Picture of the Week

A QUIZ question for all you local history buffs: when was this taken, and what was going on? Clue: this is at the corner of Denmark Street and Gaunts Lane.

This is from an ancient print (sorry it’s a bit battered!) we found in the files the other day, and we were quite excited about it as we don’t have too many dramatic shots like this from the 1940s.

We assumed it was from the Blitz as the firemen are wearing WW2-style helmets, but it didn’t take us too long to work out that the photo was taken on the afternoon of Monday, February 17 1948, and the men are tackling the biggest blaze in the city since the Colston Hall fire of February 1945.

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Inside the auditorium the whole theatre at first seemed filled with flames. In fact, it was the unbroken wall of fire rising from the stage - more spectacular than ever producers of play or film could devise.

This is the fire which seriously damaged the Hippodrome, and which broke out around lunchtime that day. Police sealed off the surrounding streets and the fire services were on the scene very quickly (if you look behind the turntable ladders to the left of the picture you can see a big crowd of sightseers.)

The theatre stage, orchestra pit, scenery and everything to the rear of the building, including the roof, were destroyed but the auditorium was saved. A heavy pall of smoke hung over central Bristol for the rest of the day.

Flying sparks started a fire in the upper part of the Halliday’s Transport warehouse where staff tried to fight the fires with extinguishers, but were soon overwhelmed. The problem was that the warehouse contained huge quantities of cork (for the wine trade?) and staff made a rapid escape six storeys downwards by using the warehouse pulley chains!

At the rear of the warehouse where large quantities of Bristol Milk sherry, stored for John Harvey & Sons, and Harvey’s staff moved quickly to clear the warehouse, moving around the dark corridors by candle light and rolling barrels of sherry while ankle-deep in water from the fire hoses.

The hogsheads were stacked in Orchard Lane, while relays of men shouldered cases of spirits from the storage stacks and piled them high on nearby pavements.

Astonishingly, no-one stopped a Western Daily Press reporter from entering the Hippodrome while the fire was at its fiercest. “Inside the auditorium the whole theatre at first seemed filled with flames. In fact, it was the unbroken wall of fire rising from the stage which gave this effect - more spectacular than ever producers of play or film could devise.”

While the auditorium, galleries, lounges, offices and dressing rooms were mostly undamaged, the fire now meant that the season’s panto, ‘Babes in the Wood’ starring Arthur Lucan – already famous for his pantomime dame, Old Mother Riley – would have to be cancelled.