Bristol Times 29 OCtober 2013

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29 OCT 2013

Celebrating our proud history and keeping your memories alive

Page 7 The message I’ll carve into my pumpkin

Mining 40 years since they closed down the collieries Page 4

Page 8 Farewell to Marion’s Memories

From Cod To Callaloo: Pages 2&3

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HOW OUR FOOD HAS SHAPED OUR HISTORY

● Beverley Forbes created the Plantation Restaurant on Gloucester Road in 2003, serving authentic Jamaican dishes including several different ways of serving callaloo.

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Tuesday, October 29, 2013

COD BATTLES AND SUGAR ADDICTIONS A new book has just been published which is going to interest Bristol foodies and history buffs alike.

Not only does it look at the story of eating and drinking in the city from earliest times to the present, but it also traces the often surprising ways in which food and drink have influenced Bristol’s history. Eugene Byrne lets his Clark’s pie go cold while he explains.

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UE Shephard is, frankly, a journalistic disappointment.

She’s written a fascinating new book which tells “the Story of Bristol through Food and Wine” but she cheerfully admits that she doesn’t do much cooking.

So there goes any chance of us leading this article with a big photo of the author, in her Domestic Goddess kitchen, doing the here’s-one-I-cooked-earlier thing. No poses of her holding some or other classic Bristolian dish from the 17th century that she’s made from an original recipe that begins “first, kill your turtle.” No, nothing like that.

“I’m not really a cooking person,” she says. “I’m not really into chefs.

You’ll never see me on The Great British Bake-Off. I can’t bake to save my life.”

From Cod to Callaloo is one of the most interesting social histories of Bristol to come along in ages.

It’s not just an account of that our Bristolian ancestors ate and drank; it’s also about the profound influences that food and booze have had on the city’s history.

Now fair enough, most of us can grasp the fact that there was a time when ready meals, sliced bread and supermarkets had not yet been invented. But nothing bears out the famous line from LP Hartley’s The Go-Between about how “the past is a foreign country” as much as the things they used to eat.

True, Bristolians did used to go and shop at Iceland. The country, that is.

The cod of the book’s title was, during the Middle Ages, an essential part of Bristolians’ diet.

Caught by Icelandic fishermen in huge quantities, the fish were gutted and hung out on racks in the cold northern air to dry.

Known as stockfish, it could keep almost indefinitely if it was dried properly, and was brought back to Bristol by traders who exchanged salt, flour, butter, pots and pans and, of course, woollen cloth for it.

It was a cheap and plentiful source of protein for the poor, but the rich had to eat it as well, as before the Reformation the calendar included

“ You’ll never see me on Great British Bake-Off. I can’t bake to save my life.

Sue Shephard plenty of days on which religion forbade the eating of meat.

The Icelandic trade was, however, relatively short-lived. The aggressive merchant federation of the North German ports, known as the Hanseatic League or ‘Hanse’ didn’t like these English interlopers muscling in on their business and put a stop to it.

It is widely suggested that being cut off from this lucrative market and important source of supply led directly to Cabot’s voyages of discovery.

According to this theory, Bristol’s merchants, eager to find new business, were willing to finance expensive and hazardous voyages of exploration far out into the Atlantic – the “Ocean Sea” – in search of the rumoured land known as Hy-Brasil.

Before and after the Icelandic trade, the cod came, usually salted, from Ireland, along with supplies of other fish species, usually shipped from Waterford, and usually traded for woollen cloth. The local saying went: Herring of Sligo and Salmon of Bann, Has made in Bristol many a rich man.

Salt cod remained for centuries a

● Above, children enjoying ice-cream from a van operated by well-known Bristol ice cream firm Verrecchia’s, in Romney Avenue, Lockleaze, around 1960 Photograph: Peter Dainton ● Right, a turnspit dog at work in a kitchen in South Wales, watercolour by Thomas Rowlandson, 1790.

Specially-trained dogs were used to turn spits in many Bristol kitchens, and there’s a dog-wheel at Blaise Castle Museum. (Picture: Private collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)

staple, particularly of the poor. When Bristol merchants set up their sugar plantations in the Caribbean, the slaves were often fed on cheap salt cod. Ackee and saltfish remains a popular Caribbean dish to this day; you could probably say it’s the national dish of Jamaica.

“I’ve always been interested in the idea of telling history through food,” explains Sue. “Lots of people write about the history of food, especially if it’s about agriculture or rural areas or about the sorts of things people used to eat in stately homes. But as far as I know nobody has really written about the history of a city through food, and Bristol is of course a very good place because of its history of trading in food and of course wine.

