Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  The natural tendency of ruthless commercial competition towards monopoly which first became apparent in the great railway age was a process which the widespread introduction of mass production methods greatly intensified. Only the most powerful of business organizations could afford the capital outlay which the new machinery involved and their weaker competitors found themselves faced with the choice between amalgamation and extinction. So rapid was this process in the motor industry that whereas in the nineteen-twenties there had been over a hundred firms in the trade, by 1939 six organizations were responsible for ninety per cent of the output of English cars. The same process was going on elsewhere though less obtrusively. Although the Great Ketton Steel Company retained a nominal identity, in fact, after the slump, it became a subsidiary of the Universal Steel Corporation. By the same token many of the small manufacturers in the town went out of business during the depression, and from the flux of closure and amalgamation there eventually emerged two new factories on the Winterstoke by-pass: The United Pressed Steel Company (known in the town as the ‘U.P.S.’) and Allied Iron Founders Limited. These were joined in 1937 by a new flotation of the Universal Steel Corporation known as Special Stress Alloys Limited, which worked in close association with Great Ketton. These new shops of brick and asbestos roofing with their rows of barrel-shaped ventilators were largely hidden from the by-pass by office blocks whose angular neon-lit façades defied architectural description. That there was a marked affinity between them and the architecture of the Seville Cinema was obvious. Their managements would probably have described them, if asked, as ‘modern’ or ‘functional’, though precisely what function their curious embellishments and the strange ‘vertical features’ which reared above their entrances performed it was hard to say.

  A characteristic of all Winterstoke’s industries, new and old, in the nineteen-thirties was their impersonality. The complexity of their machinery was matched by a human organization which was equally complex. At the time that the Darley Bank Forge was reorganized by Henry Blenkinsop the elaborate hierarchy of control which he set up had seemed impersonal enough after the old régime of the Leeds family. But, at least, the whole pyramid from Henry downwards had still been based on Winterstoke. Henry might exist upon a height so exalted that many of his employees would never see him, but he was still known to be there, and was still the ultimate ‘gaffer’. But now, in the era of mass production and monopoly, personal responsibility was so diffused, so lost in the financial and material ramifications of nation-wide organizations that, with the sole exception of the Foster Car Company, there was no longer any enthroned industrial deity in Winterstoke. The commercial destinies of the town were now determined by decisions reached in remote offices, offices in Sheffield, in Birmingham or in London’s Victoria Street or Milbank. In Winterstoke there were only managements who were as much at the mercy of such decisions as the labourers who swept the factory floors. Commercial considerations of international scope quite beyond the ken of anybody on the spot might cause the Universal Steel Corporation to close down their Great Ketton steel plant with little regard for, or knowledge of, the local consequences of such a decision. Indeed at one time such a closure was actually contemplated. As individual industries disappeared one by one or became merged in huge and amorphous monopolies, the old ‘Captains of Industry’ disappeared also. Thus Robert Foster, first Baron Emberley, was the last in the line of great men who, by their enterprise, their immense energy and their boundless material ambition, rose from the ranks of their fellows to shape the course of this history of Winterstoke for good or for evil. Had their place been taken by better and wiser men less obsessed by ambition and the will to power we should have no cause to regret their passing. But an age which was learning, in the name of democracy, to disparage any mark of individual greatness, good or bad, merely exchanged the devil for the deep blue sea of the Board, the Commission, the Committee and the Government department. This no less materialistic world was filled by men whose names find no place in this history; smaller men, place seekers, time servers and jealous little demagogues angling for the pomps and the heady vanities of power and authority but scrupulously avoiding the risks of power: its lonely insecurity and the great responsibility of individual decision.

  This passing of commercial control away from Winterstoke was inevitably accompanied by a similar decline in the autonomy of local government. When a town is no longer in command of its commercial destinies, then every aspect of its local administration must become increasingly subordinated to centralized control or chaos may result. Hence the fact that civil servants representing the Ministry of this or the Ministry of that began to usurp the functions hitherto exercised by locally appointed men in the large new office block in Wharf Square.

