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Tuesday, November 19, 2013
● Frys Chocolate Cigars would probably be illegal nowadays. Or would have to come with a lurid health warning.
THE RISE AND FALL OF FRY’S Fry’s were once one of Bristol’s best employers and the creators of many of the world’s best-loved chocolate brands. Now, former Fry’s insider John Bradley has written a history of the firm. Here he tells us about the company’s rise and fall, and about some of its most memorable advertising and promotional campaigns.
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Y PURPOSE in writing Fry’s Chocolate Dream: The Rise and fall of a Chocolate Empire, was to tell for the first time the story of J.S. Fry & Sons from the fir m’s origins way back in 1728 until the final bar of Double Decker rolled off the Somerdale’s condemned production lines in 2011. And what a story it is! History is written by the victors, which in this case was Cadbury’s, so I wanted to find out and tell how and why J.S. Fry & Sons became the world’s largest maker of cocoa and chocolate, and also why it fell under the heel of Cadbury’s so soon after reaching its zenith. It all comes down to people. The founder, a Quaker apothecary named Joseph Fry, while being a maker of chocolate, never actually got past the corner shop stage. He was more of an investor, always on the lookout for a good idea, and one that came his way was the chocolate business of another West country man, Walter Churchman, who had built a nationwide demand for his cocoa by dint of inventing a better way of grinding cocoa beans. Churchman’s big idea, which got him a Letters Patent from King George II, he described as “a large walking wheel of weight and draught for cattle”. So a business empire would be built on an extremely large hamster wheel. Following Joseph’s death, his wife Anna Fry took the reins for a few
“ So a business empire
would be built on an extremely large hamster wheel. years until their second son, Joseph Storrs Fry, was deemed ready for the top job. While his father had been a serial investor in a range of businesses, Joseph Storrs fancied himself as an inventor – and a confident young tyke he was, putting in a claim in 1792 for a cash prize being offered by the Royal Society of Arts for an improved design for dock cranes. When he turned his attention to the family business, he invented a cocoa bean roaster that would become the industry standard for a hundred years. He was also one of Boulton and Watt’s early customers for a steam engine which enabled him to industrialise the family fir m. However, his attention on the business wandered with sales suffering; after taking on and then dumping a partner whose cash stopped the company from going under, he was eventually succeeded by his three sons, Richard, Francis and Joseph Fry, who collectively set the company on the path to greatness. This third generation of Frys were an interesting lot. Francis and Richard were among the special constables called upon to quell a great
pro-Reform Bill riot in the centre of Bristol, a barney that resulted in 26 Bristolians being condemned to death for their part in, among other crimes, looting the mayor’s wine cellar, storming two gaols and burning Fry’s cocoa warehouse to the ground. When not arresting the great unwashed, Francis had a keen interest in the new railway industry, at one point crossing swords with the great I.K. Brunel over the best locomotives to be used on the South Devon Railway, eventually being proved right by events. Francis also played a key role in the Bristol Waterworks Company getting piped water into the city. In between these good works and amassing one of the world’s finest collections of early printed Bibles, Francis and his brothers developed a range of best-selling cocoa products and invented the world’s first chocolate bar before hitting on the best-selling Fry’s Chocolate Cream, now the oldest brand of chocolate bar in the world. They also set about expanding their Union Street factory site with a series of new buildings which would stand until after the move to Somerdale half a century later. By the time the brothers retired and handed over to two of their offspring, Joseph Storrs Fry II and Francis James Fry, business was booming, with Fry’s products dominating the market and available pretty much everywhere. But while business was good, it
seems the two cousins running the show – one a strictly teetotal, unmarried Quaker and the other a twice-married man-about-town – didn’t get on one little bit. In fact they only communicated by letter. In addition to this lack of harmony, there was a startling degree of complacency in the company that included the use of quill pens well into the typewriter era, the company not possessing a telephone long after they had become common in the workplace and the habit of throwing any unfilled orders onto the office fire. Such less-than-ideal management practices were at the root of the company’s undoing, even as it reached undreamed-of heights. Fry’s would lose every key race to get into breakthrough new products such as cocoa without fillers, alkalised cocoa and milk chocolate bars, the winners each time being Cadbury Bros. of Bir mingham. Interestingly, a key reason for Fry’s losing the race to develop a winning milk chocolate was the complete unsuitability of the city centre Union Street site for bringing in thousands of gallons of fresh milk a day, the company going with inferior dried milk instead. Joseph Storrs Fry II and his uncommunicative cousin oversaw the rise of the firm from a few hundred to several thousand employees, but their legacy would not last for long. Within six years of the death of Joseph Storrs II, J.S Fry & Sons would be under the sway of their
STAFF RULES PRACTISING Quakers, the Fry brothers imposed a charming set of rules and all-round good advice on their workers, including: ● Never use a profane oath or any other improper expression. ● Avoid debt. It is better to put up with much inconvenience than to be in debt. It leads to dishonesty and ruin. ● Do not be found in any part of the premises where you have no business. Few habits are more injurious in a place of business than going about without occasion. ● Do not bring into the place the news or gossip you may have heard out of doors. … and last but not least: ● A person who takes food in a disagreeable or noisy way is never a nice companion. Who can argue with any of those! great rivals, Cadbury Bros, as the two firms rushed into a complex amalgamation heavily weighted in favour of the Cadbury family. The ink on the contract was barely dry before the fragile relationships broke down with both families seem-
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Tuesday, November 19, 2013
3
RACE TO THE POLE
● Left, workers at Somerdale in the 1930s. Above, although Frys had long since moved on to Somerdale, the old factory remained standing in the middle of Bristol until the 1960s. Below, an artist’s impression of the original plan for the Somerdale factory.