“So the book is not just about cook-

ing and eating, it’s also about the business of food and how it feeds into other things such as spices and sugar and how that of course fed into the slave trade.”

Bristol’s growth and prosperity in the Middle Ages depended on imports of wine from France and later Spain and Portugal as well. Obviously the wine producers weren’t giving the stuff away; it was traded for woollen cloth, and of course this stimulated what was Bristol’s most important manufacturing industry until the early 1600s and beyond.

Bristolians wanted other things, too. Luxuries like spices to jazz up a dreary diet, raisins, currants and oranges to add a little sweetness.

And then there was sugar, stuff that was so popular, so utterly desirable that there were no depths to which

merchants would no stoop in order to meet a seemingly bottomless demand.

The part that sugar played in Bristol’s growth and the way in which it created huge fortunes is known well enough. What’s not always so obvious is the other ways in which food underpins our history.

Sue Shephard has written a number of books about food and gardening, subjects she got interested in while working as a producer at Channel Four. She won an award for her book Pickled, Potted and Canned: The Story of Food Preserving.

“Working on that was really interesting,” she explains, “because the story of food preserving is all about how people who were poor were better able to survive the winter if they could store food. But there are other

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● Above, the cover of From Cod To Callaloo

● Above, St Michael’s Church, April 1958.

“Tuppenny starver” buns are still handed out to children on Easter Tuesday. ● Left, the oyster women’s shed on Welsh Back. In earlier times, oysters were eaten in huge quantities, even by working people.

(Watercolour by George Delamotte, 1824. Courtesy Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.) ● Right, Bristol nowadays has shops and delicatessens offering food from all around the world. This one is the famous Bristol Sweetmart in St Mark’s Road, Easton.

(Pic: Stephen Morris) ular until well into the 19th century.

The centrepiece of many a big civic feast, where fat aldermen and Merchant Venturers stuffed their faces and drank themselves into a stupor, would have been a big turtle weighing 100lb or more.

There were always associations between food and power. Putting on a good spread meant you were a person of standing and influence. And of course if the monarch was visiting the catering would have to be absolutely spectacular.

When Queen Elizabeth I visited Bristol in 1574 she was entertained by the wealthy merchant John Young at his home on St Augustine’s Back.

The menu would have included things like sparrows stewed in ale, larks cooked in wine with bone marrow, raisins, sugar and cinnamon and

capons boiled with bitter oranges or lemons. There would have been peacock, roast venison in a sauce of vinegar, sugar, cinnamon and butter.

There have been rabbits, chickens, pheasants, corncrakes … and very few vegetables.

And at the end of all this would be the final ‘banquet’ course, fruit tarts, sweet wines, preserved fruits, comfits and elaborate confections of marzipan.

While the upper classes were living it up, the diet of those further down the social scale gradually improved as well, thanks to the import of food from elsewhere. By 1900 everyone could have sugar in their tea, or drink coffee, or treat themselves to a bar of chocolate from Fry’s.

Shortly before the First World War broke out, Bristol was Britain’s main

port for the arrival of shipments of bananas from the Caribbean and South America.

Indeed, it was only wars which interrupted this continuous improvement in the variety and choice that all but the very poorest could afford in their diet. The dietary privations Britons endured with food rationing in the Second World War are known well enough.

“No, the diet wasn’t very nice,” says Sue. “But people were healthier, the children grew taller.

“We might think that rationing meant that people became thin and sickly, but this was a time when science was really starting to understand nutrition and vitamins and so on. The wartime diet was dreary, but it was healthy.”

All this is true, but if you ask

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sides to this as well. Preserving food also meant that you could undertake long sea journeys.”

So without preserved food, Bristol’s merchants and explorers would not have been able to get very far.

Preserved food made the slave trade possible, likewise the great privateering voyages of the 17th and 18th centuries. Preserved food permitted Atlantic crossings to America and back – the return journey could take eight weeks or more in the days of sail – and this in turn enabled Europeans to bring back new foodstuffs – tomatoes, potatoes, turkeys and more besides.

Turkeys were a big hit in Bristol, as were turtles. The West Indian green sea turtle could be brought back alive, and while nobody eats turtle much nowadays it was hugely pop-

anyone who lived through those times if they would be happy to return to the wartime diet, the reply you’d get would be short and quite possibly rather rude.

Food rationing continued well into the post-war era, but as things gradually improved, people craved more glamorous dining.

Two Welsh/Italian brothers in Bristol had the solution.

