The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from me, Steve Winduss, at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that updates relating to the podcast, a touch of humour and a dash of "lots more". - 8th December 2024.

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Happy Sunday!
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When I was eight years old, I was living in the historic city of Bristol, 6 miles inland from the River Severn on the West Coast of England.
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The city has been a centre for international trade for over 1,000 years. John Cabot departed from Bristol in May 1497 with the blessing - and funding - of Henry VII to become one of the early European explorers of North America.
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By the 16th century, transatlantic trade was in full swing. Cotton cloth, copper, brass, gunpowder and agricultural equipment would travel from Bristol to Africa. Once the ships were unloaded, they were reloaded with enslaved Africans, transported across the Atlantic under shocking conditions to Virginia or, perhaps, one of the Caribbean islands. They were then likely sold to sugar or tobacco plantation owners.

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The final leg of the triangular transatlantic trade then involved returning to Bristol with the fruits of that enslaved labour, i.e. raw cane sugar, tobacco, rum and cotton.
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Bristol is still coming to terms with profiteering from the slave trade in the 18th century.
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You may remember the statue of Edward Colston unceremoniously dumped into Bristol Harbour in 2020. Colston was a wealthy Bristolian merchant and slave trader.
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He was also a philanthropist, meaning that many institutions in and around Bristol indirectly benefited from the slave trade and still do. That’s the conundrum that cities across Europe are currently pondering.

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Of course, as an eight-year-old, I was blissfully unaware of such matters. I had my own issues to ponder. I was sent to St. Ursula’s, an all-girls convent run by the Sisters of Mercy. All girls except me and my brother it seemed. I never quite got to the bottom of that.
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More urgently, I had to deal with Apple Boy. Apple Boy was a nameless and misguided youth who loitered around Owen Grove, looking to scare local kids much younger than himself. And he was good at it.
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On one occasion, when my brother and I were playing in the garden, he walked past the gate, grabbed an apple off our apple tree and threw it at my brother. Bullseye. We were terrified.
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From that moment, we would walk to school while keeping a wary lookout for Apple Boy. It might have only been one apple on one occasion - but 52 years later, my brother and I still remember Apple Boy. I wonder what he is doing now.

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In actual fact, Bristol was a great place to live. One of my fonder memories was going with Dad on Sunday mornings to Ashton Court for a swim. The swimming wasn’t the direct attraction, but crossing the Clifton Suspension Bridge definitely was.
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The Clifton Suspension Bridge is one of the iconic British landmarks of the Industrial Revolution and first opened to the public 160 years ago today, 8 December 1864.

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Two 85-foot tall, gothic-styled towers support wrought iron chains anchored into limestone rock on either side and sweeping across the span to support 162 wrought iron rods, which, in turn, hold up the main deck.
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To see the bridge come into view each Sunday never lost its appeal. She doesn’t receive the same international recognition as, say, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge in New York or Tower Bridge in London. But for me, the Clifton Suspension Bridge is first among equals for her resilience and breathtaking elegance.

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If you were on a passenger ship from New York heading to Bristol in the 1840s, let’s say on the steamship the SS Great Britain, you would have spent 14 days crossing the Atlantic in conditions commensurate with your fare.

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First Class passengers would have experienced spacious cabins, fine dining and elegant surroundings. Steerage passengers would have experienced an alternative version of hell.
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You would have then sailed up the Bristol Channel, that stretch of water dividing Wales and England. At the point when you crossed an imaginary line drawn from Sand Point to the East over to Lavernock Point to the West, you would have entered the River Severn.
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From there, a sharp right-hand turn into the River Avon would signal the remaining six miles of your journey upstream to the port of Bristol.
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It was unusual for a major city port to be based so far inland. Despite the tidal nature of the River Avon, the port was fully functional. Thanks to William Jessop, the river was diverted around the harbour at the turn of the 19th century and locks were installed to maintain a floating harbour.
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Today, the port activities have deferred to Avonmouth and Portishead Docks out by the Severn Estuary, saving the ever-larger ships the tricky six-mile journey up the River Avon.
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Bristol docks is now a vibrant cultural centre. In place of large trading vessels, the docks are home to pubs, restaurants, cafes, modern apartments and offices. And, of course, there is a place for the SS Great Britain herself, now a tourist attraction rather than the ocean-faring passenger ship of the 19th century.

