MEET THE AUTHOR

PETER CULLIMORE’s book Saints, Crooks & Slavers traces the history of his Bristol house from the 18th century to the present

How did you come to write the book?

It was a result of the BBC Two programme

A House Through Time. They popped a flier through our letterbox early in 2019 asking if we’d like to be on the show. We had our deeds already that we’d looked at in the past. We could make out a few names there like Jacob Crook and Edward Bearpacker, and they sounded really colourful and interesting, but we never got around to doing anything about it. Then the TV series came along, and to our amazement we reached the shortlist. That drove us to do more research ourselves, a lot more, and over the coming months we discovered that we had some really interesting people who had lived in our house. Eventually we had enough material to write a book, which had never been our intention.

Who was the most interesting resident?

My favourite is really Shurmer Bath, the man who started building the house in the first place and then went bust trying to complete it and other houses nearby. I’ve started doing some extra research during lockdown to find out more about him in particular, and I’ve begun writing what may turn out to be a book or a pamphlet or something, maybe about him and other people he knew in Bristol who are far more prominent. He was a Quaker, a philanthropist and an amateur doctor, but he had financial ties to slavery through his two marriages.

What is your advice to other people who are interested in researching their house history? Just do it! You don’t have to have lived in an old house that is obviously steeped in history to find something interesting. Why not have a go, especially with the pandemic requiring you to spend more time at home at the moment?

How has the research benefited you?

It’s been very useful for someone with Parkinson’s like me to keep my brain active during lockdown in the past year. I’ve seized on it as an activity that is beneficial to my mental health as well. It’s been a very welcome distraction to go back in time, but also to find various links with the present. It’s different from other books about house history too in that it’s written by the residents. It’s a different perspective, from people who live there and have learnt to do this sort of research for themselves.