Bristol Times Bristol Post 01 October 2013

Bristol

Times

TUE

01 OCT 2013

Celebrating our proud history and keeping your memories alive

Page 4 Rebuilding Bristol after the bombs

Letters Jessie and the fight for women’s rights

WILL BARRAGE EVER BE DEAD IN THE WATER?

● Then Energy Minister and Bristol East MP Tony Benn inspects a proposal for a barrage in the 1970s

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NE day in 1919, John Pannell, who worked at the Great Western Railway company’s chief engineer’s office in Paddington, dropped a note into the suggestions box.

Like any well-run firm, GWR operated a staff suggestions scheme, with a modest financial reward for the best ideas.

Mr Pannell’s thoughts were scrutinised by the management, who thought there might be something to them. They were passed further up the chain of command until they were passed on to the government.

The Ministry of Transport was a new creation, made necessary by the First World War and the need to co-ordinate the movement of huge quantities of soldiers, munitions, food and war materials.

The men from the Ministry passed Mr Pannell’s suggestion on to the Minister himself.

This was Sir Eric Geddes, a personal friend of Prime Minister Lloyd George. Geddes was a successful businessman who had been brought into the wartime government as one of Lloyd George’s “men of push and go” to bring some energy and talent into the war effort.

Geddes looked at Pannell’s suggestion and was enthralled.

We don’t know if Mr Pannell was ever awarded the prize for GWR’s brightest idea of the year. But just as it captivated Sir Eric, so it has bedazzled and besotted generations of engineers, business people and politicians ever since.

In almost 100 years, the idea of using the tidal power of the River Severn to generate electricity has lost none of its charisma. Men (it is always men) have fallen madly in love with the idea, some spending

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Page 6 ‘Jack Bute’ and the cider tax

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Recent news suggests that plans for a Severn Barrage are ‘dead in the water’. Perhaps they are, but as Eugene Byrne finds, we have been here before many, many times.

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Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Severn Barrage Plan has dazzled generations of engineers From page 1 entire lifetimes drawing up and perfecting plans.

Pannell’s idea was nothing airy-fairy. It was visionary, yes, but it was a hard-headed product of necessity. As a GWR engineer he knew the company had a problem. At this time, there was little road transport worth talking about; most passengers and goods in Britain were moved by rail; the coastal shipping industry had been devastated by U-Boats, and now the rail system was struggling to cope with demand.

The Severn Tunnel, linking South West England and the Midlands with South Wales was no longer adequate.

So, he reasoned, why not put a barrier across the Severn to carry railway lines. This could then also be used as a huge hydro-electric scheme generating power.

It would also impound a vast amount of water upstream, creating an immense artificial lake. Locks on the barrage would enable the largest ships in the world to enter this huge basin, creating the world’s largest floating harbour.

The Men from the Ministry, along with the men from GWR did some sums. The cost of the scheme would be something in the region of £7 million. The sum cannot easily be translated into modern terms, but since this was a time when a skilled working man might earn £5 in a good week, we are talking about tens of billions.

Plans were sketched out.

To get over the problem of variations in tidal flow at different times

of day, some of the power at peak times would be used to pump water up to a reservoir high up the Wye Valley. At slack times this would be allowed to flow back down to drive the turbines to generate power. An official announcement from the Ministry said: The attractions of the scheme would appear to be limitless. They open up a vista which is little short of a revolution in the industrial life of the West and Midlands of England. It effectively solves the problem of congestion for all traffic between South Wales and the West of England both by road and rail, and brings within reach of all classes of the community the blessings of light, purity and power.

It would save the nation three or four million tons of coal each year and would generate electricity at a cost of just over half a penny per unit.

And then, setting a pattern which has been repeated intermittently ever since, the plans got kicked into the long grass. The Treasury, doing its job properly, said that the whole thing would have to be costed out properly. A feasibility study would have to be carried out.

The scheme also had political opponents with agendas of their own.

The saving of three or four million tons of coal per annum was not at all welcome in South Wales, one of the main centres of Britain’s coal industry.

By 1921, it was completely off the agenda. The economy was struggling, men who had fought in the trenches were not all returning to

“homes fit for heroes” but to growing rates of unemployment. The government undertook a major round of public spending cuts which came to be known as the “Geddes Axe” because now, ironically enough, Sir Eric was in a new job, supervising a committee on national expenditure.

This episode rarely appears in accounts of the Severn Barrage. It remains mired in obscurity, though it

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County surveyor drew up plans in 1840s IT is often said that the idea for a Severn Barrage goes back to Brunel’s time. This is true, although Brunel himself, who would have been aware of the idea, never involved himself in it.

It was the brainchild of a man named Thomas Fulljames who in the 1840s drew up plans for a mile-long dam between Aust and Beachley – precisely where the first Severn Bridge was built in the 1960s.

Fulljames’ dam would have functioned as a rail bridge, intended to cut a significant chunk of time off the rail journeys between South Wales and the South of England. This was at a time when the Welsh coalfields were making their owners huge fortunes, and much of the line’s role would have been to bring the black gold to the south of England.

But it had another purpose, too.

