Stan Barstow Memorial Garden, Queen Street, Horbury, 2.30 pm, 65℉, 17℃: As soon as I sit on a bench beneath a weeping silver birch, aphids and plant bugs start trundling about on my knee and over my sketchbook page.
The Weeping Birch
Category: Art
Maple, Ash and Sumac
After recent wind, rain and the first overnight frost, next door’s maple is going down in a blaze of ochre yellow and one of the ash trees in the wood is now devoid of leaves.
This morning two blackbirds were fighting it out over the ever-diminishing supply of sumac berries. When a song thrush flies in the spray of berries it lands on instantly detaches, plummeting to the ground and, for a moment, taking the startled thrush with it.
The small male sparrowhawk is back, again swooping down by the feeders and then pausing to perch on the hedge and again failing to catch any prey.
This morning a distant chevron of geese headed down the Calder Valley but at the weekend a skein of twenty plus was heading in the opposite direction.
What the Right Hand is Doing
This weed – thale cress? – is the sole survivor from a late sowing of basil in a pot on the kitchen windowsill. When the weather starts to get cooler our basil seedlings give up the will to live.
I’ve been giving my right hand a bit of a break for more than six months now but it still hurts as I write – at the base of my right thumb – so I’m going to have to learn to live with it and get back to regular drawing.
Scotland’s Greatest Munros
Happy birthday to our all-time favourite Munro.
Procreate Sketches
I’ve returned to drawing on the iPad after a break of several months.
I rescued this grasshopper from the bird bath in mid-September.
On Stage at Horbury School . . .
Great celebrities who trod the boards at Horbury School:
- David Munrow, early music historian
- R. D. Woodall, local historian and head teacher
- Jane McDonald, singer, who appeared as Snow White in a Pageant Players’ pantomime (she’s now starring in pantomimes at the London Palladium, so we taught her well!)
- Sir Christopher Chataway, runner (one of the pacemakers for Roger Bannister when he ran the first 4-minute mile), who officially opened the school in 1963 when he served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education in Harold Macmillan’s government
- Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist
. . . and not forgetting:
- My brother Bill who played a pirate on the Hispaniola in the Pageant Player’s performance of the Mermaid Theatre version of ‘Treasure Island’ (we used their scripts and Bill told me that one of them was dotted with odd doodles: we suspect it was the script Spike Milligan used when he played Ben Gunn)
- My sister Linda, who played Lucy Lockit in the Ossett Grammar School production of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (a new assembly hall was under construction at Ossett so they used Horbury’s stage for several years)
- And me. I never performed on stage but I painted scenery for the Pageants for 40 years and, as a young member of the Horbury Concert Society, I illustrated and designed posters, leaflets and programme covers, including those for David Munrow and Allan Schiller
Happy birthday to Zac, who may get tread the boards at Horbury Academy in the next few years.
Link
Jane MacDonald, singer and BAFTA award winning TV presenter
Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist
Portal
If you’re standing in the queue for the Science Museum on Exhibition Road you might spot this inscription above the large and imposing archway opposite:
SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT
SCHOOLS ** MUSEUM
A.D. 1852
The date is misleading because the building – now the Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was constructed between 1899 and 1909.
I was seven years old when I first joined the queue at the Science Museum (I can be sure of the date because I remember a poster for Kirk Douglas’s film ‘The Vikings’ – released in August 1958 – on hoardings around the Natural History Museum gardens).
The Royal College of Art
At that time there was an arts and crafts-style mosaic in the frame to the right of the archway. Several muses reclined elegantly beneath an inscription indicating that this was then the ‘Royal College of Art’.
Cultural DNA
Happy birthday to James. We’ve both done the Ancestry.com DNA test recently and, would you believe it, I’ve discovered that I have a close male relative in East Lothian.
Wakefield on Screen
The only one of these television dramas and movies that I spotted filming on location in Wakefield was Alan Plater’s ‘The Biederbecke Affair’ (1985) in a sequence where James Bolan and Barbara Flyn’s characters were driving their battered yellow Bedford van round and round County Hall.
Happy birthday last week to Sue.
Eliza Elland Bell
In this photograph, probably taken around 1901, my great aunt, Eliza Elland Bell, by now Eliza Mitchell, is in her mid-thirties.
Born at Blaco Hill Farm Cottages in 1867, by the time she was 13 Eliza had started work as a domestic servant for the Johnsons at a Elm House Farm, Lound.
Ten years later and still working as a domestic servant she’d moved to Miss Hurt’s in Sutton-cum-Lound, and it was there that she met her future husband, the butler, William Henry Mitchell.
Costume
I’m colouring these images in Affinity Photo and Adobe Photoshop. Would a light sky blue be a likely colour for her outfit? I asked my friend Hilary Stubbs, my go-to costume expert:
‘I think that this colour is perfectly possible,’ she tells me, ‘though pale green or lilac would work too. Not pink as it would be considered a”young” colour I do like this colour though and it looks right.
‘The overall look of the garment should look like a dress though in reality it was probably have been a two piece to help with fit and laundering.The skirt often hook and eyed on the waist to prevent gapping.’
This wedding photograph (see link below) was taken just a year or two earlier in 1899 to me has a more Victorian look to it. The 1901 (if that’s when it was taken) with its layers and small jacket looks more Edwardian.