  Until 1930 industry had continued to observe the river boundary line by keeping itself to the south of the town, and Blenkinsop’s Brewery had remained the sole interloper on the north bank. But, far below ground and unknown to most of the inhabitants of north Winterstoke, the miners of ‘Ketton Deep’ had tunnelled their way under the river like industrious moles and were working beneath their feet. It caused no little consternation amongst the inhabitants of the neat semi-detached villas along the north side of the Coltisham Road when these blackened troglodites from the hinterland of Ketton broke surface a mere quarter-mile away from the boundary of their back gardens. What had happened was this. In view of the need for economy in a struggling coal industry, the Ketton Company decided that the cost of underground haulage from such distant coal faces to the ‘pit eye’ at Ketton had become too great. So having acquired the necessary land they proceeded to sink a new shaft which became known as Emberley Heath Pit and to build from it a short mineral branch railway which crossed over the Coltisham Road and joined the main line in a fan of new sidings near Summersend Junction. If Thomas Winter had not been forced, shortly before his death in 1925, to sell Low Emberley Farm, whose lands the new pit occupied, he might have resisted this intrusion although it is doubtful whether the impoverished lord of a diminishing manor could have successfully withstood the might of Great Ketton. The new owner of Low Emberley whose most profitable crop was the Coltisham Road villas, accepted with alacrity the handsome sum which the Steel Company offered for his farm. There is little room for regrets when the shoe pinches, and the place was worth next to nothing as a farm. No one but a sentimental fool would put any money into farming in 1930. So the spoil buckets from Emberley Heath Pit swung along on their overhead cables over the green fields to build new black mountains of waste, and the inhabitants of Coltisham Road soon enjoyed a similar landscape to that which their neighbours at Camp and Hanger Lane had for so many generations surveyed.

  The society created by industrialism could be likened to an engine whose speed cannot be governed. Notwithstanding the feverish efforts of philosophers, politicians and economists to devise some more reliable method of control, periodically its speed rises to a pitch where catastrophic disintegration becomes inevitable. So far no mechanic has seriously suggested that this may be due to any fundamental error in the design of the whole machine; trouble with the governor is the invariable diagnosis for its every defect. So the engine is repaired and set running again and another cycle of acceleration and explosion begins. As at each rebuilding the engine is capable of running at higher revolutions, disintegration when it comes is the more disastrous. In the late ’thirties it became increasingly obvious even to the most optimistic that such another explosive breakdown was imminent. The Munich crisis of 1938 made it clear that the outbreak of a second European war was only a question of time and a phase of inertia was succeeded by one of pessimistic energy. Air-raid shelters were dug in Winterstoke Park, and in every square, open space or street of sufficient width surface shelters and ‘static water’ tanks began to appear. In more and more gardens and backyards family shelters were to be seen, pathetic answers to the threatened terror from the skies. The Air Ministry requisitioned High Emberley Farm. A fleet
of roaring bulldozers and graders swept away trees, hedgerows and buildings to make the prairie-like desolation of runways, camouflaged hangars and Nissen huts which constituted His Majesty’s Royal Air Force Station, High Emberley. The Foster Car Company built what was called a ‘shadow factory’ at Darley Bank, and those who affected to be ‘in the know’ began to spread incredible rumours of great underground machine-shops quarried out of the heart of High Hanger Hill. A large new factory quite unlike its neighbours was built with remarkable speed near the eastern end of the by-pass. Covered with black and green camouflage paint its long, low single-storeyed buildings covered all the ground between the road and the railway. It did not advertise itself. Only an unpretentious bronze plate beside the office entrance announced that it was: ‘Pre-fabricated and Hydraulic Aircraft Components (1938) Ltd.’ Finally, in the following year another new factory of similar character appeared which called itself ‘The Electronics Development Corporation, Ltd., Winterstoke Division.’ Even among those who worked in these new by-pass factories, there were very few who knew the functions of the mysterious and complicated looking gadgets which they produced. Lorries hustled them away, carefully packed, to unknown destinations.