In a passage in her book which many Bristolians will find particularly interesting, Sue describes how Tony and Aldo Berni opened their first steak restaurant at the Rummer pub in St Nicholas Market in the 1950s and went on to build a huge empire of pub/restaurants serving good quality competitively-priced food which revolutionised Britons’ idea of dining out.

And the rest, you know. Though you might not know the story the book relates of how celebrity restaurateur Keith Floyd was frequently conned into providing free food for unscrupulous diners who would bring slugs with them to his bistro, drop them into the salad, and then complain…

Bristol is now a major destination for the region’s foodies, if not foodies from across the country, with restaurants offering a bewildering range of different cuisines from around the world. The callaloo of the book’s title is the generic name of a dish based on leaf vegetables from the Caribbean.

Has anything, anything at all, stayed the same in Bristol’s diet from early times to the present day?

Well, actually, yes.

“In the middle ages, there were always cases in which people were being charged with adulterating food,” says Sue. “You might say that that’s still going on with the horsemeat scandal.”

The other common strand, she says, is takeaway food. We might think that takeaways originated with fish and chip shops, but they have been around for ever. In medieval Bristol, in among all the unpleasant stinks of the town, you’d also get a frequent whiff of something more pleasant from the cook-shops and street vendors hawking anything from cooked fresh peas to “hot sheep’s feet” and, of course, pies.

“That whole takeaway thing has been going on for a very long time,” she says. “And now takeaways are as popular as ever. That’s a very important Bristolian motif, the idea of treating yourself to some nice takeaway food.”

From Cod to Callaloo is published

by Redcliffe Press, price £15.

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Tuesday, October 29, 2013

MINING A RICH SEAM OF HISTORY It’s now 40 years since the very last mines in the North Somerset coalfield ceased operating. Eugene Byrne looks back at a time when coal was king.

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● A 19th century picture of a Somerset miner with “guss and crook”

LDER residents of Bristol, or Kingswood, South Gloucestershire or North Somerset will know perfectly well that coal was once one of the area’s major industries.

To younger people, or new arrivals, it may come as a surprise. Modern British folk-memory of coal mining associates it with the Welsh Valleys, or Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.

To the untrained eye, there are very few traces left of our local industry.

And yet, coal mining is something that happened within Bristol’s boundaries, and in the surrounding areas, well within living memory. Coal was still being mined in north Somerset into the early 1970s.

Nowadays the old colliery tips have been grassed over, and former pithead buildings have been demolished or converted.

This autumn has just seen the passing of the 40th anniversary of the last of these collieries closing, when Britain’s state-run coal industry, in the form of the National Coal Board, closed the last two north Somerset pits, Writhlington and Kilmersdon.

The last trucks of coal were wheeled from the pitheads at the two collieries on September 28, 1973.

The closure marked the end of an industry which had lasted for at least 500 years. In all, there were more than 60 collieries working in North Somerset at one time or another.

It was used by metalworkers, and in lime kilns, and in the earliest times it was simply dug from shallow pits in the ground.

Coal was growing in importance by the late middle ages because the forests which once covered much of England had long-since been felled for building and for fuel. Only when the wood was running out did coal become a domestic fuel.

As the demand increased “drifts” were dug into the hillsides and, later, small mines, seldom more than 50ft deep, were developed. By the 1750s the appearance of the pits started to change as the mines became deeper and pumps (powered by horses, and steam a few generations later) were introduced to extract water.

Early mines were either leased from landowners or developed by farmers. They were worked by just a handful of men, usually with other members of their families helping when needed to supply the fuel to their neighbours.

Demand for coal really took off with the industrial revolution in the late 1700s and early 1800s, particularly with the increased use of steam engines in mining, factories and, of course, the railways.

From being a cottage industry, coal was now being extracted on an industrial scale. Landowners who had once lived off the sweat of agricultural workers now saw an opportunity to make huge fortunes from what lay under the ground on their estates.

Coal was first mined in an area

● Miners pose for a memento of the last day a

“ It’s been bloody hard graft and I’m not sorry to see it go Vic Sage, a miner for 46 years, speaking in 1973. At the age of 14 he had been harnessed to the coal trucks by the ‘guss and crook’.

around Clutton owned by the Earls of Warwick, and the Duchy of Cornwall also began to exploit the coal deposits on land around Farrington Gurney and Midsomer Norton. The Chewton Mendip-based Waldegrave family developed the mines around Radstock.

(A scion of the same family, William Waldegrave, a son of the 12th Earl Waldegrave, was Conservative MP for Bristol West from 1979 to 1997) It was Frances, Countess Waldegrave who, in 1847, appointed a manager, James McMurtrie, who later built South Hill House in Radstock.

