Bristol Plaques E-Book

Maurice Fells

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 224

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Blue, red, green and black plaques – they are everywhere in Bristol, on houses, bridges and even on a riverbank. But have you ever wanted to know more than the brief details they tell you about the person they honour? There are fascinating and colourful stories behind all of the plaques in the city, which venerate a variety of artists, inventors and scientists, as well as ordinary folk who have done extraordinary things. Read about the ex-convict whose books were turned into West End musicals, the millionaire businessman who was promised a cabbage a year as thanks for his philanthropy, and the architect transported for financial fraud who ended up having his portrait on a banknote. This handy guide is for all the curious, who want to know more about the people who lived and worked in the city in times gone by. The first volume of its kind, it is the only reference book to contain potted histories of Bristol's fascinating plaques.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As a passionate Bristolian with a deep love for the city’s long and colourful history, researching and writing this book has truly been a labour of love, especially when I discovered some notable people whom I didn’t know had strong links with this city.

This book is the result of delving into a combination of resources including old newspapers and magazines and my own archive of press releases, brochures and other publicity material that I have built up whilst working as a journalist on newspapers, radio and television.

Early editions of the Western Daily Press, founded in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the Bristol Evening Post, which first rolled off the presses in 1932, proved to be extremely helpful in providing details of citizens whose names are rarely, if at all, mentioned these days. Another source was the inscriptions, many of them weather-beaten, on the plaques themselves. Some were more informative than others. I turned to Chambers Biographical Dictionary to discover missing birth, death and other anniversary dates.

I made many visits to Bristol Central Library where the staff were most patient and courteous in dealing with my many questions. I must especially thank Dawn Dyer of the reference section for her enthusiasm in my book and for searching out files that were many, many years old and probably rarely looked at.

Thanks must also go to the various local history and amenity groups for their immense help. Maggie Shapland of Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society was always happy to pass on information, as was Pauline Luscombe of the Barton Hill History Group. The group’s publication Cotton Thread by Gary Atterton, one of its members, was extremely helpful. Simon Birch of Bristol Civic Society has to be thanked for explaining how the society would be running the Bristol Blue Plaque scheme which it had taken over from Bristol City Council, even before it had been publicly announced.

The slim but important publication 100 Bristol Women by Shirley Brown was an excellent source of information.

I must apologise to the artist extraordinaire, Mike Baker, designer of so many unusual and colourful plaques which bring the history of the Easton and Barton Hill districts to life for the numerous times I dragged him away from his studio to answer my queries. Andrew Ward of Wards of Bristol was extremely helpful in explaining the process of making plaques and the history of his firm.

This book would never have been published without the immense help and encouragement of Nicola Guy of The History Press who along with her team of editors and designer Chris West has turned my typed manuscript into a wonderful publication.

Last but certainly not least, Janet and Trevor Naylor deserve a big round of thanks for patiently and meticulously checking the manuscript before it was sent to the publishers. Trevor also spent much time treading the pavements and even the river banks of Bristol searching for plaques to photograph. The result of his many treks around town can be seen in the photographs that help to bring this book to life.

All images are courtesy of Trevor Naylor, with the following exceptions: page 30 (author’s collection), page 33 (courtesy of Clifton College) and page 112 (courtesy of the Bristol Civic Society).

CONTENTS

      Title

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

1    Personal Plaques

2    Plaques of History

3    American Connections

4    Transport and Travel

5    Public Houses

6    The Entertainment Industry

7    Industry Plaques

8    Bristol Curiosities

      Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Researching this book has involved spending a lot of time strolling the streets of Bristol looking for signs of the dead. It seems that at every turn, from cul-de-sacs to crescents, from side streets to Georgian squares and from parades to promenades you will find a plaque. Many of them are mounted on walls of homes, businesses and pubs although some are set in the pavement and one is even embedded in concrete on a riverbank. Bristol not only has the traditional blue plaques; there are also bronze, green, black, red and even multi-coloured ones and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There’s no doubt about it, Bristol offers anyone who is interested in the city’s history a feast of plaques.

It’s not just eminent scientists, statesmen, politicians, artists, explorers and high-flying aircraft designers and engineers who have been honoured with a commemorative plaque. There is also the toilet attendant who befriended prostitutes, the woman who hoaxed villagers into believing that she was a princess, and the schoolboy cricketer who’s score of 628 not out was a world record for 116 years. And there’s the former prisoner whose book was turned into a top West End musical.

