Smaller than gigantic but bigger than enormous
"They petezawls is ginormous!"

Princess Caraboo (1791 - January 4, 1865), a noted impostor, pretended to be from a faraway island and fooled a British town for some time.

On April 3, 1817, a cobbler in Almondsbury in Gloucestershire, England, met an apparently disoriented young woman with exotic clothes who was speaking a language no one could understand. The cobbler's wife took her to the Overseer of the Poor who left her in the hands of the local county magistrate, Samuel Worrall, who lived in Knole Park. When he and his wife could not understand her either, they sent her to the local inn, where she insisted on eating a pineapple and sleeping on the floor. Later, Mrs. Worrall let her stay at her family's mansion.

All they could immediately find out was that she called herself Caraboo and that she was interested in Chinese imagery. They sent her to the mayor of Bristol who ended up sending her to St. Peter's Hospital. There she declined all meat. A week later, Mrs. Worrall brought her to her husband's offices in Bristol.

Locals brought many foreigners who tried to find out what strange language the lady was talking, but apparently in vain. Then came a Portuguese sailor named Manuel Eynesso (or Enes) who said he knew the language and translated her story.

According to Eynesso, she was Princess Caraboo from the island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean. She had been captured by pirates and after a long voyage she had jumped overboard in the Bristol Channel and swum ashore.

The Worralls brought Caraboo back to their home. For the next ten weeks, this representative of exotic royalty was a favourite of the local dignitaries. She used a bow and arrow, fenced, swam naked and prayed to God, whom she termed Allah Tallah. She acquired exotic clothing and a portrait made of her was reproduced in local newspapers. A certain Mrs. Neale recognised her from the picture in the Bristol Journal and informed her hosts.

Eventually the truth came out. The would-be princess was actually a cobbler's daughter, Mary Baker (née Wilcocks) from Witheridge, Devon. She had been a servant girl in various places all over England but had not found a place to stay. She had invented a fictitious language out of imaginary and gypsy words and created an exotic character.

You will get a punch (clench fist whilst saying)
"Diesel gettee if ee don't shut it!"

Banksy is the pseudonym of well-known English graffiti artist, Robert Banks from Bristol. His artwork are often satirical pieces of art which encompass topics from politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti with a distinctive stencilling technique, has appeared in London and in cities around the world.

In March 2005, he placed subverted artworks in the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Giving me pain/To be in pain
"I gotta see a dentist, me tuff's painen I rotten."

Blackbeard (November 23, 1675 – November 22, 1718) was the nickname of Edward Teach, alias Edward Thatch (one source gives his name as Edward Drummond), a notorious English pirate who had a short reign of terror in the Caribbean Sea between 1716 and 1718, during a period of time referred to as the Golden Age of Piracy.

Blackbeard is thought to have been born in Bristol, England on November 23, 1675. He went to sea at an early age and apparently was a privateer before turning pirate. According to the French governor of the island, "Edoard Titche" commanded two boats of British pirates, one of twelve and the other of eight guns, with 250 men. Le Concorde de Nantes was a prize: a two-hundred-ton frigate armed with twenty cannons, which had ranged the west coast of Africa, taking Dutch and Portuguese ships. Teach armed it with an additional twenty guns (bringing total cannons to forty) and renamed it Queen Anne's Revenge

Teach originally served as a pirate under Benjamin Hornigold. In 1717, Hornigold retired, taking advantage of an amnesty extended to privateers by the British government.

To hit somebody
"Did ee wackum?"

William Gilbert "WG" Grace (July 18, 1848 – October 23, 1915) was an English cricketer who, by his extraordinary skills, made cricket perhaps the first modern spectator sport, and who developed most of the techniques of modern batting.

He has always been referred to in print by his initials and "WG" became something of a sobriquet. His family called him "Gilly" but this was never used in cricket circles. Grace was sometimes referred to in his later career as "The Doctor" or "The Old Man".

In a career spanning 44 years, Grace's batting average was 39.45 at first class level, an average undoubtedly dragged down by playing into his late fifties. At his peak in the 1870s his first-class season batting averages were regularly between 60 and 70, at a time where uncovered, poorly-prepared pitches meant that scores were far lower than the modern game. His career bowling record of 2809 wickets at the outstanding average of 18.14 speaks for itself.

