Fact 61: John Cleese’s silly walk
From the moment gangly comic John Cleese gave his knee-twisting, leg-sailing performance in the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch on the classic Monty Python’s Flying Circus show the world was hooked.
And when he gave a repeat in that infamous episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’ when he broke into a crazed goose-step before a party of German visitors, we knew we were seeing one of the greatest comedy routines of them all. The first performance of the Cleese silly walk? When the comedian was a schoolboy at Clifton College in the 1950s.
Already gawky but an avid cricket player, Cleese used his awkward gait to invent silly walks to annoy the cricket coach and to win popularity. He wasn’t, he admitted, a popular boy and thought he could make friends by being funny. There is even a school report from that time which refers to the ‘many Cleesian glides’ on the cricket field, a sure reference to the leggy gait he was developing into his show-stopping gag.
But while he may have been a prankster on the cricket field, he was also a good player. He even bowled out top English cricketer Denis Compton in a game between Clifton and the MCC.
Fact 62: Overdressed in Bristol fashion
Henry Tudor found Bristol girls shipshape and Bristol fashion.. . in fact rather too fashionable for a city claiming it was down on its luck. Henry, who had recendy defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field and been crowned as Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, first came to Bristol as King in 1486.
Henry, a notoriously money-minded man, was on his travels in an effort to squeeze as much cash as he could from his subjects. Bristol was well prepared for his visit. The city’s merchants told him tale after tale of Bristol’s appalling financial state. The citizens were in no position to hand out more than a pittance to the Royal coffers, they wailed.
The disappointed monarch was suspicious. On his return a few years later those same merchants and their families entertained his Majesty as royally as they could - too royally for the King to be fooled any longer into believing that Bristol was broke. The food was excellent, the wines wonderful and he noted with delight the good looks, the rich clothes and the sparkling jewels of the Bristol beauties he met.
He announced that Bristol corporation had to stump up £500 to the crown on the spot and that every Bristolian worth £200 or more had to pay a levy of £1. When the astonished citizens heard his verdict and asked why this sudden sting, the cheerful monarch replied that he had seen that Bristol could well afford the tax hike ‘because men’s wives went so sumptuously apparelled.’
Fact 63: Hang ‘em high
I can’t think of a drearier corner of Bristol than where the ruins of the New Gaol gate glows over the New Cut on Cumberland Road. I’m sure the city workers who park their cars in Bedminster and Southville and walk by the gate each day must feel the same momentary depression I feel whenever I see this grim relic.
This granite gatehouse with mock portcullis was designed with a flat roof and a trap door for public hangings. A special scaffold was made for the hangman’s visit, ‘and these grisly events never failed to attract huge crowds. The first to be hanged before the mob was a young lad from the village of Hanham who, in a fit of passion, had killed his lover. So many people turned up for the show that there were notices warning the crowds of the danger of being shouldered into the New Cut by the press of the mob.
The last to die was an 18-year-old servant girl Sarah Thomas who was driven to kill her mistress after years of ill-treatment and bullying. She screamed, howled, sobbed and pleaded throughout every last ghastly moment of her life and even the prison governor was so overcome that he fainted. t was Bristol’s last public hanging and the horror and revulsion it caused became an unforgettable memory for the citizens who witnessed this pathetic event. The gaol itself was closed in 1883 and sold to the Great Western Railway. The company used it as a coal yard.
Fact 64: Buried treasure of the blitz
When the bombs started falling down on Bristol the night of the first great blitz, well-known jeweller Mr Chilcott of Chilcott’s in Park Street was more worried about his gold, silver and jewels than he was for his own skin. Park Street was one of the worst-hit areas that night of Sunday November 24th, 1940 but luckily Chilcott’s, established in 1808, was left standing in the sea of smoke, flames and rubble.