Bristol has so many plaques largely because the city has been associated with so many important national and even international events. The Italian explorer John Cabot sailed from the city’s harbour and according to a bronze memorial tablet in the city centre discovered ‘the continent of North America’. Thomas Clarkson visited Bristol to gather information about the slave trade with which the city was heavily involved. The evidence he gathered helped to bring about the abolition of the trade. Bristol-born Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in modern times to qualify as a doctor, albeit in America, and another native of the city, the publisher John Cottle, helped to give birth to the Romantic movement in English poetry. Alexander Selkirk, a marooned sailor thought to be the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, is said to have met the author at a dockside tavern. And, of course, there was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great Victorian engineer who transformed the face of the city with his bridges, a railway system and a hotel. These and many other historic events have each given rise to a plaque.

But it’s not just people who are featured on plaques in Bristol. A traditional blue one has been dedicated to Nipper, a Jack Russell terrier, who became an international trademark.

The idea of placing commemorative plaques on the homes of the great and the good was conceived by William Ewart, a Liberal Member of Parliament. He put his idea to the House of Commons in 1863, which gave it immediate support. The idea was taken up by the Society of Arts (now Royal Society of Arts) but since 1986 English Heritage has run the traditional blue plaque scheme.

The first blue plaque was erected in 1867 and marked Lord Bryon’s birthplace in Cavendish Square, London. However, the oldest surviving blue plaque in the country is believed to be one which in 1867 was fixed on a house in St James, London, where Napoleon III once lived.

Many other similar blue plaque schemes, usually run by local authorities, have come into operation all over the country. Bristol City Council administered the scheme across the city from the 1960s until 2015 but it is now run by the long-established Bristol Civic Society. Its blue plaques panel has drawn up a set of basic ground rules under which the scheme operates. Nobody can be nominated, for example, until at least a year has passed since their death, to allow for a more objective assessment of their contribution. Advertising is not permitted and the panel must approve the design and wording.

The Civic Society does not itself nominate people for plaques, and neither does it have a budget for them. The person or group nominating someone to be honoured has to raise the funding themselves. They must also provide evidence that the person being nominated had a connection with the site being recommended for the plaque. The permission of the site owner has to be obtained and the case for the nominee’s commemoration must be put to the Civic Society. The society says:

We want to take advantage of people’s enthusiasm for blue plaques by encouraging Bristolians to come forward and nominate men and women connected with the city who have made an impact. They do not have to be national figures. We are just as interested in those who worked tirelessly for their own communities. And they don’t have to be people from the distant past. It is just as important to honour more recent figures, so that the scheme can also reflect Bristol as it is today.

The society’s first plaque honours three sisters, Berta Sacof, Helen Bloom and Jeannette Britton, for their ‘service to the community’. All sisters were members of Bristol City Council and Helen Bloom was also Lord Mayor in 1971. Although Bristol has had mayors, later Lord Mayors, since 1216 Helen Bloom was only the third woman to be elected by her fellow councillors to hold the prestigious office.

Other plaque schemes in Bristol are restricted to specific geographical areas or celebrate a particular theme. It seems that the suburb of Clifton led the way with the Clifton Improvement Committee, founded in 1900, installing impressive bronze plaques on the former homes of famous people. Many of these plaques are now as historic as the people they commemorate. Many of them are still in position although the Clifton Improvement Committee no longer exists.

Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society, founded in 1968, and one of the largest amenity groups in the country with more than 1,100 members, has taken over the task of perpetuating the memories of the famous. Its green circular plaques are a familiar sight around the two districts in which it takes an interest.

In the Barton Hill and Easton districts local history groups remember not only well-known people from their communities but also historic buildings that have long fallen into the mouth of the bulldozer in the name of progress. Mike Baker, a local artist and historian with a heritage degree, designs many of the Barton Hill and Easton plaques. His multi-coloured, bas-relief and interpretative three-dimensional style plaques tell a story and draw people in as well as bringing the history of the district to life. They are cast in both bronze and aluminium, many of them by Wards of Bristol, a family-run business which has more than half a century of sign-making tradition. A growing demand for plaques, both traditional and modern, from all over the country has helped to keep the firm in business.

In 2006, to coincide with the bicentenary of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s birth, the Retired Professional Engineers’ Club inaugurated an ‘engineering wall of fame’ on the outside wall of Bristol Aquarium. Its blue plaques celebrate the work of great engineers and scientists who have been involved with shipping, roads and bridges, the aircraft industry, railways and the brass industry. All those honoured by a plaque have local connections.

The size of most plaques prohibits much information being given about the person or event being commemorated save for the barest of details. Writers of history books and guidebooks to Bristol make casual references to some of the city’s plaques but rarely tell the tale behind the name on the wall.