● IN the great late 19th- and early 20th-century cocoa wars between Fry’s and Cadbury’s, the two companies obsessively chased the rights to supply the polar expeditions of manly, rugged explorers such as Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. Fry’s hit the jackpot by securing sole supply to Scott’s fateful last expedition. Scott was fulsome in his praise of Fry’s products: “I have much pleasure in testifying to the excellence of the goods which have been supplied to this expedition. They have been widely used both for sledge handling and at our winter station and greatly appreciated by all.” The grisly end to the expedition grabbed the attention of a nation and couldn’t have hurt sales of Fry’s cocoa, boosted by a set of picture cards detailing Scott’s fateful trip. When Scott’s supply hut was uncovered from the ice in
the 1950s, some of the remaining cases of Fry’s cocoa were returned to Bristol while some still remain frozen in the Antarctic to this day.
FRY’S FIVE BOYS
were revitalised and joined by new lines such as Punch and Picnic. The result was that, during the 1950s, Fry’s was the fastest-growing chocolate firm in Britain. But it couldn’t last. By the end of the 1960s Cadbury’s had completed a full merger with Fry’s which saw many Fry’s favourites either disappear, as was the case with Five Boys, or take on the Cadbury name, as happened with Crunchie, Picnic, Fry’s Crunch, Tiffin and Assorted Nuts. However, the Fry’s management did somewhat better, taking on many senior roles in the new organisation. Somerdale was Cadbury-ised, from the changing of the famous illuminated sign to the factory becoming just one of many Cadbury factories in an increasingly complex and sprawling international organisation. The closure of Somerdale was something that had been on the cards for far longer than most people realise and had very nearly happened almost twenty years prior and several times since. My book also covers how Fry’s spread around the world, including yet another example of Cadbury’s sticking the boot in when they took over Fry’s large Canadian business in order to use it to propagate their Dairy Milk brand. The one thing they couldn’t get rid of was the best-selling Fry’s cocoa, which is still market leader to this day in Canada – the last remaining country to sell the line. Most importantly, I could not write
this book without showcasing Fry’s marvelous legacy of advertising and packaging images. Fry’s was an early pioneer of colour printing for their labels and the use of famous contemporary artists for their advertising, over 200 of which are included. It is a fitting epitaph to one of Bristol’s best-known contributions to the world.
About the author ● John Bradley worked for Cadbury’s from 1979 to 2003, moving to Cadbury Canada in 1996 to become Vice-President of Marketing. He now works in the advertising and marketing industry in Canada. He has also written the first authorised full history of Cadbury’s, Cadbury’s Purple Reign (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), as well as co-authoring a business book, Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-Store. In 2010 he published a humorous self-help book about living with Crohn’s disease, which he has had since his early 20s. The Foul Bowel: 101 Ways to Survive and Thrive With Crohn’s Disease. You can read his blog about this at www.foulbowel.com ● Fry’s Chocolate Dream: The Rise and fall of a Chocolate Empire is available from Amazon.co.uk and other online outlets and should soon be in most bookshops in Bristol and Bath.
in the milk chocolate bar becoming known as Five Boys (even though it was in fact the same boy). Lindsay had certainly suffered for his art in the shooting of the images; the eye-catching first image which shouted desperation had been achieved by Lindsay’s father soaking a cloth in ammonia and placing it around the boy’s neck to make him cry. Lindsay himself related this story to Fry’s employees when he was given a tour of the factory while in his eighties.
