EPB-E01-S4

TimesBristol

Celebrating our proud history and keeping your memories alive

TUE01OCT2013

Letters Jessieand the fight forwomen’s rights

Page 4 RebuildingBristol after thebombs

Page 7

Page 6 ‘Jack Bute’and the cider tax

WILL BARRAGE EVERBE DEAD IN THE WATER?Recent newssuggests thatplans for aSevern Barrageare ‘dead in thewater’. Perhapsthey are, but asEugene Byrnefinds, we havebeen here beforemany, manytimes.

ONE day in 1919, John Pan-nell, who worked at theGreat Western Railwayc o m p a ny ’s chief engineer’soffice in Paddington,

dropped a note into the suggestionsb ox .

Like any well-run firm, GWR op-erated a staff suggestions scheme,with a modest financial reward forthe best ideas.

Mr Pannell’s thoughts were scru-tinised by the management, whothought there might be something tothem. They were passed further upthe chain of command until theywere passed on to the government.

The Ministry of Transport was anew creation, made necessary by theFirst World War and the need toco-ordinate the movement of hugequantities of soldiers, munitions,food and war materials.

The men from the Ministry passedMr Pannell’s suggestion on to theMinister himself.

This was Sir Eric Geddes, a per-sonal friend of Prime Minister LloydGeorge. Geddes was a successfulbusinessman who had been broughtinto the wartime government as oneof Lloyd George’s “men of push andgo” to bring some energy and talentinto the war effort.

Geddes looked at Pannell’s sug-gestion and was enthralled.

We don’t know if Mr Pannell wasever awarded the prize for GWR’sbrightest idea of the year. But just asit captivated Sir Eric, so it has be-dazzled and besotted generations ofengineers, business people andpoliticians ever since.

In almost 100 years, the idea ofusing the tidal power of the RiverSevern to generate electricity haslost none of its charisma. Men (it isalways men) have fallen madly inlove with the idea, some spending

Turn to page 2

� Then EnergyMinister and BristolEast MP Tony Benninspects a proposalfor a barrage in the1970s

EPB-E01-S4

EPB-

E01-

S4

2 Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013 3Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

Severn BarragePlan has dazzledg e n e ra t i o n sof engineers

entire lifetimes drawing up and per-fecting plans.

Pa n n e l l ’s idea was nothingairy-fairy. It was visionary, yes, but itwas a hard-headed product of ne-cessity. As a GWR engineer he knewthe company had a problem. At thistime, there was little road transportworth talking about; most passen-gers and goods in Britain were movedby rail; the coastal shipping industryhad been devastated by U-Boats, andnow the rail system was struggling tocope with demand.

The Severn Tunnel, linking SouthWest England and the Midlands withSouth Wales was no longer adequate.So, he reasoned, why not put a bar-rier across the Severn to carry rail-way lines. This could then also beused as a huge hydro-electric schemegenerating power.

It would also impound a vastamount of water upstream, creatingan immense artificial lake. Locks onthe barrage would enable the largestships in the world to enter this hugebasin, creating the world’s largestfloating harbour.

The Men from the Ministry, alongwith the men from GWR did somesums. The cost of the scheme wouldbe something in the region of£7 million. The sum cannot easily betranslated into modern terms, butsince this was a time when a skilledworking man might earn £5 in a goodweek, we are talking about tens ofb i l l i o n s.

Plans were sketched out.To get over the problem of vari-

ations in tidal flow at different times

of day, some of the power at peaktimes would be used to pump waterup to a reservoir high up the WyeValley. At slack times this would beallowed to flow back down to drivethe turbines to generate power. Anofficial announcement from the Min-istry said:

The attractions of the scheme wouldappear to be limitless. They open up avista which is little short of a re-volution in the industrial life of theWest and Midlands of England. Iteffectively solves the problem of con-gestion for all traffic between SouthWales and the West of England both byroad and rail, and brings withinreach of all classes of the communitythe blessings of light, purity andp o w e r.

It would save the nation three orfour million tons of coal each yearand would generate electricity at acost of just over half a penny perunit.

And then, setting a pattern whichhas been repeated intermittentlyever since, the plans got kicked intothe long grass. The Treasury, doingits job properly, said that the wholething would have to be costed outproperly. A feasibility study wouldhave to be carried out.

The scheme also had political op-ponents with agendas of their own.The saving of three or four milliontons of coal per annum was not at allwelcome in South Wales, one of themain centres of Britain’s coal in-d u s t r y.

By 1921, it was completely off theagenda. The economy was strug-gling, men who had fought in thetrenches were not all returning to

“homes fit for heroes” but to growingrates of unemployment. The govern-ment undertook a major round ofpublic spending cuts which came tobe known as the “Geddes Axe” be-cause now, ironically enough, SirEric was in a new job, supervising acommittee on national expenditure.

This episode rarely appears in ac-counts of the Severn Barrage. It re-mains mired in obscurity, though it

s h o u l d n’t be. This was the first time aSevern power generation schemewas seriously considered, and it setthe pattern which has been followedever since.

It goes like this: People start ser-iously talking about it, the govern-ment starts thinking about it, thegovernment then commissions astudy into it, the government decidesit’s probably a good idea, but we can’tafford it. The idea goes dormant for afew years, and then it returnsag ain.

The first time around, the barragewas back on the table pretty quickly,as a suggestion in the mid-1920s. Thiswas a time of high unemployment,and so in addition to the other be-nefits, it would keep an estimated10,000 men in work for seven years.

The government commissioned areport. Then it set up a committee.

It didn’t report until 1933, but whenit did it had an extensive plan. Itwould be built close to the site of thepresent-day Second Severn Crossing,it would take 15 years and employ anaverage 15,000 men during that time.When it finished it would provide 7per cent of the entire country’s an-ticipated electricity needs in 1941 attwo-thirds the cost per unit of elec-tricity from coal-fired stations. Itwould cost £38million.

Very interesting, said the govern-ment, which then did nothing.

And then a World War got in thew ay.

Incidentally, there is a persistentlegend that had Hitler managed toconquer Britain, he would have builtthe Severn Barrage, presumablyusing slave labour. Maybe he did say

It would generate power usinglarge pre-fabricated concrete cais-sons containing turbines every sooften. It would cost £5.6bn, but likelyrises in coal and oil prices wouldjustify the investment provided thegovernment didn't opt to build morenuclear power stations instead.

In 1984 the civil engineers WimpeyAtkins put forward a plan whichrepresented a return to the Victoriansolution. The Severn road bridge was

something about it; the Fuehrer wasnotorious for blathering on aboutgrand schemes, but the Nazi archiveshave yet to yield up any blueprintsfor Der Severn-Staudamm. And theyprobably never will.

Before the War had ended, though,the men from the Ministry (Fuel &Power this time) were looking at itagain. They rightly anticipated ahuge surge in demand for electricityin the postwar years and said thescheme was both practical and ne-c e s s a r y.

At the same time, a group of ar-chitects and surveyors looking atplans for postwar Bristol said thebarrage should be built, and that if itwas, the lake upstream of it could beused as Britain’s major port for in-tercontinental flying boat services.

But by 1947 the country had run outof money and was going through aperiod of austerity which makes ourrecent economic woes look like themost decadent Roman Emperor’sfeast.

Through the 1950s and 1960s thegovernment and the (nationalised)electricity industry occasionallycommissioned studies, always baulk-ing at the cost. Then, a major oil pricerise in 1973 caused by the OPECembargo led to renewed calls for abarrage. But by 1975, with lower oilcosts, the Central Electricity Gen-erating Board was telling a Commonscommittee that Severn tidal power“offers no prospect of producing elec-tricity more cheaply than othermeans”.

In 1978 Labour's Secretary of Statefor Energy Tony Benn (also BristolEast's MP at this time) appointed Sir

Herman Bondi to head a new com-mittee looking into the barrage.

The Bondi Committee, reporting tothe Conservative government in July1981 said that the barrage was tech-nically and economically viable. Itlooked at several possible locationsbut plumped for Brean Down, justsouth of Weston-super-Mare, to Lav-ernock Point, between Barry andCardif f.

The attractions of thescheme would appear tobe limitless. They openup a vista which is littleshort of a revolution inthe industrial life of theWest and Midlands ofEngland.

“

From page 1

IT is often said that the idea for aSevern Barrage goes back toBrunel’s time. This is true, althoughBrunel himself, who would havebeen aware of the idea, neverinvolved himself in it.

It was the brainchild of a mannamed Thomas Fulljames who inthe 1840s drew up plans for amile-long dam between Aust andBeachley – precisely where thefirst Severn Bridge was built in the1960s.

Fulljames’ dam would havefunctioned as a rail bridge,intended to cut a significant chunkof time off the rail journeysbetween South Wales and theSouth of England. This was at atime when the Welsh coalfieldswere making their owners hugefortunes, and much of the line’srole would have been to bring theblack gold to the south of England.

But it had another purpose, too.Fulljames was Gloucestershire’sCounty Surveyor, and his barrierwould have created a big lake on

the upper reaches of the Severn –a huge boost to the port ofGloucester. With the appropriatelocks in place, Gloucester wouldbe able to accommodate theever-larger ships which were nowbeing built.

Fulljames’ plan was not at allpopular downriver in Bristol,though it came nowhere close tobeing built. The costs were not just

big, but they were uncertain,because of the difficulties ofbuilding a huge dam in the middleof a fast-flowing tidal river.

For some decades afterwardsthere was intermittent talk of abarrier crossing the Severn, but itwas always as a rail bridge. Whenthe Severn Tunnel was built, therewas no more talk of a rail bridgefor many years.

too busy, and often forced to close inbad weather, and a new bridge wasneeded.

The firm proposed a shorter, cheap-er barrage between Severn Beachand Sudbrook Point in Gwent whichwould double up as a road crossing,which of course would be the route ofthe M4 Second Severn Crossing builtin the 1990s.

The Wimpey Atkins plan, put for-ward when Mrs Thatcher was inpower, was a radical new departure,even though it is nowadays largelyforgotten. It was going to be builtentirely by the private sector, itclaimed. There would be no need forany taxpayers’ i nve s t m e n t .

And so it continued. The 1980s alsoproduced the very influential pro-posal from the Severn Tidal PowerGroup (STPG), a consortium of bluechip engineering and constructionfirms (Balfour Beatty, Taylor Woo-drow, Sir Robert McAlpine and Al-stom). Their plan adopted the Bondireport route from Brean Down toLavernock, and claimed that the bar-rage, with 216 turbines, could provideup to six per cent of the UK's elec-tricity needs.

The STPG plan remained the goldstandard of barrage plans for almost30 years, with a widespread assump-tion throughout the engineering in-dustry that if it was ever built, itwould look pretty much like thiso n e.

