Tag Archives: Society of Merchant Venturers

CARRY ON MERCHANT VENTURERS

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Merchant Venturers Annual Garden Party 2025

The Society of Merchant Venturers (SMV) have been running (or at least trying) to run Bristol since their ‘royal charter’ of 1551. Nearly 500 years of feathering their own fat nests.

This unelected, undemocratic ‘union’ of rich merchants and  businessmen, landowners, property speculators and their ilk concentrated on controlling the port, overseas trade, the corporation (now the City Council) and of course they made a fortune out of slavery.

In the 20th and 21st century they are renowned for masquerading as a ‘charity’, whilst their members have their ‘fingers in the pies’ of the Port of Bristol, public utilities like Wessex Water, huge business deals such as the ‘Arena’, the Church of England, both Universities, healthcare, the arts, schools and institutions such as the Beacon (ex-Colston Hall) that have swallowed up hundreds of millions of public funds. The power of the SMVs purse dominates these areas.

As a manager at the Old Vic theatre explained to us a few years ago “you musn’t have a go at the Merchant Ventuers, nothing happens unless they say so”.

An important part of this historic control has been manipulating the local media and politicians for their own interests. For example, in the 2000s the journalists at the Bristol Post knew they could not write pieces which were critical of SMV projects, from academy schools, funding the ‘Colston Hall’ to buying the Port of Bristol for a £1.

This was because Post editors like Mike Norton were well-known for being up the arse of the Venturers. It was common knowledge amongst Post journalists that Norton desperately wanted to be invited to be a member of the SMVs and he suppressed any stories that might piss them off as a result.

In one case he even threatened to sack a journalist for exposing members of the Venturers trust (the educational arm of the SMVs) for defamation. Despite his sychophantic loyalty to the SMVs, Norton never made it to be a member and retired a few years ago.

Five years ago, under huge pressure after the city rejected the SMVs slave-trading idol Edward Colston, the Venturers realised they had to modernise in order to survive. In their minds this meant allowing a few women and ‘ethnic monorities’ to join… shocker!

Of course, these people weren’t normal Bristolians but had to be millionaire business owners with good political ties, seeking status amongst the big business people in the city. One of their targets was corporate lawyer, Marti Burgess of the Burgess family empire, inner city ‘entertainment’ property owners who made millions running clubs like Lakota in Stokes Croft.

Burgess, a close aide of Marvin Rees during his Mayoral electoral campaign in 2016, realised how powerful the SMVs were when she was asked by Rees to map out the power structures in the city. She recalled “I did not know who the Merchant Venturers were until I surveyed the city. The SMVs had interests in so many sectors I told Rees that, after the Council, they were the most powerful organisation in Bristol”.

The unelected, undemocratic and exclusive SMVs appealed to Burgess and Rees, as a powerful body to join and collaborate with.

As elected Mayor, Rees went along with most of the SMV members’ needs, continuing to pour money into their iconic baby ‘the ex-Colston Beacon’, handing the arena site at Temple Meads to Bristol University and the airfield at Filton to Malaysian corporation YTL.

Rees seemed to think that if powerful businessmen from the SMVs were nice to him, then that meant they liked him. Worried close associates in the Labour Party pointed out they were only being nice because he was the elected Mayor and they were after contracts, not because they actually liked him!

Rees even refused to engage with the campaign to remove the slave-trader Colston from representing the city, sending the cops after the Colston 4 statue topplers and claiming that the protesters were “privileged” and the SMVs were the “genuine anti-racists in the city”.

Meanwhile, despite the anti-racist rhetoric of Marti Burgess, she joined the SMVs in 2020, claiming she was going to ‘change’ the organisation from within. Fuck all has happened of course and far from leaving the SMVs Burgess has stayed in there.

In 2024, with the blessing of the “anti-racist” SMV Rees was paid off with an honorary degree from their (Bristol) university, given a ‘job’ travelling round the world to climate conferences. Earlier this year made it into the House of Lords, as Lord Rees of Easton. Not bad for a failed Mayor who managed to get the post of elected-Mayor voted out of the city.