Fulljames was Gloucestershire’s County Surveyor, and his barrier would have created a big lake on

● Thomas Fulljames’ own painting of his proposed Severn dam the upper reaches of the Severn – a huge boost to the port of Gloucester. With the appropriate locks in place, Gloucester would be able to accommodate the ever-larger ships which were now being built.

Fulljames’ plan was not at all popular downriver in Bristol, though it came nowhere close to being built. The costs were not just

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

For some decades afterwards there was intermittent talk of a barrier crossing the Severn, but it was always as a rail bridge. When the Severn Tunnel was built, there was no more talk of a rail bridge for many years.

shouldn’t be. This was the first time a Severn power generation scheme was seriously considered, and it set the pattern which has been followed ever since.

It goes like this: People start seriously talking about it, the government starts thinking about it, the government then commissions a study into it, the government decides it’s probably a good idea, but we can’t afford it. The idea goes dormant for a few years, and then it returns again.

The first time around, the barrage was back on the table pretty quickly, as a suggestion in the mid-1920s. This was a time of high unemployment, and so in addition to the other benefits, it would keep an estimated 10,000 men in work for seven years.

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

It didn’t report until 1933, but when it did it had an extensive plan. It would be built close to the site of the present-day Second Severn Crossing, it would take 15 years and employ an average 15,000 men during that time.

When it finished it would provide 7 per cent of the entire country’s anticipated electricity needs in 1941 at two-thirds the cost per unit of electricity from coal-fired stations. It would cost £38million.

Very interesting, said the government, which then did nothing.

And then a World War got in the way.

Incidentally, there is a persistent legend that had Hitler managed to conquer Britain, he would have built the Severn Barrage, presumably using slave labour. Maybe he did say

something about it; the Fuehrer was notorious for blathering on about grand schemes, but the Nazi archives have yet to yield up any blueprints for Der Severn-Staudamm. And they probably never will.

Before the War had ended, though, the men from the Ministry (Fuel & Power this time) were looking at it again. They rightly anticipated a huge surge in demand for electricity in the postwar years and said the scheme was both practical and necessary.

At the same time, a group of architects and surveyors looking at plans for postwar Bristol said the barrage should be built, and that if it was, the lake upstream of it could be used as Britain’s major port for intercontinental flying boat services.

But by 1947 the country had run out of money and was going through a period of austerity which makes our recent economic woes look like the most decadent Roman Emperor’s feast.

Through the 1950s and 1960s the government and the (nationalised) electricity industry occasionally commissioned studies, always baulking at the cost. Then, a major oil price rise in 1973 caused by the OPEC embargo led to renewed calls for a barrage. But by 1975, with lower oil costs, the Central Electricity Generating Board was telling a Commons committee that Severn tidal power “offers no prospect of producing electricity more cheaply than other means”.

In 1978 Labour's Secretary of State for Energy Tony Benn (also Bristol East's MP at this time) appointed Sir

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Legend of the spirit of the river

● Brean Down, Somerset, the English end of several barrage plans; top left, Hafren Power’s artist’s impression of its proposed barrage; above, a diagram by the Severn Tidal Power Group showing one of the generating turbines in place on its proposed barrage

Herman Bondi to head a new committee looking into the barrage.

The Bondi Committee, reporting to the Conservative government in July 1981 said that the barrage was technically and economically viable. It looked at several possible locations but plumped for Brean Down, just south of Weston-super-Mare, to Lavernock Point, between Barry and Cardiff.

“ The attractions of the scheme would appear to be limitless. They open up a vista which is little short of a revolution in the industrial life of the West and Midlands of England.

Official Government Ministry announcement, early 1920s

cessful business at Avonmouth, which is inside most of the proposed barriers.

The Bristol Port Company has lobbied against the most recent serious contender, Hafren Power, whose proposal was two weeks ago knocked back by the government on the grounds that its plans “failed to demonstrate economic, environmental and public acceptability”.

The same Parliamentary report, however, goes on to recognise – as they always do! – that there may be potential for a barrage at some point in the future.

One thing of which you can be certain is that sooner or later we will be using the power of the Severn to generate power. We may never have a full-blown barrier across the water between England and Wales, but there will almost certainly be other, smaller schemes. Conservation bodies like Friends of the Earth and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, for instance, suggest that a series of artificial lagoons could be built, using turbines to capture power from the inward and/or outward flow of water. Or there may be tidal ‘reefs’ or smaller barriers and any number of other possibilities.

But the big, bold vision of a vast dam across the Severn will continue to mesmerise many.

The great lesson of history is that the Severn Barrage is never, ever, completely dead in the water. It would be a very daring punter indeed who would bet any money that there won’t be another serious proposal on the table again within a few years – and possibly even months.

husband had wronged her.

On the English side, the river was known as Sabren. And when the Romans invaded it became known as Sabrina.

The story of Sabrina/Habren/ Hafren is completely apocryphal.

All the figures in it are legendary and have almost no historical basis. She long since became the spirit of the river, a nymph, sometimes depicted riding a sea-horse. The poet John Milton used her in his 1634 masque Comus, which is all about a young lady struggling to keep her virtue.

She appeals to the nymph Sabrina to help her: Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair; Listen for dear honour's sake, Goddess of the silver lake, Listen and save!

So … If you think that the name Sabrina only originated with the 1950s film of that name starring Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn, or with the name of an almost forgotten 1950s British glamour model, or even with a more recent TV series about a teenage witch, you’d be wrong.