In 1848, Grace was born in Downend, Bristol. He found himself in an atmosphere charged with cricket, his father (Henry Mills Grace), his mother (Martha) and his uncle (Alfred Pocock) being as enthusiastic about the game as his elder brothers, Henry, Alfred and Edward Mills; indeed, with Edward Mills Grace, always known as "EM", the family name first became famous. A younger brother, George Frederick (i.e., Fred), also added to the cricketing reputation of the family. WG witnessed his first great match when he was barely six years old, the occasion being a game between William Clarke's All-England Eleven and twenty-two of West Gloucestershire.

The highest form of praise that can be given to anything by a Bristolian.
"Yer, joo see that gawd necklace she wuz werren? It were gert lush wunnet?"

Ann Yearsley (c. 1753 - 1806) was an English poet and writer.

Born in Bristol to John and Anne Cromartie (described as a milkwoman), Ann married John Yearsley, a yeoman, in 1774. A decade later the family were rescued from destitution by the charity of Hannah More and others. More organized subscriptions for Yearsley to publish Poems, on Several Occasions (1785). The success of the volume led to a quarrel between More and Yearsley over access to the trust in which profits from the undertaking were held. Yearsley included her account of this quarrel in an 'Autobiographical narrative' appended to a fourth, 1786, edition of the poems.

Now supported by Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, Yearsley published Poems, on Various Subjects in 1787. A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade appeared in 1788. She turned to drama with Earl Goodwin: an Historical Play (performed in 1789 ; printed in 1791) and to novel-writing with The Royal Captives: a Fragment of Secret History, Copied from an Old Manuscript (1795). Her final collection of poetry, The Rural Lyre, appeared in 1796.


A real fan favourite, got both MVP's and 3 TD's in her 1st 2 games

Accurate/Accurately
"Ee casn't be as ackrut as I!"

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, FRS (9 April 1806 – 15 September 1859) was an English engineer. He is best known for the creation of the Great Western Railway, a series of famous steamships, and numerous important bridges.

Though Brunel's projects were not always successful, they often contained innovative solutions to long-standing engineering problems. During his short career, Brunel achieved many engineering "firsts", including assisting in the building of the first tunnel under a navigable river and development of the first propeller-driven ocean-going iron ship, which was at the time also the largest ship ever built.

However, Brunel is perhaps best remembered for the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol.

Clifton Suspension Bridge...the former Temple Meads railway station...the ss Great Britain - the legacy of this great Victorian engineer are some of the city's most famous attractions. His design for the Clifton Suspension Bridge was originally rejected by the competition judges, who included Thomas Telford, but sadly Brunel died before it was completed.

Brunel suffered several years of ill health, with kidney problems, before succumbing to a stroke at the age of 53. Brunel was said to smoke up to 40 cigars a day, and get by on only four hours of sleep a night.

In 2006, a major programme of events celebrated his life and work on the bicentenary of his birth under the name Brunel 200.

A fast one Blige!
"Shee's a quicken innum!"

Jo Durie (born July 27, 1960, in Bristol, England) is a former professional tennis player from the United Kingdom. During her career, she won two Grand Slam mixed doubles titles.

Durie turned professional in 1978. As a singles player, she reached the semi-finals at both the French Open and the US Open in 1983. She was also a quarter-finalist at the Australian Open in 1983 and at Wimbledon in 1984. She won two top-level singles titles (both in 1983) at Mahwah, New Jersey and Sydney. Her career-high singles ranking was World No. 5.

Partnering her fellow British player Jeremy Bates, Durie won the mixed doubles titles at Wimbledon in 1987 and the Australian Open in 1991. She also won four women's doubles titles during her career.

Durie was ranked the No. 1 British player for most of her career. She won the British national singles titles six times and the national doubles title eight times.

After retiring from the professional tour in 1995, Durie has worked as a TV tennis commentator and currently coaches the current British No. 1, Elena Baltacha.

An alcoholic drink of fermented apples
"Cider Zider I up landlord!"

Justin Lee Collins (born 28 July 1974) is an English television presenter and radio presenter from Bristol, often known as 'JLC'. His distinctive West Country accent is one of his trademarks, and he still lives in his native Bristol.

His catchphrases include"Good Times!" (and occasionally "Bad Times!"), "I love it!", "Rock On!" and "Rock and roll!". He is known to be a big fan of classic rock music and can often be seen wearing T-shirts depicting his favourite bands, for example Whitesnake, Ramones, KISS, Guns N' Roses and Tom Petty. He is often seen offering high fives.