COMPETITION MANIA ● WITH the building of the new Keynsham factory under way, Fry’s ran a competition tied to sales of Belgrave chocolates to come up with a name for the site, offering £500 as first prize (around £13,000 today). The instructions gave some guidance as to what the company was looking for: “A suitable name, which should preferably be brief, easy to pronounce, striking and unique, and which might, for example, suggest the ideal surroundings of the new site.” The competition generated an impressive 173,000 entries, of which a surprisingly high number of 120 suggested Somerdale. However, the winners’ joy was tempered by the prize being divided between them and then rounded up to a fiver each. Buoyed by the success, Fry’s
ran another contest two years later to put in order of preference ten names for “The Fry’s Girl” who advertised tins of cocoa. Attracted by a top prize of £1,000, the company received a staggering 628,053 entries, of whom 15 correctly named Phyllis, Grace, Elsie, Barbara, Patience, Prudence, Jane, Susan, Priscilla and Matilda (not a Britney or Chardonnay in sight!) in the correct sequence. The winners this time did slightly better, getting £100.
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ingly trapped in a loveless marriage. The plot thickened when George Cadbury’s son, Egbert, applied out of the blue for a job at Union Street, having found there was no job for him at Bournville. His pacifist Quaker relatives seem to have been unimpressed by Egbert’s shooting down of two Zeppelins in the First World War. Egbert was soon put in charge, along with the last member of six generations of the Fry family to play a role, Cecil Fry, of the stupendous undertaking of moving the business to Somerdale. As if this wasn’t enough of a challenge, Egbert and Cecil had to deal with a ruthless competitor who cut prices to the bone in order to drive others to the wall, that being Fry’s so-called sister company, Cadbury Bros. It all proved so much of a financial burden such that by the time the move to Somerdale was complete, J.S Fry & Sons was barely profitable, which prompted the Cadbury board to arbitrarily force Fry’s into liquidation and take over their junior partner. Egbert and Cecil, who both seem splendid fellows, took the slings and arrows from Bournville with great dignity and, having fought tooth and nail for a measure of independence, plotted a turnaround for Fry’s which would be implemented after the Second World War. Old favourites such as Fry’s Chocolate Cream, Turkish Delight, Crunchie, Sandwich bars and Tiffin
● SEARCHING round for a means of promoting Fry’s Milk Chocolate, Conrad Fry dug out an advertising image he had bought in 1886 for a then-staggering £200 and which had been used occasionally for advertising cocoa. The image, which featured Lindsay Poulton, the son of the photographer, pulling five different faces headed ‘Desperation, Pacification, Expectation, Acclamation, Realization it’s Fry’s’, would become the company’s most famous piece of communication and would result
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Tuesday, November 19, 2013
JANE AUSTEN IN PANTO? OH YES, SH It’ll soon be the Pantomime time of year. One of the most unusual offerings for this season will be a panto based on Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. It’s written by Jonathan Rowe for the St Luke’s Church Players in Brislington, who here tells us about Austen’s family and literary connections with Bristol and Brislington.
● Blaise Castle: ‘the finest place in England’, according to one of Jane Austen’s characters
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T’S Jane Austen – but not as we know it! Jane Austen’s iconic novel Pride and Prejudice is to become a pantomime in a forthcoming production to mark the double celebrations for the 25th anniversary of Brislington’s St Luke’s Church Players. It’s also 200 years since the publication of Austen’s best loved work. St Luke’s Church Players were formed in 1988 by the Rev Peter Dyson after a very successful production of Aladdin, performed as part of a church fundraising appeal to restore the church tower and bells. A quarter of a century later the Players are still going strong, with over half the present members not being born 25 years ago! More than 40 pantomimes, plays, musicals and revues have been produced by the group who were also the recipient of a Rose Bowl Award in 2010. I have especially written Pride and Prejudice – The Panto! for the Players, being secretary for all the 25 years, and one of three remaining founder members still with the group. This will be the tenth show I have created for the Players, but my first pantomime. One of the performances will be attended by Eleanor and Martha Ladds of Long Ashton, who are Jane Austen’s six-times-removed great nieces, descended from Austen’s brother, Edward Austen Knight. Edward was adopted by wealthy and childless relatives, Thomas and Catherine Knight, and became their heir, and took their name in 1812. Only a few yards away from the Church Hall there is a permanent, if perhaps tenuous family connection with the great novelist herself, as there is a memorial to her niece Catherine Anne Hubback (1818 -1877) in St Luke’s churchyard. Catherine Anne Hubback was a daughter of Sir Francis Austen, Admiral of the Fleet. Mrs Hubback became a minor Victorian novelist herself when she was forced to gain employment to provide for herself and her three small children, after her husband, John Hubback, a promising young barrister, suffered a mental breakdown.