By now, conservation groups wereraising concerns about the likelyeffect on wildlife, while in more re-cent years the Bristol Port Companylobbied against a structure whichcould adversely affect its hugely suc-

cessful business at Avonmouth,which is inside most of the proposedbar riers.

The Bristol Port Company has lob-bied against the most recent seriouscontender, Hafren Power, whose pro-posal was two weeks ago knockedback by the government on thegrounds that its plans “failed todemonstrate economic, environ-mental and public acceptability”.

The same Parliamentary report,however, goes on to recognise – asthey always do! – that there may bepotential for a barrage at some pointin the future.

One thing of which you can becertain is that sooner or later we willbe using the power of the Severn togenerate power. We may never have afull-blown barrier across the waterbetween England and Wales, butthere will almost certainly be other,smaller schemes. Conservation bod-ies like Friends of the Earth and theRoyal Society for the Protection ofBirds, for instance, suggest that aseries of artificial lagoons could bebuilt, using turbines to capturepower from the inward and/or out-ward flow of water. Or there may betidal ‘re e f s ’ or smaller barriers andany number of other possibilities.

But the big, bold vision of a vastdam across the Severn will continueto mesmerise many.

The great lesson of history is thatthe Severn Barrage is never, ever,completely dead in the water. Itwould be a very daring punter indeedwho would bet any money that therewo n’t be another serious proposal onthe table again within a few years –and possibly even months.

QUIZ question: What’s theconnection between the RiverSevern and Audrey Hepburn andHumphrey Bogart?

It’s all in a name.The company which recently

had its barrage plans knockedback by Parliament is calledHafren Power. The old 1960sSevern Bridge, as you’ll knowfrom the road signs, is calledPont Hafren.

So Hafren is just Welsh for‘Sever n’, right?

Yes, but there’s more to it thanthat. The river was named Habren(later Hafren) by the Welsh inhonour of a legend that aprincess of the same name wasdrowned in it.

According to The History of theKings of Britain by the medievalchronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth,Habren was the daughter of KingLocrin of the Britons by hismistress, a German princesscalled Estrildis. Estrildis had beenkidnapped by Huns and wasbrought along when they invadedBritain. Locrin defeated the Hunsand fell in love with the captiveEstrildis, and they had a childthey named Habren.

Now Locrin divorced his wifeGwendolen, daughter of the kingof Cornwall, and made Estrildishis queen. Gwendolen wasn’tabout to put up with this, so shewent to Cornwall, came backwith an army, defeated Locrinand had Estrildis and Habrenthrown into the river we now callthe Severn.

She then ordered that the riverhenceforth be named afterHabren so that for all time peoplewould remember how her

husband had wronged her.On the English side, the river

was known as Sabren. And whenthe Romans invaded it becameknown as Sabrina.

The story of Sabrina/Habren/Hafren is completely apocryphal.All the figures in it are legendaryand have almost no historicalbasis. She long since became thespirit of the river, a nymph,sometimes depicted riding asea-horse. The poet John Miltonused her in his 1634 masqueComus, which is all about ayoung lady struggling to keep hervirtue.

She appeals to the nymphSabrina to help her:

Sabrina fair,Listen where thou art sittingUnder the glassy, cool,translucent wave,In twisted braids of lilies knittingThe loose train of thyamber-dropping hair;Listen for dear honour's sake,Goddess of the silver lake,Listen and save!

So … If you think that the nameSabrina only originated with the1950s film of that name starringHumphrey Bogart and AudreyHepburn, or with the name of analmost forgotten 1950s Britishglamour model, or even with amore recent TV series about ateenage witch, you’d be wrong.

Sabrina is a fine old westcountry name, so if you’reexpecting a baby daughteranytime soon, well, you knowwhat to do. (And remember tosend Bristol Times somep i c t u re s ! )

� Thomas Fulljames’ own painting of his proposed Severn dam

� Brean Down, Somerset, theEnglish end of several barrageplans; top left, Hafren Power’sartist’s impression of itsproposed barrage; above, adiagram by the Severn TidalPower Group showing one ofthe generating turbines inplace on its proposed barrage

� A u d re yHepburn andH u m p h re yBogart in the1954 filmSabrina,which madethe namefashionable

County surveyor drew up plans in 1840s

Official GovernmentMinistry announcement,

early 1920s

Legend of the spirit of the river

EPB-E01-S4

EPB-

E01-

S4

2 Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013 3Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

Severn BarragePlan has dazzledg e n e ra t i o n sof engineers

entire lifetimes drawing up and per-fecting plans.

Pa n n e l l ’s idea was nothingairy-fairy. It was visionary, yes, but itwas a hard-headed product of ne-cessity. As a GWR engineer he knewthe company had a problem. At thistime, there was little road transportworth talking about; most passen-gers and goods in Britain were movedby rail; the coastal shipping industryhad been devastated by U-Boats, andnow the rail system was struggling tocope with demand.

The Severn Tunnel, linking SouthWest England and the Midlands withSouth Wales was no longer adequate.So, he reasoned, why not put a bar-rier across the Severn to carry rail-way lines. This could then also beused as a huge hydro-electric schemegenerating power.

It would also impound a vastamount of water upstream, creatingan immense artificial lake. Locks onthe barrage would enable the largestships in the world to enter this hugebasin, creating the world’s largestfloating harbour.

The Men from the Ministry, alongwith the men from GWR did somesums. The cost of the scheme wouldbe something in the region of£7 million. The sum cannot easily betranslated into modern terms, butsince this was a time when a skilledworking man might earn £5 in a goodweek, we are talking about tens ofb i l l i o n s.

Plans were sketched out.To get over the problem of vari-

ations in tidal flow at different times

of day, some of the power at peaktimes would be used to pump waterup to a reservoir high up the WyeValley. At slack times this would beallowed to flow back down to drivethe turbines to generate power. Anofficial announcement from the Min-istry said:

The attractions of the scheme wouldappear to be limitless. They open up avista which is little short of a re-volution in the industrial life of theWest and Midlands of England. Iteffectively solves the problem of con-gestion for all traffic between SouthWales and the West of England both byroad and rail, and brings withinreach of all classes of the communitythe blessings of light, purity andp o w e r.

It would save the nation three orfour million tons of coal each yearand would generate electricity at acost of just over half a penny perunit.

And then, setting a pattern whichhas been repeated intermittentlyever since, the plans got kicked intothe long grass. The Treasury, doingits job properly, said that the wholething would have to be costed outproperly. A feasibility study wouldhave to be carried out.

The scheme also had political op-ponents with agendas of their own.The saving of three or four milliontons of coal per annum was not at allwelcome in South Wales, one of themain centres of Britain’s coal in-d u s t r y.

By 1921, it was completely off theagenda. The economy was strug-gling, men who had fought in thetrenches were not all returning to

“homes fit for heroes” but to growingrates of unemployment. The govern-ment undertook a major round ofpublic spending cuts which came tobe known as the “Geddes Axe” be-cause now, ironically enough, SirEric was in a new job, supervising acommittee on national expenditure.

This episode rarely appears in ac-counts of the Severn Barrage. It re-mains mired in obscurity, though it

s h o u l d n’t be. This was the first time aSevern power generation schemewas seriously considered, and it setthe pattern which has been followedever since.

It goes like this: People start ser-iously talking about it, the govern-ment starts thinking about it, thegovernment then commissions astudy into it, the government decidesit’s probably a good idea, but we can’tafford it. The idea goes dormant for afew years, and then it returnsag ain.

The first time around, the barragewas back on the table pretty quickly,as a suggestion in the mid-1920s. Thiswas a time of high unemployment,and so in addition to the other be-nefits, it would keep an estimated10,000 men in work for seven years.

The government commissioned areport. Then it set up a committee.

It didn’t report until 1933, but whenit did it had an extensive plan. Itwould be built close to the site of thepresent-day Second Severn Crossing,it would take 15 years and employ anaverage 15,000 men during that time.When it finished it would provide 7per cent of the entire country’s an-ticipated electricity needs in 1941 attwo-thirds the cost per unit of elec-tricity from coal-fired stations. Itwould cost £38million.

Very interesting, said the govern-ment, which then did nothing.

And then a World War got in thew ay.

Incidentally, there is a persistentlegend that had Hitler managed toconquer Britain, he would have builtthe Severn Barrage, presumablyusing slave labour. Maybe he did say

It would generate power usinglarge pre-fabricated concrete cais-sons containing turbines every sooften. It would cost £5.6bn, but likelyrises in coal and oil prices wouldjustify the investment provided thegovernment didn't opt to build morenuclear power stations instead.

In 1984 the civil engineers WimpeyAtkins put forward a plan whichrepresented a return to the Victoriansolution. The Severn road bridge was

something about it; the Fuehrer wasnotorious for blathering on aboutgrand schemes, but the Nazi archiveshave yet to yield up any blueprintsfor Der Severn-Staudamm. And theyprobably never will.

Before the War had ended, though,the men from the Ministry (Fuel &Power this time) were looking at itagain. They rightly anticipated ahuge surge in demand for electricityin the postwar years and said thescheme was both practical and ne-c e s s a r y.

At the same time, a group of ar-chitects and surveyors looking atplans for postwar Bristol said thebarrage should be built, and that if itwas, the lake upstream of it could beused as Britain’s major port for in-tercontinental flying boat services.

But by 1947 the country had run outof money and was going through aperiod of austerity which makes ourrecent economic woes look like themost decadent Roman Emperor’sfeast.

Through the 1950s and 1960s thegovernment and the (nationalised)electricity industry occasionallycommissioned studies, always baulk-ing at the cost. Then, a major oil pricerise in 1973 caused by the OPECembargo led to renewed calls for abarrage. But by 1975, with lower oilcosts, the Central Electricity Gen-erating Board was telling a Commonscommittee that Severn tidal power“offers no prospect of producing elec-tricity more cheaply than othermeans”.

In 1978 Labour's Secretary of Statefor Energy Tony Benn (also BristolEast's MP at this time) appointed Sir

Herman Bondi to head a new com-mittee looking into the barrage.

The Bondi Committee, reporting tothe Conservative government in July1981 said that the barrage was tech-nically and economically viable. Itlooked at several possible locationsbut plumped for Brean Down, justsouth of Weston-super-Mare, to Lav-ernock Point, between Barry andCardif f.

The attractions of thescheme would appear tobe limitless. They openup a vista which is littleshort of a revolution inthe industrial life of theWest and Midlands ofEngland.

“

From page 1

IT is often said that the idea for aSevern Barrage goes back toBrunel’s time. This is true, althoughBrunel himself, who would havebeen aware of the idea, neverinvolved himself in it.

