The first visitors to Bristol who left any real account of the town were the Commissioners sent by William the Bastard as part of the enormous task of compiling the Domesday Survey of 1086... They described it thus in the terse and technical Latin of the Survey:

In "Barton at Bristol were six hides. In demesne three curucates and 22 villeins and 25 bordars with 25 plough-teams. There are 10 serfs and 18 co-liberts having 14 plough-teams. There are 2 mills worth 140 shillings."

When Roger received this manor from the King he found here 2 hides and 2 plough-teams in demesne, and 17 villeins and 24 bordars with 21 plough-teams. There were 4 serfs and 3 co-liberts with 3 plough-teams. In one member of this manor, Mangotsfield, are 6 oxen in demesne. Of this land, the Church of Bristol holds three hides and has there one plough-team... and so on... (4)

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The Lord Mayor,s Chapel

On the north side of College Green, facing the Cathedral, stands the beautiful Chapel of St. Mark, the only remains of the mediaeval Hospital of the Gaunts, founded shortly before his death in 1230 by Maurice de Gaunt. The south aisle was added about 1270. Later additions began at the end the 15th Century when, in 1487, the tower was built, followed by the Poyntz chapel in 1523, erected as a chantry by Sir Robert Poyntz of Iron Acton. He was a friend of both Henry VII and Henry VIII, died in 1520 and was buried in the chantry. The Poyntz coat-of-arms includes quarterings of the Amerike family, The Stars and Stripes.

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Saint Mary Redcliffe

Every year at Whitsuntide the church is strewn with rushes and the Lord Mayor and Corporation attend service there in honour of one of Bristol's greatest citizens. The beautiful Pearl Sword is carried by the City Swordbearer. (Its scarlet scabbard is encrusted with a crown, a rose, a thistle, a harp, a dragon, three lions and the arms of Bristol, some of them wrought with seed pearls.) The sword once belonged to King Richard II, who sold it to the Corporation for £50 in order to fund his liking for feasting. He was very imaginative in his choice of dishes, a fact that is commemorated in the nursery rhyme Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in a Pie.

The Plague

An unwelcome visitor came to Bristol in 1348: the Black Death, which arrived in England at the Dorset port of Melcombe Regis in the summer of 1348 and spread rapidly, reaching Bristol by the autumn. The death-rate among the clergy in Somerset during the plague of nearly 48 per cent. The toll was no doubt a good deal higher in the insanitary crowded dwellings of the poor in Bristol.

The grass is said to have grown several inches high in Broad Street for want of someone to cut it.

and, as if that wasn't enough to contend with there was...

Fire

...an ever constant threat in the old walled city of Bristol, where houses were tinder boxes of wood and fire-fighting equipment almost non-existent. For this reason all house fires had to be extinguished when the bells of St Nicholas church sounded the curfew at 9 pm.

One of the most destructive fires occurred in 1647, when flames swept across the timber houses on Bristol bridge, destroying twenty-four of them. As a result, the town council ordered a fire engine from London (cost £31 10s) plus 48 buckets (£8. 8s.). Each member of the council was told to keep six buckets in his house. [What did they use them for, I wonder?]

If the plans of a fire bug had succeeded in 1777, Bristol might have been burned to the ground. A crazy fanatic, James Aitken, alias John the Painter, decided to set fire to all the dockyards of England.

Painter planted twelve home-made fire bombs in warehouses in Bristol but they failed to work. He was arrested, and later hanged 60 feet high from a ship's mast in Portsmouth dockyard. [And served the fella right!]

REVELRY

Processions were a commonplace of urban life in the Middle Ages and the members of the Bristol city council attended many public functions in this fashion, each man in his scarlet robe walking in the place appropriate to his rank and seniority. In general, these processions had a double social meaning. Most obviously, they expressed in visible form the organisation of the municipal government; the persons holding each of the principal offices were publicly advertised. Not only were observers made aware of the hierarchy of power within the city, they were reminded through this symbolic expression of political authority of their own proper position in the community, and of the need to show deference to its leaders.

