• Swindon & Wiltshire News
• Wednesday October 25 2023
• Author Name: LazyLulu

Do you like chocolate? And smashing things?

Then get ready for FOMO. On Saturday I smashed chocolate, then ate it.

Luke Jerram, Bristol artist and creator of the 2014 giant waterslide down Bristol’s steep Park Street as well as three to-scale recreations of earth, the moon and Mars exhibited internationally, used Bristol’s historic relationship with chocolate as inspiration for his latest artwork and art performance.

Five one metre-tall sculptures, created from chocolate, were based on ‘objects that tell the story of Bristol’. Concorde, Alfred the gorilla, medicine bottles, a button and a ship’s wheel were exhibited at Aerospace Bristol, Bristol Zoo Project, Glenside Hospital Museum, National Trust Tyntesfield and M Shed.

And now they were lined up on stage at St George’s. And I was one of the ‘smashers’, chosen to demolish the edible sculptures from a ballot.

Concorde, worker’s uniform button, Alfred the gorilla, TSS Bayano wheel, medicine bottles, sculpted by Luke Jerram and Zara’s Chocolates on stage at St George’s

So while I sat in the front row, waiting to whack a ship’s wheel made of the brown stuff, looking up at the gold foil-covered sculptures, I wondered if this was art or if there had been a conversation which went like this:
“Soooo…what shall we do with all this chocolate? There’s hundreds of kilos. It’ll go off in an art gallery. And I—I mean ‘we’—can’t eat that much.”
“How about we smash it up-and give it away?!”
“On stage!”
“By members of the public!”
“To piano accompaniment!”

That may have been how the Edible Histories Chocolate Smash came about but, like all decent art, it wasn’t as frivolous as it appeared.

Before the smashing commenced, Bristol University history lecturer Dr. Richard Stone was given the tough gig of warming up the crowd with a talk on chocolate, Bristol and slavery. The pain before the reward, as he described it.

So we took our medicine with a spoonful of sugar. Fry’s, a Bristol company, sold chocolate from 1759, and in 1847 were the first to create a solid chocolate bar, rather than bitter drink. Fry’s were responsible for my childhood favourites of the Chocolate Cream (the first bar to have a filled centre), Turkish Delight and the chocolate Easter egg. A former employee of Fry’s created the Famous Names and Elizabeth Shaw brands. Chocolate is synonymous with Bristol. Liverpool is famous for the Beatles, later noted by West of England metro mayor Dan Norris, but chocolate has made more people happy than even the Fab Four, and the chocolate bar began in Bristol.

But there’s a dark side to the brown stuff.

The three big British chocolate makers were all Quakers, because, Dr Richard explained, chocolate was the sober version of alcohol for the religious temperance movement.

Quakers were known for their care of their workers, and were anti-slavery campaigners. But this ran counter to the supply chain of chocolate, given the main ingredients were the tropical crops of cacao bean and sugar cane.

Sugar cane was sourced from the Caribbean, and the workers on those plantations were slaves. When slavery was abolished by the British, the story didn’t improve: prices rose, Fry’s wholesale purchasing was shifted to the Portuguese island of Sao Tome and the Caribbean economy collapsed. In Sao Tome the continued legality of slavery until 1875 and then the use of indentured workers kept costs low.

(Luke commented that many symbols of wealth were created off the back of slavery and colonial countries. The toppling of the Colston statue was Bristol’s outcry. But, having just returned this week from touring Spain and France I can confirm, after visiting many astounding Iberian and French cathedrals, palaces and museums, that all of us Europeans were at it.)

Concorde was the first to be smashed. Like chocolate, the mothballed supersonic aircraft is also a symbol of shame and pride. It catered to the super-rich long before Elon Musk put a passenger rocket into space, but still an engineering feat. According to Luke, also an environmentalist, it ‘literally created holes in the ozone layer as it flew’. I love the idea of Concorde, just as I love the idea of space travel, but also as a lover of the climate and the ozone layer that humans need to survive, I still prefer Concorde grounded in Aerospace’s hanger.

Smashing Concorde, Luke Jerram (left). Worker’s uniform button on the right -see PPS at article end

Concorde felt like a good smashing.

The worker’s uniform button, the banana boat ship’s wheel and the medicine bottles were all fun to demolish. ‘Slow down,’ said Luke. My fellow smasher, Roman, and I were tasked with the hollow TSS Bayano ship’s wheel which had the least robust amount of chocolate to chisel into fist-sized pieces. We had to make more of a show of it to fill our allotted two minutes and pianist Oliver Humpage’s performance of ‘We are sailing’.

I glanced across at Alfred the Gorilla. Now there was a substantial amount of chocolate.

Alfred the gorilla, pre-smash

But something weird happened during the breaking of Alfred.

Alfred is Bristol’s mascot. Originally from the Congo, he lived in Bristol from 1930 until his death in 1948. His memory lived on as his remains were taxidermied and exhibited in Bristol Museum. Today, gorillas are endangered and the Bristol Zoo Project is building the first forest enclosure for their captive great apes.

As the countdown to the smash began, Hannah Windross from the Bristol Zoo Project seated next chair but one put her head in her hands saying ‘no!’ As Oliver performed ‘What a Wonderful World’, my grin faded as chisel met gorilla. The raising aloft of a hand as it parted from a chocolate arm reminded me of the hands and feet hacked off poached gorillas for medicine. The cheers as chocolate Alfred was decapitated made me think of the cheering that might happen as desperate families, driven by conflict to the depths of the Congolese rainforest, shoot a bonobo because a great ape can save many people from starvation. And then I thought of the chocolate parts of Alfred heading off to the Trussell Trust as a treat for Bristolians who can’t afford food.

As Dr Richard remarked, bitter-sweet indeed.

PS All the chocolate, a dark Bournville-style variety, was by Bristol chocolatier Zara. As far as I can tell, Zara isn’t a Quaker, but her company does use ‘sustainably produced chocolate from a family-run Columbian company’. Zara’s Chocolates is made from an in-store kitchen in Southville, Bristol. We left with bags containing big chunks of Concorde, and ‘safety advice’ – check for remaining gold foil.

PPS Turns out my Great Uncle Tom-in-law owned the Bristol button factory which made the worker’s uniform buttons. He sold the business so he could buy his home.

Edible Histories was funded by the West of England Mayoral Combined Authorities as part of the Bristol 650 celebrations. Latest news: Dan Norris tells Starmer to copy and ‘scale up’ Culture West

Photo, top: artist Luke Jerram with Alfred the gorilla. All photos here © Business Biscuit