Ever heard people swear blind they went into the caves under Redcliffe and saw the chains that held the slaves?
What about the people who say they can hear a hum when you can’t?
Bristol has a rich and diverse history and, when it comes to cities which have helped shape the world, is already punching well above its weight.
READ MORE: All the things that have been invented in Bristol
But which of the things people tell you with pride about this city of ours are true? And which, er, aren’t?
1. Bristol invented the chocolate bar
Truth factor 2/10: False, with an element of truth
Sorry Bristol, but people were eating chocolate bars for decades before the day Joseph Fry and his chocolatiers perfected a way to mix the ingredients of cocoa powder, sugar and cocoa into a paste which could then be put into a mould for mass production in 1847.
The story goes that until that point people bought chocolate as shavings or powder or flakes and put it into hot drinks or sprinkled it on bread or put it into biscuits.
But that isn’t true. For a start, the processing of cocoa into chocolate is called ‘Dutching’, because it was invented by a chap called Coenradd Van Houten, back in 1828. And in any case, people had found ways to make chocolate bars long before that.
In 1779, the Marquis de Sade wrote a letter moaning no one sent him cookies while he was in prison, and said they ‘must smell of chocolate, as if one were biting into a chocolate bar’ – which suggests they were already common.
What Bristol can claim, perhaps, is it came up with the world’s first mass-produced chocolate bar, but not the chocolate bar itself.
2. The door at the Hatchet Inn is covered with human skin
Truth factor 3/10: Maybe, but unlikely
It’s in all the guidebooks and history books, on the walking tours and the pub boasts it, but there is little evidence it actually is.
The story goes that the door of one of Bristol’s oldest pubs – probably the longest-open pub – the Hatchet Inn, down behind the Colston Hall – is covered by the tanned skin of a human being. The legend is that it was the skin of a hanged convict.
Conveniently, it is reputedly under layers and layers of black paint. But there is no evidence, apart from folklore, to suggest that this is actually the case.
Until the owners of the Hatchet allow the door to be scientifically examined…
3. Bristol invented bungee jumping
Truth factor 8/10: Sort of true, but not completely
The first modern bungee jump as we would understand it did indeed take place from the Clifton Suspension Bridge on April Fool’s Day in 1979.
But those three students, David Kirke, Geoff Tabin and Simon Keeling, got the idea from the south Pacific.
In Vanuatu, a rite of passage saw boys prove they were men by leaping from platforms with vines tied to their ankles as a test of courage.
While not using rubber cords and not ‘bouncing’, as it were, they look like bungee jumpers.
But even then, the Chicago World Fair in 1892 had a ride which was effectively a bungee jump. No fewer than 200 people would sit on the ride, which would fall from a tower and bounce held up by powerful elastic rubber bands.
So Bristol invented modern day bungee jumping, and it can also claim the word ‘bungee’ too. It’s an old West Country word.
4. The New Cut was dug out by French prisoners of war from the defeat of Napoleon
Truth factor 2/10: Not really, no.
There is an old legend about the New Cut river, which was dug as the river-equivalent of a bypass for the Avon in the first decade of the 1800s.
It was done to create the Floating Harbour to regulate the tide on the old river and the docks.
The line that it was dug by French prisoners of war from the Napoleonic conflict is often included in heritage guides and the like, but there’s no evidence this is the case.
It’s possible. There were French prisoners of war held in Bristol at the time. But two things suggest it’s not true.
The first is that the majority of French soldiers and sailors captured by the British were captured, and therefore presumably sent to be held in Bristol, after the start of work to dig the channel. Work began on May 1, 1804 and it was less than five years before the river was diverted, in January 1809.
The second is there are no contemporaneous accounts of the PoWs working on the job. And there are plenty of accounts of the work happening.
One key one describes how, when the job was finished, those in charge held a huge celebratory feast for all those who worked on the project, and described them as navvies – the men who were employed at the time digging canals.
It said they all got really drunk and when the cider and ale ran out, there was a huge fight between them – with the English navvies fighting the Irish navvies, and no mention of the French.
5. Blackboy Hill is named after a slave
Truth factor 1/10: No, sorry
It gets a one out of ten simply because no one is definitively sure where the Blackboy Hill name comes from, but the name predates the start of the industrial-scale genocidal transatlantic slave trade.
The name of the road almost certainly comes from the name of a pub on that hill – rather than the other way round – and the pub was probably named after Charles II, who because of his swarthy complexion was known as ‘the black boy’.