When they had all assembled on College Green there were "drynkyngs of sondry wines", and "Spysid Cakebrede" was eaten by the assembled celebrants. At the Hall the mayor and his brethren became the guests of the weavers, which gave the latter the opportunity to display their wealth and manifest their importance. Moreover, "the cuppes" were "merelly filled aboute the hous," which signifies the drinking of "healths" among the participants. Suitably inebriated, the council membership found their way "every man home" alone. What had started as an ordered procession now became a leaderless and unorganised - and disorderly - movement away from it. [So, what's new?]

At Corpus Christi. . .the members of every guild . . . assembled with music, flags and banners to join in a splendid ecclesiastical Procession through the streets, where houses were decorated with tapestry, brilliant cloth, and garlands of flowers, and the afternoon was spent in the performance in the open air of miracle plays, in which every craft claimed its special part. And on Midsummer Eve, these same gildsmen " - who emulated each other in the display of gay dresses, banners, burning torches, and in the supply of minstrels and musical instruments", marched through the streets, the proceedings terminating in Morris dancing and various games in which the populace participated.

These celebrations, along with others in Advent and at Christmas, played an important part in the official civic calendar. The mayor and his brethren of the Common Council, far from being God's ministers in punishing "dicers, mummers, ydellers, dronkerds, swearers, roges and dauncers," participated in, and even led, most of the festivities.

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A NEW FOUND LAND

A bronze tablet on St. Augustine's Bridge bears the inscription :-

From this Port

John Cabot and his son Sebastian

(who was born in Bristol)

Sailed in the ship Matthew, A.D. 1497

and

Discovered the Continent of America

In 1497 the Collector of Customs of the Port of Bristol was a man by the name of Richard ap Meryk, or Ameryk, a Welshman, and it is quite possible that the newly discovered land was later named America in his honour and not after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Italian, as some think.

The Society of Merchant Venturers

The Society of Merchant Venturers of the City of Bristol was incorporated by letters patent of Edward VI on I8 December 1552 but the merchant organisation then established by royal authority was certainly not the first organisation of merchants in the city. The Society had ancestry going far back into the middle ages, and it was possibly flourishing in the later 15th Century.

Queen Elizabeth's Hospital School

The first school to be established in the buildings of the dissolved Hospital of the Gaunts was Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, which was founded by John Carr, a soap merchant, in 1590, on the model of Christ's Hospital, London. A royal charter was granted by Queen Elizabeth I in the same year and a grant of arms - which includes Bristol's ship-and- castle crest - a little later.

Bristolians who watch the boys of the QEH file into the Lord Mayor's Chapel for Council Prayers wearing their traditional dress are seeing living history. The blue-coats, girdles, preaching bands, moleskin breeches and bright yellow socks of pupils at what is sometimes called "The City School" have survived four centuries of change. Today, the school is famous for its rugby, music and drama.

Stories are still told today by the school's boarders concerning the ghost of a matron called the Grey Lady, who is supposed to have thrown herself off the battlements when her fiancee was killed in the Great War. Another ghost is that of a boy who fell from The Upper and died in the yard (supposedly the largest paved area in the city). The present buildings were constructed over a Jewish graveyard, but its residents seem to sleep in peace.

The quartercentenary of the school was marked by the building of a 200-seat theatre which, in the spirit of the school's founder, serves the whole city.

Bristol Grammar School

The Grammar School was founded by Robert and Nicholas Thorne in 1532. Its first home was St Bartholomew's Hospital, at the bottom of Christmas Steps; in 1767 it moved to Unity Street and in 1879 to the present site in Tyndall's Park. Just over fifty years ago it survived a major physical threat which obliterated many of its neighbours. A plaque in the present Third Year block, opened in 1928 as the Preparatory School, testifies to this:

"This building, damaged by enemy action in November and December 1940, was rebuilt in 1951 -1952"

The Bristol Police Occurrences Book, giving a minute by minute account of the raid on 24th November 1940, is somewhat more dramatic:

"20.12 hrs. Grammar School burning furiously."

The Prep School, temporarily accommodated at Western College, Cotham Hill, and using furniture "kindly loaned to us in our dire need," by Clifton College (which spent the war in Bude), found a permanent home in the School House, and the school carried on. However, some concessions were made: "As a result of untimely visits by the German Air Force, morning prayers are no longer held in the Great Hall, and to avoid the forgathering of large numbers, prayers are now to be held by form masters in their own form rooms".

