Anyone for CGI – Iron, that is?

Travel theme: Ripples

Ripples through time, ripples of iron: Ailsa’s prompt gives me the chance to show another shot of Bage’s Flaxmill-Maltings, the world’s first iron-framed building and eighteenth century blueprint for the skyscraper.

Recently, fellow blogger Frizztext in his post on Frankfurt Mainhattan spoke of “skyscrapers to sharpen the corporate identity”, a stunningly acerbic phrase, and Charles Bage certainly had something of the sort in mind when he built the flaxmill. The whole thrust of his design was to overcome a long-standing and costly problem for mill owners: the propensity of flax and cotton mills to go up in flames. There was certainly big money to be made in proving such a design. For one thing it meant industrialists could build bigger, taller factories, the better to exploit larger numbers of needy workers including orphans.

However, the iron-clad tower above (and whose rusty corrugations I confess to enhancing with some digital tinkering), belongs to the building’s later phase when it was used for malting barley for the brewing trade. I confess, too, to a yen for corrugated sheet iron. You could put it down to a childhood spent in rural Cheshire where the curved iron cladding of Dutch barns formed striking landmarks across the flat farmland. It was usually painted black.

St Chad's Gospel Mission Church, Blists Hill, Madley

St Chad’s Gospel Mission Church, Blists Hill Open Air Museum, Shropshire. Photo: Creative Commons David Dixon

Corrugated Galvanised Iron is anyway a brilliantly useful structural material. It was invented in the 1820s by Henry Palmer, architect and engineer to the London Dock Company. Cheap, and relatively easy to transport, it has been used all over the world to rainproof grass huts, make instant pioneer homes and water tanks, and to clad colonial godowns and administrative offices. One useful property is that it is pest proof. At least I think termites can’t quite manage to recycle it. It is ideal for prefabricated buildings, requiring little skill to erect. Furthermore, as it rusts, it creates its own art installations across the landscape. There are of course downsides in the tropics, rusting being one of them. Also iron roofs convert buildings into ovens during the hot season, and into tin drums in the rainy season.

I bet all you travellers out there (and especially those of you who live in Australia and New Zealand) have some good CGI shots too. Here are some more of mine.

Kenya:

Kikuyu Farmhouse, Central Highlands

Karen Blixen’s Coffee Farm Manager’s House, Karen, Nairobi

A farm in the Ngong Hills at Denys Finch Hatton’s grave site

And in Stone Town, Zanzibar:

Zambia:

Zimbabwe:

Colonial house, Harare

Lamu, Kenya:

Seychelles:

Victoria, Mahe

Bee-line

Word a Week: vibrant

Click on the image to enlarge. This photo was taken blind (because the sun was shining on my camera screen), and on a happy snapper Kodak Easyshare. So I cannot take much credit for any of this. But isn’t it good to see so many bees, and especially after hearing of all the pesticidal threats to their existence. So a big cheer for the bees. We cannot live without them. Love the way you can see the fluttering wings.

My writer’s mind, much like my garden, is often chaotic and full of weedy overgrowth. And so this morning, as a ready excuse not to tackle the former, I decided to go into the other weedy place in pursuit of something for the ‘A Word a Week’ challenge. I also thought I would try to overlook the fact that Sue, who set the challenge is very annoyingly enjoying tropical wonders in Malaysia while manfully coping with WFDS – wi-fi deficiency syndrome.

Apart from which, this is just the other excuse I’ve been looking for to show off some of the rampant vegetation in my small but multi-level flowerbeds. So welcome to my garden on the Edge of Silurian Shores.

Wild stock and Welsh Poppy. These came from my batty Aunt Miriam’s Devon garden. She is no longer with us, but doubtless is dead-heading and pruning and stealing cuttings somewhere in the big garden in the sky.

Verbascum, columbine, Patty’s Plum poppies

This white foxglove has grown itself in the path along with the pink and white columbine. I love plants that do their own gardening.

Pasque flowers going to seed at sunset – much like the photographer.

Variegated Lemon Balm not only smells delicious when you brush by it, but it makes a wonderful soothing tea if you are feeling stressed. Also good in Pimms and shredded finely on strawberries. Or in salads and tabbouleh.

Japanese Crab Apple in bloom a few weeks ago. Already there are thousands of tiny apples forming. You can see what they look like in autumn here. Wonderful for crab apple jelly, and of course emergency winter rations for the black birds.

Allium.

The garden coming into the kitchen, though a certain amount of vigilance and exclusion must be deployed. Having suffered an invasion of leopard slugs on my counter tops and in the spaghetti, I definitely draw the line at all forms of molluscs coming in too.

Townsend Meadow behind the garden and looking towards Wenlock Edge. For geology lovers this upthrust limestone ridge was once the bed of the tropical Silurian Sea i.e. c.400,000 million years ago. At that time this piece of ground was lying somewhere off East Africa.

And because one look isn’t enough, another view of an oriental poppy, freshly opened, but not quite pressed.

Finally, a Bee Movie. And for all those who follow Frizz on Flickr Comments, please note the sound effects. Don’t they remind you of something?

‘B’ Movie

The Great Earthly Curves Mystery: what, when and why?

I could also throw in a ‘who ’ and ‘where’? So what’s your best guess on the identity of this marvellously curvaceous earthwork? No forward peeking. Here’s another shot.

While you’re pondering, I should say that in a former life, in a long ago era that my knees think could well be the Lower Paleolithic, I studied Prehistory and Archaeology. That’s a clue.

Okay. Here’s the whole thing.

1935 and 1937 aerial photographs taken by Major George Allen and in the possession of the Ashmolean Museum.

Both images are in the public domain.

These, then, are the ramparts of Maiden Castle, one of Britain’s most famous Late Bronze Age – Iron Age hill forts. After two thousand years of wear and tear, the whole structure seems to have simply grown from the natural contours of the Dorset uplands. Of course when they were first excavated, with simple picks, incalculable people-hours, and much project management, the banks would have been higher still, and the ditches more sharply ankle-breaking; in their pristine state of freshly exposed chalk, they would have glistened white across the land and been visible for miles.

And so in the past this place would have looked utterly magnificent, and other-worldly too, perhaps the equivalent of seeing a shimmering giant spaceship looming over the countryside; and perhaps that was the point. Or at least one of the reasons for its existence. This place was not only defensive, a signifier of tribal authority, but probably also the place of seasonal sacred gatherings, a place of pilgrimage in some sense.

In fact a metaphysical aspect for this location is indicated across four millennia. The first human activity dates from around 4,000 BC when people of the Neolithic or New Stone Age built a prominently sited enclosure. The banks were low and hardly banks at all. Nor were they continuous, so it seems unlikely that it was made for defence. It appears to have been a place where people gathered for social and sacred reasons rather than in times of enemy attack. The burials of two children that were found there date from this time.

