The Long John Silver Trust is a registered charity (in England and Wales) and was set up initially to raise funds for a sculpture of Stevenson’s immortal scallywag Long John Silver, fictional Bristol pub landlord and pirate of repute, renowned for his duplicity. This was in 2004 after Treasure Island had been chosen as launch book for Britain’s first Great Reading Adventure in Bristol in 2003.
To be educational and inclusive, this led on to a proposal for a Treasure Island Trail around Bristol’s old dockside. We believe this to be a unique and fun way to experience a key part of Bristol’s maritime and literary past.
Much like Stevenson’s original book we aim to be educational and inclusive and with this in mind we have teamed up with local special needs charity PROPS, Bristol Radical History Group, Destination Bristol, Redcliffe Community Forum and the Robert Louis Stevenson Club.
We have a great relationship with Bristol based sailing ship Matthew (a replica of Cabot’s ship that discovered Newfoundland in 1497). Jungle Talk provide our parrot, Cap’n Flint, when required.
We have three Patrons:- Steve Yabsley, Royston Griffey; Bristol City Councillor and former Lord Mayor of Bristol; and Nicholas Newton, son of the brilliant actor Robert Newton (who in the Trust’s opinion did the finest ever portrayal of Silver in Disney’s film of Treasure Island in 1950).
We have several trustees who bring a variety of skills to our organisation.
A busy summer for the LJST …
This summer has been eventful for the Long John Silver Trust with plenty of things going on, not least volunteer walks for Bristol museum M Shed where during July and August we’ve done guided walks entitled Pirates & Prejudice around our Treasure Island Trail.
Ongoing, we’ve also done Abolition Walks around the docks and central Bristol telling the story of Bristol’s literary and maritime past.
Fundraising has also been ongoing with lots of walks and talks for various local organisations, all helping to raise money for PROPS to keep them tending our Treasure Island Trail planters.
To this end, The Beaufort Arms held its annual Harvest Home Auction, which this year raised an amazing £400 split equally between the Evergreens and PROPS (the group of young trainees that tends the Beaufort Market Garden and our Treasure Island Trail).
Tip top auctioneer Terry Tripp starred again as our “man in the middle”, and after a rousing chorus of “The Old Rugged Cross” (for absent friends), proceedings began. As usual, you can’t have an auction without items to sale, and we were indebted as ever to the tremendous kindness and generosity of our community.
We had Josie’s fabulous flowers and bountiful baking, Keith’s and Dave Harris’s veg this year augmented with caulis from Jonathan & Jackie, succulent specialty tomatoes from Chris & Sal (including crystal lemon cucumbers!) and a remote-controlled getaway Range Rover car courtesy of Mandy & Neil…
Apart from Jen’s dog Dillon eating my corned beef pastie, it was a super night with everyone going home happy – especially Jen’s dog as he’s supposed to be on a diet!
This was followed on Sunday by the Bristol Hash House Harrier running group who also donated £100 to PROPS for their Beaufort sausage & chips. With these two donations we emptied out the PROPS collecting tins in the pub and found another £200; this was after they were entertained by Professor Apple and his cider making kit…
PROPS had their best month ever when Mick Bendeaux flogged off some old Beaufort skittle pins and balls for an amazing £133 on Ebay – much to everyone’s surprise.
With grateful thanks to Eugene Byrne for permission to use extracts from “Extracts from Bristol Myths and Legends – Tall Tales” copyright 2006.
From the era of the slave trade comes a character who may well turn into one of the most famous Bristol myth figures of all. Hop forward please, Long John Silver.
Long John Silver has, on first appearance, little to commend himself to Bristol. He was a Bad Guy, and more importantly he is a complete work of fiction, product of the pen of a Scottish novelist who didn’t actually visit Bristol until after he had written ‘Treasure Island’.
But we like Silver a lot. We like him so much that in recent years people ranging from the Bristol Civic Society through to a local anarchist newsletter have called for a statue of Silver to be set up somewhere in Bristol.
In ‘Treasure Island’ we first encounter Silver running a dockside pub with his black wife. Many Bristolians believe that Silver’s pub is the Hole in the Wall on Queens Square or possibly the Llandoger Trow in King Street. Indeed, many Bristolians probably believe that Silver was a real historical character.
He is a powerful icon for all sorts of reasons, but which basically stem from the fact that Robert Louis Stevenson knew that to make the bad guy a bit more interesting, he had to make him a little bit good. In fact, it’s only a pity that being a Victorian, he couldn’t follow the corollary and make the good guys a little bit bad. Dr Livesey, Squire Trelawney and Jim Hawkins are all insufferably dull and upstanding when compared with the charismatic and amoral Silver.
So why not a statue to a fictional bad guy? Some say it would make a nice tourist attraction. Others say Silver is a real working-class hero. A disability rights campaigner said to me, “We like Long John Silver because it proves you can be disabled and be interesting as well. The one thing he’s not is a victim.”
The story starts in the pub, the “Spyglass”, named because of the two slit windows let into the walls of a porch-like projection into the street, to enable a watch to be kept out for the dreaded “Press Gang”. This was a gang of naval sailors who would invade a pub to find some unsuspecting drunk, and press a shilling into his hand. This ‘acceptance’ of the “Queen’s Shilling” meant that the poor fellow would wake up on board ship, unable to leave only as a deserter, with the noose as penalty.
The “Hole in the Wall” pub still has its spyglass, hence its strong contention for the original “Spyglass” in Stevenson’s book. However many pubs had such windows, and so the situation is not conclusive, especially as Stevenson did not visit Bristol until after publication.
Great news, at the recent meeting of the Council of Europe in Greece, our route “In the Footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson” won a prize for Best Practices.
Every Cultural Route has to have a scientific (or research) aspect, and after the success of an RLS academic meeting in Bordeaux earlier in 2022, our team of Christian Brochier and Michel Legros suggested that we tie-in with the academics to help with future research. The accompanying certificate is our prize for the idea
The objective of the European Stevenson network is to promote the life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson and in parallel, the territories visited and explored by the author.
Discover the Network’s website : www.rlstevenson-europe.org/en