The boys raised money for Bren Guns, trained in readiness for service in the forces, and spent hours as fire watchers. Fifty years ago the Headmaster, at the Service for thanksgiving for victory in Europe, recalled the boy on fire-watching duty at the School, who, after being treated by him for a head-wound caused by our own shrapnel, said 'Won't this be something to tell my children?

ROYAL VISITS

Queen Elizabeth I visited Bristol in 1574. Because great honour accrued from rare opportunities to entertain royalty, every effort was made to show the City at its best. During the visit "the mayor and all the council, riding upon good steeds, with footcloths, and pages by their sides" received Her Majesty within Lawford's Gate, just outside the boundaries of the city. "At the gate the mayor delivered his mace unto her Grace (thus relinquishing the sign of his authority as her lieutenant) and she delivered it unto him again," reinforcing her authority over the city and his dependence upon her for favour. After an oration by John Popham, the Recorder, and the presentation of a gift of £100 in gold to her, the queen was escorted through the city in a procession in which "the mayor himself rode nigh before the Queene, betweene 2 serjeants at arms." This procession, with each rider holding his proper place in relation to the queen and the others in the order of march, set the tone for the military displays that occupied the Queen's time for the rest of her three-day stay.

The Red Maids' School

The Red Maids' is the oldest surviving girls' school in the country and every Red Maid is well aware that she is part of a living tradition of care and education which has its roots deep in the commercial trading heart of the city itself.

The school was founded in 1634 as the result of the benevolence of John Whitson, merchant, Mayor of Bristol and Member of Parliament. Of his time in London, Whitson declared 'I daily learnt new lessons of the world's vanity, and augmented my grief together with my experience,' but depressed by the world or not, he was forward-thinking enough to endow a school for girls, perhaps because he himself had three daughters, and survived them all. How his widow - his third wife - felt when he left much of his property to charitable purposes is indicated by her challenge to his Will, which delayed the school's establishment until five years after his death.

The school owes its name - and the girls' distinctive uniform - to John Whitson's expressed wish that the 'poor women' for whom he was providing should 'go and be apparelled in red cloth.' The uniform is never more apparent than in November, when the school honours its founder in a ceremony which is the highlight of the city calendar. The whole school processes through the streets of Bristol from Whitson's tomb in St Nicholas' church to a service of thanksgiving in the cathedral. Boarders are clad in traditional uniform of scarlet cloaks and straw bonnets, and the traffic of the city is stopped for the occasion by a mounted police escort.

Early this century the Red Maids School moved from its original city home to spacious accommodation in Westbury-on-Trym, where it flourishes today.

The Old City Centre

"A few churches of eminent beauty rose out of a labyrinth of narrow lanes built upon vaults of no great solidity. If a coach or a cart entered these alleys, there was danger that it would be wedged between the houses, and danger also that it would break into the cellars. Goods were therefore conveyed about the town almost exclusively in trucks drawn by dogs; and the richest inhabitants exhibited their wealth not by riding in gilded carriages but by walking the streets with trains of servants in rich liveries, and by keeping tables loaded with good cheer. The pomp of the christenings and burials far exceeded what was seen at any other place in England. The hospitality of the city was widely renowned, and especially the collations with which the sugar refiners regaled their visitors. The repast was dressed in the furnace, and was accompanied by a rich brewage made of the best Spanish wine, and celebrated over the whole kingdom as Bristol Milk."

(Macaulay's History of England.)

The streets had been constructed for a far less congested life. Their average width was less than twenty feet, while the houses, chiefly of timber and plaster, overhung the roads. There were no pavements and the roads themselves were roughly paved with stone blocks, with a channel down the centre. Pigs nosed among the garbage in this open drain, and in spite of the fact that at one time an official was employed to cut off the tails of the offending animals, the nuisance continued. Sanitation received scant consideration. There were no underground sewers, the Avon and Frome doing service as waste-disposers instead. The water supply was far from satisfactory. A well in the middle of Wine Street served the whole area! It is not surprising that visitations the plague were fairly frequent.

