Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  The Midshire buses did not compete directly with the Winterstoke trams except on a few short stages for they ranged further afield. But the success of the motor bus was too patent to be ignored. The town boundaries had thrust outwards since the tramways had been built, and when the Town Council were faced with the alternatives of extending the tram routes or scrapping them altogether and substituting buses the bus supporters carried the day. So the last trams clanked sadly away into the silence of the scrap-yard and in their place, wearing the same livery of cream and scarlet, the new ‘Winterstoke District’ double-decker buses appeared. But for some years after the old tramlines remained in the streets to trap incautious cyclists.

  Before the war the proud railway companies, so confident in their long-held monopoly of passenger traffic, had hardly begun to regard the motor bus as a serious competitor. After the war its advance was so rapid that it caught the railways, if not napping, at least off guard. While they were making good the arrears of maintenance which had accrued during the war their nimble rival, operating on tracks provided by the State, had achieved an impregnable position by the time the railways fully realized the gravity of the threat to their traffic. The London & North Midland Railway, as the combined Grand Central and Great North-Western Companies now called themselves, sought to take over Midshire Motor Services outright or, alternatively to acquire a controlling interest. Such strategy had worked well enough a century before when the railways had gone to war against the Canal Companies, but they soon discovered that these new bus proprietors were made of tougher metal. Peter Foster refused to be overawed by the majesty of the London & North Midland and declined to surrender to their blandishments. A brief spell of intensified competition ended in the truce of a ‘knock-for-knock’ Agreement over rates and traffic on certain routes. If anything, the honours lay with the Midshire Company. Certainly the crowds on the platforms of Winterstoke station during the morning and evening rush periods were obviously less dense; there were vacant seats in compartments which had always been well-filled, and on many a local train the complement of coaches gradually fell from a crowded eight to a half-empty four. So the road had its revenge at last; it also gave the railways a taste of the bitter medicine which they had meted out to the unfortunate canal companies.

  The decline and eventual eclipse of the Lobstock Canal which accompanied the renaissance of the road makes sad reading. When the Great North-Western Railway Company obtained a controlling interest in the Midshire Union Canal Company they accepted that Company’s obligation to maintain its waterways in a proper navigable condition. As the years went by, however, the railway masters showed themselves to be experts in the art of observing the letter of this obligation whilst totally ignoring its spirit. Superficially, the works appeared to be reasonably well-maintained, but the most vital maintenance work of all, that of dredging, was sedulously neglected. Traders had to reduce the pay-loads of their boats in order to struggle along the mud-choked channels, while ‘stoppages’ due to summer water shortage grew more frequent and prolonged as feeders and storage reservoirs became choked and silted. The Railway & Canal Traffic Act which was designed to remedy these abuses remained to all intents and purposes a dead letter. Canal traders appealed in vain to the Commissioners appointed under the Act but could obtain no redress. A small trader, owning, perhaps, half a dozen canal boats and scarcely able to sign his own name was no match for the Goliath of the Great North-Western which could afford to employ its own staff of legal experts to put up a barrage of casuistic argument in the event of attack. It was, indeed, scarcely to be expected that the North-Western should spend money in the interests of traders who competed with them for goods traffic. The only section of the Midshire Union Canal system which continued to flourish under railway control was one to the North which lay in the territory of the rival Grand Central Railway. Here the North-western concentrated the Midshire Carrying Company’s fleet and harassed the Grand Central very successfully for many years until the amalgamation of the two Companies in 1921 put an end to the game and the Carrying Company was wound up. But the Lobstock Canal, running parallel with the North-Western’s own main line, was fated from the outset. The appearance, in Darley Bank Basin, shortly before the outbreak of war, of canal boats propelled by Bollinder semi-diesel engines seemed to promise a canal revival, but because nothing was done to reinforce the canal banks against the wash from their propellers, the effect of the new boats was to make the condition of the canal rapidly worse so that they defeated their own object. When the war called a temporary truce and both the railways and canals operated under Government control there was a revival of traffic on the Lobstock down to Winterstoke, and Ketton tunnel often reverberated with the steady, purposeful throbbing of the new boats. But so soon as peace returned the traffic fell away and it became increasingly clear that the canal was doomed.

  The end came one night in 1925. The captain of a late travelling motor-boat and ‘butty’ tied up at ‘The Boat’ above Winterstoke top lock and, finding Joe Horner, the lengthman, occupying his usual seat in the bar, told him that he had ‘felt a flush’ as he was travelling through the tunnel. Investigation next day soon found the reason for this sudden and mysterious surge of water: part of the tunnel roof had collapsed, damming the canal with the debris of fallen bricks and spoil for a length of fifty yards. The theory which was advanced to account for the disaster was that the tunnel had been seriously weakened by the subsidence of old workings of the Ketton Colliery. It was hopefully rumoured that negotiations were going on between the railway company and the Great Ketton Steelworks and that as soon as an agreement was reached repairs to the tunnel would be put in hand. But time slid by: months became years and still nothing was done. The few boats in Darley Bank Basin which had at first been kept hopefully afloat leaned wearily away from the quay walls, snapped their rotten mooring lines and sank. Seams cracked and gaped on their cabin panelling as sun and rain bleached and rinsed away their brave decoration; bright painted castles became misty outlines and roses of red and yellow faded to the pallor of moonflowers. Paddle racks rusted, lock gates rotted and the locks themselves became choked with old bicycle and perambulator frames, battered oil drums, tin cans and worn-out motor tyres, all the hideous and useless detritus of the most wasteful civilization that the world has ever known. Finally, after three years had passed, the London & North Midland Railway Company applied for powers to abandon the waterway on the grounds that during those years it had carried no traffic. The L. & N.M.R. Canals (Abandonment) Act, 1929, officially pronounced a sentence of death on the Lobstock Canal which had in fact been carried out long before.

