Fact 81: NSM - No Thanks!
It was the loudest ‘No’ in Bristol’s smoky history after tobacco giants Wills announced the biggest revolution in smoking since Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco from the New World to the Court of Queen Elizabeth.
By the 1970s the anti-smoking health campaign had reached such proportions that Wills and other cigarette giants decided that if you couldn’t beat ‘em, you could try to woo 'em. And Wills did so with NSM or New Smoking Material. The idea was cunningly simple. Cut down on tobacco, give cigarette smokers a substitute to puff on and, hey presto, smoking could be acceptable as a healthy pursuit once more. In June, 1977 the new-style cigarettes were launched in a fanfare of publicity.
It didn’t work. In fact it failed so catastrophically that within three months of the much-advertised launch of safer ciggies, Wills’ directors realised they had a huge turkey on their hands. What to do with all those unwanted packets of fags? Set fire to them in the biggest bonfire in Bristol’s tobacco history when more than 100 million NSM ‘gaspers’ were cremated. Wills claimed foul, accusing the government of torpedoing their new products by not allowing a price advantage over the more tar-filled standards cigs. The public didn’t agree. NSM lacked the nicotine kick that smokers crave. . . it was as simple as that.
Fact 82: When Buffalo Bill came to town
It was the biggest superstar show Bristol had ever seen ... 12 performances over six days by the then top name in thrilling spectacle, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Pioneer Exhibition.
Colonel William Cody, to give him his real name, brought four train loads of Red Indians, cowboys, buffaloes, horses, ponies, stage coaches and extras. . . so many that when they processed up the Gloucester Road on their way from Temple Meads station to their show site on Horfield Common on Sunday September 26th, 1891, onlookers reckoned the parade was a mile long.
Today Cowboys and Indians are old hat. But when Buffalo Bill made his triumphant visit to Bristol, the fictional Wild West was considered the most romantic, colourful place in the world and Colonel Cody its most famous character. A 15,000 seat stadium was built on Horfield Common for the twice-daily performances which included spectacles like Buffalo Bill’s single combat with Yellow Hand, an attack on a train by Red Indians and daredevil riding and shooting displays.
The ticket sellers proclaimed that ‘Colonel W.F. Cody Will Positively Appear At Every Performance’ and the punters poured in, more than 100,000 of them paying a shilling a ticket to watch the show of a lifetime. The self-publicising giant of the Wild West world watched his trainloads of riders and animals return to Temple Meads at the end of the week and drawled ‘I’m well satisfied.’
Fact 83: Bristol’s first Walkman wearer?
Headphone-wearing youngsters walking Bristol’s streets with their personal stereos playing away have been a familiar sight for some years now.., but a student with a Walkman when grandad was still in his teens? Impossible, you might say. But you’d be wrong. There he is, as clear as day, the zapped-out character with the headphones, the long hair and the beatific grin of someone listening to the latest sounds at full volume.
‘He’ is made of stone and he is one of the many grotesques designed by the artist Jean Hahn who was commissioned by the distinguished architect Sir George Gatley to provide the decorations for the lavish Wills Hall of Residence in Stoke Bishop. Hahn designed another set of heads for the Wills Memorial Building in Queen’s Road, Clifton. This gargoyle, thought to represent a physicist or electrical engineer, looks so modern that it’s hard to believe that it was carved by one of a group of local stonemasons in the 1920s.
As for those early headphones he’s wearing, they were either meant for receiving the primitive wireless transmissions of the day or for use in a scientific or medical equipment experiment.
Fact 84: We three kings
There they stand, surveying the traffic and the bustle of Colston Street ... the Three Kings of Cologne. The trio, sculpted by Bristol artist Ernest Pascoe, took up their places on their public niches in 1967 when the early sixteenth century Chapel Of The Three Kings of Cologne was re-opened and rededicated after extensive restoration.
The Three Kings? Yes, of course, they are the Three Wise Men of the Nativity, Balthazar, Caspar and Melchior and their name was chosen by Bristol merchant John Foster when he added the chapel in 1504 to the adjoining almshouses he had founded 20 years before. It is said that John Foster decided to honour the famous three after a visit to Cologne where he was particularly struck by the shrine honouring the relics of the Three Wise Men, relics which had been moved to Germany from Milan and, before that, Constantinople.
The 1967 renovation of the chapel also included the creation of a new stained glass window showing the Three Kings greeting the infant Christ and Mary.
Fact 85: Broadmead... Bristol’s inside-out shopping centre
When Bristol started rebuilding in the 1950s, it promised itself a shopping centre fitting for the Young Elizabeth age of the new Queen Elizabeth II. The old, much-loved Wine Street/Castle Street shops had gone up in flames in the first big blitz ofNovember 1940. The new centre, it was decided, would look towards the future.
Fine plans were prepared, creating four roomy, open piazzas on the square-shaped Broadmead area. Cars would be banned and the shops serviced in off-peak hours by lanes behind the piazzas. Pedestrians would rule. It wasn’t to be. Traders were horrified at the thought of a centre where motorists wouldn’t be allowed to park outside their front door and jeered at the idea of traffic-free pedestrian precincts.
The traders won. The service lanes were widened into main roads with high street frontages, the piazzas shrank to grubby service areas behind the shops and Broadmead was blighted. But those original designers had the last laugh. Today the roads the traders demanded have become pedestrian precincts and Broadmead’s biggest attraction is the car-free Galleries shopping mall.
