It might be 50 years ago since Bill’s homemade stereo spontaneously combusted, singeing my books and diaries on the shelf above but, as he’s my brother I’ve never let him forget it!
I still remember the thrill of first hearing familiar records in stereo for the first time. The track I particularly remember was ‘The Shirt Event from Olympia’ by the Bonzo Dog Band. Going from mono to stereo was the equivalent of switching from 2D to 3D. The surprise was that we could tap into this sophisticated technology with Bill’s concoction of bits of old amps from a record player and radio wired together and held in place with tacks hammered into an offcut of plywood. Initially the speakers weren’t even in boxes, they were just lying there on the floor next to makeshift amplifier.
We now know that attaching a transformer to a piece of wood isn’t a good idea.
Here’s just one of the casualties amongst our treasured records, books and diaries on the metal shelf unit above. I got our local printer Mr Chappell to trim off the worst of the charred edges from my copy of Coyler & Hammond’s Flies of the British Isles. Still readable but hardly a pleasure to use, so naturally when I spotted a pristine copy amongst the secondhand books in the cafe at the National Trust’s Wentworth Castle I went for it.
Nor could I resist Guide to Microlife by Rainis and Russell, Animals under logs and stones by Wheater and Read and Small Freshwater Creatures by Olsen, Sunesen and Pedersen.
Pumpkins drawn on my iPad Pro in Clip Studio Paint, using the ‘Real G-Pen’ and the lasso fill tool for the colour, and Adobe Fresco using the ‘Natural Inker’. The difference between the blotty line of the bottle and watch and the softer line of the pumpkin drawings is just because of the pressure applied when using the Apple Pencil.
This afternoon on the Baines centenary walk, from his birthplace in a terraced house on Shepstye Road to his grave in Horbury Cemetery, we called at the Stan Barstow Memorial Garden on Queen Street. Just over the wire fence at the far end there’s this little patch of overgrown garden, behind Mr Pimm’s dress shop at number 17.
Gordon Pullin, who had performed William’s songs at the recital, read a letter that William had written to his pianist friend Frederick Dawson from this garden.
17 Queen Street, Horbury, Nr. Wakefield.
8.8.21
Dear Mr. Dawson,
I like writing this in a gently swinging hammock – underneath a fruit burdened apple tree – a lurid hot blue sky above.
I almost wish that it was apple blossom time . . . . I would love this tree that I am under to shed its snow on me. but, I must be careful not to get a wallop from a frisky apple on my head . . . . the trees are loaded.
I am delightfully lazy! I can smell the ripening raspberries . . . . and the delicate scent in the shade is wonderful . . . .
I might add that a hammock is certainly no the most comfortable place to write in. There is a certain amount of adventure about it . . . . . I might roll over the side before I have finished . . . If I make a blot you will know what has happened.
There is a stolid Yorkshire fly . . . . that will persist in alighting on my nose. ’Tis a bother!
You will notice by the address given on the other side . . . . that I am at my birthplace.
I am staying with an aunt just on the fringe of the village – and everything is quite primitive. No gas – and only well water . . . I almost feel like growing a beard here!! I am the returned native . . . .
As a boy I used to think that the tower of Horbury Church must almost touch the sky. There it stood with its huge finger pointing upwards . . . .
On Shrove Tues:- pancake day as we called it . . . . we were told that at 12 o’clock pancakes were thrown over the steeple. I never saw it happen . . . . . but I thought what a wonderful thing it was to be able to perform such a feat.
But I am wandering from what I intend writing about. Augers have returned my pieces – they inform me that they must wait and see the results of my “4 Poems” . . . . .
These publishers put years on to me. I have sent them to Elkins – he wants to know my terms? (I have also written to Elikins to see if there is “anything in” its £75 a year royalty story) – If not – what would you say. A royalty on every copy or sell them outright? I must have them out.
Re. “Glancing Sunshine” – my friend Wood has written a verse on it:-
Lying in an emerald glade Lying in the scented shade – (Lying, dreaming, as one must) Glancing through the Fairy Dust – Seeing a rill floating down, Dancing in his airy gown: Singing silver music there Through the dreamy, dusty air.
Do you like it?
Or does this appeal to you more:-
“In the glancing beams that streamed through the trees the dust danced and was golden”.
This is a piece of Oscar Wilde-Baines.
Last Friday afternoon I journeyed to Harrogate, to see Dan Godfrey . . . . In the train I read a most entertaining book “Set down in Malice” by Gerald Cumberland. I was particularly entertained with one chapter called “Music in Berlin” -!
I can hear someone calling me to tea . . . . tea in this boiling sun! I must away – and get off my perch.
After taking over the ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ franchise, Marvel reveals its dramatic reboot of the Sodor Universe. Happy Birthday to Norah on the Island of Sodor AKA the Isle of Man.
More sketches from my first term of John Norris Wood’s natural history illustration course at the Royal College of Art, fifty years ago in the autumn of 1972. Again, I can see the influence of Victor Ambrus, which was no bad thing. I was happiest drawing in black and white, not surprisingly as the method that I used for the colour here was to carry around three bottles of indian ink in the primary colours, red, blue and yellow.
This morning we walked alongside this meander of the River Calder although in the 45 years since I drew this trees have grown up along the bank, obscuring the view across the river.
My room at 14 Evelyn Gardens, October 1972
It’s rare for me to bump into anyone who I remember from 50 years ago at the Royal College of Art when we’re down by the river but this morning we stopped and had a chat with Sarah, Gardner as was, who lived in a slightly larger room than mine (above) in the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington.
She doesn’t remember me from that time but she was just 4 months old as the term started, so that’s not surprising. Her dad Roger was in his second year in the painting department.
This drawing was in my A4-sized notebook, so the drawings in it are mainly doodles that I got distracted by when I should have been getting on with some writing. I wish that I’d taken the doodles further, I prefer the playfulness to some of my more serious work from that time.
The drawing of my table is so evocative, a reminder me of once-familiar objects such as a pint-sized milk bottle, my long-gone brown teapot and the small transistor radio which wasn’t really up to the job and which I soon replaced, calling in an electrical shop on the Edgeware Road to choose it.
That looks like a plastic butter dish in the foreground, I’d forgotten that. In those days margarine came in a silver paper wrapper rather than in a plastic tub.
Finally, from that same notebook, an early rough for my mural of birds in the college greenhouse on the top floor of the RCA’s Kensington Gore building. You can see that I was keen to include lettering. I think that I was in awe of the work I saw in the painting school, suffering ‘agonies of diffidence’ (to quote comic artist Frank Bellamy when he found himself in a similar context) when I took my work in there.
The lettering was my way of saying this is intended as an illustration, a drawing that’s here to do a specific job – help people identify the birds – not a serious painting.
Lightning sketches from an engagement party, Normanton Market and a lightning-struck birch tree by the car park at the Seed Room, Overton. You can see the split running the full length of the trunk of one of these trees.