  This Abandonment Act meant more than the closing of an old highway; it brought to an end the small, closed world of the canal, an eighteenth century world which had stubbornly survived until the twentieth. Despite the contribution which the canal had made to the progress of industrial revolution, it had itself preserved the traces of that older, tougher, but freer England which had everywhere been overwhelmed when the black tide swamped the green. To meet one of the long, narrow boats, glowing with barbaric colour and aglint with polished brass gliding slowly along the lonely levels on Barnby Moors as dusk was falling was to be reminded, with a sudden pang of nostalgic anguish, with a sudden stirring of ancestral memory, of that lost England. In some strange way the life of these nomadic people seemed nearer to that of the Iron Age men who sleep in their long barrow on Summersend than to our own; nearer to the life those itinerant story-tellers and ballad singers knew who roamed England before ever the monk Ambrosius wrote his chronicles. A life of material poverty, hard, bitter, often cruel and yet mysteriously enriched. By what? By some brighter memory of lost Eden? As the reflected glow from its lighted cabin faded from the water the traceless passing of the boat would recall the words of the gipsy, Petulengro: ‘There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who wou
ld wish to die?’ But now the canal was dead. The long boats would come no more to Winterstoke and, like the railway navvies before them, their people vanished without trace.

  In the early ’thirties, Darley Bank Basin was transformed. The basin itself was filled in to make a new car park and central bus station. The surrounding warehouses and slum properties were demolished and in their place grew new shops, a new cinema and, occupying one whole side of the square, a great neo-Georgian building of five storeys which housed a new police station and the offices of various departments of local government. Wharf Square, as it was called, was graced by the statue of Henry, first Baron Winterstoke, which was removed from its original site at the junction of High Street and Bridge Street where it had become an obstruction to traffic. From his new eminence Lord Henry appeared to be conferring, with one uplifted hand, a perpetual benediction upon the new subterranean public lavatories (Gentlemen to the right of him, Ladies to the left) which supplemented the original conveniences of green-painted Gothic ironwork erected during his father’s mayoralty.

  Wharf Square was only one of many changes which the Age of Internal Combustion and Electricity brought to Winterstoke. The most remarkable of these changes was the migration from the centre of the town towards its suburbs. Whereas previously its people had crowded together in the black heart of the town in order to be near their work, now the cars and the buses gave wings to their impulse to escape from it. The canal and the railway with their prescribed ways of water and steel had been responsible for compact areas of urban growth, but the new transport, ranging quickly and freely over dustless black roads of tarmacadam, was entirely centrifugal in its effect upon the dense mass of the town. Winterstoke began to sprawl as it had never sprawled before, devouring the surrounding countryside at a prodigious rate. Shopkeepers ceased to live over their shops; houses were converted into offices. All who could afford to do so forsook the centre of the town, drawn outwards by an impulse to live in the country which, because it was a mass impulse, defeated itself. Except for its cinemas and pubs, the centre of Winterstoke emptied itself each evening as soon as the shops closed and became a place of the dead inhabited only by strolling policemen and stray cats until the following morning when the engine-driven tide would turn and bring its population roaring back. Up Emberley Hill, along the Coltisham Road and along Park Road as far as St. John’s Bridge and the new Wendle Bridge Hotel which replaced the Winterstoke Arms, the lines of neat detached villas advanced.

  Because the new suburban Winterstoke has its exact counterpart in every sizeable town in England, there is no need for us to linger in this prim world of privet hedge and raw red tile, of pebble-dash and mock Tudor timbering, of grinning bay window, artificial stone bird bath and aubretia-covered rockery of sooty stone. It was a strange half-world of compromise and pretentious make-believe created by a people who imagined they could combine the advantages of town and country life without the disadvantages of either and succeeded in destroying both. How hygienic were these new ‘all-electric homes’, how convincing a demonstration of the blessings which material progress had showered upon mankind! How consoling to shut out the realities of life’s mysterious and terrible adventure behind a ring fence of the office desk, the golf club, the bridge party, the wireless set, the weekly visit to the cinema and the week-end car ride! Compared with the old crowded courts of Camp, Hanger Lane or Darley Bank, life in these new suburbs was so eminently respectable and law-abiding, so disinfected and dehydrated, that they seemed almost as dead as the cemetery in Lower Leasowe.