This book, the first of its kind in Bristol, aims to fill that fascinating gap. It not only provides potted biographies of many remarkable men and women but also puts the spotlight on their connection with the city and provides the locations of plaques. However, it does not set out to be a definitive guide to every plaque in Bristol for the simple reason that no one knows exactly how many there are. Unfortunately, there is not a comprehensive list of plaques provided by the various organisations. So, I may well have missed some, especially if they are now obscured by overgrown shrubbery or trees. But more than likely, the ever active local history organisations and amenity groups have probably put up some more plaques in the time between my completing the manuscript of this book and its publication.

Bristol Plaques acknowledges the achievements of remarkable people, some of whom may otherwise have gone unsung.

Maurice Fells, 2016

1

PERSONAL PLAQUES

REVD CANON ALFRED AINGER (1837–1904)

WRITER AND CHURCH OF ENGLAND CLERGYMAN

PLAQUE: CLIFTON ROAD, BS8 1BS

When he was appointed a canon of Bristol Cathedral in 1887 the Revd Alfred Ainger found that apart from the usual religious services there were no other activities taking place in the church. It was not long before he introduced a number of lectures on literary subjects, readings from Shakespeare and other dramatic productions. The move seems to have been popular with the rest of the cathedral clergy and the congregation because after his death a memorial window was installed in honour of Canon Ainger. Mr Ainger also preached at neighbouring churches and taught at the cathedral school.

During his clerical career Mr Ainger held various prestigious posts including those of Assistant Master of the Collegiate School, Sheffield; Master of the Temple in London’s legal enclave, off The Strand; and Chaplain in Ordinary to both Queen Victoria and Edward VII.

While he was at Bristol Cathedral Mr Ainger was noted for making it almost a duty to climb the steep hills to his home in Clifton each day. Apparently, he refused offers of transport until poor health forced him to do so.

As residentiary canon of the cathedral he was required to live in the city for three months a year. As there wasn’t any cathedral property available for his accommodation Mr Ainger rented Richmond House, a handsome early eighteenth-century mansion on Clifton Road overlooking the much better known Palladian-style Clifton Hill House. However, a small black plaque on one side of the front door of Richmond House states that it is ‘an English Listed Building’.

Another plaque on the front of the house commemorates the Reverend Ainger. Its inscription says that Mr Ainger ‘Master of the Temple, friend of Dickens, and biographer of the essayist Charles Lamb lived here 1888–1898’. Apart from writing a life of the essayist Lamb, he contributed to biographies on some of the ‘literary greats’ of the day, including Alfred Tennyson, to the Dictionary of National Biography. These entries were always published under the initials ‘A.A.’.

Ainger’s friendship with Dickens went back to the days when he attended school with two of the authors’ sons, and sometimes was invited to their home.

THOMAS BEDDOES (1760–1808)

SCIENTIST AND PHYSICIAN

PLAQUES:RODNEY PLACE, CLIFTON, BS8 4HY11 HOPE SQUARE, BS8 4LX6 DOWRY SQUARE, BS8 4SH

Dr Thomas Beddoes had a traditional education at Oxford University, where he later became a reader in Chemistry, but when he set up his medical practice in Bristol he became known as the doctor with ‘curious cures’.

He set up a laboratory in a Georgian house in Hope Square, Hotwells, but wasn’t there long before he opened what he grandly called his Pneumatic Institute at nearby Dowry Square. A local newspaper reported that Dr Beddoes could treat ‘incurable diseases including consumption, dropsy and obstinate venereal complaints’.

One of his ideas was to cure or prevent consumption by the inhalation of gases, and amongst other experiments extensive trials with nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, were carried out at the institute. Dr Beddoes also recommended that his patients should enjoy the company of cows and inhale the gases they exhaled from both ends of their body. He even drove milking cows upstairs into patients’ bedrooms and used oil stoves to raise the room temperature even higher. One of his patients was reported as claiming that she slept three nights in a cow shed and was cured of her illness.

It was said that Dr Beddoes also tried to bleach the skin of a black man white by making him hold his arm in a jar of oxide gas. Needless to say this experiment was in vain.

To help him run his institute Dr Beddoes employed a 19-year-old man from Penzance, Humphrey Davy, who had been recommended to him as a ‘clever chemist and promising young man’. Beddoes appointed Davy as superintendent of the institute and also provided him with accommodation at his home in Clifton.

Beddoes ran the institute for about three years and when Davy left he turned it into a charitable dispensary, called the Preventive Medicine Institute for the Sick and Drooping Poor. Beddoes died at his home aged 48, suffering from dropsy in the chest.