● Brislington House, also known as Long Fox Manor, once an asylum, but nowadays split into flats
PANTO & PREJUDICE
● The grave of Austen’s niece, Catherine Anne Hubback, in St Luke's churchyard, Brislington He was declared insane in 1850, and sadly spent the remaining 35 years of his life as a patient at Brislington House Asylum, which still stands on Bath Road, now converted to luxury flats and known as Long Fox Manor. Brislington House was founded by Dr Edward Long Fox (1761-1835) in 1804 as one of the first purpose built asylums in the country for the humane treatment of the mentally ill, and it continued to be run by the Fox family until 1951. John Hubback died in 1885 aged 74 and is buried in the churchyard where his gravestone also contains a memorial to his wife who died in 1877 aged 59 in Gainesville, Prince William County, Virginia, USA. She had emigrated there seven years earlier,
following two of her three sons. Catherine’s first novel was a completion of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons, (written 1803 -05) which she published as The Younger Sister in 1850. She went on to write a further nine books and became a favourite novelist for Victorian young ladies, though her work is all but forgotten today. She dedicated The Younger Sister to her ‘Aunt Jane’ and wrote: “Though too young to have known her personally, was from early childhood taught to esteem her virtues and admire her talents.” One of her later books, The Rival Suitors, was called by a reviewer “the best of all Mrs Hubback’s novels, and which proves her to be nearly allied
by genius as she is by blood to the first of English female novelists, Miss Austen”. Catherine capitalised on her relationship with the famous aunt she never knew, who died the year before she was born. She wrote to her son, John, in 1871: “I mean in future to have my name printed as Mrs C Austen Hubback and make believe the A stands for that. I have written it at length so nobody knows and Austen is a good nom de plume.” Catherine was a most ardent, spirited and imaginative woman – “vivid” was how her son John described her. Her memorial in St Luke’s churchyard in front of the West door reads: “Also in memory of Catherine Anne, his wife, daughter of
● PRIDE and Prejudice – The Panto! is performed by the St Luke’s Church Players from December 4-7 at 7.30pm with a 2.30 Saturday matinee at St Luke’s Church Hall, Church Parade. Jonathan Rowe said: “I first had the idea of turning ‘Pride and Prejudice’ into a panto two years ago after seeing a ‘straight’ version performed by students of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. “Mrs Bennet is a perfect ‘Dame’ role, there are two pairs of romantic leads in Elizabeth and Mr Darcy and Jane and Mr Bingley, and great comedy characters with the odious Mr Collins, and wayward teenager Lydia Bennet, not to mention an eminently hissable villianess in the nasty Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Oh, and I’ve added Willy the incontinent dancing dog!” For tickets call 0117 971 1339 or 0750 392 9996. For further information contact jonathan_rowe1@tiscali.co.uk. “The Duchess of Cambridge is Jane Austen’s 11th cousin, six times removed – not a lot of people know that!” says Jonathan.
Sir F.W Austen, Admiral of the Fleet. She died in Virginia, USA, 25th February 1877 – And There Was No More Sea.” Jane Austen herself may not have mentioned Brislington in any of her novels but a neighbouring village is referred to in Northanger Abbey (1818) when the heroine, Catherine Morland, and her companions, are travelling along the Bath Road en route to Bristol and Blaise Castle: “In the meanwhile, they proceeded on their journey without any mischance; and were within view of the town of Keynsham.” Blaise Castle, in Henbury, the Gothic folly built in 1766 is called by another character, “the finest place in England”. Blaise Castle House was
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Tuesday, November 19, 2013
5
Footsteps into history Clifton Court
HE IS!
● One of the first houses in Clifton, once home to American troops and later the mother of film star Cary Grant (right)
Home to rich, influential – and D-Day planners
P
● Jane Austen Congregational Church (now United Reformed Church). In Jane Austen’s day Brislington was a rural North Somerset village much favoured by Bristol merchants when “got up in the world”, and there were many large mansions with extensive grounds. In both Northanger Abbey and Emma there are references to Kings Weston House. Mrs Elton says “we had a delightful exploring party from Maple Grove to King’s Weston”. Kings Weston House, near Lawrence Weston was built 1712-19 and designed by the great architect of the day, Sir John Vanburgh. Jane Austen enjoyed (and may well have taken part in) family theatricals at her childhood home at Steventon
Rectory in Hampshire where her father the Rev George Austen was rector, and in February 1788 the Austens and friends performed Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb – “a grand burlesque in the tragic style” – which includes some rather panto-like characters such as Princess Huncamunnca, Mr Doodle and Mr Noodle, and a female principal boy role of Tom Thumb himself. We can only wonder what Jane Austen would have thought of her “darling child”, as she called Pride and Prejudice, becoming a pantomime, but I like to think she would be amused and no doubt astonished at the worldwide high regard and affection enjoyed by her work after 200 years.