Food was lacking in variety, for until the introduction of root crops for cattle food about 1730, there was little fresh meat to be had in winter, and until the breeding of cattle was improved they were, by modern standards, scraggy and bony. Canning and refrigeration had not yet solved the problem of the [preservation and] import of perishable goods. Even so, the gentry in Bristol managed to load their tables well. They drank deeply, too, of port, spirits, beer, cider and perry. Tea and coffee were popular. The majority of people had three meals a day, at about 7 a.m., noon and 6 p.m., though among the upper classes dinner was usually about 2 p.m.

Though the few wealthy people ate well, the many ate meat once a week if they were lucky, and subsisted on bread, pulses and cheap ale - the water was deadly. Generally, the labouring classes fared badly. In Bristol the wages of labourers in different factories varied from 7/- to 35/- per week, though the average seems to have been in the neighbourhood of 10/- to 15/-. Common Labourers earned 1/6 per day, "without victuals". The common prices of necessities were:

Beef, 41/2d, to 5d. per Ib. Mutton, 5d. to 6d. per Ib.

Veal, 6d. per Ib. Bacon, 9d. to 10d. per Ib.

Butter, 11d. to 1/- per Ib. Potatoes, 6d. per peck.

Bread, 1/- for 4-lb. loaf. Wheat, 12/- a bushel.

Barley, 4/2 a bushel. Oats, 3/- to 3/6 a bushel.

Coals, 31/2d. a bushel.

In contrast:

At a private dinner in the first decade of the 19th Century the Mayor entertained twenty-one guests, including an Admiral and four Army officers, to a dinner at which they consumed 62 bottles of wine. The whole thing cost £2.37p per head, about £100 today. Contrast that with the fact that in 1831 a servant girl, Anne Reynolds, earned a shilling a week (5p) and her victuals for slaving all hours of the day and half the night in a cheap rooming house near Christmas Steps.

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"In the middle of the streets, as far as you can see, are hundreds of ships, their masts as thick as they can stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable."

Alexander Pope, in 1732

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The Llandoger Trow

This famous inn was originally one of a number of timber-framed houses built near the quayside by wealthy merchants in the 17th Century. The Trow takes its name from the flat-bottomed sailing barges used by merchants who traded from nearby Welsh Back. The Llandoger part of the title is probably associated with the village of Llandogo on the Wye. It, and other inns like it, were used for the recruitment - and sometimes impressment - of sailors. Today, a visitor to the Llandoger can imagine it being peopled by smugglers, pirates and slave traders. Some people say that Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk there, who told him, over a tankard or two of ale, the tales that resulted in the writing of Treasure Island.

Judge Jeffreys

The mayor of Bristol received a sharp rebuke from Jeffreys when in 1685 he came to Bristol to deal with the rebels of the Monmouth Rebellion during the ‘Bloody Assizes’. Having condemned six rebels to death (three were later reprieved, three were hung on Redcliffe Hill) he turned his attention to the mayor, seated beside him in his robes. He upbraided the Chief Citizen as a knave and a kidnapper and forced him to enter the dock like a common prisoner. The mayor was fined £1,000 "for suffering a boy committed to Bridewell to go beyond the Sea." He had followed the custom of the times of reprieving criminals sentenced to death on condition they agreed to serve on West Indian plantations.

Jeffreys was only 37 when he was made a judge by King James II. He was suffering from a painful disease and drank heavily to dull the pain, and would listen to no defence during the trials. In all, 233 persons were hanged, drawn, quartered and gibbeted at crossroads, market places and village greens in the West country, which soon reeked of decomposing corpses.

Cholera

In 1849 cholera came to Bristol. There were 778 cases, of which 444 resulted in death. A health report later commissioned by the Council stated that:

There were no sanitary authorities in Clifton, in which lived an estimated 60,000 people, or in St. Philip's Parish, Westbury or Bedminster.

Sixty-four people were living in one house in one of the stench-filled Courts during the epidemic.

Sewage from houses in Kingsdown ran down to St. James and sometimes into the dwelling houses. Some sewage drained into cess pools which filtered into nearby wells.

Whiteladies Road had an open gutter for sewage. Clifton was poorly lit, whilst Bedminster, Redland and Cotham had no lights at all. Ashes and house refuse was thrown daily into many private roads in the suburbs, and never removed. Drunkenness, filth, and excessive mortality were attributed to want of drainage and want of water.

In 1851 a new law gave the council power to make the necessary improvements. When cholera came again in 1866 there were only 29 fatalities.