Then around 3000 BC, after the enclosure was no longer used, a large ditched barrow was built. It apparently contained no burial, but may still have been a meeting place and important ritual landmark. Again, both the enclosure and the later barrow would have been bright white when newly made. Over three thousand years later, in late Roman times when Roman beliefs had fused somewhat with local beliefs, a small Romano-British temple was built there.

In between, the site was used by Bronze Age farmers who left behind traces of their fields, then around 600 BC the first hill fort was constructed. At first it was much like the many other hill forts that were being built at this time across Britain. It was not especially impressive, and enclosed around 6.4 hectares (16 acres). But around 450 BC it underwent a massive expansion, involving the enclosure of two hill tops. The defended area increased to 19 hectares (47 acres) which, the English Heritage guide tells visitors, is equivalent to 50 football pitches. Also at this time the defences became very complex, and the banks were raised to a height of 8.4 metres (28 feet). In other words, it was an extraordinary feat of engineering and manual labour. It was a statement of power, capacity and authority. It was a place that people looked up to in every sense.

Maiden Castle is also unusual is that, unlike many other hill forts, there is evidence that people lived there. These people were the Celtic Durotriges. Excavations have revealed that they lived in thatched round houses, grew wheat and barley which they stored in granaries and kept sheep, pigs and cattle. Doubtless they would have had horses for transport and oxen for ploughing. Iron was worked on the site. Then there were the piles of round stones, strategically placed around the fort. These were probably used for slingshot, and suggest that an attack was expected.

Reconstruction of an Iron Age round house. Photo: Creative Commons, WyrdLight.com

It appears, too, that the expected siege did take place. During the 1930s excavations of Maiden Castle, Sir Mortimer Wheeler uncovered part of a cemetery. Of the 52 bodies excavated, a number showed signs of a violent death. This, Sir Mortimer concluded, was evidence of an attack by Vespasian’s legionaries during the Roman invasion of AD 43. In 2009, a burial site with 50 decapitated bodies was discovered not far from Maiden Castle during road building, and according to Roman historical accounts, Vespasian conquered some 20 hill forts across the Durotriges’ territory.

By the time the Romans arrived, Britain had long been a prosperous country inhabited by a number of different Celtic tribal groups. It was not a backwater as we might imagine. The Romans, after all, were coming for a reason, not out of idle curiosity. For two hundred years before the invasion, Celtic traders had well-established markets in Europe.

Iron Age Shield found in the River Thames at Battersea Bridge, London. Photo: Creative Commons, Wikipedia.

Their inlaid gold-, silver- and ironwork was exquisite (and endlessly curvy) – torcs, brooches, shields, swords. They made fantastic weather-proof felted capes. They exported surplus grain from the numerous farmsteads whose traces still remain across Britain’s landscape. They sold slaves, and hunting dogs. In return, they imported amphorae of olive oil and wine, amber and ivory jewellery. It was a moneyed economy.

Gold torc from the Snettisham Hoard, Norfolk. Photo; Creative Commons, (Wikipedia).

Below is an example of a Durotriges gold stater. Coin experts point out that it shows an abstracted Celtic version of the head of Apollo (left) and a dismembered horse (right). The finds of such coins have been used to plot the extent of Durotriges territory – that is, from East Devon, across Dorset, and including southern Wiltshire. By AD 70 they had become Romanized, and were part of the Roman Province of Britannia. The process of urbanizing the Durotriges occurred, then, not at Maiden Castle, but down on the banks of the River Frome at what is now Dorchester. During this time the hill fort was apparently abandoned, and not apparently used again until the building of the 4th century temple.

Photo: Creative Commons: Numisantica (http://www.numisantica.com/)

But to come back to the curvy earthworks and their purpose. Many archaeologists have argued that hill forts of Maiden Castle’s scale and impressiveness belong to the category of defensive tribal strongholds known as oppida. These are found across Europe – from Spain to the Hungarian plain. In other words, they could be described as proto-towns.

Yet this notion of incipient urban development does not fit the the hundreds of British hill forts that show absolutely no sign of permanent occupation, nor of warfare for that matter. Because there is one BIG disadvantage to occupying a hill fort for any length of time, and that is access to fresh water. The need to bring it in makes the occupants highly vulnerable in all sorts of ways.

All that can be said with certainty is that these structures were of huge importance to the people who built them. The effort that went into their construction, the periods of rebuilding over several centuries tells us this. We can also surmise that the cultures who produced them were prosperous and highly organised. Building these hill top structures required people-power, and from a population who mostly lived elsewhere in defended farmsteads. The building of them could only happen when there was no demanding farm work, probably between planting and harvest time, when digging conditions were favourable. But then if the Celts were known to trade in slaves, then presumably they also had their own. Perhaps these impressive monuments were built by slaves?

Another thing that we often make mistakes over, is that non-industrialised people do not, and probably never did, divide up their reality into strict divisions of sacred and profane as we do. All reality is sacred in some sense. From our position of self-appointed technologised loftiness we often refer to such belief systems as ‘superstition’, while engaging with our own spirits of consumption in shopping malls and coffee shops. But if people did not occupy these hill forts permanently, then for practical purposes, whether as defensive retreats or the meeting place for the seasonal ceremonies of scattered Celtic clans – the need for a striking location that everyone could find would be paramount. A place where beacons could be lit and seen for miles, where raw rock ramparts would float in the sky like a mirage.

Perhaps there was indeed a need to feel secure from enemies and wildlife while serious rituals were being conducted. But then high banks may also be used to contain sound as an amphitheatre does – the chanting of storytellers, the pronouncements of seers and leaders. Also a hilltop is closer to the spirit world, to God, the Creator, to Heaven; it is a place half way between the mundane and the sublime. And just because a sacred thanksgiving is going on, it does not exclude the possibility for horse trading and dowry negotiation, or for storytelling contests and trials of warrior strength, or displays of obedience from hunting dogs.

So: the great earthwork mystery remains largely unsolved. Perhaps it does not matter. When we visit such places we know they are special; if we allow ourselves to respond, that is enough. With that thought in mind, it is fitting to end with a literary connection. Maiden Castle of course loomed large on the creative landscape of Thomas Hardy, famous son of Dorchester. In the Mayor of Casterbridge, the hill fort provides a dramatic setting where would-be lovers seemingly meet by chance.

“Elizabeth, as has been said, often took her walks on the Budmouth Road, and Farfrae as often made it convenient to create an accidental meeting with her there. Two miles out, a quarter of a mile from the highway, was the prehistoric fort called Mai Dun, of huge dimensions and many ramparts, within or upon whose enclosures a human being as seen from the road, was but an insignificant speck. Hitherward Henchard often resorted, glass in hand, and scanned the hedgeless Via — for it was the original track laid out by the legions of the Empire — to a distance of two or three miles, his object being to read the progress of affairs between Farfrae and his charmer.”

