Carolus Allen

[Allen Descendant]

Interesting about Mr Allen being the organist at St Mary Redcliffe.  His daughter Emma taught piano for many years and played in concerts in the Bristol area.

Regarding your comment about your great gran, No.21 Longfield Road was within a mile of central Bristol. My father and his cousin were visiting in WW2 and both being electrical engineers volunteered to install electricity as they were concerned about a bomb hitting the house.  My great aunt and her father refused. The house survived the bombing but the next 3 houses were flattened!!  I had to go to my great aunt's in the 1950s at half-term and, yes, the gas lighting was downstairs and you took a candle to bed.  I could understand this in the wilds of Cornwall but not in the centre of Bristol.

I have some information about Alfred KIRKLAND that I started to glean from my 3rd cousin, yesterday.  She is going to get more information for me. Where do I put this?

[S_L]

2 hours ago, Tony Newnham said:

My Great-Grandmother had no electricity in her house until she died (early to mid - 1960's).  It was a typical fair sized Victorian terraced house.  Gas lighting on the ground floor only (which was all that was used by that time).  A gas stove in the kitchen, alongside a coal fire range (which I never saw in use).  Outside toilet.  If you needed to go upstairs in the dark you used a candle.  No TV  (obviously), but there was a radio - on a "Redifusion" system.  Basically a cable relay system.  There was a choice of BBC Light programme & home service.  My sister & I would regularly go there for tea on Fridays.  Granny Pete (Mrs Peters) was quite happy with what she had & never wanted anything more modern.  I guess when you've lived your life without "modern" luxuries you don't see the point.

At least Granny Pete had running water - I remember Mum & Dad taking her to visit a friend who lived in a cottage in the country - their water supply was a spring across the road!  (That would probably have been late 1950's)  How times change!

LOL - now that brought back memories!

I remember, as a young boy, going to bed with my candle. We had no electricity in the house and a coal fire range for cooking. There was no mains sewage and water came from a well. This was in a remote part of the East Riding of Yorkshire. Before that I lived on the island of Eigg - with similar, and in some cases even more primitive, domestic provision!

And today I live in a hamlet in S.W. of France - I do have mains water but there is a deep well in the middle of the house!!!

[Damian Beasley-Suffolk]

Whilst I don't doubt for a moment that this lady lived without electricity, having no electricity in that part of Bristol must have been a choice. I knew St Andrews very well as an adolescent, 10 years or so later, as I had school friends living close by. The area always appeared very well-to-do, full of rows of houses built in the same style around the turn of the century, all connected to mains water, electricity and sewers, no mean feat when you realise how hilly it is. Then again, a little further up the road in Horfield my grandfather had the gas connection removed from the building completely as he didn't trust it, and ran everything with electricity. He was an engineer so it wasn't an arbitrary choice. Around that time, as decimalisation was exactly 50 years ago this week, it was still common to hear shopkeepers giving the prices of thing in "old money" as well as new to some of the older folk who may have taken some time to adapt to changes, or were happy with how things were. At the risk of straying into 4 Yorkshiremen territory, it's nevertheless interesting to learn more about what was really going on while you were a child.