had passed into the ownership of W H Gore Langton MP, who extended and altered the West Wing to what we see today. The bays to the rear of the main house had also been added and the secondary entrance into this side of the house was in place. In 1934 Clifton Court was purchased by Chesterfield Place Ltd and converted into a nursing home. At this stage, new ‘nurses quarters’ were added to house 12 nurses who shared two bathrooms, toilets and a small kitchen. It was at the Chesterfield Nursing Home that Hollywood actor Cary Grant’s mother, Elsie, lived out her final years. It was all change for Clifton Court in
Clifton Court “andAt Clifton
College, General Omar Bradley supervised much of the planning for Operation Overlord – the D-Day landings in Normandy October 1943 when the building was taken over by the U.S. First Army. Here, and at Clifton College, General Omar Bradley supervised much of the planning for Operation Overlord – the D-Day landings in Normandy. In 1961 Nuffield became the newest resident of Clifton Court, establishing its first hospital in Bristol and only its third in the country. The Chesterfield Hospital underwent many alterations, including further extensions to the large rear wing, the addition of a new operating suite and, in the 1980s, the conversion of the ‘nurse’s quarters’ into pathology laboratories. Nuffield Health continued to operate a hospital on the site until 2008, when it moved out of the historic building and into the better equipped St Mary’s Hospital, just off Clifton Triangle. The restoration of Clifton Court has seen like-for-like replacement of features in need for repair; for example, oak has been used to replace damaged oak. The original plasterwork remains and some 9,000 Welsh slate tiles were used to repair the roof.
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built nearby 1796-98. Emma (1816) features Jane Austen’s only Bristolian character, the dreadful nouveau riche Mrs Elton (nee Miss Augusta Hawkins) who marries the local vicar of Highbury. Both slightly vulgar and condescending she is always extolling the virtues of her rich brother-in-law Mr Suckling’s house, the fictional Maple Grove, “near Bristol”, a large country house and estate, perhaps not unlike The Grove in Brislington. Built in about 1790, now converted to flats, its large and elegant grounds are now covered by Edwardian streets, such as Montrose Park, Grove Park Road, and Pendennis Park. From 1906 to 1978 the house was used as a church hall for Brislington
RIVATE healthcare charity Nuffield Health has recently opened its redeveloped Chesterfield Hospital in Clifton. A key part of the £20m development has been the restoration of Clifton Court, a Grade II listed Georgian house which fronts the site. Clifton Court is an interesting footnote in Bristol’s wider history. When it was built in 1742 it was one of the first houses to be built in Clifton. Until the 1720s there were probably less than 500 people living in the parish of Clifton, and most of those were in Hotwells. The wealthier folk of Bristol aspired to homes in the fashionable Queen Square, built in the early 1700s, but this was still set among the noises and smells of the busy port. The move to Clifton really began with the erection of grand houses like Clifton Wood House, Clifton Hill House and Clifton Court. For many years, Clifton remained a fairly exclusive enclave, partly because it was hard to get to. The roads leading there were steep tracks which could be dangerously slippery in wet weather. Well into the 1770s the fashionable day-trippers who made it as far as Goldney House to admire the shell-lined grotto and gardens were few and far between. Clifton Court was originally the home of Nehemiah Champion II and his wife Martha Goldney; daughter of another famous Clifton former resident, Thomas Goldney II. Nehemiah Champion made a lot of brass (literally) – building a fortune from his brass works at Baptist Mills in Easton and Warmley, Bristol. The Goldney family and Champion were renowned for their interest in emerging industries, including – for Thomas Goldney II, Martha’s father – the shipping trade and, in war, financing privateering expeditions. It is thought Clifton Court was built by architect William Halfpenny, who also built The Cooper’s Hall on King Street, the only surviving building that can positively be attributed to him today. This theory is strengthened by the use of black copper slag blocks at the back of Clifton Court; these would have come from Champion’s brassworks. By the mid-19th Century, the house
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Tuesday, November 19, 2013
HELP US CREATE ROLL OF HONOUR F
EBRUARY 1945 saw the start of Operation Veritable, one of the last main battles on the Western Front and indeed one of the lesser known battles. The aim of this operation in and around the Reichswald was to create a breakthrough to the River Rhine. In October 1944, the progress of Operation Market-Garden ground to a halt in the Groesbeek and Nijmegen area of the Netherlands. It was vital to get a foothold on the Rhine and to break the last natural barrier between the western Allies and the Ruhr area and Berlin. Many soldiers lost their lives in this battle, about 4,000 on Allied side, about 8,800 on the German side. In this area there are many War Cemeteries. Well known ones are the Canadian War Cemetery in Groesbeek and the one in the Reichswald. In the Gennep area there are two cemeteries where soldiers of the Commonwealth are buried; Ottersum (eight graves) and Milsbeek (210 graves). In 2015, 70 years after World War 2 ended, we think it would be a great gift to the those who fell, that their names, faces and the sacrifices they made will always be remembered. Our aim is to create a Roll of Honour for the soldiers buried in our Milsbeek and Ottersum War Cemeteries, and of course for those who fell in the area of Gennep, many of whom do not actually have a grave.
