Fact 11: Bristol and the Beatles
One Beatles’ worldwide smash hit was inspired by a stroll around Bristol’s city centre, and one of the loveliest of their songs at that time.
Paul McCartney was in Bristol in November, 1965 to join his 19-year-old actress girlfriend Jane Asher whe was appearing in the title role of a new play Cleo by Frank Marcus at the Bristol Old Vic’s Theatre Royal in King Street and breaking box office records.
Paul popped down to Bristol from time to time during the play’s run. One evening while Jane was on stage at the Theatre Royal he went for a walk through the nearby streets, his face disguised by a scarf and hat. Beatlemania was still at its height and he would have been mobbed if he’d been recognised.
A theme had been buzzing in his head about a girl called Daisy Hawkins, but the name somehow wouldn’t fit with the tune he’d been tinkering with alongside his collaborator John Lennon.
Daisy, Daisy... perhaps Eleanor instead? And then Paul glanced at a shop on the city centre, saw the shopkeeper’s name of Rigby and everything fell into place. The result was one of pop music’s finest classics.
Fact 12: 'Don’t Cry For Me Argentina' - Bristol nightmare
Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s career as a talented young composer of musicals was on the rocks when his brand new show Jeeves, co-written with Tim Rice, was given a pre - London run at the Bristol Hippodrome.
The musical, based on the immortal P.G. Wodehouse character, was clearly doomed to be a disaster and a despairing Lloyd-Webber, who seemed to have the Midas touch after brilliant successes with both Joseph And His Technicolour Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar, saw his reputation about to go up in the flames.
He left a particularly dreadful performance at the Hippodrome in despair, walking across the Centre to the Unicorn Hotel where he locked himself into his room, put all thoughts of rescuing his Jeeves musical behind him and wrote an agonised first number for a new musical light years away from the Wodehousian world of toffs, butlers and country house weekends.
The song? ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’, the cornerstone of the daring musical Evita based on the life of Eva Peron, glitzy wife of a South American dictator. It was to be the number which, above all others, confirmed Lloyd-Webber as one of the most popular stage composers of the 20th century.
Fact 13: Archie Leach from Bristol
Gary Grant will never be superseded as Bristol’s most glamorous 20th century son ... but Archie Leach, his real name, certainly left his native city under a cloud.
The stage-struck lad was a pupil at Fairfield Grammar School in Montpelier and he spent every spare moment hanging around Bristol’s theatres, hoping for a break into show business.
At last his chance came with an opportunity to join a knockabout act of boy comedians run by the clown Bob Pender. Archie ran away from home but was tracked down with the Pender boys 10 days later by his father and returned to Bristol and to Fairfield school.
It was war. Archie was determined to re-join Pender so he became the baddest boy in Fairfield, skipping classes and then, finally, sneaking across to the school’s girls section with a mate and accepting a dare to enter the girls’ toilets. He was grabbed by a burly hockey teacher and, the next morning, publicly expelled in front of the assembled school. Three days later he re-joined the Pender troupe.
Which perhaps explains why, for the rest of his life, Gary Grant inserted an inaccurate line in Who’s Who about his education. His school, the entry stated, was one Fairfield Academy in Somerset.
Fact 14: The all-seeing Observatory
Clifton Observatory is one of Bristol’s oddest-looking buildings and its position is even odder, standing in stark isolation on the highest spot in Bristol on the site of an ancient British camp just above the Clifton Suspension Bridge. You can still see the outlines of the hill-fort’s ramparts more than 2,000 years later.
This odd, tower-like structure was, in fact, a windmill, strategically placed to take advantage of the prevailing south-westerly winds and it did its job well until mighty winds sent the sails flying so quickly that the friction caused the mechanism to burst into flames, setting fire to the mill.
William West, an entrepreneurial artist with a romantic eye, turned the attractive ruin into an Observatory half a century later, installing powerful telescopes and the famous Camera Obscura which is still a tourist attraction today.
The Camera swings to project a 360 degree picture of Bristol on to a circular screen in a darkened room at the top of the building.West developed his lucrative side-show by excavating a passage to the subterranean Giant Ghyston’s cave, installing a Gorge-side viewpoint for visitors where the cave opens to the sheer rock face.
Fact 15: £1 million-a-day bicycle ride
Every day of the working week he’d arrive promptly on his bicycle at 3.30 p.m., a cheque for £1 million or so tucked safely away in his pocket.
His daily ride took him across Bedminster Bridge on the short journey from W.D. and H.O. Wills’ redbrick factory and offices in East Street to the Custom House in Queen Square.
This bicycling millionaire wasn’t famous, just a duty clerk in the tobacco giant’s finance department who was glad to get out of the office and enjoy a little fresh air and exercise on the interesting journey past St Mary Redcliffe Church and the east end of the City Docks, its quaysides busy with dockers unloading ships.