It was the brainchild of a mannamed Thomas Fulljames who inthe 1840s drew up plans for amile-long dam between Aust andBeachley – precisely where thefirst Severn Bridge was built in the1960s.

Fulljames’ dam would havefunctioned as a rail bridge,intended to cut a significant chunkof time off the rail journeysbetween South Wales and theSouth of England. This was at atime when the Welsh coalfieldswere making their owners hugefortunes, and much of the line’srole would have been to bring theblack gold to the south of England.

But it had another purpose, too.Fulljames was Gloucestershire’sCounty Surveyor, and his barrierwould have created a big lake on

the upper reaches of the Severn –a huge boost to the port ofGloucester. With the appropriatelocks in place, Gloucester wouldbe able to accommodate theever-larger ships which were nowbeing built.

Fulljames’ plan was not at allpopular downriver in Bristol,though it came nowhere close tobeing built. The costs were not just

big, but they were uncertain,because of the difficulties ofbuilding a huge dam in the middleof a fast-flowing tidal river.

For some decades afterwardsthere was intermittent talk of abarrier crossing the Severn, but itwas always as a rail bridge. Whenthe Severn Tunnel was built, therewas no more talk of a rail bridgefor many years.

too busy, and often forced to close inbad weather, and a new bridge wasneeded.

The firm proposed a shorter, cheap-er barrage between Severn Beachand Sudbrook Point in Gwent whichwould double up as a road crossing,which of course would be the route ofthe M4 Second Severn Crossing builtin the 1990s.

The Wimpey Atkins plan, put for-ward when Mrs Thatcher was inpower, was a radical new departure,even though it is nowadays largelyforgotten. It was going to be builtentirely by the private sector, itclaimed. There would be no need forany taxpayers’ i nve s t m e n t .

And so it continued. The 1980s alsoproduced the very influential pro-posal from the Severn Tidal PowerGroup (STPG), a consortium of bluechip engineering and constructionfirms (Balfour Beatty, Taylor Woo-drow, Sir Robert McAlpine and Al-stom). Their plan adopted the Bondireport route from Brean Down toLavernock, and claimed that the bar-rage, with 216 turbines, could provideup to six per cent of the UK's elec-tricity needs.

The STPG plan remained the goldstandard of barrage plans for almost30 years, with a widespread assump-tion throughout the engineering in-dustry that if it was ever built, itwould look pretty much like thiso n e.

By now, conservation groups wereraising concerns about the likelyeffect on wildlife, while in more re-cent years the Bristol Port Companylobbied against a structure whichcould adversely affect its hugely suc-

cessful business at Avonmouth,which is inside most of the proposedbar riers.

The Bristol Port Company has lob-bied against the most recent seriouscontender, Hafren Power, whose pro-posal was two weeks ago knockedback by the government on thegrounds that its plans “failed todemonstrate economic, environ-mental and public acceptability”.

The same Parliamentary report,however, goes on to recognise – asthey always do! – that there may bepotential for a barrage at some pointin the future.

One thing of which you can becertain is that sooner or later we willbe using the power of the Severn togenerate power. We may never have afull-blown barrier across the waterbetween England and Wales, butthere will almost certainly be other,smaller schemes. Conservation bod-ies like Friends of the Earth and theRoyal Society for the Protection ofBirds, for instance, suggest that aseries of artificial lagoons could bebuilt, using turbines to capturepower from the inward and/or out-ward flow of water. Or there may betidal ‘re e f s ’ or smaller barriers andany number of other possibilities.

But the big, bold vision of a vastdam across the Severn will continueto mesmerise many.

The great lesson of history is thatthe Severn Barrage is never, ever,completely dead in the water. Itwould be a very daring punter indeedwho would bet any money that therewo n’t be another serious proposal onthe table again within a few years –and possibly even months.

QUIZ question: What’s theconnection between the RiverSevern and Audrey Hepburn andHumphrey Bogart?

It’s all in a name.The company which recently

had its barrage plans knockedback by Parliament is calledHafren Power. The old 1960sSevern Bridge, as you’ll knowfrom the road signs, is calledPont Hafren.

So Hafren is just Welsh for‘Sever n’, right?

Yes, but there’s more to it thanthat. The river was named Habren(later Hafren) by the Welsh inhonour of a legend that aprincess of the same name wasdrowned in it.

According to The History of theKings of Britain by the medievalchronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth,Habren was the daughter of KingLocrin of the Britons by hismistress, a German princesscalled Estrildis. Estrildis had beenkidnapped by Huns and wasbrought along when they invadedBritain. Locrin defeated the Hunsand fell in love with the captiveEstrildis, and they had a childthey named Habren.

Now Locrin divorced his wifeGwendolen, daughter of the kingof Cornwall, and made Estrildishis queen. Gwendolen wasn’tabout to put up with this, so shewent to Cornwall, came backwith an army, defeated Locrinand had Estrildis and Habrenthrown into the river we now callthe Severn.

She then ordered that the riverhenceforth be named afterHabren so that for all time peoplewould remember how her

husband had wronged her.On the English side, the river

was known as Sabren. And whenthe Romans invaded it becameknown as Sabrina.

The story of Sabrina/Habren/Hafren is completely apocryphal.All the figures in it are legendaryand have almost no historicalbasis. She long since became thespirit of the river, a nymph,sometimes depicted riding asea-horse. The poet John Miltonused her in his 1634 masqueComus, which is all about ayoung lady struggling to keep hervirtue.

She appeals to the nymphSabrina to help her:

Sabrina fair,Listen where thou art sittingUnder the glassy, cool,translucent wave,In twisted braids of lilies knittingThe loose train of thyamber-dropping hair;Listen for dear honour's sake,Goddess of the silver lake,Listen and save!

So … If you think that the nameSabrina only originated with the1950s film of that name starringHumphrey Bogart and AudreyHepburn, or with the name of analmost forgotten 1950s Britishglamour model, or even with amore recent TV series about ateenage witch, you’d be wrong.

Sabrina is a fine old westcountry name, so if you’reexpecting a baby daughteranytime soon, well, you knowwhat to do. (And remember tosend Bristol Times somep i c t u re s ! )

� Thomas Fulljames’ own painting of his proposed Severn dam

� Brean Down, Somerset, theEnglish end of several barrageplans; top left, Hafren Power’sartist’s impression of itsproposed barrage; above, adiagram by the Severn TidalPower Group showing one ofthe generating turbines inplace on its proposed barrage

� A u d re yHepburn andH u m p h re yBogart in the1954 filmSabrina,which madethe namefashionable

County surveyor drew up plans in 1840s

Official GovernmentMinistry announcement,

early 1920s

Legend of the spirit of the river

EPB-E01-S4

EPB-

E01-

S4

4 Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013 5Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

Latimer’sDiary

How about twinning uswith Waterford, Mr Mayor?

REBUILDING BRISTOLAFTER THE BOMBS

OUR first ever documentary,a VHS of course, was Yate –A Surprising History. Wethought it would be good tomake a film about the town

where we live,” says Andy Warren.“Everyone said it would never sell,

who on earth wants to watch a filmabout Yate? But it did sell, it wasvery popular here, and so then wewent on to make a film about Chip-ping Sodbury, then one about Clifton,and basically just went fromt h e re …”

From these humble beginnings in1993, Andy Warren (cameraman andtechie) and Dave Rogers (historian)set up 1st Take.

The firm, which specialises inhistorical documentaries, is nowclose to making its 100th film.

During that time they have turnedout films looking at the history ofmany different areas of Bristol, sev-eral about historic railways and awide range of others, from closelyresearched film on Bristol’s historicindustries to re-releasing some won-derfully elegiac films Sir John Betje-man made in the West of England inthe 1960s.

While 1st Take’s roots are local(the firm’s still based at Yate) theyhave made plenty of films abouttowns, aviation, railways and morebesides elsewhere.

Their biggest seller to date, you’llbe pleased to hear, remains veryBristolian. C o n c o rd e ’s Homecoming,an account of the last ever Concordeflight as she came into Filton inNovember 2003, has shifted between11,000 and 12,000 copies.

“We made the decision to putcameras in all sorts of places,” s ay sAndy. “So we had them at vantagepoints all over the area – C l eve d o n ,on top of the Cathedral and so on.”

There were also cameras at Cum-berland Basin, Purdown, Horfieldand even on top of blocks of councilflats. And at Filton itself, of course.

Many 1st Take documentaries arecrammed with archive footage. Someof this comes from newsreels, somefrom archives, and some fromprivate individuals. For SteamAround Bristol, a nostalgic journeyvia stations around the city - BathSpa, Keynsham, Brislington, Whit-church, Portishead, Shirehampton,Avonmouth, Severn Beach and manymore - they successfully appealed viaa letter in the Evening Post for people

A newly released DVDuses old film footageand present-day scenesto chart some of the as-tonishing changes whichcame to many Bristolneighbourhoods withredevelopment in the1950s, 60s and 70s.Eugene Byrne re p o r t s .

City Docks.Their newest film is the second

looking at the reconstruction of Bris-tol after the Second World War anduses much of this footage from theRecord Office intercut withpresent-day scenes to bear witness tothe astonishing ways in which manyneighbourhoods around town weretransfor med.

Bristol After the Bombs Vol. 2 t a ke sus to Redcliffe to see how the wreck-ing ball cleared Georgian terraces tomake way for 1960s maisonettes andflats. We also visit Kingsdown, Clif-ton, St Judes and, scene of one of themost dramatic transformations of

all, Barton Hill.Guided around by local historian

Mike Hooper, the film will evokememories for anyone who lived inBristol in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Andfor anyone else the sheer scale ofchanges wrought on neighbourhoodsby German bombs and postwar de-velopers alike will be quite stag-gering. Most of the old footage comesfrom a film shot for Bristol CityCouncil titled The Changing Faceof Bristol.

“It may have been the Clerk of theWorks, or someone like that who shotit. Someone was going around with acine camera recording places as they

were being demolished, or wereabout to be re-developed.

“We think it may have all beendone by the same guy. If you watchthe film carefully, you’ll see the samecar in lots of scenes, a Ford Consul.So we reckon it was his car.”

So there you have it. If anyone inyour family worked for the council inthe 1960s, drove a Ford Consul andmay have gone around town filmingold neighbourhoods, write in and letus know.

Bristol After the Bombs Vol 2 isreleased on DVD by 1st Take,priced at £14.95

See: www.1st-tak e.com

who had old cine film and photos toget in touch.

Another good source is the BristolRecord Office (BRO), which has anarchive of old film footage takenaround the city. Material here datesback to the early days of film andis being catalogued and digitised byvolunteer experts.

