THE SKELETON ARMY OF STEVEN STREET

Each Sunday the Salvationists would gather

at St Giles Cemetery – once the site

of a medieval leper hospital

set well beyond Chester’s city limits.

To the thud of the bass drum, to chords of brass,

to banners declaiming ‘Be just, and fear not!’,

to the singing of ‘A friend of Jesus,

O what bliss!’, uniformed they would march

onwards to a ‘Stronghold of Satan’ –

past the spot where, high above the river,

a Protestant and a Catholic

were burned to death a century apart.

 

Beside the canal, near the abattoir,

steam mill and lead works, was a purpose-built

enclave of constricted streets of back-to-back

lodging houses, public houses, gin shops.

Steven Street – perhaps three yards across

and fifty long – was the centre of the slum,

and home to hundreds of Irish Catholics

who were refugees from the Great Hunger.

 

The Salvation Army would march past the cramped,

noisome ghetto along the canal path

to ‘O boundless salvation!’. One Sunday, ‘Black

Sunday’, an ecumenical group

of English and Irish, Catholics

and non-Catholics – probably outrageously

drunk, as well as outrageously poor –

waited for the parade to pass by

the canal end of Steven Street, then followed

the last rank – mocking the hymns, hurling abuse,

dead rats, stones, and unfurling a raggedy

banner with a scrawled skull and crossbones.

Some Salvationists were seriously

assaulted, needing medical attention –

but the magistracy, concerned for Chester’s

tourist trade, considered the Sally Army

provocative, so bound over

the Steven Street ‘generals’ to keep the peace,

despite green-ink letters to the local press

railing against Fenians and Popery.

 

That year the British sent forty thousand troops

to land at Alexandria and invade

the Suez Canal Zone, the canal itself

being supposedly under threat. Steven Street –

or, rather, its straitened dwellings – was demolished

when I was a young man, and replaced with a block

of social housing. About twenty feet

of narrow road way, barely a car’s width,

remains – but not much else has changed: lives crippled

by accident, and the self-interest

of others; lives abridged by class, and want,

and bigotry; whole nations hoodwinked

by wonders and marvels, by abstractions;

consumed, diminished by avarice.

 

 

British EmpireSalvation ArmySkeleton ArmiesSteven Street in Chesterthe Great Hungerthe Irish Famine