Tag: ghost signs

Ghostly presences

Ghost sign on a wall in Bladud’s Buildings, Bath

It would be nice to be able to believe that the story of Bladud – the mythical king who founded Bath after noticing his rather scabby pigs liked to roll in the black mud of the heated swamp that was once all that existed of the Georgian/Roman/1960’s redevelopment horror – was so fanciful that no-one, not even a PR consultant, would ever come up with such a fanciful story again. Such people still exist in droves as hack journalists and are only too happy to use Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 11th century yarn to attract visitors/shoppers to the City. Naturally they’re not coming for the black mud any more, and leprosy has dropped off the radar for the well-to-do; but they are coming to experience the rather confusing melange of Roman Bath and Jane Austin’s Bath alongside a bit of shopping and more chain restaurants than you could shake a stick at. We don’t mention slavery except perhaps to mention the brave attempts to abolish it. Kingsmead doesn’t feature much in the story because it was heavily bombed in error by enemy pilots during the war who were using an old version of Google Maps and missed the Abbey and the Admiralty offices by a quarter of a mile. Kingsmead has always had a bit of a reputation which it clings to even after the loss of the medieval brothels, stinking dye works and unruly drinking dens. We’ve had two stabbings, and a drugs arrest since we got back from Cornwall on Monday. Bladud, just to clarify things, was not a Georgian builder and had no hand in building the rather lovely terrace that bears his name. But hey! truth is whatever you want it to be and if you’d like to believe that the Bell Inn on Walcot Street was landlorded in the sixth century BCE by King Lear (Bladud’s Son) be my guest. You’ll be working for the Conservative government in no time.

Sorry, honestly, for that little eruption of bile, but living in the gulf between what we experience every day and how the media chooses to report it is depressing and debilitating in every way. However back to ghost signs, and the one in the photo was only uncovered in July of last year, and all credit to the owners who understood that historical relics like this are a marvellous reminder of the real life of the City in the past. Actually there are two signs, and the one underneath can be dated to around 1847. You can check it out on the Akeman Press website run by Andrew Swift, the author of some of the best historical guides to Bath. We ordered one of his books online and they delivered it by hand!

These ghostly remains are a powerful reminder that we don’t live exclusively in the present, whatever the therapists may tell us; we really can be in two places, or two centuries at once, and that experience can be profoundly important. Seeing and touching the insignificant artifacts of the past stretches the imagination and informs a kind of empathy with the challenging and different cultures of the past. I was once asked if I was a member of the “Somerset Poles”. I assumed that the question referred to the direct descendants of Margaret Pole, 15th Century Countess of Salisbury, and for all I know I could be. What I didn’t realize until last year, was that there are many more people with my surname living in places like South Stoke than I’d ever known about. There are family stories about my dad going to visit to old aunts “somewhere near Cheddar” who were part of my great grandmother’s family; so yes I probably am a Somerset Pole but I harbour no delusional thoughts about living in one of those grand Georgian houses. My first thought on seeing those ghostly signs was to imagine myself driving a small cart down the street, collecting urine for the dye works. I’m really not gentleman material.

The signs also remind me that I won’t be here forever. Andrew Swift suggests that an early owner of the building would have been the surgeon and apothecary William John Church. Where is he buried? who knows? There are no surviving grateful patients or litigious failures to ask and in any case he moved on when the eye infirmary set up shop. I can close my eyes and imagine well heeled patients entering and leaving through that very door. People began coming to Bath in Georgian times because they were often sick and believed that the sulphurous waters could make them well. Later, when it became fashionable, there’s no doubt that some of the visitors could have been found in the brothels of Kingsmead and up the London Road.

Bath has an incredible abundance of ghost signs and most visitors hurry past without looking up at them but for me they’re better than all the carefully curated signage. Dog food, engine oil, eye infirmaries, dairies, cafes; in fact all the everyday stuff tells us more about Bath than the glossiest shop window. When I was a child and we caught the bus into Bristol, I was always intrigued by a sign above a fairly grubbly looking shop front in Old Market. It announced “Ace Erections” by way of a curly neon tube in red. I always thought it was a building company!