Some of the moving pictures at theBRO were made for Bristol CityCouncil. 1st Take has made twodocumentaries, for instance, aboutBristol’s docks in the 1940s, 50s and60s, and material for these came frompromotional films the council madewhen it owned Avonmouth and the

� cap:

� P i c t u re staken fromstills in thefirm:

1 InR e d c l i ff e ,lookingt o w a rd sSt MaryR e d c l i ff e

2 The oldG ro s v e n o rHotel

3 CattleMarketbridge

4 Tr a i ngoing overthe FeederCanal

5 MontagueHill,Kingsdown,1953

6 Barton Hill– terracedhousesbeingdemolishedto make wayfor towerblocks

EVENIN’ all! Here is a thing Ifound the other day on a hu-morous website from Water-ford in Ireland. The site’scalled Waterford Whispers

(w aterfordwhispersne ws.com – NB:other things on it are a bit offensiveand sweary. Also you won’t get a lot ofthe gags if you’re not Irish.)

It’s headed: “Reeling in the Years:F lanagan’s Internet Café, 1934.”

Which I thought hilarious. Sowould you if you spent so much timeputting nostalgic old black-and-whitephotos into newspapers, books andmag azines.

This got us wondering if there’sanyone out there with the requisitePhotoshop skills to make someequally absurd spoof pics of oldBristol.

We were thinking maybe of theDutch House before the war as anAmsterdam-style cannabis café, or ahorse-drawn Georges Brewery drayloaded with cans of Red Bull or otherenergy drinks. An ironmonger’s shopwith a load of satellite dishes hangingin the window? Or how about an icecream vendor’s bicycle with a signoffering to unlock mobile phones?OK, you get the idea. Any that yousend in to us will of course attract theusual reward.*

I suppose the council budget fortown twinning is a bit on the thin sidethese days, but if there is any cash inthe biscuit-tin I’d like to suggest thatthey spend it on twinning Bristolwith Waterford.

It’s a good match. Like Bristol it’salways been a trading port, and bothplaces have a history going back over1,000 years, and for much of that timeboth cities traded extensively witheach other. Just saying.

(*Nothing)

You need leather ballsRugby League fan? Then if you’re

at the Bristol Record Office (until Oct3), the Bristol Central Library (Oct5-24) or M Shed (Oct 25 – Nov 30) keepan eye out for a little display ex-hibition called Rugby League and theSouth West.

Put together to mark Bristol’s host-ing of the 2013 Rugby World Cupmatch between the USA and the CookIslands at the Memorial Stadium onOctober 30, it’s a potted history ofRugby League. It covers the game’sorigins, development, and featuresthe stories of some of the sport’sSouth West and Welsh heroes over thepast century.

A Family AffairAnd so to the Old Vic the other

night for a wee party to launch AFatal Duel: Bristol 1809. SubtitledBristol 1809: A Fugitive’s Story.

It’s a fascinating tale, all the moreso because it’s true. In 1809 Bristollawyer Henry Smith and business-man Richard Priest had a row at theTheatre Royal. It was trivial and silly,but things got out of hand and itbecame a matter of honour, so twodays later the gentlemen fought aduel in Kingsdown, just outside thejurisdiction of Bristol’s magistrates.

Smith wounded Priest and re-turned to his office thinking allwould be well, but later the same dayheard that Priest had bled to deathand that he would now be facing amurder charge. So he legged it, end-ing up in the middle of the PeninsularWar in Portugal and Spain.

I’ll not tell you the ending, except tosay it’s got everything, including loveinterest and courtroom drama. Itwo u l d n’t be at all surprising if someenterprising TV producer or moviedirector picked it up. Any scriptwould have to tone down Smith’sarrogance and self-pity somewhat,but everything else is there,re a dy - m a d e.

One of the striking things about theevening at the theatre, though, waslearning all the intricate family con-nections involved in the story. Thebook was written from Smith’s ownpapers by his descendants Tim Rooth

and Alexander Hellawell. One ofSmith’s friends was a lawyer whofounded the modern day Bristol prac-tice of Burges Salmon. Another wasfrom the Lean banking dynastywhich, among other things, paid forBristol’s Central Library.

Mr Rooth has a cousin, Anne Hicks,the Bristol artist who, with her hus-band Jerry, played a leading part incampaigns to improve Bristol in fromthe 1960s to the 1990s.

Anne and Jerry Hicks’ daughterKim is a well-known actress. So whobetter, on the night, to read extractsfrom Henry Smith’s account of hislife on the run, over 200 years ago?

A Fatal Duel is published by Red-cliffe Press at £11.50, and is a dashedgood read.

Hats off to Fanny!One suspects the an-

niversary will probablygo unremarkedeverywhere else,but we ought toremember her… October 6will be the150th an-niversary ofthe death ofFrances Mil-ton Trollope,one of themost remark-able womenBristol everp ro d u c e d .

She was born in1779, probably inStapleton, daughter ofWilliam Milton and his

first wife Mary, nee Gresley. Bothp a re n t s ’ families were well-to-do andBristolian. Her paternal grandfatherwas an apothecary from QueenSquare, while her paternal grand-father was a distiller.

Known to all the family as ‘Fa n ny ’she was highly intelligent, energeticand resourceful. It turned out shewould have to be, as she marriedbarrister Thomas Trollope in 1809.Trollope, through a mixture of in-competence, bad personality and badluck, suffered various financial mis-fortunes. The couple had seven chil-dren, their third son being AnthonyTrollope, who was destined to be oneof Britain’s greatest 19th-centurynovelists. (In his day-job working forthe Post Office he also invented thepillar box. As doubtless they will tellyou on TV programmes like QI.)

In desperation, Fanny fled her ab-usive and impecunious hus-

band and travelled toAmerica with some

of her children, tolive at a com-

mune set up bythe feministand social re-for merFa n nyWr i g h t .

This was ater ribleidea. The

idealisticcommunity

turned out tobe a malaria-rid-

den swamp, andFanny Trollope now

had a series of (mis)adventures trying to sup-

port her family. This included settingup a retail centre in Cincinnati, gen-erally reckoned as America’s firstever shopping mall. Got that? Theubiquitous US shopping mall wasinvented by a woman from Bristol!

Her fortunes changed when, on re-turning to England she wrote Do-mestic Manners of the Americans.

Published in 1832 it was anovernight literary sensation. It is stillfunny today, painting the inhabitantsof the young United States as by turnsvulgar, boorish, puritanical, or mon-strous religious hypocrites. Obvi-ously the Brits lapped this sort ofthing up, while equally obviously theYanks hated it.

Here she is on dining, Americ-an-style:

The total want of all the usual cour-tesies of the table, the voracious rapid-ity with which the viands were seizedand devoured; the strange uncouthphrases and pronunciation; the loath-some spitting, from the contaminationof which it was absolutely impossibleto protect our dresses; the frightfulmanner of feeding with their knives,till the whole blade seemed to enter intothe mouth; and the still more frightfulmanner of cleaning the teeth after-ward with a pocket knife, soon forcedus to feel that we were not surroundedby the generals, colonels, and majorsof the Old World; and that the dinnerhour was to be anything rather thanan hour of enjoyment.

Fanny went on to become the fam-i ly ’s principal breadwinner andturned out several more travel booksand numerous works of fiction. Shewas a redoubtable anti-slavery cam-paigner, too, who is said to have in-spired Harriet Beecher Stowe towrite Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If you fancyreading Domestic Manners you canfind it online easily enough –try http://tinyurl.com/American-Manners

There. Got through all of thatwithout making a single puerile jokeabout Fanny Trollope’s name. Welldone, us!

Gromit TalesA couple of weeks ago I was wit-

tering on about how all the Gromitfigures around the city this summerwere so hugely popular there werebound to be odd tales and urbanlegends about them in years toc o m e.

The Editor of this very newspaper,a man who is, after all, supposed toknow what’s going on, tells me that heheard that in some places, peoplewere going out of their homes late atnight or early in the morning to cleantheir neighbourhood Gromit. Cananyone confirm?

Did any of you go out there withsoapy water and sponge to buff upyour Gromit for the day? Did you seeanyone else doing so? Give us a shoutif you can help. These tales are thefolklore of the future.

Cheers then!� Get in touch: Email Bris-tol.Times@b-nm.co.uk or write toBristol Times, Bristol Post, TempleWay, Bristol BS99 7HD.

� Above, Kim Hicks reads from AFatal Duel; below right, FannyTrollope, famous novelist and writer,who also invented the shopping mall

2

3

4

1

5

6

EPB-E01-S4

EPB-

E01-

S4

4 Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013 5Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

Latimer’sDiary

How about twinning uswith Waterford, Mr Mayor?

REBUILDING BRISTOLAFTER THE BOMBS

OUR first ever documentary,a VHS of course, was Yate –A Surprising History. Wethought it would be good tomake a film about the town

where we live,” says Andy Warren.“Everyone said it would never sell,

who on earth wants to watch a filmabout Yate? But it did sell, it wasvery popular here, and so then wewent on to make a film about Chip-ping Sodbury, then one about Clifton,and basically just went fromt h e re …”

From these humble beginnings in1993, Andy Warren (cameraman andtechie) and Dave Rogers (historian)set up 1st Take.

The firm, which specialises inhistorical documentaries, is nowclose to making its 100th film.

During that time they have turnedout films looking at the history ofmany different areas of Bristol, sev-eral about historic railways and awide range of others, from closelyresearched film on Bristol’s historicindustries to re-releasing some won-derfully elegiac films Sir John Betje-man made in the West of England inthe 1960s.

While 1st Take’s roots are local(the firm’s still based at Yate) theyhave made plenty of films abouttowns, aviation, railways and morebesides elsewhere.

Their biggest seller to date, you’llbe pleased to hear, remains veryBristolian. C o n c o rd e ’s Homecoming,an account of the last ever Concordeflight as she came into Filton inNovember 2003, has shifted between11,000 and 12,000 copies.

“We made the decision to putcameras in all sorts of places,” s ay sAndy. “So we had them at vantagepoints all over the area – C l eve d o n ,on top of the Cathedral and so on.”

There were also cameras at Cum-berland Basin, Purdown, Horfieldand even on top of blocks of councilflats. And at Filton itself, of course.

Many 1st Take documentaries arecrammed with archive footage. Someof this comes from newsreels, somefrom archives, and some fromprivate individuals. For SteamAround Bristol, a nostalgic journeyvia stations around the city - BathSpa, Keynsham, Brislington, Whit-church, Portishead, Shirehampton,Avonmouth, Severn Beach and manymore - they successfully appealed viaa letter in the Evening Post for people

A newly released DVDuses old film footageand present-day scenesto chart some of the as-tonishing changes whichcame to many Bristolneighbourhoods withredevelopment in the1950s, 60s and 70s.Eugene Byrne re p o r t s .