Bury Ditches, Shropshire

Once in Zambia: in memoriam

Mara boys 2

On the Road in Africa

You could say that both this image and the survival of its medium (old film) is fleeting. The original photo was taken from a passing Land Rover on a dirt road. As you can see, I’ve been playing about with it. But it struck me, too, that there is a deeper meaning here. Life can be all too fleeting in the non-industrial world, and especially on bad roads. See for instance Jujufilms , a blog that shows both the dark side and wondrous vivacity of Nigerian life.

But this reminds me of another kind of disaster. When Team Farrell was living in Zambia in 1992-3 there was too much dying going on – from famine, TB, malaria and cholera. And then there was one especially tragic event that touched all Zambians. Our passing connection with it began when we did something that we have never done since – we went to a football match. On 30th January 1993 Zambia was playing Namibia in the World Cup qualifying round at Lusaka’s Independence Stadium.

The reason we were in Zambia was because in November 1992 Team Leader, Graham, had been seconded from the Natural Resources Institute, Kent, to the EU Delegation in Lusaka to manage the distribution of European food aid to upcountry Zambians. There had been a bad drought in southern Africa during that year, and President Chiluba, who had recently succeeded Kenneth Kaunda in the first multi-party elections since Independence in 1964, did not trust his ministers to distribute the maize flour and cooking oil fairly, or even at all. Instead, he said, international donors were to use Missions and NGOs to reach the starving villagers. And so this was Graham’s own mission – organising food deliveries to far flung corners of the Zambia.

Famine, though, was not the only problem at that time. There were guerrillas from Mozambique spilling over Zambia’s remote eastern borders to predate on poor villagers. Then from the north came the unpaid members of Mobuto’s Zairian Army. To make up for a lack of salaries, they would drive down into the Copper Belt, or even as far as Lusaka, for a spot of night-time looting and pillaging. (It will be remembered that Mobutu was another dismal world leader put into power by Western governments). Last but not least, Son of Kaunda, doubtless suffering the loss of the family power-base, was plotting a military coup. All seemed precarious, then, a situation made much of by British-born locals and EU diplomats who never tired of telling us of their hair-raising confrontations with rapacious gunmen stealing even their curtains, or how our Suburu would surely be car-jacked if we were silly enough to drive into the city.

Going to a football match, then, suddenly took on an element of foolhardiness. It was one of Graham’s colleagues, David Walker, visiting Zambia for a short stint of crop storage consultancy, who said we must go. And since his enthusiasm was so infectious, go we did, although it took much persistence to get tickets; none of the European Zambians had any idea how we might buy them; nor could they imagine why we would want to. It was Wilfred, the EU Delegation’s driver who told us when and where to go for them.

And so, come match day, on a hot Saturday afternoon, we set off in the Suburu that was ‘bound to be car-jacked’. Independence Stadium is a little way from the city, out on the Great North Road. There were no signs, only two brick gateposts in the middle of nowhere. We simply followed the trucks and pick-ups jammed with excited fans, and the thousands and thousands of pedestrians. It was a real family outing – mothers, fathers, children, alert but placid babies tied to their mamas’ backs.

When it came to parking, Graham soon struck a deal with two boys to ‘guard’ the car. A young police woman politely asked if, Madam, could she see what I had in my basket, and briefly explored our picnic. Soldiers checked our tickets. And as the ugly concrete stadium filled, the Namibian team entertained the crowd with a synchronized warm-up to rhumba rhythms. The only dint in the general good humour came when a Zambian team official began to announce line up changes over the PA system. The whole stadium groaned. “Now just listen!” said the official in the manner of a thwarted school teacher. And everyone did, while he spelled out the reasons for the substitutions.

At five minutes to kick off, the presidential motorcade swept round the ground, releasing the diminutive President Frederick Chiluba in front of the grandstand to greet the teams. The military band struck up the national anthems, the President was installed in his executive armchair, and the TV camera woman atop her scaffold was ready to roll. Zambia needed four goals to qualify. There was a general air of speculative optimism: was it too much to ask? But fifteen minutes in, with the first goal scored, everyone was certain. Their heroes would not fail. This was the team that had thrashed Italy 4 –0 at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. This was the team set on winning the first Africa Cup of Nations trophy. They were going places, taking with them, Zambians’ highest hopes.

It was not the greatest match. There were groans, then laughter at many missed chances. Being no football expert I would have to say that the Namibian team’s best moment had probably been during the rhumba warm-up. But when the fourth Zambian goal was scored the stadium exploded with cheers of delight – everyone on their feet, babies held above the crowd so that their infant eyes might witness the scene of victory. A man in front of us then threw up his arms and began to dance. And when that was not joyful expression enough, he turned, shaking our hands as he moved along the row. “My own young brother,” he said in disbelieving tones. “It was my own young brother who scored the fourth goal.”

The match won, the fans left quietly. We returned to the Suburu that had not been car-jacked, and paid the boys their kwacha. Leaving by car, though, was not so easy. We found ourselves locked in a vast sea of humanity. As we slowly edged forward, people rested their arms on the car window sills in a companionable way, exchanged a few words with us. Finally, a kind policeman waved us out onto the Great North Road where we joined the dash of fan-filled trucks, the smelly old bus that was transporting the military band back to barracks, and finally the Zambian team bus, that pulled alongside before overtaking. “My God!” Graham cried. “We’re in the procession.” We gave the team a cheer. It had been a thoroughly good-hearted afternoon.

Three months later the entire Zambian team was dead. On 27th April they were on the way to play Senegal when their plane crashed off Gabon. We had been out of the country when it happened, and returned to a nation that had had the stuffing knocked out of it. President Chiluba declared a week of national mourning. The radio played only funereal music and, on the 3rd May 1993, Zambia’s team and Zambia’s hopes were buried in state on ground near Independence Stadium. The tens of thousands of people who attended wept. The President wept – real tears, not like the ones his predecessor was wont to weep.

“Today we inter our heroes,” he said, “but we do not bury their dreams and aspirations.”

And so the building of a new team became a touchstone for the greater struggle of building a new nation. I thought of the man who had danced his joy and shaken our hands, and wondered how he was. Cool Britons that we were, we had not asked his brother’s name.

Now, twenty years on, Zambia is a nation on the up, and when the Zambian people finally receive the full value of the mineral wealth extracted from their land by international companies, they will surely do a lot better. But when it comes to the 1993 disaster, the families of the dead team and air crew still do not know why the crash happened. The aviation report is yet to be released. Somehow it means the grieving just keeps on going.

