Author: Richard

Chairs

I have been drawing recently but you wouldn’t know it from my sketchbook; these are all I have to show for the last week or two. I’ve been drawing the maps for Walks Around Ossett in the odd hours I’ve had between family matters and parcelling up my books. Parcelling up books and shipping them out to customers never seems like real work – it’s therapeutic but hardly taxing – but it is, after all, the way I make my living, so I shouldn’t grumble!

I think that I can see a patch of calm, clear water ahead but at the moment I really feel as if I’m swimming against a backwash and getting nowhere and that is reflected in this handful of sketches:

  • a couple of people at the Wakefield Naturalists’ meeting on Tuesday
  • a newspaper drawn when I waited to have my hair cut last week
  • two chair backs

The chairs are entirely typical of my unsettled life at present; I started drawing one chair then got moved on after I’d drawn two lines then – at my next port of call – I’d no sooner started drawing a second chair when someone came along and moved it!

Rhubarb Rootstock

Finally, this afternoon, after a morning painting scenery and an afternoon at a farm shop event, I got the best part of an hour to sketch. As it was a Rhubarb Festival event the most appealing subject to hand was a basket of forced rhubarb and an example of the rootstock from which the shoots are grown, at this time of year, in total darkness to ensure an early crop, at a time of year when there is a break in the supply of soft fruits.

The Cat & Clothes Line

Barbara shouted up to me ‘Just take a look at that cat on the lawn!’

It’s been a wild day, wild but mild; this morning our neighbour’s three-year old boy got blown over in a gust on the way to school and the handful of stallholders who turned up at Ossett Market were sent home because of the danger of goods and even stalls being blown around. I felt particularly sorry for the fishmonger with all his fresh fish, having to pack up his van. We’ve had a lot of rain too and the Calder is running beige-brown and flowing up over the bridge piers but not quite at flood level yet.

But some are enjoying the call of the wild; the frayed end of the broken washing line (broken by blue tits pecking at it!) was snaking and jerking around on the lawn near the pond, exactly in the way that you’d tempt a kitten to chase a piece of string, but on a larger and livelier scale.

Too much of a temptation for this black and white cat which was taking it’s usual shortcut back from the meadow via our back garden path. You can see (below) that at times it turned its back on it but then thought ‘Well, just one more go . . .’

It was so happy rolling on its back, pouncing and sitting with its ‘prey’ wrapped around its shoulder. Occasionally it did pause and look around as if thinking ‘This is silly, I hope no one is watching me.’ But it still couldn’t resist another mad tussle with the playful frayed end of the rope beckoning.

I’d love to have had time to make quick sketches but the last ten days have been taken up with preparations for Barbara’s mum’s funeral on Monday. I’m not going to really settle down until after there’s been that short ceremony of closure.

Over the past weeks and months I’ve slipped further and further behind with my latest booklet, the deadline for which is looming up in the next two to three weeks, but haven’t been able to make any real progress on it.

Hills

Thanks to our relaxed but relentless attention over the past few days to essential tasks, we’re hoping to get back out in the countryside next week, not to the wilder uplands of the Pennines that I’ve fondly imagined here, but at least we should manage to get out into the more homely farmland around Ossett to check out walks for my latest booklet. This is getting increasingly urgent as I’ve promised to have it ready to launch at the Rhubarb Festival in Wakefield at the end of February.

This pagoda reminds me of the ventilation towers on whisky distilleries, which I drew, years ago,  for Steve Cribb’s book Whisky on the Rocks but I drew this from the Bakehouse Cafe in Ossett; this is the largest of three pagodas on the roof of a Victorian building which I believe was once the town’s Conservative Club but which is now a wine bar.

I like to have fresh herbs in the kitchen, which are especially welcome at this time of the year when there’s a very limited supply from the garden. By the time this Marjoram outgrows its the ceramic pot it was supplied in, spring will be here and we can plant it out in the herb bed.

