Redcliffe Press Publications
UPDATED11 June 2009
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THE CORNISH REVIEW ANTHOLOGY 1949-52 
Post-war Cornwall saw a remarkable flowering of the arts and literature. Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth spearheaded the modernist movement in Britain, the Leach Pottery attracted worldwide attention and Cornish culture was celebrated in a myriad forms.
Writer and editor Denys Val Baker was at the heart of all this activity. His Britain’s Art Colony by the Sea became an iconic record, while the Cornish Review, which he launched in 1949, provided a regular platform for the area’s writers, critics and historians. Some of the period’s finest writing appeared in his pages, although – as some critics pointed out – by no means all the contributors were Cornish-born. This anthology, drawing together articles, poetry and short stories, gives a flavour of those heady years: artist Peter Lanyon writing on ‘The Face of Penwith’, poems by the deaf and blind St Austell poet Jack Clemo, Sven Berlin on his world as a sculptor, Guido Morris expounding the finer points of letterpress printing, and Charles Marriott recalling Cornwall’s early art colonies. Bernard Leach, Charles Causley, the irascible Arthur Caddick, memories of D H Lawrence in Cornwall, W S Graham’s celebrated poem ‘The Voyages of Alfred Wallis’ – all these and much more sparkle in these pages.
Not least of historical and cultural interest is Val Baker’s bitter-sweet essay on the two incarnations of the Review: 1949-1952, from which these extracts are taken, and a final flowering from 1966 to 1974. Ultimately, the Review foundered for lack of money and readers; ironically, original copies are now much sought after by collectors.
978-1-904537-36-6
230 x 153mm
160pp
£10
BRISTOL'S FLOATING HARBOUR: THE FIRST 200 YEARS
Peter Malpass and Andy King
On l May, 1809 the port of Bristol was transformed for ever by the completion of the Floating Harbour. For centuries, ships coming up the Avon had been stranded on the muddy bed of the river at low tide.
William Jessop’s system of dams and locks kept ships afloat at the quaysides at all times, while a new course for the river Avon (the New Cut) provided a tidal bypass. This massive civil engineering project took five years to complete and cost twice the original estimates, but it improved the efficiency of the port and allowed the City Docks to thrive until the 1960s.
Today the Floating Harbour remains an important and iconic feature of the city. No longer a working port it has been transformed into a place of new apartments, office jobs, leisure and tourism.
Peter Malpass and Andy King tell the story of the Floating Harbour from the earliest proposals right through to the present day – drawing on original research and the huge collection of paintings and photographs held in the City’s collections.
160pp
Profusely illustrated in colour and black & white with paintings and atmospheric photographs of the city docks at work
ISBN 978-1-906593-28-5
£14.99 Softback
BRISTOL IN 1807: Impressions of the city at the time of abolition
Anthony Beeson
What was Bristol like two hundred years ago, in the year the slave trade was abolished? A recent exhibition 
at Bristol Central Library gave us some idea.
Now, in a glorious collection of extracts from books, letters, diaries, poems, all brilliantly illustrated with paintings and prints, we get a glimpse of the fantastic whirligig that was the rumbustious Bristol of the early nineteenth century.
Here, we rub shoulders with a motley crew of villains, dupes, pleasure seekers and the sick desperately seeking health at the ailing Hotwell spa. In these pages, we find the best places to promenade and how to flirt on College Green.
Foreign visitors were appalled at how Bristolians drank to excess and behaved atrociously when drunk. This is the city in which 800 men went on strike for missing breakfast, and where hoteliers kept turtles and served them for dinner, most notably the famous John Weeks at the famous Bush Tavern in Corn Street.
An almost endless cast-list of eccentrics includes George Pocock, who invented a boy-spanking machine for unruly pupils and a ‘charvolant’, a kite-propelled carriage. Contributors include Bristol-born poet Robert Southey, posing as a Portuguese traveller, visitors from London who marvelled at Bristol’s backward manners and Robert Lovell, who turned in an amusingly savage poetical Bristol – a Satire.
