As good as gold?
DID you see The Gold on telly? Mrs Latimer and I have just finished watching it and were very impressed. Good old The BBC; that’s a fair chunk of this year’s licence fee covered.
The dramatisation of the Brink’sMat robbery and the subsequent fate of the tons of gold that were nicked was a splendid bit of work. We especially liked Hugh Bonneville’s charismatic performance as DCI Brian Boyce; a real eye-opener as we’d just thought he was a lightweight as Lord Wossname in Downton Abbey and Mr Wossname in the Paddington movies.
Anyways, if you’ve not seen it, catch up with it on the iPlayer. Thoroughly recommend it. One wee issue …
OK, there’s no point in moaning about historical inaccuracies in TV dramas and films. Of course they are going to take liberties with facts in order to tell a good story and simplify complex sequences of events. Of course they are.
One might, on the other hand, moan a little about, shall we say, moral inaccuracies.
Local boy made bad John Palmer, as portrayed by John Cullen, comes across as a decent, likeable sort who’s had to claw his way up in the world, an’ he loves his family an’ such.
Palmer it was who helped dispose of the gold from the unlikely setting of his second-hand gold dealing business in Bedminster. He got away with it, claiming he didn’t know where the gold had come from.
But this is a man who, in real life, was convicted of swindling thousands of people with his fraudulent Spanish timeshare racket. There’s nothing likeable or Robin Hoody about scamming ordinary folk out of hard (and honestly) earned money.
Yes, it’s a TV drama which makes it plain at the start of each episode that it’s taken a few liberties with facts and people. But it would be a shame if anyone came out of it with the idea that Palmer was a decent bloke at heart. His actions as a timeshare fraudster, the thousands of people he conned, the retirements he ruined, say he was nothing of the sort.
“After I read this book I felt so mad I threw it on the bonfire and it gave off a reddish, sickly flame and bad smell.”
Now I’ve dabbled in the bookwriting game myself, and would have sold both grandmothers to be able to put a line like that – from a
reader’s letter to the Post in 1973 on the cover.
This year it’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book which received the above endorsement and I’m going to stick my neck out here and call it the most influential local history book ever published in Bristol.
This is Derek Robinson’s A Shocking History of Bristol. Later editions go under the title A Darker
History of Bristol, though it’s basically the same book with a few text changes and some different pictures.
When it first came out you could’ve got yourself a copy for 50p, which wasn’t that steep even then.
This was the price of two packets of king size fags in 1973, whereas nowadays you’d have to pay more than 25 quid, and have to ask specially for them while a disdainful shop assistant opened the special poisons cabinet to get them, and they’d come in packaging covered in pictures of rotting bodily organs. Don’t ask me how I know this.
But in any event, if you need a new copy, it’s yours for a tenner from Tangent Books, so it’s not gone up as much in price as the cigs.
Robinson’s book, as many BT readers will know because they’ve read it, is a relatively slim volume. It makes no pretence to being a comprehensive history of the city, but rather looks into some of the more embarrassing or shameful aspects of Bristol’s past.
This ranges from the slave-trading of Anglo-Saxon times through to the long slow decline of the port of Bristol due to civic greed, dithering and stupidity. Along the way he tackles the city’s ignominious record in the Civil War, the massive riots of 1831, the Quaker-bashing mania of the mid-17th century and, of course, the transatlantic commerce in human beings. For many years, Robinson’s was the best and most accessible short account of what it was Bristol slavers got up to – all in just 17 A5-size pages.
Perhaps it reached into so many households exactly because it’s a small book, and because it’s not “academic”. You can find more detailed accounts of some of the scandals in older books (particularly Latimer’s Annals), but Robinson, did it in a more digestible form.
Perhaps his sales were also boosted by the fact that he was well-known in Bristol in the 1970s for his series of humorous ‘Bristle’ books (and occasional forays into TV) about the local dialect.
Every half-informed Bristolian at the time knew about the city’s past in the Transatlantic trade, but it was this book which gave all the essential details of what Edward Colston and co. got up to, a tale Robinson related in a tone of cold, measured fury. There’s a straight line from that book to the final fall of the statue. And indeed, that’s the paint-spattered Colston statue on the cover of the latest edition.
The book was not the work of some woke liberal, but a Bristol born and brought-up lad who wanted to set the record straight. This was 1973, when Bristol was going mad for the 600th anniversary celebrations of its county status.
“The book,” he told me some years ago, “was a corrective to all that excess when everyone was going around telling everybody what a wonderful city Bristol was. I grew up in Bristol, and I knew it’s as imperfect as any other city, and its history when I dug into it, proved the point.”
But as per the quote above, not everyone was pleased.
Cheers then!