Heroes Acre Memorial, Lusaka

Francis Alisheke / zambianfootball.net Wikipedia Commons gabon+pyra.jpg

Memorial to the 1993 Zambian team. Both photos: Lusaka Times

Footballers
Efford Chabala (goalkeeper)
John Soko (defender)
Whiteson Changwe (defender)
Robert Watiyakeni (defender)
Eston Mulenga (midfielder)
Derby Makinka (midfielder)
Moses Chikwalakwala (midfielder)
Wisdom Mumba Chansa (midfielder)
Kelvin “Malaza” Mutale (striker)
Timothy Mwitwa (striker)
Numba Mwila (midfielder)
Richard Mwanza (goalkeeper)
Samuel Chomba (defender)
Moses Masuwa (striker)
Kenan Simambe (defender)
Godfrey Kangwa (midfielder)
Winter Mumba (defender)
Patrick “Bomber” Banda (striker)

Coaching staff
Godfrey “Ucar” Chitalu
Alex Chola
Wilson Mtonga (doctor)
Wilson Sakala

Others
Michael Mwape (FAZ Chairman)
Nelson Zimba (public servant)
Joseph Bwalya Salim (journalist)

Crew
Colonel Fenton Mhone (pilot)
Lt Colonel Victor Mubanga (pilot)
Lt Colonel James Sachika (pilot)
Warrant Officer Edward Nambote (fitter)
Corporal Tomson Sakala (steward)

Peaceful wildlife, unpeaceful writer

Travel theme: peaceful

Okay, I confess. I’m using Ailsa’s weekly photo challenge for a piece of shameless self-publicity. Because today I’m feeling anything but peaceful. I’ve just heard that my short story ‘Flight’ won third place in the International Bath Short Story Award, sponsored by Writing Events Bath. Of course it’s set in Africa as most of my fiction is. To read ‘Flight’, follow this link then scroll to the foot of the page. Twelve of this year’s short- and longlisted stories are to be published by Hearst as an e-book anthology under a new imprint UkEditBooks in November. So all you fiction writers out there, seasoned or novice, submissions for the 2014 Bath Short Story Award are OPEN 1st November 2014. Go for it!

Now to calm things down I’m posting some shots of some very languor-inducing wildlife. Besides which, big cats do ‘laid back’ like no other, and quiet small elephants are a joy to behold on any occasion. And as for Grevy’s Zebras composing themselves so stripily, what else is there to say but ENJOY!

Travel theme: Peaceful

The Medicine Man

My scanning of old negatives from Kenya and Zambia days in the 1990s is an on-going task – both tedious and oddly compulsive. Sometimes I hit the batch scan button so I can hoover or iron at the same time. Once in a blue moon I look up from such a task to find that a particularly striking image has materialized on the screen – something I had forgotten entirely. To see it again is almost shocking. This was such a photograph. In some ways I wish I had not taken it.

The location is the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri, Kenya, and the subject, a performer, dressed in the manner of a Kikuyu medicine man or mundu mugo circa 1900 when European ethnographers and missionaries began to take photographs of Kenya’s peoples. The Outspan itself is also a colonial construct, built by Major Eric Sherbrooke Walker in 1928. He later built Treetops, a small game-viewing lodge a few kilometres away in what is now the Aberdares National Park. In the beginning this truly was a tree house, complete with a platform overlooking a waterhole. It was here, in 1952, that a safari-ing Elizabeth Windsor learned that her father, George VI, was dead and she was now Queen Elizabeth II. Not long after this, freedom fighters in the predominantly Kikuyu-led Land and Freedom Army (generally referred to as Mau Mau) burned Treetops down. Today its successor is an imposing affair, several storeys high, but still looking out on the waterhole where game comes to drink at dawn and dusk.

The two hotels are on the standard tour bus itinerary. Visitors are bussed up from Nairobi to the Outspan for lunch, and in the afternoon they transfer to Treetops. For their entertainment in between there are performances at the traditional Kikuyu village in the Outspan’s garden. The intention is that the visitors will learn something about the human locals before they spend a sleepless night watching out for elephant and leopard at Treetops’ floodlit waterhole.

For most of the day, then, the village is shut, hidden behind a bamboo screen. It comprises a couple of thatched round houses, a granary and a blacksmith’s workshop. The place only bursts into life after lunch when a troupe of young dancers, wearing the polite and thus fully clothed version of traditional undress, put on a brief but lively song and dance show. As one of YouTube’s videos of this show indicates, some of the audience completely misunderstand what they are seeing and think the performers are real villagers who actually live in the thatched round houses. In consequence, they marvel at the dancers’ good English, despite the fact that English is Kenya’s official language.

Context, as they say, is everything, and it is perhaps not surprising that such confusions arise. What is real and what is not? What is authentic and what is concocted from cherry-picked elements of a little remembered past? Even born and bred Kenyans may ask this question of the bizarre circumstances that often arise in a country where multi-cultural idioms too often collide.

After the singing and dancing, visitors may look around the village houses while the young performers try various ways to part them from their cash. The inevitable curios appear. I say, No thank you. I live in Nairobi. A young man grins and suggests that I might like to give them money for beer. A girl hushes him. I begin to suspect that some of them are already a little high. I say kwa heri and move away.

And it’s then that I see the old man, perched on his elders’ stool. At his feet, on a goatskin, are the trappings that suggest the medicine man’s profession. I greet him in the customary way: Hello mzee, how are you? But he does not respond, either to my words or to my presence. This is quite extraordinary behaviour for a Kenyan. The exchange of common courtesies at every meeting – whether with friends or strangers – is de rigeur. At first I conclude that he doesn’t speak Ki-Swahili, but only Kikuyu. Then I wonder if this is all part of his role play. Medicine men and women were august individuals who once wielded great sacred and psychic authority; they would be above casual chitchat with the likes of me. Finally it occurs to me that he might once have been a real medicine man, but can no longer practise his trade.

Then I do the tourist thing and take that photograph.

So why does it still worry me all these years on? Why do I find the Kikuyu Village experience, beyond its light entertainment value, so distasteful?

In some ways the whole thing is well meant, and whatever tourist resort you go to in Kenya there is likely to be ‘the traditional dancing slot’ at some point, usually between the hot buffet lunch and the game drive. Nationally too, much store is set by remembering the old songs and dances, and every afternoon on Kenyan television there would be performances by school children around the country. After all, songs and dances are, like the story-telling tradition, a strong part of any culture’s identity. But then do they work outside the context that gave rise to them? Do they still have intrinsic meaning beyond the exotic outward show for tourists’ delectation?

Perhaps I am only offended by my impulse to want to photograph everything – look, snap, move on; another form of plunder? Perhaps that old man’s withdrawn, sad look more than pricks my conscience. But then perhaps he also feels ashamed of what he does to earn a few bob every day? Might not pretending to be medicine man bring its own form of psychic retribution?