ISBN 978-1-906593-26-1
£10
256pp, illustrated throughout, including 16 pages of colour illustrations. Paperback
THE ARCHITECT'S TALE
William Bertram
After his student project was apparently ‘borrowed’ by one of the world’s most famous architects, 
chance (and talent) has allowed William Bertram to create beautiful buildings for some of the richest, most influential and interesting people of the age.
He is a favoured architect of the Prince of Wales, for whom he has created pavilion retreats and other features at Highgrove and a fairytale tree house for the princes William and Harry. Summoned to Virginia by the glamorous Patricia Kluge and her elderly husband –one of
America’s richest men – he is wined and dined at their Albemarle estate and, in the rustic surroundings of John Kluge’s log cabin, learns how even the super rich don’t like to part with their money.
In Bath, with luck and timing, he is entrusted to create one of the world’s great hotels at the Royal Crescent – at the very heart of his hero John Wood’s Georgian city. At Cliveden, the Astors’ country house in Berkshire, his vision and craftsmanship are brilliantly employed to transform into a superb hotel one of England’s great houses –redolent of the Astors and the downfall of the Macmillan government at the hands of Christine Keeler. It’s here that his client John Tham marries the actress Jenny Agutter (not, however, before the local fire brigade is called upon to replenish ancient water tanks). In Prague and on the cusp of a deal, his plans for the decaying Salm Palace fall foul of rival ownerships and the unresolved claims of European aristocracy in a post-communist world.
At the little church in Bladon next to Blenheim, he redesigns the Churchill family plot and, with the blessing of Lady Soames, creates a new gravestone for her father Sir Winston – an almost sacred place of pilgrimage. In designing an oriel window for a church in Somerset, he reveals how extraordinary generosity restores faith and defeats infighting.
The author talks knowledgeably about architecture – and especially of the Classical tradition which he so loves – and describes how truly worthwhile buildings are created by an almost intuitive grasp of space and location – and dogged determination. His long, litigious and bitter battle with conservation groups opposed to Cavendish Lodge –his great neo-classical creation in Bath – is recounted blow-by-bloody blow, using contemporary newspaper accounts to colour an even-handed history of attacks, resignations and final victory: Bath’s greatest building in 100 years.
The Architect’s Tale will entertain and inform anyone interested in the mysterious business of how our built landscape is shaped and our buildings created. Students of architecture will find inspiration here.
Above all this is a book about people: wealthy clients, fine craftsmen, shrewd negotiators and eccentrics, written by a master story teller.
296pp
Hardback
£18.99
IN PRINT
How I lived a Year on just a pound a day
Kath Kelly 
With the recession biting and green issues constantly in the news, publication of this entertaining but always practical guide to sensible living could not be more timely.
Incredible but true – the story of how one woman lived for a whole year on just a pound a day.
Kath Kelly was broke. That was OK, as all her friends were, too. But she had an important event to budget for, just a year away. One drunken night, she made a rash decision: to live on just a pound a day for the next twelve months.
In 12 month-by-month chapters, she tells how a mission to cut her spending to the bone showed her another side of herself and of human nature. Through a year like no year she had spent before, she discovered how greed and waste was messing up people – to say nothing of the planet – and came to see how much fun can be had on a few pennies a day.
A comprehensive directory of organisations and websites provides invaluable leads for all of us – whether we want to follow Kath all the way or just pick up tips on how to save money and live more sensibly.
ISBN 978-1-906593-12-4
192pp
paperback
£6.99
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Also available from your local bookseller
The Historic Gardens of Cheshire
Tim Mowl and Marion Mako
One hundred gardens feature in this richly illustrated celebration of historic gardens in Cheshire.
From the Duke of Westminster’s Eaton Hall to Lord Leverhulme’s Thornton Manor and his noted garden village at Port Sunlight, there is a swagger and grandeur about the landscape and garden experiments in the county. Country-house gardens by noted designers abound throughout the county. Public parks feature, too, including Joseph Paxton’s astonishing Birkenhead Park, which was the inspiration for New York’s Central Park.