A large black plaque, erected by the long-defunct Clifton Improvement Board, is attached to Dr Beddoes’ house in Rodney Place, Clifton. The inscription states that his son, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who became a poet and physiologist, was born there in 1803. While he was still at school he wrote a drama called The Bride’s Tragedy. After he died at the age of 46, a friend published Poems by the late Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

The rather informative tablet at his birthplace also tells us that one of the visitors to the house was Maria Edgeworth, an aunt of the young Beddoes. She was a novelist, who also wrote books on education as well as improving stories for children. There is also a plaque, erected by Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society, outside a house in Hope Square which simply reads ‘Thomas Beddoes, scientist, worked here 1793–99’. There is also a plaque outside Dr Beddoes’ Institute at Dowry Square.

ERNEST BEVIN (1881–1951)

TRADE UNION LEADER AND POLITICIAN

PLAQUE: 39 SAXON ROAD, BS2 9 UQ

The life story of Ernest Bevin could be summed up in the sort of front-page headline that editors of tabloid newspapers love: ‘From van boy to Cabinet Minister’.

Bevin was born in the Somerset village of Winsford, in the heart of Exmoor, as far away as one could imagine from the corridors of power in Westminster and Whitehall. His formal education, for what it was, ended when he was only 11 years old and Bevin was sent to work on a farm. Two years later he found himself working as a kitchen boy in a restaurant in the centre of Bristol. Later Bevin became a van boy and subsequently drove a van delivering bottles of mineral water for a local firm.

He soon took an interest in local politics and was appointed unpaid secretary of the Bristol Right-to-Work Committee. Bevin was later involved with the merger of fourteen trades unions and 300,000 workers to form the mighty Transport and General Workers’ Union, which was officially launched on New Year’s Day 1922. He became the union’s general secretary, a post he held for nearly twenty years.

After the General Strike of 1926 Ernest Bevin strengthened his links with the Labour Party and was eventually elected as a Member of Parliament. He was a Labour minister in Winston Churchill’s coalition government of 1940–45 and after the Labour Party’s landslide victory in 1945 he was appointed foreign secretary in Atlee’s government. By the early 1950s poor health had caught up with Ernest Bevin, causing him to resign from government in March 1951. He died a month later.

Before the First World War Ernest Bevin married a wine taster’s daughter and the couple made their home in Saxon Road, St Werburghs. A blue plaque honouring Ernest Bevin is fixed to the terraced house with an inscription stating that he lived there, although it does not say for how long.

ELIZABETH BLACKWELL (1821–1910)

PIONEERING PHYSICIAN

PLAQUE: 1 WILSON STREET, BS2 9HH

With her doggedness and determination Elizabeth Blackwell must have been an inspiration to all women when she achieved her goal of becoming a doctor. Indeed, she was the first British woman to become a general practitioner, albeit qualifying in America.

Initially she was refused entry to the medical colleges with their all-male students and staff who were against women joining them. Elizabeth Blackwell eventually succeeded in getting a place at Geneva Medical College, New York State. Not only did she graduate as a doctor but also came top of her class.

Elizabeth Blackwell, the third of nine daughters of a sugar refiner, was born at Counterslip, but when she was just 3 years old the family moved to Wilson Street in the St Paul’s district of Bristol where she was brought up. Eight years later, with the infectious disease cholera raging in Bristol, her father took the family to America where he set up a refinery. Ironically, cholera was also rampant in New York where the Blackwell’s settled.

After her father’s death in 1838 Elizabeth helped to support the family financially by teaching, although she devoted much of her spare time to studying medicine using textbooks that were borrowed from friends. In 1847 she was admitted as a student to Geneva Medical College.

After qualifying Elizabeth worked in a hospital in Paris, later joining the staff of the renowned St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, before returning to New York to set up a hospital which was staffed by women only. She later returned to Britain, where she was the first woman to have her name entered on the British medical register. Unfortunately, she contracted an eye disease from a patient, losing the sight in one eye, which put an end to her ambition to be a surgeon. But that didn’t prevent her working in medicine until she was in her mid eighties.

Elizabeth Blackwell is honoured for her work by a plaque mounted on the wall of her childhood home in Wilson Street, St Paul’s. A plate beneath it states that the plaque was ‘donated by the Medical Women’s Federation and Friends’. Appropriately, it was unveiled by the late Dr Beryl Corner, a Bristol-born physician who was the first consultant paediatrician in the south-west of England, a position that she achieved in the face of male prejudice. Dr Corner became a national pioneer in the care of newborn children.