Standing, but wide open to temptation from looters who could easily have crawled in through the broken windows. Looting blitzed properties was one of the more unsavoury features of ‘our finest hour. So Mr Chillcott ignored the dangers, collected all the most expensive items he could carry from the shop and escaped through a trap door to the street outside. As the bombs continued to fall he hurried to the graveyard of St George’s Church just up the hill and secretly buried a fortune in valuables.
The next morning, as shattered Bristolians surveyed the wreck of Park Street, Mr Chillcott returned to the graveyard and recovered the ‘loot’.
Fact 65: The night the Beatles ‘bombed’ in, Bristol
Tuesday November 10th, 1964 is one of pop music’s notable dates, the last night of the final full-length Beatles’ British tour. . . and the night John, Paul, George and Ringo were well and truly bombed!
The place was the Colston Hall where the Fab Four headed a ten-act bill which also included top Tamla Motown singer Mary ‘My Guy’ Wells. The Beatles were paid £850 for their two Bristol shows and there was an end-of-term euphoria at the close of an astonishing tour and an extraordinary year in which Beatlemania had become a worldwide phenomenon.
The film A Hard Day’s Night had rocketed them to top of the box office charts at the world’s cinemas, they had sold records by the million and their American tour had been one of the greatest successes in showbiz history. And all within little more than ten months. Towards the end of the second show - with girls screaming so loudly you couldn’t hear a note they played or a word they sang - some bright spark who’d clambered into the roof space high above the stage dropped a bag of flour on the world’s most famous superstars.
The bag exploded perfectly, covering the Beatles with flour. Ringo had to clear his drums while John, Paul and George fell about, shrieking with laughter. No one claimed responsibility but the prank was probably the work of one of the road crew, part of the tradition of end-of-tour fun and games.
The Beatles did play a very brief British tour the following year but by then they’d had more than enough of life on the road. And the number they were playing when the flour tumbled that night in Bristol? ‘If I Fell’.
Fact 66: St Werburgh’s... a church on the move
Victorian Bristolians thought big and bold, and when a well-loved, centuries-old church began to get in the way of the major redevelopments in the city centre, the church had to go. The building was St Werburgh’s in Small Street, a handsome part of old Bristol’s history with its fine tower and decorated exterior. Unfortunately it happened to be in the wrong place by the end of the 1870s.
The building had already been saved a century before when it was claimed to be unsafe, but an appeal raised enough money to keep it standing. In 1878, with the east end blocking an increasingly important artery in central Bristol, even an appeal couldn’t save St Werburghs. So it was demolished. . . but very, very carefully. Major bits and pieces were transported a mile or so east and painstakingly fitted together jigsaw-style into a new St Werburgh’s in the area that now carries its name.
The other bits of old St Werburgh’s had a more ignominious end. They were spirited off to non-ecclesiastical sites across the city where the weathered stone was re-used in new buildings.
Fact 67: 'Bristol knew all about container shipping more than a century before today’s big boxes'.
The great container revolution, it’s always said, was one of the wonders of post-war years. That was when, the story goes, standardised containers which slipped on and off lorries, trains and ships with equal ease arrived and took off in a big way, changing the face of the freight business.
Not true at all. Bristol knew all about container shipping more than a century before today’s big boxes began fetching goods to and fro and William Knee is the man who deserves all the credit. He’d opened a depot in Temple Street, near the new Temple Meads station, when the railways began and, within a few years, he announced a spectacular new service, the Knee’s Furniture Van For The Removal Of Furniture etc Without Packing.
It was a brilliant invention and an instant success. His wheeled vehicles fitted neatly aboard Great Western flatbed wagons to provide the first roll-on, roll-off service of them all. You loaded your Knee’s van outside your own home, it travelled by road and rail and was delivered to the front door of your new house. Knee’s road’n’rail furniture vans did a roaring trade until shortly before World War I ... providing the very first model for today’s global container trade.