I suppose it comes down to respect. This man looks old enough to remember the last vestiges of his people’s ‘elder days’ before colonial rule finally changed everything. He probably grew up in a house like the ones in the Outspan village. Most likely he would have been born on a Native Reserve, euphemistically referred to as African Land Units. These were demarcated in the early 1900s by the British colonial administration, ostensibly to protect native territories from encroachment by future European settlement. This was especially necessary for the Kikuyu of Central Province. They occupied prime land in the cool highlands that were thought the ideal place to settle by the white pioneers who lived in mortal fear of the sun’s actinic rays and thus had to wear flannel layered spine pads and solar helmets to protect themselves.

Even so, the Kikuyu lost out. When the reserves were being surveyed, the population had been decimated from small pox and famine, and the survivors had fled to relatives in the north. The unoccupied lands quickly returned to bush, and so were deemed virgin territory by the land surveyors. When southern Kikuyu families at last returned to their homesteads they found their land taken by British would-be coffee farmers. This was one of the issues that fuelled the 1952 uprising, this after King George had failed to deliver the justice that Kikuyu elders thought their heartfelt letters to him would surely yield.

Now I suppose this piece is timely for two important events. The first is that the sixty year reign of the British sovereign who became queen while she was in Kenya is now being celebrated. The other, and to me, more important news is that the British Government has just apologised to the Kikuyu victims of the 1950s colonial detention camps, with each of the 5,000 complainants receiving around £2,000 in compensation for torture and mutilation. Most were imprisoned without trial.

And so perhaps finally what this portrait of the old medicine man is telling me is, that all too often we rich, technologized northerners are too ready to judge by appearances, the outward trappings of costume and regalia, and thus come to all the wrong conclusions. We have done this since we arrived on the African continent. I do not know this mzee’s true story, and in a way that seems typical of much of the industrial world’s relationship with the people of the Africa. We tell our own stories in which they feature, but we rarely want to know what really happened. Perhaps it’s time we asked. We might learn something to our advantage.

Windows in Wenlock

In response to Frizztext’s ‘Tagged W’

Here are some scenes of the town where I live, Much Wenlock, a settlement continuously lived in for the last thousand years. For more of its history see my post Of Silurian Shores.

The town grew up around a medieval monastery. This is the tower of Holy Trinity church which survived Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540. It has been our parish church since around 1100 AD. Originally it was part of the monastic complex.

The Priory ruins are now owned by English Heritage. This twelfth century Cluniac Priory was once one of the largest religious houses in Europe. It was built on the site of a much earlier abbey founded in the seventh century by St Milburga, daughter of King Merewald of Mercia. England’s Norman rulers wished to cash in on the sanctity of St. Milburga’s remains as well as making a big architectural statement on the Saxon landscape.

This is street is called The Bullring, once the place for bull-baiting, a popular local sport until the early 19th century.

The Guildhall was built around 1540 as the court house to replace the monastic court after the Dissolution. Town Council meetings are still held here. The ground floor is used for various markets. In this photo, taken in 2012, townspeople are celebrating Much Wenlock’s Olympic Games connections. See Of wolf farts, windmills and the Wenlock Olympics.

The George and Dragon is one of the few survivors of the town’s once numerous inns and public houses. The town’s main industries were limestone quarrying, lime burning and agriculture – all hard-working pursuits guaranteed to build up a thirst.

Raynald’s Mansion (above) on the High Street dates from around 1600.

Ashfield Hall, also on the High Street, was built before 1421. It was possibly built on the site of St. John’s Hospital for ‘lost and naked beggars’. For a time is was the Blue Bell Inn and then a lodging house for itinerant labourers. (A History of Much Wenlock by Vivien Bellamy.)

These ogival windows are a local ‘speciality’.

And some of my windows.

Looking down on the town from the south west, Windmill Hill top right, The Wrekin top left.

WP Challenge: In the Background (MMBA in Zimbabwe)

Weekly Photo Challenge: In the Background

There’s always a lot of background in Africa: MMBA as the colonial British frequently referred to it – Miles and miles of bloody Africa. The origin of this expression is variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Ruark. In any event MMBA is always difficult to capture in a photograph.

The shot above was taken from the hilltop ruins above Great Zimbabwe. The original negative has degraded a little, but the photograph was also taken in winter-time when the landscape of southern Africa anyway takes on the aspect of an ‘old master’ oil painting.

As ever when Team Farrell go travelling, Team Leader Graham was striking out in front – ‘Our Man in Africa’, while Nosy Writer was busy being nosy and fumbling with the settings on her Olympus Trip. Inevitably, TL ended up walking into NW’s line of sight. Here, though, I’m glad he did. He may be in shadow, but he provides a handy foil for the backdrop. It could be a stage set, couldn’t it? There’s definitely a sense of unreality.

And here’s another painterly ‘in the background’ view: the Great Enclosure of Great Zimbabwe with giant aloes in the foreground. Of course, when it comes to the history of this World Heritage site, ‘in the background’ could well have another and wholly insidious meaning. When geologist, Carl Mauch, first visited the site in 1871 he was convinced that the massive dry-stone granite walls were the remains of the Queen of Sheba’s lost city of Ophir. (See also my post on The Swahili). For some decades this view persisted. It was not in the interests of pioneer imperialist Cecil Rhodes for it to be known that Africans had a sophisticated historical heritage. He financed the first excavation by James Theodore Bent whose brief was to ‘prove’ that the complex had been built by the Phoenicians or the Ancient Egyptians. In 1928-9 British archaeologist, Gertrude Caton-Thompson refuted this conclusion, pronounced it African-built but “the product of an infantile mind.”

Some people may be surprised to know how often archaeology is used as a political tool, but it was, and still is.

In the 1960s-70s when Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, was under the white rule of Ian Smith’s regime, history was again re-written. Any historians who dared to state that Great Zimbabwe was built by indigenous Africans put themselves at risk, and their work was censored. This led to the departure from the country of many prominent Rhodesian archaeologists including Peter Garlake, both an expert on the ruins, and Rhodesia’s then Senior Inspector of Monuments. His excavations in the 1960s, and those of Paul Sinclair in 1986 fully demonstrate that from around 1200 AD to c. 1500 AD when it was abandoned, the Shona-speaking Karanga people built and lived in this extensive settlement.

Estimates for the population over this period range from 5-30,000. It was a wealthy centre for cattle rearing and for cereal and cotton growing. Gold from mines further inland was brought into Great Zimbabwe, its rulers acting as middle-men in the trade that extended to the Swahili city of Sofala on the Mozambique coast. In return for gold and ivory, the Karanga imported luxury goods – fine textiles, Persian and Chinese wares, including Ming porcelain.