Sabrina is a fine old west country name, so if you’re expecting a baby daughter anytime soon, well, you know what to do. (And remember to send Bristol Times some pictures!)

● Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in the 1954 film Sabrina, which made the name fashionable

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It would generate power using large pre-fabricated concrete caissons containing turbines every so often. It would cost £5.6bn, but likely rises in coal and oil prices would justify the investment provided the government didn't opt to build more nuclear power stations instead.

In 1984 the civil engineers Wimpey Atkins put forward a plan which represented a return to the Victorian solution. The Severn road bridge was

too busy, and often forced to close in bad weather, and a new bridge was needed.

The firm proposed a shorter, cheaper barrage between Severn Beach and Sudbrook Point in Gwent which would double up as a road crossing, which of course would be the route of the M4 Second Severn Crossing built in the 1990s.

The Wimpey Atkins plan, put forward when Mrs Thatcher was in power, was a radical new departure, even though it is nowadays largely forgotten. It was going to be built entirely by the private sector, it claimed. There would be no need for any taxpayers’ investment.

And so it continued. The 1980s also produced the very influential proposal from the Severn Tidal Power Group (STPG), a consortium of blue chip engineering and construction firms (Balfour Beatty, Taylor Woodrow, Sir Robert McAlpine and Alstom). Their plan adopted the Bondi report route from Brean Down to Lavernock, and claimed that the barrage, with 216 turbines, could provide up to six per cent of the UK's electricity needs.

The STPG plan remained the gold standard of barrage plans for almost 30 years, with a widespread assumption throughout the engineering industry that if it was ever built, it would look pretty much like this one.

By now, conservation groups were raising concerns about the likely effect on wildlife, while in more recent years the Bristol Port Company lobbied against a structure which could adversely affect its hugely suc-

QUIZ question: What’s the connection between the River Severn and Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart?

It’s all in a name.

The company which recently had its barrage plans knocked back by Parliament is called Hafren Power. The old 1960s Severn Bridge, as you’ll know from the road signs, is called Pont Hafren.

So Hafren is just Welsh for ‘Severn’, right?

Yes, but there’s more to it than that. The river was named Habren (later Hafren) by the Welsh in honour of a legend that a princess of the same name was drowned in it.

According to The History of the Kings of Britain by the medieval chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, Habren was the daughter of King Locrin of the Britons by his mistress, a German princess called Estrildis. Estrildis had been kidnapped by Huns and was brought along when they invaded Britain. Locrin defeated the Huns and fell in love with the captive Estrildis, and they had a child they named Habren.

Now Locrin divorced his wife Gwendolen, daughter of the king of Cornwall, and made Estrildis his queen. Gwendolen wasn’t about to put up with this, so she went to Cornwall, came back with an army, defeated Locrin and had Estrildis and Habren thrown into the river we now call the Severn.

She then ordered that the river henceforth be named after Habren so that for all time people would remember how her

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Tuesday, October 1, 2013

REBUILDING BRISTOL AFTER THE BOMBS A newly released DVD uses old film footage and present-day scenes to chart some of the astonishing changes which came to many Bristol neighbourhoods with redevelopment in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Eugene Byrne reports.

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UR first ever documentary, a VHS of course, was Yate – A Surprising History. We thought it would be good to make a film about the town where we live,” says Andy Warren.

“Everyone said it would never sell, who on earth wants to watch a film about Yate? But it did sell, it was very popular here, and so then we went on to make a film about Chipping Sodbury, then one about Clifton, and basically just went from there…”

From these humble beginnings in 1993, Andy Warren (cameraman and techie) and Dave Rogers (historian) set up 1st Take.

The firm, which specialises in historical documentaries, is now close to making its 100th film.

During that time they have turned out films looking at the history of many different areas of Bristol, several about historic railways and a wide range of others, from closely researched film on Bristol’s historic industries to re-releasing some wonderfully elegiac films Sir John Betjeman made in the West of England in the 1960s.

While 1st Take’s roots are local (the firm’s still based at Yate) they have made plenty of films about towns, aviation, railways and more besides elsewhere.

Their biggest seller to date, you’ll be pleased to hear, remains very Bristolian. Concorde’s Homecoming, an account of the last ever Concorde flight as she came into Filton in November 2003, has shifted between 11,000 and 12,000 copies.

“We made the decision to put cameras in all sorts of places,” says Andy. “So we had them at vantage points all over the area – Clevedon, on top of the Cathedral and so on.”

There were also cameras at Cumberland Basin, Purdown, Horfield and even on top of blocks of council flats. And at Filton itself, of course.

Many 1st Take documentaries are crammed with archive footage. Some of this comes from newsreels, some from archives, and some from private individuals. For Steam Around Bristol, a nostalgic journey via stations around the city - Bath Spa, Keynsham, Brislington, Whitchurch, Portishead, Shirehampton, Avonmouth, Severn Beach and many more - they successfully appealed via a letter in the Evening Post for people

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● Pictures taken from stills in the firm: 1 In Redcliffe, looking towards St Mary Redcliffe

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2 The old Grosvenor Hotel 3 Cattle Market bridge

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4 Train going over the Feeder Canal 5 Montague Hill, Kingsdown, 1953

4 who had old cine film and photos to get in touch.