Other highlights include a garden laid out to symbolise John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a cosmic arboretum created by Sir Bernard Lovell at Jodrell Bank and England’s most atmospheric rococo garden at Adlington near the border with the Peak District.
Exciting modern gardens include one based on Piet Mondrian paintings, another draws inspiration from Alice in Wonderland while a back garden in Sale combines brilliant planting with modern sculpture and ceramics laid out like objets trouves among exotic architectural planting.
This is the eighth title in Tim Mowl’s celebrated series of books in the Historic Gardens of England series, now being published by Redcliffe Press. Somerset and Staffordshire will follow in 2009
ISBN: 978-1-906593-14-8
288pp with 60 colour and many black & white illustrations
Softback with flaps
£19.95
A Life of Two Halves: The Chris Garland Story
With James Ryan and Mark Leesdad
‘Roller-coaster ride’ is an over-used phrase but for former soccer star Chris Garland, it’s very apt.
Born in the red half of Bristol, Chris supported Bristol City from a very early age. Like a lot of youngsters, he enjoyed watching his heroes train and play, particularly his hero John Atyeo, and would often hang around the ground to get the players’ autographs. His footballing skills developed, along with his dream of playing for the club he loved. He was soon signing autographs instead of collecting them.
Once established in the Bristol City first team, he was destined to move to one of England’s bigger clubs and in 1971 he set off for Chelsea. A move from the bright lights and the King’s Road came in 1974 when he joined First Division rivals Leicester City. In December 1976 he achieved his ultimate dream, when he came home to play for Bristol City in the First Division. But after Chris had played a key role in helping the club retain its top-flight status, things started to go wrong –successive relegation seasons, being frozen out by the new manager, long-term injury and the financial crash of 1982, when Chris became one of the famous Ashton Gate Eight.
Although Chris was later to rejoin City for a third time, things were never the same. After football, ventures in the fruit-and-veg business and then in the wine trade proved unsuccessful, while a career in insurance ended in redundancy. A gambling problem created additional stresses, leading to marriage break-up and bankruptcy. At one stage he was sleeping rough and even contemplated suicide. And all this while struggling with Parkinson’s Disease.
For Chris Garland it has certainly been a roller-coaster ride. A life of two halves.
ISBN 978-1-906593-11-7
230 x 155mm
176pp, with 32pp plate section
Hardback
£16.99
John Barry: The Man with the Midas Touch
Geoff Leonard, Pete Walker, Gareth Bramley
John Barry, far and away Britain’s best-known film and popular composer, has made not one but four outstanding contributions to the international music scene.
For rock 'n roll fans, The John Barry Seven were pioneers of the emerging British music scene in the 1950s, while his distinctive pizzicato string arrangements for Adam Faith’s pre-Beatles successes like ‘What Do You Want?’ are part of pop music history. Chart aficionados point to commercial successes like ‘Hit and Miss’ for TV’s Juke Box Jury and The Persuaders. But, for millions of film-goers, Barry’s greatest achievements, apart from the memorable James Bond film themes and scores, have been the Oscar-winning scores for Born Free, The Lion in Winter, Out of Africa and Dances with Wolves. In John Barry – The Man With The Midas Touch, this astonishing 50-year career is celebrated in all its musical facets. The authors, each one an authority as well as a fan, draw not only on their own experience, but also on conversations with Barry himself and people who have known him since his formative years as performer, producer, arranger and writer.
More than 300 photographs (120 colour and 180 black and white) celebrate John Barry’s entire career, including many never previously published.
The most detailed and complete discography yet compiled is another feature of the book, making it an essential reference for enthusiasts and music historians.
