John Hudson looks back at jazzman Nat Gonella's Bristol connections

The jazz great Nat Gonella had no close ties with Bristol, other than headlining in variety at the Hippodrome in the inter-war years.

But when his career seemed to be drawing to an end, he made the extraordinary decision to come to the city and throw his trumpet off the Clifton Suspension Bridge as a final gesture of closure.

In the mid-Seventies, by which time he himself was nearing 70, he was still enjoying nostalgic gigs and get-togethers, not least in jazz-mad Holland.

But he could no longer play the trumpet to his satisfaction, and although singing in his gravelly voice was fun, and hugely popular, he knew that his days of blowin’ up a storm were through.

So to Bristol he came, to visit his daughter Natalie Wilson, but also determined to keep his appointment with the Clifton Bridge.

“I wanted to see it go down into the mud – spla-a-at! – and that would be that,” he told his fellow jazzman Digby Fairweather.

He doubtless got the idea from the 1959 biopic The Five Pennies, in which Danny Kaye, playing the cornet ace Red Nichols, throws his instrument into San Francisco Bay off the Golden Gate Bridge.

What Red Nichols did not have was a determined daughter like Natalie who said “Not on your life”.

She whipped the trumpet off her dad, kept it for if he ever wanted it again and sold it only after his death at the age of 90 in 1998, when it fetched £3,000 at auction.

Natalie was born in the early Thirties, and was Nat’s only child.

He was married to his first wife Betty for only half a dozen years, and when they divorced in 1937 he was surprised and embarrassed to be given custody of the little girl.

The pre-war years were the height of his career, as he dashed around all over Europe as “the British Louis Armstrong”.

And besides, by this time he was head-over-heels in love with his new wife-to-be, the glamorous and exotic Stella Moya.

Whatever the custody arrangements, Natalie found herself being looked after by various relatives of her mother, and spent some time living in Shaftesbury.

When she grew up she moved to Bristol to work, and briefly found local fame in 1953, when her boss put her forward for Miss Bristol and she won it.

This was not just any old year to win a local beauty contest, since Natalie found herself at the heart of the city’s coronation celebrations.

She soon lost regular touch with her mother, but missed her father greatly, and felt expensive presents from various parts of the world were no substitute at all for the fun they had briefly shared together.

But in later years, after Nat had married his friendly and homely third wife Dorothy, family became much more important to him, and there would be regular contact with Natalie.

They discovered they saw eye-to-eye on so many issues.

But she really couldn’t let dad get away with that Clifton Bridge stunt...

n The story of it – and of everything else in an amazing musical career – can be found in Nat Gonella: A Life in Jazz, by Ron Brown with Digby Fairweather, Northway Publications, £9.99.