The Great Bristol Riots

The riots of 1831 were one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the United Kingdom: more people were killed and injured and more damage was done in Bristol than ever occurred anywhere else in the kingdom before or since.

See Hotheads and Heroes

also by Peter Macdonald

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Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Throughout the length and breadth of England it would be hard to find a landscape so well calculated to appeal to Brunel's romantic temperament, to his love of drama and his sense of grandeur, as the fantastic gorge which the Avon has carved through the limestone escarpment which barred its way to the Bristol Channel. The precipitous crags of white limestone, capped, as appropriately as a folly tower in a nobleman's park, by the little observatory; the black maw of the Giant's cave adding a suggestion of Gothick gloom; the admirable foil of Leigh Woods, thickly clothing the Somerset slope opposite, and lastly, far below, the silver skein of the tidal river bearing to Bristol Port the shipping of the seven seas: here was every ingredient that his fancy could desire. It is easy to imagine his excitement when he heard of the proposal to bridge the Avon gorge and to invite engineers to submit designs. Here indeed was a project after his own heart. Let him design a bridge worthy of such a setting, a triumphal arch that would leap from lip to lip of Bristol's seaway in one sheer and splendid span.

Brunel decided that the site called for a suspension bridge. He visited the Menai and devoted two days to a minute examination of Telford's bridge... he also visited the Scotswood and Stockton suspension bridges. In his diary at this period, too, he pasted a cutting of a newspaper account of the collapse of the Broughton suspension bridge near Manchester: the rhythmic tread of a company of troops marching over the bridge had set up such a violent harmonic motion that a pin in one of the suspension chains broke and the bridge collapsed at one end.

The span of a suspension bridge all is lightness and aerial grace; its strength resides in the suspension towers and anchorages which uphold it. To make this strength manifest and thus to point the contrast between the opposing towers and the slender web of links and rods they bear, Brunel's native adaptation of an ancient monumental style was a stroke of artistic genius. Every line of these squat towers which straddle the roadway with firm-planted feet is eloquent of their purpose, a purpose admirably emphasised by the simple monoliths of stone atop the chain anchorages.

On June I8th I83I the Bridge Committee decided to commence work by clearing the site on the Clifton side and on the 21st a very odd little ceremony took place. While workmen began digging on Clifton Down a public breakfast was held at the Bath Hotel, after which the gentlemen and their ladies walked to the site, where they assembled in a circle round a pile of stones which had been dug out. Brunel then entered the circle, picked up a stone from the heap and handed it to Lady Elton who, holding it in her hand, made a short speech. This was followed first by a deafening discharge of cannon which had been mounted on the rocks just below and then by the distant strains of the National Anthem, played by a band of Dragoon Guards who were down in the gorge. Colours were then run up on a flagstaff erected for the occasion while Sir Abraham Elton delivered the usual flowery oration. "The time will come," he said, turning to Brunel, "when, as that gentleman walks along the streets or as he passes from city to city, the cry would be raised 'There goes the man who reared that stupendous work, the ornament of Bristol and the wonder of the age."' This provoked loud cheers, and the toast "Success to the undertaking and to the conductor" was drunk in sparkling champagne, the "humbler citizens being regaled with a barrel of beer".

Another example of Brunel’s genius was

The Great Eastern

The ship left Liverpool on September I0th I861 for New York under the command of Captain James Walker. Three days out she encountered a storm of such severity that a heavy sea carried away one of the boats on her weather side. Swinging at sea level from one of the davits it was in imminent danger of fouling the paddle wheel, so Captain Walker ordered the ship astern, so that the boat could be cut away without risk. Taken unawares by this sudden manoeuvre, the helmsmen lost control of the wheel with the effect that the huge rudder, sucked by the screw, swung over until the quadrant hit its stop with such a mighty jar that the vertical steering shaft broke clean in two at its weakest point - just above the ball-bearing which carried its weight. The great ship immediately fell off and lay broadside at the mercy of the storm which proceeded to demonstrate the vanity of the boast that any ship made by man can be the mistress of the North Atlantic.