Another good source is the Bristol Record Office (BRO), which has an archive of old film footage taken around the city. Material here dates back to the early days of film and is being catalogued and digitised by volunteer experts.

Some of the moving pictures at the BRO were made for Bristol City Council. 1st Take has made two documentaries, for instance, about Bristol’s docks in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, and material for these came from promotional films the council made when it owned Avonmouth and the

6 Barton Hill – terraced houses being demolished to make way for tower blocks

City Docks.

Their newest film is the second looking at the reconstruction of Bristol after the Second World War and uses much of this footage from the Record Office intercut with present-day scenes to bear witness to the astonishing ways in which many neighbourhoods around town were transfor med.

Bristol After the Bombs Vol. 2 takes us to Redcliffe to see how the wrecking ball cleared Georgian terraces to make way for 1960s maisonettes and flats. We also visit Kingsdown, Clifton, St Judes and, scene of one of the most dramatic transformations of

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all, Barton Hill.

Guided around by local historian Mike Hooper, the film will evoke memories for anyone who lived in Bristol in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. And for anyone else the sheer scale of changes wrought on neighbourhoods

by German bombs and postwar developers alike will be quite staggering. Most of the old footage comes from a film shot for Bristol City Council titled The Changing Face of Bristol.

“It may have been the Clerk of the Works, or someone like that who shot it. Someone was going around with a cine camera recording places as they

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

“We think it may have all been done by the same guy. If you watch the film carefully, you’ll see the same car in lots of scenes, a Ford Consul.

So we reckon it was his car.”

So there you have it. If anyone in your family worked for the council in the 1960s, drove a Ford Consul and may have gone around town filming old neighbourhoods, write in and let us know.

Bristol After the Bombs Vol 2 is released on DVD by 1st Take, priced at £14.95 See: www.1st-take.com

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Tuesday, October 1, 2013

How about twinning us with Waterford, Mr Mayor?

Latimer’s Diary

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VENIN’ all! Here is a thing I found the other day on a humorous website from Waterford in Ireland. The site’s called Waterford Whispers (waterfordwhispersnews.com – NB: other things on it are a bit offensive and sweary. Also you won’t get a lot of the gags if you’re not Irish.)

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

Which I thought hilarious. So would you if you spent so much time putting nostalgic old black-and-white photos into newspapers, books and magazines.

This got us wondering if there’s anyone out there with the requisite Photoshop skills to make some equally absurd spoof pics of old Bristol.

We were thinking maybe of the Dutch House before the war as an Amsterdam-style cannabis café, or a horse-drawn Georges Brewery dray loaded with cans of Red Bull or other energy drinks. An ironmonger’s shop with a load of satellite dishes hanging in the window? Or how about an ice cream vendor’s bicycle with a sign offering to unlock mobile phones?

OK, you get the idea. Any that you send in to us will of course attract the usual reward.* I suppose the council budget for town twinning is a bit on the thin side these days, but if there is any cash in the biscuit-tin I’d like to suggest that they spend it on twinning Bristol with Waterford.

It’s a good match. Like Bristol it’s always been a trading port, and both places have a history going back over 1,000 years, and for much of that time both cities traded extensively with each other. Just saying. (*Nothing)

port her family. This included setting up a retail centre in Cincinnati, generally reckoned as America’s first ever shopping mall. Got that? The ubiquitous US shopping mall was invented by a woman from Bristol!

Her fortunes changed when, on returning to England she wrote Domestic Manners of the Americans.

Published in 1832 it was an overnight literary sensation. It is still funny today, painting the inhabitants of the young United States as by turns vulgar, boorish, puritanical, or monstrous religious hypocrites. Obviously the Brits lapped this sort of thing up, while equally obviously the Yanks hated it.

Here she is on dining, American-style: The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the Old World; and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment.

You need leather balls Rugby League fan? Then if you’re at the Bristol Record Office (until Oct 3), the Bristol Central Library (Oct 5-24) or M Shed (Oct 25 – Nov 30) keep an eye out for a little display exhibition called Rugby League and the South West.

Put together to mark Bristol’s hosting of the 2013 Rugby World Cup match between the USA and the Cook Islands at the Memorial Stadium on October 30, it’s a potted history of Rugby League. It covers the game’s origins, development, and features the stories of some of the sport’s South West and Welsh heroes over the past century.

A Family Affair

● Above, Kim Hicks reads from A Fatal Duel; below right, Fanny Trollope, famous novelist and writer, who also invented the shopping mall Smith wounded Priest and returned to his office thinking all would be well, but later the same day heard that Priest had bled to death and that he would now be facing a murder charge. So he legged it, ending up in the middle of the Peninsular War in Portugal and Spain.

I’ll not tell you the ending, except to say it’s got everything, including love interest and courtroom drama. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if some enterprising TV producer or movie director picked it up. Any script would have to tone down Smith’s arrogance and self-pity somewhat, but everything else is there, ready-made.

One of the striking things about the evening at the theatre, though, was learning all the intricate family connections involved in the story. The book was written from Smith’s own papers by his descendants Tim Rooth

and Alexander Hellawell. One of Smith’s friends was a lawyer who founded the modern day Bristol practice of Burges Salmon. Another was from the Lean banking dynasty which, among other things, paid for Bristol’s Central Library.