  The declaration of war in September 1939 was marked by none of the scenes of jingoistic enthusiasm and excitement which had marked the previous declaration of August 1914. The new generation in Winterstoke knew better. Some found themselves anxiously scanning the skies, half-expecting that swift annihilation by aerial bombardment which the Jeremiahs had prophesied. Others were mainly concerned to get their children evacuated to ‘safe areas’ as quickly as possible. Long trainloads of ‘evacuees’ pulled out from the Central Station, and when the children of Camp, Hanger Lane and Ketton arrived in the ‘reception areas’ their hosts were surprised and shocked to discover that England still had slums. They had hitherto associated slums with the England of Charles Dickens and were appalled by these verminous little creatures with the domestic habits of animals that had never been house-trained.

  After all this foreboding and anxious preparation the ‘phoney war’ which lasted through the long hard winter and into the belated spring was an anti-climax, a wearisome prolongation of nervous tension. Then came the fall of France and the threat of invasion which brought the hastily constructed road blocks, the concrete blockhouses, the removal of signposts and the recruitment of the L.D.V. In September the first ‘blitz’ was launched on London; Winterstoke flew a circle of silver barrage balloons and at nightfall the bombers, heavy laden with their deadly freight, roared up from High Emberley in increasing strength on their missions of retaliation. During all this time Winterstoke lay every night expectant and silent under the dark apprehensive blanket of the black-out—but nothing happened. It was not until a night of full moon in March, a ‘bombers’ moon’ they called it now, that Winterstoke heroically received its long dreaded ‘baptism of fire’. It was the town’s first experience of the ‘total warfare’ of industrial society since the Zeppelin raid of twenty-five years before. But how great the progress in the technique of destruction since then! The warning sirens had sounded many times before, but this time, as their wailing died away the whole sky, it seemed, began to pulse with the throbbing of high-flying aircraft. From the encircling hills of High Hanger, Summersend and Emberley, searchlight beams made a pyramid of light overhead and then suddenly the whole horizon seemed to become alight and alive with flashing fire as the deafening barrage of Bofors and naval guns opened up. The first wave of aircraft dropped a shower of well-directed incendiaries which, by an unlucky chance, set fire to the gasworks. Along this bright flare-path the following waves flew in to drop their loads of high explosive. The first bomb to fall was short of the target area. It scored a direct hit on ‘Highways’, the large house which Robert Foster had built for himself near the Winterstoke Golf Course, and the first Baron Emberley perished with all his family. By one of those ironical freaks which often occurred in the ‘blitz’, the last bomb of this stick fell in the centre of Wharf Square and toppled Henry Blenkinsop from his pedestal. Next morning his headless trunk was found half buried in a deep crater surrounded by fragments of glazed earthenware and twisted pipes which represented all that remained of the public lavatories. So a single bomb aimer, unknowing and unknown, put an end to the last of Winterstoke’s great men.

  The damage caused to the town by its one great air raid of the war was so haphazard, so irrational and purposeless that a visitor from some more rational age before man’s conquest of the air would have found himself quite at a loss to account for it. Of all the legitimate targets for attack, only the Great Ketton Steel Works and the railway yards, neither of which were able to black-out their activities completely, suffered any substantial damage. The authorities congratulated themselves on the miraculous escape of Winterstoke’s ‘key industries’ and her power station. That St. Cenodoc’s Church was a roofless shell, the Theatre Royal destroyed and hundreds of homes either seriously damaged or reduced to rubble with great loss of life was deeply regrettable but of less account. The homes of the machines were safe; in this war of machines, that was of paramount importance.