From the stern of the crippled ship there came a terrifying succession of detonations as the useless rudder, now completely unconstrained in its travel, beat itself against the blades of the screw. The engines were stopped. The ship might still have been manoeuvred on her paddles but such was the fury of the seas that in a very short time nothing remained of the two great wheels but the bare hubs, and the ship was left completely helpless. She rolled so heavily that her grand saloons were practically wrecked before the crew managed to regain control of the rudder with jury tackle and the ship was able to limp slowly back to Cork. From thence she returned to the grid at Milford where repairs were made and two new paddle wheels of smaller diameter and stronger construction were fitted. The cost of repairs was such that the ship had to be sold, and was then used for cable laying.

On the last day of June, I866, to the music of 'Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye' from the band of the guardship, and resounding cheers from ships and shore, the great ship swung slowly away from her mooring at Sheerness with her cable tanks replenished.

On the 26th July the Great Eastern steamed slowly into the inlet in Heart's Content Bay, Newfoundland, and on the following day, amid scenes of wild enthusiasm, the cable was taken ashore by the tender Medway. 'The old cable hands seemed as though they could eat the end' wrote Gooch; 'one man actually put it into his mouth and sucked it. They held it up and danced round it cheering at the tops of their voices. It was a strange sight - nay, a sight that filled our eyes with tears. Yes, I felt not less than they did. I did cheer, but I could better have silently cried. Well, it is a feeling that will last my life - I am glad two of my boys were present to enjoy and glory in their part of so noble a work. They may, long after I am gone, tell their children of what we did.' Gooch then sent through the cable the news of their triumph: 'Gooch, Heart's Content to Glass, Valencia, July 27th, 6 p.m.: Our shore-end has just been laid and a most perfect cable, under God's blessing, has completed telegraph communication between England and the Continent of America.'"

Thus for the first time the new world spoke to the old.

As a result of this success the Great Eastern went on, like some industrious spider, to weave a web of cables round the world; from France to America and then from Bombay to Aden and up the Red Sea.

Aircraft

The British and Colonial Aeroplane Company was registered in February 1910 with a nominal capital of £100. With the company established, two men were sent to Paris, where they arranged for a Zodiac biplane to be exhibited at the Olympia Air Show in London in March 1910. Afterwards, this aeroplane was taken to Brooklands, where it refused to fly. Within a few weeks a blatant copy was ready to fly, the first Bristol aircraft to leave the ground. It was called the Boxkite and some seventy-eight were built at the rate of two a week.

Before the end of 1910 machines and men were on their way for demonstrations in India and Australia. At home two aircraft were loaned to the War Office for the annual Army exercises on Salisbury Plain, one for the Red Force, the other for the Blue. (Some generals saw no point in having exercises at all if both sides could so quickly learn what the other side was doing!) However the War Minister was persuaded to form an Army Air Battalion and four Boxkites were ordered. Word reached Russia, and their order was for eight.

"On Saturday, the Bristol biplane was taken out for a ten minutes' trip. The whirring of the propeller, a short, swift run, and the aeroplane rose gracefully in the air, speeding forward at a height of about thirty feet... the maximum height reached was about 100 feet. During the afternoon, thousands assembled on the Downs. At 2.45 p.m. Sir George White ordered another flight and amidst ringing cheers M. Tetard, the famous French aviator, took his seat upon the biplane and circled the Downs. It was evident to the spectators that during a large part of the flight the aeroplane was badly buffeted by the wind, and it speaks volumes for the skill of M. Tetard and the quality of the biplane that he was able to give so fine an exhibition under such adverse weather conditions. Nevertheless, he landed lightly as a bird in a space kept clear by the police."

The Old Vic

Nearly every building in Bristol's King Street is scheduled under the Act as an ancient monument. Some of them stand in shameful neglect and decay. Almost alone among them the Theatre Royal, built in I766, is renovated and still fulfilling the original purpose for which it was built. It is the oldest theatre in the country. When it was built, King Street, adjacent to the docks, was the centre of the city's life and commerce. The merchants lived in their handsome houses on the other side of the road, or in the neighbouring Queen's Square, named after Queen Anne.

Always, the theatre has had to struggle in an atmosphere of storm or stress, and, at the very outset, the idea of a permanent home of drama encountered the fierce opposition of the religious element in the city. 18th Century Bristol had waxed rich on the slave trade, and when public conscience was aroused it found its expression in an excess of Puritanism.

