Bristol's director of rugby Pat Lam was impressed that his side could dig out victory in hard conditions.
He said: “Winning ugly is important. The good moments were pretty and looked nice but there were lots of ugly in there.
“In the warm-up a lot of balls were going down and that carried on into the game as the opening stats were horrendous.
"In the first 23 minutes, there were nine turnovers and four penalties and it was therefore no surprise that we were 15 points down.
"At half-time I stressed that we needed to be more disciplined and more accurate and if we did, we’d come home stro...