page_title: The Flower of Gloster
section_title: The book
hierarchical_section_title: The Flower of Gloster / The book
caption_attribution_description: English: 1911 advert flower gloster.
context_page_description: The Flower of Gloster is a 1911 book by E. Temple Thurston, an Anglo-Irish poet, playwright and author. Published by Williams and Norgate, it sold well enough to merit a second edition two years later. A third unillustrated edition was published by Chapman and Hall in 1918, after which the book remained out of print for over half a century until being republished by David & Charles in 1968. A year before that, ITV had broadcast a 13-part children's serial of the same name based on Thurston's original narrative.
context_section_description: Themple Thurston's original book opens with the author dreaming of escape to the English countryside and trying to buy a narrowboat from which to see it. After meeting with scepticism and warnings about the unsavoury nature of canal people, he is advised to go to Oxford to view The Flower of Gloster. The boatyard owner, similarly sceptical, advises him to hire 'some decent fellar with an horse, what'll look after yer going through the locks.'. He introduces him to Eynsham Harry who, after some protracted negotiations in The Nags Head, agrees to be Temple Thurston's guide and mentor.
  Their journey takes them first along the Oxford Canal to just north of Banbury, where they join the sprawling network of Midlands canals. They head north through Warwick and Leamington Spa, but as they near the heavily industralised landscape of the Black Country Temple Thurston begins to have some doubts about continuing and beseeches Eynsham Harry to turn the boat around – no easy task! - and head back via the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal to the pastoral landscapes they have so recently passed through.
  At one point in the journey, Temple Thurston abandoned the canal in order to walk along the River Avon to Evesham and Tewkesbury, where het met up again with Eynsham Harry and The Flower of Gloster. According to David Viner's analysis of the text, the seemingly simple circuit of Oxford-Banbury-Warwick-Stratford-Tewkesbury-Oxford would not have been as straightforward as the author portrays it. Viner questions whether the journey ever took place in its entirety, the story was a composite of several journeys or canalside visits made on separate occasions. Whatever the truth, Viner concluded that none of the doubts on the literal interpretation of the journey detract from the book's value as a 'good read', an example of Edwardian romanticism, or its influence on canal history which has now lasted over a century. He is said to be the last person to navigate the Thames and Severn Canal.
caption: Advert for original edition
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