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Bristol is also recognised as the home of Banksy, the mysterious street artist whose sophisticated graffiti pops up unexpectedly in locations worldwide. The most expensive Banksy painting sold to date fetched over £18 million at auction in 2021.
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The Harbourside area of Bristol Docks boasts a Banksy rendition of Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring.

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Out of curiosity...​
The artist Johannes Vermeer, whose most recognisable works include View of Delft, The Milkmaid and Girl with a Pearl Earring, died 349 years ago next Sunday, 15 December 1675.

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One landmark you wouldn’t have seen on that final six-mile leg from the River Severn to Bristol Docks in the 1840s would have been the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which hadn’t yet been constructed.
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​Since 1754, several attempts had been made to connect Clifton across the Avon Gorge to Leigh Woods and beyond. Projects generally floundered for lack of cash.
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In 1829, the Admiralty dictated that any bridge must provide at least 100 feet of clearance, ruling out a planned stone bridge close to the river itself. A far more ambitious construction would be needed to span the 700 feet across the gorge at its highest point.
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A competition was run to entice the country’s leading engineers to design such a bridge. Despite 22 other entries to choose from, the judge, Thomas Telford, inexplicably selected his own submission. The resulting - and unsurprising - opprobrium led to a stalemate.
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The competition was re-run in 1931, minus Thomas Telford. Up-and-coming civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel won the day. His selection launched a career which led to a legacy as one of the great British civil engineers of the Industrial Revolution.
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In addition to the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Brunel would design pioneering steamships, including the SS Great Britain mentioned earlier. He would design and project-manage the Great Western Railway linking Bristol to London, involving the construction of bridges, viaducts and tunnels. He was a visionary.
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At the time of the competition, the Clifton Suspension Bridge would be the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world. Unfortunately for Brunel, a continuous feed of unexpected events would stretch the construction period to 33 years, by which time it wasn’t.
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The Bristol Riots had brought progress to a standstill for so long that the licence to build the bridge had expired and needed to be reinstated.

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Even more unfortunate for Brunel, by the time the Clifton Suspension Bridge was completed, he had been dead for five years. The work was completed by William Henry Barlow and Sir John Hawkshaw as a memorial to him.
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On the opening day 160 years ago, the bridge was lit up with arc lamps and flares. 150,000 people gathered to watch speeches, processions and military displays. It was a celebration of Victorian engineering and of Brunel’s genius.
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Ever since that day, the Clifton Suspension Bridge has attracted attention. The advent of flight meant that pilots would fly their biplanes precariously under the bridge to the whoops of onlookers.
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In 1957, RAF pilot John Crossley went rogue and flew his de Haviland Vampire jet under the bridge at 450 mph. It would be his last misdemeanour as he crashed into the Leigh Woods side of the gorge and was killed instantly.

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Out of curiosity...​
The British-built Concorde’s birthplace was at Filton, Bristol in 1962, just up the road. On its final flight in 2003, it flew directly over the bridge to celebrate two of Bristol’s finest engineering achievements.

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Like many other bridges, the Clifton Suspension Bridge has also attracted less desirable attention as a hotspot for suicide attempts. An estimated 500 poor souls have taken their own lives by jumping from the bridge since 1864.
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However, contrary to popular opinion, jumping from a bridge 250 feet up from a river is not a failsafe method of ending your life.
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In May 1885, 23-year-old barmaid Sarah Ann Henley had been jilted by her lover. In a fit of depression, she had made her way directly to the Clifton Suspension Bridge, climbed over the railings and jumped.
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Depending on your viewpoint, fortuitously, Ms Henley’s billowing Victorian bloomers and skirt provided an opportune and unexpected level of upthrust.
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Consequently, her speed of descent was sufficiently reduced that she survived when she hit the muddy bank below. To add insult to injury, a passing cab driver refused to allow her in his cab as she would dirty the seats. Two good samaritans who had seen her fall had to stretcher Sarah for an hour to the Bristol Infirmary.
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In January 1900, Sarah Ann Henley married Edward Lane. She lived to the ripe-old age of 85.
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Out of curiosity...​
If you are struggling to believe surviving this fall is possible, listen to my interview with Australian Brad Guy in the podcast episode Parachute Roulette. In 2023, I talked with Brad about his one and only free-fall experience when both parachutes failed to open. Brad hit the ground at terminal velocity.

