Old Father Latimer's SEASONAL SELECTION BOX

Being a Christmas CONFECTION of CHOICE ANECDOTAL TREATS and STOCKING-FILLERS from the ARCHIVES of the LOCAL PRESS lovingly picked for your diversion by MR LATIMER, the CELEBRATED HACK WRITER and BARRACK-ROOM LAWYER.

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Dockers unloading oranges

» Mr Latimer is available for private hire for ghostwriting autobiographies, curating hate-mail for politicians or in-laws, etc. at very reasonable rates.

He is also an engaging public speaker who can discourse with wit and authority on any subject you like as long as he gets a free dinner and you don't mind him making most of it up. For an additional £20 he undertakes to wash himself beforehand.

Christmas in Bristol was celebrated frugally in 1945 as you might expect. Though Germany had surrendered in May, the war with Japan had only concluded in August.

Food was still rationed and many families were still apart as many servicemen and women were still overseas and had yet been demobilised.

By December, though, at least the 2,000 or so Bristolians who had spent some part of the war in German prisoner-of-war camps, had all arrived home. The last of them got to Temple Meads Station the weekend before Christmas, some carrying wooden toys carved in Germany and presumably bought for a few cigarettes, and which were now to be gifts for children who had not seen their fathers in years.

The big news on Christmas Eve - a Monday - was that everyone in Bristol was eligible for a pound of Jaffa oranges, so two or maybe three.

The fruit had arrived on Friday at Avonmouth aboard the SS Sampenn, and dockers had worked furiously to unload her. All the following day lorry-loads containing Bristol's share about 12,000 cases were being delivered to the fruit market at Coopers Hall on King Street and from there rapidly dispatched to shops around the city.

One shop in Westbury-on-Trym reported a queue 100 yards long waiting for oranges when it opened.