Gerry Brooke looks back at the Avon Gorge Hotel row, Hartcliffe, F.Notham, a long established wine merchant, and housing expansion in South Glos.

This was the autumn week in 1971 when the IRA in Northern Ireland was at its most active.

In Londonderry a 17-year-old girl had been bundled into a car by a group of hooded women to face a kangaroo court.

Her crime? Fraternising with British soldiers.

And her punishment? Having her hair shorn off and then being tarred and feathered.

The girl was thankfully rescued by a “mercy squad” of Republican women who had distanced themselves from this archaic form of punishment.

In Bristol the row over the Grand Spa Hotel (now the Avon Gorge) and its controversial plans for an extension into the Avon Gorge below the suspension bridge was rumbling on.

After a massive fight by conservationists the plans, approved by the council, had been thrown out by Peter Walker, the Environment Secretary.

Now the hotel’s owners, said the Post, were seeking “substantial” financial compensation for the fiasco.

In Hartcliffe, Bristol’s largest housing estate, residents were still battling for somewhere for their children to play.

“It is very bad that an estate the size of Hartcliffe should be without any facilities,” raged local councillor Roy Willmott.

Bob Wall, chairman of the Public Works Committee, agreed and told the Post, “The people who originally planned Hartcliffe made no real provision for parks and play areas.

“We have been left holding the baby.

“But I am sure much can be done and we are certainly doing things for the estate, such as laying out a playground at Blackthorne Close at a cost of £850.”

In other news it was announced that F. Notham and Co., an old established Old Market wine and spirit merchants, was closing down after 160 years of trading.

The owner, Mr Downs, said that he had been forced out of business by more than 30 burglaries and break-ins in four years.

He could no longer, he said, get anybody to insure his windows.

But he agreed that competition from supermarkets and cash and carries, plus the gradual decline of Old Market, had also played a part.

The family business, which at one time had six Bristol outlets and a warehouse, had been started with a £100 loan by Francis Northam in Clare Street in Victorian times.

Many people in South Gloucestershire were getting hot under the collar over plans to develop 18,000 acres of farmland for housing.

It would, said the experts, bring in an extra 330,000 people.

Frampton Cotterell parish council, worried that the development would swamp their village, were proposing a limited expansion of many of the smaller villages instead.