1940s
It is the Second World War that is amongst many people’s memories of the hall during the 1940’s.
Gwyneth Williams recalls…
“On the weekend of the Bristol Blitz my parents had a young lady staying from Exmouth who had come for an interview for a job. On the Sunday evening she went to a concert at Colston Hall with her boyfriend. While at the hall the Air Raid started and the audience were advised to remain in the hall. I think most people stayed all night and the next morning they had to pick their way through hosepipes and fire fighters to get home”.
Mrs P Symons of Highridge, Bristol recalls the heady days of Colston Hall in 1940, when star of the 1930’s, dance band singer Al Bowlly, sang in Bristol.
“This was when London evacuees came almost en mass to Bristol, presuming us to be a safe area… When he sang his immortal ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime’, I couldn’t contain myself. Being right behind the mike, I fished a penny (‘dime’) from my purse and threw it at his feet…he picked it up and looked me straight in the face, with those beautiful eyes, and said: "thank you".
Source pic of Al Bowlly
During the 1940’s a fire robbed Bristol of its concert hall once more. The hall managed to survive the German Luftwaffe in 1940 and 1941, but didn’t escape from a discarded cigarette in 1945. An entry in the hall diary on February 5th simply states, "Hall destroyed by fire”
A local newspaper article entitled ‘Organ Crashes in Sea of Flames’ reports,
“When the first officer entered the Hall the organ was a mass of flames…Unrecognisable was the body of the hall. Where a big audience sat last night and laughed and applauded Carroll Gibbons and his band was a mess of charred wood red hot metal and a few surviving scraps of fabric.”
