No prize this time Railings mystery solved

DURING the current lockdown I’ve spent quite a bit of time going through back issues of Bristol Times. In the November 19 2019 issue a photo of some intricate railings surrounding a public loo came with an appeal for suggestions as to where it was.

Have you found out where? You see, referring back to the previous issue,12 November 2019, it seemed to me that the photo on Latimer’s Diary page, the one with the halftimbered car, showed something familiar.

Having a magnifying glass to hand I studied both pictures and thought the profile of the railings of the underground loo near the Bay Horse looked similar to the other, both having balls and twiddly bits. Do I get the usual prize (i.e. nothing)? Pete Hammond via email

Editor’s reply: Obviously we’re very flattered that readers are looking through back issues of BT in lockdown, but alas Mr Hammond, we are unable to award you the usual prize of nothing, for we did resolve the matter. The November 12 photo was taken on the Haymarket, while the one featured the following week was at the top of Prince Street.

It is possible that the ironwork came from the same supplier, accounting for the similarity of the balls and twiddly bits.

Great neighbours

✒ REGARDING the “squatters” camp at Purdown (BT Letters, July 7): My parents lived in a similar situation in an army hut on Bedminster Down for a while after the war, but she only mentioned it to me quite late on in her life as I think she was slightly ashamed of it.

She married Dad in 1942 but they never set up home together during the war as he went to lots of different places with the RAF, so she carried on living with her parents.

When Dad was demobbed they were desperate to have a place of their own but for many months they had to share a small bedroom in my grandparents’ small terraced house along with my mum’s sister and her husband, who had also just come back from the war.

Although pre-fabs and council houses were being built, there weren’t enough for the demand and my parents were on a very long waiting list. Then, when my Auntie Jean got pregnant and they had the prospect of yet another person under the same small roof that was the last straw.

When people started taking over empty army huts my Dad got in there and grabbed one of the huts at Bedminster Down and that was where they moved.

The way Mum told it, they loved it to begin with because though it was rough and ready they at least had a “place of their own”.

But as was mentioned in your letters page last week, not all the locals took to them kindly, looking down their noses at them. On the other hand, she said, the “neighbours” in the other huts were very nice and they looked after each other.

After about 18 months they managed to get a proper council house and I was born not long after that.

I never had the chance to ask Mum whereabouts the huts were, but during the lockdown I’ve been on the internet doing the research and I am 99 per cent certain that they were where the South Bristol Crematorium and cemetery is. Had it not been for their luck in getting a house it is possible that I would have been born there – and maybe I’ll be buried there as well! Valerie Hodge Long Ashton

Editor’s reply: We’d also be 99% certain that your Mum and Dad lived at the Bedminster Down antiaircraft gun site as we don’t know of any other wartime military installations in that neighbourhood.

For what it’s worth, your parents were in some of the poshest huts in Bristol. Empty military huts all over the city (and elsewhere in the country) were occupied by people in the summer of 1946.

By the end of that year, well over 1,000 people were living in them within Bristol’s boundaries alone.

While most of the huts had been in use until 1945, many were in poor condition. Some had been vandalised by departing soldiers or local kids, and few had luxuries like running water, proper sanitation or electricity. The Bedminster Down ones, though, according to reports in the Post from 1946, were the elite, with everything neat and tidy and running properly.

Various letters and mails from readers in the BT letters pages a while ago also suggest that the last people to occupy the Bedminster huts before they were abandoned may well have been German prisoners-of-war.

Within weeks of being squatted, all the Bristol huts became de facto “council housing”, with “tenants” paying rent, and normal services, like refuse, postal deliveries etc, water, electricity etc.

Purdown Percy

✒ Regarding possible military sites on Purdown during and after the second World War: I was born in 1941 and after being bombed out lived on Stapleton Road with my mother and grandparents.

My Dad was captured at Crete in May 1941 and was a prisoner of war for the next four years until the war ended.

The big gun sited at Purdown was known locally as Purdown Percy. A letter that my Mum sent to my Dad was censored by the Germans and led him to believe Percy was a real person and that my Mum was having an affair with him!

When America entered the war their soldiers had a camp on Purdown, and any buildings still there after the war could be something to do with them. The soldiers were often seen in Eastville walking past our house, and my Mum, only 22 years old, admitted to being a little frightened of them.

After the war many people were homeless, thanks to the German bombing. Ex-soldiers sometimes knocked on my grandparents’ front door asking if there was any work to do in return for a cup of tea, never begging, always offering something in return.

On one occasion my Grandfather, a First World War veteran, took an almost brand new pair of shoes off his own feet and gave to the visitor at the door.

“He needed them more than me,” my Grandfather said.

They were always headed for a bed for the night which we understood to be at Winterbourne, but could well have been huts that were left by the American troops on Purdown.

In other parts of the country many families were living in accommodation no longer needed by the military. After my Dad was released and home again, perhaps 1947, I remember being taken by my parents to visit my Dad’s friend, a fellow prisoner of war, who was living in a Nissen hut with his family somewhere in Oxfordshire.

Whether they were squatting there I don’t know, but it was spacious and quite homely.

I think we were quite envious because at least they had a home of their own, not like us, sharing with grandparents and with thousands of others on the Council Housing

waiting list for accommodation that didn’t exist. P. Collins by email