Collins presents The Friday Night Project with Alan Carr for Channel 4. He has also hosted a clutch of Bring Back... shows in which he aims to reunite groups, normally who are associated with TV or music. Previous shows included the 1980s cast of Grange Hill and The A-Team. The Bring Back series also included Bring Back The Christmas #1 and Bring Back The One Hit Wonder. Bring Back...Dallas is currently in production.

The best
"Weem the kiddiez!"

Wallace & Gromit are the main characters in a series of three British animated short films, a series of ten short animated sequences, and a feature-length film by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. All the characters were made from moulded Plasticine modelling clay on wire frames, and filmed with stop motion clay animation.

Aardman Animations, Ltd., also known as Aardman Studios, is an Academy Award winning animation studio based in Bristol, United Kingdom. Aardman is famous for its claymation/stop-motion animation productions, particularly plasticine duo Wallace & Gromit.

Wallace is an absent-minded inventor, cheese enthusiast (especially for Wensleydale cheese), and companion to the dog Gromit who appears to be rather more intelligent than his master. Wallace is voiced by veteran actor Peter Sallis; Gromit remains silent, communicating only through body language.

A resident of Southmead, North West Bristol (derog.)
"Shaint goen out wiv a meader is she?"

Vicky Pollard is a teenage girl who is intended to be a parody of chavs living in the West Country at the time Matt Lucas was studying at the University of Bristol. When challenged about something, she comes up with gossip that has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever predicament she is in at the time, although she claims to be "getting there". She also speaks unusually quickly which, together with the gossip she comes up with, usually confuses or annoys the person in question. Her place of residence throughout the series was a fictitious town called Darkley Noone, which is shown to be in Bristol. For instance, she refers to places within the Bristol area, such as Fishponds, the Broadmead Shopping Centre and Wookey Hole (which is actually just outside Wells, but is a short drive from Bristol). She also speaks with a Bristolian accent.

Vicky Pollard went to school in the first and second series. In the first series, she was accused of shoplifting, became pregnant (and swapped the baby for a Westlife CD) and was sentenced to borstal where she bit someone called Jackie (a counterpart of Vicky played by Williams). In the last series, she was hired to babysit and had a wild party in the house while the parents were away and tried to get money from a fake lottery ticket. In Little Britain Abroad she was shut in a Thai prison for smuggling drugs and her mother, Shelly Pollard (played by Dawn French), made an appearance in court saying that Vicky got into a bad crowd at the age of three. Vicky was sentenced to 10 years for this offence (her mother gets 20 for annoying the judge). Her boyfriend, Jermaine made a brief cameo appearance in a sketch in Series 2. In Comic Relief does Little Britain Live, supermodel Kate Moss played Vicky's twin sister "Katie Pollard", and declared that Vicky was the 'pretty one' and Katie was the "easy one". She is shown in various episodes to be a chav girl seeking to get pregnant in order to get a council house: - in one episode, she is shown enviously referring to an acquaintance of hers who is only 9 years old, but has a council house of her own and 3 children. On the episode where she takes a job at a sleazy sex hotline, she is shown pushing along 6 daughters in buggies all dressed identically to her, whilst in the babysitting episode, she also mentions that she has 6 children of her own.

Absurd; preposterous; laughable
"Pronouce I H's that be Redikerlous"

Roni Size (born Ryan Williams), came to national prominence in 1997 as the founder and leader of Reprazent, a drum and bass collective. That year they won the Mercury Prize for their album, New Forms.

Size grew up in the Bristol suburb of St. Andrews and cites reggae as one of his early influences. Size was expelled from school at the age of 16 and started attending house parties run by Bristol mavericks the Wild Bunch (later Massive Attack). He learned the basics about music production down at his local youth club before setting up his own home studio.

Size was keen to describe the mélange of influences as intuitive: "If Krust walks into the studio and his head is nodding, that's enough. I know I've got a result there. He doesn't need to touch a button or tell us what he thinks, 'cos we already know what he's thinking."

Much of the acclaim centred around Size's melding of the new with the old - the propulsive jungle beats accompanied by live drums and double bass. The band - Size (compositions/programming), DJ Krust, Onallee (vocals), Dynamite MC and rapper Bahamadia (a former protégé of Gang Starr) - came together on Bristol's highly fertile and disparate club scene. As a result, Reprazent's sleek, highly musical take on drum 'n' bass is equally informed by hip-hop, funk, soul and house.

