Sarah’s birthday today, and this card celebrates her enthusiasm for giving her class to a hands-on taster of Ancient Rome.
“Zach said straight away when I opened it ‘I know this one, it’s definitely Uncle Richard’s!’ ” she tells me, “and then was occupied for 5 minutes trying to work out the maths problem! Until Will explained it was deliberately very difficult :-)”
From my school Ancient History book my S.P.Q.R. News features a comics section based on my mum’s paper, The Daily Mail, so my Col. Pewtius was inspired by Arthur Horner’s Colonel Pewter which ran in the paper from 1960 to 1964. I thought enough about Colonel Pewter to collect the strips, originally four square panels in a 2×2 grid, and paste them into a newsprint booklet I’d made for them. This was a story called 12.2 to the Tropics about a Titfield Thunderbolt type steam excursion that ends up on a tropical Shangri-La deep in the North Wales hills. Unfortunately I no longer have it and it’s not one of the reprints that show up when I search Google.
At first the adventures of Adamus in the Corn Top strip didn’t mean anything to me but, knowing the way my mind works, I remembered the title Barley Bottom.
I must have read Barley Bottom in a friend’s dad’s newspaper as at that time it appeared only in the Daily Herald, a left-wing paper. My Adamus seems to be in the same mould, a hapless everyman frustrated by big business and establishment politics:
‘Frame 1: Adamus is trying to keep an old soari service going (possibly I meant to write ‘sella’, a Roman sedan chair) Frame 2: At Bigus House: ‘Lay an ambush’.
Barley Bottom by ‘Lucian’ was written by Roger Woddis and drawn by Derek Chittock.
Colonel Pewter had originally appeared in a liberal newspaper, the News Chronicle, Barley Bottom was left-wing so presumably Flook the strip that I read for years in my mum’s Daily Mail was suited for right-wing readers. I liked the nostalgia of Colonel Pewter but out of the three of them my favourite was Flook because of the crisp, bold pen work of the strip’s cartoonist Trog.
For my brother-in-law John’s big birthday plus one, a cartoon of our regular walk around Newmillerdam, which would be a quiet place if it wasn’t for all that birdsong and – on her My Yorkshire show last week – Jane McDonald singing Jessie Ware’s Remember Where You Are on the slope behind the Boathouse.
The Wakefield Naturalists’ Society had their first AGM since the pandemic on Monday but it was a case of blink and you’ll miss it, as the main event of the evening was Ron Marshall talking about Ardnamurchan, the Outer Hebrides and the Shetlands.
These sketches were drawn with a Lamy nexx with a B – bold – nib. I’m getting towards the end of my bottle of De Atramentis, an ink which soon dries, allowing me to add watercolour.
We bought a pack of uni ball Signo gel pens, designed specifically for writing, so naturally I had to try one out for drawing these marigold seed heads.
We almost gave up on this morning’s walk at RSPB Fairburn Ings as the rain seemed to be setting in but as it was so quiet there we were able to get good views of two roe deer, grazing just 50 yards from the Roy Taylor trail. This was the best of my iPhone shots, on the others they were heads down, white rumps towards us.
The reeds festooning the trees are an indication of flood levels but this morning most of the paths had dried out.
Confession time: the Parliament of Crows is a collage of four photographs. There were more crows than shown here but I couldn’t get them all to pose together for their group photograph.
I’m delighted to have made it onto the cover of this month’s Vis News, the Visual Narratives Academy Newsletter.
‘This issue we interview a fine British comics maker and illustrator,’ writes editor David Haden, ‘who cleverly combines digital methods with traditional looks. It’s a long and informative interview.’
My comic strip experiment for this month’s Dalesman didn’t make it into print – editor Dan Clare and I decided that Dalesman readers would prefer a more traditional format for the nature diary! – so I’m delighted that Vis News has featured the strip and the process that I went through in creating it.
When St Paul’s was built in 1721, it overlooked open countryside on the southern edge of Sheffield. As the city expanded its congregation swelled, amongst them my grandma and grandad’s family. Grandad was a church warden here.
Slum clearance resulted in a plummeting congregation and in 1937 the church closed. It stood next to the Town Hall, on what is now the Peace Gardens.
At first I thought that one of these top-hatted figure on the left was reaching into his inner coat pocket to pay his fare for a Hanson cab ride into town.
It’s a small detail in a photograph of the top end of Westgate, Wakefield, taken, I guess in late Victorian times.
They’re standing by the cabmen’s shelter. My thanks to Graham Cass for posting the photograph on the Wakefield Historical Appreciation Facebook page.
Drawn in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro using the Real G-Pen, the Lasso Fill Tool and a bit of virtual Charcoal.
Book Superheroes bursting into colour. Having familiarised myself with the storytelling suggestions in Stan Lee’s How to Draw Superheroes, I can now let these characters return to their secret hideout and get on with my other projects.
In my grammar school days, Ancient History, with it’s epic battles and larger than life characters, always had more appeal for me than the serious, grown-up Social and Economic History from 1750-1865 that we were obliged to study for our O-level with its sober politicians and reformers and its Corn Laws, Factory Acts and Reform Bills.
I couldn’t remember the litany of dates, I still couldn’t tell you when the Metropolitan Commissioner for Sewers was appointed and despite my enthusiasm for history in general, it turned out to be the one subject that I failed.
In Ossett we were surrounded by the tail end of the Industrial Revolution with plenty of textile mills, steam railways and coal mines with five miles of the school but there was no hands-on element to the course it was all classroom based and all taking place elsewhere than on our local patch, which actually had its own local luddites, reformers and innovators.
Unfortunately, to judge from the length of my school exercise book, we got just one term of Ancient History with our class teacher Miss Eaves. I’m still enthusiastic enough about the subject to have taken the University of Reading’s FutureLearn course on Ancient Rome twice, once before our visit there three years ago and, again, to recap after.
