Catching up

HELLO! Welcome! And let me say what a pleasure it is to see so many eager young faces here at St Cruella’s at the start of the new school year. I trust you all had a wonderful summer!

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I certainly did. I wasn’t away, because no-one in their right mind, unless they have school-age children, goes on holiday in August when the roads in Bristol are so quiet and the office (if you work in one) is chilled out because the boss is away. Nope, been here all along, me, but this column fell by the wayside as BT was wallowing in summers past.

So now we're back, a few corrections and additions to our various summer features:

In the August 12 edition looking at Bristol in the summer of 1975, we had a photo of some half-built Concordes. Reader David Bradley mailed in to say that the picture would have been taken at Weybridge, prior to delivery by road to Bristol and Toulouse, and not Filton, as we stated.

However, no naughty-step for me, as it was the picture agency that captioned it wrong. OK, so I should have known better. Maybe I'll stand on the naughty-step for a minute and doom-scroll on my phone.

Some supplementary information on our piece on Ridgeway Park Cemetery (BT, July 15): The article said that one Otto Bernard Schaefer was buried there in WW1 and that his remains were later removed to Cannock Chase, and we assumed that this meant he must have been a German soldier or sailor.

John Penny mailed to say that Otto was in fact a civilian internee who was reburied at the Cannock Chase War Cemetery, not the German military cemetery there, as part of an initiative by the German government in the 1960s. John was kind enough to supply a photo of the grave, too. Otto Schaefer would have died, as we speculated, at the Beaufort war hospital and was probably held at the internment/PoW camp at Yate.