Breakfast with Bristol24/7: Jeff Lovell

Former firefighter and passionate Knowle Wester Jeff Lovell has become Bristol’s first citizen. We caught up with the man over a fry up in Hengrove.

Normally, when you’re made lord mayor of Bristol, the city’s “first citizen”, you stand in front of your peers to receive the regalia, chair your first meeting and then return to the Mansion House in Clifton.

 It’s what lord mayors (not to be confused with elected mayors, of course) have been doing for years. Until now, that is. Jeff Lovell, a proud “Knowle Wester” and firefighter of 30 years, did things his own way when he recently stepped into the 800-year-old ceremonial role.

After the official “mayor making”, instead of being driven up to Clifton to sip champagne and nibble on tiny smoked salmon canapes with the great and the good, Jeff, 63, went back to Filwood to join his friends and family who had packed the public gallery to witness the proud moment.

“Some lord mayors wander off to the Mansion House, yeah,” Jeff tells me, sipping his coffee as he waits for his full English at Franky and Benny’s in Hengrove Leisure Park. “I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to go back to the community where I come from, where 50 of those people had given up their time coming to see me and spend a couple of hours with them having a cider.”

It’s only 48 hours after the big day at City Hall when we catch up for breakfast together. Pushing open the door of the empty faux New York-Italian chain diner, I half expect him to be clutching his robes and holding onto his feathered hat, gold chain of the city dangling around his neck. But alas, just a polo shirt and jeans will do. The full regalia is stored at the Mansion House and driven to him before his first meet and greet of the day.

I’d approached Jeff for an interview in his new chains during a break in the ceremony, but was told his diary is now out of his hands for a year – already being filled by a team of people with visits, ribbon cuttings and speeches to look forward to over the next 12 months.

I was put onto the council’s press team, which would handle all enquiries for him for the next year. And thus, at Franky and Benny’s, the pair of us were joined by press officer Kirsty for our breakfast, a silent third wheel on our awkward date.

Jeff knows the waitresses here from family meals, and they bring us our breakfasts just as we begin to chat about his early life.

Fiercely proud of his family, Jeff breaks out of his usual banter which comes with all the nudges and winks of a cheeky uncle as we broach what was perhaps one of the most difficult and formative periods of his life.

“When I was 14, coming onto about a year before I had to leave school I had to make a decision whether to leave full time education or stay on.

“That was when I was first told that my dad was diagnosed with a debilitating disease, as they called it.”

His burly firefighter exterior shows signs of breaking as he continues: “It was MS. And it… Well, it put him in a wheelchair in the end.” He pauses, moisture forming in his eyes.

He steadies himself, wiping the two tiny tears making their way down the creases from his eyes, before explaining how he took up an apprenticeship at a paint company to help pay the household bills and keep things afloat.

A few years down the line, he began looking for something more long-term and answered an advert on the side of the new Temple Back fire station.

He was taken on by the brigade in 1974, aged 23, and in his first year was called to the scene of the IRA bombing of Park Street.

“I remember being on Park Street stood on a pile of rubble with a jet just cooling down the pile,” he says.

“We were as quick as we could be. The concern was about a secondary explosion. The first one invites you in, the second one takes you out. It was steaming hot when I got there and we were there all through the night. Quite an awakening for a young laddie,” he adds.

During his time as a fireman he held a number of positions, including as an investigative photographer with the grim task of photographing the aftermath of deadly fires.

“It was dead bodies normally,” he says. “As soon as it was safe enough to get me into the building, they’d say ‘Jeff, it’s your scene’.

“I would then go in and capture as much of the scene as it was. The photographs reveal a lot the eye can’t see because the flash lights up the shades,” he adds.

The job got too much for him as he found himself bottling up the things he’d seen because he worked alone.

“If you’re riding front line it’s different,” he says. “You go back to the station and you share it between yourselves. It allows you to talk about it. There’d be a debrief and then the black humour kicks in and you needed it; it was a release button.”

Shortly after retiring, Jeff was persuaded to enter politics by former colleague and now a fellow Labour councillor in Filwood ward, Chris Jackson, who Jeff still calls Jacko.

“Knowle West was built from the ground up,” Jeff says, as we move onto the place he calls home and the challenges it faces.

“They did the housing, the shops the play areas, the picture house, the schools. It was inspirational at the time. But it all went. I mean, the library is still there. But even the pubs went eventually.

“For good or bad these places were people’s identity. Now they’ve taken it away and I think they’ve ripped away the personal identification, and that really was the beginning of challenging issues with anti-social behaviour and drugs.”

He says he’s already requested that his team make time in the diary to return to Filwood as much as possible so he can give back what he believes he owes to the area and hopefully inspire the next generation of Knowle Westers.

Working painfully slowly towards the end of his fry up, he recalls a moment in his early firefighting career when his boss told him he could be sitting in his seat in 10 years’ time.

“I thought, ‘good heavens this man is an idiot’. He wasn’t, he was an inspiration because it didn’t take me long to think, ‘hang on a minute, can I do this job?’ Those little things are inspiration and they cost nothing,” he says.

So what’s his style going to be as lord mayor? “As I was advised, it’s be who you are. What you see is me. I can be as official as anyone wants me to be but on the other side of the coin I’m still Jeff Lovell.

“The next lord mayor may do it differently again. But there’s still a lot of to be seen in my term so we’ll see how it goes.”

Read more: Breakfast with Bristol24/7: Peter Sanchez-Iglesias