I’ve enjoyed having one or two comments to my postings,  many thanks for those, but I’m having trouble with spam comments at the moment so I’ll probably have to turn off the comments (not sure how I do that at present!), to allow myself more time for the drawing and writing the diary itself. What a nuisance!

Winter Gnat

This little insect, shown here 4 or 5 times life size, must have flown into a carrier bag I was carrying as we walked back from town across the park and got squashed. My microscope reveals that it’s a Winter Gnat, a two-winged fly that is conspicuous at this time of year when there are so few insects about. You seen them dancing in swarms in damp grassy places especially in the late afternoon, which was when I unwittingly trapped this one.

This seems to be a female because it has a curved dagger-end to its thorax which I guess is the ovipositor.

A Kind of Therapy

We had the phone call at 5.15 a.m. to say that Barbara’s mum Betty had died peacefully in her sleep at the Hospice. Rather than sit in a heap, we’ve worked our way through the day by gently getting on with the various tasks we’re obliged to do, such are registering her death.

Betty has been a largely unseen presence in my online diary for the last 12 years. There are dozens of drawings of the Hawthorns and the Ash log at the end of her garden. I’ve been asked to say a few words about her at the funeral. She combined a disarming innocence with a twinkle mischief so I want to get the tone just right between her sense of fun and the sadness and sense of loss we feel. And that inevitable feeling ‘I wish that I’d asked her more about her early life’.

School Museums

As we come out of the back entrance of the Registry Office on Northgate, Wakefield, we pass this unprepossessing 1960s prefab-style building which takes me back to my first inkling that I wanted to publish my natural history sketchbooks as an illustration student in the early 1970s. This is where I came because at that time it was the West Riding School Museum’s Service. Eric Woodward the director must have got fed up of seeing me but he patiently encouraged me as my idea for a Natural History of Wakefield grew from a wall chart to a booklet to facsimile sketchbook with fold-out maps, posters and prehistoric panoramas; a kind of History of the Entire Planet, which just happened to be centred on Wakefield.

The School Museums was just one inspiration for me. They sent out stout wooden boxes on loan which opened up to reveal little displays of historical objects, model dinosaurs, scale models of buildings and so on. I liked that idea of a carefully made Box ofDelights which goes out into the world with an informative display and some inspiring objects that you can examine hands-on.

As a college project I worked on a display about spiders and their webs which could be sent out to a school like a giant-sized pack of cards and slotted together. It never got as far as being added to the School Museums collection but I don’t think the materials – mounting card with transparent perspex for the step-by-steps of how a web is made – would have survived the rough-and-tumble of the classroom.

Chris Woffenden e-mailed me. He sums up how I felt when I saw this former creative hub converted to its present mundane purpose as a council storeroom:

Small world – I was a Graphic Designer/Illustrator there in the 80’s. Eric Woodward was a great encouragement to us all – whether drawing or model making etc. I grew up inspired by the delivery of those wooden boxes as a child at school in the 70’s – never thought I would work there. It was a sad day when it closed down – an even sadder one for the children at school at the moment that don’t know what they are missing.

Scrubland

The Runtlings, Ossett; The winter hedgerows are busy with birds: Greenfinch, Great Tit, Long-tailed Tit and – probing the leaf-litter beneath trees – a few Redwings. A Kestrel hovers over the rough, grassy mounds on waste-ground around Dewsbury Sewage Works.

In my childhood, rough grassland dotted with thorns was a familiar habitat around old collieries, factories and railway sidings. Much of this ‘brown land’ has now been reclaimed for housing and office parks, and today, when more thought goes into landscape design, areas that would once have been left as derelict have been transformed into community parks with fishing ponds, copses and little meadow areas but, because of my childhood memories of roaming around post-industrial landscapes, I feel a touch of nostalgia for these pockets of unkempt scrubland, the hunting ground of the Kestrel.

Sycamores

The Hospice makes the most of its leafy surroundings with plenty of windows and several small conservatories, a contrast with the tall, often inaccessible windows in the wards of the old buildings of Pinderfields Hospital just across the road.

