Tunnel mystery Passageway could have been used as shelter
REGARDING your recent piece about Kingswood tunnels (Latimer’s Diary, May 18), there are stories of similar tunnels in Frenchay, but recently workmen stumbled upon two of them.
They were doing some work inside the old Frenchay Hospital site, on the pavement of the road by the South Lodge (formerly CLIC Cottage), when they broke into two of them.
One of the workmen took some photos of one of the tunnels, and its position is very peculiar. It’s about 20 feet from the South Lodge, heading diagonally across open space towards Beckspool Road.
They told me it was about 20 feet long, with seven foot headroom, and about five or six feet wide. The top of the roof was about a foot below ground level. The walls were pennant stone, and the arched roof brick. The floor was under water, put possibly pennant stone like the walls.
Curiously, there was a small wooden bench along one side – see photo.
All very odd, but I wondered if perhaps the tunnel’s existence was known in 1940, and it was turned into a make-shift air-raid shelter for the South Lodge? That might possibly explain the brick roof.
Whatever its original purpose, it would not have been trivial, as most of Frenchay’s ground is hard pennant stone, and not easy to tunnel.
Alan Freke by email
Cool storage solution?
✒ RE your appeal in BT for suggestions regarding the reason for the underground tunnelling carried out and discovered in areas of Kingswood during the days when deer were stalked by hunters for both sport and food.
I’m aware that there are caves dug in suitable places all around the bleak Yorkshire moors and up into the Scottish borders near to where grouse are driven and shot for game.
The season for that sport begins in mid-August, which is possibly the hottest time of the year, so once a drive is over, the birds are picked up, and to avoid them staying around in the hot sun all day, they are braced up and taken to one of these shaded haunts where the air is cool and the birds can remain fresh until they are collected, ready for dispatch down to London and places to provide some expensive fodder on the menu for the wealthy city folk.
Compare the size of a small grouse with a much larger hunk of venison in very similar conditions, and wouldn’t you have thought these more expansive underground creations might just serve as cooler ‘safes’ for the kill of the day, until they could be literally carted off and prepared as part of a banquet quite literally fit for a King. Knowing Henry VIII, he’d probably polish off a whole deer himself, and not a half rotten one at that either – all thanks to a simple cool tunnel. Dare I say it? Food for thought. Regular BT reader Name and email supplied
» Editor’s reply: It gets curiouser and curiouser, doesn’t it? Do readers know of any other tunnels in the Kingswood area? And do we know of any documentation which might tell us definitively what they were for? As Mr Freke points out, making these things in the first place would have been no simple matter, and the trouble and expense of digging and roofing them would probably have been beyond the means of ordinary folk.
Shelter in the garden
✒ FURTHER to your discussions about air raid shelters, when my daughter moved into their house in Saltford they found this shelter under a rockery in the garden.
It was full of rubble and was a hazard to their young twins so my son-in-law cleared it out and mended the only decayed part (the door) He has put a secure hatch over the entrance. The local primary school has visited it as part of their lessons about WW2.
It is dry and quite big and we believe other houses in the area had similar shelters.
Fran Churchouse
By email » Editor’s reply: Many thanks for taking the trouble to send us this! We’ve got a bit of a subterranean theme going on this week, haven’t we? Readers may remember we’ve got an on/off correspondence going on about air raid shelters being discovered in people’s back gardens and we’re very happy to hear of any new finds – and what uses they can be put to.
Fags and pink paraffin
✒ I FORGOT to describe a couple of important features of the shops in Dovercourt Road Bristol as they were in the 1950s-60s in my previous letter (May 11).
These were the vending machines. Outside of the Newsagents on Dovercourt Road stood two big chrome plated cigarette machines. You could find these machines all over Bristol. I think Harold Dolman’s company made them in Ashton.
They took Half-Crown coins (12 and half pence), and if the price of fags changed pennies or halfpennies would be placed inside the
cellophane of the fag packets.
Next to these machines were two chewing gum machines. One was for PK (Wrigley’s) chewing gum. They were three pence (a thrupenny bit), and every fourth vending gave you a free packet of gum.
The other machine sold Bazooka Joe Bubble gum.
This was soft and pink and contained a little cartoon featuring Joe and his chums. If you saved these up you could send off for a present from the Bazooka Joe company.
Inevitably they looked much better in the description on the back of the cartoon. I sent for a magic signalling ring which turned out to be a little plastic whistle on a ring.
There was also a handy postage stamp vending machine nearby. A book of stamps was a shilling or two-bob (two shillings i.e. 20p).
Finally in the hardware shop was yet another vending machine that sold pink paraffin which many Bristol people used to call ‘Parafeen.’ You placed a hose on the machine into your paraffin can. Then you put two two-bob bits in the slot.
Fascinatingly, a large back-lit clear glass bottle inside the machine filled up with paraffin to the desired level. When it had finished, you pulled a lever and the paraffin would drain into your container.
I hated the chore of getting the paraffin as our paraffin can was very heavy and hurt my hands on the way home, especially when it was cold.
Incidentally, the TV advert for Pink Paraffin was quite funny. It starred a large pink velvet creature called Pongo who had a kind of elephant’s trunk with two great big human nostrils on the end of it. With this he went around sniffing places.
When he went into a house that used the rival Esso Blue Paraffin he sniffed the air and promptly fainted, his trunk deflated by his side.
Then, someone would administer the nice pink paraffin and our hero would make a miraculous recovery.
Sean O’Brien
by email