McMurtrie was a canny operator, and he made his employer vast amounts of money, enabling her to maintain an extravagant lifestyle in London where she was a prominent society hostess. McMurtrie remained in charge until the turn of the century and was succeeded by his son, George, who retired in 1925 when the 11th Earl sold the family’s mines.

The Waldegraves’ Radstock collieries were brought by William Beauchamp, a former manager of a small mine at Vobster. Beauchamp had invested in a number of smaller pits for some years and his purchase propelled him into a bigger league. The Norton Hill pit, in particular, was so profitable that it was known locally as “Beauchamp’s goldmine”.

● The Radstock museum His son, Frank, later inherited his father’s interests and his ability and in 1918 was created a baronet for his war work.

When the industry was nationalised in 1947 Sir Frank’s pits were producing more than half the total output of the area, about 600,000 tons a year.

After his death in 1950, the National Coal Board actually took over his old family house, Woodbrough House, which became the area office. Both of his sons, Sir Peter and Ian, took up management positions with the new nationalised firm.

North Somerset’s problem, though, was that its coal was of indifferent quality, and the narrow seams were difficult to work. They did not lend themselves well to the new machinery that the industry was bring-

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● The last load to be brought up from the Kilmersdon pit

day at Writhlington colliery, 1973

National Smelting at Avonmouth. In a desperate effort to meet demand, the National Coal Board started pouring money into the coalfield. In 1954, more than £500,000 was committed to Norton Hill, creating what was, in effect, a new mine and briefly lifting the output to more than 320,000 tons a year.

By the end of the 1960s, however, production stood at barely 200,000 tons a year, and falling. The complex geology of the coalfield made conditions more costly and difficult.

Working at the coal face was becoming increasingly hazardous. As the miners dug their way further and further from the shaft bottom, there were increasing problems with water.

The thin coal seams were broken up geological faults.

Pensford pit was closed in 1958, and

Norton Hill, once a goldmine, followed in 1966. New Rock closed two years later.

By the late 1960s, only Kilmersdon and Writhlington remained, supplying the Portishead power station. By now, though, commercial customers were using more and more oil. Clean air laws had also reduced domestic demand.

(The Somerset coal was also notoriously dirty; if you visit Bath nowadays, you can admire the honeyed hues of the city’s elegant Georgian buildings. If you were taken by time-machine to the Bath of the 1950s you would be shocked to find the predominant colour of the place was black. The buildings had been discoloured by almost two centuries of burning particularly dirty coal).

Portishead converted to oil-firing in 1972 and the two pits, losing £500,000 a year between them, were doomed. Some 430 miners were laid off.

The passing of the industry was not really a cause for regret. While conditions had improved vastly since the days of the local coal barons, mining was always a dangerous and unpleasant job.

There was the constant threat of flooding, explosions, or falling roofs.

Miners who made it to middle age were often victims of respiratory diseases because of the high levels of dust underground. Every family in the area had its own tales to tell of the horrible conditions in which their forefathers, and often young children, had worked.

The fine lifestyle of Lady Waldegrave and her ilk came at a price which was paid by working people.

For example, until 1949 the “guss and crook” remained in use to haul coal from the face. The guss was a tar-coated rope worn around the waist; this was attached to a chain which pulled a small sledge or wagon onto which the coal was loaded.

This apparatus was used by “carting boys” – usually aged around 14 or 15 – who pulled the sledge on hands and knees along a shaft often no more than three feet high – too low for pit ponies – to take the coal to the surface.

A former miner, AJ Parfitt, described in 1930, how as a young boy, his legs and waist were raw until his skin hardened. His mother bathed his wounds with urine which was thought to toughen and cleanse the skin.

At the time the pit foreman at Writhlington memorably remarked: “We have worked hard and played hard but it’s a wonder to think that I won’t have to go down a pit again.”

The 40th anniversary of the closure was recently remembered by former colliery workers and their families,

though the years have taken a toll on their numbers. A permanent record of the district’s mining heritage is stored at Radstock Museum, where people can see a collection of colliery equipment, photographs and other memorabilia.

“The industry defined the gritty character of this area, its economy and its very appearance,” said museum volunteer Wendy Walker. “The museum is surrounded by hills created by old slagheaps, now wooded over, and memories are still sharp.

Every year the Somerset miners hold a reunion here, and every year they enjoy exchanging stories of their years in the pits.”

In 1973, Vic Sage, who had worked in the coalfield for 46 years, was interviewed by the Somerset Guardian. At the age of 14 he had been harnessed to the coal trucks by the guss and crook.