City Docks.Their newest film is the second

looking at the reconstruction of Bris-tol after the Second World War anduses much of this footage from theRecord Office intercut withpresent-day scenes to bear witness tothe astonishing ways in which manyneighbourhoods around town weretransfor med.

Bristol After the Bombs Vol. 2 t a ke sus to Redcliffe to see how the wreck-ing ball cleared Georgian terraces tomake way for 1960s maisonettes andflats. We also visit Kingsdown, Clif-ton, St Judes and, scene of one of themost dramatic transformations of

all, Barton Hill.Guided around by local historian

Mike Hooper, the film will evokememories for anyone who lived inBristol in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Andfor anyone else the sheer scale ofchanges wrought on neighbourhoodsby German bombs and postwar de-velopers alike will be quite stag-gering. Most of the old footage comesfrom a film shot for Bristol CityCouncil titled The Changing Faceof Bristol.

“It may have been the Clerk of theWorks, or someone like that who shotit. Someone was going around with acine camera recording places as they

were being demolished, or wereabout to be re-developed.

“We think it may have all beendone by the same guy. If you watchthe film carefully, you’ll see the samecar in lots of scenes, a Ford Consul.So we reckon it was his car.”

So there you have it. If anyone inyour family worked for the council inthe 1960s, drove a Ford Consul andmay have gone around town filmingold neighbourhoods, write in and letus know.

Bristol After the Bombs Vol 2 isreleased on DVD by 1st Take,priced at £14.95

See: www.1st-tak e.com

who had old cine film and photos toget in touch.

Another good source is the BristolRecord Office (BRO), which has anarchive of old film footage takenaround the city. Material here datesback to the early days of film andis being catalogued and digitised byvolunteer experts.

Some of the moving pictures at theBRO were made for Bristol CityCouncil. 1st Take has made twodocumentaries, for instance, aboutBristol’s docks in the 1940s, 50s and60s, and material for these came frompromotional films the council madewhen it owned Avonmouth and the

� cap:

� P i c t u re staken fromstills in thefirm:

1 InR e d c l i ff e ,lookingt o w a rd sSt MaryR e d c l i ff e

2 The oldG ro s v e n o rHotel

3 CattleMarketbridge

4 Tr a i ngoing overthe FeederCanal

5 MontagueHill,Kingsdown,1953

6 Barton Hill– terracedhousesbeingdemolishedto make wayfor towerblocks

EVENIN’ all! Here is a thing Ifound the other day on a hu-morous website from Water-ford in Ireland. The site’scalled Waterford Whispers

(w aterfordwhispersne ws.com – NB:other things on it are a bit offensiveand sweary. Also you won’t get a lot ofthe gags if you’re not Irish.)

It’s headed: “Reeling in the Years:F lanagan’s Internet Café, 1934.”

Which I thought hilarious. Sowould you if you spent so much timeputting nostalgic old black-and-whitephotos into newspapers, books andmag azines.

This got us wondering if there’sanyone out there with the requisitePhotoshop skills to make someequally absurd spoof pics of oldBristol.

We were thinking maybe of theDutch House before the war as anAmsterdam-style cannabis café, or ahorse-drawn Georges Brewery drayloaded with cans of Red Bull or otherenergy drinks. An ironmonger’s shopwith a load of satellite dishes hangingin the window? Or how about an icecream vendor’s bicycle with a signoffering to unlock mobile phones?OK, you get the idea. Any that yousend in to us will of course attract theusual reward.*

I suppose the council budget fortown twinning is a bit on the thin sidethese days, but if there is any cash inthe biscuit-tin I’d like to suggest thatthey spend it on twinning Bristolwith Waterford.

It’s a good match. Like Bristol it’salways been a trading port, and bothplaces have a history going back over1,000 years, and for much of that timeboth cities traded extensively witheach other. Just saying.

(*Nothing)

You need leather ballsRugby League fan? Then if you’re

at the Bristol Record Office (until Oct3), the Bristol Central Library (Oct5-24) or M Shed (Oct 25 – Nov 30) keepan eye out for a little display ex-hibition called Rugby League and theSouth West.

Put together to mark Bristol’s host-ing of the 2013 Rugby World Cupmatch between the USA and the CookIslands at the Memorial Stadium onOctober 30, it’s a potted history ofRugby League. It covers the game’sorigins, development, and featuresthe stories of some of the sport’sSouth West and Welsh heroes over thepast century.

A Family AffairAnd so to the Old Vic the other

night for a wee party to launch AFatal Duel: Bristol 1809. SubtitledBristol 1809: A Fugitive’s Story.

It’s a fascinating tale, all the moreso because it’s true. In 1809 Bristollawyer Henry Smith and business-man Richard Priest had a row at theTheatre Royal. It was trivial and silly,but things got out of hand and itbecame a matter of honour, so twodays later the gentlemen fought aduel in Kingsdown, just outside thejurisdiction of Bristol’s magistrates.

Smith wounded Priest and re-turned to his office thinking allwould be well, but later the same dayheard that Priest had bled to deathand that he would now be facing amurder charge. So he legged it, end-ing up in the middle of the PeninsularWar in Portugal and Spain.

I’ll not tell you the ending, except tosay it’s got everything, including loveinterest and courtroom drama. Itwo u l d n’t be at all surprising if someenterprising TV producer or moviedirector picked it up. Any scriptwould have to tone down Smith’sarrogance and self-pity somewhat,but everything else is there,re a dy - m a d e.

One of the striking things about theevening at the theatre, though, waslearning all the intricate family con-nections involved in the story. Thebook was written from Smith’s ownpapers by his descendants Tim Rooth

and Alexander Hellawell. One ofSmith’s friends was a lawyer whofounded the modern day Bristol prac-tice of Burges Salmon. Another wasfrom the Lean banking dynastywhich, among other things, paid forBristol’s Central Library.

Mr Rooth has a cousin, Anne Hicks,the Bristol artist who, with her hus-band Jerry, played a leading part incampaigns to improve Bristol in fromthe 1960s to the 1990s.

Anne and Jerry Hicks’ daughterKim is a well-known actress. So whobetter, on the night, to read extractsfrom Henry Smith’s account of hislife on the run, over 200 years ago?

A Fatal Duel is published by Red-cliffe Press at £11.50, and is a dashedgood read.

Hats off to Fanny!One suspects the an-

niversary will probablygo unremarkedeverywhere else,but we ought toremember her… October 6will be the150th an-niversary ofthe death ofFrances Mil-ton Trollope,one of themost remark-able womenBristol everp ro d u c e d .

She was born in1779, probably inStapleton, daughter ofWilliam Milton and his

first wife Mary, nee Gresley. Bothp a re n t s ’ families were well-to-do andBristolian. Her paternal grandfatherwas an apothecary from QueenSquare, while her paternal grand-father was a distiller.

Known to all the family as ‘Fa n ny ’she was highly intelligent, energeticand resourceful. It turned out shewould have to be, as she marriedbarrister Thomas Trollope in 1809.Trollope, through a mixture of in-competence, bad personality and badluck, suffered various financial mis-fortunes. The couple had seven chil-dren, their third son being AnthonyTrollope, who was destined to be oneof Britain’s greatest 19th-centurynovelists. (In his day-job working forthe Post Office he also invented thepillar box. As doubtless they will tellyou on TV programmes like QI.)

In desperation, Fanny fled her ab-usive and impecunious hus-

band and travelled toAmerica with some

of her children, tolive at a com-

mune set up bythe feministand social re-for merFa n nyWr i g h t .

This was ater ribleidea. The

idealisticcommunity

turned out tobe a malaria-rid-

den swamp, andFanny Trollope now

had a series of (mis)adventures trying to sup-

port her family. This included settingup a retail centre in Cincinnati, gen-erally reckoned as America’s firstever shopping mall. Got that? Theubiquitous US shopping mall wasinvented by a woman from Bristol!

Her fortunes changed when, on re-turning to England she wrote Do-mestic Manners of the Americans.

Published in 1832 it was anovernight literary sensation. It is stillfunny today, painting the inhabitantsof the young United States as by turnsvulgar, boorish, puritanical, or mon-strous religious hypocrites. Obvi-ously the Brits lapped this sort ofthing up, while equally obviously theYanks hated it.

Here she is on dining, Americ-an-style:

The total want of all the usual cour-tesies of the table, the voracious rapid-ity with which the viands were seizedand devoured; the strange uncouthphrases and pronunciation; the loath-some spitting, from the contaminationof which it was absolutely impossibleto protect our dresses; the frightfulmanner of feeding with their knives,till the whole blade seemed to enter intothe mouth; and the still more frightfulmanner of cleaning the teeth after-ward with a pocket knife, soon forcedus to feel that we were not surroundedby the generals, colonels, and majorsof the Old World; and that the dinnerhour was to be anything rather thanan hour of enjoyment.

Fanny went on to become the fam-i ly ’s principal breadwinner andturned out several more travel booksand numerous works of fiction. Shewas a redoubtable anti-slavery cam-paigner, too, who is said to have in-spired Harriet Beecher Stowe towrite Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If you fancyreading Domestic Manners you canfind it online easily enough –try http://tinyurl.com/American-Manners

There. Got through all of thatwithout making a single puerile jokeabout Fanny Trollope’s name. Welldone, us!

Gromit TalesA couple of weeks ago I was wit-

tering on about how all the Gromitfigures around the city this summerwere so hugely popular there werebound to be odd tales and urbanlegends about them in years toc o m e.

The Editor of this very newspaper,a man who is, after all, supposed toknow what’s going on, tells me that heheard that in some places, peoplewere going out of their homes late atnight or early in the morning to cleantheir neighbourhood Gromit. Cananyone confirm?

Did any of you go out there withsoapy water and sponge to buff upyour Gromit for the day? Did you seeanyone else doing so? Give us a shoutif you can help. These tales are thefolklore of the future.

Cheers then!� Get in touch: Email Bris-tol.Times@b-nm.co.uk or write toBristol Times, Bristol Post, TempleWay, Bristol BS99 7HD.

� Above, Kim Hicks reads from AFatal Duel; below right, FannyTrollope, famous novelist and writer,who also invented the shopping mall

2

3

4

1

5

6

EPB-E01-S4

EPB-

E01-

S4

6 Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013 7Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

READING the article onTuesday, September 17,about Bristol Suffra-gettes took me back tostories of Jessie Stephen,

a suffragette honoured with a blueplaque on her home at 27 ChesselStreet, Bristol in 2003 (I have a Po s tarticle entitled ‘CampaigningHeroine Jessie Honoured’ d at e dSeptember 8, 2003).

During my time working for IanWhite, Member of the EuropeanParliament for Bristol (1989-1999),I was privileged to be involved inorganising memorial lectures inJe s s i e ’s honour. During this time Iundertook research into her veryfull and inspirational life, part ofwhich covered her work with theWSPU and their campaigns.

