Marlens have compiled a new walk covering the Clevedon seafront heritage trail .
The trail begins at the pier’s toll house in Marine Parade and leads walkers to the other side of the seafront, along Poet’s Walk before ending at St Andrew’s Church in Old Church Road. The route also passes a number of interesting and historical landmarks and buildings along the way including the bandstand, Marine Lake and Clevedon Hall.
The town of Clevedon has connections to two of England’s best known poets.
Poets’ Walk is a popular footpath which runs along the coast and around Wain’s Hill and Church Hill at the southern end of Clevedon. The walk is said to have inspired poets such as Alfred Tennyson , Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Makepeace Thackeray, who visited the town. The formal path which exists today was constructed in 1929. Poets’ Walk was designated as a Local Nature Reserve in 1993.
The Sugar Lookout is a feature on Poets’ Walk. It was built by Ferdinand Beeston in around 1835. It is said to have been used in the mid-19 th century by a family of sugar importers called Finzel to look out for ships sailing up the Bristol Channel, which were carrying sugar from the West Indies. It later fell into ruin but has recently been restored.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife Sarah spent the first few months of their married life in a cottage on Old Church Road in Clevedon in 1795.
In the mid-18 th century the author William Makepeace Thackeray was a frequent visitor of the Elton Family, who lived at Clevedon Court. He is best known as a novelist but he did also write some poetry.
Alfred Tennyson had a close friend at Cambridge University called Arthur Hallam. Arthur’s mother was a member of the Elton family of Clevedon Court. Arthur, who was a poet and essayist, was engaged to marry Tennyson’s sister Emily but he died suddenly in Vienna in 1833 at the age of 22. His body was brought back to England and he was buried in the family vault at St Andrew’s Church in Clevedon. In 1850 Tennyson wrote a poem called In Memorium in tribute to his friend. In the same year he made his first visit to Clevedon. The house on Old Church Road in Clevedon, where he is said to have stayed, is called Tennyson House. A nearby road is called Tennyson Avenue.
Antibiotics are compounds produced by bacteria and fungi, which are capable of killing or inhibiting the growth of other microbial species. Before their introduction as medicines, there was no effective treatment for infections such as pneumonia, meningitis or rheumatic fever.
In 1928 Alexander Fleming, who was a Scottish bacteriologist working in London, first noticed that the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus wouldn’t grow in the parts of a culture, which had accidentally been contaminated by the green mould Penicillium notatum. He conducted research on the mould and discovered that it produced a substance capable of killing many of the common bacteria, which cause infections in humans. However he was unable to produce a purified form, which was also stable.
Further research was carried out in the late 1930s by British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain , Australian pathologist Howard Florey and others at Oxford University to produce penicillin in a form that could be used as a human medicine. By 1941 they had developed an injectable form of the drug, which was available for use in humans. During the Second World War development of large scale production of penicillin took place in the United States. However it was also produced in Clevedon .
In 1943 the Royal Navy set up their first laboratory in Clevedon at the White House in Highdale Road . However it wasn’t large enough, so the equipment was moved to the house that is now 5 Elton Road , although at this time it was No 4 and was called Eastington House. The rooms in the house were used for research and assay laboratories. The penicillin was produced in a factory built on land behind the house.
Penicillin was produced by growing the Penicillium notatum mould on a culture medium at a controlled temperature. This was done in sterilised milk bottles. 40,000 were used at Clevedon, as each one only produced a very small amount of antibiotic. Many local people were employed in the laboratories, in addition to the Royal Navy staff. The freeze dried powder was packed and distributed to the armed forces and a few civilian establishments. When reconstituted with sterilised water it became injectable.
After the end of the Second World War the Royal Navy sold the Clevedon factory to Distillers Company Ltd. They moved in at the beginning of 1947. They worked on developing new antibiotics but in 1949 the research station was transferred to the Medical Research Council. They continued research in to antibiotic alternatives to penicillin and also manufactured other drugs. The Clevedon site closed in 1961.
Further Reading :
Clevedon Places and Faces: Rob Cambell (editor). Matador, 2010
Clevedon Civic Society Local History Group are hosting a number of history themed talks in 2017, starting with ‘Celtic Legacy’ by Derek Lilly, on 19 January. Details of events can be found on their website . Visitors are welcome to attend for £3.
The Observer Corps was set up in 1925 but had its roots in the First World War. The need for an organised early warning system was recognised when the Germans started aerial bombing raids on southern England using Zeppelin airships in 1915. A network of observers stationed at strategic locations was set up.
During the 1930s the number of observation posts was greatly increased until by 1939 the whole of Britain was covered by the network. During the Battle of Britain in 1940 the Corps plotted the positions of German aircraft and passed the information to the RAF. To recognise the value of this work, on 9 th April 1941 King George VI conferred the title Royal on the Observer Corps. Women were allowed to join the ROC from July 1941.
