Wednesday 15^th November 2023

The Bristol heat of the Historical Association Great Debate

Which historical place or person from your local area deserves greater recognition?

There were ten candidates from seven schools.

The winner was Alicia Morgan from Clifton College who presented the case for Carmen Beckford, black activist in Bristol and one of the founders of St Pauls Carnival. Carmen’s incredible community work led her to become the first Black recipient of an MBE in the South West.

There were two runners up. Arthur Fisher from Beechen Cliff School presented the case for the Bath Pavilion. Lily Wiltshire presented the case for RAF Locking.

A big thanks to all the students who took part. Many of them had travelled a great distance. Thank you to their teachers and parents.

This year the three judges were Professor Ronald Hutton, Clare Deering and Eugene Byrne.

Professor Hilary Carey University of Bristol 8^th November 2023

Professor Carey gave a fascinating lecture on the special execution sermons given by prison chaplains known as ordinaries each Sunday at Newgate Prison before the public executions of condemned prisoners. Her lecture covered the period 1789-1868 during which 657 souls were executed. She explained the duties of the “ordinaries” who were relatively well paid prison chaplains. The nature of the sermons they gave. How prisoners behaved showing penitence or resistance to these execution sermons and how the practice was reformed and eventually abolished. During the office of two ordinaries Brownlow Forde and Horace Cotton there were 548 executions.
These executions were very different from our pre-conceptions of hangings. Often, they were done in batches with six condemned prisoners for various offences all executed at once. The crowds at these executions were often large. In 1868 200 Irish turned up for the execution of a Fenian (Michael Barrett) who almost escaped into the crowd. Common offences were what today would be called “white collar” crimes like forgeries or utterers who passed on forged notes. Murderers were allowed to exempt themselves from the sermons but those prisoners who attended were grouped around a coffin. As well as their families the congregation for the sermon paid tickets to attend and were often made up of bankers from the City of London. Professor Carey used 19th century newspapers including the reports of the young Charles Dickens (Boz) to gain the texts of these sermons. Clearly the public had a taste for reading about these crimes and executions. Her visual sources included prints by Hogarth and the ‘Microcosm of London’ illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson. The penitence and resistance of prisoners was fascinating. The Cato Street conspirators (1820), all atheists refused to recognise the authority of the courts, the sermon or the executioner. Other prisoners showed conspicuous piety seizing the coffin at the sermon and declaring their regrets. Others dressed in white like martyrs. The logic behind the penitence was that some of these prisoners’ sentences were commuted even at the last minute on the scaffold.
The last public execution took place at Newgate in 1868 but it would be another 96 years before execution in Britain would be abolished. Our audience as usual supplied some thought provoking questions.

On Wednesday 8th November at 7.30 pm Professor Hilary Carey from the University of Bristol will be giving a lecture entitled…
‘The only good of an execution’
The condemned sermon at Newgate, 1799-1865
The lecture will be in Lecture Theatre B.H05LT at 7 Woodland Road BS8 1TB.
The doors open at 6.45pm. The lecture is free to members and university staff and students. It is £3 for non-members.

If you would like to join the Bristol Historical Association or renew your membership please pay £15 to to our account through a bank transfer.
Bristol Historical Association. Sort code: 60 02 38.
Account number: 72628723. Please put your name on the transfer.

Steve Carpenter’s visit to Ashton Gate Primary School 2nd November 2023

The Bristol Historical Association sent Steve Carpenter to Ashton Gate Primary School to talk about the Frys (Cadbury) chocolate factory at Somerdale. Steve worked in maintenance at the factory from 1975 until 1981. The children were eager to know how chocolate was made. Of particular interest was what do you do with waste chocolate and exactly how much chocolate were Fry’s workers allowed to eat. Although Frys merged with Cadbury in 1919, the factory at Somerdale did not change its name until 1981.

Thank you to Rachael Herbert who has an award winning history curriculum at the school. The children have been learning about the history of Fry’s chocolate.

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Rob Bell. Many of you will remember Rob as the very enthusiastic guide at Acton Court when we did our tours in May 2019 and June 2022. Rob was an archaeologist all his life. Rob will be best remembered for his work at Acton Court, where he spent three years in the 1980s working with a large team of archaeologists to unravel the history of the house. The result of the work was the excellent ‘Acton Court: The Evolution of an Early Tudor Courtier’s House’, which he co-wrote with buildings historian Kirsty Rodwell, and it will forever be a great tribute to him.