However, there was a spanner in the works when Rees was asked to declare his business interests as a Lord. As Private Eye pointed out, Rees’ own ‘personal services’ company was being paid by Ameresco Inc, the US multinational that signed a billion pound contract (yes! £1,000,000,000) with Bristol City Council under Rees’ watch in 2021. Smoking gun or what? At the Bristolian press centre we waited weeks for a news organisation in Bristol to follow up the Eye article.

The only place it appeared was on a local blogger’s website and the blogger’s husband happened to be a leading reporter in the Bristol media organisation Bristol 24/7, but still there was silence.

Who is on the board of 24/7? Yes, you guessed it SMV member and close associate of Rees, Marti Burgess. It would be no surprise to us that Burgess suppressed this massive story. 

As a result of the yawning silence over this smoking gun, The Bristolian broke the story on the streets of Bristol by publishing the ‘Robber Baron’ issue . 48 hours later the cat was out of the bag when the Bristol Post ran the story, and then surprise, surprise even the fawning Rees propaganda arm the Bristol Cable were forced to say something. This is nothing new to us at The Bristolian as we often have to lead the way with ‘difficult’ stories like this. To this day 24/7 have left it unreported.

They say nothing changes, everything stays the same…..in the newly ‘diverse’, ‘modern’ Bristol we have the same old power structures, political corruption, businesses leeching off public money and of course members of the SMVs like Burgess controlling our access to news to protect their business interests and their dodgy ‘high and mighty’ mates.

The Committee for Public Safety

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

Dan-Tyndall-Photo
Devil Dan: quite partial to a bit of chattel slavery

Farewell, then, “Devil” Dan Tyndall, vicar of St Mary Redcliffe.

A sort of occultist in Christian drag, Devil Dan sold his sorry posh arse to the Merchant Venturers and the cult of Colston. Delivering mad sermons on demand in Bristol’s churches  celebrating a slave trader and mass murderer.  Until 2020 when the Church of England finally ordered a halt to the madness.

Devil Dan leaves behind a message listing his notable ‘wins’ in Bristol. Number one is, er, “a strapline and four key themes that really describe who SMR is”!

So much for spiritual wellbeing, the teachings of Christ and help for the poor. Corporate messaging is what mattered to Dan!

Good riddance.

BBC/BCC: Spot the difference.

The BBC excelled themselves recently as slave-trade apologists when the panel of ‘Politics Live’ on BBC 2 collectively cut off and chastised a Colston Four defendant when they had the gall to suggest that Bristol City Council decision-making was dominated by a cabal of the unelected, super-rich and prejudiced descendants of slave-traders.

It seems that the Merchant Venturer mafia are more influential nationally than we may have imagined. Whoever we elect Washington calls the shots. Strange days indeed.

YOUTH ZONE: ALL THE WRONG MOVES

Youth Zone
Artists impression of Bristol’s forthcoming Merchant Venturers Zone

The horrifying reality, being built on open space at Inns Court, about Bristol’s Youth Zone, a giant shed for the youth of Bristol that no one in youth works wants, is emerging.

Now chairing Youth Moves, the charity managing this public-private partnership big project that’s swallowing Bristol City Council’s entire youth services budget whole, is Heather Frankham, a Merchant Venturer and, until July, a director of the miserably failing Venturers Trust. The local academy trust so useless it has had to disband and hand their work over to a competent body, the national E-ACT academy trust.

The Venturers Trust’s recent handiwork includes transforming the Merchants Academy in Hartcliffe into a OFSTED-rated ‘inadequate’ school and shutting the school’s sixth form at a week’s notice in September 2023 leaving sixth formers in Hartcliffe without a sixth form to attend. Just the track record required to be trusted with further large sums of public money for youth services in South Bristol then.

Frankham has wasted no time in appointing a snooty twit from Clifton to support her Youth Zone madness. Please step forward newly installed interim chief executive for Youth Moves, Guy Cowper. This former Operations Manager at posh and private Clifton High School will now be responsible for delivering youth services in south Bristol. What on Earth qualifies him in any way for this role is not clear.

Mystery, meanwhile, surrounds the sudden departure of Youth Moves’ former CEO, experienced Knowle West youth boss Ali Dale who suddenly quit in May explaining “it is time for me to move on” after 13 years running the popular charity.