“It’s been bloody hard graft and I’m not sorry to see it go,” he told the Somerset Guardian.

But like many of his colleagues, he did mourn the loss of the powerful bonds of comradeship between the men who did this dirty, dangerous, back-breaking work.

The museum has recently been awarded £10,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund for Mining the Past, a project which will enable local schoolchildren to record the memories of surviving miners.

“Through this project, and through the permanent record of the Somerset Coalfield contained in the museum, we are paying tribute to the miners who gave this district its industrial heritage and special character,” said Wendy Walker.

Radstock Museum is at Waterloo Road, Radstock, North Somerset BA3 3EP, open 2pm-5pm Tues-Fri & Sun, 11am-5pm Sat. Closed December & January. Admission £5 adult/£3.50 seniors, students/£2.50 age 6-15/£12 2 adults, 2 children.

See www.radstockmuseum.co.uk

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ing in.

Through the 20th century, as in many other coalfields, declining profits led owners to try and reduce miners’ pay and conditions from time to time. Some pits were simply closed.

By the time of nationalisation there were only 12 pits remaining in North Somerset, and their productivity was falling. The coalfield had produced one and a half million tons annually at the end of the First World War, but now it had dropped by two thirds.

At the same time, the country was crying out for coal. The Somerset pits could sell every last ounce of the stuff they produced, and it still wasn’t enough.

Much of the field’s output went to the power station at Portishead and to

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Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Happy memories of steamer trips Vice and virtue in Old Market ✒TRINITY Community Arts is set to launch a new local history project to document the real history of Old Market, Bristol. Vice and Virtue will look beneath the area’s reputation to explore the many cultures that have lived here, its national significance as an area of architectural conservation and key moments of historical interest.

Themes will include the riots of 1932, the Black GI presence, the history of Bristol’s Gay Village, the High Street’s sex industry and the ever-changing face of Old Market.

The project – funded by Heritage Lottery Fund, Quartet Community Foundation and the Old Market Community Association – will consist of oral history and reminiscence activities designed to encourage members of the community, of all ages, to share their experiences, photos, documents and memorabilia.

This rigorously researched project will build on existing online and

R

E: Bristol Times, October 15 – What a wonderful photo of the Bristol Queen, taken in June 1964. It invokes so many happy memories of trips on the “paddle steamers from 1947 to the early 1960s.

It was a great shame when P & A Campbell withdrew the ships. Perhaps you can say when the Bristol Queen was withdrawn.

I was the last booking clerk at Montpelier Railway Station from June 1961 to the end of November 1964, when the clerical staff were withdrawn.

I remember we still had joint rail/steamer tickets valid between Bristol and Barry Island – you could take the journey out by ship and back by train, or vice-versa Those were the days!

Colin Radford Hanham Editor’s reply: Thanks for that, Colin.

In answer to your query, the Bristol Queen, which had always been rather accident-prone, was laid up in Cardiff in August 1967 with paddle problems.

By now, Campbell’s steamer business was encountering financial problems, partly because of competition from the new Severn Bridge. While she was laid up she was further damaged when hit by another ship. Campbell’s hoped to get her going again, but the costs were too high and she was sold for scrap and broken up in the Netherlands at the end of 1967.

But here’s another picture of her in happier times. Here she is steaming down the Avon to the sea on August 6 1950.

Picture of the Week

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● Old Market Street around 1908 hard copy archive information. It will culminate in an exhibition, booklet and heritage trail featuring all the work gathered through the project.

Much coverage has been given to the area in recent years, often referring to its “‘seedy reputation”.

But comments from other residents and traders have worked to counter this image, including Mr Ferris, a local publican saying in a local newspaper article, “It’s amazing we’ve done so well in the recession...more and more people are choosing to live here.”

Paul Bradburn, Chair of Old Market Community Association, said: “A project that celebrates the rich heritage of the area and allows the general community to appreciate that heritage will be a great benefit to the people of Bristol.”

The project will run until spring 2015.

If you have an Old Market story, photo, or memorabilia you would like to share, or would like further information, please contact 0117 9351200 or email story@3ca.org.uk.

Visit our website for more infor mation: www.3ca.org.uk/activities/heritage

● WORN smooth by countless generations, the rocks close to the Clifton Observatory have been used as a slide since … well, we don’t know.

So here’s a group of happy kiddies snapped by a Post photographer in 1961.

Who was the first person to think of using it as a slide? Surely it must originally have been fairly rough? Or was it simply that our forebears had tougher backsides?

Maybe it wasn’t used by children at all originally, but by drunken and rowdy young men.

There’s also a story.

