The Good Old Coaching Days, Trouble with the Locals, and the Great Way Round

The Troublemaker Sacheverell and the Quest for Georgian

Dr Henry Sacheverell was born in Marlborough in 1674, a son of the rector of St Peter’s Church. He became an outspoken high Anglican Oxford don who was impeached and tried in Westminster Hall for publishing a sermon condemning the Whig government for undermining church and state by being too soft on dissenters. The London mob enthusiastically backed Sacheverell by sacking and burning six dissenting chapels. His trial and the subsequent unrest directly led to the government falling from power in August 1710. The 18th century began with controversy but quickly quietened down as Marlborough increasingly became a stop en route to the fashionable spa town of Bath. The Georgian style that Bath inspired took root as Marlborough copied it. The High Street contains many old buildings, a high proportion from the 18th century. Nikolaus Pevsner in his “Buildings of England” comments, “Nearly all that matters is Georgian.”

At that time it was fashionable to build high classical facades to the front of town buildings, which had the deliberate effect of hiding the roofline, which was considered vulgar. The Royal Oak has the base of its roof hidden in this way. Many of Marlborough’s buildings started with heavily pitched roofs “modernised” in the 18th century. Looking behind the roofline can reveal more about a building than the much-altered front.

Wykeham House, in blue and red brick trim, displays lead rainwater pipes bearing the date 1761. It has a pedimented doorway on classical Doric columns, the pediment being the triangular structure above: in the 18th century it was the “in thing” to have your front entrance embellished in this way. The “Ivy House Hotel”, a very elegant mid-Georgian building, also has a pedimented doorway and the “Merlin” has a fine early 18th century front with segment-headed windows and a centre bay flanked with paired pilasters imitating the classical style that was flourishing in Bath.

The use of Venetian windows, those with a central round-arched light flanked by oblong ones either-side, reflects the fashion of the Georgian period. Venetian windows are sometimes known as Palladian windows after the style of the 16th century Italian renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio.

Marlborough and the Coaching Trade and the Great Way Round

The 18th century saw a rapid rise in road traffic as the turn-piking of the London to Bath and Bristol road allowed faster, safer and more comfortable travel. The first mail coach in Britain passed through Marlborough on 2nd August 1784, heralding the golden age of coaching, which was to last until the advent of the railway half a century later. Timeless images of these “coaching days” often appear today on Christmas cards, and images of olden England, evoking tradition and longevity, when, in fact the period only lasted for two generations before the steam locomotive destroyed it.

Bath’s popularity as a spa town helped to increase the wealth and prosperity of Marlborough’s innkeepers and farriers. At its height, 44 coaches a day changed their horses in Marlborough. The town’s inns, taverns and stables did a roaring trade. In other respects, however, the town never got over the disasters of the 17th century. Marlborough’s cloth trade declined and died as the textile revolution hit the west Wiltshire and east Somerset towns of Trowbridge, Bradford-on-Avon and Frome. The Kennet and Avon Canal, opened in 1810, providing inland navigation between London and Bristol, missed Marlborough passing through Devizes instead. The industrial revolution had the effect of moving production away from small towns like Marlborough. Because of this the expanding Bath stone and the growing Somerset coal mining industries had little impact on Marlborough. The later sarsen stone industry was to prove to be too little, too late to have much impact on the town’s economic fortunes.

When the railway came, it too missed Marlborough. Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway from London to Bristol was opened in 1841. Its route took it through Swindon, twelve miles north of Marlborough, in a great loop to avoid the Marlborough and Berkshire Downs. At a stroke it killed the lucrative coaching trade. To Marlborough people, the initials GWR meant not Great Western Railway but “Great Way Round”.

Trouble with the Locals: the Swing Riots and Repression

By 1841, Marlborough was already suffering from severe social and economic problems. In November 1830 it had been at the centre of the last great labourers’ revolt, better known as the Swing Riots, when half-starved agricultural labourers rioted and destroyed threshing machines that were depriving them of essential winter work. Incendiary fires were started on the hayricks of farms where the owners were known to be hostile or unsympathetic to the labourers’ plight. On 22nd November special constables were sworn in at a meeting held at the Duke’s Arms Inn in Marlborough. The disturbances were eventually suppressed by a combination of mounted yeomanry and special constables organized by the landowners.