In an interview for Spare Ribmagazine she referred to an eventin the Central Hall in Old Market,Bristol:

“… the police had been careful –they were on the roof, they were inthe hall, all over the place – to seethat she (Mrs Pankhurst) didn’tget into the hall. Then when thechairman announced that she hadthe greatest pleasure in announ-cing the arrival of her respectedand beloved leader – because youused very emotive words – every -body thought it was a joke. But wed i d n’t because we knew thatsomething had happened. We hadall the platform with barbed wirearound it, with bunting over thebarbed wire, with flower pots andall sorts, and one woman had oneof those revolvers with blank shot.And when Mrs Pankhurst steppedforward, you should have seen thefaces of the police. They couldn’tbelieve their eyes. Nobody toldthem how she got in there, but wewere told afterwards that shecame in the Corporation laundrybasket. When the police tried todrag poor Mrs Pankhurst away,they rushed forward to the bunt-

ing and got their hands all lacer-ated. We were throwing flowerpots, there were all sorts banged atthe police. You didn’t think aboutit being violence, you only wantedto protect the women you’dbrought there.”

Other memoires recall attackson pillar boxes where acid waspoured in to damage and disruptthe mail. These were very feistywomen unafraid of taking risks!

Exhibition puts focus on heritage buildingsWar diary a piece of family’s history

THE Seven Years War, from1754 to 1763, was, some his-torians claim, the first everworld war. Britain andFrance and their respective

allies fought it out for supremacy inEurope, Asia, Africa and North Amer-ica.

Our side won. This was the war inwhich Clive of India took Bengal,while the French were decisively de-feated in America, particularly withWo l f e ’s victory at Quebec.

World wars are not cheap. Britain’swar effort resulted in huge increasesin taxation, and one of the hardestplaces to be hit was Bristol and thesurrounding counties.

It was only during the NapoleonicWars that income tax was introduced.Until then, all taxation was essen-tially on the movement of goods (cus-toms) or their production and sale( e xc i s e ) .

For a government eager to raise rev-enue, increasing taxes on the con-sumption of alcohol was, then as now,an easy option.

They had already increased the du-ties on beer. Before the War had evenended the publicans of Bristol wereadvertising in a local paper that theyhad no choice but, regretfully, to in-crease the price of ale to fourpence(less than 2p in modern money).Someone pointed out that this wasmore than was being charged in Lon-don, which was paying exactly thesame taxes. The Bristol publicanssaid that beer would now be three anda half pence a quart.

Now, though, the governmentplanned to tax cider as well.

This was the work of George III’sPrime Minister, the Earl of Bute, whowanted to charge four shillings (20p)on every hogshead (a barrel contain-ing 52 and a half gallons) of cider.

The move was hugely unpopular,particularly in cider-producinga re a s.

When peace with France and Spainwas proclaimed on March 30, 1763, alocal paper versified:

The Peace is good – who dare disputethe fact?

See the first fruits thereof – the CyderAct!

Bristol’s Corporation ordered thata rundlet of wine (about 15 gallons) belet into each of the conduits at AllSaints, St Thomas and the Quay, butthere was little popular rejoicing.

It was the same a few weeks laterwhen the city held its official day of

How cider tax left a sour taste andplayed a part in American rebellion

�RECENTLY, I cleared my grand-mother’s effects (she died in 2001) andfound the Second World War diary ofTrooper Richard Jack Slaughter ofReconnaissance Corps 15th ScottishRe giment.

The last entry is February 8, 1945.Having done some research, I dis-covered that he was killed on Feb-ruary 10, 1945 and is buried inGermany. He was the son of SydneyRichard and Gertrude FannySlaughter of Bristol. I believe this isthe same Sydney Richard who wasthe last family company director of

Photograph brought backmemories of school exchange�THE photograph in Bristol Times (September 17)of Year 4 Merrywood girls (abov e) brought back lotsof memories of the Bristol-Bordeaux exchange.

I am in the photograph along with quite a few girlsI remember. Also Miss Blacklock, our music teacher,peering through the middle.

I think that the Notre Dame is in the back-g round.

I still keep in touch with my French exchangestudent.

Christine (nee Stone)

� THIS is a funeral portrait of a youngwoman from ancient Rome, painted around60AD, give or take a few years.You can get up close to her at BristolMuseum & Art Gallery anytime between nowand January 12 at the Roman Empire: Powerand People exhibition. Courtesy of the BritishMuseum, it features over 160 pieces,including sculptures from the villas of theEmperors Tiberius and Hadrian, coins,jewellery and even children’s socks.Bristol Times will be taking a closer look in acouple of weeks when the museum opens anadditional exhibition about the Romansaround Bristol. Provincial minded? Us?Roman Empire: Power and People Is open10am-5pm every day (5pm Sat & Sun),admission £5 /£4 concessions/£3 child (5 to16yrs), under 5s free. Family ticket £10 (2adults/2 children or 1 adult/3 children) alsogets you the loan of a Roman kit bag to helpfind out more about Roman life.Image © The Trustees of the British Museum

thanks for the peace. By nowGloucestershire cider was being soldoff at ridiculously low prices to evadethe forthcoming tax.

The Corporation had laid on gun-powder and bonfires and free beer, butcontemporaries say that there was nocelebrating. The mayor led the alder-men and corporation to the Cathedralto give thanks, but no one else fol-lowed him.

Things turned ugly in the eveningwhen the mob carrying a jack-boot –the King’s Scots-born Prime Ministerand royal favourite was known as“Jack Bute” – paraded around with aneffigy covered in plaid. This was soonburned after plenty of physical andverbal abuse.

Bute’s ministry fell shortly after-wards, but the Cider Act came intoforce in the autumn of 1763, anyway.

There were mock funeral servicesacross the west of England. Someonewrote in a Bristol paper, again refer-ring to the hated Scottish minister:

Sooner than yield to a tax on ourf ru i t ,

The trees, though in blossom, shallfall to the root.

May those who persist in enforcingthe deed

For evermore dwell on the north sidethe Tweed.

Now the locals determined to makethe Cider Act unenforceable. Somecarried on producing and consumingcider as though nothing hadhappened. In the Forest of Dean anexcise man was abducted by minersand imprisoned underground for overa month.

In Bristol, two young men who had

been hired by the excise men to sur-vey the location and size of cider appleorchards around the area were seized.They were only released after givingtheir solemn word that they wouldquit their new jobs immediately.

Bute’s successor George Grenvilleretained the tax for as long as hecould. By 1764 it was bringing £30,000a year into the government coffers,making a big dent in the nationaldebt.

Political pressure from cider-pro-ducing areas would eventually over-whelm the government, though, andthe tax was abolished in 1766. In themeantime, Grenville was imposingmore taxes on Britain’s Americancolonies, thinking it only fair thatthey should cover some of the costs ofkeeping the French out.

One of the reasons that Grenvillethought he could keep imposing taxeson the American colonists was thatnew impositions like the Sugar Act of1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 werenearly as unpopular as the Cider Acthad been in England.

In the end, though, the Americancolonists decided they weren’t goingto take any more “taxation withoutre presentation”. In the short run thisled to the Boston Tea Party, withanti-tax activists chucking tea intothe harbour, and in the longer run tothe American War of Independence.

So you might say that because theBritish government believed thatAmerican colonists were more docileand law-abiding than the bolshy andrebellious people of Bristol and sur-rounding counties is why we have aUnited States of America.

Exactly 250 years ago,the west country’s ciderindustry was almost putout of business by taxincreases levied by adeeply unpopular gov-ernment. The tax, andthe furious reaction to itin Bristol and the westof England, also ledindirectly to Americanindependence. EugeneByrne raises his glass.

� Ciderp ro d u c e r sswore theywould soonerlet theirapples rot onthe groundthan pay thehated newtax. Below,John Stuart,3rd Earl ofBute, thePrimeMinister whoi n t ro d u c e dthe Cider Tax.Doesn’texactly looklike the sortof blokewho’d enjoy apint of natch,does he?

� Following theBristol Times articleon the suffragettes’arson campaignaround Bristol in1913 (BT, Sept 17)the good folk at theFrenchay VillageMuseum sent us acouple of photos.These showBegbrook Houseshortly after it wasset on fire bywomen protestingat the treatment inprison of RachelPease, who wasbeing force-fedwhile on prisonhunger strike.

As well as her involvement inwo m e n’s suffrage, Jessie cam-paigned for the rights of domesticworkers and successfully negoti-ated the doubling of wages of wait-resses at Lyons corner-house tearooms; she ran her own secret-arial agency, wrote many pamph-lets and toured several countriesgiving lectures on workers andwo m e n’s rights. She served as aCouncillor in Windmill Hill andstood for Parliament in Westonsuper Mare. In 1955 she receivedthe TUC Gold Badge and in 1977was awarded the MBE for a life-time’s service to the Trade UnionMovement. She died in Bristol inJune 1979 and 16 years later IanWhite honoured her memory withthe first of the Jessie Stephen Me-morial Lectures, events he sup-ported until he lost his seat in1999. She was also honoured witha tree at Ashton Court and a me-morial bench which was origin-ally installed at the large Co-op

department store in Broadmead,known as Fairfax House. The seatwas later moved to the Co-opHomeworld car park (currentlybeing developed for a new Asda) inFilton. Whether it remains is an-other question.

It is difficult to keep brief anytribute to Jessie but just lookingthrough my old papers to providethe detail of this summarybrought back so many memoriesof both this formidable woman Inever met, and of Marge Evans,another truly inspirational Bris-tol campaigner I did have the priv-ilege to have known. Margeworked alongside Jessie andchaired the first lecture but hadsadly passed away by the second.The tributes that came in to hermemory were equally as impress-ive as those for Jessie and I feelvery lucky indeed to have played asmall role in honouring themboth.

Denise Goodman, via email

the Bristol firm, Bray and Slaughter.My grandmother, Irene Palmer

(nee Pow) was born in Bristol in 1906but moved to Poole, Dorset in, I be-lieve, the 1920s. Other than the Bristollink, I do not know why she wouldhave had this diary.

I would dearly love to know if thereare any descendants of Richard livingin Bristol still as I would love to beable to give them this piece of theirf amily’s history.

I can be contacted ond.belbin@sk y.com.

David Belbin

B R I S T O L’S Heritage is being ‘re -cycl e d ’ at an astounding pace.Look, for example, at what hashappened to historic (and not sohistoric) buildings, at the E shedand the M shed, at Bush Housethat was once the Acraman’swarehouse, at William Champi-o n’s pin-making factory in King-wood/Warmley and at theTobacco Factory.

