Bristol History Podcast Tom Brothwell

This week I met with Professor Nick Groom, to discuss the life, work and reputation of the Bristolian poet Thomas Chatterton. Born in Redcliffe in 1752, Chatterton was a precocious talent. In just seventeen years of life he produced a great body of poems, plays, prose works and a collection of medieval writings that he attributed to a fictional 15th century monk named Thomas Rowley. We discussed the details of Chatterton's short life and the myths that surround his posthumous reputation.

This week I spoke with Brycchan Carey, Professor of English at Northumbria university to discuss the life and work of 18th century Bristolian poet and milkwoman, Ann Yearsley,

This week I met with ballooning pioneer Don Cameron. We discussed the birth of hot air ballooning in Britain, the fifty-year history of his company - Cameron Balloons, the remarkable rise of the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta, and touched on some of the extraordinary feats of ballooning that Don has undertaken.

This week I spoke with Andrew Foyle from Outstories Bristol, a volunteer community history group with an objective to gather, preserve and communicate the stories of LGBTQ people in Bristol and the surrounding area. We discussed some of the stories of LGBT people throughout Bristol’s history from the 17th century to the present day.

This week I spoke with amateur historian Steven Carter to discuss his research on how profits from the slave trade were fed back into British industry. Focussing on Edward Protheroe - a feted coal industrialist in the Forest of Dean in the early 19th century - Steven has traced how a substantial amount of the Protheroe family wealth was derived first from the slave trade and later from the labour of enslaved people on sugar plantations. During our chat we discussed the surprising and sometimes obscure ways that profits from the transatlantic slave trade and slavery-reliant industries were channelled back into the British economy.

This week I met with Dr Michael Whitfield to discuss Bristol's dispensaries. For the two hundred years or so before the creation of the NHS in 1948, the dispensaries were one of the main providers of healthcare in Britain, especially for its poorest people. We discussed how the dispensaries operated, who paid for them and what they can tell us about modern day healthcare.