You know the artist Richard Long? Makes things out of sticks and rocks and mud and other bits of nature. Well apparently he was once being interviewed about his art by an Italian magazine journalist. They were walking by here and it’s said he managed to convince the gullible Italian hack that the Clifton rock slide was one of his art installations.

● Life in ‘Clifton Village’

Was ‘Clifton Village’ an estate agent invention? ✒FOLLOWING the article about the origin of the term “Clifton Village” (Latimer’s Diary, BT, October 15) I spoke to several other longstanding Clifton residents.

They all agreed that although they would talk about ‘Going to the village’ and still do, they thought that the term ‘Clifton Village’ was coined in the 1970s by estate agents – much like their much-derided and short lived ‘Lower Clifton’ for Southville.

I helped organise the Clifton Village Fayres and at our first meeting we agreed that we wanted to give the atmosphere of an old-fashioned village fair.

We obviously had to preface this with ‘Clifton’ for publicity etc. Little did we know that the fairs would later attract as many as 9,000 people at a time!

Michael Pascoe Clifton

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Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Halloween, heritage, and heroes of war and science

O ● Above, a photograph of the St Silas Football Team; below, the Post caricature of captain Brain Banfield (back, 2nd right)

Every player’s ambition to have caricature in Post

H hi! Journalists refer to the high summer as the “silly season” because there’s not enough news. The cops, on the other hand, refer to the period from Halloween to Bonfire Night as the “silly season” because there’s, well, too much news.

Now when I were a nipper, you’d get your Dad’s best shirt and trousers, stuff them with newspaper, use your Mum’s

✒AT

the recent St Philips Marsh Open Day an appeal was made for photographs of the St Silas Football Team, who were quite a force in the 1950s and early 60s when they played in the First District League and the Premier Combination.

The attached team photo and Evening Post caricature of team captain Brian Banfield was brought in by his daughter.

The Marsh was a hotbed of soccer and boasted two senior amateur sides, St Silas and St Philips Marsh Adult School.

There was great rivalry between the two teams, and derby matches took place on a regular basis.

The Banfield family played a huge part in the organisation of the club. Brian Banfield (back row, second from right) was a fine player and played in the left half position.

It was every Bristol amateur footballer’s ambition to have his caricature in the Post – this was a sign that you had “made it” in the local soccer world.

I am trying to put names to all the players in this team photo, and would be grateful if anyone could assist.

Brian Davies Saltford Briandavies17@btinternet.com

Grand reunion for 1968-1970 nurses ✒WERE

enjoy being nasty to small children. If a gang of teenage thugs from the nearby estate drop round at 10 in the evening, I will also offer them a treat. Some apples and fresh vegetables, as I reckon the little darlings could use some proper nutrition.

Then again, I am also considering entering into the spirit of the occasion by hollowing out a pumpkin. Not with a scary face; I’m carving the words GO AWAY!* into it. (*NB: Use of the words GO AWAY should not be taken literally in this case. I was thinking of rather stronger language. Mrs Latimer is taking legal advice on this as we speak.)

If you find yourself in Broadmead any time between now and November 16, then drop in to Wesley’s New Room in the Horsefair, where they have an exhibition entitled Bristol’s Heritage Buildings: Relics or Le gacies’ The exhibition looks at old buildings that Bristol has lost, and at the different ways in which certain buildings have been saved and put to new uses. It includes material on the Pierean Centre in Portland Square, Ashton Court mansion, the work of the Bristol Civic Society and lots more.

Some of the panels were prepared by the late Dorothy Brown, reflecting her concerns and achievements around heritage issues affecting Bristol and South Gloucestershire.

The Exhibition is open from 10am-4pm Mondays to Saturdays until November 23rd and admission is free. There is also an event with talks and discussions on the theme on November 16 from 2pm. There is no admission charge and no advance registration is necessary. All are welcome.

See www.newroombristol.org.uk for further information, or email james gibbs@btinternet.com.

Korean War book The Korean War has particular resonance in the Bristol area, particularly on account of the astonishingly heroic part played by the 1st Battalion of the Glosters.

If this is of interest to you, you might want to take a look at a new book

by Stephen F. Kelly titled British Soldiers of the Korean War in Their Own Words.

The author has interviewed a number of veterans, all of whom are now in their eighties, (though none are from Bristol). The result is a vivid account of the conflict from the viewpoint of the ordinary soldier. He takes us through call-up, shipping out, combat, casualties and, in a series of passages that leave you filled with admiration for these

blokes, about the experiences of some who were taken prisoner and had to endure a regime of captivity that was both brutal and insanely stupid.

