One curious incident happened when the contents of fifty puncheons of rum gushed out of a bonded warehouse and ran flowing down the street, setting fire to a house at the other end.
The riots were quelled by the military on the Monday, after many thousands of pounds’ worth of property had been destroyed; and one of the results was that four persons were hanged.
By what might almost be described as a stroke of good fortune—inasmuch as it perpetuated the name of Tussaud—there was in Bristol at that time a lad of nineteen years, named William Muller, whose genius as a painter gives Bristol just cause for pride to-day. This gifted youth produced a series of wonderful sketches of the “Bristol Revolution,” as it was then called, in which he portrays the weird and striking scenes of incendiarism in the city streets.
One of these sketches is now in our possession. It shows Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition premises standing out full and clear in the fiery glare, while the figures and other articles are being hurriedly removed and piled up in the roadway before the jeering mob. The figures and decorations are easily recognised in the picture, and many of them are still included in the Exhibition.
For no imaginable reason the premises occupied by Madame Tussaud’s collection had been marked to be burnt. A chalk sign was scrawled upon the door, and the adjoining buildings, besmeared with petroleum, had been already set on fire. In Madame’s employment was a stalwart and loyal negro. This black servant took up his position at the entrance to the Exhibition, and threatened to kill with a blunderbuss the first man who dared approach to harm the place.
The negro kept the mob at bay long enough, it would seem, to save the building, for at eight o’clock Madame’s anxiety was relieved when she heard, above the wild yelling of the infuriated people, the distant sounds of the drums and fifes of the 11th Infantry Regiment, just then reaching the outskirts of the city. The music that cheered her scared the plundering rabble and stayed their depredations.
Madame Tussaud came through all this in her seventieth year, with twenty years of activity still before her; and, after a long tour through provincial towns, she took her Exhibition to Blackheath, on the south-eastern side of London, attracted, no doubt, by the fact that that place had become a fashionable resort owing to the residence there, some years previously, of Queen Caroline, the estranged wife of George IV.