Bristol’s Heritage Buildings:Relics or Legacies? is an exhib-ition and networking event at

John Wesley’s New Room in theHorsefair, Bristol.

The exhibition (Oct 21-Nov 23,open 10am-5pm, Mon-Sat) and thenetworking event (Sat, Nov 16,1.30pm-5pm) at the New Roomwill draw together those intent onrescuing, restoring and regener-ating Bristol’s Heritage Build-ings. As a police station and alibrary are transformed to houseprimary schools, they willprovide chances to assess what ishappening and share ideas.

The New Room, the Georgianmeeting house that was benignlyneglected during the 19th centuryand adventurously restored in1929/30, will provide an ideal set-ting for discussion about Bristol’sHeritage Buildings: Relics orLe gacies?

At the exhibition and net-work-ing event there will be contri-butions about, for example, ActonCourt; Arnos Vale Cemetery;Charles Wesley’s House; CliftonRocks Railway; Kingswood Her-

itage Museum; George HerbertOatley – whose sequicentenary isbeing celebrated; the PierianCentre; Trinity Arts Centre ;Quakers Friars and the Suspen-sion Bridge.

Architects, activists, and aca-demics will be among those in-volved, sharing ideas,experiences and links.

For up-dates see the New Roomwebsite www.ne wroombristol.org.uk. Contact j a m e s g i bb s @ b t i n -ter net.com.

To rc h e dduringp rotestsove rfo rce -fe e d i n g

� Jessie Stephen, fighter for women’s rights, pictured in later life

Picture of the Week

Suffragettes How Jessie helpedthe fight for women’s rights

Jessie Stephen

The police tried todrag poor MrsPankhurst away ... Wewere throwing flowerpots, there were allsorts banged at thepolice.

“

EPB-E01-S4

EPB-

E01-

S4

6 Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013 7Tu e s d a y, October 1, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

READING the article onTuesday, September 17,about Bristol Suffra-gettes took me back tostories of Jessie Stephen,

a suffragette honoured with a blueplaque on her home at 27 ChesselStreet, Bristol in 2003 (I have a Po s tarticle entitled ‘CampaigningHeroine Jessie Honoured’ d at e dSeptember 8, 2003).

During my time working for IanWhite, Member of the EuropeanParliament for Bristol (1989-1999),I was privileged to be involved inorganising memorial lectures inJe s s i e ’s honour. During this time Iundertook research into her veryfull and inspirational life, part ofwhich covered her work with theWSPU and their campaigns.

In an interview for Spare Ribmagazine she referred to an eventin the Central Hall in Old Market,Bristol:

“… the police had been careful –they were on the roof, they were inthe hall, all over the place – to seethat she (Mrs Pankhurst) didn’tget into the hall. Then when thechairman announced that she hadthe greatest pleasure in announ-cing the arrival of her respectedand beloved leader – because youused very emotive words – every -body thought it was a joke. But wed i d n’t because we knew thatsomething had happened. We hadall the platform with barbed wirearound it, with bunting over thebarbed wire, with flower pots andall sorts, and one woman had oneof those revolvers with blank shot.And when Mrs Pankhurst steppedforward, you should have seen thefaces of the police. They couldn’tbelieve their eyes. Nobody toldthem how she got in there, but wewere told afterwards that shecame in the Corporation laundrybasket. When the police tried todrag poor Mrs Pankhurst away,they rushed forward to the bunt-

ing and got their hands all lacer-ated. We were throwing flowerpots, there were all sorts banged atthe police. You didn’t think aboutit being violence, you only wantedto protect the women you’dbrought there.”

Other memoires recall attackson pillar boxes where acid waspoured in to damage and disruptthe mail. These were very feistywomen unafraid of taking risks!

Exhibition puts focus on heritage buildingsWar diary a piece of family’s history

THE Seven Years War, from1754 to 1763, was, some his-torians claim, the first everworld war. Britain andFrance and their respective

allies fought it out for supremacy inEurope, Asia, Africa and North Amer-ica.

Our side won. This was the war inwhich Clive of India took Bengal,while the French were decisively de-feated in America, particularly withWo l f e ’s victory at Quebec.

World wars are not cheap. Britain’swar effort resulted in huge increasesin taxation, and one of the hardestplaces to be hit was Bristol and thesurrounding counties.

It was only during the NapoleonicWars that income tax was introduced.Until then, all taxation was essen-tially on the movement of goods (cus-toms) or their production and sale( e xc i s e ) .

For a government eager to raise rev-enue, increasing taxes on the con-sumption of alcohol was, then as now,an easy option.

They had already increased the du-ties on beer. Before the War had evenended the publicans of Bristol wereadvertising in a local paper that theyhad no choice but, regretfully, to in-crease the price of ale to fourpence(less than 2p in modern money).Someone pointed out that this wasmore than was being charged in Lon-don, which was paying exactly thesame taxes. The Bristol publicanssaid that beer would now be three anda half pence a quart.

Now, though, the governmentplanned to tax cider as well.

This was the work of George III’sPrime Minister, the Earl of Bute, whowanted to charge four shillings (20p)on every hogshead (a barrel contain-ing 52 and a half gallons) of cider.

The move was hugely unpopular,particularly in cider-producinga re a s.

When peace with France and Spainwas proclaimed on March 30, 1763, alocal paper versified:

The Peace is good – who dare disputethe fact?

See the first fruits thereof – the CyderAct!

Bristol’s Corporation ordered thata rundlet of wine (about 15 gallons) belet into each of the conduits at AllSaints, St Thomas and the Quay, butthere was little popular rejoicing.

It was the same a few weeks laterwhen the city held its official day of

How cider tax left a sour taste andplayed a part in American rebellion

�RECENTLY, I cleared my grand-mother’s effects (she died in 2001) andfound the Second World War diary ofTrooper Richard Jack Slaughter ofReconnaissance Corps 15th ScottishRe giment.

The last entry is February 8, 1945.Having done some research, I dis-covered that he was killed on Feb-ruary 10, 1945 and is buried inGermany. He was the son of SydneyRichard and Gertrude FannySlaughter of Bristol. I believe this isthe same Sydney Richard who wasthe last family company director of

Photograph brought backmemories of school exchange�THE photograph in Bristol Times (September 17)of Year 4 Merrywood girls (abov e) brought back lotsof memories of the Bristol-Bordeaux exchange.

I am in the photograph along with quite a few girlsI remember. Also Miss Blacklock, our music teacher,peering through the middle.

I think that the Notre Dame is in the back-g round.

I still keep in touch with my French exchangestudent.

Christine (nee Stone)

� THIS is a funeral portrait of a youngwoman from ancient Rome, painted around60AD, give or take a few years.You can get up close to her at BristolMuseum & Art Gallery anytime between nowand January 12 at the Roman Empire: Powerand People exhibition. Courtesy of the BritishMuseum, it features over 160 pieces,including sculptures from the villas of theEmperors Tiberius and Hadrian, coins,jewellery and even children’s socks.Bristol Times will be taking a closer look in acouple of weeks when the museum opens anadditional exhibition about the Romansaround Bristol. Provincial minded? Us?Roman Empire: Power and People Is open10am-5pm every day (5pm Sat & Sun),admission £5 /£4 concessions/£3 child (5 to16yrs), under 5s free. Family ticket £10 (2adults/2 children or 1 adult/3 children) alsogets you the loan of a Roman kit bag to helpfind out more about Roman life.Image © The Trustees of the British Museum

thanks for the peace. By nowGloucestershire cider was being soldoff at ridiculously low prices to evadethe forthcoming tax.

The Corporation had laid on gun-powder and bonfires and free beer, butcontemporaries say that there was nocelebrating. The mayor led the alder-men and corporation to the Cathedralto give thanks, but no one else fol-lowed him.

Things turned ugly in the eveningwhen the mob carrying a jack-boot –the King’s Scots-born Prime Ministerand royal favourite was known as“Jack Bute” – paraded around with aneffigy covered in plaid. This was soonburned after plenty of physical andverbal abuse.

Bute’s ministry fell shortly after-wards, but the Cider Act came intoforce in the autumn of 1763, anyway.

There were mock funeral servicesacross the west of England. Someonewrote in a Bristol paper, again refer-ring to the hated Scottish minister:

Sooner than yield to a tax on ourf ru i t ,

The trees, though in blossom, shallfall to the root.

May those who persist in enforcingthe deed

For evermore dwell on the north sidethe Tweed.

Now the locals determined to makethe Cider Act unenforceable. Somecarried on producing and consumingcider as though nothing hadhappened. In the Forest of Dean anexcise man was abducted by minersand imprisoned underground for overa month.

In Bristol, two young men who had

been hired by the excise men to sur-vey the location and size of cider appleorchards around the area were seized.They were only released after givingtheir solemn word that they wouldquit their new jobs immediately.

Bute’s successor George Grenvilleretained the tax for as long as hecould. By 1764 it was bringing £30,000a year into the government coffers,making a big dent in the nationaldebt.

Political pressure from cider-pro-ducing areas would eventually over-whelm the government, though, andthe tax was abolished in 1766. In themeantime, Grenville was imposingmore taxes on Britain’s Americancolonies, thinking it only fair thatthey should cover some of the costs ofkeeping the French out.

One of the reasons that Grenvillethought he could keep imposing taxeson the American colonists was thatnew impositions like the Sugar Act of1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 werenearly as unpopular as the Cider Acthad been in England.

In the end, though, the Americancolonists decided they weren’t goingto take any more “taxation withoutre presentation”. In the short run thisled to the Boston Tea Party, withanti-tax activists chucking tea intothe harbour, and in the longer run tothe American War of Independence.

So you might say that because theBritish government believed thatAmerican colonists were more docileand law-abiding than the bolshy andrebellious people of Bristol and sur-rounding counties is why we have aUnited States of America.

Exactly 250 years ago,the west country’s ciderindustry was almost putout of business by taxincreases levied by adeeply unpopular gov-ernment. The tax, andthe furious reaction to itin Bristol and the westof England, also ledindirectly to Americanindependence. EugeneByrne raises his glass.

� Ciderp ro d u c e r sswore theywould soonerlet theirapples rot onthe groundthan pay thehated newtax. Below,John Stuart,3rd Earl ofBute, thePrimeMinister whoi n t ro d u c e dthe Cider Tax.Doesn’texactly looklike the sortof blokewho’d enjoy apint of natch,does he?

� Following theBristol Times articleon the suffragettes’arson campaignaround Bristol in1913 (BT, Sept 17)the good folk at theFrenchay VillageMuseum sent us acouple of photos.These showBegbrook Houseshortly after it wasset on fire bywomen protestingat the treatment inprison of RachelPease, who wasbeing force-fedwhile on prisonhunger strike.