British Soldiers of the Korean War is published by the History Press at £16.99.

Don’t forget Cecil!

A couple of weeks ago, after Cotham Grammar School alumnus Peter Higgs bagged the Nobel Prize for Physics, Bristol Times ran an article about the deeply strange life and stranger personality of another Bristolian physics laureate, Paul Dirac.

This prompted an email from BT reader Lew Pedler who was slightly alarmed that people would get the impression that Higgs and Dirac were Bristol’s only winners of the Nobel for Physics. What, he asked, about Cecil Powell (left)?

Good question, although the thing is that Cecil Powell (1903-1969) won his prize while he was Professor of Physics at Bristol Uni. And you sort of expect a fair few Nobel winners down the years to be associated with one of the world’s major research universities. Higgs and Dirac, on the other hand went to school in Bristol.

But fair do’s. Powell was another Nobel winner connected with Bristol. He was born in Kent into an academic family, went to Cambridge and worked at the Cavendish Laboratory as a postgraduate and went on to spend much of his career in Bristol, first as a lecturer, then as Melville Wills Professor of Physics.

At Bristol his work included developing ways of measuring the mobility of positive ions, and establishing the nature of the ions in most of the common gases. He built a Cockcroft generator for accelerating fast protons and deuterons, researched cosmic radiation and developed methods for determining the energy of neutrons.

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1949 and won the Nobel the following year “for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method”.

In the 1950s he was one of the scientists who signed up to the manifesto put forward by Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and scientist Joseph Rotblat calling attention to the dangers of nuclear weapons and calling for peaceful resolution of conflict. He was a leading member of this movement until just before he died.

So then, Cecil Powell. He was a pretty cool dude.

And not nearly as odd as Paul Dirac.

PS: The Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 was won by Nevill Mott, also associated with Bristol Uni. But that’s another story.

Cheers then!

● Get in touch: Email Bristol.Times@b-nm.co.uk or write to Bristol Times, Bristol Post, Temple Way, Bristol BS2 0BY

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you in the 1968-1970 set at Winford Orthopaedic Hospital, Bristol? Are you in the picture above, does anyone know other nurses that were in our set at WOH? Sue Blithe, Aileen Morgan, Pam Jones Dru Pickard and Kathy Giles are having a grand reunion in 2014 – come and join us.

Really looking forward to catching up!

Email: sueswanborough@ btinternet.com Mobile: 07905208728

Latimer’s Diary

Old buildings and what to do about them

gloves for hands, make a head out of an old football, stick a fright mask on it and then pile the lot into the pram (taking care to first remove your baby sister and put her somewhere safe, like the rabbit hutch) and then wheel the lot into town.

You’d find a decent pitch, put together a sign requesting a penny for the Guy and stand around waiting for the moolah to roll in, hopefully in tanners and thruppences rather than mere pennies.

Our gang perfected the racket over the years. There were two kids a few years younger than me living up the road. They had these big sad eyes that make old ladies go all weak-kneed. One year we actually offered them 50 per cent of the entire take because they looked so cute, so deserving … Worked a treat. Kept us in cheap sweets all the way to Christmas.

It’s not often you see kids seeking money for the Guy nowadays. Now it’s all about Halloween and trick-or-treating. So between this and the sale of high explosives to clueless youngsters (and indeed adults), the local constabulary is kept pretty busy.

Bonfire night and the detonation of various pyrotechnics around the neighbourhood in the weeks before and after I can kind of deal with. It is traditional, after all.

Halloween, on the other hand, I detest because it’s a dumb American import that – listen up, kiddies – NEVER USED TO HAPPEN HERE BEFORE THE 1980s!!

Pardon my shouting.

Folklorists will tell you that in Britain there are many regional and local Halloween traditions, some of which look a lot like trick-or-treating.

Yeah, right.

It is also true that hardly any British kids used to do it. The current Halloween “tradition” is nothing of the sort. It only caught on with the huge popularity of Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. and the big trick-or-treating scene in that.

Now look; if your children or grandchildren live in my neighbourhood and they come knocking at a reasonable hour, accompanied by a responsible adult, I’ll punt them some sweets because I don’t

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For the last time... God bless, love, Marion THANK YOU, MARION ● TODAY’S column is the last Marion’s Memories for Bristol Times. We cannot let such a popular columnist finish without putting on record our appreciation for Marion’s writing that has always been witty, wise, generous in spirit and a celebration of life as lived then – and now.

Tim Davey, Features Editor

This week in the final Marion’s Memories, a happy birthday, a nostalgic stroll around Bedminster and the scent of Woman I HAVE just celebrated my 81st birthday and was fortunate to receive many lovely cards and presents. One of my presents, a bottle of perfume called ‘Woman’ gave me an extra reason to smile.

