Month: March 2021

The Miss Mosleys

Miss Mosleys

The Miss Mosleys make an appearance in my Wakefield Women in History Month series of sketches, as representatives of the women naturalists, often on the botanical side, who have made such a contribution to our local natural history records. In the days before local and national government departments were set up to monitor the environment we relied – and still do rely to a large extent – on the observations made by amateur naturalists, the original citizen’s science.

As I understand it, the Mosley sisters were natural history royalty, the daughters (correct me if I’m wrong) of an outstanding naturalist of his day, Seth Lister Mosley (1847-1929), curator of the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield. He pioneered an ecological approach to understanding the natural environment. In October 1923 he was invited to the opening of Wakefield’s museum in Holmfield House, in the city’s park.

For many years, the Wakefield Naturalists Society held an unpublished manuscript of British butterflies and moths illustrated and written by Mosley, which has now been added to the archives at the Tolson Museum.

In 1999, Miss A Allen, former leader of Wakefield Naturalists’ Plant Section, recalled the Society’s meetings of half a century earlier:

After the opening formalities at each of our monthly winter meetings, and before we settled down to enjoy the illustrated talk, individual members would tell us of any interesting observations – one of my friends likened this to a Prayer Meeting! We took ourselves seriously, guided by the 60 and 70 year olds in charge.

The summer outings were less formal. The leader for the occasion would have walked the route a few days earlier to ensure that we missed nothing of interest on the Saturday afternoon. Apart from that we just among ourselves and made our own observations.

I was 40 when the 1951 survey was made the Naturalists’ was only one of many leisure pursuits. Looking back, I marvel that I was able to do so much.”

Miss A Allen
Wakefield Naturalists at St Aidan’s last autumn (we were actually more socially distanced than I’ve shown here!)

So Nats meetings were pretty much the same then as they are now! Sadly because of restrictions, we managed just two indoor and two outdoor meetings last year.

Naturalists meeting

In recent years a Wakefield Flower Group was started by the late Pauline Brook. Pauline really would deserve a post of her own. What particularly fascinated me was that, in her younger, hippy years, she had for a while lived in a cave below The Acropolis, Athens. A fascinating and funny lady.

Link

Wakefield Naturalists’ Society

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Ann Hurst

Ann Hurst

According to the blue plaque erected by Wakefield Civic Society this week:

Ann Hurst
(1772-1832)

Wakefield’s first female newspaper owner and proprietor. (1823-1830) Played a leading role in the promotion of the abolition of Slavery and was an active supporter of early medical provision for women and the poor. Her paper ‘The Wakefield & Halifax Journal’ was distributed from this property at 56 Westgate

Wakefield Civic Society, 2021, with Dream Time Creative.
Ann Hurst

I’m not sure if a portrait exists of her, so I imagined her reading galleys from her paper. I’m guessing that to do all she did, she must have been quite a commanding figure, so I thought of Anne Reid’s character, Lady Denham, in the recent television version of Jane Austen’s Sanditon. Hopefully Ann Hurst wasn’t quite so intimidating.

Angelica Kaufmann

Angelica Kaufmann

Angelica Kaufmann’s self-portrait hangs in the house at Nostell Priory and it is possible that she had a hand in the decorations, working alongside Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale. The self-portrait sees her torn between her twins passions – for music and for painting, who she paints as muse-like figures.

Swiss-born Angelica (1741–1807) worked in England for fifteen years and in 1768 became a founder member of the Royal Academy. It would be another 150 years until the next female artist was elected as an academician.

Angelica Kaufmann

If we can believe the portraits of her, Angelica looked impossibly glamorous, in a Dangerous Liaisons kind of way when she painted but I can’t believe that she dressed like that when she painted murals at Nostell, so I’ve borrowed Kate Winslet’s landscape gardener’s outfit from A Little Chaos.

High-speed Still Life

sketches

Don’t get me wrong, I like slow drawing. I love to follow a contour at the speed that an ant would trundle along it. I find cross-hatching, bracelet shading and stippling mindlessly absorbing – or should that be mindfully?

But, as I’ve recently been taking a close look at the work of Quentin Blake, I can also see that it can be liberating to have a change of pace and to lighten up a bit, so each of these little details was completed in a minute or so. No shading, just outline.

As we reach a milestone on what we hope might be a steady return to some kind of normality, I should explain that I’m drawing these on location only because we’re in my brother-in-law John’s support bubble, on our regular socially-distanced visit. Monday morning walking around Illingworth Park with John is the social highlight of our week.

Eliza & Helen Edmonstone

Eliza and Helen

For World Women’s Day, two local heroes, Eliza and Helen Edmonstone, who did what they could in an attempt to preserve the legacy of their brother-in-law Charles Waterton: his museum and nature reserve at Walton Hall, near Wakefield.

Eliza (1807-1870) and her younger sister Helen (1813-1879) were of Scottish/Caribbean descent.

