The true history for Mr Howsman

By Graham Carter, 2006
I'm really looking forward to 2006 - and one of the things I'm looking forward to most of all is looking backwards.

This paper will shortly embark on a major project to chronicle the history of Swindon - and it was very nice of the British National Party to remind us, in the last days of 2005, why this will not only be a fascinating exercise but also a necessary one.

Only by seeing where we've been can we really understand where we are going - and that is especially true in fast-growing places like Swindon.

So if Mike Howsman, the BNP's chairman in Wiltshire, is interested in facts rather than dodgy ideology, he will no doubt be following the paper closely in the next few months.

The BNP's philosophy is not difficult to understand because it chiefly involves identifying minorities - what they might call Œoutsiders' - and turning the rest of society against them.

But I'm puzzled why the party considers Swindon to be a "very fertile" hunting ground for new members, as reported in this paper last week.

Perhaps when he understands our history a little better, Mr Howsman will understand why what he says is utter nonsense.

There is a clear theme at the centre of Swindon's story - and if you thought it was the railways, you're wrong.

As important as the Great Western Railway is in our history, it represents a relatively brief chapter in a main plot which runs right through the story - before, during and after the railway era - and explains why Swindon continues to be successful.

This success is not despite the Œoutsiders' the BNP despises, it's because of them.

Arguably the town's most eminent historians - William Morris, the founder of this paper in 1854, and Mark Child, author of the 2002 book, Swindon, An Illustrated History - agree that it's probably always been that way.

They both supported the theory that the Bell in High Street, which is believed to date to at least 1515 and for centuries was at the centre of the social framework of the small town of Swindon, was built by and/or run by Flemish cloth workers.

But these immigrants were only the first in a whole parade of Œoutsiders' who have beaten a path to Swindon.

Brunel realised how important it was to attract men and their families to come to Swindon and work in his railway factory in the 1840s.

He ordered the building of the Railway Village - a genuinely radical idea for the time - and the GWR provided all kinds of amenities, including a health service, social centre and schools.

Outsiders flooded into the town - like the Welshmen who came to work the new rail mills in 1861 and soon ensured that Swindon had the highest proportion of Welshmen of anywhere in the world outside Wales.

During the First World War Belgian refugees were welcomed with extraordinary generosity and, after the Second World War, it was obvious to the town's leaders that it would only survive the decline of the railways by attracting thousands of new faces and new industries from London and elsewhere.

In the meantime, the town quickly forged links with Germany after the war and welcomed the arrival of strong Polish, Italian, Irish and Asian communities.

Strange that a town that now not so much embraces Asian culture as laps it up during the annual Mela should be considered "very fertile" ground by the BNP.

It clearly hasn't occurred to them, either, that our biggest employer (after Swindon Council) is a Japanese company which had to recruit a large number of skilled workers from outside the town.

They may not be aware, either, that when Honda representatives were asked why they chose Swindon as a base for their massive car plant, they said it was because of the warm welcome the town had given to them as outsiders.

The BNP's main problem is that it has its own rules for judging nationality or affinity to a place, and these are based on the hopelessly old-fashioned idea that it depends on where your distant ancestors happened to be born.

The party is obviously going to have to re-write history to persuade us that anybody is any more of an outsider than anybody else in Swindon - and no doubt it will try.

It won't change the unwritten rule that Swindon always welcomes strangers and hopefully always will.

Though we may just make an exception in the case of the BNP.

This was my weekly column in the Swindon Advertiser on January 3, 2006. It was in response to the far right-wing British National Party's announcement that they were fielding a candidate in the forthcoming local elections in Swindon. At the time I was compiling the Chronicle of Swindon, a 25-part weekly history (of eight tabloid pages per part) charting the town's history.
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