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Picture of the Week ● REMEMBER the old Bristol Bus Station? Course you do! Here it is in all its pomp, photographed for the Post in October 1962. Look at all the lovely Evening Post adverts on the pillars! We all have memories of that place; some happy ones, like the excitement of taking the bus to Weston for the day or getting the coach for an adventure in London. There will be sad memories, too, like seeing loved ones off as they depart for a new and better life in Portishead or somewhere like that. While one cannot deny that the place had a sort of grubby charm, the dominant emotions associated with the bus station would be boredom, frustration, and quite possibly murderous feelings about the feathered vermin which used to infest the place. Remember the pigeons? If you have any happy memories of the old Bus Station, or indeed the pigeons, do feel free to share them…
● Left, Milsbeek Cemetery, in the Netherlands, pictured in the snow by one of the project volunteers. Below left, graves in Reichswald Forest War Cemetery
“ Our aim is to create a Roll of Honour for the soldiers buried in our Milsbeek and Ottersum War Cemeteries, and of course for those who fell in the area of Gennep, many of whom do not actually have a grave. In total there are 218 graves in our Cemeteries. We have some information in the form of photographs or the stories behind them for some, and some of which we know nothing
at all. We are looking for, and need your help in, gathering more information in order to create a complete and where possible a comprehensive history of the soldiers buried here. We are looking for relatives, descendants or friends of the soldiers who are buried here in our War Cemeteries. Please help us in our quest to gather as much information as you possibly can provide. Our names are Han van Arensbergen, local historian working on the war history of Gennep and Operation Veritable, and Paul ten Broeke, local photographer who is in the process compiling the stories behind those who lost their lives. If you want to help, to be able to
remember the soldiers, come into contact with us. We both speak and read fluent English, so please do not hesitate to contact us either by phone or email. We would greatly appreciate your help. Han van Arensbergen, Bergstraat 10, Gennep, Netherlands. T: + 31 485 512461 Paul ten Broeke, Perron 12, Gennep, Netherlands. T: +31 485 801504 E: Roh.Milsbeek.Ottersum@gmail.com
● Web: sites.google.com/site/ rollofhonourmilsbeekottersum/ ● www.facebook.com/ MilsbeekWarCemetery ● www.facebook.com/ OttersumWarCemetery
www.bristolpost.co.uk
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
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Do you have a lucky charm? ● THIS photo comes to us from M shed, who, as regular readers will know, are looking for your family memories, letters and mementoes of relatives who lived through the First World War, either in the armed forces, or on the “Home Front” back in Bristol. So what’s this curious little object all about then? It’s a lucky charm, known as a “touch wood”, or more commonly at the time, “Touch Wud”. Touch Wuds came in many different varieties, but all comprised a small piece of wood, typically set in metal – sometimes even gold or silver. Usually they were quite comical. The idea was of course that you would touch the wood of your Touch Wud for good luck. During WWI they were given to soldiers by family members and friends. Bristol’s Museums and Galleries have a number of them in their collections, but they would absolutely love to hear from you if you have one in your possession – and hear the story behind it, and of its original owner.
● Flying Fox arriving at Cumberland basin, Bristol, in 1922
Happy days in the Naval Reserve ✒I
If you have one, and want to share its story with the rest of Bristol, contact Catherine Littlejohns, Senior Collections
Officer, Public History. Email: Catherine.Littlejohns@ bristol.gov.uk or telephone 0117 903 9816/352 6953.
Memories of uncles who fought in World War I ✒I HAVE just read your article in Bristol Times of November 5, and although I don’t have any letters, postcards etc. from the First World War, but I did have two uncles who fought in that awful war. My name is Anthony Eliot Wilcox, and I was born in Lydney, Gloucestershire on August 15, 1945. Apparently I was conceived when my father, Arthur Edgar Wilcox, came home from India/Burma nine months earlier in the Second World War to see my mother, Lillian Mary Wilcox. He then had to return to the
sub-continent, and it seems that by the time he returned after the end of the war I was about 10 months old. Dad was born on March 3, 1909, and was one of eight children, and the youngest in the family. There were five boys and three girls, and the two eldest boys, Reginald Tremayne Wilcox (born 1894) and William Thomas Wilcox (born 1897) both went to fight in the First World War. I’m sure both were in the army, and served in the Gloucestershire Regiment. Unfortunately, William never returned home, being a casualty of the war, but I can recall with fond
memories visits with Mum and Dad to see Uncle Reg and his family – wife Charlotte, daughter Joan and son-in-law Frank and their friendly dog in another part of Lydney, especially at Christmas. I was of course still quite young in those days and Uncle Reg never spoke to me about his experiences in WWI. I am still in touch with his daughter’s daughter Susan, who lives in Cornwall and has a grown-up family of her own. Mr A.E. Wilcox Ashton, Bristol.
