Fells Bristol Plaques

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6906-2
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Blue, red, green and black plaques - they are everywhere in Bristol, on houses, bridges and even on a riverbank. But have you ever wanted to know more than the brief details they tell you about the person they honour? There are fascinating and colourful stories behind all of the plaques in the city, which venerate a variety of artists, inventors and scientists, as well as ordinary folk who have done extraordinary things. Read about the ex-convict whose books were turned into West End musicals, the millionaire businessman who was promised a cabbage a year as thanks for his philanthropy, and the architect transported for financial fraud who ended up having his portrait on a banknote. This handy guide is for all the curious, who want to know more about the people who lived and worked in the city in times gone by. The first volume of its kind, it is the only reference book to contain potted histories of Bristol's fascinating plaques.

MAURICE FELLS is a born and bred Bristolian with a passionate interest in the city's history, and a prolific author of books about Bristol. He worked as a journalist in both the print and broadcast mediums, and held key editorial posts in regional television, radio and newspapers. He now freelances, with features on local history appearing in the Western Daily Press and Bristol Post. He is often asked by BBC West and ITV West to take part in programmes about regional history. He has also written features about the regeneration of Bristol City Docks for national newspapers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fells, Maurice

Leseproben

1

PERSONAL PLAQUES

REVD CANON ALFRED AINGER (1837–1904)

WRITER AND CHURCH OF ENGLAND CLERGYMAN

PLAQUE: CLIFTON ROAD, BS8 1BS

When he was appointed a canon of Bristol Cathedral in 1887 the Revd Alfred Ainger found that apart from the usual religious services there were no other activities taking place in the church. It was not long before he introduced a number of lectures on literary subjects, readings from Shakespeare and other dramatic productions. The move seems to have been popular with the rest of the cathedral clergy and the congregation because after his death a memorial window was installed in honour of Canon Ainger. Mr Ainger also preached at neighbouring churches and taught at the cathedral school.

During his clerical career Mr Ainger held various prestigious posts including those of Assistant Master of the Collegiate School, Sheffield; Master of the Temple in London’s legal enclave, off The Strand; and Chaplain in Ordinary to both Queen Victoria and Edward VII.

While he was at Bristol Cathedral Mr Ainger was noted for making it almost a duty to climb the steep hills to his home in Clifton each day. Apparently, he refused offers of transport until poor health forced him to do so.

As residentiary canon of the cathedral he was required to live in the city for three months a year. As there wasn’t any cathedral property available for his accommodation Mr Ainger rented Richmond House, a handsome early eighteenth-century mansion on Clifton Road overlooking the much better known Palladian-style Clifton Hill House. However, a small black plaque on one side of the front door of Richmond House states that it is ‘an English Listed Building’.

Another plaque on the front of the house commemorates the Reverend Ainger. Its inscription says that Mr Ainger ‘Master of the Temple, friend of Dickens, and biographer of the essayist Charles Lamb lived here 1888–1898’. Apart from writing a life of the essayist Lamb, he contributed to biographies on some of the ‘literary greats’ of the day, including Alfred Tennyson, to the Dictionary of National Biography. These entries were always published under the initials ‘A.A.’.

Ainger’s friendship with Dickens went back to the days when he attended school with two of the authors’ sons, and sometimes was invited to their home.

THOMAS BEDDOES (1760–1808)

SCIENTIST AND PHYSICIAN

PLAQUES:
RODNEY PLACE, CLIFTON, BS8 4HY
11 HOPE SQUARE, BS8 4LX
6 DOWRY SQUARE, BS8 4SH

Dr Thomas Beddoes had a traditional education at Oxford University, where he later became a reader in Chemistry, but when he set up his medical practice in Bristol he became known as the doctor with ‘curious cures’.

He set up a laboratory in a Georgian house in Hope Square, Hotwells, but wasn’t there long before he opened what he grandly called his Pneumatic Institute at nearby Dowry Square. A local newspaper reported that Dr Beddoes could treat ‘incurable diseases including consumption, dropsy and obstinate venereal complaints’.

One of his ideas was to cure or prevent consumption by the inhalation of gases, and amongst other experiments extensive trials with nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, were carried out at the institute. Dr Beddoes also recommended that his patients should enjoy the company of cows and inhale the gases they exhaled from both ends of their body. He even drove milking cows upstairs into patients’ bedrooms and used oil stoves to raise the room temperature even higher. One of his patients was reported as claiming that she slept three nights in a cow shed and was cured of her illness.

It was said that Dr Beddoes also tried to bleach the skin of a black man white by making him hold his arm in a jar of oxide gas. Needless to say this experiment was in vain.