Fact 68: Pie Poudre . . and instant justice
The sign still hangs over the Stag and Hounds pub on Old Market -Pie Poudre Court, Established 1483. But only keen local historians and those with memories of a quaint annual ceremony know that this was once the spot where instant justice was handed out to pickpockets, cheats and thieves when Old Market really was a market.
Pie Poudre? It’s a rough-ish piece of French which means Pie (pied, or foot) and Poudre (powder) and together they form an expression meaning ‘dusty feet’ or raga-muffins. Market days always attracted suspicious characters and petty crimes, but detaining suspects for a later trial over trivial offences was a costly nuisance. Hence the Pie Poudre Court to mete out immediate fines, punishments or imprisonment.
At first it met under an oak tree where the Stag and Hounds now stands and then, the legend goes, it moved to an upstairs room inside the pub. There was an annual ceremony to mark the court’s opening in which food and drink were served, but rowdies who had downed too much free ale and cider often spoiled the proceedings, so it was suppressed in 1870. A scaled-down version - without the booze - continued until 1973 although the court itself had been abandoned a century before.
Fact 69: The Bristolian who invented the movies
They’ll go on arguing about who invented the movies for decades to come and the big dollar brigade keep insisting that the American Thomas Edison was the Father of the Cinema. They tried that during the lifetime of inventive Bristol photographer William Friese-Greene who promptly went to the U.S. courts to point out that he had patented his invention before Edison. He won.
William was born in 1855 and lived behind where today’s Council House now stands on College Green. He became a photographer and did very well, expanding his business from a studio in Queen’s Road to further studios in Bath and Plymouth. He loved invention and patented schemes ranging from air-ship bombs and stereo colour film to X-ray apparatus.
Bristol was too small a world for this ambitious man and he moved to London in his early 30s. One project fascinated him — the possibility of moving film, one which dated back to a moment he saw shadows created by passers-by reflected through blinds. How could he capture those fleeting images? At last he found the solution.
On June 21st, 1889 he took out Patent No. 10131 for a projector which took and showed moving pictures by using opaque film with slotted holes which could be run through a camera to record scenes in close sequence. The soon-to-be-familiar movie camera, no less. Any more proof needed? William even sent Edison precise details of the mechanism involved because he hoped to interest the American in a joint project to ally Edison’s phonograph with tbe Friese-Greene camera.
And Edison, so-called Father of Cinema, never replied.
Fact 70: Eddie’s fatal last ride
Eddie Cochran, top American rock’n’roller, took a last-minute decision that cost him his life one fatal night in Bristol. Eddie had been appearing all week at the Bristol Hippodrome, heading a rock’n’roll variety package which also included fellow American Gene Vincent and youthful British rockers Billy Fury, Georgie Fame and Joe Brown.
The singer/songwriter who had scored worldwide hits with now-classic songs like ‘C’mon Everybody’, ‘Somethin’ Else’ and ‘Three Steps To Heaven’ couldn’t wait to get back to the States after his ten-week British tour. On the day of the final show, Saturday April 16th 1960, he and Gene Vincent decided not to catch the late night train from Temple Meads to Paddington but to hire a cab to Heathrow instead. It would save time and all the hassle of travelling on to London Airport, they agreed.
Eddie, Gene, Eddie’s girl-friend, songwriter Sharon Sheeley and a friend were collected by a Bristol taxi for the long joumey up the Great West Road. They never reached their destination. A tyre burst at Rowden Hill on the outskirts of Chippenham in Wiltshire, the car swerved and it struck a lamp post. Eddie died in St Martin’s Hospital, Bath, without recovering consciousness.
The distraught Sharon Sheeley was detained with back and leg injuries and comforted by the Everly brothers Don and Phil who raced to her bedside when they heard news of the tragedy as they arrived for their show in Bristol. Cochran’s records sell to this day. . . and each year a group of loyal fans hold a silent ceremony and lay a wreath by the roadside at Rowden Hill to mark his death..
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