Memories of Brislington Past - part 2 of 3

THE CLAYFIELD-IRELANDS

For over 150 years the Clayfield-Irelands were the major landowners in Brislington. A survey in 1884 showed that they owned 707 acres, nearly 300 more than the Cooke-Hurles. Their estate was broken up in 1925 but there are still many reminders of the family in the district, from the name of Clayfield Road to the memorials in St. Luke?s Church.

It is interesting to speculate whether Brislington would have developed in the same way if any of the 15 children of Squire James Ireland, who died in 1864, had themselves had children. They were all childless. When the last son, Alfred, died in 1923 the estate passed to a distant relation in Scotland.

He had so little interest in the place that the land was sold and Crittall?s Factory was built in 1927 on the site of the family home, Brislington Hall. This was the beginning of rapid ?development?.

In many ways the family were typical of the many rich Bristol merchants who invested their money in a house and estate in the clean country air of the Somerset village of Brislington. The family came originally from Beaminster in Dorset where they were small farmers.

It was James Ireland who made a fortune in Bristol as a sugar and wine merchant and bought land in Brislington in the 1770?s. He was a remarkably energetic man, a great success in business, High Sheriff of Somerset in 1782, husband of Frances Godde, one of the wealthiest heiresses of the day and a friend of John Wesley. Wesley often stayed in Brislington Hall during his tours of the West Country and described ]ames as 'so pious and friendly a person.

His memorial in St. Luke?s Church gives some indication of the impression he made on his contemporaries: 'He was a man of very considerable qualifications and endowments, extensively known and universally beloved in his neighbourhood .... In domestic life he was affable, condescending and affectionate, gentle in his manners, a lover of peace, the friend of decorum and the guardian of order'.

image left: The Front view of Brislington Hall where the Clayfield-Ireland's lived a happy life for many years.

James left two daughters and the elder married Edward Clayfield, also a Bristol merchant.Their elder son, Edward, inherited an estate in Devon at Dowrich and it was the younger son James who assumed the name Clayfield-Ireland by royal licence in 1827.

This was to comply with instructions in his maternal grandfather's will that he could not inherit the estate unless he did so.

He married in 1832 Letitia Priaulx, an heiress from Guernsey. There were seven sons and eight daughters of the marriage but no grandchilden.

Miss Pearce

Miss Pearce came to live in Brislington in 1896. Her father was coachman to the Clayfield-Irelands and she has many memories of them:

'I was only a year and a week old when we came first to Brislington. My father used to drive the carriage wherever they wanted and he looked after the horses. He didn’t train for the job but the old coachman retired and he took over.

The Clayfield-Irelands had about five servants and then of course all the outside men gardeners and boys. I remember from about the age of five going out for drives with Miss Constance she was a cripple because the nurse dropped her when she was a child.

I used to go out with her around the garden and stay with her while she picked off all the dead roses and then we’d go and sit on a seat overlooking Flowers Hill. We lived in the entrance lodge. My father didn’t earn very much but my mother helped with the butter making and I used to go up every night to skim the large pans and I really enjoyed myself.

The Clayfield-Irelands were popular in the village but they were a strange family. Miss Mary was at Dr. Fox’s. I always understood she had ‘flu badly and after that she was sent to Dr. Fox’s and stayed there. Miss Constance went into the Convent at one time and I understand she was bought out of there.

She was a great lady - she used to wear a different flower in her bonnet for every season and put a white cover over her umbrella for the summer time. Miss Annette lived at Weston and I went there once for a week and we got on very well..

I remember Miss Mary once ran away from Dr. Fox’s and made her way to Weston to stay with Miss Annette and there was a big hunt on for her. Miss Mary was quite all right to talk to but she wasn’t responsible for her actions and she was always trying to escape.

There used to be lots of arguments between the sisters and Miss Alice who was a Plymouth Brethren. She used to walk to their meeting place in Totterdown. Miss Eleanor spent a lot of time travelling abroad - it was always great excitement among the servants because Miss Eleanor was coming home and then she’d be off again. She was very jolly and I liked her very much.

I knew Miss Constance the most - my sister and I used to help her walk around the estate. People used to take their caps off to the family when they went by. I was told to curtsy to them when I was a tiny child. Miss Constance said: 'I’m a lady born and I would like your child to curtsy to me.' So my sister and I had to. Those were far off days.

The house was very big inside, a lovely polished hall. We used to dance there at Christmas. They had grand dinner parties and I used to peep in and see them coming down the stairs. They used to say how you could hear someone, I suppose a servant, dropping a plate basket downstairs and no one knew who it was. It was said to be haunted. The Squire used to go down to Arno's Castle for his bath. There was a Roman bath there which has been taken away now.

My father used to drive the Squire to the White Hart Hotel and all the tenants would pay their rent there. They got a lot a money that way. The Squire used to put away £1 for each year’s service so that when he died my father had £25 because he’d been there 25 years. Every year they used to have the workhouse people from Keynsham over for tea in the afternoon.

Every year also the brass band would go up from the village and we’d all go to the Hall and dance and all the children were invited as well. They’d also have a garden party in summer time and everyone went. I once thought I was going to have diptheria and had to miss the party but it turned out to be tonsilitis. I had to stay indoors with a sheet over the door. I was very disappointed.

TRAMS & BUSES

The History

'The Bristol Tramways Company was set up in 1874 and started operation with the first tram on 9th. August, 1875, on a route from the top of Colston Street to the bottom of Blackboy Hill.

They started developing other horse tram routes in the city and eventually by the mid 1890’s they decided horses were not really good enough for the long and hilly routes and they were one of the first companies in the country to electrify the tram system.

This was carried out between 1895 and 1900. The first power station was at Beaconsfield Road, St. George and that covered the Old Market to Kingswood and Eastville lines which were the first electrified lines. When they extended electrification to the other side of the city they purchased a former sugar refinery at Counterslip by St. Philip’s Bridge and that became the main generating station for the whole system.

Power from there supplied the lines to Staple Hill, Kingswood, Hanham, Brislington, Knowle, Bedminster, Ashton, Hotwells, Westbury and Filton.

At their peak in 1920, 237 trains were running (there had been 232 by 1901). It was a private company. The Corporation of Bristol built the original line - they obtained an Act of Parliament for this but, they had not sought the powers to operate it.

A number of local industrialists therefore decided to set up a company to rent the line from the Corporation for a fixed period and thus give a percentage of profits to the Corporation.

During the first few years they found that having paid the rent from their profits they had nothing left because the horses ate all the rest of the income. This was one of the things that persuaded them to go on to electric traction. Horses could be used for only a couple of hours and then had to be given a four hour rest and two new horses had to be brought out for the tram; so, to operate the first six trains in 1875, they needed 60 horses. This rate was not economical.

Brislington Tram Terminus

In 1907 a house once stood beside the Square in Brislington at the tram terminus - this house was where the parish clerk, Mr. Skilling lived He collected rates and dealt with all kinds of parish business. When the tram reached Brislington there was always a short lay over period, about 5 minutes and then the next tram would be coming in so there was nearly always a tram sitting at the terminus.

There was overhead current collection and the circuit was made back through the rails. The tracks in Brislington came along as a dual track and then merged into one. On the overhead system you came along on one wire and as the tram reversed the overhead arm would come back, go out to the side and then pull back.

The first line coming in the Brislington direction ran from Bristol Bridge as far as Three Lamps at Totterdown in 1879 - that was horse operated. They extended it in 1898, still with horses, to Arno's Vale. In July 1899 they converted that length to electricity and from 22 December 1900 they electrified the whole route to the Square in Brislington. It was in fact one of the last lines to be electrified right through.

The Company was keen to expand but in order to construct any lines they had to obtain an Act of Parliament but this was nothing to do with the Corporation. The Bristol Corporation retained the right to purchase the Company in 1915 and after that every succeeding seven years.

They did not exercise this option until 1937 but it was a form of control and they took a percentage of the profits. It was because of this indecision as to whether every seven years the Corporation would buy out the Company that the trains were never modernised. The trains that were purchased in 1897 — 1901 were the ones that were running in 1941. The Company would not invest in new stock with the possibility that they would be bought out and so Bristol had some of the most archaic trains cars in the whole country.

Sandy Park

The Brislington Depot in Sandy Park was opened in 1900 as the main depot for the south side of the city and the main repair workshops. It was a good Company - the employees had security of employment. It was an honour to work for the Company. You behaved yourself and you never got the sack. Boys under 18 years of age were employed as points boys, promoted to bus conductors at 18 and to tram conductors at 21.

