The Tailor of Gloucester

Good Morning!
Ok...get out your maps. Sarah and I left Paddington Station in London yesterday morning and traveled west and north by train through the Stroud Valley to Gloucester and Cheltenham. A perfectly pleasant journey through rolling hills and fields filled with cattle, sheep, and stone walls. After reading parts of her journals, I realized that this was the route that Beatrix took to visit her cousin Caroline.
Once we arrived in Gloucester, we located the Shop of the Tailor of Gloucester. It is currently closed to the public, and the city is in the middle of a fund raising campaign to reopen the site. I had been in touch with the tourism council and had made arrangements to be let in by Mr. Ivan Taylor, the jeweler from next door.







You can see the front of the shop as Beatrix saw and sketched it for her story. Behind me is St. Michael's Gate which leads to Gloucester Cathedral. I read that though it is a winter scene that she drew, it was in the hot summer that she did her sketching. My reading also said that her proper Victorian mother would have been shocked to see her daughter sitting on the step of the shop drawing.






Beatrix based the her story of the Tailor of Gloucester on a true story that she heard while visiting her cousin, Caroline. Of course, there really weren't magical mice that could sew, but there really WAS a Tailor named John Pichard, and after leaving work unfinished one weekend, he came back and found it completed! You will have to ask me what really happened...because I found out!





We traveled to Chleltenham to spend the night at a beautiful B and B called the Mooreend Park Hotel and guess who we met up with? Sam McFadden from Manchester who is studying here at the University! What fun!



We leave for Bath this morning.
Your aff friend and teacher,
Kathy Hawkins