Month: October 2025

Landsman Swift, HMS Ajax

Watercolour of HMS Ajax, By Unknown author – National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7645510

Where was my Great, Great, Great Grandfather ‘Billy’ Swift 220 years ago today? Thanks to a Battle of Trafalgar records update on Find My Past, I now believe that he was on board the HMS Ajax, picking up survivors from a storm which followed the battle.

Searching the British Library Newspaper Archive in October 2013, I came across this notice from the births, deaths and marriages column of the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent dated 18 November 1862.

If he was aged 78 when he died in 1862, that makes his birth year 1784.

Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

Could my great great great grandfather really have been ‘present at the Battle of Trafalgar’ on 21 October 1805?

I’ve put in a request for the death certificate to check that this really is ‘our’ William Swift. We already knew that he’d worked at Joseph Rodgers from an obituary notice for his son, Samuel Burgin Swift, who followed in his footsteps there (as did his grandson).

My mum has the article, reprinted as a handbill;

Handbill

‘he [Samuel] was a thoughtful, industrious workman, and inherited the skill of his father “Billy Swift”.

It seems to me unlikely that a young man from landlocked Sheffield would have served in the Battle of Trafalgar but Geoffrey Tweedale, author of A Directory of Sheffield Cutlery Manufacturers, 1742-2010, tells me; ‘Being at Trafalgar is not so strange — he lived a long life and his earlier career could have included military service. I’ve come across at least a couple of cutlers/silver platers who saw action during the Napoleonic War.’

That “Billy Swift” in quotes misled me. The only William Swift that I could find at Trafalgar was Irish, serving on the HMS Temeraire, but the new records include one more Swift serving at the Battle of Trafalgar: Samuel Swift, a Landsman, born in 1784 in Nottingham.

He would have been 21 years old at the time of Battle of Trafalgar, so just the right age for our “Billy Swift”. Samuel is a name which comes up in the Swift family tree, for instance ‘Billy’s’ son Samuel Burgin Swift.

Time to find out more about Samuel Swift (1784 – 1862) from Nottinghamshire, as I feel that he’s a likely match for my ancestor.

Update

At last I’ve tracked down my ancestor William Swift at the Battle of Trafalgar: he did change his name, but not to Samuel Swift.

The Wedding Party

Richard by Florence

My thanks to Florence for this portrait, drawn at Isabel and Declan’s wedding celebration in Mexborough last month. Colour added by me in Adobe Illustrator. That’s how I’d like to look (I requested a bit more hair on top) so I’ll update my social media.

Wooded hillside near Mexborough

Setting out for the celebrations, I packed everything that I needed for sketching – fountain pens, water-brush, A6 sketchbook – then forgot to pack the bag itself, so for the weekend it was back to basics, borrowing Barbara’s Uniball signo gel pen, which is great for drawing, and her notebook, which luckily is unlined.

View from our room at the Pastures Grange Best Western Hotel.

Five minutes walk down the road from our hotel, the Pastures Grange at Mexborough, Denaby Ings Yorkshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve lies alongside the river on the Doncaster and Worksop extension of the Trans-Pennine Trail. Gadwall and heron joined mallards, coot and moorhen on a small reed-fringed lagoon.

After the buffet . . .

As soon as the music started I had to give up any attempt at chatting and switched to drawing.

Florence joined me and we took turns with the one-and-only sketchbook.

I was impressed by the way she caught the action of the dancers, including the bride performing a forward roll.

party girl
Party girl by Florence.

Widescreen Watercolours

I’m starting a 12 x 6 inch format Pink Pig sketchbook, 150 gsm textured Ameleie paper (their own make). I’ve started with a couple of half-hour watercolour sketches, trying to get away from my usual approach of drawing in detail first, then colouring in.

View from my window, overlooking the lower end of Coxley Valley.

I quickly drew outlines in pencil for my first sketch (top) but started straight off in watercolour with the second.

