There was no huge divide however. The rest of Gloucestershire was part of our native land. Glo'shire had its own identity overall and we were proud of it. I got to know the area around Stroud and Whiteshill, Paganhill etc quite well because I have relatives there and we would stay with them at Easter, and sometimes at Christmas. These visits were days of excitement and adventure rambling over the Cotswolds during the long sunny days, and sitting beside an open fire at night listening to ghastly and ghostly takes of old.

 

History came early in my life. And its first dawnings and sources seems like a kind of folklore of its own as I think back across over half a century. My school history homework essays would be very long, informative and loaded with illustrations I laboriously constructed. I really did have a positive zest, or a puritanical zeal for it- even getting the history master to set me history projects or homework for the summer holidays!. But long befure then ever since I was a small boy I would ask of my parents that I be taken to a castle wherever we were on a holiday or day trop. Or on a trip out with my dad in lorry away somewhere distant and fabulous. They kindly indulged my passion. Castles were my priority: they seemed like real history to me and spoke of immense actions and profound occurrences. But the architecture of such places fascinated me: the construction of the drawbridge and portcullis, the lay-out of the dungeons, the depth of the wall and arrangement of the arrow slits and so on. And I could be precocious too- I remember of several occasions I had the audacity to correct the guides in some of the castles and palaces where we had conducted tours (simple facts usually to do with whatever king was on the throne). Looking back I think they must have hated this precocious boy making their life a misery! Though I recall with fondness that one guide, at Hastings Castle, a military looking gentleman with a handlebar moustache took up the challenge and asked me questions in front of the group he was guiding, then pleased with my response sort of took me on as an assistant in the next stage of his tour- a demonstration of the construction method of the dungeon and its strange ability to inform jailers what prisoners were talking about: then led me off into a dark recess of the tunnelled dungeons, placed me on one side, then himself on the other and then got me to enact an escape conspiracy, which of course could be heard by the group further back even though conduction in a low whisper. Oh I felt so proud, a sort of initiation into my passion of history. Another glimpse of that possible future life (that sadly never came to be).

 

I had developed a reputation for history at school, it had become a passion of mine. So, for School Open Day when I was 15 or 16  I was asked by our kindly deputy Headmaster Mr.John Bullock JP (who also had a passion for history and not only because he taught it) to undertake a project for the school and make an exhibition on local history.

 

I was given dispensation to be away from school for a week so as to travel the (in those days) immense distance north to Gloucester and go to the County archives in Shire Hall, and undertake what I later learnt was called "research". I stayed with my Aunt Peggy and Uncle Terry near Stroud (they were a joy to stay with and encouraged my intellectual aspirations). Each day I would be up early, had a cooked breakfast and walked down the hill from Whiteshill and caught the bus into Stroud and then another over to the city of Gloucester far away. I loved every second of that week and wished it could last forever and my passion for history suddenly took on a professional streak, glimpses of a career entered my consciousness, I imagined myself one day being a Mortimer Wheeler. But more than that was a quickening sense of history as a living thing which can enrich and modify our lives and behaviour today as Simon Schama remarked in his television series on the history of Britain. It was also a senses of being part of history, or being an element of the lineage of the history of our land and connected to and having a duty for it. All accepted now in the these days of the Royal Society of St.George or the Council For the Protection of Rural England. But in those days I suspect somewhat unusual. I found it hard to convey that sense to others.

 

I researched many topics that week: the history of Grimsbury Farm; Barrs Court and Lord Stafford's estate, murder and mayhem at local pubs; the history of the local coal mines; the development of industry and smelting and metal production- which seemed to pre-empt what happened "up North" years later; local villains; the Cock Road Gang; John Wesley and George Whitfield and the Christianisation of the local mobs; Kingswood Royal Forest; and much more. And one of the subjects I came across was Warmley House and William Champion.

 

Now things have come full circle and again I have found my passion for history and folklore now that I am retired. For history and folklore had been intertwined when I was young. The land itself seemed alive with a spirit of its own and that of our ancestors. And in reality I feel that is how it actually is. Certainly we must bring to our heritage and history a rationale and scientific process to glean more knowledge and make connections and wider our perspective.  But it must not be a reductionism for then we amputate a part of our very being for folklore and myth and legend are but expressions of a history in epic and mysterious forms of a people and its land.

 

Well then what shall I start writing on? Initially, from the depths of my childhood memory (plus some professionlal research) I shall write on the following subjects (many others of course will follow)

1. The Giants Vincent and Gorum.

2. The headless horseman of Warmley.

3. The full-moon midnight walks of Neptune's statue.

4. Hanham Mount.

5. John Wesley and George Whitfield.

6. William Champion.

7. Pirate tales of the Llandoger Trow.

8. The Cock Road Gang.

9. Sally on the Barn.