Mr Rooth has a cousin, Anne Hicks, the Bristol artist who, with her husband Jerry, played a leading part in campaigns to improve Bristol in from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Anne and Jerry Hicks’ daughter Kim is a well-known actress. So who better, on the night, to read extracts from Henry Smith’s account of his life on the run, over 200 years ago?

A Fatal Duel is published by Redcliffe Press at £11.50, and is a dashed good read.

Hats off to Fanny!

One suspects the anniversary will probably go unremarked everywhere else, but we ought to remember her … October 6 will be the 150th anniversary of the death of Frances Milton Trollope, one of the most remarkable women Bristol ever produced.

She was born in 1779, probably in Stapleton, daughter of William Milton and his

first wife Mary, nee Gresley. Both parents’ families were well-to-do and Bristolian. Her paternal grandfather was an apothecary from Queen Square, while her paternal grandfather was a distiller.

Known to all the family as ‘Fanny’ she was highly intelligent, energetic and resourceful. It turned out she would have to be, as she married barrister Thomas Trollope in 1809.

Trollope, through a mixture of incompetence, bad personality and bad luck, suffered various financial misfortunes. The couple had seven children, their third son being Anthony Trollope, who was destined to be one of Britain’s greatest 19th-century novelists. (In his day-job working for the Post Office he also invented the pillar box. As doubtless they will tell you on TV programmes like QI.) In desperation, Fanny fled her abusive and impecunious husband and travelled to America with some of her children, to live at a commune set up by the feminist and social refor mer Fanny Wright.

This was a terrible idea.

The idealistic community turned out to be a malaria-ridden swamp, and Fanny Trollope now had a series of (mis) adventures trying to sup-

Fanny went on to become the family’s principal breadwinner and turned out several more travel books and numerous works of fiction. She was a redoubtable anti-slavery campaigner, too, who is said to have inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If you fancy reading Domestic Manners you can find it online easily enough – try http://tinyurl.com/AmericanManners There. Got through all of that without making a single puerile joke about Fanny Trollope’s name. Well done, us!

Gromit Tales A couple of weeks ago I was wittering on about how all the Gromit figures around the city this summer were so hugely popular there were bound to be odd tales and urban legends about them in years to come.

The Editor of this very newspaper, a man who is, after all, supposed to know what’s going on, tells me that he heard that in some places, people were going out of their homes late at night or early in the morning to clean their neighbourhood Gromit. Can anyone confirm?

Did any of you go out there with soapy water and sponge to buff up your Gromit for the day? Did you see anyone else doing so? Give us a shout if you can help. These tales are the folklore of the future.

Cheers then!

● Get in touch: Email Bristol.Times@b-nm.co.uk or write to Bristol Times, Bristol Post, Temple Way, Bristol BS99 7HD.

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And so to the Old Vic the other night for a wee party to launch A Fatal Duel: Bristol 1809. Subtitled Bristol 1809: A Fugitive’s Story.

It’s a fascinating tale, all the more so because it’s true. In 1809 Bristol lawyer Henry Smith and businessman Richard Priest had a row at the Theatre Royal. It was trivial and silly, but things got out of hand and it became a matter of honour, so two days later the gentlemen fought a duel in Kingsdown, just outside the jurisdiction of Bristol’s magistrates.

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Tuesday, October 1, 2013

How cider tax left a sour taste and played a part in American rebellion Exactly 250 years ago, the west country’s cider industry was almost put out of business by tax increases levied by a deeply unpopular government. The tax, and the furious reaction to it in Bristol and the west of England, also led indirectly to American independence. Eugene Byrne raises his glass.

● Cider producers swore they would sooner let their apples rot on the ground than pay the hated new tax. Below, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, the Prime Minister who introduced the Cider Tax. Doesn’t exactly look like the sort of bloke who’d enjoy a pint of natch, does he?

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HE Seven Years War, from 1754 to 1763, was, some historians claim, the first ever world war. Britain and France and their respective allies fought it out for supremacy in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.

Our side won. This was the war in which Clive of India took Bengal, while the French were decisively defeated in America, particularly with Wolfe’s victory at Quebec.

World wars are not cheap. Britain’s war effort resulted in huge increases in taxation, and one of the hardest places to be hit was Bristol and the surrounding counties.

It was only during the Napoleonic Wars that income tax was introduced.

Until then, all taxation was essentially on the movement of goods (customs) or their production and sale (excise).

For a government eager to raise revenue, increasing taxes on the consumption of alcohol was, then as now, an easy option.

They had already increased the duties on beer. Before the War had even ended the publicans of Bristol were advertising in a local paper that they had no choice but, regretfully, to increase the price of ale to fourpence (less than 2p in modern money).

Someone pointed out that this was more than was being charged in London, which was paying exactly the same taxes. The Bristol publicans said that beer would now be three and a half pence a quart.

Now, though, the government planned to tax cider as well.

This was the work of George III’s Prime Minister, the Earl of Bute, who wanted to charge four shillings (20p) on every hogshead (a barrel containing 52 and a half gallons) of cider.

The move was hugely unpopular, particularly in cider-producing areas.