Back in the 1500s and 1600s, the word ‘black’ was used to describe anyone who wasn’t pale-skinned. Many a Bristolian back then would describe a Welsh person as ‘black’.
6. Bristol had its own time zone
Truth factor 9/10: Yes it did, but…
So did everywhere else. People would set their watches by the sun, so Bristol was just over ten minutes ‘behind’ what the time is in, say, London. Bristol was an important city nationally back in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s, with a civic pride that proclaimed its own time more.
But having different times all around the country didn’t make it easy to timetable the new-fangled railway service, so time only became a national thing in the 1830s and 1840s.
It was presumably some sort of reaction against that that prompted an additional minute hand to be added to the clock on the Exchange building in Corn Street showing both Bristol Time and the time those in that there London said, when Greenwich Mean Time was adopted across the country.
It gets a 9, simply because so did Birmingham and Cardiff and Liverpool back in those days and, after all, time is just a relative concept.
7. Bristol invented Ribena
Truth factor 10/10: Yes, it did AND it won us the war
The year was 1933 and come the hour, come the man – a chap called Vernon Charley, a scientist from the University of Bristol, working at the wonderfully-titled Long Ashton Agriculture and Horticultural Research Station.
The Government wanted a way to get vitamins into children, and concentrated fruit or berry squashes were the best way. He found the blackcurrant squash he produced kept its vitamin C content, and what became Ribena was created. It took five years to turn into a drink you could buy – in 1938, it was marketed as a concentrate squash.
In wartime, with oranges a thing of the past, Britain could grow blackcurrants and Ribena effectively stopped Britain losing the war by all the people of Britain dying of scurvy.
8. Bristol built the first suspension bridge
Truth factor 0/10: Not even close
Another claim fostered by the cult of Brunel, it seems. There were obviously simple suspension bridges for millennia, and even chain-linked ones made of iron were constructed in the Himalayas in the 1400s.
It’s not even the first ‘modern’ one – that is the Menai Bridge across to Angelsey, which was built in 1826. Brunel won the competition to design a suspension bridge across the Avon Gorge in 1831, but it wasn’t even actually built until 1864.
So the only thing Bristol can possibly claim as a first when it comes to suspension bridges is the specific design feature of how to bore the foundations – and that was actually invented by a mother of six from Brislington by the name of Sarah Guppy, an astonishing inventor in the early 1800s. Her son was Brunel’s second-in-command, and she gave her designs to Brunel.
9. The Bristol car park attendant who took all the money
Truth factor 3/10: Not true, but….
Remember back in the first days of the internet – around the late 1990s and turn of the Millennium? Back then, people had AOL email accounts and there were websites for businesses, but no blogs or social media. I know, right?!
Back then, a big thing was chain emails – people would get funny stories on email from friends, and then pass them on. The first record of this tale comes from that era.
Everyone knows the story: The car park attendant who spends 25 years dutifully collecting £1 from everyone parking in the car park outside Bristol Zoo. One day he doesn’t turn up for work, and the zoo call the council to ask where their man is.
The council respond – ‘wait, isn’t he employed by you?’ and the man himself has collected all the money for years for himself, and is chuckling away on a beach in Spain that Monday morning.
Every time there was a new innovation on the internet, the story was shared there - so it went from email chains to blogs, and then to news websites (it was an April Fool story by the Bristol Post some point in the mid-2000s), and then on social media. It is still out there, circling the world and delighting new generations every year.
Alas, it’s not true. But. The reason it gets a three on the truth factor rating is it does have an element of truth about it. Anyone perusing the agreements, history and saga of car parking at the zoo can see where it might have come from.
The zoo negotiated a deal with the Bristol Downs Committee to have an overflow car park (so not the official, permanent zoo car park) back in the 1960s, and did so without hindrance until the late 1990s, when someone at Bristol City Council decided that, really, the zoo should actually have planning permission for this.
It was only earlier this year, when the zoo successfully applied for its seventh temporary permission, that it emerged that the zoo has been taking the money in from tens of thousands of visitors parking there on that publicly-owned land, but only pays the city (in the form of the Downs Committee) £12,000 a year for the privilege – a fraction of the money the committee charges the likes of the circus or Massive Attack for using the Downs for a much shorter time.
There is also a second similar story, that also dates from the origins of the zoo myth. It was exposed by the Bristol Post last year – that since the first years of the 2000s, Bristol City Council had been paying a private company hundreds of thousands of pounds every year to operate the Long Ashton Park and Ride car park and bus service, when all they did was open the gates in the morning and take people’s money.
They stopped running the bus years ago, and were still taking the money.