ISBN 978-1-904537-77-9
255 x 180mm
304pp
£19.99
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FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS: 2009
GARDENS OF STAFFORDSHIRE
Timothy Mowl & Dianne Barre
Staffordshire is usually associated with the Potteries and the Black Country, the 
industrial heartland of the Midlands, yet it is also a county of gently rolling landscape with some of the most eccentric gardens in the country. Nothing is quite what it seems. Alton Towers, famous for its blood-curdling theme-park rides, has an historic garden with orangeries, temples and a Chinese pagoda. Trentham, best known of the county’s heritage sites with a rich garden history, has a breathtaking modern garden of swaying grasses by Piet Oudolf. There are remains of Elizabethan water gardens at Gayton and Gerards Bromley and, in Izaak Walton’s county, fishing pavilions in the form of a Doric temple at Calwich Abbey and a Gothic chapel at Blithbury Priory.
The county’s richest period is the Georgian when Shugborough was given Chinese, Greek and Gothick garden buildings and Enville, a beautiful Gothick orangery like a Staffordshire ornament. One admiral owner at Batchacre directed mock battles on his lake with naval frigates and military forts. Most bizarrely, The Wodehouse at Wombourne had a mechanical hermit to delight visitors. All these eclectic layouts are a welcome relief to the vapid parks of Capability Brown and the suburban landscapes of Humphry Repton which followed them. The themed gardens – Egyptian and Chinese – at the National Trust’s Biddulph Grange are the county’s most important nineteenth-century designs, and even the Art Deco potter Clarice Cliff had a flower-packed garden in the suburbs of Stoke.
Recently published The Historic Gardens of Cheshire
ISBN: 978-1-906593-15-5
288pp with 60 colour and many black & white illustrations
Softback with flaps
£19.95
PUBLICATION SEPTEMBER 2009
Douglas Light Aero Engines: From Kingswood to Cathcart
And their contribution to private flying in the 1920s and 1930s
Brian Thorby
This ground-breaking book tells of the contribution made by converted Douglas motorcycle engines to the development of private flying in the golden age of civil aviation from 1923 to 1939.
The story begins in the early 1920s, with prize competitions in Britain and Germany designed to encourage the development of affordable light aircraft. Before established aero-engine makers took this new market seriously, a major power source was the renowned twin-cylinder motorcycle units made by Douglas, of Kingswood, Bristol.
Later, from those Douglas works came Cyril G Pullin, a brilliant designer whose ideas put him among world leaders in rotary-winged aircraft development after he moved to G & J Weir at Cathcart in Glasgow in 1933. Another ex-Douglas engineer also joined Pullin to design the innovative power units for these autogiros and helicopters
This profusely illustrated record of a remarkable period in aviation history charts the fortunes of Douglas and its successors, their engines and the aircraft they powered.
Price TBA
PUBLICATION TBA 2009
A TASTE OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE
Andrea Leeman 
A Taste of Gloucestershire explores the county’s great wealth of food and drink. The third volume in an acclaimed series, the book dips into the story of Old Gloucester cattle, endangered in the mid-twentieth century but now requisite among a herd in order to make Single Gloucester cheese. A smokery displays smoked eel on its shelves and gives an update on the elvers that were once the traditional fare of Gloucester folk.
Perry is one of the county’s great drinks but why will the perry pear only grow within sight of May Hill? Fine flour is milled at Shipton Mill and there’s a visit to The Duchy Home Farm, including a hot tip from their Veg Shed.
Recipes old and new include Oldbury Tarts, traditional gooseberry pies in a hot crust pastry – and with the Old Spot as the county’s favourite pig there are plenty of delicious pork recipes too.
Bee Colony Collapse Disorder leading to loss of pollination is something all farmers dread, but it’s encouraging to hear wise words from a bee farmer and to taste fine local honey made by himself and his son. And should you sense a thirst coming on after reading this, Uley Brewery brews excellent cask ales with hops from just over the hill in Herefordshire. The feel throughout the county is of mindful farming, with an eye to top quality produce and a sustainable future.
Also available
A Taste of Devon
A Taste of Somerset
ISBN 978-1-906593-30-8
210mm x 255mm
112 pp
Full colour illustrations throughout
Softback
£10
PUBLICATION: OCTOBER 2009
Burblings of an Old Bat
Caroline Salt
Here it is – just the present for a favourite aunt! Burblings of an Old Bat are offered here for all those who – like the author – refuse to give in to old age and continue (with a redeeming sense of humour) to be bellicose and determined in the face of the absurdities of modern life.
