Category: Art

Today, for the first time, we’re visiting – snow over Sheffield permitting – what was the Swift family home on Nether Edge Road, Sheffield. Number 77 was where my mum, Gladys Joan Swift spent her childhood but 82 years ago tomorrow, on the evening of the 12th December 1940, it was damaged beyond repair by an incendiary bomb in the Sheffield Blitz.

The Rolls Royce in the driveway looks impressive but the explanation for that is that my grandad was a funeral director.

Here’s my mum (on the right) with her neighbour Marjorie from number 81.

Living next door was my mum’s grandma, Sarah Ann Swift. She didn’t join my mum and her parents, Maurice and Ann Swift, in their stoutly built concrete air raid shelter at the end of the garden on the night of the raid, preferring to stay in her cellar, but unfortunately her side of the semi-detached house, number 79, was so badly damaged in the raid that she had to be rescued through the coal chute, along with her little dog Queenie.

To judge by the photographs, those two went everywhere together. She bought herself a house in another part of Sheffield when she was made homeless by the raid . . . a house that would cause a bit of a stir when she didn’t leave it to her son Maurice (my grandad) in her will. He felt as he’d paid off her mortgage he would be in line to inherit it. Why he didn’t I’m still not entirely sure . . .

My mum gave the impression that Maurice could be a difficult character and I think that is borne out by the fact that on my mum and dad’s wedding photograph, taken at the end of the war, he is the only guest who isn’t smiling!

Like Great Grandma Sarah Ann, he’s a character I would have liked to have got the chance to get to know. I remember him and I was fascinated by his interest in home movies – wish we still had those.

He had some talent as an artist and, I believe, as a designer of furniture. Here’s watercolour drawn when he was aged 13, which I think would have been in 1890.

I’m rounding off the William Baines centenary year on a suitably seasonal note with this article, A Composer’s Christmas in the December edition of The Yorkshire Dalesman.

From the diaries of William Baines, the Yorkshire composer who died 100 years ago, and from reminiscences of his relations and friends, Richard Bell has sketched this impression of Christmas early in the last century.

It grows on you. This double album, from the original television soundtrack composed by Benjamin Merrison and Will Slater, is my favourite when I want to settle down to a session of drawing plants (or any other subject else for that matter) as it flows so organically, like the impressive time-lapse sequences in the Green Planet television series.

But it stands on its own too; I like the lightness of touch; it’s not too ponderous but it does evoke the sense of wonder that you get from being in green spaces and observing nature. It’s good on plants behaving badly too – strangler vines*, I’m thinking of you! – described with humour and sometimes a sense of impending menace in the music.

I’m looking forward to revisiting the series to see how the now-familiar music fits with the sequences.

* Looking at the tracks list, I’m not sure that the notorious strangler fig actually makes an appearance but the tracks on cholla buds and ancestral grasses have a similar thrusting dynamic about them.