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Fact 1: The daredevil barber of Bedminster
Of all Bristol’s daredevils, Charlie Stephens, the fearless barber of West Street, Bedminster was the greatest — and he died the most spectacular death possible in a stupendous act of courage.
Charlie’s colourful career as a self-confessed ‘tempter of fate’ included shaving people in a lion’s cage at the Bristol Coliseum, having an apple balanced on his throat sliced in two by a sword, parachuting in a red coat from balloons with landings on Chessel Street and Bedminster railway station, diving off the Forth Bridge and standing stock-still while crack shots knocked sugar cubes from the top of his scalp.
But they were mere aperitifs to the Big One. Charlie was determined to pull off the greatest stunt of all. He was going to ride the Niagara Fails in a barrel.
He had his barrel made in Bristol. It was painted in bright zebra stripes and specially cushioned for the gigantic forces of the world’s most famous water-fall.
Charlie was convinced he could make his fortune from the film rights to his spectacular success in shooting the Falls and he was sealed into his barrel on July 11, 1920. Minutes later he was dead, his barrel smashed to smithereens and his body in pieces.
All they found of this brave, likeable man was a severed arm which was interred in an unmarked grave in the local cemetery. The camera crew’s fee was just £20, enough to cover the funeral expenses.
Charlie was 58. He left 11 children, a widow, Annie and an enduring memory as a larger-than-life character.
Fact 2: Robinson Crusoe in Bristol
The early 18th century Bristol sea dog Captain Woodes Rogers made an astonishing discovery when he and his crew landed on an exotic South Seas island when escaping from a storm.
A bizarre figure stumbled towards them. . . a deeply tanned white man dressed in goatskins who brokenly explained how he had been a prisoner on the island for four years.
Gradually the story emerged. This strange person was a Scot, Alexander Selkirk, who had been marooned on his desert island after a shipboard dispute.
Luckily for him, the island offered shelter, water and plenty of nourishing food in the form of fish, wild goats, fruit and vegetables. Woodes Rogers took his exotic find on board and brought Selkirk safely back to the City Docks in Bristol and his home in Queen Square (a plaque at 33-35 marks the site). Selkirk lived in Bristol for some years, where he became first a local then a national celebrity.
His romantic tale of life marooned on a tropical island inspired Daniel Defoe’s classic 'Robinson Crusoe'. It has been claimed that Defoe met Selkirk in Bristol and heard the story first-hand before writing the book.
Fact 3: Brunel's gateway to the world
Brunel House stands at the rear of the Bristol City Council Council House on College Green hardly looks like the Gateway To The New World. But that was how the brilliant engineer and pioneer Isambard Kingdom Brunel dreamt of his handsome building with its imposing facade.
It was named the Great Western Steamship Hotel when it opened in 1839 and it was designed as a luxurious resting place where rich voyagers would be pampered on their final night in England.
Brunel was a visionary who never did things by halves. His brilliantly successful Great Western Railway between London and Bristol was only part of a much, much more ambitious route.
Nothing less than the great journey from London to New York and then beyond.
The plan was thus: passengers would be whisked down to Bristol on the comfortable, broad gauge railway where they would spend the night at the Great Western Steamship Hotel.
From there it would be a brief journey by road to Severnside and the speed, excitement and comfort of Mr Brunels latest transatlantic ocean liner.., and then the great crossing.
Alas, the scheme was a flop, the transatlantic trade was lost to rival ports and the former hotel saw several changes of use. It was a Turkish bath, then an untidy hotch-potch of offices.
It lay derelict for a while until the 1980s and a successful rescue plan which saved the historic facade and developed a modern office complex on the site. The building is now the home of several Bristol City Council departments.
Fact 4: BRISTOL'S SLAVE GRAVE
At least one black slave who was a victim of the notorious transatlantic trade in humans does have a memorial in Bristol. . . the teenager Scipio Africanus.
Scipio lies buried in Henbury churchyard where his grave has long been an object of curiosity and pilgrimage.
There is an enduring myth that Bristol slavers brought their wretched cargoes of terrified Africans home to the City Docks and kept them in chains in Redcliffe caves before transporting them across the Atlantic.
In fact they were shipped directly from Africa to the colonies in the New World, part of the triangular trade in which merchants exchanged British goods for slaves on the West Coast of Africa and then slaves for produce like sugar and tobacco on the other side of the ocean.
But a small number of black men and women slaves did reach Britain, often becoming servants of rich folk looking for an exotic novelty to show off to guests. Scipio Africanus was one of them.
He was servant to the seventh Earl of Suffolk who lived in the now-demolished Great House near Henbury church. Scipio became much loved by the young Earl and his wife who treated him almost like a son.
The lad was just 18 when he died in 1720.
His memorial stone reads:
'I who was born a Pagan and a Slave, Now sleep sweetly a Christian in my grave, What tho’ my hue was dark, my Saviour’s sight'
She was the prettiest exotic princess Bristol had ever seen... and the cleverest hoaxer of them all.
She was 'Princess Caraboo', a beautiful, dark creature who arrived mysteriously in Almondsbury in April, 1815. She caused a sensation. Her hair was swathed in a turban of scarves, she spoke a strange, babbling language no-one could understand but by gesture she explained that she was an important person - and that she was in desperate trouble from her enemies.
Little by little her tale unfolded. She revealed that she was none other than Princess Caraboo from the distant land of Javanu where she had been kidnapped by merciless pirates.