We’re here visiting my mother-in-law Betty. They’ve done all they can for her medically in the hospital and the aim of the Hospice is now to make her comfortable rather than to bombard her with all resources of modern medicine in order to come up with a cure for her condition.

I see it as the difference between hard-nosed Health, with a capital ‘H’ – with all it’s targets for waiting lists, meeting budgets and successful outcomes – and well being, a softer concept which is more difficult to measure but is obvious when you come across it.

Leafy views and fresh flowers in vases, hair-dressing and aromatherapy sessions, have no place in the already stretched budgets of our National Health Service but they make such a difference to the way you feel, such a difference to the atmosphere of the place. The Health Service view might be to diagnose the problem and work towards a cure, seeing the patient to some extent as a problem to be solved. With the Hospice, it seems more as if the main aim is to treat you as a human being.

Having said that, we’ve got no complaints about the treatment Betty received in her months on the acute wards but the Hospice feels like the right place for her to be now.

Kat Kong

On our walk along the towpath yesterday afternoon, I tried photographing the Canal House cat – well one of the Canal House cats, there are several – as it sat on a shed roof and it’s ended up looking giant-sized compared with the old barge-horse stables, like Kitten Kong in The Goodies, which rampaged around London and demolished the Post Office Tower. Barbara and I saw Jack Black in Gulliver’s Travels in 3D last week so perhaps that influenced my viewpoint.

Flowstone

I’ve never taken so many photographs as I have since I got my little Olympus Tough a year ago; it’s almost always with me. I’ve drawn this deposit of flowstone in my Wild West Yorkshire diary before but yesterday I took the opportunity to photograph it on the camera’s macro setting. It’s such a small camera that all I need to do is lean over, holding it at arm’s length, to get near the outflow, which comes out of the canal bridge on a steep banking. In close-up it looks like deposits that I’ve seen in limestone caves. I assume that water is dissolving lime in mortar between the stones of the bridge piers.

Hoar Frost

Yesterday afternoon the shadows were white – white with frost. The towpath is something of a sun trap, even when the sun is so low on a winter’s day, but the ridge of trees opposite casts a long shadow so in places the path is muddy but just inches away the ground is frozen solid and the vegetation rimed with hoar frost where it has remained in shadow all day.

Towpath Birds

Each bird has it’s distinctive way of getting across the canal;

The Moorhen has the most amphibious method, combining land, air and water for the short journey. As it sees us approach, it pauses on the towpath, stalks a few tentative steps to the bank, launches itself into the air with limited effect then staggers along the water surface for a few paces – with the out of control momentum of someone jumping onto the platform before the train has stopped – before settling to swim the last yard or so to the seclusion of the bankside vegetation.

The Wren zooms along, wings a-whir, from the undergrowth on the towpath side to the hedge on the far bank.

A small group of Long-tailed Tits take a roller-coaster flightpath from the tops branches at one side to those on the other. Repeated wing-beats interspersed with short rests result in their bouncing flight.

A pair of Mallards swim across with a surreptitious air. The drake might be trying to avoid the attention of rival males. Later we see a duck closely pursued by two drakes flying up river.

Razor Shells

You can see why the razor shells you find on sandy beaches get their name when you see old cut-throat razors like these; they have the same proportions and gentle curve. Abalone shell has been incorporated into the grapevine decorations on the handles of these razors. The abalone is ear-shaped with a row of perforations – which would be the effect one of these cut-throats would have on my ear, if I ever attempted to use it!

In Wild Yorkshire on 7 August I wrote about my great-great grandad, Samuel Bergin Swift who designed a cut-throat razor for Napoleon III.

It seems that his son George, my great-grandad on my mum’s side, might have been equally talented. I like to think my enthusiasm for applied arts – if I can include writing and illustrating books in that category – comes from that side of the family. Yesterday, while having a cup of coffee with my mum, we were talking about Samuel Bergin’s designs and she mentioned that she has two cut-throat razors that belonged to George.

maker's nameThey have the maker’s name on the blades; ‘JOSEPH RODGERS&SONS, CUTLERS TO THEIR MAJESTIES, No.6 NORFOLK STREET’; the firm where at least four generations of my family worked. The final line of the address, ‘SHEFFIELD’ is almost entirely worn away.

