Picture of the week

HERE’S something nice and gruesome for you …

We’ve been spending some quality time with Fred Little (18741953) lately. The Bristol photographer and photographic equipment dealer took a lot of pictures of “old Bristol” and made copies of earlier Victorian pictures of the city to sell as prints and postcards.

The Broadmead branch of the London Camera Exchange recently discovered a load of negatives of Fred’s pictures and donated them to the Bristol Archives, but since Fred made and sold large numbers of postcards, other people have been collecting them for a long time, including Gavin Roberts, a professional photographer based in Bristol.

Gavin is a big fan of Fred’s work and thinks (as do we) that he has been unfairly overlooked. He has even put together a website of Fred Little pictures which he has been collecting on postcards and negatives over the years. He has put several of these, along with some pictures and biographical information about Fred, on a dedicated website at www.fredlittle. co.uk

He’s very kindly sent us a scan of this one, which Fred labelled: “In the Lady Chapel, St Peter’s Church, Bristol”.

Now on first glance this looks very macabre; you’d think that a tomb had been opened so that a skeleton could be photographed.

However, BT and Gavin have done a bit of digging around and we’re pretty sure that we’re not looking at actual human remains, but at sculpture - the give-away is in the texture of the cloth, which looks a lot more like carved stone than real fabric. We are 99% certain that this carving comes from the tomb of the Newton family, who were wealthy landowners based at Barr’s Court in the 17th century.

The tomb was carved in the 1650s, during the time of the Commonwealth, when Cromwell and his cronies ruled the land. When Lady Newton died in 1655 her son turned the funeral procession to St Peter’s into a big anti-government demonstration, with 300-400 Royalist supporters following the coffin to the church.

At the top of the tomb was an effigy of Lady Newton dressed in all her finery as a young woman of King James I’s time, but underneath it was a carved cadaver, a reminder of Death in the form of a skeleton from which not all the flesh has not yet rotted away. This, we believe, is what’s in our picture.

Now this is where things start to get seriously ghoulish. This, you see, was thought to be an effigy of a man who starved himself to death.

Gavin Roberts uncovered a book that Fred Little and his brother Arthur (an antique dealer who was also very interested in Bristol history), wrote about St Peter’s, so let’s allow them to tell the story:

Tradition has it that the original of this monument was the parish priest, who took an oath that he would fast forty days …

Fasting at Lent was very common, particularly among Anglicans – i.e. Royalists – at this time, though for most this only meant cutting out, or cutting down, on meat, or only eating after sunset. But this guy, if the legend is true, went all the way.

… But the thirty-eighth day being come, and as he had not shewn himself to the parishioners for some days, they forced an entry into his apartments and there found him dead and terribly emaciated, through taking no food for so long a time. The parishioners of that time thought no better memorial could be than to reproduce in stone the exact state of the priest as he was discovered.

So while it might not be an actual skeleton, the back-story is pretty horrible.

According to another account we found, one of the vicars of St Peter’s in the mid-19th century disliked it so much that he had it put into a box and removed. The Little brothers mention that at one point, presumably in later Victorian times, the figure was kept in an upright position against the south wall of the church.

If it was still in St Peter’s in 1940, it was presumably lost in the Blitz, although it may have survived whole or in pieces and gone into storage somewhere. If anyone knows where it is, do tell!