But fate had come to her aid when the pirate ship sailed up the Bristol Channel. She had seized her chance by jumping overboard and swimming to the shore near Aust.
The self-styled Princess fooled everyone, including Bristol’s Town Clerk who gave her a home and revelled in his celebrity guest.
Princess Caraboo was shown all over Bristol’s as a most fascinating personage for more than two months and her fame spread across the country. She even gave oriental sword-fighting displays to demonstrate the wonders of Javanu’s martial arts ‘traditions’. That, perhaps, was painting the lily.
Because shortly afterwards, Her Royal Highness was rumbled. She was, in fact, plain Mary Baker, a cobbler’s daughter from Devon. Mary had hoodwinked thousands, from rich merchants and aristocrats to the most humble.
Mary was hurried off to America to spare everyone’s blushes and in a vain hope that the tale of Princess Caraboo would be quietly forgotten. It wasn’t, of course.
But years later Mary did return under her own name and she lies buried in Arno’s Vale cemetery in Bristol, the city she so cleverly duped.
Fact 6: Stuffed Alfred from Clifton
Alfred the Gorilla was more than just one of the most prized exhibits at Bristol zoo... he was a celebrity.
The lowland gorilla arrived in Clifton as a two-and-a-half to three-year-old furry toddler on September 5, 1930 and he was an instant hit.
During those early years little Alfred was a familiar sight in his collar and chain being taken for walkies by his keeper. But the good life at the zoo saw him putting on height and weight, and before long Alfred was too big and powerful to ramble at a chain’s length and he was caged in an increasingly secure gorilla house.
Alfred loved children and adored playing hide and seek with youngsters by running in and out of the inner cage in his compound.
When Alfred died in 1948, Bristolians couldn’t bear to part with their old friend from the zoo. He represented too many memories. So they had Alfred stuffed and put him back on show, this time at the City Museum in Queen’s Road where you can see him to this day.
But there is a memento at the zoo it self a sculpted bust of his head which pays tribute to a very popular character.
Fact 7: EDWARD TEACH OF BEDMINSTER
Bristol can boast a terrible rogues’ gallery of reckless, vicious pirates but none of them approach the devilry of the infamous Blackbeard.This bizarre character was portrayed with relish by the star Robert Newton in the title role of the Hollywood film, but even Newton at his over-the-top best couldn’t have matched the original.
Blackbeard hailed from Redcliffe and his real name was Edward or Edmund Teach. It was said he was responsible for more than 2,000 deaths during his reign of fear as the most bloodthirsty of all pirates in the early 18th century.
Teach specialised in horror tactics. He wore a long black beard and during assaults on ships he thrust smoking fuses into his beard and matted hair so that he hove into view like Satan himself, with a shawl of devil-like black smoke around his face.
Teach’s favourite hunting ground was off the American coast and the West Indies where he terrorised shipping and won an appalling reputation for his 'most bloody disposition. . . cruel to barbarity'.
He is said to have married a dozen women bigamously before he met a fittingly violent death on the coast of Carolina, murdered by pirate-hunters.
Fact 8: Billy Butlin and his Bedminster hoop-la stall
Billy Butlin paid just £1.50 in Lock’s Yard, Bedminster for a hoop-la stall in a travelling fair. . . and a multi-million pound fortune was launched.
Born in South Africa in 1899, he came to live in Bristol as a little boy when his mum married a Bristol gas worker. He went to St Mary Redcliffe School for a while before emigrating to Canada.
After World War I service with the Canadian army, he worked his passage across the Atlantic to Liverpool, was paid £5 and walked 160 miles back to Bristol to join the Marshall Hill fair at its Bedminster winter base.
Billy made his hoop-la pedestals the easiest to ‘hoop’, gave out prizes more quickly than anyone . . . and took 10 times the profits of his stunned rivals with their penny-pinching attractions as he triumphantly toured the West Country on the travelling fair circuit.
He went from hoop-la stalls to amusement parks to zoos and, in 1935, to his first holiday camp in Skegness, an idea he’d long since dreamed about after remembering a rotten holiday on the Bristol Channel when he’d been thrown out of his lodgings by a seaside landlady who wouldn’t allow ‘guests’ to stay during the day.
Give the punters a fair deal, a roof over their heads and amusements, and they would flock in just as they had to his Bedminster hoop-la stall. And, of course, it worked.
Fact 9: The man who invented the blanket
Did a Bristolian invent the blanket? Yes, the legend goes. Not only invented but also gave the world’s pre-duvet sleepers the name of their favourite winter bed-time warmer.
He was Ted Blanket who lived in the Temple district of the city in the 14th century when the area, near the present day Temple Meads station, was an important weaving centre.
One bitterly cold night in 1343 Ted ran out of firewood, his home was freezing so he took some soft, unfinished, loosely woven woollen cloth which he had brought home to experiment with, and laid it on his bed. Despite the freezing temperatures, he and Mrs Blanket had a remarkably warm night’s sleep.
News of this new-fangled invention travelled fast and folk queued up to buy the very latest in household aids.
It’s said that no less a person than King Edward III ordered two of Mr Blanket’s remarkable woollen novelties, and that at that point Ted’s fortune was made.
Fact or fiction? There was a notable weaver in Temple called Ted Blanket, he did make a fortune and he did become a bailiff of the city and a Member of Parliament.
Ted lies buried in St Stephen’s Church, just off the city centre. Wrapped in a blanket? Perhaps.
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