From 1940-42 a network of 150 satellite posts was established to improve coverage along the south and east coasts of Britain as far north as Dundee and on the coasts of Lancashire and Cheshire. Some of these posts were manned by the ROC but most were manned by the RAF, coastguards or Anti-Aircraft Command.
The ROC was temporarily stood down on 12th May 1945 but was reactivated in 1947 in response to post war threats from the Soviet Bloc. In 1955 the ROC was given responsibility for giving warning of air attacks in a future war and to measure radioactivity levels in the event of a nuclear attack. The above ground monitoring posts offered little protection from radioactivity. Therefore a programme of works was developed to build a network of underground posts. By 1964 1,563 underground posts had been constructed across the UK. They were designed to provide satisfactory blast protection and to be able to be used self-sufficiently for a number of weeks if a nuclear attack on the UK had occurred.
Cuts in defence spending reduced the number of ROC posts to 873 in 1968. With the final end to the Cold War and more cuts in defence spending the ROC was finally stood down on 30 th September 1991.
In North Somerset ROC Underground Monitoring Posts were located at Long Ashton, Portishead, Clevedon, Bleadon and Winscombe. The Winscombe and Clevedon posts have been demolished. Remains of the Portishead and Bleadon posts can be seen from public rights of way. The Long Ashton post may still exist but it is not on a public right of way.
Bleadon’s ROC Monitoring Post is now in the middle of a new golf course on the top of Bleadon Hill. It was built in 1959 and used until 1991. The access and ventilation shafts are both visible from a public footpath, which runs northwards from Roman Road. Grid reference: ST345 579
The very overgrown and truncated remains of the access shaft of Portishead ROC Monitoring Post can be seen in a small area of waste land on the south side of Down Road. It was built in 1964 but closed down in 1968. Grid reference: ST448 759
A comprehensive survey of the remains of all the ROC Monitoring Posts in the United Kingdom can be found on the Subterranea Britannica website: http://www.subbrit.org.uk/category/nuclear-monitoring-posts
A comprehensive history of the Royal Observer Corps can be found on the Royal Observer Corps Association’s website: http://www.roc-heritage.co.uk/roc-history.html
Further Reading:
Attack Warning Red: The Royal Observer Corps and the Defence of Britain 1925 to 1992: Derek Wood. Macdonald and Jane’s Publishers Limited, 1992
Edith Louisa Cavell was born on December 4th 1865 in the village of Swardeston in Norfolk, where her father Frederick was the vicar for 45 years. After being educated at home for several years, Edith boarded at Belgrave House School in Elton Road, Clevedon from 1883-84. She then attended schools in London and Peterborough. In 1889 she became governess to a family in Brussels and she remained in this post for six years. She returned to England in 1895 to nurse her seriously ill father and she then decided to train as a nurse. She trained at the Royal London Hospital and then worked at various hospitals in London and Manchester.
1 Elton Rd, Clevedon
In 1907 Edith was appointed as director of a new nurses’ training school in Brussels, which had just been set up by Dr Antoine De Page. She successfully persuaded potential recruits and members of her committee that nursing was a respectable profession and one which required professional training.
After the German occupation of Belgium in late 1914, Edith became involved in an underground group formed to help British, French, and Belgian soldiers reach the Netherlands, which was a neutral country. The soldiers were sheltered at the Berkendael Institute, which had become a Red Cross hospital. They were provided with money and guides by a Belgian called Philippe Baucq. About 200 men had been helped before Edith and several others were arrested in August 1915 by the Germans.
The group of nine people was brought before a court martial on October 7th, 1915, accused of assisting the enemy and of trying to damage the German war effort. Edith Cavell made a full confession and was sentenced to death on October 9th, along with four others. The remaining four were sentenced to hard labour. Edith Cavell and Philippe Baucq were executed by a firing squad on October 12 th 1915 in Brussels, despite the efforts of the American and Spanish ministers to secure a reprieve. Edith’s execution on a charge, which did not include espionage, was considered outrageous and was widely publicised by the Allies.
After the war there was a funeral service for Edith Cavell at Westminster Abbey and on 15th May 1919 her body was reburied on the outside of the south east corner of Norwich Cathedral. She is commemorated on the Swardeston village sign and by a statue in St Martin’s Place in London. There are busts of her at the London Hospital Museum; in Brussels; Melbourne in Australia and Norwich. She also has many streets in the UK and across the world named after her and a bar in Tombland, Norwich There is a blue plaque on 1 Elton Road, Clevedon , commemorating the time she spent at school in Clevedon.
Further Reading:
Edith Cavell: Faith before the Firing Squad
: Catherine Butcher. Monarch Books, 2015
Edith Cavell: Nurse, Martyr, Heroine:
Diana Souhami. Quercus Publishing, 2015
