Cheltenham Guides

[steepholm]

I meant to mention that last Monday I went to Cheltenham on the train - only half an hour (in theory) from Bristol Parkway, although I ended up on the stopping service that waited in a siding in Gloucester to be overtaken by the express. Apart from that, there were only two stops: one in Yate, where a large group of young people with backpacks got off (were they going to pay homage at J. K. Rowling's birthplace, I wondered idly?), and then again in Dursley (where no young people got off at all, thanks no doubt to the slanders of the same JKR).

I was going to meet the owner of a Cotswold company that specialises in private tours for Japanese visitors, as I was hoping to get an inkling of what brings Japanese people to the area. We met in a café and talked for an hour, and a very interesting conversation it was too, though I'm still digesting it so I won't go into it now - but in lieu of that let me share with you the title page of the book I gave him as a thank you (though only a print-on-demand reprint, alas), my great-great-great-great grandfather Weeden Butler's Cheltenham Guide (1781), which as far as I know is his earliest publication. It's a handy description of Cheltenham at the time, including an account of the origins of the famous spa a couple of generations earlier. Apparently a Mr Mason noticed the pigeons pecking at the soil around a pond fed by a spring - for the salts, it seems - and that inspired him to buy the land and set up a little hut from which he sold the water, after which his son-in-law built a dome, a colonnade, and all the amenities that polite society could demand. Thus was born, of a pigeon, the pump room, the literary festival, the Gold Cup and Agamemnon dead. (Actually that last one might have been a different bird.) The little blighters are still commemorated on the town's crest.

The water tastes pretty vile, though; worse, if possible, than those of Sulis.

Comments

[calimac]

Among the amenities of Cheltenham is the Music Festival, known to me because in its early years in the 1940s and 50s it was known for its embrace of modern tonal music when other festivals were jumping to the avant-garde. Composers like William Alwyn, Malcolm Arnold, and Edmund Rubbra became known as "Cheltenham symphonists," intended as derision (like "cowpat music" for Vaughan Williams and Holst) but taken as a badge of honor. (Curiously, all 3 were from Northampton.)

[steepholm]

I could and should have mentioned the Music Festival, not least because it occasioned my first ever visit to Cheltenham, thirty odd years ago, when my brother had a piece performed at the Pittville Pump Room as part of that event. I seem to hear about it less these days than the Literary Festival, though, perhaps because I move in the wrong crowd.

My main memory of the occasion is stopping at a pub on the way back and drinking cloudy scrumpy, which gave me such a hangover that I've never felt the same way about cider since.

[calimac]

my brother had a piece performed at the Pittville Pump Room

Did he? We have a small but choice concert hall here called le petit Trianon, modeled after the one at Versailles but not in nearly so choice a neighborhood, in which your brother has also had a piece performed - my only live encounter with his music.

[thistleingrey]

Wait, do people go to drink the waters or to sit in (or near) them? (Aquae Sulis is usually Bath in Somerset, no?)

[steepholm]

I don't think they've ever bathed in the waters at Cheltenham, perhaps because unlike Bath they're not naturally hot. They drink them in both places, though. Weeden gives detailed instructions on the best way to acclimatise oneself to the frankly challenging taste of the Cheltenham waters, but have tried them I think it must have been an uphill struggle.

[thistleingrey]

Fascinating. TIL, as they say!