You can still see those shrunken piazzas, an unsightly monument to a short-sighted past.
Fact 86: The Clifton slide
There it is, a marble-like track of limestone rubbed smooth by generations of children’s trousers and skirts on the helter-skelter ride down the diagonal raft of rock just below the Observatory in Clifton.
No one can remember when children began turning a narrow lane of the rock surface into a shiny chute . . . but then no one can remember when children didn’t shriek and squeal and risk their necks on this rough-and-tumble ride down to the zig-zag path below.
The authorities try to fence it off, but no restrictions in the world would stop daredevils ‘bottoming’ it down just as their great-great-grandparents did. In Italian art circles, the Clifton slide has a far loftier reputation. Shortly after winning Britain’s top art award, the Turner Prize in 1990, the Bristol-based artist Richard Long who creates landscape works like stone circles and gravel lanes in remote parts of the world was interviewed by a leading Italian art critic.
Long told of how the Clifton Downs had been an inspiration in his early days and he took the Italian writer for a walk up on the Downs. As they passed the bottom of the slide he pointed out the dramatic sight and joked ‘My first serious piece of sculpture’. The Italian critic took the gag seriously, and it was duly reported.
Fact 87: Cabot’s ‘Whalebone gift
Of all Bristol’s off beat relics, the gigantic hoop of bone slung so carefully with its base resting on a cherubic head in St Mary Reddliffe Church must be the most bizarre and wonderful. It is the rib of a cow whale and it came to Bristol, so the legend goes, as one of the only mementoes of the historic journey made by the Genoese-born adventurer John Cabot when he crossed the Atlantic in 1497.
Cabot had made an unsuccessful attempt to cross the Atlantic the year before. But it was in 1497, aboard the Bristol-made ship the Matthew with a crew of just 18 he reached Newfoundland. And there, or on one of his brief landings as he explored the eastern coast of America, he presumably found the great length of bone so carefully preserved in Bristol’s fairest parish church.
There was another yarn told about the bone. . . that it was a rib from a gigantic cow killed by Guy, Earl of Warwick. This story stems from the fact that there is a similar whale bone preserved in Warwick Castle. Sceptics doubt that Cabot brought the bone back aboard the Matthew. Enthusiasts are sure that it was his gift to Bristol. Either way, it’s a curiosity not to be missed.
Fact 88: Bristol’s forgotten war memorial
A hundred people will pass St Andrew’s Church for every one who pauses, surprised by the long, wide, slightly raised terrace at the Clifton Hill end of what is sometimes called Birdcage Walk. The walk is a lovely avenue of pleached lime trees between Queen’s Road and Clifton Hill, passing through a churchyard. But where is the church?
It was St Andrew’s Church and its churchyard has a fascinating collection of tombs and memorials, but St Andrew’s itself died on the first night of the Bristol Blitz, on Sunday November 24th, 1940. The body of the church which had been built in the twelfth century, extended in the seventeenth century and replaced by a Regency Gothic church in the 1820s, was wrecked that night but the tower survived until 1958, when it was demolished.
The rubble was razed and removed, the ground cleared but the bones of the church’s outline left in the earth as a reminder of those dreadful nights. A plaque explains the story to those rare few who do stop to examine this extraordinary war memorial.
Fact 89: The posh pawnshop’s discreet entrance
It wasn’t just the poor and working class who used Bristol’s many pawnshops in the bad old days, ‘quality’ folk weren’t above the services of the pawnbroker when times were hard. The smartest - and those with the most to lose should they be spotted by their respectable friends and neighbours and even, in some cases, wives and husbands - used the oh-so-discreet services of Messrs Chillcotts in Park Street.
Park Street was and is a very, very public place and one of the West Country’s most famous shopping streets, so no self-respecting person would be seen dead trying to pawn a bit of the family silver in the main shop. So instead Chillcotts installed a hatch at the back of the shop which shy pawners could use at night. Goods to be pawned could be slipped through the hatch with the owner’s name attached. Goods went down a chute to the back room and owners claimed the ticket the following day - using the back door in Great George Street for added discretion -when staff could make a discreet offer without causing embarrassment.
Fact 90: Bristol’s best for Good Queen Bess
Bristol put out all the flags, painted its public monuments and provided nothing but the best when Queen Elizabeth I arrived in Bristol on August 14th, 1574 at the start of a week-long visit. And there is one reminder of her visit in which Bristol staged mock battles, fired several salutes and laid on sumptuous feasts for Her Majesty and her court.
It is the superb saddle cloth the Queen used when she rode into Bristol on a white horse and it is now lovingly preserved by the Society of Merchant Venturers at Merchants’ Hall in Clifton. The blue velvet cloth is decorated with wondefful silver ornaments and solid silver stirrups, a marvellous reminder of an extraordinary visit.
The Queen stayed at the Great House on St Augustine’s Back, on the site of what is now the Colston Hall and the cloth she had sat on was carefully put aside and presented by Bristol Corporation to Thomas Colston, the High Sheriff of the county. It stayed in the family until the family seat at Roundway, Devizes was sold in 1947. The cloth was one of many lots which came up for sale and it was snapped up by Sir Foster Robinson who brought it back to Bristol and presented it to the Merchants.
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