Around 200 people gathered at the top of Stroud High Street at midday on Saturday and paraded a wicker effigy of a mill owner through town and to Wallbridge, where they threw him into the canal to commemorate protests in the town 200 years ago.
While gathered, they heard a reading of a piece by local historian Stuart Butler, songs from the Cryptids Choir and a rallying speech from educator Meg Campbell. The Stroud Water Riots were a series of protests that took place throughout the year of 1825 and were started by mill workers who were being paid poverty wages and couldn’t afford to live.
Twenty-one protestors were arrested and many imprisoned at Horsley correctional facility, where they would have been subjected to hard labour. They threw mill men and strike breakers into the mill ponds and in Wotton-under-Edge they burnt their looms. The strike gathered 6,000 at Selsley, 3,000 at Stinchcombe and catalysed solidarity strikes from stonemasons and carpenters.
People from across different cultural and political organisations, including SISTER (Stroud in Internationalist Solidarity Together for Earth Repairs), the Green Party, Periscope artists collective – who made the effigy – the RYSE (Radical Youth Space for Educations), Dialect writers group, and Cryptids Choir, came together to mark the anniversary and invited everyone to help throw the mill owner in the canal.
The event was part of the Decolonial Open Communiversity, a process that brings together people from around the world to tell the stories of resistance to power and injustice in their communities, learning from history and from each other to create more imaginative and affective action that can change the world for the better.
Attendee Quinn, 27 said: “The power of people coming together in their communities, and the number of people who joined us today mimicked the walk that the mill workers took in their communities 200 years ago.”
March organiser Meg Campbell, 24, added: “The world feels bleak right now. We’re looking at a future of increasing chaos, while already communities are struggling – there’s no houses, people are working and are still in poverty and young people are fighting for their own mental health.
“I want to share a quote from Kofi Klu, a Pan-Afrikanist we’ve had the honour of working with and learning from over the last number of years: ‘The best pages of history are the ones ordinary people of conscience decided to write.’ The mill owner represents the systems we are fighting against – not one bad boss, it’s the whole damn thing.”