In consolidation of their mainstream breakthrough (the most significant for jungle (music) since Goldie's debut), Reprazent set out to become the summer sound of 1997 with a series of festival appearances (including Tribal Gathering).

To go fast (usually on two wheels of a four wheeled vehicle)
"Blige! Ee anked it roun that corner mind!"

Giovanni Caboto (c. 1450 – c.1499), known in English as John Cabot, was an Italian navigator and explorer commonly credited as the first early modern European to discover Canadaand some countries of North America in 1497.

John Cabot was born in Italy, in a small country best known as Gaeta, in Latium. His name is mistakenly associated with Genoa, as some writers of recent times supported the belief he was, like Columbus, born there. In 1461 Cabot was living in Venice, where he achieved his citizenship. In about 1470 he married a Venetian woman, Mattea Bragadin, and they had three sons: Ludovico, Sebastiano and Sante.

A merchant like his father, Cabot traded in spices with the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, and became an expert mariner. Valuable goods from Asia - spices, silks, precious stones and metals - were brought either overland or up the Red Sea for sale in Europe. Venetians played a prominent part in this trade.

Then, about 1490, Cabot and his family moved to Valencia in Spain. It is probable that, like his fellow-countryman Christopher Columbus, Cabot wanted to be part of an expanding frontier of exploration, the Atlantic Ocean. The leaders in this enterprise were the Portuguese, and the Spanish were also interested. The monarchs of both countries wanted to find new routes to Asia and its riches - routes which would avoid the Mediterranean and the virtual monopoly on the spice trade held by the Italians. There was another motivation as well. In a deeply religious age, Europeans wanted to spread knowledge of Christianity, and to contain the spread of Islam.

However, neither Portugal or Spain was interested in John Cabot. The Portuguese pioneered their route to Asia by sailing down the African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope. And once Columbus had returned in triumph from his first transatlantic voyage in 1493 - he reached the Caribbean, but thought it was part of Asia - the Spanish likewise thought they had found their route to the east.

As a result, Cabot turned in 1494 or 1495 to England - to the merchants of the port of Bristol, where he settled with his family, and to the king, Henry VII. His scheme was to reach Asia by sailing west across the north Atlantic. He estimated that this would be shorter and quicker than Columbus' southerly route. Cabot was trying to go one better.

In England, Cabot received the backing he had been refused in Spain and Portugal. First,the merchants of Bristol agreed to support his scheme. They had sponsored probes into the north Atlantic from the early 1480s, looking for possible trading opportunities.

To beat up
"You better go, ee wants to fire you up."

Massive Attack are a successful and critically acclaimed band from Bristol, England. They have released eight albums - four full studio albums, two movie soundtracks, one remix album, and a greatest hits collection. Their music is electronic and combines elements of jazz, hip hop, rock, and classical into music that is often named as trip-hop and other genres; lately darker, subtler forms of electronic music have been dominant influences.

Massive Attack are constant collaborators and have worked with a diverse mix of artists, from Sinéad O'Connor to reggae star Horace Andy to Madonna and they did a remix for Qawwali master, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Their work has also been used in many feature films and televisions shows, including The Matrix, 24, The West Wing, and House. They also have a financial stake in a small night club, Tube (formerly Nocturne, a private members club that they jointly owned), located in their hometown of Bristol

A copy, replica
"Don't buy they thas jus a replicawl."

Cary Grant (born Archibald Alexander Leach in Bristol; January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986) was an English film and stage actor who later gained American citizenship. Known for his transatlantic accent, debonair demeanor and "dashing good looks", Grant is considered one of classic Hollywood's definitive leading men.[4]

Grant was named the second Greatest Male Star of All Time (after Humphrey Bogart) by the American Film Institute. He was known for both comedic and dramatic roles; his best-known films include The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Gunga Din (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Notorious (1946), The Bishop's Wife (1947), To Catch a Thief (1955), An Affair to Remember (1957), North by Northwest (1959), and Charade (1963).

Nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Actor (Penny Serenade and None But the Lonely Heart) and five times for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, Grant was continually passed over. In 1970, he was presented an Honorary Oscar at the 42nd Academy Awards by Frank Sinatra "for his unique mastery of the art of screen acting with the respect and affection of his colleagues"