JACK (JOHN) BOARD (1867–1924)

GLOUCESTERSHIRE AND ENGLAND CRICKETER

PLAQUE: 22 MANOR ROAD, BS7 8PY

Jack Board was wicket keeper and batsman for Gloucestershire County Cricket Club for twenty years without a break, after being picked out of the relative obscurity of club cricket by W.G. Grace. He joined the county side in 1891 and played in 525 first-class matches. As a batsman he scored a total of 15,674 runs with Gloucestershire; his highest score being 214 against Somerset at Bristol.

Jack Board was born in Clifton and by trade was a gardener.

He was picked as England wicket keeper for Test match tours of South Africa between 1899 and 1906.

He died at the age of 57 on board the Kenilworth Castle when he was returning home from an annual winter coaching engagement in South Africa. A blue plaque on a house in Bishopston states that Jack Board lived there from 1896 until 1902.

DOROTHY BROWN (1927–2013)

ENVIRONMENTAL CAMPAIGNER

PLAQUE: 5 BUCKINGHAM VALE, BS8 2BU

Dorothy Brown, who was born in Berwick-upon-Tweed, England’s most northern town, and educated in Edinburgh, only moved to Bristol as her husband had a job in the city. Despite her northern background Dorothy came to love Bristol so much that she became an indefatigable campaigner to save its historic buildings.

Her campaigning began in earnest in 1970 when plans were revealed to build an eight-storey hotel on the rock face of the Avon Gorge close to Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge. She discovered that a number of her friends were also against the plans for the proposed hotel. Dorothy Brown co-ordinated a city-wide battle to fight the developers; eventually the project was turned down by the government.

She set up the Bristol Visual and Environmental Group to combat Bristol City Council’s development plan of 1966 with its proposals to destroy many of the city’s historic buildings. Some 400 of them were earmarked to fall into the mouth of the bulldozer but Dorothy managed to save many of them. There were also plans to fill in the city’s harbour with concrete to make way for a major road scheme. Following city-wide protests by environmentalists, including Dorothy Brown, this project never came to fruition.

In 1971 she set up the Conservation Advisory Panel to advise the city council on planning matters. She served on the panel right up until her death. As part of her campaigning Dorothy also wrote books about the city’s heritage and focused the spotlight on buildings in need of restoration.

In recognition of her work she was awarded an MBE in 1988. Three years later Bristol University awarded her an honorary Master of Arts degree.

Dorothy Brown died suddenly aged 86 in her local public library, where she was doing research for an exhibition that she was organising about Bristol’s heritage.

In 2015 Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society unveiled a plaque in honour of Dorothy Brown’s life and campaigning work outside the house in Clifton in which she lived between 1955 and 2013. An inscription on the plaque describes her as a ‘tireless campaigner’.

ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL (1806–1859)

ENGINEER

PLAQUES:CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE, BS8 3PAANCHOR ROAD, BS1 5LLGAS FERRY ROAD. BS1 6TY

The great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge referred to it as ‘my first child, my darling’. But unfortunately he never saw the bridge, which airily spans the Avon Gorge 245ft above the River Avon, finished. He died five years before the first pedestrian and horse and cart crossed it when it opened in 1864. An inscription on a plaque fixed to the pier at the Clifton end of the bridge says it was completed as a ‘monument to Brunel’.

Another plaque on the pier was unveiled in 1986 to mark the 150th anniversary of the laying of the bridge’s foundation stone by the Marquess of Northampton. This ceremony took place on the 27 August 1836 at 7.15 a.m. Afterwards Brunel, along with a party of invited guests, enjoyed a celebratory breakfast.

Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Construction work on the bridge started in 1831 but was dogged by financial problems. Just seven years later work was brought to a halt when the contractors went bankrupt. Another firm took over but in 1843 funds ran out and work temporarily stopped again. In all, it took thirty-three years to build the bridge.

Brunel came to Bristol to recover from an accident whilst working for his father on the Rotherhithe Tunnel under the River Thames. While convalescing he entered a competition to design a bridge that would cross the Avon Gorge, linking Clifton on the Bristol side with Leigh Woods on the Somerset side. The judging panel eventually accepted a design by Brunel as the winning entry. He initially planned to build giant sphinxes – a fashionable decoration at the time – on the top of the bridge’s two piers but this proved to be financially prohibitive.

Brunel was not a man who let the grass grow under his feet. Whilst working on the bridge he accepted the job of engineer to the Great Western Railway. He masterminded construction of its network of many hundreds of miles of track, its tunnels, viaducts and bridges. Brunel was also responsible for some of the modifications to Bristol’s Floating Harbour. In a busy life he also built ships, advised on the construction of railways as far away as Australia and East Bengal, and even designed a military hospital for use in the Crimean War.