Having wrecked a generation’s education in South Bristol, are the Merchant Venturers and their friends and relatives about to wreak their incompetent havoc on youth services in South Bristol?

Watch this space.

***CORRECTION*** an earlier version of this story said that Guy Cowper and Heather Frankham were partners. This is not the case.

TRASHING AVONMOUTH ‘BEST OPTION’?

Wind turbines
These would look lovely on the Downs

Labour’s Southmead councillor and cabinet member for climate change stuff, working class man of the people, Kye “The” Dudd, has another shit idea in the pipeline that will dump on a working class community.

“With the Local Plan review, we’re looking at allocations in the Avonmouth area for wind turbines,” he blustered at the Nazi Post recently.

“Within our boundaries, that’s probably the best option. There are other options outside our boundaries, but obviously that’s not for us to decide.

Not strictly true. “Probably the best option” within Bristol is the Merchant Venturer-managed Downs, which have the best wind patterns in the city. How about the comfortably well-off posh of Clifton and Stoke Bishop lead on our climate emergency commitments for once and host a few wind turbines?

A direct challenge to the wealthy and influential of the city that great big pussy and bootlicker of the wealthy, The Dudd, is way too scared to pursue.

AIR YOU KIDDING?

St Philip's Bridge, Bristol 01
Air on sale

Bristol City Council’s latest brilliant business wheeze is to buy, er, fresh air off royalty!

A decision sneaked out under the cover of darkness explains, “the council must pay the Crown Estate (TCE) for the Right of Air being granted over TCE land in order to provide the St Philips Footbridge connection between Temple Island and Albert Road.”

Yes, you read that correctly. We’re paying Tampon Charlie for the use of  fresh air in St Philips. The deal is that we pay the super-wealthy king an ‘air space levy’ of £117,500 plus costs. This, we’re assured, comes at a fifty per cent discount. What a deal!

We’ll be paying Merchant Venturers for our water next … Oh hang on …

LOCAL PLAN: HOW TO DEMAND A SLAVE TRADE MEMORIAL

Local Plan  Seamans Chapel

The city’s political class and self-styled ‘leaders’, with strings openly being pulled by the Society of Merchant Venturers, continue to undermine any chance of memorialising the city’s links to the slave trade. Any site proposed for a memorial over the last seven years has been knocked back by the mayor who has chosen to prioritise boozy food halls and gastropubs as his legacy.

One way to get around the mayor and the city’s ragbag of crap ‘leaders” intransigence is to get a site for a memorial agreed in the forthcoming Local Plan. Potential sites available in the centre include: the Old Seaman’s Chapel (SA403) on Royal Oak Avenue on the corner of Queen Square and Prince Street, ideal for an abolition museum and history centre; 16 Narrow Quay (SA404), the empty space between Arnolfini and the YHA, ideal for a memorial garden and The Grove Car Park (BDA0801) by the Thekla, a, potentially large space to develop.

All the sites can be found in the Draft Allocation document going to Full Council this week: https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/s89151/08.2%20Appendix%20A2%20Development%20Allocations%20Annex.pdf. Old Seaman’s Chapel  (SA403) is on page 68; 16 Narrow Quay (SA404) is on page 70 and The Grove Car Park (BDA0801) is on page 58.

Details of the sites are in the document and all you need to do is respond to the forthcoming Local Plan consultation and request that each site is designated for “Community Facilities, in particular a museum exploring the history of slavery and it’s abolition from a Bristol viewpoint.”

Simple. Go tell the city’s useless self-serving ‘leaders’ what you want!

HOT MESS PRESS

Our local press in their own words:

Media dissertation  Max Thrower

‘How does local media serve local politics in Bristol?’ enquires “Meejah” Max Thrower, recently appointed political assistant to the Green councillor group. It’s the title, that’s just hit our newsdesk, of his recent dissertation for an MA in Political Communications from Goldsmiths College, London, a  hotbed of fashionable post-modern drivel. 

The first twenty pages of the forty-page effort are therefore inconsequential academic gobbledegook that even Goldsmiths’ tutors probably skipped reading judging by the amount of uncorrected typos twisting any vague bit of meaning in there.

