In my young days one of the highlights of the year was the Whitsuntide Procession which took place in Kingswood every Whit Monday. The Procession, 10,000 strong, made up of the congregations of local...
On Sunday 26 March 1882, smoke was seen billowing from the top of the New Pit, in Golden Valley, Bitton. Abraham Cook, 55, the bailiff, insisted on going down the pit, against the better...
On Thursday 27 September 1764, a spinster in late middle-age, Miss Jefferies, went to her sister Frances’s house on College Green where she had been invited to dine at 12 noon. It appears the...
With the Euros on our collective minds I am honouring our Brislington family team, the Miller family. By 1901 the Millers arrived at 9 Grove Road with a large family and were soon blessed...
The Bristol Mercury of 13 June 1846 tells of a recent event in Gloucester when on Tuesday night at nearly midnight, a girl of abandoned character nicknamed ‘Welsh Nan’ with her hair dishevelled, her...
Would any of this have happened if we hadn’t come to Brislington to live? Perhaps, perhaps not. I never had anything to do with Brislington before and although I knew vaguely that it was...
My previous subject (Mary Kennedy, as far as we know) wrote only one line about her voyage to the other side of the World and back. By contrast Anna Maria Falconbridge is her direct...
Mary Kennedy of Baptists Mills in Bristol is one of an elite group of people who made landfall at Sydney Cove in January 1788. They numbered approximately 1,373 persons, consisting of convicts, male and...
A Man of War is a most miserable place,” so says 14 year-old sailor James Harding from St George, in 1810, as if we didn’t know from numerous films and TV. In the later...
The Story of the street in Kingswood where I was brought up. For thirty years of my life, give or take the few when I went travelling, I lived at no. 33 Victoria Park,...
I have been researching the social history of the West Country for 45 years. During this time I have collated information on a wide range of people living and working in the West Country including miners, ethnic minorities, petty criminals, sailors, tommies, benefactors, brassmakers and many more. The thing that I find amazing is that ordinary people always lived extraordinary lives. I hope you like my blog that brings together my lifetime of research.
