Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Spotted at the Øl hygge café bar, High Street, Horbury, this morning: to celebrate his 300th birthday last month, John Carr makes a brief visit to his birthplace, the cottage at the left-hand end of this Grade II-listed former farm house, which dates from 1637.
After his extended stint as architect in residence at the Redbox Gallery, Queen Street, the John Carr roadshow was moving on to its next venue . . . at the other end of Horbury, in the Carnegie Free Library.
It’s my brother’s turn to be in the spotlight in today’s dip into my 1964/65 negatives. In this one I’ve cloned him in a double exposure – evidently with a brother like Bill, one of him wasn’t enough. But it hasn’t worked out and the two sides of his persona are threatening each other with knives.
That’s my thumb print, yet another example of my inept film developing skills. My Ilford Sprite 127 plastic camera had no tripod bush so I rested it on a wooden stepladder.
More special effects as Bill hurtles down our driveway.
We called our homemade go-carts trolleys. I remember that this one included the comfort of an old spongy rubber doormat on the running board. The baton by the back wheel might be a makeshift break.
With a bit of help from the Adobe Illustrator this is me in January 1965 with my leg in a cast after breaking my leg hurrying home on an icy Boxing Day evening to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe.
My mum had added a long zip to my trousers to fit over the cast. I rather liked the new ash-wood walking stick which Pinderfields Hospital had loaned me so I was not pleased when some of my classmates used it for an improvised game of golf, scratching the handle 😮
I’d like to say that the grainy quality of the photograph was deliberate but it was probably caused by thermal shock to the film in my early attempts at developing it in a Paterson’s developing tank.
The Broken Leg, my comic strip diary from that time
There were chapels at the north-east end of Kirkham Priory, separated by an ambulatory (an aisle) from the main altar on the far right on my photograph. This black and white 127 photograph, coloured in Photoshop, is from my one and only visit there in 1964.
Another colourised shot of Sandal Castle in 1964, this time looking from the motte towards the Presence Chamber and kitchen. In 1964 wooden palings were used to cordon off the area.
Like the semi-fictional teenage Steven Spielberg in his movie The Fabelmans, in 1964 my brother Bill and I spent hours planning and making the props for mini Standard-8 cine movies. I would have liked to have made a King Kong-style movie of some giant beast lurking over our house but it was beyond the resources we had available at the time.
I tried it out in this shot from my Ilford Sprite 127 but it didn’t work because – in the original – Bill’s hand didn’t quite rest on the corner of the house because the view from the camera’s viewfinder didn’t quite match the view through the lens.
Thanks to Photoshop I’ve been able to nudge Bill into position. And the Photoshop Neural Filter has done a great job of colourising Smeath House.
A final round-up of hospice staff for my project and the last one, the gardener, is my favourite, probably because I’ve had so many uniforms to draw. This is my third of fourth attempt at the gardener. Originally I had him wielding a chainsaw, which wasn’t really suitable for a group photograph, then I tried him with a pair of shears, which didn’t work because he then needed a little shrub to trim, which I didn’t have room for. The potted plant, garden fork and olive body warmer work fine for my hospice staff group.
A lovely afternoon for John’s wake at Ossett Cricket Club, looking out across the Calder Valley.
I took this photograph in 1964 when the 443 ft Emley Moor television transmitter on the left was replaced by the 1,256 ft mast on the right. Five years later, in March 1969, this new mast collapsed because of strong winds and accumulated ice.
The original transmitter had been constructed in 1956 to broadcast the new commercial ITV channel. When the new mast came online it was dismantled and reconstructed at Craigkelly, Fife, to the north of Edinburgh, across the Firth of Forth. It’s still in use today.
Unfortunately one of my photograph of one of the anchors for the supporting cables is a double exposure but you might be able to make out the shape of a concrete block.
The double exposure is unfortunate but as a bonus you get a rare photograph of our bathroom windowsill in 1964. I might have accidentally pressed the shutter button as I prepared to remove the film from the camera. I developed my own films at the time – as you might guess from the uneven development of this shot – so I might have been using the airing cupboard in the bathroom as a makeshift darkroom when loading the film into the developing tank.
I’m aiming for a fairly generic version of the hospice staff but inevitably the individual characters keep asserting themselves.