Fifty years ago today my exhibition, The Yorkshire of William Baines, marking the 50th anniversary of the death of the composer was in its second (and final) week at the Harrogate Festival. According to my diary William’s music and my show were getting a good reception.
I’ve been here before; coming through the darkened room with the piano and sitting down and watching. I definitely remember some of the slides particularly.
“I’ve been here before;” was the reaction of one young visitor, “coming through the darkened room with the piano and sitting down and watching. I definitely remember some of the slides particularly.”
His parents were equally enthusiastic; his mum thought ‘the music was marvellous’ and his dad mentioned that he had a friend who interviewed for Radio 3.
People had been so helpful as I prepared the show, loaning pictures, objects and manuscripts connected to the composer.
Helen Millifanti, curator of the Pump Room Museum, found me an Edison phonograph which we got working. It stood in a mocked-up parlour with an upright piano also on loan from the museum alongside a framed photograph of William as a toddler standing next to an Edison Bell Phonograph. I think that I remember that Mr Baines, William’s father, George William, sold them in his shop on the High Street; the latest technology in his day.
Radio Leeds
Radio Leeds had just celebrated its fourth birthday. My interview with Peter Hawkins went well and they invited me to write and introduce a radio documentary on Baines to coincide with the anniversary in November.
Goodnight to Flamboro’
To celebrate William’s sea piece Goodnight to Flamboro’, I painted one of the sections of the clip together displays we’d assembled for the exhibition.
Highlight of the week was a recital by Eric Parkin on Friday 4th August. Peter Hawkins interviewed a cousin of William’s Elsie Hargreaves and his school day’s friend Ernest Hindle and I’m pleased to say that we still have a couple of brief clips in my Hat’s Off Gentleman – A Genius! documentary.
Amongst the audience was, according to my diary, a ‘Chorister from York’. That must have been Robin Walker, now a composer himself who has been busy producing a new recording of William’s music to launch this autumn for the 100th anniversary.
Bird and Wells
I got to meet Linda Kitson who was energetically working as artist in residence at the Festival. Drawing at events and recitals during the day and posting the results on a board in the Majestic Hotel in the evening. The ‘Writers Talking’ sessioin on Saturday 5 August included Stan Barstow and Terence Dicks. While Stan’s work is definitely inspired by gritty reality, Terence Dicks, script editor on Dr Who, explained that his ‘life has been free of super villains, space monsters and Cybermen’.
My life has been free of super villains, space monsters and Cybermen
All the while Linda Kitson was squatting on the floor, moving about to to draw the various speakers. I wished that I could be so fearless when out with my sketchbook. She assured me that I’d love working at the Royal College of Art. She’d recently graduated but she said she often dropped in, using the place as ‘her club’. I became a good deal more at ease drawing in public thanks to the weekly sessions drawing at London Zoo during my time at the RCA.
Surprise visitors: John Bird and John Wells
I was most star struck though meeting satirists John Bird and John Wells who’d come in to the Royal Baths, where my exhibition was held, to escape from the rain.
Gilbert Mills
On Thursday, 10th August, veteran pianist Gilbert Mills introduced himself. Born ten years before William (so that would be about 1889) he championed William’s music in the very earliest days of radio, before the BBC was founded, giving recitals on 2LO, as it was called.
He demonstrated on the old upright piano in my mock-up of the Baines parlour. He insisted that Eric Parkin hadn’t got it right in his recording of Blackbird Singing in a Convent Garden. He played it with the trilling lilt that you get when a blackbird sings.
he was an odd bod. He was reckoned to be something of a genius even when he used to wander about Cleckheaton; gaunt-looking and huge hands, long fingers he had
A visitor on the final day of the exhibition who knew William