As well as her involvement inwo m e n’s suffrage, Jessie cam-paigned for the rights of domesticworkers and successfully negoti-ated the doubling of wages of wait-resses at Lyons corner-house tearooms; she ran her own secret-arial agency, wrote many pamph-lets and toured several countriesgiving lectures on workers andwo m e n’s rights. She served as aCouncillor in Windmill Hill andstood for Parliament in Westonsuper Mare. In 1955 she receivedthe TUC Gold Badge and in 1977was awarded the MBE for a life-time’s service to the Trade UnionMovement. She died in Bristol inJune 1979 and 16 years later IanWhite honoured her memory withthe first of the Jessie Stephen Me-morial Lectures, events he sup-ported until he lost his seat in1999. She was also honoured witha tree at Ashton Court and a me-morial bench which was origin-ally installed at the large Co-op

department store in Broadmead,known as Fairfax House. The seatwas later moved to the Co-opHomeworld car park (currentlybeing developed for a new Asda) inFilton. Whether it remains is an-other question.

It is difficult to keep brief anytribute to Jessie but just lookingthrough my old papers to providethe detail of this summarybrought back so many memoriesof both this formidable woman Inever met, and of Marge Evans,another truly inspirational Bris-tol campaigner I did have the priv-ilege to have known. Margeworked alongside Jessie andchaired the first lecture but hadsadly passed away by the second.The tributes that came in to hermemory were equally as impress-ive as those for Jessie and I feelvery lucky indeed to have played asmall role in honouring themboth.

Denise Goodman, via email

the Bristol firm, Bray and Slaughter.My grandmother, Irene Palmer

(nee Pow) was born in Bristol in 1906but moved to Poole, Dorset in, I be-lieve, the 1920s. Other than the Bristollink, I do not know why she wouldhave had this diary.

I would dearly love to know if thereare any descendants of Richard livingin Bristol still as I would love to beable to give them this piece of theirf amily’s history.

I can be contacted ond.belbin@sk y.com.

David Belbin

B R I S T O L’S Heritage is being ‘re -cycl e d ’ at an astounding pace.Look, for example, at what hashappened to historic (and not sohistoric) buildings, at the E shedand the M shed, at Bush Housethat was once the Acraman’swarehouse, at William Champi-o n’s pin-making factory in King-wood/Warmley and at theTobacco Factory.

Bristol’s Heritage Buildings:Relics or Legacies? is an exhib-ition and networking event at

John Wesley’s New Room in theHorsefair, Bristol.

The exhibition (Oct 21-Nov 23,open 10am-5pm, Mon-Sat) and thenetworking event (Sat, Nov 16,1.30pm-5pm) at the New Roomwill draw together those intent onrescuing, restoring and regener-ating Bristol’s Heritage Build-ings. As a police station and alibrary are transformed to houseprimary schools, they willprovide chances to assess what ishappening and share ideas.

The New Room, the Georgianmeeting house that was benignlyneglected during the 19th centuryand adventurously restored in1929/30, will provide an ideal set-ting for discussion about Bristol’sHeritage Buildings: Relics orLe gacies?

At the exhibition and net-work-ing event there will be contri-butions about, for example, ActonCourt; Arnos Vale Cemetery;Charles Wesley’s House; CliftonRocks Railway; Kingswood Her-

itage Museum; George HerbertOatley – whose sequicentenary isbeing celebrated; the PierianCentre; Trinity Arts Centre ;Quakers Friars and the Suspen-sion Bridge.

Architects, activists, and aca-demics will be among those in-volved, sharing ideas,experiences and links.

For up-dates see the New Roomwebsite www.ne wroombristol.org.uk. Contact j a m e s g i bb s @ b t i n -ter net.com.

To rc h e dduringp rotestsove rfo rce -fe e d i n g

� Jessie Stephen, fighter for women’s rights, pictured in later life

Picture of the Week

Suffragettes How Jessie helpedthe fight for women’s rights

Jessie Stephen

The police tried todrag poor MrsPankhurst away ... Wewere throwing flowerpots, there were allsorts banged at thepolice.

“

EPB-

E01-

S4

8

SADLY in September BluebellCourt said goodbye to our chefTony, and to Claire, our lovelywaitress. Both will be sadlymissed.

Derek and I already knew Tonybefore we moved to Bluebell since hewas our former neighbour. Apartfrom lunches, teas, coffee and cakes,we enjoyed some really special even-ings meals at Christmases, St Geo-rg e’s day, fish and chip suppers, andour lovely barbecues.

Claire brightened all our lives withher lovely smile and happy nature.Every home has a hearth, my mumused to say, and without our café ourre s i d e n t s ’ lounge is now empty.

Derek and I are lucky to be still soindependent and able look afterourselves, so lunch or Sundaydinner cooked by someone else is atreat instead of a necessity (ofcourse, Derek has his own “someoneelse” – me!)

I heard after Tony left that thosewith pacemakers cannot even eatfrozen meals, because they are un-able to use a microwave.

It is fortunate Bluebell has ‘caring’carers to look after those that need it.I absolutely love my morning coffeeand afternoon tea when I am at homebut when I am out I never go toStarbucks or Costa Coffee unless I amforced to, because it is so expensive.

Those shops are everywhere,which I think destroys our lovelylittle independent cafés which westill find tucked away.

Mind you, I am old fashionedenough to still use a vacuum flask –and have done ever since I can re-member, probably because Mum al-ways did when I was a child.

Dad couldn’t abide the sort of milkytea we had out sometimes, so a flaskwas the obvious answer – and a lotcheaper then buying five cups of teaon a day out.

Somehow tea always tasted verydifferent out of a flask, and, of course,needed more preparation because inthe time I am talking about, beforethe war and afterwards, tea wasloose-leaf and we had to make a pot of

tea first, then add it to the milk andsugar in the flask through the teastrainer – something my grandchil-dren cannot envisage.

When Mum and Dad took us chil-dren to Weston-super-Mare, Clevedonor Portishead for the day, the onlythings Dad shelled out for were anice-cream, pony rides along the sandsif it was Weston and a bag of chipsbefore we came home.

Down we would sit on the sands,and Mum would unpack our meatpaste or fishpaste sandwiches (I stilllove Shiphams salmon paste) and

This week in Marion’sMemories - the value ofa good cup of tea andwhy people these daysno longer take a flask ondays out. Maybe it’s theStarbucks generation,muses Marion.

A day out isn’t completewithout a flask of tea

� Me saying goodbye to Claire and Tony before I went on holiday

Footsteps into history

The spooky old churchwith the leaning tower

THE ruined Temple Church,just off Victoria Street, is oneof the most enigmatic placesin the west of England, withall manner of weird stories

attached. Which is just as you’d ex-pect from the site of what was once achurch belonging to the Knights Tem-plar, the medieval order of sol-dier-monks, leading to all manner ofoccult stories and mystic overtones.

Sadly, there are no tales of fabulousriches and hidden treasure, though itis said that the ghost of one of theKnights Templar stalks the fire bri-gade HQ nearby.

The present church (what’s left ofit) was built in the middle ages andbecame the principal church ofBristol’s fabulously wealthy cloth in-dustry. As it was built in marshyground, the tower leans at a slighta n g l e.

Legend has it that choirboysand/or actual parishioners wouldturn up for the service and put nuts inthe crack between tower and church.T hey’d then come out after the ser-vice, after the bells had been rung,and retrieve their nuts, all crackedand ready for eating.

In 1778 the church was the scene ofthe famous/notorious exorcism ofGeorge Lukins, aka the “Yatton Dae-

moniac”. Seven ministers, includingJohn Wesley himself, supposedly castout the demons who had possessedLukins, a tailor from Yatton.

Temple Church’s overcrowdedgraveyard was closed down, alongwith most other parish churchyardsin Bristol, as a health hazard in themid 19th century. A few years later itreopened as a little urban park, afunction it still serves, and verypleasant and shady it is too, espe-cially on hot days.

The church was gutted by fire dur-ing the first major German air raidon Bristol (November 25, 1940; theinformation on the English Heritageplaque on the church is wrong!).

A company of Royal Engineerscame into the city to help clear up thedamage the following morning.

The officer in charge of them wasabout to demolish the leaning toweras he assumed it had been damagedby the bombing and was on the vergeof toppling over.

The locals had a difficult time per-suading him it had always been likethat. Church and tower now remainas a permanent memorial to the Bris-tol blitz.

We pulled our rather atmospheric1963 picture of the church from thea rch ive s.

“

water or gas, which fortunatelyd i d n’t happen often.

If we had been in the shelter longenough to drink the tea, we wouldhave a lovely cup of cocoa, mixed withmilk, and made with the still-hotwater from the Thermos.

When Dad was demobbed and wentto work at St Anne’s board mills,whatever shift he was on, off he wentwith his flask of tea and his sand-wiches (often Spam).

When George and I got married webought our own flask but because wed i d n’t use it so often it did have afunny smell – so before using it wewashed it out with vinegar.

Gradually after George and I mar-ried, and rationing finished, insteadof the paste sandwiches Mum wouldcook a chicken for our day trip andtake some tomatoes. What luxury!But we still took our flasks of tea.Those were good days, my friends.

But one day Dad was upset becauseMum forgot to put in the salt cellar –well, truth to tell we were all dis-appointed because in those days, inour house anyway, the ‘condiments’,as Dad called them were on the tableat every mealtime. If we had a sand-wich or a bit of bread and dripping wealways salt-and-peppered it.

I am known for my somewhat ex-cessive use of pepper – for which Ialways blame my dad when I seteverybody off sneezing, because hewas exactly the same.

Now to my son’s disappointment Ino longer salt my vegetables like mymum did – and the only salt on thetable is Lo-Salt, which my son refersto as “no salt”

All the ladies in those days werequite heavy-handed with the salt, un-like today.

Mum, and my first mum-in-law,always put a great big tablespoon ineach saucepan. The only habit I can-not break is a sprinkle on my boiledor fried eggs! But as my first husbandtried to persuade me when he grew amoustache – which I disliked – e at i n gan egg without salt is like kissing aman without a moustache!

God Bless, love, Marion.

� Te m p l eC h u rc hin 1963

then out would come the trusty flaskwith its own little cup.

Of course, Dad got the first cup,then Mum, then us girls.

When the Second World War star-ted Mum bought another flask andwhen the air raids got really bad, andwe were on hot bricks every night incase the sirens went off, Mum wouldfill one flask with tea (as Gran said ifthere wasn’t an air raid nothing waswasted because we could drink itanyway) and the other one would befilled with boiling water – in case wegot home from the shelter and had no

As my first husbandtried to persuade mewhen he grew amoustache – which Idisliked – eating an eggwithout salt is like kissinga man without amoustache!