Ghost Signs

Wittgenstein wrote of thinking that one cannot see one’s way around, saying ‘We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.” And while on the topic of philosophy in general and Wittgenstein’s philosophy in particular, I should like to take this chance to pass on a piece of advice that I have kept in mind throughout the writing of this book, remembering it as his on one of the two occasions when he took part in a public discussion in Oxford. Wittgenstein interrupted a speaker who had realized that he was about to say something that, although it seemed compelling, was clearly ridiculous, and was trying (as we all do in such circumstances) to say something sensible instead. ‘No,’ said Wittgenstein. ‘Say what you want to say. Be crude and then we shall get on.’ The suggestion that in doing philosophy one should not try to banish or tidy up a ludicrously crude but troubling thought, but rather give it its day, its week, its month, in court, seems to me very helpful. It chimes of course with Wittgenstein’s idea that in philosophy it is very difficult to work as slowly as one should. 

From the introduction to Phillipa Foot “Natural Goodness”

I took these photographs in Bath today as we went in search of the original signage for Hand’s Cafe in the Abbey Square, which I wanted to insert in yesterday’s post to try to illustrate the usefulness of stretching the meaning of “Palimpsest” to include wildflowers that once signified whole industries – now largely forgotten.

That said, I have always been attracted to these so-called ghost signs because they have the effect of situating you in two places at once; the here and now, and the past. The idea of being in two places at once is both difficult and troubling because there seems no way of explaining, even to a sympathetic listener who may well believe what seems to be self-evident – that each moment in time passes by as if caught in the flow of a river – is false.

Just as one example – each time I find a plant that I’ve previously identified, and especially if naming it was particularly difficult, I inwardly relive the moment of discovery, the place, the weather, the exact setting and mood of the place as if I were still there in the past ‘though I know I’m in the present.

I remember once standing at one end of Damery Lake on a packbridge and being overwhelmed by the presence of a young officer in the thick of a First World War battle, standing with me and harnessing my imagination to recall a happy moment in his own past, fishing in the lake. It was all over in an overwhelming moment of intense introspection. I cite this not to push a non-existent reputation as a psychic; but because I don’t understand it and can’t explain it.

If we’re going to develop any kind of Green Spirituality or ethic we have to find a new framework for understanding ourselves which will undoubtedly feel difficult, perhaps insane, to someone steeped in the Cartesian dualism that’s still the dominating culture of our time. So this will be hard – which is why I find Phillipa Foot’s recollection of Wittgenstein so encouraging. Be crude and then we shall get on, and never be afraid of sounding like a fool. Don’t tidy up ludicrously crude but troubling thoughts but give them all the time they need.

Toadflax poetry

Clockwise, Common Toadflax, Common Toadflax, Ivy Leaved Toadflax, Purple Toadflax, the white form of Ivy Leaved Toadflax growing on the walls of St David’s Cathedral in Pembrokeshire.

Palimpsest

Lovely word – “Palimpsest”, but not so lovely when you’re trying to type it into your mobile on a crowded train with no air conditioning and whilst being distracted by the sheer strangeness of your neighbours. We were coming back from Salisbury after a boozy lunch with friends, Madame was snoring gently beside me and I was gazing out of the window enjoying the hallucinogenic feeling of passing through fields and cuttings at 70 miles an hour. Opposite were a couple of very young women curled up together on the seat with their arms around one another in a kind of blissful sleep. Trains are more often very restless places these days. Mobile phones and laptops were playing their part in protecting people from relaxing and enjoying the experience, but I had just one word to type before it fled my memory altogether.

More often than not, for me, a potential post is just a formless and disorganized cloud of ideas until a single word or thought provides the catalyst which crystallizes the whole piece into (I hope) some kind of order. And so, in no particular order there were dozens of Purple Toadflax plants flowering in the back lane to the allotments. The walls around here are always covered with Ivy Leaved Toadflax and I’ve had a rather distressing difficulty in remembering the English name of plain old Toadflax because my mother usually called it “Bacon and Eggs” and I associated it with Snapdragons – from which there was no way back to its proper name.

English plant names are a delight and a minefield because so many of them are local or regional and all too often entirely different plants have the same English names. Small wonder that most botanists prefer the laser precision of Latin binomials to the poetics of local names. Linaria vulgaris is what it is and no other plant, relative, offspring or imposter will be allowed to claim the throne unless the DNA matches. Nonetheless, the evocative English names draw me in. “Why Toad?” “Why Flax?” – I wonder as I stroke their leaves and drink in their intense colour and faint perfume.