When peace with France and Spain was proclaimed on March 30, 1763, a local paper versified: The Peace is good – who dare dispute the fact?

See the first fruits thereof – the Cyder Act! Bristol’s Corporation ordered that a rundlet of wine (about 15 gallons) be let into each of the conduits at All Saints, St Thomas and the Quay, but there was little popular rejoicing.

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

thanks for the peace. By now Gloucestershire cider was being sold off at ridiculously low prices to evade the forthcoming tax.

The Corporation had laid on gunpowder and bonfires and free beer, but contemporaries say that there was no celebrating. The mayor led the aldermen and corporation to the Cathedral to give thanks, but no one else followed him.

Things turned ugly in the evening when the mob carrying a jack-boot – the King’s Scots-born Prime Minister and royal favourite was known as “Jack Bute” – paraded around with an effigy covered in plaid. This was soon burned after plenty of physical and verbal abuse.

Bute’s ministry fell shortly afterwards, but the Cider Act came into force in the autumn of 1763, anyway.

There were mock funeral services across the west of England. Someone wrote in a Bristol paper, again referring to the hated Scottish minister: Sooner than yield to a tax on our fruit, The trees, though in blossom, shall fall to the root.

May those who persist in enforcing the deed For evermore dwell on the north side the Tweed.

Now the locals determined to make the Cider Act unenforceable. Some carried on producing and consuming cider as though nothing had happened. In the Forest of Dean an excise man was abducted by miners and imprisoned underground for over a month.

In Bristol, two young men who had

been hired by the excise men to survey the location and size of cider apple orchards around the area were seized.

They were only released after giving their solemn word that they would quit their new jobs immediately.

Bute’s successor George Grenville retained the tax for as long as he could. By 1764 it was bringing £30,000 a year into the government coffers, making a big dent in the national debt.

Political pressure from cider-producing areas would eventually overwhelm the government, though, and the tax was abolished in 1766. In the meantime, Grenville was imposing more taxes on Britain’s American colonies, thinking it only fair that they should cover some of the costs of keeping the French out.

One of the reasons that Grenville thought he could keep imposing taxes on the American colonists was that new impositions like the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 were nearly as unpopular as the Cider Act had been in England.

In the end, though, the American colonists decided they weren’t going to take any more “taxation without representation”. In the short run this led to the Boston Tea Party, with anti-tax activists chucking tea into the harbour, and in the longer run to the American War of Independence.

So you might say that because the British government believed that American colonists were more docile and law-abiding than the bolshy and rebellious people of Bristol and surrounding counties is why we have a United States of America.

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

War diary a piece of family’s history ✒RECENTLY,

I cleared my grandmother’s effects (she died in 2001) and found the Second World War diary of Trooper Richard Jack Slaughter of Reconnaissance Corps 15th Scottish Regiment.

The last entry is February 8, 1945.

Having done some research, I discovered that he was killed on February 10, 1945 and is buried in Germany. He was the son of Sydney Richard and Gertrude Fanny Slaughter of Bristol. I believe this is the same Sydney Richard who was the last family company director of

the Bristol firm, Bray and Slaughter.

My grandmother, Irene Palmer (nee Pow) was born in Bristol in 1906 but moved to Poole, Dorset in, I believe, the 1920s. Other than the Bristol link, I do not know why she would have had this diary.

I would dearly love to know if there are any descendants of Richard living in Bristol still as I would love to be able to give them this piece of their family’s history.

I can be contacted on d.belbin@sky.com.

David Belbin

www.bristolpost.co.uk

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

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Suffragettes How Jessie helped the fight for women’s rights Torched during protests over forcefeeding

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EADING the article on Tuesday, September 17, about Bristol Suffragettes took me back to stories of Jessie Stephen, a suffragette honoured with a blue plaque on her home at 27 Chessel Street, Bristol in 2003 (I have a Post article entitled ‘Campaigning Heroine Jessie Honoured’ dated September 8, 2003).

During my time working for Ian White, Member of the European Parliament for Bristol (1989-1999), I was privileged to be involved in organising memorial lectures in Jessie’s honour. During this time I undertook research into her very full and inspirational life, part of which covered her work with the WSPU and their campaigns.

In an interview for Spare Rib magazine she referred to an event in the Central Hall in Old Market, Bristol: “… the police had been careful – they were on the roof, they were in the hall, all over the place – to see that she (Mrs Pankhurst) didn’t get into the hall. Then when the chairman announced that she had the greatest pleasure in announcing the arrival of her respected and beloved leader – because you used very emotive words – everybody thought it was a joke. But we didn’t because we knew that something had happened. We had all the platform with barbed wire around it, with bunting over the barbed wire, with flower pots and all sorts, and one woman had one of those revolvers with blank shot.

And when Mrs Pankhurst stepped forward, you should have seen the faces of the police. They couldn’t believe their eyes. Nobody told them how she got in there, but we were told afterwards that she came in the Corporation laundry basket. When the police tried to drag poor Mrs Pankhurst away, they rushed forward to the bunt-

● Following the Bristol Times article on the suffragettes’ arson campaign around Bristol in 1913 (BT, Sept 17) the good folk at the Frenchay Village Museum sent us a couple of photos.

These show Begbrook House shortly after it was set on fire by women protesting at the treatment in prison of Rachel Pease, who was being force-fed while on prison hunger strike.

