Air raid shelter was a perfect gang headquarters
REGARDING air raid shelters in gardens. In around 1960, when I was about five years old, my family – Mum, Dad, me and my younger brother and sister – moved into a Victorian terraced house in Westbury-on-Trym. The previous owners, or the ones before that, perhaps, had built a brick and concrete air raid shelter in the back garden. As with your correspondent HM Brace, someone had knocked a hole into the wall and put a window into it.
Dad had no use for it as a garden shed. Garden might be too grand a word for something which was a glorified back yard now I think of it, but when you are a kid you see everything as being much bigger than you do as a grown-up.
The shelter was ours. It was a brilliant “den” for us kids. For us it was the centre of a lot of our games, and for a couple of years it was a sort of gang HQ for most of the lads in the street of my age. I half remember that the shelter was the only reason the other boys let me join!
I do remember once going to the home of another lad who lived a couple of streets away, and there was one which was almost identical in his garden, but it had no window and it was dark and smelly and full of spiders.
By the time I was in my teens I was no longer interested in “playing”, but my youngest sister and her friends used to hang out in it, having dolls’ parties and so on.
This was in the 1960s and 70s and I remember Dad joking from time to time that we shouldn’t knock it down because we might be glad of it if World War Three broke out.
One summer, when I was about 16 or 17 Dad decided to re-design the garden and decided that the shelter should come down. Mum was not keen because of the mess it caused, but Dad and I set to work with sledgehammers. We made very little progress, and then I was hit in the eye by a chip of brick.
One rushed visit to the Eye Hospital later – no serious harm done – and Mum put her foot down. The bomb shelter stayed. It was still there when my parents moved out in the early 1990s.
D. Parker, Thornbury
A plaque for O’Donnell?
THE Bristol author and ghost hunter Elliot O’Donnell was born on February 27 1872 at 16 Wellington Park, Clifton, and later lived with the rest of the family at 1 Sherborne Villas, Alma Road, Clifton.
He died on May 8, 1965, aged 93 at the Grosvenor Nursing Home in Clevedon, Somerset. I have copies of his birth and death certificates.
He is buried, along with his wife Ada at St Etheldreda’s church, Guilsborough, Northants.
I am very surprised that this Bristol-born author of more than 60 books has not been honoured with a blue plaque on his birth place. What does one have to do to put that right? David Shelton Bishopsworth
Editor’s note: Mr Shelton’s letter came through the post some months ago, but we have only recently been able to retrieve it and others, but thought it worth including, this being Halloween time.
Elliot O’Donnell was indeed a prolific ghost-hunter and it is rather curious that he seems to have been so completely forgotten as his books were very popular in their day.
Regarding blue plaques, there are a few regulations which might prevent the owner of a property putting a plaque up, but not many. In practice, if you want to put a plaque on your own house, there’s not much to stop you.
As for “official” schemes, the Clifton & Hotwells Improvement Society have a long-running “green plaque” scheme commemorating interesting/important residents of those areas. For details of this, see www.cliftonhotwells.org.uk/plaques
The Bristol Civic Society also runs a blue plaque scheme, and to find out more, or nominate someone, see www.bristolcivicsociety.org.uk/blueplaques/
Searching for Piro and Pero
I AM trying to resolve a query that I have in trying to write the history of Tockington Manor School/ House.
A daughter of Samuel Peach, the owner had married Henry Cruger junior in Bristol. Henry became an MP and Mayor of Bristol.
His father Henry senior moved from New York to live in Bristol with his son in 1775, he brought with him his Black servant named Piro/Pero. Henry senior died in December 1780 aged 67 years. In his will, as I understand it, he granted freedom to his servant
Piro.
Can you shed any light if there were two Black servants in Bristol with the name of Piro and Pero? I am aware of the connection with John Pinney. Could John Pinney have employed Piro/Pero after Henry Cruger’s death?
It would be most helpful if you could resolve this query.
Eric Garrett Archivist to Olveston Parish Historical Society
by email Editor’s reply: It seems unlikely to us that Henry Cruger senior’s Pero/ Piro was the same person as the Pero in Pinney’s household. We’ve also checked all the usual reference books and can find no suggestion of this, but any further investigation would probably require delving into the archives. Are there any readers who might be able to help with Mr Garrett’s inquiry?