It’s not hard to see that these old names are evocative; suggesting ancient uses in healing such as Pilewort or brewing with Mugwort, or perhaps warning of danger – for instance, Fools’ Parsley – or descriptive like Jack go to bed at noon, whose flowers close up at mid day; Cuckoo pint (Cuckoo’s pintle) with its bawdy references to cuckoldry; Pissabed (Dandelion) which had always been used as a diuretic. I could go on almost forever but the best collection of these old country names is undoubtedly Geoffrey Grigson’s “An Englishman’s Flora” which you’ll probably find for 50p at an Oxfam shop somewhere near you.

The Old Hands Cafe. In 1971 you could buy a cheap lunch of cottage pie and chips, big enough to feed you for 2 days!

However some country names come loaded with so many wonderful associations that metaphor hardly fits the bill, and these Toadflaxes are better explained by the rather academic word – palimpsest – which sounds much more obscure than it really is. Here’s an example from Bath; the so-called ghost sign. When we were students here, there was a cafe called “Hands” in the Abbey courtyard. They’d never painted out the old sign for “Hands Dairy” which is still there today and neither have any of the succession of tenants since the cafe closed down and any number of different businesses took it on. A palimpsest is just the academic word for something which has been overwritten by something newer. Across history, writing materials were expensive and hard to come by, so recycling was the norm. The Romans re-used the little tiles used for sending messages, for instance. Scholars of ancient texts often have to read through several layers to try to separate the wood from the trees.

Some plant names like Toadflax are exactly like that. I’ll adapt the term palimpsest to emphasise the haunting thought that far from being a simple metaphor, behind the vernacular name there is a whole hidden history; a cloud of references to another way of life, to skills now almost extinct and an industry that even used its low grade waste to clothe slaves.

So firstly, why Toad? Well, for once we know exactly how and when the term entered the English language because it came by means of William Turner in 1548 when he translated the German name into Todes Flax. It’s all in Geoffrey Grigson’s book by the way. Its principal crime was to closely resemble the flax used for producing linen cloth (until it flowered). It’s also an invasive weed that, like bindweed, will grow from any stub or fragment of rhizome and was once a persistent weed of commercial Flax fields. So that’s the flax part explained, but why “Toad” or “Todes”? Well there’s a thought that the snapdragon shape of the flowers which gape wide when squeezed, somehow resemble the gape of the toad’s wide mouth.

But etymology is only a part of the fun, because beyond the name lies the industry. Fully grown flax was not cut but uprooted and dried. The seeds were removed by a process called rippling and then the plants were retted in water so that the woody layers were separated from the fibres. Trust me, this will have been a very smelly process indeed because it relied upon bacteria or fungi to do the rotting. The rest of the process is best described by quoting from the New England Flax and Linen website.

After retting, the straw is then put through three different mechanical processes. The first is called braking or breaking, where the bundles of flax are crushed and the woody material is broken up. The second is scutching or swingling, where the fibers are vigorously whacked with a wooden blade to remove the remaining woody material. Finally, the fiber is hetcheled or hackled by drawing the fibers through a set of sharp tines. The shorter fibers are removed, the thin strands of fibers are separated, and the fibers are aligned lengthwise. The shorter fibers are known as tow, and the long fibers are called line. At this point the fiber is ready to spin into thread and subsequently woven into cloth.

Braking, scutching, swingling, hetcheling and hackling; tow and line – these are wonderful lost words, lost procedures and lost skills from the flax weaving industry. They evoke the stink and noise of so many pre-industrial processes so let’s not get too whimsical about the pristine rural life. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to live next door to a tannery or a dye works.

Pale Flax – the precursor of the commercial species, growing wild in Cornwall.

There are many plants still growing wild in the UK that are the sole remnants of once common processes and industries and whenever we stumble across them they contain a powerful sense of history. Woad and Weld, Dyers Greenweed and Madder are as evocative to me as any Cornish winding engine or pithead. Plants and their uses are the faint traces of a whole culture and we would do ourselves no favours if we reduced them all to Latin. There’s very little difference in biodiversity between so-called brownfield and greenfield sites whatever the developers may claim. Of the Toadflaxes there are (according to the Book of Stace) eight wild species and fifteen garden escapes, the Ivy Leaved Toadflax belongs to a different family – Cymbalaria – and of all those, only one was economically important; the blue flowered Linum usitatissimum which provides both flax for weaving and also linseed oil when the seeds are pressed. As the Latin name suggests – it’s the useful one.

The dye plant Weld, growing in a wildflower mix on the riverbank in Bath in 2019.