“ The police tried to drag poor Mrs Pankhurst away ... We were throwing flower pots, there were all sorts banged at the police.

Jessie Stephen ing and got their hands all lacerated. We were throwing flower pots, there were all sorts banged at the police. You didn’t think about it being violence, you only wanted to protect the women you’d brought there.”

Other memoires recall attacks on pillar boxes where acid was poured in to damage and disrupt the mail. These were very feisty women unafraid of taking risks!

As well as her involvement in women’s suffrage, Jessie campaigned for the rights of domestic workers and successfully negotiated the doubling of wages of waitresses at Lyons corner-house tea rooms; she ran her own secretarial agency, wrote many pamphlets and toured several countries giving lectures on workers and women’s rights. She served as a Councillor in Windmill Hill and stood for Parliament in Weston super Mare. In 1955 she received the TUC Gold Badge and in 1977 was awarded the MBE for a lifetime’s service to the Trade Union Movement. She died in Bristol in June 1979 and 16 years later Ian White honoured her memory with the first of the Jessie Stephen Memorial Lectures, events he supported until he lost his seat in 1999. She was also honoured with a tree at Ashton Court and a memorial bench which was originally installed at the large Co-op

department store in Broadmead, known as Fairfax House. The seat was later moved to the Co-op Homeworld car park (currently being developed for a new Asda) in Filton. Whether it remains is another question.

It is difficult to keep brief any tribute to Jessie but just looking through my old papers to provide the detail of this summary brought back so many memories of both this formidable woman I never met, and of Marge Evans, another truly inspirational Bristol campaigner I did have the privilege to have known. Marge worked alongside Jessie and chaired the first lecture but had sadly passed away by the second.

The tributes that came in to her memory were equally as impressive as those for Jessie and I feel very lucky indeed to have played a small role in honouring them both.

Denise Goodman, via email

Exhibition puts focus on heritage buildings John Wesley’s New Room in the Horsefair, Bristol.

The exhibition (Oct 21-Nov 23, open 10am-5pm, Mon-Sat) and the networking event (Sat, Nov 16, 1.30pm-5pm) at the New Room will draw together those intent on rescuing, restoring and regenerating Bristol’s Heritage Buildings. As a police station and a library are transformed to house primary schools, they will provide chances to assess what is happening and share ideas.

The New Room, the Georgian meeting house that was benignly neglected during the 19th century and adventurously restored in 1929/30, will provide an ideal setting for discussion about Bristol’s Heritage Buildings: Relics or Legacies?

At the exhibition and net-working event there will be contributions about, for example, Acton Court; Arnos Vale Cemetery; Charles Wesley’s House; Clifton Rocks Railway; Kingswood Her-

itage Museum; George Herbert Oatley – whose sequicentenary is being celebrated; the Pierian Centre; Trinity Arts Centre ; Quakers Friars and the Suspension Bridge.

Architects, activists, and academics will be among those involved, sharing ideas, experiences and links.

For up-dates see the New Room website www.newroombristol. org.uk. Contact jamesgibbs@btinternet.com.

● THIS is a funeral portrait of a young woman from ancient Rome, painted around 60AD, give or take a few years.

You can get up close to her at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery anytime between now and January 12 at the Roman Empire: Power and People exhibition. Courtesy of the British Museum, it features over 160 pieces, including sculptures from the villas of the Emperors Tiberius and Hadrian, coins, jewellery and even children’s socks.

Bristol Times will be taking a closer look in a couple of weeks when the museum opens an additional exhibition about the Romans around Bristol. Provincial minded? Us? Roman Empire: Power and People Is open 10am-5pm every day (5pm Sat & Sun), admission £5 /£4 concessions/£3 child (5 to 16yrs), under 5s free. Family ticket £10 (2 adults/2 children or 1 adult/3 children) also gets you the loan of a Roman kit bag to help find out more about Roman life.

Image © The Trustees of the British Museum

Photograph brought back memories of school exchange ✒THE photograph in Bristol Times (September 17)

of Year 4 Merrywood girls (above) brought back lots of memories of the Bristol-Bordeaux exchange.

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

I think that the Notre Dame is in the background.

I still keep in touch with my French exchange student.

Christine (nee Stone)

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BRISTOL’S Heritage is being ‘recycled’ at an astounding pace.

Look, for example, at what has happened to historic (and not so historic) buildings, at the E shed and the M shed, at Bush House that was once the Acraman’s warehouse, at William Champion’s pin-making factory in Kingwood/Warmley and at the Tobacco Factory.

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

Picture of the Week

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Footsteps into history ● Temple Church in 1963

This week in Marion’s Memories - the value of a good cup of tea and why people these days no longer take a flask on days out. Maybe it’s the Starbucks generation, muses Marion.

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

A day out isn’t complete without a flask of tea

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The spooky old church with the leaning tower

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HE ruined Temple Church, just off Victoria Street, is one of the most enigmatic places in the west of England, with all manner of weird stories attached. Which is just as you’d expect from the site of what was once a church belonging to the Knights Templar, the medieval order of soldier-monks, leading to all manner of occult stories and mystic overtones.

Sadly, there are no tales of fabulous riches and hidden treasure, though it is said that the ghost of one of the Knights Templar stalks the fire brigade HQ nearby.