His funeral was in Tetbury on Friday 27th October. A large number of archaeologist friends attended the funeral. As an old friend I was asked to deliver the eulogy.

I have attached a few photographs.

Rob Pritchard

Professor Robert Gildea

Our first lecture of 2023-24 focused on the communities affected by the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85.

This fascinating and at times very moving lecture looked at how an industry that once employed a million men was defeated in a long-drawn-out dispute in the mid 1980’s.  The lecture highlighted how close knit communities were split and brought down.

Professor Gildea has based his new book on hundreds of interviews he did with miners, their wives and families.

He started the talk by describing the lives of miners. There were the boys who left school on a Friday and were down the pit by the following Monday. Many married young. Miners often drank and gambled as a compensation for the dangerous work they did. It was their wives who controlled the family budget and held the families together. Mining communities relied on organisations like the Miners Welfare.

During the struggle communities were split especially in Nottinghamshire. Many of the striking miners were sacked for the smallest offences. One miner was sacked for doing a v sign to a coachload of working miners. Communities survived by setting up soup kitchens and organizing food parcels. Women’s rallies were described in detail and without sentimentality.  

After the strike pit closures inevitably destroyed miners’ lives even further. Some skilled miners were able to find work. Many more eked out an existence in the gig economy. Many striking miners found themselves unfairly imprisoned and blacklisted. Others were sucked into drug addiction. Families collapsed under the pressure while others reinvented themselves like Sian James the Labour MP for Swansea East. Many of the survivors were determined to save their communities.  It was a complex and unfinished story.

This lecture was more than a narrative of a momentous part of the 1980’s. It was real insight into the methodology of Social History. Based on the oral history project carried out since 2013 this told the history of the dispute and its aftermath from the bottom up; from the perspective of the marginalized losers of the dispute rather than the government. Professor Gildea shared some of his interviews across the six main coalfields.  Miners and wives and their families were interviewed.  Professor Gildea described this strike as part of the “unmaking of the English Working Class” in contrast to EP Thompson’s famous work.  The project’s aim was to record for communities their voices and their story and the original interviews are being digitized and kept in the British Library archives.  Our audience responded with many thoughtful questions and we ran out time for all of them to be answered. 

Fourteen teachers attended our last event of the year. Mollie Burden and Rachael Herbert gave a delightful talk about the award winning history curriculum at Ashton Gate Primary School. We particularly loved their use of Bristol’s history including such topics as Fry’s chocolate, Brunel’s ships and the 1963 Bristol bus boycott. Dr Sarah Whitehouse gave a talk about ‘teaching tolerance in troubled times’ which led to a lively discussion about such topics as the fall of Colston. It was a lovely way to end the year.

Wednesday 21st June 2023.

Thirty eight Bristol HA members enjoyed a leisurely early evening cruise around the harbour on the Matthew. Evan Jones gave several enthralling talks on John Cabot’s 1497 and 1498 voyages to Newfoundland and what life would have been like for the crew. There was the added bonus of a bar and a fish n chip supper. A great way to end the 2022-23 season.

Sixty six people attended Ben’s lecture including students from seven schools. Ben’s lecture looked at the arguments around the fall of Tsarism. The optimists argue that the regime could have been saved were it not for the First World War. The pessimists argue that it was doomed. English absolutism was destroyed at the end of the seventeenth century and French absolutism at the end of the eighteenth century. The Russian victory over Napoleon lulled the Tsars into a false sense of security. Rather than looking at the characters of individual Tsars, Ben chose to examine the problems caused by social and economic upheaval, defeat in war, non-Russian nationalism and revolutionary agitation. He examined the role of key ministers such as Witte and Pobedonostsev. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had many unforeseen consequences not least the further impoverishment of the peasants and the alienation of the nobility and gentry. Ben suggested the Polish revolt of 1863 was another warning that went unheeded. In the 1905 revolution many of the key areas of unrest were in non-Russian areas of the empire.
Thank you to Ben for putting Tsarist Russia into perspective and for coming all the way from Exeter.