Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A smelter, a cook, a domestic servant and a chauffeur. Joseph, Hannah, James and Helena – my great uncles and aunts – stand alongside my Grandad Robert on the back row of the c.1904 photograph of the Bell family of Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire, which I’m currently researching.
The handwriting that I’ve added is that of the 1891 census enumerator for Lound, John Wragg, 54, Certificated Teacher at the School House, Sutton-cum-Lound Church of England School.
If you’re standing in the queue for the Science Museum on Exhibition Road you might spot this inscription above the large and imposing archway opposite:
SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT
SCHOOLS ** MUSEUM
A.D. 1852
The date is misleading because the building – now the Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was constructed between 1899 and 1909.
I was seven years old when I first joined the queue at the Science Museum (I can be sure of the date because I remember a poster for Kirk Douglas’s film ‘The Vikings’ – released in August 1958 – on hoardings around the Natural History Museum gardens).
At that time there was an arts and crafts-style mosaic in the frame to the right of the archway. Several muses reclined elegantly beneath an inscription indicating that this was then the ‘Royal College of Art’.
Happy birthday to James. We’ve both done the Ancestry.com DNA test recently and, would you believe it, I’ve discovered that I have a close male relative in East Lothian.
The only one of these television dramas and movies that I spotted filming on location in Wakefield was Alan Plater’s ‘The Biederbecke Affair’ (1985) in a sequence where James Bolan and Barbara Flyn’s characters were driving their battered yellow Bedford van round and round County Hall.
Happy birthday last week to Sue.