So much for Cecil Rhodes and his racist agenda. Although even in death this man manages to still make his presence felt. He chose to be buried in the Matobo Hills, territory of Ndebele people, and at a place known as Malindidzimu, Hill of Spirits. From here, also known as World’s View, I imagine that he thought he could continue to ‘rule’ Africa. The locals find the presence of his spirit here in their own sacred place quite offensive.

View from Cecil Rhodes’ grave in the Matobo Hills, and his stated aim: “I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives.”

From his 1877 Confession of Faith

And as an antidote to that dispiriting diatribe here are some more ‘in the background’ views in Zimbabwe:

Gateway in the Great Enclosure, Great Zimbabwe

The mysterious tower inside the Great Enclosure

Me looking small and very young inside the Great Enclosure. The walls are dry-stone granite – not a lick of mortar.

A roadside soapstone artist in Harare. This bust of a Shona elder is a common subject. Zimbabwe has produced some of the world’s outstanding sculptors.

Looking down on the Great Enclosure. For decades many Europeans refused to believe Great Zimbabwe was an African settlement.

Victoria Falls through a misty spray of mighty Zambezi.

Victoria Falls from the Zambian side. Most of the water on this side of the Zambezi is abstracted. My wet kanga wrap nearly took me hang-gliding off the knife edge in a rainstorm, but that’s another story.

Dete school girls, with a train in the background!

And finally, because this is Africa, there has to be shot with some elephants in the background. Taken in Hwange National Park.

Zimbabwe

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The Many Faces of Evelyn Mary Ashford

What does this face say to you? Naivety. Candour. Wistful intelligence. Vulnerability. A time long past?

It is clearly an ‘old photo’, a studio shot. I also happen to know that it was made for wide circulation, part of the subject’s own personal war effort during the early 1940s when she tirelessly wrote cheering letters to numerous servicemen fighting overseas. This is my aunt, Evelyn Mary Ashford, my father’s little sister, thirteen years his junior. In a few weeks time it will be her ninetieth birthday, and although many who know her will mark this day with cards and kind words, it is unlikely that she will fully understand; these days her mind quite inhabits another zone.

Her corporal self, however, lives in a nursing home in rural Wales where she is well cared for. Hers is a strong old body. She has survived a Luftwaffe bombing, diabetes, breast cancer, strokes, repeated acts of medical negligence and, most recently, recovered from a broken hip.

Like many women of her generation, her spirit has also borne years of thwarted ambition, the denial of the higher education that her village school essays prove she deserved. As a country girl she has believed herself socially inferior. As a childless woman she has felt a misfit. As a daughter she has sacrificed her own longings to ‘be someone’ , first to leave school at fourteen years old to care for an invalid mother, later to take in a domineering old father whose presence further blighted the first fifteen years of her marriage. And while the physical wounds of the 1942 bomb blast were exquitisitely repaired – her face was miraculously re-constructed over four years by Professor T P Kilner, a pioneer in Plastic Surgery for disfigured service personnel – the psychological effects of her experience were never addressed.

In the end, you could hardly see the scars as the later photographs below clearly show. But for years afterwards Evelyn reported the emergence of glass shards from all parts of her body. Also there were the years of disfigurement between admissions for plastic surgery to St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, and later to Stoke Mandeville (then a military hospital) where she received her final round of surgery alongside service amputees and burns victims. It was while she was here that she read letters to a young Canadian from the Royal Canadian Engineers. A landmine explosion had blown off his right leg and arm and left him partially blind. She and other patients were also shocked to see the arrival of the first victims released from the Belsen concentration camp. This is how she describes the scene in some lecture notes:

“All along the wall of the Main Hall there were stretchers lined up. Each one carried a skeletal form covered in a grey army blanket which barely disguised the fact that there was very little flesh on brittle bones. Gaunt, hollow eyes turned to look at us. ‘How are they ever going to put those poor souls right again,’ someone said.”

***

I of course have only known the older Evelyn, so I cannot say what it would have been like for her to suffer multiple facial injuries – to effectively ‘lose face’ in all senses. She was nineteen when it first happened, in love, the shining light of her village, and she also earned a living in a very public place as an assistant in Whites, a big Guildford department store.

The effects, though must have been devastating. But then how do you begin to come to terms with your own injuries when you know that others were suffering far worse, or were dead, or that your particular wounds were considered a civilian casualty, and not the product of heroic self-sacrifice in action? Self pity, then, was not only NOT ALLOWED. It was seen as positively unpatriotic. These were the years of the ‘stiff upper lip’, ‘grinning and bearing it’, both hard to pull off with glass-torn flesh. There are, though, some later passing references to unresolved issues. After the bomb blast Evelyn suffered from blistering rages which only her husband, Geoffrey Gibbings, was later to help her to overcome.

Married life c.1953

***

It was December 16th 1942 when the German pilot of the Dornier 217 strafed and then dropped three bombs beside the 1.34 pm Guildford to Cranleigh train. It must have been half-day closing because Evelyn’s account, written a month afterwards, says it was a Wednesday and she was going home from work. The train on this line comprised only two carriages, and she and two other White’s girls, Marjorie and Avis, were the only ones in their compartment.

Evelyn remembered the greyness of the day, the black silhouettes of trees across the farm fields, a swirling misty rain as they approached Bramley. She also said she felt an unaccountable depression. Avis was reading a book, The Sun is My Undoing, and Marjorie was leafing through Evelyn’s copy of the London Illustrated News. Suddenly, as she and Marjorie were chatting, there was a terrific clatter along the train roof – like a shower of hail. Next she says it was

as if someone had given me a crack on the head with a giant hammer and I was going down and down, then round and round into eternity.

When she came to, she found herself hanging out of the corridor window with the remains of the door hung around her shoulders. Through the glassless window she first thing she saw was the three Canadian soldiers who had got on the train with her at Guildford. They were beside the track. One was badly cut and his clothes were in shreds. He held his companion as they sobbed together like children. The third soldier was dead, lying against their knees with a handkerchief over his face. In her muddled state, and before she passed out, Evelyn remembered thinking that they must have been in an accident, and that one of the soldiers was dead. Poor things, she thought.

When she surfaced again it was to find that her own clothes in shreds and that the valise she had put on the seat beside her was pierced through by a shaft of wood. Marjorie had disappeared completely, and Avis lay under the debris, apparently unscathed but dead, with the usual quiet smile on her face. Later, it transpired that Marjorie had been blown out of the carriage. She had lost an eye.

In a 1944 letter to one of her many war-time pen-pals, a young American trainee pilot, Evelyn describes what happened next:

at last I ended up in hospital with no face or clothes to speak of…I opened my one good eye and saw a handsome face smiling down at me. This boy, as he looked to me, was in shirt sleeves and I, thinking he was a student, and being very light-headed…reached up and patted his face saying, “Hello, Sunshine” with the result that he had a lovely blood-stained cheek. He turned out to be the hospital’s leading surgeon and ever afterwards was known as Sunshine Allen.

