It can be a hard life, being a cartoonist, sitting in the corner of the Capri brainstorming chicken superheroes for Marvel (no, not that Marvel, these are for a chicken-mad superhero fan of the same name).
So, lets get them in order this time, in the order they come in the name ‘Marvel’. First up (after RedCap the rooster, haven’t drawn him yet) is Attila the Hen. Could be related to a Marvel superhero who is handy with an axe.
Next, meet Vorwerk and E.N.
And finally LegHorn, the superchicken, and doesn’t he know it. Colour scheme taken from a Leghorn cockerel.
My father, Robert Douglas Bell trading with the Bedouin, colourised version. Bedouin tribesmen rescued my dad when he got trapped behind enemy lines when trying to rescue a wounded comrade during the Siege of Tobruk.
Tonight on BBC 1 there’s the first of a drama series about the origins of the SAS which, according to the Radio Times includes a punch-up in a bar in Cairo in 1941 between British Commandoes and Australian soldiers. Sounds pretty tough and, as SAS Rogue Heroes is written by Steven Knight, who also wrote Peaky Blinders, I’m sure that it will be staged with plenty of swagger.
So, when guys as tough as this get into a brawl, who do you send in to restore order?
Well in real life, this man, my dad, Robert Douglas Bell. A sergeant in the Royal Artillery, he evidently had to skills and the character to take on drunken SAS men and, for that matter, the local drug dealers too.
I’m still getting into colourisation using the neural filters in Photoshop and I’m not convinced that everyone wore blue – I feel that the tank top should be bottle green – but I do think that the process brings a small black and white print vividly to life.
Colourisation brings this corner of Cairo to life.
You know what they say, never work with children or chickens. ‘En and Vorwerk were standing in the wrong positions for this group photo. There goes any chance of a Marvel franchise. Perhaps DC Comics would be interested in the film rights . . .
With a few memorable exceptions, the chickens I have known have been remarkably relaxed, contentedly clucking to themselves, but supposing chickens had another secret life and had to use their superpowers to save the planet (yes, superpowers to save the planet, not superglue).
First out of their secret high tech hideout, MoreHen, a muscle-bound hunk of a hen.
I’ve been experimenting with photo restoration and colourisation using the neural filters in Adobe Photoshop.
I like the patina of old photographs but the sepia-toned world that they evoke can put a bit of a barrier between us and them.
Besides, working on the images on the 27 inch screen of my iMac brings out details that I might miss in the original. The ‘neural filter’ seems to favour blue as the main colour for clothes. My guess is that there was more colour about.
It’s freshens up the scratchy surface of this photograph of Mr and Mrs Baines with friends. Are the two women sisters? No names on the back, just a pencilled ’33’. It’s possible that they are relatives of the Radley or Naylor families of Horbury. The family portrait and – as far as I remember – this walking group, were given to me by Mrs Nora Naylor, nee Radley, of Cooperative Street, Horbury.
Mr and Mrs Baines
For a while, the Baines family ran this shop, demolished in the early 1960s, next to St Peter’s Church. Ann North lent me the much-blemished photograph and I’ve colourised this version from my print of it.
Primitive Methodist School Feast, 1906
Again, the original of this postcard is black and white. William appears, aged 6 or 7, possibly the boy in the flat cap in the bottom left corner.
Thanks to ridiculously high res scan of the original – 2400 dpi! – I can zoom in on a small area to reveal long-gone shops.
Another close-up of the postcardI think this would have been a Whitsuntide feast, traditionally when people treated themselves to new clothes after the winter . . . and decorated straw hats of course.
Projecting the partial eclipse onto the wall at the Coffee Stop, shadow of binoculars on the right.
My thanks to Zach (pictured below busy drawing) who reminded us all that there was a partial eclipse of the sun yesterday morning as we sat in the Coffee Stop at Horbury Junction.
I used my binoculars to project this image onto the wall, covering up one lens so as not to project two images.
As you can see, the excitement was all too much for this black Labrador, patiently waiting as its owner drank her coffee.
The waters of Newmillerdam were rippling tranquilly in the autumnal morning light yesterday, so hypnotically that one toddler was standing transfixed.
‘He’s fascinated by the water,’ his mother explained to Barbara. The child, oriental and completely bald, like a young version of the Dalai Lama, who is traditionally chosen by senior monks who meditate at Lhamo La-Tso, an oracle lake in central Tibet.