The margay was trained to hunt rats at Walton Hall. I’ve read that Waterton trained it to run with foxhounds.

According to a story that I heard via my tutor, Professor Bryan Robb, at the Royal College of Art, whose wife was related to Waterton, a tame crow (or possibly a raven?) once interrupted mass in the small chapel at Walton Hall, wandering in during the service and causing mayhem.

Charles Dickens consulted Waterton when researching the habits of Grip, the pet raven in Barnaby Rudge.

By the way, a credit to another of my tutors at the Royal College, Quentin Blake, who, amongst other things, did what he could to find me work on BBC television’s Jackanory and who tried to broaden my outlook by getting me to draw zoo animals in the way that Ted Hughes might see them. I now realise that I could have learnt a lot from him, so I’m currently taking another look at his work and trying to free up my pen and wash. When he’s adding wash, he never works exactly to the outline and in this drawing I tried hard to do that, but it’s difficult for me with my rather literal approach to illustration.

Jill Nalder

Jill Nalder

Jill Nalder, actress and activist, was this week’s sitter, painted by Gregory Mason on Portrait Artist of the Week.

Jill Nalder

Jill has been taking part in hedgehog surveys in Regents Park. In the area between Primrose Hill and Regents Park she says there should be about 300 hedgehogs but the surveys have revealed that they’re down to just 27 individuals. Rather than doing a hedgehog rescue, the group are looking at ways to ensure the population is sustainable.

Jane Bagshaw, Kitchen Maid

kitchen maid

I was at ‘The Towers’ working for Doctor Fred Walker. He had a surgery out at the other side of the road, some distance away. As kitchen maid I didn’t get out much. The housemaid used to take the child out, so she got out more.

I had a weekend off each month and then I’d go back home. No, I don’t think there were any trams. The doctor had a pony and trap and a groom to look after it.

No, I haven’t seen Upstairs, Downstairs . . . the people next door say I ought to look at it.”

Jane Bell, 7 March, 1974

This was my grandma on her 91st birthday, when we visited her at Sutton-cum-Lound in Nottinghamshire on Thursday, 7 March 1974, reminiscing about the brief period in her life when she worked in Wakefield. I’d been showing her Harold Speak and Jean Forrester’s book of photographs of Old Wakefield. From what she said, it’s hardly surprising that she didn’t have more memories of the city at that time.

By the time of the 1901 census she’d moved up to being cook, for a family in Sheffield, so her time in Wakefield must have been towards the end of the 1890s or 1900.

diary
Extract from my diary for 7 March 1974. I’d travelled up on the train from my student accommodation near the Royal College of Art that morning.

Dame Mary Bolles

Dame Mary Bolles

Dame Mary Bolles was born in the reign of Elizabeth I and died, aged 81, on 5 May 1662, in the reign of Charles II. She remains the only woman to have been awarded a baronetcy, in her case the Baronetcy of Nova Scotia, bestowed on her by Charles I in 1635.

water tower

She’s probably best known in Wakefield for the Water Tower, which she had constructed to pump a water supply up to Heath Old Hall. There are suggestions that it also supplied Heath Village and possibly an ironworks.

Dame Mary Bolles

I haven’t found a portrait of her, other than the effigy on her memorial in Ledston Church, so these are my attempts to imagine her as a cavalier lady at the time she became a baronet(ess?). The terms of her will called on her executors to open the Hall to guests and to slaughter as many of her fat sheep and cattle as necessary for the funeral feasting, which was to last six weeks. According to some accounts, she also stipulated that a particular room in the house should be left locked until 50 years after her death.

The Old Hall fell into ruin after being used as a supply store during World War II, but the original door of Dame Mary’s room, reputedly a haunted door, can be seen in Wakefield Museum.

Sultana Scones

scones

Luckily, I had Barbara to call on when I had a bit of a scone dough disaster this morning. All it took was her cool, calm manner, a spatula and the perfectly judged addition of extra self-raising flour.

loaf

I was on safer ground with our regular half wholemeal/ half plain flour loaf.

I drew the scones with a Waverley Pen nib and the loaf with the similar looking but slightly larger Telephone Pen nib. I think that for me the Telephone Pen, with its ‘Turned up Point’ is a bit smoother to draw with, which suits me. That’s just as well because I have just one Waverley Nib but luckily I’ve got an almost full box, containing a gross (144) of John Heath’s ‘Golden Coated Telephone Pen’ nibs.

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Sowing Sweet Peas

sowing sweet pea

Toilet roll tubes are biodegradable so, when these sweet peas are ready, I can put them straight in the ground without disturbing the long tap root. I’ve used soil from the greenhouse, which I’d refreshed with plenty of garden compost in the autumn. I’ll probably get a little weed seedlings springing up but I’ll keep pulling those out and the sweet peas shouldn’t have any difficulty competing with them.