Your letters

■ Bristol Times welcomes letters and emails on any subject connected with history, heritage and nostalgia in the Bristol area. We are also happy to publish appeals for information as well as comments and additional information on articles and letters we have already published.

We also love getting photographs but please do not send originals if you want them returned. Photocopies of pictures will not reproduce well on our pages. If sending pictures by post, send us a copy of the original that you have scanned (or photographed with a digital camera) and printed out. If sending pictures by email, scan or photograph your original and send it as a jpeg of at least 300dpi resolution. A rough rules of thumb is that if the full size of a colour or black and white picture is four inches (10cm) or more on your computer screen and all the details are clear, it should be OK. But bigger is always better!

Solid shelter is 80 years old

✒ I AM writing in reference to the usage of air raid shelters as mentioned in BT August 11th and August 25th.

I enclose photographs of a Morrison air raid shelter in my back garden which I use as a shed for garden tools, plant containers and lots of odds and ends. It really needs painting and smartening up!

I was once given a price for demolition of £4,000 but for now I will leave that for someone else to do when I am no longer around.

We came to live here in 1945 and my mother kept chickens – they were brought into the shelter at night and used a chicken run at the side of the main garden but unfortunately a fox got at them.

I believe the shelter is 80 years old if built in 1940 when children were evacuated and gas masks issues to everyone. I have always known it as a Morrison shelter but I may be wrong?

Brilliant! What a wonderful thing to have in your garden (not everyone might agree). It’s probably as well that you didn’t have it demolished as it might by now be an attractive selling-point for prospective buyers.

This does not look to us like a Morrison Shelter, which was at root a very basic structure whose principal component was a curved sheet of corrugated steel. This is a far more substantial shelter which from some of the photos (we’ve not had space to show them all) included reinforced concrete as well as bricks.

It does look a lot like a number of other garden shelters we’ve seen and may well have been built to a standard design. Can any readers offer any information?

It’s no surprise that it would have cost so much to demolish. We know of one householder in Bishopston many years ago who had a similar shelter to yours in his small back yard. He tried taking it down himself

»

with a sledgehammer and elbowgrease, but gave up in despair. A structure designed to withstand high-explosive bombs is not to be trifled with …

Some form of code?

✒ THE article about the WW1 postcards (BT, Sept 1) refers to “in the pink”.

This was an old saying which meant that you were very well, as in tickety boo.

Thanks Mike. You raise an interesting point insofar as we assumed that readers would all know that that was what Cecil Brown meant when he was writing to his parents and sister at their home in Bishopston.

It’s as well to be reminded that words and expressions which we assume everyone understands may be nothing of the sort. The curious thing about the 32 postcards is that more than half of them use this expression, which leads us to suspect that “in the pink” might – just might – be some sort of secret code the family had agreed on to evade the censors. At its most basic it might simply have meant that he was not in the line and not in any danger.

Meanwhile, the postcards of Cecil Howard Brown of 81 Kennington Avenue, who served in (we think) the 6th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment in WW1 and who was later a furniture retailer in South Wales, remain unclaimed by any relatives. Jon Knowles, who found them at a London car boot sale, will happily donate them to any family members who come forward.

» Miss Shilling’s brilliant gizmo

✒ THE Miss Shilling mentioned in the note on the Dynasphere (BT Letters, September 8) was Beatrice Shilling, a brilliant engineer who most famously invented a device to prevent Merlin engines cutting out in a dive – a matter of life and death for Spitfire and Hurricane pilots during dogfights in the Battle of Britain.

You must be right. The picture was taken at Brooklands, where Beatrice ‘Tilly’ Shilling regularly raced motorcycles in the Thirties. The gizmo she devised to prevent Merlin engine cut-out was variously, and in all cases un-gallantly, known as ‘Miss Tilly’s Diaphragm’, ‘The Tilly Orifice’ or, grotesquely, ‘Miss Shilling’s Orifice’.

»