REFER to Terry Male’s article (Bristol Times, November 12) about joining the RNVR in the fifties. I joined Flying Fox in 1962 and recall her well. The male ‘heads’ as I recall were up forward against the ship’s side and you could look out at the dock through open scuttles. We had a Bofors 40mm gun (below decks) to practise on. I was a telegraphist and our instructor was a Chief with the nickname ‘Froggie’. He was as old as Methuselah, but knew his stuff. I recall a Lt. Commander Surgeon from Bath giving me a medical in a small room by the ship’s office with the door open and Wrens wandering outside. He asked me to drop my trousers, which I did, then he turned and bawled: “Pants too! How the devil can I examine you like that!” Happy days. Although I had been a sea cadet I still had to do basic training at Devonport. I recall most of the doors in the heads were missing. I also remember having to ask a leading hand to use the iron to press my uniform. I cannot repeat what he said – the RNVR were very low on the regulars’ list! How things have changed. Two good things were scram time as, because I was very slim the ladies always gave me extra eggs and bacon. I was also given 200 cigs for the 2 weeks even though only 17!
“ How things have changed. Two good things were scram time as, because I was very slim the ladies always gave me extra eggs and bacon. I was also given 200 cigs for the 2 weeks even though only 17! We were inspected on first day at St Beudaux Signals school in very wet cold October weather by a snotty-nosed two-ring Lieutenant who saw that my pal from Bath (a trainee solicitor) was wearing a vest under the very itchy woollen winter top. It cost him an 11 shilling fine! I also remember being told we were not obliged to salute Wren officers but could do so if we wished to. Again – times have changed. My time stood me in good stead. I was taught respect of self and others, self-reliance, and comradeship. It also led me to become a Chief in the Sea Cadet Corps for 12 years later on. If you want to get ahead and serve the country please consider the RNR. Ken Sharp via email
Next week
Soaring ambitions NEXT week it will be ten years since Concorde last flew. Join us as Bristol Times takes a nostalgic look back at Bristol’s supersonic icon.
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From folk funnyman to a queen of Dunkirk
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ELLO, good evening and welcome … Right then, some very good news. Just in time for Christmas there’s a biography of Fred Wedlock (right) coming out. I’ve not seen it yet, but it’s by local journalist and author John Hudson, and this can only be a good thing. John is a meticulous researcher and an excellent writer. He did a superb book on Adge Cutler a while ago. A couple of years before that his biography of John Atyeo had me gripped – and I say this as someone with no interest whatever in football. John’s new one is called Fred Wedlock: Funnyman of Folk and is published by Bristol Books, a community interest company which aims to keep alive important stories about local people. “Fred did for the West Country what Billy Connolly did for Scotland, Max Boyce for Wales and Jasper Carrott for Birmingham,” says John. “He had opportunities to make a much bigger name for himself but he so loved the people and places of the West that he was happy to settle back here after his brush with the madness of fame.” We’ll be running a big article on Fred, and on John’s book, in a couple of weeks’ time, but if you can’t wait, then you are cordially invited to the launch party. This will be at the Studio at M shed at 2pm on Saturday, November 23, admission is free. There will be archive film of Fred in action, musical tributes from The Willbees, Hannah Wedlock and Aj Webber. And of course John will be signing copies of his book. Things don’t get any more Bristolian than this, so don’t miss it! If you can’t make it, and can’t wait for the Bristol Times article, then it will be available soon in local bookshops, price £12, or available online from www.bristolbooks.org.
Discover Bedminster
A nice earner for us? AS you’ll know from reading the Post, the Council has all manner of budgetary problems at the moment. George F will be making his big budget statement any time now, and it’s not going to be good news. (If he’s half the politician I think he is, he’ll try to divert attention from the bad news on spending by making some dramatic announcement about something else. Declaring war on South Gloucestershire Council ought to do the trick.) Anyway, I want to do my bit, and I’ve come up with a wheeze to earn us a few quid on the side. There was a thing in Bristol Times a couple of months back about former Lord Mayor Royston Griffey becoming a freeman of Bristol. I’ve been pondering it ever since, wondering if I should apply for freeman status myself. It’d look good on the business cards. The only problem is that to do this properly, you have to be apprenticed to a freeman, and pledge, under rules drawn up in the olden days, to give up frequenting taverns, fornicating and playing dice. Don’t know about you, but I couldn’t live without my weekly game of dice. Now back in the middle ages, and for some while after, you had to be a freeman, or burgess, in order to carry out most forms of trade within Bristol. Until the reforms of the 19th century, only freemen had the vote. Apprenticeship was only one route to freeman status. You could also become a freeman by being born the son of one, or by marrying a freeman’s widow.
“ You have to pledge to give up frequenting taverns, fornicating and playing dice ... I couldn’t live without my weekly game of dice.