The cheque he carried was Wills’ payment for the next day’s duty on the raw tobacco leaf taken out of the bonded warehouses at the Ashton end of the City Docks.
No more. Wills left for Hartciffe and first its name and then cigarette production vanished from Bristol. The Customs left their Queen Square home. And, anyway, computers have replaced that bicycle in fast-forwarding payments.
Fact 16: The Black Castle of Arno’s Vale
The Black Castle at Arno’s Vale just off the Bath Road is a thoroughly sinister-looking place... it doesn’t take much imagination to think of prisoners locked in dungeons, dark secrets and satanic rites.
Little wonder, then, that as the writer Horace Wapole arrived in Brislington in 1766 on a journey to Bristol he was taken aback by the 'large Gothic building, coal black and striped with white. I took it for the Devil’s Cathedral!'
In fact the Black Castle is a weird and wonderful folly built in the shape of a castle by wealthy copper smelter William Reeve to house offices and stables opposite his home Mount Pleasant, now the Amo’s Court Hotel.
And that blackness comes from the very unusual building materials which Reeves used. The walls are made of black copper-slag blocks recycled from his works at Crew’s Hole.
Fact 17: Saved - Three Lamps at Totterdown
Bristol thought it had lost its lovely old Three Lamps sign at the junction of the Bath and Wells roads when Totterdown was demolished to make way for an urban motorway which was never built.
The acres cleared for that planned road are now buried by new housing estates and Totterdown is a residential district once more.
And the eye-catching Three Lamps sign is back again after a lengthy spell spent at the City Engineer’s depot in Ashley Down, just by the main railway line to the Midlands. Passengers leaving Bristol for Birmingham and points north could see it clearly.
The sign was well worth saving. It’s one of the best surviving early 19th century road signs in Britain and Bristol has done it proud, lovingly restoring the handsome letterwork and cast iron column and creating a fittingly attractive surround of brickwork and railings now that the Three Lamps stands once more on the spot it originally occupied.
Fact 18: Thomas’ Goldney’s cave of jewels
Aladdin’s cave was said to sparkle with a million jewels... and so does the cave that Thomas Goldney created in the lavish gardens of his hillside home in Clifton.
Goldney was a rich merchant who sent his ships to some of the world’s most exotic places. Their orders were to bring home the most profitable items from across the oceans - and to collect shells, sparkling stones, coral and other bright and shiny pieces for the grotto he began to build in 1737.
Thomas Goldney’s grotto took nearly 30 years to complete. He was delighted with the result and his delight has been shared by generations of romantics ever since. The cave is a fairyland of glints, lights and sparkles and one of the most brilliant follies in the world.
Today Goldney’s home and garden belong to Bristol University. Goldney House is a student hall of residence. But the garden is open to the public from time to time. . . and so is Mr Goldney’s fabulous cave.
Fact 19: Pitch and Pay Lane
Pitch and Pay Lane. It sounds such a jolly, cheerful name reminiscent of children’s games, larks and fun. . . but its true story is a sad, sinister one.
The lane was once a little country road centuries before this part of modern Bristol had been developed by rich Victorians into the smart suburb of Stoke Bishop.
That odd name recalls dark days when the old city of Bristol was often struck by plagues and epidemics. The City Docks were notoriously filthy and contagious diseases were one of the sorrier results of living beside what was nothing less than an open sewer.
Bristol’s reputation for disease was so bad that country folk living around the town were always on the alert for some fresh danger to their health. When some new outbreak did occur, Gloucestershire farmers and smallholders refused to come near the place. They were only prepared to sell their produce at a safe distance from the unhealthy citizens.
So, at this pre-arranged spot, they developed the practice of pitching their produce at the waiting, hungry Bristolians. . . while the citizens paid by throwing back the necessary cash. It was an early example of the quarantine principle - pitching, paying and preventing the spread of illness.
Fact 20: Fountain on the move
Old Thomas Proctor’s fountain is one of Bristol’s most fanciful - and weighty - Victorian monuments . . . but that didn’t stop it from hitching up its masonry skirts and crossing one of the city’s busier roads.
Alderman Thomas Proctor had the drinking fountain built at the top of Bridge Valley Road in 1872 on the site of the old Clifton turnpike. But by the end of the 1980s, it had become a traffic hazard hiding the view of cars approaching this busy junction from the Portway.
So the fountain was moved stone by stone and feature by feature. across the main road to the green by the Mansion House.
Alderman Proctor made another handsome gift to Bristol. Using the name Nil Desperandum (never despair) he secretly donated the first cash to restore St Mary Redcliffe Church. The fountain is designed by London architect George Godwin, who began that St Mary Redcliffe restoration.
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