To help him run his institute Dr Beddoes employed a 19-year-old man from Penzance, Humphrey Davy, who had been recommended to him as a ‘clever chemist and promising young man’. Beddoes appointed Davy as superintendent of the institute and also provided him with accommodation at his home in Clifton.

Beddoes ran the institute for about three years and when Davy left he turned it into a charitable dispensary, called the Preventive Medicine Institute for the Sick and Drooping Poor. Beddoes died at his home aged 48, suffering from dropsy in the chest.

A large black plaque, erected by the long-defunct Clifton Improvement Board, is attached to Dr Beddoes’ house in Rodney Place, Clifton. The inscription states that his son, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who became a poet and physiologist, was born there in 1803. While he was still at school he wrote a drama called The Bride’s Tragedy. After he died at the age of 46, a friend published Poems by the late Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

The rather informative tablet at his birthplace also tells us that one of the visitors to the house was Maria Edgeworth, an aunt of the young Beddoes. She was a novelist, who also wrote books on education as well as improving stories for children. There is also a plaque, erected by Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society, outside a house in Hope Square which simply reads ‘Thomas Beddoes, scientist, worked here 1793–99’. There is also a plaque outside Dr Beddoes’ Institute at Dowry Square.

ERNEST BEVIN (1881–1951)

TRADE UNION LEADER AND POLITICIAN

PLAQUE: 39 SAXON ROAD, BS2 9 UQ

The life story of Ernest Bevin could be summed up in the sort of front-page headline that editors of tabloid newspapers love: ‘From van boy to Cabinet Minister’.

Bevin was born in the Somerset village of Winsford, in the heart of Exmoor, as far away as one could imagine from the corridors of power in Westminster and Whitehall. His formal education, for what it was, ended when he was only 11 years old and Bevin was sent to work on a farm. Two years later he found himself working as a kitchen boy in a restaurant in the centre of Bristol. Later Bevin became a van boy and subsequently drove a van delivering bottles of mineral water for a local firm.

He soon took an interest in local politics and was appointed unpaid secretary of the Bristol Right-to-Work Committee. Bevin was later involved with the merger of fourteen trades unions and 300,000 workers to form the mighty Transport and General Workers’ Union, which was officially launched on New Year’s Day 1922. He became the union’s general secretary, a post he held for nearly twenty years.

After the General Strike of 1926 Ernest Bevin strengthened his links with the Labour Party and was eventually elected as a Member of Parliament. He was a Labour minister in Winston Churchill’s coalition government of 1940–45 and after the Labour Party’s landslide victory in 1945 he was appointed foreign secretary in Atlee’s government. By the early 1950s poor health had caught up with Ernest Bevin, causing him to resign from government in March 1951. He died a month later.

Before the First World War Ernest Bevin married a wine taster’s daughter and the couple made their home in Saxon Road, St Werburghs. A blue plaque honouring Ernest Bevin is fixed to the terraced house with an inscription stating that he lived there, although it does not say for how long.

ELIZABETH BLACKWELL (1821–1910)

PIONEERING PHYSICIAN

PLAQUE: 1 WILSON STREET, BS2 9HH

With her doggedness and determination Elizabeth Blackwell must have been an inspiration to all women when she achieved her goal of becoming a doctor. Indeed, she was the first British woman to become a general practitioner, albeit qualifying in America.

Initially she was refused entry to the medical colleges with their all-male students and staff who were against women joining them. Elizabeth Blackwell eventually succeeded in getting a place at Geneva Medical College, New York State. Not only did she graduate as a doctor but also came top of her class.

Elizabeth Blackwell, the third of nine daughters of a sugar refiner, was born at Counterslip, but when she was just 3 years old the family moved to Wilson Street in the St Paul’s district of Bristol where she was brought up. Eight years later, with the infectious disease cholera raging in Bristol, her father took the family to America where he set up a refinery. Ironically, cholera was also rampant in New York where the Blackwell’s settled.

After her father’s death in 1838 Elizabeth helped to support the family financially by teaching, although she devoted much of her spare time to studying medicine using textbooks that were borrowed from friends. In 1847 she was admitted as a student to Geneva Medical College.

After qualifying Elizabeth worked in a hospital in Paris, later joining the staff of the renowned St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, before returning to New York to set up a hospital which was staffed by women only. She later returned to Britain, where she was the first woman to have her name entered on the British medical register. Unfortunately, she contracted an eye disease from a patient, losing the sight in one eye, which put an end to her ambition to be a surgeon. But that didn’t prevent her working in medicine until she was in her mid eighties.

Elizabeth Blackwell is honoured for her work by a plaque mounted on the wall of her childhood home in Wilson Street, St Paul’s. A plate beneath it states that the plaque was ‘donated by the Medical Women’s Federation and Friends’. Appropriately, it was unveiled...