It took me right back to a scene from Coronation Street when Hilda Ogden was using a bright red lipstick and husband Stan said “What’s that smell, Hilda?” and Hilda replied: “That’s WOMAN, Stanley, WOMAN.” Hilda and Stan were my all-time favourite comedy duo in the soap.

We also enjoyed a lovely family meal in Bristol Fashion and I thought “That’s it for another year!”

Then a few days later Derek said he had another treat for me. We lunched again in Bristol Fashion and, after lunch, we spent a lovely, quiet, time together in St James Priory church,

● Stan and Hilda Ogden - Marion’s all-time favourite Coronation Street comedy duo where my dear mum and dad married in 1927, eighty six years ago.

I wondered what hopes and dreams they had on that day and how glad I was to know their lives had been happy.

Mind you, our next sojourn into the past didn’t go quite so well. We decided to walk into Bedminster or Be’minster as we called it, which Derek, since he grew up in Kingsdown, never knew in its prime.

Although we had, on occasion, shopped in Bedminster, it was the

first time we had ever walked together into East Street from Redcliffe Hill and telling how it was nearly reduced me to tears.

Living in Regent Street, as a little girl, Bedminster was a noisy, exciting, place full of smells. From Redcliffe Street right down through East Street to the toilets on the London Inn there were so many shops.

My Dad used to tell me how many pubs there were in Bedminster – I think he only drank in one or two of them – and how on Saturday nights

Coming up

In your Bristol Times next week Remembrance special WITH Remembrance Day coming up, Bristol Times will be looking at the stories behind some of Bristol’s war memorials.

THE CENOTAPH Bristol’s main civic monument to the dead of the First World War, the cenotaph in the city centre, was not built until the 1930s, long after every other major UK city had unveiled theirs. We look at some of the reasons why, and the

surprising story of its designers.

LOCAL MEMORIALS There are some moving and surprising stories behind some of the other war memorials around Bristol. One was tended for several decades by a lone woman who had lost two brothers in the Great War, another was denounced by the local vicar from the pulpit, while Bristol also erected the first memorial to boy

scouts who had been killed in the First World War. BRISTOL 2014 With next year’s centenary of the start of the First World War, we look at some of the plans to mark the anniversary in Bristol and at how you can help, by telling your family stories, and showing old letters and mementoes. ● Published only with the Bristol Post, next Tuesday, November 5.

there were more people using the ‘loos’ than could possibly have drunk in any one pub. All the men scurrying to empty their bladders before getting on the number 10 or 10a bus to Knowle West. On the right was the faggots and peas shop.

Only rarely was I allowed out at night with my Gran, but when I was I loved it when we went to get a basin of faggots and peas.

The ‘cop shop’ was also on the right, along with the Hippodrome, where my, then young, mum and dad, used to

go on a Saturday night whilst Gran baby sat. So was WD & HO Wills, where so many young people started their working lives, including my first husband. George used to work in the warehouse and sometimes, if he knew I was coming to Bedminster, he used to look out for me and give me a little wave. Apparently you had to be very polite and well turned out to get into Wills. Though I was reliably told that on Fridays the girls, who had to wear a turban, used to wear their hair curlers underneath so that they looked their best for their night out.

When I was little my dad used to take me to Verricha’s for a lovely banana split but when George and I went in there years later I always used to have a strawberry milkshake.

When George and I got married we got all our ‘Beautility’ furniture in Bedminster. We used to say if you couldn’t get it in Bedminster, you didn’t want it or didn’t need it.

My first job, when I left school, was at Coventry and Jeffs, but then, lured by the promise of more money I went to work at Curry’s, East Street. My manager was a Mr Walsh, and I did accounts which mostly consisted of making out the hire purchase agreements for cycles, and radiograms – a very popular item in 1949. Customers were supposed to come in weekly and make their payments which would be suitably recorded, and, if customers missed more than one payment, I would send a warning letter, reminding them of their obligations.

However, one family steadfastly ignored all reminders and Mr Walsh, bravely decided to go and tackle the miscreants! However, as he went up the garden path, he spotted the cycle, a blue Raleigh, leaning against the wall. Quick as a thought, he wheeled it down the path, jumped on it and cycled back to Curry’s.

Much to my surprise that was the end of the matter.

So, did I enjoy my nostalgic stroll down memory lane?

To tell the truth it was quite sad.

The Hippodrome got bombed during the Second World War and most of the other shops no longer exist.

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God Bless, love Marion.