Lye of the land Remembering a time of maps before apps...
I’VE been slowly working my way through the thousands of old Post photos and negatives I’ve scanned in recent years, cleaning them up for putting into BT at some point.
I sometimes post some of them to the Bristol Times Twitter feed (@ Bristol_Times), just to see what gets a reaction.
So, for instance, a very boring photo of a patch of Canons Marsh which is now part of Millennium Square being used in the 1970s as a car park proved hugely popular. I have no idea why.
This photo from exactly 25 years ago of Dame Edna Everage got some interesting responses, too, not so much because of Dame Edna (who was posing for pictures before doing a show in Bristol – presumably the Hippodrome) but because of the A-Z of Bristol (and Bath).
Remember the A-Z? Time was when no home was without one because it was – mark my words carefully, young ‘uns! – the only way of finding your way around town.
I acquired my first copy when I had a student job as a roadsweeper. Because I was filling in for regular sweepers who were away on holiday, I was doing different streets every week. The A-Z was handy for planning the most efficient route.
This mattered a lot; the last thing you wanted was to be going uphill when your barrow was full and heavy. If you had to sweep horrors like Marlborough Hill (Kingsdown) or Constitution Hill (Hotwells) then you needed to ensure you did them first.
More importantly, you needed an A-Z to give people directions. In the 20th century, people had corporation roadsweepers instead of satnav. He knew every street within a one-mile radius of wherever he lay his brush and was accosted several times daily by pedestrians and drivers needing directions. No problem for me if I was in the middle of town, or Bedminster or Clifton, but plonk me and my barrow in St George or Easton and I was lost – but not if I had my tatty and be-grimed A-Z in my pocket!
The picture on Twitter got a number of replies from people who say they still use their copies in preference to digital technology which, let’s face it, isn’t always reliable.
A great big Lye
Whilst Twittering about Dame Edna’s A-Z, I also mentioned the curious case of Lye Close, which appears in some editions as a little side-street just off Canynge Square in Clifton.
Lye Close – the clue is in the name – is a lie. It doesn’t exist, never existed. It was one of the socalled “trap streets” which the Geographer’s A-Z Map Company Ltd. inserted into its maps to catch out anyone ripping off its copyright.
The firm started in the 1930s, and making the maps which made its fortune was hard and expensive work, so the last thing they wanted was other people copying their maps and passing them off as their own.
Anyone publishing a map of Bristol with Lye Close in Clifton had plainly ripped it off from the A-Z and would be getting a very menacing letter from Geographer’s A-Z’s lawyers. The firm did the same thing in some other towns, with a fair few in London.
There was another interesting reply from one Twitter user, who said he recalled some controversy when one edition of the Bristol A-Z implied that – horror of horrors! – City and Rovers would be sharing the ground at Ashton Gate.
Does anyone have any recollection of this? Do you have the offending edition? If so, can you mail us a photo or scan of the page in question?
Tell us about “Dynamite Bill”
Just a weird little story I came across in some old newspapers: Ninety years ago this month, all of Bristol was in a frightful tizzy over the disappearance of 17 pounds of gelignite from the premises of Messrs. Thomas Free and Sons Frenchay Quarries Ltd at Staple Hill.
Gelignite, aka blasting gelatin, aka “jelly” was invented by Alfred Nobel, who also invented dynamite before going on to invent the guilty conscience (aka the Nobel Peace Prize).
Jelly is cheap and stable, and was commonly used for demolition, and quarrying.
The cache at the Staple Hill quarry was securely stored in a
sturdy magazine with three locks on the doors.
But not securely enough to stop someone breaking in and taking a quantity of gelignite pellets and some black powder (presumably used for detonating it?)
The law quickly concluded that the theft was the work not of terrorists or safe-breakers, but kids.
Quantities of jelly were found around the Fishponds area and a youth was arrested who confessed to Superintendent Reed that they had broken the pellets up and thrown bits at passing girls, at trains and into schoolrooms.
“They had also exploded some of the gelignite in the streets.”
The ringleader, a 15-year-old from St George, was duly grassed up and nicked. “I done it for mischief,” he told the Superintendent.
At Staple Hill Police Court on October 24, 1930, the boy’s mother blamed his fixation with explosives on trashy novels – “Penny Dreadfuls”.
“There was one called ‘Dynamite Bill’. I have tried to get them away from him. I don’t know where he gets them from.”
The Superintendent informed the court that the kid was a one-boy crime wave all on his own, with plenty of previous. He was remanded for a week pending a medical examination and was likely to be sent to a training ship.
So then … Anyone reading this who thinks they might know who this lad was? He’ll be 105 years old now or, more likely, dead. If he was your uncle, father or next-door neighbour, tell us about him. We want to know if he straightened out or continued his life of crime.
What to do with idle hands
I recently retrieved some of the letters that had arrived at the office through the post over the past few months. Some will appear on the BT letters pages, but some, alas, are too dated to include. We are very, very sorry for this because communication with and from readers is extremely important to us, but blame the wretched virus.
There was a very nice letter from BT regular Mrs Carol Dyer which arrived back in April (sorry! See above) during the first lockdown (first because we might be having another by the time you’re reading this). She was grateful to her neighbours in Barr’s Court and to family for looking after the needs of herself and her husband.
Mrs Dyer and her husband took a very pro-active approach to house arrest, with puzzles, playing cards and getting out their old vinyl LPs. As he had been a keen pianist back in the day, her husband obtained a secondhand keyboard and was working his way through old music books. Mrs Dyer was also learning to crochet and writing a true story from her childhood.
I was moaning on these pages last week about how increasing numbers of us are in thrall to hightech digital entertainment, plus social media, plus checking our phones.
The Dyers’ aggressively positive attitude to enforced leisure puts me to shame – and perhaps some of you, too!
At the same time I was reminded of BT’s recent article about the Folk House’s 100th birthday, and the observation that Graham Knight, Secretary to the Folk House trustees, made about the popularity of its classes. Pottery, art, dancing, music, writing – all hands-on stuff, none of it anything to do with digital technology.
It’s shaping up to be a long old winter, and even people in full-time jobs are going to find they have time on their hands. Now would be a good time to learn to do something with those hands other than just switching channels or posting pictures of kittens.
And remember if you’re writing your memoirs of Bristol in former times, we might well want to publish an extract. You don’t even have to give us any sex and scandal.* (* It’d be nice if you could, mind.) Cheers then!