The present church (what’s left of it) was built in the middle ages and became the principal church of Bristol’s fabulously wealthy cloth industry. As it was built in marshy ground, the tower leans at a slight angle.

Legend has it that choirboys and/or actual parishioners would turn up for the service and put nuts in the crack between tower and church.

They’d then come out after the service, after the bells had been rung, and retrieve their nuts, all cracked and ready for eating.

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

moniac”. Seven ministers, including John Wesley himself, supposedly cast out the demons who had possessed Lukins, a tailor from Yatton.

Temple Church’s overcrowded graveyard was closed down, along with most other parish churchyards in Bristol, as a health hazard in the mid 19th century. A few years later it reopened as a little urban park, a function it still serves, and very pleasant and shady it is too, especially on hot days.

The church was gutted by fire during the first major German air raid on Bristol (November 25, 1940; the information on the English Heritage plaque on the church is wrong!).

A company of Royal Engineers came into the city to help clear up the damage the following morning.

The officer in charge of them was about to demolish the leaning tower as he assumed it had been damaged by the bombing and was on the verge of toppling over.

The locals had a difficult time persuading him it had always been like that. Church and tower now remain as a permanent memorial to the Bristol blitz.

We pulled our rather atmospheric 1963 picture of the church from the archives.

ADLY in September Bluebell Court said goodbye to our chef Tony, and to Claire, our lovely waitress. Both will be sadly missed.

Derek and I already knew Tony before we moved to Bluebell since he was our former neighbour. Apart from lunches, teas, coffee and cakes, we enjoyed some really special evenings meals at Christmases, St George’s day, fish and chip suppers, and our lovely barbecues.

Claire brightened all our lives with her lovely smile and happy nature.

Every home has a hearth, my mum used to say, and without our café our residents’ lounge is now empty.

Derek and I are lucky to be still so independent and able look after ourselves, so lunch or Sunday dinner cooked by someone else is a treat instead of a necessity (of course, Derek has his own “someone else” – me!)

I heard after Tony left that those with pacemakers cannot even eat frozen meals, because they are unable to use a microwave.

It is fortunate Bluebell has ‘caring’ carers to look after those that need it.

I absolutely love my morning coffee and afternoon tea when I am at home but when I am out I never go to Starbucks or Costa Coffee unless I am forced to, because it is so expensive.

Those shops are everywhere, which I think destroys our lovely little independent cafés which we still find tucked away.

Mind you, I am old fashioned enough to still use a vacuum flask – and have done ever since I can remember, probably because Mum always did when I was a child.

Dad couldn’t abide the sort of milky tea we had out sometimes, so a flask was the obvious answer – and a lot cheaper then buying five cups of tea on a day out.

Somehow tea always tasted very different out of a flask, and, of course, needed more preparation because in the time I am talking about, before the war and afterwards, tea was loose-leaf and we had to make a pot of

tea first, then add it to the milk and sugar in the flask through the tea strainer – something my grandchildren cannot envisage.

When Mum and Dad took us children to Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon or Portishead for the day, the only things Dad shelled out for were an ice-cream, pony rides along the sands if it was Weston and a bag of chips before we came home.

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

“ As my first husband tried to persuade me when he grew a moustache – which I disliked – eating an egg without salt is like kissing a man without a moustache!

then out would come the trusty flask with its own little cup.

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

When the Second World War started Mum bought another flask and when the air raids got really bad, and we were on hot bricks every night in case the sirens went off, Mum would fill one flask with tea (as Gran said if there wasn’t an air raid nothing was wasted because we could drink it anyway) and the other one would be filled with boiling water – in case we got home from the shelter and had no

water or gas, which fortunately didn’t happen often.

If we had been in the shelter long enough to drink the tea, we would have a lovely cup of cocoa, mixed with milk, and made with the still-hot water from the Thermos.

When Dad was demobbed and went to work at St Anne’s board mills, whatever shift he was on, off he went with his flask of tea and his sandwiches (often Spam).

When George and I got married we bought our own flask but because we didn’t use it so often it did have a funny smell – so before using it we washed it out with vinegar.

Gradually after George and I married, and rationing finished, instead of the paste sandwiches Mum would cook a chicken for our day trip and take some tomatoes. What luxury!

But we still took our flasks of tea.

Those were good days, my friends.

But one day Dad was upset because Mum forgot to put in the salt cellar – well, truth to tell we were all disappointed because in those days, in our house anyway, the ‘condiments’, as Dad called them were on the table at every mealtime. If we had a sandwich or a bit of bread and dripping we always salt-and-peppered it.

I am known for my somewhat excessive use of pepper – for which I always blame my dad when I set everybody off sneezing, because he was exactly the same.

Now to my son’s disappointment I no longer salt my vegetables like my mum did – and the only salt on the table is Lo-Salt, which my son refers to as “no salt” All the ladies in those days were quite heavy-handed with the salt, unlike today.

Mum, and my first mum-in-law, always put a great big tablespoon in each saucepan. The only habit I cannot break is a sprinkle on my boiled or fried eggs! But as my first husband tried to persuade me when he grew a moustache – which I disliked – eating an egg without salt is like kissing a man without a moustache!

God Bless, love, Marion.