the 1940s and early 50s, and they can all talk about the radio programmes they heard and hated. Many had to be in the same room as radio programmes that bored them stiff for one very good reason. Through much of the year, there was only one really warm room in the whole house. For many it was the kitchen.
His parents were keen gardeners and ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ (or whatever it was called then) was, for him, the most profoundly dull thing he could imagine. It came on during Sunday lunch, after ‘Two-Way Family Favourites’ when records were played for family members serving abroad in the forces. That was bearable if only for hearing the foreign place names, though most people requested classical music. Pop music was only just developing and the BBC was probably not keen on broadcasting swing-band music or jazz on a Sunday. If you wanted your lunch - which you always did - there was no escaping a programme that was on at Sunday lunchtime. Listening to a group of professional gardeners discussing lawn maintenance or dealing with radish pests was the ultimate high price to pay for a square meal. His parents enjoyed it immensely, and conversation was suspended until the programme was over.
There were two other particular dislikes. ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ was an artificially hearty music programme with too much solo singing for his liking. Welsh and Scottish tenors, songs from the musical shows - and probably some Gilbert and Sullivan – were featured. At these times some of our cultural preferences can be set solid for the rest of our lives. The other, even more impenetrably boring for him then, was ‘Round Britain Quiz’, with its Anglo-American edition called ‘Transatlantic Quiz’. He might have managed a general knowledge quiz if only he could have answered a single question. But he found this stuff so out of the way, and the meandering intellectualising so painfully dull, that he ached with the tedium of it. His parents knew very few of the answers themselves, but clearly enjoyed the elevated level of discussion that led to unearthing the obscure solutions. In later years he has enjoyed it for the same reasons as they did but, enduring it through his pre-teen years, he must frequently have wondered why such a thing could be even remotely considered as leisure enjoyment. Then, as now, at times you do wonder whether you and your parents even inhabit the same planet.
Not all his radio experience was like that. As he grew older, they listened and enjoyed together ‘Life with the Lyons’, ‘The Huggetts’, ‘The Al Read Show’, ‘Much Binding in the Marsh’ with Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne, ‘Take It from Here’ with Professor Jimmy Edwards, ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ with Ted Ray and Kitty Bluett, and Tommy Handley in ‘ITMA’. His mother tended to want to enjoy these with him, even though she was less keen on the Lyons or the Huggetts. If his father disliked it, there was no pretending that he did. He would pick up the newspaper and tuck himself safely down behind it. However, Al Read, and most especially, ‘Much Binding’ were right up his father’s street. All these shows were extremely formulaic in structure and featured inimitable catchphrases that he always saw coming, and corny signature tunes that he was ready to mumble along to or whistle. And, having heard it, no one could ever forget Wilfred Pickles and ‘Have a Go’ which went round the country from town to town, asking questions so that contestants could win prizes of a few shillings or a prime cabbage donated by a local benefactor. Week by week, the audience was goaded into applauding simply because a contestant was 68 or 77 years old and, despite the presenter’s blatant insincerity and patronising approach, the innocent participants lapped it up as the crowd cheered.
Competing today to win a million pounds in a TV quiz or winning it in the National Lottery typifies a world of very different values. The altered nature of parent-child relationships, contemporary mass entertainment, the influence of the media, youth culture, the education system itself, 24-hour surveillance systems, the Worldwide Web: together, they speak of life-styles and priorities as alien as anything could be from the life of that small, anxious, long-headed boy selected by Miss Toddington for her school in the early 1940s.
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