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BRISTOL said bon voyage to the Medway Queen (above) a few weeks back after her stay at Albion Dockyard for
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Farewell to the Heroine of Dunkirk
restoration work. (Though as I was writing this, she was still at Avonmouth awaiting a four-day window of decent weather for the tow back to Kent.) Medway Queen, aka the “Heroine of Dunkirk” is a remarkable piece of history. It’s difficult to name her without prefacing her with some old-fashioned term of admiration like “plucky” … Even though she’s just a piece of machinery. Anyway, all this had me racing off to the internet to have a listen to J.B. Priestley’s amazing wartime radio talk about the miracle of Dunkirk and the part played it in by ships like Medway Queen. Before the war she’d been a bog-standard pleasure steamer, but at the war’s start, she was conscripted as a minesweeper. She then took part in Operation Dynamo, helping get troops off the beaches at Dunkirk. She made seven trips in all – more than any other ship – and rescued 7,000 men. Armed with a 12-pounder and a couple of machine guns she also claimed to have shot down three German aircraft. Priestley, speaking on the BBC in 1940, spoke of the part played by former pleasure steamers at Dunkirk as “an English epic … so typical of us, so absurd and yet so grand and gallant that you hardly know whether to laugh or to cry.” Of Medway Queen and all the other Queens and Belles, the “fussy little paddle steamers” he said: “She has paddled and churned away for ever. But now look – this little steamer, like all her brave and battered sisters, is immortal. She’ll go sailing, proudly down the years, in the epic of Dunkirk. “And our great-grandchildren when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, will also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell – and came back glorious.” You can listen to Priestley’s whole talk at www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ dunkirk/14310.shtml. … And if that doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, you are obviously not normal, and should seek medical attention. Cheers then!
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And this last opened a loophole for more unscrupulous politicians. The story goes like this: at election times, both parties (we’re talking about Whigs and Tories here; Labour hadn’t been invented yet) would not just wine, dine and generally bribe freemen to vote for them. They would also go all-out to turn as many of their supporters as possible into new freemen. And for this, they would a-wooing go. They would knock on the doors of freemen’s widows and even seek them out in the parish workhouses. The ladies would then be offered quite handsome financial inducements to marry these Whig or Tory partisans. In marrying, these men would then achieve freeman status and could vote for their side in the election, and everyone was happy. (Apart from the losing side.) Not long afterwards these sham marriages would be dissolved in a rather quaint manner. Both parties, man and (often considerably older) wife would go into a churchyard and stand on either side of a grave. They would hold hands across the grave, then let go of one another and declare solemnly that they had married until death should part them. And now death had indeed parted them. As they were standing either side of a grave. That’s the story, anyway. I have no idea how true it is; it comes from an anecdote Prime Minister Lord Rosebery told in 1894 when he came to unveil the Edmund Burke statue down the Centre. Still, it wouldn’t be like a politician to say anything un-
true, would it? True or not, it suggests a wheeze the Council could run to make a few quid on the side in these austere times; traditional Bristol divorces. You’d have some Council official or registrar, and dress him/her up in 18th century gear. They would then take the happy couple to St Stephens churchyard, or maybe the more picturesque dereliction of St John’s, stand them to either side of a grave and then recite a load of old blether in cod-18th century talk. Something like: Oyez! Oyez! Be it hereafter publickly known and broadcast that these two people, Mr Joseph Bloggs, an assistant computer helpdesk manager of 38 Acacia Avenue, Brislington and Mrs Catherine Bloggs, an supermarket checkoutress who hath returned to her mother’s house, are hereby divorced on account of their mutual dislike ye one of ye other, and that they are parted by death. I now pronounce the pair of you fancy-free. You may now fling your rings back at one another and flip a coin for custody of Moggins ye Cat.” All their family and friends can then applaud, the ex-groom may then kiss the ex-bride’s best friend and the ex-bride may kiss the ex-groom’s best mate (who they’ve been seeing on the side for the last three months) and everyone can then go off for a bit of a do at the Rummer or the Glass Boat. We could bring in lots of visitors with our Bristol Divorces. We could be the Gretna Green of marital separation, and of course offer any divorcees an excellent chance of copping off with someone new at our many excellent night-spots. I offer your worship the Lord Mayor, and your trousership the elected mayor, this idea to see if we can boost the city’s revenues. No, no, there’s no charge for this suggestion. Just doing my civic duty.
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ANOTHER date for your diary. Among M shed’s busy programme of events, there’s one here I particularly like the look of. On Wednesday December 11, they’re running a guided walk from M shed to Victoria Park. One of the museum’s experts will show you how Bedminster evolved from a rural Somerset parish to a bustling industrial town. It’ll look at the impact this had on public health and visit some of the key features of the Victorian expansion of south Bristol. There’ll also be historical photographs, drawings and maps to look at on the way. It leaves M shed at 10.30am and lasts about an hour and three quarters; no charge, but they say a donation of £2 per person would be nice. Book in advance at the information desk on 0117 352 6600 or sign up on the day.
Latimer’s Diary