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Clifton Suspension Bridge wasn’t the first, the longest, the highest or the most expensive suspension bridge ever built. However, Isambard Kingdon Brunel had built a bridge to last, using pioneering methods and materials of the day.
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Most of the original wrought iron metalwork is still intact. His structural calculations from nearly 200 years ago have proved robust enough to accommodate over three million vehicle crossings per year today.

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Above all, the Clifton Suspension Bridge remains a symbol of Victorian engineering, a marker of the genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and testimony that the most functional structures can also be the most beautiful.

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Dates with History

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​Today...​
​Émile Reynaud, French inventor and artist, was born 180 years ago today, 8 December 1844. From an early age, Émile was fascinated by art and science. Work as a photographer turned his attention towards the potential for animation.
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Émile had seen the Zoetrope in action; a cylindrical contraption with slits along one edge giving sight of sequential images on the inside the cylinder.
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By spinning the cylinder, an effect of movement could be achieved. The human eye’s tendency to hold on to an image for a fraction of a second helped to smooth out the impression of a moving image.
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Reynaud set about improving this rudimentary experience. In 1877, he designed the praxinoscope which introduced a series of mirrors in place of slits. The net effect produced a brighter, more visually attractive motion scene.

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Eleven years later, Reynaud took the concept one stage further to produce the Théâtre Optique, a development which could project the praxinoscope image onto a screen.
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Unfortunately, the introduction of cinematography - the use of photographic film in place of hand-painted images - rendered Reynaud’s inventions obsolete. Although he died in near-obscurity in 1918, he is remembered today as a pioneer of early cinema.

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Friday...​
Fifty-six years ago this Friday, 13 December 1968, US President Lyndon Johnson and Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz set off an explosion in El Paso, Texas, which diverted the course of the Rio Grande. Thankfully, this was an agreed action, not a declaration of war.
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The River had served as a boundary between the two nations since the end of the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848. However, flooding between 1848 and 1864 had caused the Rio Grande to divert southwards in the El Paso region, effectively reclaiming 600 acres of land for the Americans.
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The area in question was El Chamizal, and the Chamizal Dispute remained an open sore in diplomatic relations between the two nations for a further 100 years until an agreement was accommodated in 1963.
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An ambitious project was undertaken to construct a four-mile channel to redirect the Rio Grande back to its original location. On 13 December 1968, Johnson and Ordaz met on the Santa Fe Bridge to ceremonially demolish a temporary dam and allow water to flow through the new channel.
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As a result of the 1963 agreement, approximately 5,000 US residents had been forcefully relocated to other areas in El Paso.
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Question of the Week

First an apology and correction to last week’s newsletter. I talked about the origins of the Star Trek franchise. The original film was indeed released in 1979 but I should have quoted the airing of the TV series as between 1966-69, rather than the incorrectly stated 1976-79. Thanks to K.W. for highlighting this for me.

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The blockbuster film The Towering Inferno was released 50 years ago this Friday, 13 December 1974. The sky-high disaster movie was one of the stand-out films of my childhood. The action sequences and special effects were ahead of their time and the film remains iconic among disaster movies today. Ironically, it really was Friday 13th that day.
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The cast was star-studded, including William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Fred Astaire.
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But what were the names of the two lead actors in the film?

And Finally…

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The English poet and playwright Robert Browning died 135 years ago this Thursday, 12 December 1889. He was born three days earlier than William Henry Barlow, the co-designer of the Clifton Suspension Bridge that we looked at earlier.
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Browning’s early work was criticised as obscure and overly challenging which limited his early popular appeal. However, by the time of his death in 1889 he was recognised as one of England’s greatest poets.
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I am no expert in the works of Robert Browning but I’m a sucker for an impactful quote, which he dutifully provides in his 1855 monologue, Andrea del Sarto, The Faultless Painter:

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Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.

Question of the week... Answer

The two lead actors in the 1974 film The Towering Inferno were Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. The film was released in the same week as James Bond’s The Man with the Golden Gun.

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