  The social strata were even more subtly graded and distinguished in these new suburbs than they had been in the older residential quarters of the town. All the best people lived along Park Road in detached houses set well back from the road in their sloping gardens so that their windows could peer over the park wall. The ghost of that ‘night-shrouded splendour’ of Winterstoke still seemed to haunt the heavy trees of the park to make the neighbourhood, in the house agent’s term, ‘most exclusive’. Next in the social scale were the houses which climbed resolutely up Emberley Hill until they linked the old village with the town. Then followed the semi-detached villas which lined both sides of the Coltisham Road as far as Sir Richard Blenkinsop’s Cedar Lodge, now a seedy guest-house hiding its shame behind a screen of overgrown laurel and rhododendron bushes.

  Besides these contributions of the private builder to the growth of Winterstoke, the Town Council themselves were also active. As long ago as 1890 the Housing of the Working Classes Act had empowered them to ‘acquire, rearrange and reconstruct an area proved insanitary’; also to acquire land on which to build, manage and let what were described in the Act as ‘working-class lodging houses’. But in spite of being thus armed, until the outbreak of war, the back-to-back courts of Ketton, Camp, Hanger Lane and Darley Bank still stood intact. True, they were no longer so grossly overcrowded and they were provided with wash-houses and outside water-closets, but by no flight of fantasy could the most euphemistic house agent describe them as desirable. Even after the war the majority lingered on amidst their sombre slag tips, for the principle adopted by the Council was not to rebuild but to build anew elsewhere and as the demand for housing always seemed to exceed the supply, the rate of demolition by no means equalled that of new building. The Council sowed its first crop of new houses on the remaining lands of the Abbey home farm much to the consternation and impotent fury of the neighbouring residents in that hitherto exclusive neighbourhood. The old farm itself, which still showed remnants of the secular buildings of Winterstoke Abbey, was demolished and the Abbey Cinema now overlooks its site. Whereas this Abbey Estate, as it was called, was simply an extension of the existing rectangular trellis pattern of streets, the next municipal enterprise, the Wendleside Estate which was begun in 1934, was of different form and could be called an early example of a ‘planned conurbation’. Its road system was laid out in the shape of a wheel, a central green and an outer ring road being linked by the spokes of a series of radial avenues. As all the semi-detached council houses which bordered this geometrical pattern were exactly alike, the effect produced by this new estate upon a stranger visiting it for the first time, particularly after dark, was bewildering in the extreme. It was not unlike a maze whose centre was its inner ring where a sense of direction was easily lost. It possessed a certain nightmare quality. For having penetrated to this centre from the Coltisham Road it was possible to imagine oneself perambulating for ever round the disc of trampled turf unable to find the way out. This estate was laid out on the lands of Upper Mill Farm between the Coltisham Road and the river. The farm itself was pulled down. Latterly it had been one of the few prosperous farms in the neighbourhood, growing market-garden produce on a large scale for sale in Winterstoke Market and to several greengrocers in the town.

  The effect of the daily tide of buses and cars which ebbed and flowed between the centre of Winterstoke and its suburbs combined with the rapidly increasing volume of through traffic passing east and west along the High Street and north and south between Church Ambling and Lobstock was to create a major traffic problem, particularly at the point of intersection of these two main thoroughfares. It was to relieve congestion at this point that the statue of Henry Blenkinsop was removed to Wharf Square. Yet the problem remained. Long lines of buses, cars and lorries throbbed and fumed head to tail in a haze of blue vapour while a sorely-tried police force struggled to prevent the engine-driven torrent from becoming irrevocably dammed up. Traffic signals, roundabouts, parking prohibitions, speed restrictions and one-way traffic schemes, all were introduced to assist the police and to prevent confusion from becoming worse confounded. Roads were widened where possible and a new bridge of reinforced concrete was built over the Wendle at St. John’s beside the old medieval bridge which was referred to as a ‘bottle-neck’ and was showing signs of strain under the continuous burden. Yet all these expedients were to a great extent nullified by the persistently increasing volume of traffic. After one A
ugust Bank Holiday a correspondent of the Winterstoke Sentinel reported the spectacle of a motionless line of vehicles extending from the High Street traffic lights as far as the Wendle bridge. Finally, in 1933, the Ministry of Transport authorized the construction of the Winterstoke By-pass.

  This new road with its dual carriageways described an are round the south-eastern part of the town. From a junction with the Lobstock Road near the entrance to the Great Ketton Steelworks it burrowed under the Ketton curve of the old Great North-Western Railway, skirted the station marshalling yards, and crossed the railway and the river at Upper Mill to join the Coltisham Road at a large new roundabout by ‘The Cedars’ guest house. Traffic travelling from west to east was thus able to avoid the centre of the town altogether by turning right in the direction of Camp and Darley Bank before reaching St. John’s Bridge, left into the Lobstock Road at the ‘Woodcolliers’ (now a palatial establishment in the Tudor style) and from thence on to the by-pass. It was of equal value to the Coltisham—Lobstock traffic.