Peter Cullimore (P W 1961 – 1971)

Retired journalist and Peter Cullimore (P W 1961-1971) got in touch with us earlier this week to tell us about the book – Saints, Crooks & Slavers –  that he and his wife, Sue co-wrote.  Sue and Peter Cullimore researched the history of their home after it was shortlisted for the recent BBC TV history series A House Through Time, presented by David Olusoga.

Published close to the start of lockdown in March, the book was written not for profit and was very much what he describes as “a labour of love”. During lockdown, he and his wife delivered hundreds of ordered copies on foot to local people’s doorsteps, as part of their daily exercise routine.

Local to Wycliffe, Stroud Bookshop are the stockist in Gloucestershire. Otherwise it’s available from half a dozen other small independent bookshops in Bristol and surrounding area, which also take orders online. Or, you can order directly from Peter by contacting either by email: petercullimore@blueyonder.co.uk or by ringing: 07730 493872.

Congratulations Peter and Sue, we wish you success with the book. What a colourful history the house has and how informative for anyone wishing to trace their own house through time!

Below he talks about what inspired him to begin the task:

Looking back 60 years, my earliest school memory is of a house in Dursley. Here I was taught to read, write and add up by Miss Newth. She ran a private day school from her home in the town, known affectionately to everyone just as “Miss Newth’s”. She lived in The Knapp, alongside Dursley “Rec” and near the Secondary Modern, as it was then (now Rednock School). Miss Newth had just 12 pupils, boys and girls from the age of four to about seven. I remember her as a kind and gentle teacher, loved by all.
At “playtime” we ran wild in her back garden, or played cricket on the Rec, with Miss Newth bowling a tennis ball at us. She also took us on nature walks along a footpath towards Cam. In the classroom her aged mother, called Mrs Newth, sat watching the lessons. It had been her school previously.

I was reminded of those days in 1950s Gloucestershire when writing a new book on the history of where I live now, an 18th century house in the Montpelier district of Bristol. Its early residents included one of two sisters known as the “Misses Phippen”. Mary and Charlotte Phippen were Quakers. From the 1820s, they ran small private schools in their own home, as did Miss Newth much later. Unlike her,
the Phippens took girls only, and from the poorest families. But Miss Newth’s house school came at the tail end of a tradition stretching back to the Georgian era.

The not-for-profit book, Saints, Crooks & Slavers, was cowritten with my wife Sue. She’s a retired teacher and lecturer herself, and taught Geography at Stroud Girls’ High School in the 1970s and 80s, where she was “Miss Walker”.

After Miss Newth’s, I became a pupil at Wycliffe College in Stonehouse for the rest of my own school education.

The writing project was inspired by our house being shortlisted for the recent TV history series A House Through Time, presented by David Olusoga. Although the BBC eventually chose a property in central Bristol instead, we got hooked on doing our own research into the origins and colourful past residents of 60 Fairfield Road.

It’s been home to Sue and me for 34 years. Before that we lived in Cheltenham, where I began my career in journalism. Nowadays I’m also retired, but I was a trainee reporter on the Gloucestershire Echo for three years in the late 1970s. When I left, my replacement was a youthful David Garmston, now and for decades one of the main presenters on Points West. I then moved on to the newsroom at Severn Sound, followed by BBC Radio in Bristol and London, and later ITV Wales.

Montpelier is a suburb on the north side of Bristol and lay in Gloucestershire until boundary changes in 1832. Our house, originally called Spring Cottage, was built on land owned by the wealthy Bearpacker family. They were clothiers from Wotton-under-Edge. The property’s first developer and resident in the late 1700s, a Quaker businessman named Shurmer Bath, had close links with the slave trade. He twice married into the family of a slave owner, who’d sold his plantation in the Caribbean for a small fortune. But Shurmer went bankrupt trying to build our house, and others in Montpelier, as a construction boom turned to bust in the Napoleonic Wars.

Our book came out during lockdown at the start of the pandemic. It was just as the slavery issue re-ignited in such dramatic fashion, with the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Black Lives Matter protest movement spreading worldwide.

The book describes many other fascinating past occupants of our ‘house through time’. They include a shady French aristocrat, Guillaume de Beaumont, who pretended to be English and changed his name to William Beaumont. He’d escaped to England as a child, with the help of loyal family servants, after his parents were executed by guillotine in the French Revolution.

A century later, one branch of a large local family, the Vowles, rented our house, while another branch lived right opposite. They included Arthur Vowles, who set up a brushworks at Stonehouse in the early 1900s. W.H. Vowles and Sons became a major employer in the town.

Alongside a lively narrative about all these previously unknown historical characters, our book gives step-by-step advice on how to research your own home and predecessors in it. These practical tips for the reader were compiled by Sue and checked for accuracy by a senior archivist. Saints, Crooks & Slavers is unusual in being a detailed house history and research guide written by us the residents, rather than by an expert historian. In our research, we taught ourselves about censuses, births, deaths and marriage records, old trade directories and a labyrinth of other sources along the way. It’s been a steep learning curve, but house detective work like this is a lot of fun. I recommend it as a welcome distraction in these grim times.

Saints, Crooks & Slavers, by Peter and Sue Cullimore, is lavishly illustrated with photos and historical maps. It’s available for £12 in the Stroud Bookshop at 23 High Street, Stroud, or from Max Minerva’s at Westbury Park in Bristol www.maxminervas.co.uk and other local bookshops. You can also order it online from Max Minerva’s or the publisher, Bristol Books: www.bristolbooks.org Or get it direct from us, the authors, by emailing petercullimore@blueyonder.co.uk , and we’ll post you a copy.