So while there sadly isn’t an individual parking attendant who has taken advantage of the incompetence of the authorities in Bristol, plenty of other people have.
10. The Bristol Crocodile
Truth factor 0/10: Of course not.
There was a sighting of a crocodile in the River Avon New Cut, and then there was another one. Then a couple of other people reckoned they saw a crocodile splashing about in the muddy river.
But the likelihood that there actually is a crocodile in the river is zero. For a start, the water is too cold. Secondly, there really isn’t enough in there for it to eat. Thirdly, you’d see it when the tide goes out. Next!
11. Totterdown is called Totterdown because people totter down the steep hills.
Truth factor: 0/10 – sounds likely, but isn’t true at all.
A well-known myth, most recently perpetuated with zero research by another Bristol publication, that is not true, even though it makes a lot of sense.
The thing is Totterdown was called Totterdown long before they built the lovely Victorian terraces on the steep hills off the Wells Road.
In fact, it comes from the word ‘totter’, which is what travelling traders were called back in previous centuries. They would arrive from Somerset in the evening, rest up in one of the inns on the Wells Road, before heading into the city in the morning for a day’s hustling. And 'down' means 'hill', as in 'Durdham Down'.
12. Rob del Naja is Banksy
Truth factor 1/10: No, he isn’t.
It’s not true no one knows who Banksy is. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of people, maybe thousands, who grew up in the Bristol ‘scene’ of street art and graffiti and music in the 1980s and 90s who know exactly who Banksy is.
What is the case is that Bristol has collectively decided it’s quite good fun to keep the mystery going, so no one is telling.
Last year, just before Massive Attack played that rain-sodden gig on the Downs, a researcher came up with a huge amount of evidence that claimed that Rob del Naja – aka 3D of Massive Attack – was, in fact, Banksy.
This was after he noticed Banksy’s work around the world tallied with Massive Attack’s gigs around the world. But actually, all that did was show Banksy probably travels the world with the band.
Look at what someone like John Nation says about this. He ran the youth centre which fostered and produced the street art and music scene in the 1980s. He knows Rob del Naja and he knows Banksy.
Long before someone suggested they were the same person, in a host of interviews over the past 20 years he talks about them as two different people – about how del Naja was one of the first wave of street artists and musicians in the mid-1980s, and Banksy was a younger kid who would watch the older ones.
In his rare interviews about his background, Banksy himself has often explained how he got into street art by going to the Barton Hill youth club and watching the older kids painting - the likes of Inkie and 3D. It gets a one, not a zero on the truth factor for the simple reason that, until Banksy does a Facebook Live painting a masterpiece standing next to Rob del Naja, there’s always that miniscule element of doubt….
13. Bristol invented the (chocolate) Easter Egg
Truth factor 10/10: yes we did!
Of course, the giving and receiving of painted chicken eggs has been a thing people did to celebrate Easter for centuries. But yes, we have the Frys to thank for the conversion of the celebration of the resurrection of Christ into a feast of chocolate gorging.
In 1873, looking for new lines, JS Fry & Sons tried making chocolate eggs. It was a hit.
14. They kept slaves in Redcliffe Caves
Truth factor 0/10: No they didn’t
It’s one of the most persistent myths that swirl around Bristol’s dark and shameful history of the transatlantic slave trade. It is often proclaimed by people with the admirable intention of trying to highlight the city’s role in the slave trade, perhaps to someone trying to play down its importance.
But there’s no truth to it. There are caves under Redcliffe, yes. There are even some chains, or marks on the sides where chains would have been, yes. The authorities almost certainly used the caves as prison cells at some point in Bristol’s long history.
But, the transatlantic slave trade, which saw millions of men, women and children bought in chains in west Africa and sent to a life of forced labour in the Caribbean and North America, was controlled from afar by Bristol. Very very few slaves ever went on the third leg of the journey – from North America back to Bristol.
This was a horrendous business. Humans were noted down as property and cargo and were noted in detailed lists of ship's manifests. There are no records of large numbers - even from one ship - returning from North America full of people who had been enslaved in Africa.
They did make that second trip occasionally, only in small groups or as individuals. They would have been brought back under the euphemism as ‘servants’, and were very often boys and girls in their early teens, picked to be the servants of the aristocracy, like the slave Pero, who has a bridge named after him near the Watershed.
If anyone is looking for evidence of Bristol’s shameful slave trading past, it won’t be found in Redcliffe Caves. It’s in the lavishly expensive buildings of Clifton and Redland and the mansions like Dyrham Park and Ashton Court, where the small number of people who got rich from the trade spent that money.