  The majority of the bombs had not fallen so very wide of the mark, for it was the quarters of the town nearest the mines and factories, Camp, Hanger Lane, Darley Bank and Ketton which were the hardest hit. The long overdue demolition which the Town Council had failed to accomplish had now been carried out in one night with remarkable efficiency. Had it not been for the death roll involved, this drastic surgery could scarcely have provided any cause for regret. Unfortunately, however, it cannot be said that the new rows of ‘Pre-fabs’ represented much of an improvement upon their predecessors. Admittedly they were described as temporary housing and they did, in the shortest possible time, provide shelter for the bombed-out families. But to-day these little white metal boxes, rather bleared now with grime, still terrace the slopes of the hills. For all their hideous squalor, at least the old courts suggested a kind of crude and violent life and a certain permanence. In fact they had proved all too permanent until war destroyed them. But the new ‘pre-fabs’ suggested neither life nor permanence. Resembling some ephemeral shanty town growing, mushroom-like, about a new oil well or a lucky gold strike; further removed from any conception of architecture or craftsmanship than the crude thatched huts of the railway navvies, these machine-made dormitories with their underground bolt-holes represented a civilization that was nearing the end of its tether.

  In the first world war it was not until the submarine blockade began that the vulnerability of industrial England was realized. In 1939 the additional and far more deadly menace of far-ranging enemy bombers to a country dependent on supplies from overseas markets for over sixty per cent of its food was recognized from the moment that war was declared. Once again the fool’s paradise of the industrial economist was rudely shattered and England was forced to look to her land as a source of life instead of as a blank space on the map waiting to be scribbled upon by the industrialist, the road maker, the town planner or the builder. So William Winter of Emberley found himself courted by Government, all unmindful in their panic anxiety of their predecessor’s broken faith, just as his father had been twenty-five years before. A family who had obstinately refused tempting offers from speculative builders and who were regarded in Winterstoke as eccentrics, and obstructive, if not selfish, reactionaries, now emerged yet again into the limelight from their moated stronghold. Once more, as in 1917, the word went out to speed the plough, but this time there was a significant difference; the plough could no longer speed so far as it had done before. Low Emberley Farm had been lost to the Universal Steel Corporation and Emberley Hill to the Air Ministry. Everywhere in the Wendle valley the green had been in full retreat since 1917 and fields which had then grown corn had been lost beyond any recall. In this respect the age of the internal combustion engine had been far more swiftly and extensively destructive than the whole century long age of steam. No crops would ever grow
again on the rich market garden lands of Upper Mill or on the broad acres of the Abbey Home Farm. Along the by-pass with its sprawling factories, along the old main roads, everywhere the acid of an urban civilization had eaten its corrosive way into the green. Even those parts of Summersend and High Hanger Hills which had not been scarred past redemption by industry had been lost to agriculture forever. They now wore the dark, dense fleece of Forestry Commission conifer plantations and, when the time came to clear-fell them for pit props or pulp, their barren, acid soils would quickly leach away down the steep slopes to leave insufficient fertility to nourish even the hardiest of sheep. These ravished lands of the Wendle valley formed only a small part of the total of three and a half million acres which had been lost to agriculture in England and Wales since 1891. Yet there were now fourteen million more mouths to be fed. Because even fewer men could be spared to till the land than in the first world war, machinery invaded the fields upon a scale never before seen in England. More powerful tractors, multi-furrow ploughs, gyro tillers, combine drills, combine harvesting machines as large as cruiser tanks, all lumbered into the fields with one object—to cash in as speedily as possible upon the fertility which the fields had stored up during their years of neglect.

  Whether William Winter, with generations of experience behind him, really approved of this new expediency farming it is impossible to say. For if he did not he had no option but to keep his thoughts to himself. His cropping policy was dictated by the Midshire War Agricultural Executive Committee, and the machines which roared over his land were theirs. Perhaps, too, the knowledge that he was to be the last Winter of Emberley made him lose heart. His only son, Flight-Sergeant Hugh Winter, was rear gunner in one of the Wellingtons which roared away into the dusk one evening from High Emberley and never returned.