A collector who has a special interest in Rodgers’ pen-knives and razors tells me:

It’s very difficult to date Rodgers razors but they look to be late Victorian or Edwardian.  The reference to THEIR MAJESTIES simply means the fact that Rodgers have been cutlers to George 4th, William 4th, Victoria and so on.

I have never seen decoration like that on a Rodgers razor before and so if you look, the pin at one end is different from the other end.  My thinking is that these razors were either bought as standard razor blades and had different handles fitted.  Or, the original handles got damaged and were taken off and replaced with these.  This would not be unusual.

The very good news is that they have been replaced with some stunning inlaid pique work using possibly pieces of mother of pearl but the majority of it is definitely abalone.  It is a much more iridescent and colourful shell than MOP.  Your relative who worked at Rodgers would have likely been able to do this work easily or he would know someone who could.  I think these handles are one of a kind.  It doesn’t make them unique in particular, it just means they are a good example of pique work.  Because pique work like this is all hand done, every item is different in some way.  The grapes were a popular symbol of art nouveau decoration which makes me think these are late Victorian.

The decoration is superb.  I forgot to mention that it looks like there is some inlaid metal in there as well.  That would be perfectly normal.  The metal and abalone compliment one another.  It could be gold or silver, it’s difficult to say without seeing it.

The handles themselves look to be an early bakelite/plastic but it’s hard to say.  They could also be buffalo horn, ebony wood or tortoiseshell.  I didn’t think so at first but them I remembered that unpolished shell does have a very dark colour to it, especially when it’s thick.  I’m sorry I cannot help you more in that handle material.  One thing you could do is hold the handle up to a bright light and if i has a browny colour, it will be shell.  Horn and ebony tend to have a grained appearance which I don’t think these have.  If you cannot see a grain and it doesn’t shine brown through a bright light, I would think they are bakelite.

Because the handles are mounted on metal, I haven’t been able to shine a light through them. Along the edges, I can’t see any signs of them being translucent.

Tankersley Park

Tankersley Park“From Rotherham we turned north west to Wentworth, on purpose to see the old seat of Tankersley and the park, where I saw the largest red deer that, I believe, are in this part of Europe: One of the hinds, I think, was larger than my horse, and he was not a very small pad of fourteen hands and half high. This was anciently the dwelling of the great Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, beheaded in King Charles the First’s time, by a law, ex post facto, voted afterward not to be drawn into a precedent. The body lies interred in Wentworth Church.”

Daniel Defoe, A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain, 1727

M1 near TankersleyAs you head north on the M1 from Sheffield to Wakefield you pass the Park, now a golf course, visited by Defoe in the 1720s. There had been 280 deer in the park in 1653 but by the late 1800s the Park had long been split up and the remaining deer were removed to Wentworth.

golf courseThe mounds on the golf course are spoil from shallow pits dug to get at a layer of ironstone. Sparse, rabbit-nibbled grasses, yarrow, birdsfoot trefoil and other wildflowers cover each circular mound of shale but in the central depression, where the old shaft has caved in, thorn and elder bushes take root.

Churchill TankThese ironworkings date from the 1790s, after the break-up of Tankersley Park, and by 1850 about 250 ironstone miners worked here.

Over one thousand Churchill Tanks were assembled here during World War II in a factory which stood on a site 500 yards west of the M1.

Tankersley Church‘Many were slain and some taken prisoners’ when the Royalists won a victory over the Roundheads in the Battle of Tankersley Moor, 1643. Sir Francis Wortley, a Royalist who led a troop of some 900 men in the battle, had cannon balls made at his forge a nearby Wortley. TankersleyCannon balls and a bullet found on the battlefield are preserved in Tankersley Church, which stands on the hill overlooking the motorway.