This selection of weekly articles which Caroline Salt wrote for the Bristol Evening Post will either have readers muttering, ‘the stupid old bat’, or – much more likely – shouting with glee, ‘Yes, she’s absolutely right’.
ISBN: 978-1-906593-07-0
Softback
192pp
£7.99
St Mary Redcliffe: The Church and its People
Peter Aughton
Reflected in the waters of the Floating Harbour and looking over Redcliffe Wharf stands an ancient church of astonishing beauty. The spire stands high above the surrounding buildings. The church is full of smaller spires, its architecture Perpendicular and lavishly decorated, the walls supported by flying buttresses. It has beauty, age and symmetry. A church on the Red Cliff has dominated the area for a thousand years and the present building has been there for nearly seven hundred of those years.
St Mary Redcliffe lies on the south bank of the river Avon. It was built outside the walls of the ancient city of Bristol, yet through the centuries it has played an important part in the city’s history. And when we come to study the parish history we find not only local happenings but world shattering events. In the late fifteenth century, a parishioner called John Cabot sailed from Redcliffe to discover New Found Land across the Atlantic Ocean. Christopher Columbus notwithstanding, true Bristolians believe that America was named after Cabot’s contemporary, Richard Ameryk. In the seventeenth century, when America first became colonised by the English, William Penn of St Mary Redcliffe had the state of Pennsylvania named after him.
There is a long-standing tradition that in Tudor times Good Queen Bess admired the church so much that she declared it to be ‘the fairest and goodliest parish church in England’. The queen’s exact words cannot be confirmed but it is impossible not to agree with the sentiment. The church proved to be a great attraction for artists, musicians and poets. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey were drawn to it, not least because of its connection with the local boy-poet Thomas Chatterton. All three poets felt that they owed much of their inspiration to the boy who died a generation before them. Painters such as the young J M W Turner, Thomas Girtin, Sell Cotman, William Muller and T L Rowbotham painted memorable studies of the church in its Romantic setting.
But it is not just the celebrated and artistic, but also the ordinary people of the parish who are celebrated in this book. Peter Aughton’s lively text does justice to a rich parish history spanning many centuries, his words complemented by a selection of marvellous illustrations.
168pp, with 45 colour pictures and many black and white illustrations
Paperback £17.95 [ ISBN 13: 978-1-904537-83-0]
Hardback £25 [ISBN 13: 978-1-908593-03-2]
PUBLISHED JUNE 2008
Cavafy Gone Gothic
Brian Earnshaw
These poems often rhyme, but never indulge in T S Eliot’s or Archbishop Rowan’s poetic obscurity, though they might perhaps have been a little less frank – they owe more to Browning’s personal narratives, Larkin and Betjeman’s sense of place. Written at the time, they offer a cheerfully homoerotic account of life in an enjoyably closed and mannered heterosexual College of Education in 1960s and ’70s Cheltenham – an English spa town of semi-Alexandrian decadence. Teaching school children can be fun, but training would-be teachers how to teach them is challenging – more like a drama school, as they have to be persuaded to perform their subjects seductively for reluctant audiences. So the poems range from racial comedy and conflict in the lecture room to attempted seduction in an American Greyhound Bus, tension on French roads and rehearsals of Byron’s Don Juan in a Regent’s Park terrace. The poems end with emotional frustration and resolution in the industrial wastelands of Enoch Powell’s Black Country. This is an honest account of the complications of affectionate lust in a very Establishment and officially Christian context – all very English.
ISBN 978-1-906593-06-3
215mm x 138mm
64pp
Softback £7.95
PUBLISHED JULY 2008
A Universal Passion: Music and Dance from many cultures
Monica Connell
Twenty musicians and dancers from cultures spanning four continents talk about their lives and art. Each conversation – recorded, transcribed and sympathetically reworked by Monica Connell – is accompanied by a colour photograph of the artist performing.