For the previous forty years there had been a small theatre in what was then the countryside, half a mile outside the town at the foot of Brandon Hill. Run by an actor by the name of Powel, who had been a leading man with Garrick at Drury Lane, this building had become too small for the growing theatrical interest of the town. (Thomas Chatterton spoke of this theatre as the "hut at Jacob's Well".) A plot of land was acquired in King Street and, despite vehement local protests a company of citizens was formed to promote the scheme. Chief among the organisers were Alexander Organ, who was subsequently to become mayor of the town, and Thomas Symons, a solicitor. They gathered around them forty-eight people, who each subscribed the sum of £50. In return, these donors each received a silver token which gave them the right to a seat at one performance of every play produced in the theatre. Other money was subscribed and eventually the theatre was built at a cost of £5,000. The foundation stone was laid on the 30th November 1764, and the theatre opened on 30th May 1766. James Patty was the architect and Michael Edkins the decorator. A gallery was added towards the end of the 18th Century and the highly decorative ceiling raised to meet it.

Garrick was present in the audience for the inaugural performance, and described the building as "the most beautiful theatre in Europe". Despite the interest that he showed, Garrick himself never played at the theatre; his is, therefore, practically the only classic name missing from the list of actors and actresses who have trod the boards of King Street. The roll call includes, among many others, the Kembles, Sarah Siddons, Kean, Macready, Irving, Forbes-Robertson, Ellen Terry, Tree and Sybil Thorndike.

CLIFTON COLLEGE

"The boys in the dormitory of which I had part-charge were older and bigger than myself. Many of them were distinguished in the various fields of athletics and by no means unconscious of their eminence; with these boys I had scarcely a bowing acquaintance.

It was one of my duties to impose a period of silence, so that they should say their prayers; but most of them were quite devoid of prayerful inclinations. My requests for silence were not received politely; in fact, I might as usefully have addressed them to the lions and tigers who could be heard roaring in the Zoo a few hundred yards away. But, gentle reader, imagine your-self a youth of eighteen or nineteen, who has spent part of the live-long summer day patriotically compiling a century for your School against Cheltenham or Sherborne, and then imagine yourself, at the close of that great day, being ordered to pray by a small, obscure boy who is not even in the House Eleven! Would you not think him presumptuous ? Would you not feel like Prince Henry when he was " run in " by the Chief Justice?" Clifton School Days 1879-1885 O.F. Christie Shaylor, London 1930

The Second World War

It took just one night for the history of centuries to vanish in flames and rubble. Sunday, 24th November 1940 was the night that the war came to Bristol, and when that terrible night was over, little remained of some of Bristol's favourite buildings and streets. "The City of Churches had in one night become the city of ruins," wrote the Lord Mayor, Alderman Thomas Underwood in an account of the blitz, written in 1942. "In the most heavily bombed area, entire streets were completely devastated whilst in other streets wide gaping wounds showed isolated premises which had miraculously escaped destruction.

"Wine Street, held by many to be the most valuable shopping street in the provinces, was reduced to a mass of rubble. Castle Street, built on the site of Bristol's Norman castle precincts, suffered almost as completely.

"Severely damaged shopping streets in other districts were College Green, Park Street, Queen's Road, Redcliffe Street, Thomas Street and Victoria Street. Many historic buildings and architectural treasures were destroyed." They included St Peter's Hospital, a medieval building which had been home to alchemists and pirates, and housed the Royal Mint and Britain's first sugar refinery. The old Dutch House, a beautiful black and white half-timbered house, went, as did the city museum, the art gallery, much of the university - including the beautiful Great Hall - the Prince's Theatre, the Upper Arcade shops, three churches dating back to Norman times, seven modern ones, eight schools, alms-houses, cinemas, Georgian houses, and factories. Ten thousand homes were also damaged or destroyed.

The attack had begun at 6.50pm with flares falling from the skies. Then the bombers arrived. "Showers of incendiary bombs kindled and spread the conflagration," wrote Alderman Underwood. "High-explosive bombs whistled and screamed to earth. Many were of extremely large calibre and spread the raging fires from building to building until whole streets were ablaze.

"The flames appeared as one huge fiery furnace leaping high into the air and giving an intensity of daylight over a great part of the city."