Seventy years on, there is no way of knowing if Evelyn remembers any of this. Over the past few years she has grown increasingly confused, and after several strokes has been unable to speak very well – a declining state generally described as ‘having dementia’. I know it is said that unresolved anger is a feature of dementia, and there may be a big element of this in Evelyn’s mental retreat – years of repressed frustration perhaps. But wherever her mind is now, I feel it is there, somewhere, tracking in a parallel universe. It is our loss that we can no longer communicate with her in this new world.

As the keeper of her notebooks and letters, the fragments of her life, I now find myself the custodian of her memories. This of course is flawed in many ways. A long family feud meant that I did not really get to know Evelyn until later years. We wrote to one another while I was in Africa, and I knew she always led a hectically busy life within whichever community she and my uncle had made their home. I never had the chance, or even thought to ask her about her life; how it had really been. I knew her only in the present where she was an expert horticulturalist, seamstress, good cook, great reader, great letter writer, dedicated Women’s Institute judge and committee member, animal lover, church goer, former small-time sheep farmer and generous friend to anyone need. I also knew that my mother had been deeply jealous of her.

Evelyn’s archive is not extensive. It includes some of her village school essays from 1936-7, notes for lectures given to her gardening club and the W.I, and a fraction of her lifetime’s correspondence with friends around the world. There are also two day-books of newspaper cuttings and her commentaries upon current affairs dating from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Finally there is a notebook of creative writing pieces.

My aunt wanted to be a writer; was so thrilled when my own work began to be published. All her life she strove to cultivate herself, and on all fronts. There appeared to be no subject that did not interest her. Coming from a background with a Victorian father who thought it more important that his daughter be apprenticed to a draper’s than to go on to high school, and then marrying a stalwartly middle class man who thought wives should stay at home, she later sought her educational opportunities within the seemingly unchallenging sphere of the Women’s Institute’s Denman College. Here she attended all manner of courses whenever the chance arose, then passed on her knowledge wherever she could. At seventy nine, and much to her husband’s bemused irritation, she went to word processing classes so she could write up her lecture notes in a more orderly fashion. Clearing her home, I found her notes on the letters I had written from Africa. Naturally she had turned them into one of her talks.

But perhaps in the end it is best to let the photographs of Evelyn tell their own story. Here, then, are some of the many faces of Evelyn Mary Ashford, glimpses of a life well lived. She truly is an inspiration to all who have had the pleasure to know her.

Evelyn around a year old. She was born at Redhurst Cottages, Cranleigh, Surrey in 1923. Her mother Alice, was a Streatham girl and former cashier for Sainsbury’s. Her father Charles Ashford was Head Gardener at Redhurst Manor. (Below) Aged three, in the walled garden at Redhurst. Her life-long interest in horticulture began in this garden, listening to her father’s instructions to his men.

The Ashford Family, my father Alex at the rear c. 1930

At Pitch Hill, aged around fourteen (1937). This was her last year at school. In an English exercise of that year she wrote: “These are the things that I want in life: 1. A library of my own; 2. All Rudyard Kipling’s Works; 3) lots of money so that I can make poor people happy.” She also wanted to have lots of REAL friends and play Madame Defarge in a stage version of Tale of Two Cities. The people she most wanted to meet included Jean Batten, famous New Zealand aviator, H.G. Wells and Alfred Hitchcock.

In 1941 the 2nd Royal Gloucester Hussars were billeted in Cranleigh where Evelyn’s family lived. This is how Evelyn met her future husband Geoffrey Gibbings. He is taking the photograph of this, the ‘Hoy Gang’ picnic on Pitch Hill. Later that year the 2nd RGH was posted to Libya to fight in the North African Campaign. Evelyn did not see Geoff again until the end of the war.

Evelyn as an ARP (air raid protection) volunteer (left). Looking after mother (right). On the roof of White’s department store with her fellow assistants (bottom).

War’s end and engagement to Geoffrey Scott Gibbings. He twice escaped capture by the Germans while fighting in the desert. (Below) At the New Year’s Eve Southampton Motor Club dance c.1955. After the war, Geoff worked in the motor trade for the rest of his working life. Somehow this last photo tells you everything you need to know about Evelyn. May her dance go on in some part of her mind.

Evelyn Mary Ashford, born 1923

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And many thanks to Su Leslie for her inspiring Shaking the Tree blog on her family history.

Pattern for the Skyscraper

Weekly Photo Challenge: Pattern

Fractured Light by Andy McKeown, Flaxmill-Maltings, Shrewsbury May 11-12 2013

At first sight there may seem to be no connection whatsoever between Andy McKeown’s magical lightshows (Fractured Light) and the skylines of NYC, Dubai, Chicago, Hong Kong. But believe me there is. In fact there are some clues in the photo below, although they are heavily disguised by the giddy maypole effect of light streamers. Architects should spot them, though – the slender columns of cast iron. And this is where the another kind of pattern comes in – not in the spectacle of fractured light, but in the venue. On the 11-12 May 2013 the Friends of the Flaxmill-Maltings held an open weekend so Nosy Writer and hundreds of other nosy people could look round this old industrial complex, perhaps for the last time before renovation work begins. Since the buildings have been lying derelict for decades this was something of a celebration, hence the performances by musicians, craftspeople and artists all over the complex.

Andy McKeown’s ‘Fractured Light’ was up on the third floor of the Cross Mill, and without the entrancing light show the place would have been dank, cold and cavernous. It was originally the mill where hackling or flax dressing took place, and is part of a late eighteenth century iron-framed building – the first of its kind in the world. This is Bage’s Flax Mill in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the place where, in 1796-7, the makings of the skyscraper began.

Photo: Shropshire Archives

Above is the building around the end of the nineteenth century after it had been converted into a malting factory. The main five storey block was the original flax mill. And its connection with the Manhattan skyline?

IS THIS:

…a constructional frame of iron columns and beams that ever since has allowed buildings to go upwards.

As with many great innovations, the development of iron framed buildings was prompted by disaster. In 1796, linen magnate, John Marshall and Shrewsbury businessmen, Thomas and Benjamin Benyon had suffered severe financial losses when their timber-built mill in Leeds, Yorkshire, caught fire. Such fires in textile mills were all too common. Flax and cotton dust are highly combustible, and not only were the early mills built extensively from timber, they were also candlelit. And so when Messrs Marshall and Benyon had the opportunity to develop a new flax mill in Ditherington, Shrewsbury, a fire-resistant building was what they required. And a good part of the answer lay in an up and coming new material – cast iron.