Together photograph and ‘story’ create an intimate portrait of artists ranging from a Sierra Leonean percussionist to a Portuguese fado singer.
A Universal Passion gives an insight into how international musicians and dancers – all now based in the South West of England and Wales – share their art through performance and teaching. Music is a ‘language’ by which musicians, dancers and audiences from radically different backgrounds come together and communicate. New traditions bring vitality to, influence and merge with existing ones in a wave of vibrancy, exuberance and joie de vivre.
Monica Connell is a writer and photographer. Her previous work includes Against a Peacock Sky (Viking, 1991), an account of two years as an anthropologist in the Jumla region of North Western Nepal. She lives in Bristol.
ISBN 978-1-904537-86-1
270mm x 210mm
100 pages
softback £12.95
Published June 2008
DISCOVER BRISTOL ON FOOT: WALKS AND QUIZZES
John Dennis and Robin Haward
Discover Bristol on Foot: Walks and Quizzes contains eight walks which begin and end at the wonderful rhinoceros beetle at Millennium Square. They are carefully chosen for all the family, whether residents or visitors to Bristol, and take you round the nooks and crannies, as well as the more famous sights, of this most rewarding of cities.
Each walk lasts about an hour or two, depending on how fast you walk and how long you linger. They ask questions all the time – fun questions designed to make you look at Bristol in a slightly different way. Your guides provide the answers, with interesting snatches of history. No matter how well you thought you knew your city, we guarantee you’ll learn something new. Good luck beetling around Bristol!
ISBN 978-1-904537-90-8
210mm x 148mm
64pp
Softback £4.95
Published June 2008
Bristol: New Perspectives
Jamie Koster
In Bristol New Perspectives photographer Jamie Koster turns the familiar into something exotic. With his keen photographer’s eye, careful selection and some artifice, he shows us a Bristol we haven’t noticed before. The Elizabethans had a word for it: a conceit, a fanciful, ingenious or witty expression. James’s idiosyncratic book is just that – a photographic conceit.
Here is Bristol to be enjoyed for what it isn’t: Venice, or Sweden, or Brassai’s Paris by night; war-torn Baghdad; a chunk of Mayan architecture; Indonesia, or down-at-heel New York. Welcome to a new Bristol.
210 x 210mm
32pp, full colour throughout
ISBN: 978-1-904537-97-7
£4.99
PUBLISHED MAY 2008
Joseph Cottle and the Romantics: The Life of a Bristol Publisher
Basil Cottle
Joseph Cottle of Bristol is best known as the publisher of Lyrical
Ballads in 1798. Publisher, editor and author, he was, effectively, the first to publish the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Southey and Charles Lamb. He produced an edition of Thomas Chatterton’s poems and wrote (rather second-rate) verse epics of his own. His controversial Recollections of Coleridge were notorious for publicizing the poet’s opium addiction. His life and correspondence included contact with notables of the period, both inside and outside the literary world: Wesley, Hannah More, the ‘milk-maid poet’ Ann Yearsley, Humphry Davy, de Quincey, Byron, Mary Russell Mitford and many others.
This biography sheds light both on nineteenth-century Bristol and the literary world of the time, and on the emerging Romantic Movement. It offers fascinating insights into author-publisher relationships and aspects of the relationship between literature and economics, geography,
theology, biography, private life, personal prejudices and other elements in the contemporary culture. With its rich sense of locales and relationships and their relevance to writers, Joseph Cottle and the Romantics is of interest not only to scholars of Romantic literature, but also to social historians and those interested in the history of Bristol.
Basil Cottle was not related to his namesake. This biography, combining literary-historical and local interest, epitomises his special skills. A Reader in the Department of English at Bristol University, he wrote well-respected books on the history of language and literature, and was an expert on Bristol and its history. He was also noted for the vigour, wit and clarity of his style, as evidenced here in a book as readable and accessible as it is informative.
234 x 156mm
approx 356pp, with black and white photographs
Paperback
ISBN 13: 978-1-904537-80-9
£35
PUBLISHED MARCH 2008