Not so tranquil were the black-headed gulls mugging the tufted ducks to steal the freshwater mussels they were diving for. At first I saw a gull touch down on a duck’s back, swooping in from behind, but the duck immediately dived out of reach. Next two gulls were diving on a pair of tufted ducks which had just surface and I saw that one gulls managed to grab an acorn-sized object which was probably a small freshwater mussel.
Grandma’s Swan Prints
Back to a bit of tranquility: I spotted these Victorian chromolithographs at the Drift Cafe at Cresswell, Druridge Bay. They’re so like the pair that my Grandma Bell had hanging in her cottage, and later bungalow, at Sutton-cum-Lound that I feel they must be from the same edition. When grandma died in the late 1970s my cousin Janet took them, and grandma’s dark-wood dresser to her flat in Poplar, East London. It was strange to see them in their new surroundings.
The canal below Hartley Bank, with the birches coming into their autumn colours reminded me of the tranquil atmosphere of grandma’s pictures.
After the useful French phrases for walking the dog for Michelle’s birthday, we’re going for some Parisian sophistication for Isabel’s card (Bon anniversaire for yesterday).
This blog post is an extract from my 1972 leaflet ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’. I still have a few copies left if you’d like to order one, please contact me for details.
William Baines was born on Palm Sunday, 26 March, 1899, at 11 Shepstye Road Horbury.
Writing in 1972, on the 50th anniversary of William’s tragically early death, aged just 23, Stan Barstow, whose novel Joby describes a childhood in a town like Horbury, recalled:
I was born a few doors down along from William Baines in Shepstye Road, Horbury; but he had been dead for six years by the time I arrived on the scene. He was, in fact, exactly contemporary with my mother and its odd to think of her still alive and William dead all these years. But consumption and the like nipped off many a young life in those days: my mother’s talk of her youth is full of references to parents who “had eight and buried three”. And, of course, it’s tempting but futile to speculate upon how Baines’s talent might have developed had he survived and been with us, in his seventies, today.
Primitive Methodist Chapel
‘I probably saw William’s father though I doubt that I ever heard him play the organ, for I went into the Primitive Methodist Chapel no more than a couple of times. The Highfield Methodist Chapel was where I spent the Sundays of my youth. There were four Methodist chapels within a couple of hundred yards along Horbury High Street in those days: the two I’ve mentioned and the Wesleyan and the Congregational. What their precise differences in belief and form of worship were I never knew, but it was only much later, after the Second World War, when their separate congregations began to fail, that three of them (the Congregational holding on to its independence) amalgamated for survival. A supermarket now stands on the site of the Primitive Methodist Chapel now [2022: currently Bistro 42 and the Lucky Flower Chinese takeway].
William sits beside his father at the organ, my sketch from my ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’ leaflet, 1972.
How quiet Horbury must have been in William’s day. I remember it as quiet enough in mine, for although I was born into the age of the internal combustion engine it was half a lifetime before bypass roads and six-lane super highways. An attractive little town at that time, compact, stone-built, sitting on the hill above the Calder, with green fields all round it. In the evening a one-armed lamplighter made his rounds; in the the early morning you would be stirred out of sleep by the clatter of colliers’ clogs passing under the window. Not much different, on imagines, from William’s time, for although his youth and mine were separated by a terrible war, change came much more slowly than in the years since 1945.
Primitive Methodist Chapel, photography by Chappell and Hill, Horbury
Stan Barstow’s autobiography, ‘In My Own Good Time’
A puritanical town, of course. What other could it have been under that great weight of Methodism? Drink was a blatant evil, sex a vast unmentionable mystery. It’s perhaps fortunate that William was a composer, rather than a writer, for music carries few of the moral associations of literature. He’d have had a hard time putting the truth on paper in those days. His departure from his birthplace was not the kind of exile D. H. Lawrence had to seek from a not dissimilar environment, and his future, had he lived, would surely not have been plagued by the kind of persecution Lawrence suffered. But that is speculation again, and we should be grateful for what, in his short life, he left us to enjoy.’
Stan Barstow, ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’, Harrogate Festival 1972
Mr Baines opened a music shop directly opposite the Primitive Methodist Chapel on Horbury High Street.
More sketches from my first term of John Norris Wood’s natural history illustration course at the Royal College of Art, fifty years ago in the autumn of 1972. Again, I can see the influence of Victor Ambrus, which was no bad thing. I was happiest drawing in black and white, not surprisingly as the method that I used for the colour here was to carry around three bottles of indian ink in the primary colours, red, blue and yellow.
