HOME FROM HOME
Bristolians made use of disused military camps after the war ended
IN August 1946, Bristolians in need of somewhere to call home moved into disused military camps all over the city in Speedwell, Avonmouth, Shirehampton, Whitchurch, Westbury-on-Trym, Bedminster Down, Purdown, Brislington and ‘White City’ (Southville).
We have only a handful of photographs and interviews from this remarkable chapter in Bristol’s history despite over a thousand people being involved, many of whom were rehoused in new council housing down the road in places like Lockleaze and Southmead.
Were you, your family members or your friends one of the 326 Nissen families in the 1940s and 50s? Do you have memories, stories or even photos to record and share? Get in touch! Let’s make sure this remarkable story of Bristolians in need taking matters into their own hands is recorded for posterity.
Email me on info@bristolsquatted.org or text, WhatsApp or phone me on 07757 577910.
The address bristolsquatted.org should take you to a basic page with info about the project and a link to the map. I’ve also set up a Facebook page at facebook.com/ bristolsquatted.
If you’re interested in learning more, or helping out with this community history project I’d love to hear from you too!
Tom Brothwell
Editor’s note: BT has already noted the 75th anniversary of the occupation of empty military huts around the city by homeless families is coming up, and we’ll have a big article about it in August.
It really was an extraordinary episode in Bristol’s history, and if you have any personal memories, or stories from older family members about occupying and living in the huts, please contact Tom.
Designer search
Avon Local History & Archaeology (ALHA) supports many local community history groups as well as some of the larger key organisations which specialise in areas of research across the area that used to be Avon.
Alongside our Facebook page, which provides more transient news, our website at www.alha.org. uk has some great functions used by both our members and the general public. It’s a great resource to publicise events staged by our member groups and offers access to materials previously published.
We’re planning to redevelop our website to improve on the services we already provide to our members but also cater better to the general public in signposting viewers to local events and organisations.
While we are committed to finding a web designer to ensure our new site satisfies all our requirements in a fresh new way, we’re also looking for a fresh new face to help define these requirements, take an active part in the project and to maintain the site with news and events once it is built.
If this is you, you’ll be supported by a small team to share the load, but you’ll be a key player on ALHA’s committee which meets quarterly (via Zoom at present). This volunteer role is flexible with teamwork mainly handled through emails with an occasional Zoom meeting, but you might expect to spend six to seven hours a month at times to suit you.
If you’d find this an interesting challenge and would like to know more, please email the webmaster team at AHLAWebmaster@gmail. com
Group’s top honour
Warmley Men in Sheds has been awarded the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service (QAVS).
Equivalent to an MBE, the QAVS is the highest award given to local voluntary groups in the UK, and they are awarded for life.
Warmley Men in Sheds is based in the workshop in Kingswood Heritage Museum, and whilst it is open to all men, the majority are guys who have retired and are looking for an opportunity to be creative with like-minded men and to meet socially.
It has proved exceptionally helpful to those in danger of loneliness and depression through engaging in practical projects either for themselves or the community.
The group has forged links with local community groups and has contributed to projects that include providing and installing bird boxes, feeders and insect homes for a primary school wildlife garden, and hedgehog and bat boxes for local wildlife projects.
It works closely with Kingswood Heritage Museum, often working on the museum’s display cabinets and interpretative models.
Warmley was the first ‘men’s shed’ in the UK to work with and support Legs4Africa, a Bristolbased charity that recycles prosthetic legs that would otherwise end up in landfill, and that facilitates amputee-led support groups so that amputees in sub-Saharan Africa can live more independent, fulfilled lives.
The charity has recycled over 10,000 legs and shipped over 9,000 of them to Africa since 2014.
For more information on Warmley Men in Sheds, please contact Mervyn Bishop on 0117 9676807 or by email: mervyn.bishop@ yahoo. co.uk
Kingswood Heritage Museum
Editor’s reply: OK, this isn’t strictly local history, but as the Men in Sheds are based at one of BT’s favourite museums and as it’s a wonderful achievement, we had to publish this. Huge congratulations to you, and here’s to more Men In Sheds everywhere!
Computer first
I just started reading a book that I bought in a second-hand shop ages ago, and I attach a photo of a piece of paper torn out of a newspaper that fell out of it.
It seems to me a very interesting story about an experiment in the transmission of data by radio “to local micro-computer enthusiasts”.
The article says that Radio West will transmit bursts of data during a radio programme to be decoded by the microcomputer linked to a radio receiver in the same way a cassette recorder is connected for use as a program store.
There is no date on the article, but its mention of Radio West and microcomputers and no mention of the internet must mean it is from the 1980s? It says that “the station has scored a first in British broadcasting”.
Can you or your readers tell us anything more about this?
B. Lewis by email Editor’s reply: We really do need someone to write us an article, or even a book, about Bristol’s very proud, and rather hidden, record of innovation in electronics and computing.
The clipping (which doesn’t look like it came from Post) doesn’t tell us that much, but we do know something about the story anyway, which, briefly, goes like this:
In the summer of 1983, Bristol’s first independent radio station, Radio West (later GWR, now Heart Bristol) started scheduling a weekly (?) programme for computer enthusiasts called Datarama.
This was long before the days of smartphones, let alone home or
office internet access, but even then there were plenty of people who owned home computers – Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Micros, Commodore Vic-20s etc.
While these were mainly used for games which we’d consider ridiculously crude nowadays, many early owners were also very interested in programming and exploring the potential of what they could do with these machines.
Radio West, at the prompting of its then chief engineer, Tim Lyons, decided that it would be a cool idea to transmit computer programs over the airwaves. Having received the go-ahead from the Independent Broadcasting Authority, it was doing so by around July ’83.
If you were into this sort of thing you will also remember that many people recorded computer programs to cassette tapes and (as we understand it) Datarama was sending what by modern standards were ridiculously small amounts of data which could be recorded onto tape and then processed by the computer. Initially, we think these were just for the BBC Micro and the Sinclair ZX81.
There were simple games, very basic animations and later a Christmas card in ASCII graphics. But we believe that the very first transmission was a picture of Charlie’s Angels actress Cheryl Ladd. It came out the other end looking like something from a fax machine, but it was recognisable (just!) as the face of the star.
More than that we can’t tell you, nor do we know what the eventual fate of the Datarama programme was, so if anyone can tell us more, we’d love to hear from you.
If you look at it from a certain angle, and if you are drunk or deluded enough, you could say that this demonstrates how the wi-fi internet connection was invented in Bristol.
Ahem.
Well, perhaps not.
But it was definitely a little footnote in the development of computing, and it happened in the Radio West studios down at the Watershed.