THIS was the week in 1981 when MP Michael Foot came in for criticism over his dress and demeanour during London’s Cenotaph Remembrance Day ceremony.

The Labour leader had turned up in a scruffy, unbuttoned coat (described by the media as a “donkey jacket”), and turned his head from side to side during the two-minute silence.

His wife, Jill, however, said that he was dressed perfectly well in a black suit as “befitted the occasion”.

So much for London, but what was happening in Bristol?

The news, as now, was very much about a Severn Barrage.

This time around the story was Bristol’s seeming lack of interest in talks being held by Woodspring District Council (now North Somerset) with Newport and Cardiff.

The £5 billion project – lasting 12 years and creating 21,000 jobs – was aimed at creating a “super-port” the size of Rotterdam.

The planned barrage, said a Woodspring spokesman, could create a boom similar to that experienced by the Scottish towns affected by the North Sea oil industry.

Remember Exegesis, the brain- washing cult which was going to set up a “university city” in the West?

The cult – which had members in Bristol – had settled on an HQ in Glastonbury, where they hoped to draw in up to 7,000 new members.

The group was apparently interested in buying the Crown Hotel, where 26 people had previously undergone a 15-hour seminar costing £230 a head.

Whatever happened to the cult?

CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was undergoing something of a revival in 1981, and members were upset when Bristol’s Tory MP Michael Colvin suggested that the campaign was being backed with Russian money.

He said that the Russians had spent £6 million on anti-nuclear propaganda in the West, with much of that money going to the quarter of CND members who were Communists.

CND asked for a public apology if the statement proved untrue.

In other news, two of Bristol’s oldest and best known chartered surveyors and estate agents, Pritchard and Company and Alonzo, Dawes

and Hoddell, had agreed to merge in early 1982.

With nine offices and 13 partners, they were to be known as Hoddell Pritchard.

After a competition run by Comben Homes, four would-be historians were toasting a new name for a walkway opposite The Ostrich Inn on the Merchants Landing development of 121 houses and apartments.

It was to be called Trin Mills after the mills on the Malago stream which occupied the area from medieval times until the construction of the Floating Harbour in 1809.

One out-of-town venue which Bristolians would no longer be frequenting was the much troubled Yew Tree Country Club and Motel

at Langford.

The Post’s diarist said that the club, whose ownership was in question, was in debt to the tune of £250,000.

Country clubs, with their extended licensing hours and big-name draws, were very popular throughout the Sixties and Seventies.