The late 18th century was the age of cast iron. It was the revolutionary material of choice for engineers and architects of vision. In 1781 the spectacular unveiling of the world’s first iron bridge had taken place at Coalbrookdale, a few miles downriver of Shrewsbury. It was a PR stunt of breath-taking proportions: to use this untried material in such a dramatic and highly visible setting. But it was not all bravado. There were practical considerations too: the need to span the Severn in order to make a more convenient road link between various iron works, thus replacing a treacherous ferry crossing. Then there was show-off element of achieving this with a single arch that was tall enough to allow swift passage for the sailing barges that plied the Severn from Bristol to Shrewsbury. Usually these large cargo boats had to lower their masts to go under the Severn’s many stone bridges.

At the time, then, the Iron Bridge was a new world wonder and a magnet for celebrity visitors. Coalbrookdale ironmaster, Abraham Darby III, was the man making his pitch for the utility of cast iron, egged on by business associate John ‘Iron Mad’ Wilkinson whose works across the river from Coalbrookdale were being served by the new bridge. When in 1795, the Iron Bridge was the only bridge to survive unscathed the massive river floods of 1795, it more than sparked the interest of Thomas Telford, ‘Father of Civil Engineering’. At the time he was also in Shropshire, working as County Surveyor. He went on to devise his own astonishing uses for cast iron, not least the Pontcyssylte Aqueduct near Llangollen in North Wales.

But if all this constructional enterprise in iron seems a bit old hat to us now, then perhaps we should try thinking of the River Severn in Shropshire as the Silicon Valley of its day. Cast iron helped drive the Industrial Revolution in all its component parts; it brought us to where we are today.

The world’s first Iron Bridge, built by Abraham Darby III and opened in 1781. Today, it is a world heritage site and still spans the River Severn in Ironbridge, Shropshire.

While technological developments were proceeding in Shropshire, the possibilities of using iron in industrial buildings were also being explored by Derbyshire cotton spinner and architect William Strutt. He was particularly concerned to find a way to make cotton mills more fire resistant. To this end, he developed the shallow arched brick ceilings with tiled and plaster floors that his friend and fellow Derbyshire man, Charles Bage was later to use in the Ditherington Flax Mill. He also used sheet iron to encase the mills’ timber beams to inhibit fire damage. All these measures he discussed by letter with Bage who shared his interests. And in 1776 Bage, just happened to be a wine merchant and surveyor, working in Shrewsbury.

And so as the old A-Team phrase would have it, here we have a good plan coming together. Charles Bage was engaged by Marshall and the Benyon Brothers to design their flax mill. There on the banks of the Shrewsbury Canal that Thomas Telford was just then completing, he would create a quite novel construction in iron, and since this was pioneering stuff, he decided to take nothing for granted. He set about undertaking a series of experiments to test the structural properties and strength of iron, and so established the modern discipline of structural engineering. The papers with his calculations still survive.

The Ditherington Flax Mill, then, was the first mill to be built from brick and iron. It was this mode of construction that led the way for the development of multi-storey, fire-resistant buildings, and whose techniques were later adapted for the rebuilding of Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871.

Cast iron pillar on the ground floor of the flax mill warehouse.

But this is where the story of entrepreneurial enterprise and invention takes a nasty turn. We are, after all, also talking about the growth of the factory and and the enslaving of human beings to the demands of machines and mill owners. In the 1840s there were 800 employees at Ditherington and, as time went on, more than half of the workers were under twenty years old, with some as young as seven. These were the apprentices, mostly orphans and illegitimate children despatched from parish Work Houses in order to learn a trade. At Ditherington, the conditions were reputed to be better than most mills: accommodation in the Apprentice House was strictly segregated, and the welfare and moral upbringing was overseen by a manager. Even so, working hours were long and life was tough. There were cruel and vindictive overseers who beat the children for the slightest mistake, or dipped them head first into a water cistern if they dozed off at their work.

In 1832 there was a House of Commons enquiry into factory working conditions and Ditherington workers gave evidence. One Samuel Downe, born in Shrewsbury in 1804, told the Committee that he began work at the mill from the age of ten. Of his working hours he says:

“We used to generally begin at five o’clock in the morning till eight at night.”

And when he was asked if he had been beaten, he said that once he had been beaten so hard that he could not lie on his back to sleep. The reason given for the brutality was this:

“I had never been in a mill where there was machinery, and it was winter time, and we worked by gas-light, and I could not catch the revolutions of the machinery to take the tow out of the hackles; it requires some practice, and I was timid at it.”

Scene from one of John Marshall’s flax mills in Leeds c.1800, much as his Ditherington Mill would have looked. (Copyright expired)

Despite such indictments, John Marshall saw himself as a benign employer. He believed that treating his workforce well meant they would work harder and yield greater profit. He thus provided ventilation and heating in the work rooms, and in time added baths and changing rooms. Also in 1834 when there were 92 child employees, they were by then allowed two two-hour sessions, morning and afternoon, for lessons.

Even so, the processing of flax on this vast scale, was a dusty, unpleasant business. The crop had to be dried, then de-seeded by threshing and combing. Then it was left to partially rot for up to three weeks so the stems could be peeled away from the useful fibre. Next this fibre was dried, separated and combed by machine and finally twisted into yarn on spinning machines.

Throughout the 18th century, linen was a hugely important textile. In Shrewsbury flax yarn production took over from the dwindling wool industry, employing many of its skilled workers. During the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815) Ditherington was supplying the yarn to make Britain’s military uniforms. But with successive generations of owners, and doubtless the growth of the Lancashire cotton industry, the mill began to fail, finally closing in 1886. Some ten years later it had a new lease of life. The five-storey building was converted into the Maltings, making malt for the brewing industry. These works finally closed 1987, and since then this extraordinary building has been left to fall apart, despite being a Grade I listed building.

Photo: Keith 1999 Creative Commons

This, though, is hopefully about to change. Finally, on the verge of collapse, and after much campaigning by the Friends of Flaxmill-Maltings, a partnership of English Heritage and Shropshire Council has put in a bid for funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Their plans include a massive regeneration scheme, bringing environmentally friendly office and workshop space to a currently depressed part of Shrewsbury. Perhaps at last this landmark structure will have a bright new existence, and just as Andy McKeown’s light show amazed and energized the Open Day visitors, infuse its occupants with life-enhancing potential, banishing the ghosts of dismal exploitation.

In the meantime, Nosy Writer, like many others, is rather keen on scenes of industrial decay. So here are a few shots of the Flax Mill-Maltings – pattern of bricks, timber and iron.

The timber hoist tower was added during the Maltings phase and the ornamental capping put up to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

For more info about the Flaxmill project: http://flaxmillshrewsbury.wordpress.com/

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge