The Mayflower is a steam tug preserved by Bristol Museums Galleries & Archives. She is based in the City Docks outside the M Shed. She is the oldest Bristol-built ship still afloat and is believed to be the oldest surviving tug in the world.
She was launched on 18th May 1861, cost £1,000 and was built to work on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal and the River Severn.
This week she’s not afloat at all, but high and dry on the patent slipway of the Underfall Yard undergoing some maintenance and is due to remain there for the next week, as I gathered on Friday evening.
Local author, historian and journalist Eugene Byrne is leading a guided walk at 10 pm on Sunday, 23rd June 2013 for Bristol Civic Society.
The topic of Eugene’s walk will be – as stated in this post’s title – ‘Bristol’s tall tales and urban legends’ ( will the legendary Bristol Hum be included? Ed. ).
The duration of the walk will be approx. 90 minutes to 2 hours.
To book a place phone 07535 074296 or email walks (at) bristolcivicsociety.org.uk.
The cost will be £2 for Civic Society members and £5 for non-members.
Late yesterday afternoon I returned from Barncamp 2013, – a weekend of “hacktivism, workshops, entertainment, politics and fun in the sun” held at Highbury Farm up the beautiful Wye Valley a few miles south of Monmouth. Barncamp itself was open to attendees from Friday 7th June to Sunday 9th June. As part of the production crew, I got to spend a couple of additional nights on site, wearing out the view. Barncamp is a joint production between HacktionLab, FLOSS Manuals and Bristol Wireless.
The view up the Wye to Monmouth from the Barncamp site
My highs and lows of the event are listed below.
The highs
Seeing the International Space Station (posts passim) pass overhead on the first evening.
Ben Green’s wild food walk – something I’d been promising myself to do for years. I ate wild garlic flowers for the first time while on Ben’s walk.
Not reading the online edition (or any other format) of the dreadful Bristol Post.
A fine pub lunch – steak and ale pie -at the Lamb & Flag after my visit to A&E in Abergavenny (see below).
Seeing lots of people I haven’t seen since the last Barncamp, 2 years ago.
“Wow!” Charlie‘s one word tasting note for Laphroaig single malt whisky.
Getting a surprised reaction from some for annointing the campfire hearth with Laphroaig before lighting (humour an old hippy as he appeases the genus loci, will you? Thanks. Ed.).
Excellent beers all weekend (apart from the solitary pint of Nutcracker over at The Boat in Penallt).
The lows
Getting knackered walking up and down the hill from the camping field to the barn and up and down to the village shop.
Not catching sight of the ravens I heard all the week.
Hitting myself on the left thumb with a lump hammer, requiring a trip to Neville Hall Hospital in Abergavenny and the insertion of 3 stiches (picture below).
Having to come back to Bristol and routine.
Ouch!
And finally…
A big thank you to the folks at Highbury Farm, our hosts for Barncamp, especially Tez for the comfrey to help with my war wounds. Hope to see you again soon.
Sean Benyon, Labour councillor for Bristol’s Southville ward, has either bought fellow councillor Gus Hoyt’s old mobile phone (posts passim) or has fallen into the same predictive text trap as his Green colleague down the Counts Louse.
For people my age, “know your place” is synonymous with the British class system and was usually found in company with the idiom “your elders and betters“.
However, for Bristolians, Know Your Place is also a local success story, particularly as it’s somewhere one can learn about and share information about historic Bristol. It’s part of the local council website where visitors can:
Explore historic maps of Bristol including 18th century tithe maps, late 19th & early 20th century Ordnance Survey maps, plus Ashmeads plans of central Bristol from 1828, 1855 and 1874;
Access information from the Bristol Historic Environment Record (HER);
Upload your own historical information and images; and
Comment on your area’s heritage.
My bit of Bristol as seen on Know Your Place with 1880 Ordnance Survey map overlay
Know Your Place was funded jointly by the City Council and English Heritage and was money well spent, only costing £25,000.
Since the site went live, more than 500 people have contributed their own historical information and images, but there’s still more that could be added given that the city’s history goes back to at least Saxon times.
There are now plans to expand the mapping to Bristol’s surrounding authorities, which go under the acronym CUBA – Councils that Used to Be in Avon.
Despite its long and fascinating history, Bristol has had a reputation over time of being the graveyard of dreams. Some dreams assume concrete form and it is the lack of concrete – or any other building materials – that are the subject of local author Eugene Byrne’s new book ‘Unbuilt Bristol’, which is published today by Redcliffe Press at a very reasonable £15.00.
Unbuilt Bristol is described as ‘The city that might have been 1750-2050’. As regards the book’s content, Eugene writes:
While all your old favourites are there (all the other proposals for a bridge over the Avon Gorge, the insane 1960s/70s plan to fill in the Floating Harbour and cover it in roads etc.) there are plenty more which you won’t have heard of. Like the Victorian scheme to put Bristol’s main railway station in Queen Square, or a visionary 19th century plan to run the city’s street lighting using power generated by the rise and fall of the river Avon.
And it’s the latter idea – that visionary 19th century plan to run the city’s streetlights on tidal power from the Avon that forms the subject of this post.
River Avon – the power behind the city of Bristol. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The project to generate electricity from the Avon to run Bristol’s streetlights is described in Charles Wells’ A short history of the Port of Bristol’, which was published in 1909 and is available free from the Internet Archive. Regarding the amount of tidal power available and the fate of the project itself, Wells wrote:
…when proposals were first brought before the city for the introduction of electric light (November, 1881), Mr. Smith secured the appointment of a committee to consider an interesting scheme for utilising the great power of the tide in the river Avon for generating the electricity. Mr. Smith said he believed by this method a saving of about £6,000 per annum could be effected compared with the cost of generation in the ordinary way. Prof. Silvanus P. Thompson, who was on the staff of Bristol University College, had made calculations (upon data supplied by Mr. T. Howard, Dock Engineer) showing that the available tidal power at Totterdown was over 6 billions of foot pounds per annum, equal to 279,389 h.p. per tide. At Rownham the power was three times greater, and at Avonmouth over 2,000,000 h.p. per tide. To light by electricity the 4,274 street lamps then in the city would require from 4 billions to 2 billions of foot pounds per annum according to the system adopted. There was, however, no practical result from the appointment of the committee, and in March 1891 the Corporation voted £66,000 for the beginning of the present installation with an ordinary power station on Temple Backs.
Where it meets the Severn estuary at Avonmouth, the Bristol Avon has a tidal range of 15 m (49 ft), the second largest in the world, only being beaten by the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada.
Given the present concerns about burning fossil fuels and carbon emissions, perhaps it is time to revisit generating electricity from the Bristol Avon, although one factor that could prove a disadvantage is the heavy load of silt sloshing up and down the river with every tide.
This coming Monday 29th April Bristol Radical History Group and Bristol & District Hazards Group are jointly organising an evening talk entitled ‘Blacklisting’ at 7.30pm at Tony Benn House, 92 Victoria Street, Redcliffe, Bristol BS1 6AY (map) to mark Workers’ Memorial Day.
Politicians and employers like to portray the blacklisting of trade union members for their health & safety activities as a thing of the past. That does not correspond with the reality of life for those who continue to stick their neck out to protect themselves, their workmates and the public. Indeed, here in Bristol builders and electricians who were members of trade unions were banned from taking part in the building of Cabot Circus shopping centre, it has emerged.
The talk will feature 2 speakers.
Firstly, Di Parkin is a historian and has published “60 Years of Struggle“, the history of Betteshanger, a militant Kent pit. She will speak about the actions of the Economic League who provided blacklisting information to employers in the 1970s and the impact this had in places such as British Leyland’s Cowley car works and the Kent coalfield.
Secondly, an electrician who’s an active member of Unite, a shop steward and who has worked in the construction industry for 40 years will talk about his experiences of victimisation and the campaign against blacklisting.
In ‘A Shropshire Lad’ published in 1896, A. E. Housman (1859–1936) wrote:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
It’s a poem that has stayed with me throughout life since I first heard it and memorised it at Market Drayton Junior School in Shropshire some five decades ago: and I must agree with dear old A.E.; the cherry is a lovely tree. The Japanese even have a cherry blossom festival.
Eastertide was early this year in March and was unusually cold, so the cherry trees still had bare boughs then.
They’ve only just started blooming properly in Bristol now.