Amongst numerous incidents, on 23rd November 1830, a crowd of working people came to blows with the forces of law and order at Rockley. They were intent on destroying the threshing machines at Temple Farm. During the affray Oliver Codrington, a special constable from Marlborough, was struck and wounded by a hammer thrown by one of the rioters, Peter Withers a 23 year old blacksmith from Ogbourne St Andrew. A county magistrate Thomas Baskerville, who was involved in the disturbance at Rockley, is cited as seconding a resolution to immediately ask for help from Bow Street to investigate the causes of fires. Requests were also made for troops to be sent to the neighbourhood and rewards offered for information leading to the conviction of fire-raisers.

Of the 339 cases heard at the Salisbury special commission in January 1831, 152 resulted in transportation to the penal colonies in Australia, more than from any other county. Peter Withers was sentenced to death. It emerged in court that Codrington had been only slightly injured and the hammer which struck him had been thrown by Withers after a ferocious attack by Codrington with a hunting whip loaded with iron at the end. Despite facing exile or, in Withers’ case death, the rioters stood up to their accusers in court. Comparing the bearing of the Wiltshire rioters with the Hampshire rioters at the Special Commission in Winchester, the special correspondent of the “Times” newspaper reported,

The prisoners here turn to the witnesses against them with a bold and confident air: cross-examine them, and contradict their answers, with a confidence and a want of common courtesy, in terms of which comparatively few instances occurred in the neighbouring county.

Withers had his sentence commuted to transportation for life. Sadly, he never saw his wife and five children again.

The difficulties didn’t end with the Swing Riots. Poverty and lawlessness continued to be major problems. When the Marlborough Workhouse was built at the top of Hyde Lane in 1837, poverty itself seemed to have been made into a crime. Perhaps it is no surprise that Wiltshire had the first County Constabulary in the country; established in Devizes in 1839.

The workhouse had been built as a result of the 1834 poor law amendment act which had, as its main object, the ending of outdoor relief to the able-bodied poor. The Swing Riots of 1830 had been a spontaneous outburst by agricultural labourers against rural poverty. It is unsurprising, in the wake of these unprecedented outbreaks, that the government wanted to end the problem of rural poverty once and for all.

The workhouse system, which emerged from the poor law amendment act, was made possible by the amalgamation of parishes into poor law unions for the purpose of administering poor relief. One workhouse would, in future, serve the needs of many parishes. The poor rate raised would be sufficient to build and maintain this workhouse. The Marlborough union included 14 parishes, all of which sent guardians to weekly meetings.

The Marlborough union workhouse’s early years were fraught with difficulties as it was bitterly resented by the local poor. A riot in January 1849 resulted in the kitchen being wrecked and windows smashed. A meeting on 10th January revealed the extent to which the guardians had lost control,

The Guardians present inspected the damage done in the kitchen and other places by the able bodied inmates. Ordered that the windows be mended by rough Boarding or in such other manner as shall protect the inmates of the house (except those in the able bodied Men’s Ward) from the inclemency of the present weather and season but the board will not incur any expenses however trifling in reinstating either the present or any future wilful damage that may be done to the House by the inmates until proper protection is afforded to the officers and property of the Union by the punishment of the offenders and the due enforcement of discipline.

It is significant that the windows in the able bodied men’s ward were to be left un-boarded. As it was the middle of winter, this was presumably to serve as a punishment to those who had rioted. Control was tightened as the 19th century progressed, but it was obvious that the workhouse continued to be hated and resented. The rioters of 1849, by the destruction of property, were reacting to poverty in a similar way to the Swing rioters of 1830.

Marlborough Union Workhouse survives today as a much renovated complex of retirement homes. The original plaque still bears the name of the builder and architect as well as the word “workhouse”, which the developer erased in 1998 but was ordered by Kennet District Council to re-instate. Local people had complained that the past was being wiped out as the real history of this place was being deliberately concealed.. The symmetrical courtyards, the radiating wings, and, most significantly, the imposing panopticon rising above the entire building and commanding views of every part of every courtyard, mark the workhouse as essentially a prison. As a monument to social history, it marks and commemorates the grinding poverty of past times and the reaction of political authority to it. The poor law guardians were responding to a national law: it was not their idea to build a workhouse. As such, this building possesses a national significance in British social and public history.

Yet this building has a still deeper, more profound significance. Even main-stream histories acknowledge a link between the Swing Riots and the poor law amendment act. As far as reform of the poor law was concerned,

The agrarian disturbances of 1830 brought matters to a head.

The workhouses were built as engines of social control. Their function was to ensure that those in poverty would be segregated from the rest of society and, therefore, unable to participate in the kinds of challenges to law and order as had been so recently seen in the desperate events of 1830. The Marlborough union workhouse building memorialises those events and the people caught up in them: it is a reminder to the social injustice and poverty of those times.