The people of medieval Bristol were so closely linked to a German port in the Baltic Sea that the two populations shared a unique type of worm living in their guts. The bizarre discovery...
I became interested in the Peninsular War period through the TV series “Sharpe”. This is predominately a male tale of derring-do but when visiting the National Army Museum in London (www.nam.ac.uk) I discovered the...
My great great grandfather Henry FRAY was so afraid of being incarcerated in Keynsham Workhouse that he fatally cut his throat with a razor in 1900. “The Workhouse” cast a terrible shadow over the...
Bristol was still reeling from the aftermath of the Reform Riots of 1831 with the condemned rioters in gaol awaiting their tragic fate, when a new peril appeared over the horizon: the Cholera Morbus,...
“The Budgetts”, originally written about forty years ago, was my first attempt at the story of a family and therefore I call it part of my “Juvenilia”. It arose out of a conversation with...
Find me a scientist was a challenge issued by my late brother Colin Pillinger. At Christmas I would send him a story about our numerous ancestors but the nearest approximation to science I came...
Thomas Dafter, yeoman of “Wollen” (ie Oldland) Glos, yeoman, took out a marriage licence on 8 Nov 1684 to marry Mary Pollen, of St Augustine, Bristol, with the wedding to be at the bride’s...
Mary Magdalen (Maudlin) is traditionally, though unproven, the New Testament’s “fallen woman”, who Jesus saved through her repentance, but it was probably by accident rather than design that Bristol’s Female Penitentiary was situated at...
Jonathon Bisp of Winterbourne, c1754, who appears in my Kingswood Index (elsewhere on this site) was apparently also nown as “Bliss”. In 1996, Mrs Walsh, a descendant of the Bisp Family, sent me a...
Though the main theme of this hardback book concerns the accidents, fatal (and otherwise) which befell the coalminers who worked in the historic Kingswood (South Gloucestershire) Coalfield it is hoped that through these tragic...
I have been researching the social history of the West Country for 45 years. During this time I have collated information on a wide range of people living and working in the West Country including miners, ethnic minorities, petty criminals, sailors, tommies, benefactors, brassmakers and many more. The thing that I find amazing is that ordinary people always lived extraordinary lives. I hope you like my blog that brings together my lifetime of research.
The War of 1812 – Bristol’s American POWs
13 March 2025
Richard Hendy, mariner, 1926-2024
12 December 2024
