Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
My Great Aunt Sarah, was born in the year that the Penny Farthing Bicycle was invented and died in the year that the first man walked on the moon. She lived to celebrate her 97th birthday, but sadly although she lived just up the road from my Grandad Robert Bell, her younger brother, I don’t remember ever having met her.
My Great Uncle Ernest spent much of his career working underground as a ‘coal getter’ and ‘hewer’ but in retirement he described his former profession as ‘Farmer’.
Ernest Bell was born at Blaco Hill Cottages, near Lound, Nottinghamshire on 22 August 1869. In the 1881 census, aged 11, he is already working as an agricultural labourer.
On 9 November 1891 he married factory hand Elizabeth Cunningham of Mexborough, daughter of Harriet Cunningham, widow, and her llate husband John, a waterman. Mexborough lies 20 miles to the north-east of Blaco Hill in the Don Valley, mid-way between Sheffield and Doncaster. Ernest is working as a ‘miner’, later (1901) describing himself as a coal hewer.
The witnesses are John’s brother George William Bell and Elizabeth’s younger sister Edith, 18, who worked as a servant in a beerhouse.
He and his wife Elizabeth have five children, Ellen aged seven and her four younger brothers: Ernest, 5, George William, 3, Charles, 1, and James, aged 4 months. All were born in Mexborough.
In addition to the children, they have lodgers: fellow coal hewer Harry Smith, a widower from Worcestershire, and his seven-year old daughter Harriet.
Ernest and Elizabeth were married for 18 years and had 9 children, of which 6 survived but by 1911 George is a widower with a fifth son, Robert, aged 4 to look after. Agnes Knott, 50, born in Belper, Derbyshire, has moved in as ‘housekeeper’.
By 1921 Ernest has married Agnes and they’ve moved to Church Street, Mexborough. Ernest now works as a labourer for the Barnsley British Cooperative Society. The society had a warehouse at Mexborough and a pencilled note on the census form suggests to me that Ernest worked on the ‘Engine’ – presumably a stationary steam engine – there.
In the 1939 Survey Ernest is now married to Edith, born 16 April 1891. They’re living at Arnold Crescent, Mexborough, and he describes himself – despite spending so many years as a coal hewer and as a labourer at the co-op – as ‘Old Age Pensioner, Farmer’. Edith is a ‘Housewife’.
Ernest died on 1 January 1957.
In this photograph, probably taken around 1901, my great aunt, Eliza Elland Bell, by now Eliza Mitchell, is in her mid-thirties.
Born at Blaco Hill Farm Cottages in 1867, by the time she was 13 Eliza had started work as a domestic servant for the Johnsons at a Elm House Farm, Lound.
Ten years later and still working as a domestic servant she’d moved to Miss Hurt’s in Sutton-cum-Lound, and it was there that she met her future husband, the butler, William Henry Mitchell.
I’m colouring these images in Affinity Photo and Adobe Photoshop. Would a light sky blue be a likely colour for her outfit? I asked my friend Hilary Stubbs, my go-to costume expert:
‘I think that this colour is perfectly possible,’ she tells me, ‘though pale green or lilac would work too. Not pink as it would be considered a”young” colour I do like this colour though and it looks right.
‘The overall look of the garment should look like a dress though in reality it was probably have been a two piece to help with fit and laundering.The skirt often hook and eyed on the waist to prevent gapping.’
This wedding photograph (see link below) was taken just a year or two earlier in 1899 to me has a more Victorian look to it. The 1901 (if that’s when it was taken) with its layers and small jacket looks more Edwardian.
At Horbury Library this morning the Friends of the Library group launched the Horbury Tapestry website, featuring an ultra-high resolution interactive version of the tapestry which was created twenty years ago to celebrate the centenary of the town’s Carnegie Free Library.
My mum, Gladys Bell, was one of 70 stitchers led by Janet Taylor who between them created more than 200 pieces of embroidery celebrating the life of the town.
www.horburytapestry.co.uk designed by the One to One Development Trust
I never met my Great Uncle ‘Jack’, grandad’s elder brother. He was christened John Theodore Bell but probably got Jack because his father was also a John.
This photograph, part of a family group, was taken at Lound around 1901 (and colourised by me in Affinity Photo 2 on the iPad).
At that time, aged 27, he was working as a steel polisher in New Radford, Sherwood, on the north side of Nottingham. He had married Fanny Taylor, 26, and was living at 16 Deligne Street, with his in-laws, Leicester-born Edward Henry Taylor, 59, an army pensioner and his wife, Chelmsford-born, Sarah Taylor, 54, a lace worker specialising as a clipper – cutting away the connecting threads at the edges of the lace.
The 1911 census records that the couple had one child who died in infancy.
In the 1921 census he is still working as an ‘Iron & Steel Polisher’ in the Raleigh Bicycles factory in Nottingham. They’ve moved to 5 Edith Terrace, Radford, and mother-in-law Sarah, now 73, has moved in with them.
John was born on 1 April 1874.
We’ve been out on location researching my September article for the ‘Dalesman’ magazine and I thought I’d go for an IMAX-style panorama of Charles Waterton’s nature reserve at Walton Hall, Wakefield, which, as you can see from the 1865 engraving, has now been restored to its former glory, thanks to extensive tree-planting and landscaping by the Waterton Park Golf Club.
I’ve dropped in contemporary engravings of Waterton’s adventures – a bit of a comic-strip version of the life of a complex character, imagining it as if it was a magic lantern show of his exploits.
As a graphic designer/illustrator, I’ve gone for layout first, text to follow. The placeholder text is a corrupted version of a text by Cicero, which I feel that Waterton might approve of as he had a habit of dropping Latin quotes into his natural history essays.
I couldn’t resist the 6 month free trial of the three Affinity apps – Photo, Illustrator and Publisher. Printing a booklet, which is the main thing that I’d use Affinity Publisher 2 for, can be tricky as most of the options are hidden in various drop-down menus and pop-ups and the exact settings depend on what kind of printer you’re using.
I’m using a Xerox VersaLink C600 colour laser printer with a duplex option (it can print on both sides of the paper).
Swiss chard at Harlow Carr, drawn with my non-dominant left hand.