The second section is where the action is. Featuring interviews with self-styled local experts like Bristol Cobblers’ (surely Cable? Ed) part-timer Neil “Professional Bristolian” Maggs; the Nazi Post’s Tristan “Gruppenführer” Cork;  Martin “Latte” Booth, Editor, Bristol 24/7; Alex “All At” Seabrook, a BBC Local Democracy Reporter (LDR) working out of the Post and Cobbler’s not-editor “Door” Matty Edwards. Also along for the ride were The Bristolian, the Greens’ Carla “Head Girl” Denyer plus a rare appearance from mayoral bag carrier “Slo” Kev Slocombe.

After a risible quote from the Press Gazette claiming these indistinguishable liberal left centrists of our local press have created a media oasis in Bristol, it’s not long before our media stars are fighting like rats in a sack. “The issue of funding models and the supposed influence of corporate interests has created tension between media outlets,” and, “the tension between  outlets was most apparent between The Bristol Cable and Bristol 24/7 and the way that people viewed their funding,” we’re told.

“According to Neil [“Professional Bristolian”, Cobblers], Bristol 24/7 received money from a tobacco company that they used to fund a community reporter scheme. Martin [“Latte”, 24/7] described this advertising as a ‘necessary evil” and would love to see them not accept any advertising.” 

“The incident was called out by The Bristol Cable, who Tristan [“Gruppenführer”, Nazi Post], cheerily pointed out “get most of their money from philanthropic billionaires”.

“According to Martin [“Latte”, 24/7], The Cable’s grants allow them to “loudly criticize us [Bristol 24/7] for daring to accept advertising”. 

And on it goes: “People were also critical of Bristol 24/7, with Tristan saying that they “get their money from… a handful of rich people in Bristol”. [“Slo”] Kev believed that financial loss means they must be “bankrolled by a group of businessmen” that run bars and restaurants. Tristan noted that Bristol 24/7 have been called out in the past for “writing favourable things to do with pubs in Easton”.”

Adding to a sense of dodgy money washing around our gormless local press: “Martin [“Latte”] stated that Bristol 24/7 is a community interest company, although he didn’t know the details and liked “to just get on with the journalism side of things”.”

Neil [“Professional Bristolian”, Cobblers] then calls out his Cobbler’s colleagues as “Marxist in their origins and… a bit pompous and self-righteous with that at times”. Surely more to do with being middle class twats than anything to do with Marxism? Or is this Goldsmiths College style Marxism we’re talking here?

Rounding off a thoroughly undignified episode, Local Democracy Reporter Alex “All At” Seabrook – Marxist proclivities unknown – revealed that the thought of going out and speaking with actual Bristolians rather than communicating with middle class people on Twitter was “horrifying”

But last word to “Slo” Kev Slocombe (who should be a Marxist) hitting nails on heads: “[The Cable is] a vanity organization driven by mysterious tech money,” he explained.

In future, do look out for the local press complaining about politicians “squabbling”!

The dissertation’s solution to this local press hot mess is the completely shit idea of state funded media for Bristol. Probably the fastest route to creating the most dull ,unreadable crap imaginable. Censoriously micro-managed by some hideous unelected committee of wealthy establishment tosspots with a Merchant Venturer in the chair.

They will definitely not be Marxists.

Wanna read ‘How does local media serve local politics in Bristol‘? Drop us a line at bristoliannews@gmail.com and we’ll send you a copy.

Gotta a dissertation about Bristol? Send us a copy and we’ll give you the feedback your academic tutors won’t!

LOOKING AFTER THEIR OWN?

Merchant Venturers logo


The Bristol Beacon’s establishment bailout continues apace with the Society of Merchant Venturers giving the council’s outsourced money pit a £50k handout in January.

The luvvies did ten times better than most other charities funded by the Venturers. For instance, rape trauma victims got £4.7k; services to help people rebuild their lives following a stroke got £2k and teenagers with learning disabilities got £2k.

Maybe it helps that Bristol Music Trust, handed the Beacon for a pittance by the council, has super-wealthy Merchant Venturer and all-round shit boss, Andrew Nisbet on the board?