Weird and wonderful ways to travel by bus
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HISTORY always favours the winners, or so the saying goes. But sometimes the losers can have an interesting story to tell.
Take the plan to transform Tewkesbury from a bustling coaching town into a fashionable spa and health resort for instance.
A reminder of this failed attempt was Spa House, which stood on the Ashchurch Road about a mile out of Tewkesbury until it was demolished in 1961.
The site is now occupied by Springfield and Wellfield Gardens.
In about 1830 Nicholas Smithsend who lived at Walton House, discovered a mineral spring in the grounds of his home and sniffed an opportunity, or so he thought.
Smithsend engaged a physician named James Johnstone to analyse the water and the results, snappily entitled “Some account of the medicinal water, near Tewkesbury; with thoughts on the use and diseases of the lymphatic glands” were published.
In an effusive report, Johnstone, reported (as he had been paid to report) that the water was remarkably wonderful in every regard.
“Its resemblance in taste, and other appearances to the Cheltenham water, strikes everyone who makes the comparison. Its operation on the body, also is exactly the same, a pint or more, acts as a gentle laxative and diuretic.”
Analysis revealed the water contained Epsom and Glauber salts and advertisements promoting the new spa claimed that a good guzzle of the salty solution would cure just about any malady known to man.
The spa opened in the mid 1830s and Tewkesbury braced itself for an expected influx of the great and good who were going to put the town well and truly on the map.
But it didn’t happen. The venture was not well funded, so lacked the ballrooms and meeting places that made a spa favoured by the rich and leisured classes.
More to the point, the fashion for taking the waters had waned by the time Tewkesbury’s spa appeared, so Smithsend’s water venture sank almost without trace.
Fortunately for members of their crews, ships built by the Gloucester Ferro-concrete Shipbuilding Co Ltd in the latter years of the First World War didn’t sink, although they weren’t a sufficient success to keep the firm afloat.
These vessels were the brainchild of a Gloucester architect named William Leah, who designed the Theatre De Luxe cinema in Northgate Street, Gloucester and the splendid Art Deco delight that can be seen at the top of Stroud High Street to this day and opened in 1931 as the town’s main branch of the Co-op.
With iron and steel in demand for the war effort, Leah’s plan was to build concrete barges on the canal at Hempsted.
Between 1917 and 1920 seven, seagoing concrete barges were built by the firm, which employed 350 people.
Launched into the canal, the dumb barges, so called because they had no engines, were towed behind a tug.
Each weighed 850 tons, had a carrying capacity of 1,000 tons and saw service ferrying munitions across the English Channel to the trenches in northern France.
They were obviously well made, as some of them were in use bringing salt and other cargo from Sharpness to Gloucester until the 1960s.
Six were then beached at Purton to reduce river erosion, while the seventh was rescued in 1990 by staff and friends of the National Waterways Museum where it can be seen today.
By 1920 the war had ended and the need for concrete barges had disappeared.
No more vessels were built, but the works continued to make concrete for many years.
There were some spectacular failed ventures during the half century or so following George III’S visit to Cheltenham, when the town was developed at meteoric pace by speculators who were out to make a fast buck.
One of them was a solicitor named Thomas Billings who in 1831 bought land that is today the Park campus of the University of Gloucestershire.
His plan was to build a zoo, or as it was officially titled, the Gloucestershire
Zoological, Botanical and Horticultural Gardens.
A grand plan it was too, as the illustration you see reproduced here proves.
Around the centre piece Grand Promenade some 750 feet long and punctuated by statues and fountains, were arranged various aviaries, aquariums, dens for carnivorous animals, monkey houses, a reconstruction of the North Pole complete with icebergs and
polar bears, a bear pit, llamas, zebras and kangaroos, plus houses and paddocks for elephants and rhinos.
There was also to be a “Geographical and botanical garden for the arrangement and culture of plants in the respective countries to which they are indigenous”.
An issue of 4,000 shares at £5 was offered to the market to bolster finances and Queen Victoria’s Coronation Day, 28 June 1838, was chosen for the new zoo’s opening.
But there were problems. For one thing the project was underfunded, but more importantly Cheltenham already had a well established zoological and botanical garden.
In 1821 Charles Hale Jessop opened such a venture on a 20-acre site near the town centre that remained in business until 1870. Now the spot is Waitrose and its immediate environs.
Cheltenham simply didn’t need two zoos and Billing’s enterprise failed.
All that remains is Cornerways, the white building with an Italianate tower at the junction of Park Place and The Park that was the entrance to his zoo.
A decreasing number of older residents still call it the Elephant House.