They looked forward to going from conductor to driver and on to inspector and making a real career of it. Their rules and regulations were very strict. If you didn’t abide by them you were instantly dismissed. You didn’t find a driver or conductor smoking on duty. They had to maintain their trains in clean order. You weren’t late in the morning or you got no work and therefore no pay for half a day.

But if you did your job well they looked after you. They had one of the first pension schemes, started in 1898. In the 1926 General Strike the tramway employees did not strike — they used to sleep beside their trains in the depot to prevent them being damaged by people who wanted to stop them running.

The tramway was very welcome in Brislington because at that time the village was becoming a suburb of Bristol and before the trains the only way for poorer people to get into the city was to walk — the Squire had his carriage, the tradesman his cart but everyone else had to walk to Three Lamps.

There was a proposal to extend the tram line from Brislington to Keynsham and connect with the Bath trains which came out as far as Newton St. Loe and proposed to extend to Saltford but it came to nothing. From 1906 they started running motor buses to link the two systems, from Brislington to Newton St. Loe.

The trains were licensed to carry 53 seated people but they were known to carry well over this number on a single tram and that was going up and down Blackboy Hill. In the old days most of the big events in Bristol used to take place on Durdham Downs as it was the only big open space and they used to run special services there. They used to pack the people on board the trains and send them off at the rate of one every 45 seconds. They could move a crowd at the rate of over 10,000 an hour.

The fare from Brislington to the Centre used to be 2d. per adult and 1d. for children and those prices didn’t change much till the 1930’s. The trains ran in all weathers — it didn’t matter if it was foggy because the lines kept them straight, or flooded. Nothing stopped them until the bombs in the last war.

There were no serious accidents on the Brislington line. There was an accident when a tram ran away down Whiteladies Road but that was only one of the two fatal accidents in the whole history of Bristol trains. The Brislington line ran across the city to Hotwells and it was very popular because it served Temple Meads.

They used to run every five or six minutes at off-peak periods and one behind the other when it was busy. It was a cheap way to travel; until the mid 1930’s private transport to and from work was unheard of. People might use a car to go to the countryside at the weekend but no one would drive to work. They’d all Jump on a tram and people in those days didn’t mind walking a short distance to get on a tram.

The Bus

The first motor buses came in 1906 but horse drawn buses had been operated from 1877 whey they were used from outlying areas like Kingswood to bring people in to get the trains. Later on they used horse buses on the route to Clifton and the Suspension Bridge because the residents of Clifton objected to having trains through their village.

They considered them too noisy. Horse buses were not operated to Brislington by the Tramways Company - they were probably operated by local carriers who would just put people in the back of a cart and perhaps put a few benches there. The motor buses started on February 5, 1906 and ran to Keynsham and Saltford and from August 20, 1906 they were extended to Newton St. Loe to join up with Bath trains.

image above: Bus at the top of White Hart Hill, taken between 9th. December, 1935 when this bus was first licensed and 1940 when it received wartime painting. This vehicle was the Bristol Tramways and Carriage Company's exhibit at the 1935 Commercial Motor Show for which it was painted all in gold livery.

The big advantage of the bus over the tram was that you kept dry upstairs in wet weather.

The Bath service ran till the early 1930?s when they operated the direct bus service from Bristol to Bath - the old 33 route. People felt very loyal to the trains - they were reliable and people knew they could walk up to the tram stop and the tram would be along in a matter of minutes.

The big advantage of the bus over the tram was that you kept dry upstairs in wet weather but Bristolians had been so used to getting wet upstairs that they didn?t worry much about it. Early buses in 1906 were double decked.

They kept? them like that on the city route but on the country routes they cut them down to single deck because of the danger of overhanging trees.

Also, because of the uneven roads, people were frightened to be on top. The whole bus swayed so much - it had solid tyres and the roads were rutted and pitted, not even fully tarmaced. There weren?t any serious accidents - but the speed limit was only 12 m.p.h.

The early buses were built by Thornycroft. The Tramways Company experimented with some F.I.A.T. buses but these were a disaster. They took the Company to Court for supplying defective vehicles and finally won their case in 1910.

In 1908 they decided that no manufacturer in the world could provide exactly what they wanted so they started to design and build their own buses and they still make bus chassis to the present day. In May 1908 the first home produced bus was put on the road. They started building them in the bus depot at Filton and moved to Kensington Hill, Brislington in 1912.

They were always a forward looking Company, always first in the field with new designs. They had a very forward looking General Manager and an excellent Chief Engineer!?