Studio window

Yesterday I’d made a start: I’ve drawn this view (below) from the garden centre at Shelley several times over the years but I draw it as if I’m recording the shapes of fields and woodland for a sketch map. Yesterday, fortified with latte and an elderflower and blueberry flapjack, I dived straight in with the Pentel Aquash water brush.

View from the Shelley Garden Centre yesterday.

Link

Pink Pig 12 x 6 sketchbook

Watercolour Workshop

colour washes
Overlaid washes, primary colours only.

A watercolour workshop led by Neil Pittaway at the Rich & Fancy Cafe in Horbury on Sunday was an opportunity for me to try some alternative techniques to my regular tried-and-tested approach.

masking tape experiment
Masking tape experiment.

I remember one piece of advice that I’d heard years ago which was that you should never paint with watercolour straight from the tube (or, in my case, the tray). Always mix the colour you need.

Wet-on-wet and graduated washes.

In the first exercise (top) we ignored that advice and painted swatches of the traditional primary colours – cadmium yellow, ultramarine and cadmium red – directly on the watercolour paper. When they’d dried off for a while we mixed secondary colours by painting another primary colour over each of them, so blue over the yellow gave us green and so on.

Further washes resulted in brownish or greyish tertiary colours.

Wet-on-wet.

We experimented with masking tape – Neil isn’t a great fan of masking fluid – then wet-on-wet washes and graduated washes.

Overlaying triangular swatches.

For a final piece, predictably for an illustrator like me, I decided against the more spontaneous techniques – which included running the tap over your work! – and instead I went for a fairly controlled set of overlapping swatches, inspired by some Paul Klee abstract and semi-abstract watercolours we’d been looking at.

Link

Neil Pittaway artwork

Neil Pittaway painting, drawing and printmaking.

The Book on the Shelf

book shelf
Please pick me up next, urged the book on the shelf,
You must know that reading is good for your health:
To be lost in a book is like getting a hug
And isn't dependent on battery or plug.

You might think me pushy but I've waited ages
For any kind reader to riffle my pages.
You may feel you'd hate me but might be a lover:
Remember you can't judge a book by its cover.

Folk not using bookmarks are one of my fears,
They fold down my pages and give me dog ears.
Now that I'm older, I'm weak in my spine
But handle me gently and I'll be just fine.

On this shelf I've rubbed shoulders with books thick and thin
But we found 'War and Peace' a bit hard to fit in.
We had one of those library books come here to stay -
It stayed one extra week, now there's four pounds to pay!

I was dazzled by sunlight when I was unboxed,
So please pull down that blind or I'll be slightly foxed.
I hope classic reading comes into your plans:
I'm set in Times Roman and not Comic Sans!
This was my effort for prompt 47 (of 100) in John Gillard’s ‘Coffee Break Writing’.

Honey Fungus

Drawing board

My recycled materials made-to-measure for A5 sketchbooks drawing board is proving useful as a lightweight outdoor studio/nature table.

honey fungus

I wouldn’t normally pick anything on a woodland trail to draw it but I don’t think anyone would object to me taking a closer look at this honey fungus, provided I don’t go spreading the spores around.

honey fungus

I’ve passed this old honey fungus a couple of times, deciding that I’d prefer to draw a fungus that isn’t so overgrown with dead grass stems and starting to get buried in fallen leaves.

honey fungus

But that’s really the story of what’s going on here. The honey fungus are returning these birch logs at the edge of the path in New Hall Wood into the leaf mould of the woodland floor.

Cutting Back

gardening gloves

Time for the autumn cut-back in the garden, starting at the top end trimming back bay and oregano, hawthorn hedge and the long grass around the pond.

It’s tough on my thumb joints but also on the Fiskar’s hedge shears that I’m using. They have a gear mechanism but – especially when I’m cutting thicker stems – it springs out of gear, with the result that one of the blades flaps about uselessly.

It doesn’t taken long to loosen the bolts amd put it back togetheer but I’m evidently not there yet with judging how much I should tighten the three bolts: too much and the shears are too stiff to use, too slack and they pop out of gear again.

shears

The long-handled shears, without any gearing, are proving most reliable.