The Black Horse, Somercotes, Alfreton, Derbyshire, 2009, Google Street.
I’ve long known the story that my grandad’s brother Charles Bell died in a stable fire when looking after a sick mare but now, thanks to a newspaper report from the Derby Mercury, Wednesday 11 May 1898, I know a lot more about the circumstances of the tragedy and about his daily life.
You can read the full story, from a newspaper clipping posted by a distant relative of mine on Ancestry, at the end of this post.
There are plans to build 4 million homes on the green belt according to today’s Telegraph.
‘Sandstone causeway north west of Junction 39. Hawthorns and ash tree 8th March 1983.’
There’s a triangle of countryside at Broad Cut Farm, Calder Grove, near Wakefield, that has survived between to the river and the M1 where there’s a now plan to build a hundred of those homes plus 10 manufacturing units..
Google Maps 2024
The causey stone public footpath in my 1983 drawing was originally a colliery tram road, where horse-drawn trucks were taken to Hollin Hall Coal Staith just downstream from Broad Cut Lower Lock. There’s a row of six ‘Old Limekilns’ next to them.
1854 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, made available by the National Library of Scotland
The small building at ‘Th’ Owlet Lathe’ in the top right corner of the map was a dovecote.
I perched on the southbound side of motorway embankment in 1983 to draw it:
Room for 260 pairs of pigeons
A ruinous dovecote stans close to the motorway embankment at Owlet Laithes, just north of junction 39. It is built of handmade bricks on a ssandstone base which acted as a damp-course. The roof is of large Yorkshire stone (andstone) flags held on to a rough-hewn timber framework by wooden pegs.”
Unfortunately this old building disappeared within a few years of me drawing it.
Colliery spoil heaps were once such a prominent feature of our local landscape that it never occurred to me to photograph one but this example, at the top end of Coxley Valley, featured as a stand in for an extinct volcano in our 1966 Indiana Jones-style mini-movie ‘Quest Coxley’.
That’s my friend John as the intrepid explorer clutching the cavalry sword he used to hack through the dense undergrowth of New Hall Wood.
Settling Pond
Today at the same footbridge you’re entirely surrounded by woodland and the spoil heap itself has been landscaped to create a gentler slope.
The banking at the foot of the spoil heap in the 1966 photograph was the dam wall of a settling pond constructed to prevent sediment discharging into Coxley Beck. It has now almost completely silted up. In the 1980s it attracted hundreds of mating toads in springtime and hopefully it still does.
Fire break?
OS Six-inch to the Mile map, 1930. National Library of Scotland, colour added by me in Photoshop.
The footbridge over Stony Cliffe Beck is top centre in this map from 1930. Denby Grange Colliery was then called the Prince of Wales Colliery. One feature in the old map that isn’t obvious when you’re walking through what is now Stonycliffe Wood Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve is the band devoid of trees across the top of the map: a fire break?
Our ‘Quest Coxley’ travelogue was just one minute long, so that’s about 12 feet of Standard 8 cine film at 18 frames a second. In Photoshop I’ve stitched together 20 frames from a second or two of a panning shot to make the panorama.
A smelter, a cook, a domestic servant and a chauffeur. Joseph, Hannah, James and Helena – my great uncles and aunts – stand alongside my Grandad Robert on the back row of the c.1904 photograph of the Bell family of Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire, which I’m currently researching.
The handwriting that I’ve added is that of the 1891 census enumerator for Lound, John Wragg, 54, Certificated Teacher at the School House, Sutton-cum-Lound Church of England School.
My Great Aunt Sarah, was born in the year that the Penny Farthing Bicycle was invented and died in the year that the first man walked on the moon. She lived to celebrate her 97th birthday, but sadly although she lived just up the road from my Grandad Robert Bell, her younger brother, I don’t remember ever having met her.
My Great Uncle Ernest spent much of his career working underground as a ‘coal getter’ and ‘hewer’ but in retirement he described his former profession as ‘Farmer’.
Ernest Bell was born at Blaco Hill Cottages, near Lound, Nottinghamshire on 22 August 1869. In the 1881 census, aged 11, he is already working as an agricultural labourer.
Mexborough
On 9 November 1891 he married factory hand Elizabeth Cunningham of Mexborough, daughter of Harriet Cunningham, widow, and her llate husband John, a waterman. Mexborough lies 20 miles to the north-east of Blaco Hill in the Don Valley, mid-way between Sheffield and Doncaster. Ernest is working as a ‘miner’, later (1901) describing himself as a coal hewer.
The witnesses are John’s brother George William Bell and Elizabeth’s younger sister Edith, 18, who worked as a servant in a beerhouse.
He and his wife Elizabeth have five children, Ellen aged seven and her four younger brothers: Ernest, 5, George William, 3, Charles, 1, and James, aged 4 months. All were born in Mexborough.
In addition to the children, they have lodgers: fellow coal hewer Harry Smith, a widower from Worcestershire, and his seven-year old daughter Harriet.
Ernest and Elizabeth were married for 18 years and had 9 children, of which 6 survived but by 1911 George is a widower with a fifth son, Robert, aged 4 to look after. Agnes Knott, 50, born in Belper, Derbyshire, has moved in as ‘housekeeper’.
The Barnsley-British Cooperative Society
Google Street view (2022) of the George and Dragon and George’s Buildings, 1878, Church Street, Mexborough.
The Co-op warehouse, Mexborough and Swinton Times February 17, 1928
By 1921 Ernest has married Agnes and they’ve moved to Church Street, Mexborough. Ernest now works as a labourer for the Barnsley British Cooperative Society. The society had a warehouse at Mexborough and a pencilled note on the census form suggests to me that Ernest worked on the ‘Engine’ – presumably a stationary steam engine – there.
Google Street view (2020) of John and Edith’s house on Arnold Crescent, Mexborough.
In the 1939 Survey Ernest is now married to Edith, born 16 April 1891. They’re living at Arnold Crescent, Mexborough, and he describes himself – despite spending so many years as a coal hewer and as a labourer at the co-op – as ‘Old Age Pensioner, Farmer’. Edith is a ‘Housewife’.
At Horbury Library this morning the Friends of the Library group launched the Horbury Tapestry website, featuring an ultra-high resolution interactive version of the tapestry which was created twenty years ago to celebrate the centenary of the town’s Carnegie Free Library.
In the group creating the tapestry (centre, top) that’s my mum on the left and her friend Olive Sergeant on the right.
My mum used a drawing I’d made of Carr Lodge for her emboridery.
My mum, Gladys Bell, was one of 70 stitchers led by Janet Taylor who between them created more than 200 pieces of embroidery celebrating the life of the town.
I never met my Great Uncle ‘Jack’, grandad’s elder brother. He was christened John Theodore Bell but probably got Jack because his father was also a John.
This photograph, part of a family group, was taken at Lound around 1901 (and colourised by me in Affinity Photo 2 on the iPad).
At that time, aged 27, he was working as a steel polisher in New Radford, Sherwood, on the north side of Nottingham. He had married Fanny Taylor, 26, and was living at 16 Deligne Street, with his in-laws, Leicester-born Edward Henry Taylor, 59, an army pensioner and his wife, Chelmsford-born, Sarah Taylor, 54, a lace worker specialising as a clipper – cutting away the connecting threads at the edges of the lace.
The 1911 census records that the couple had one child who died in infancy.
In the 1921 census he is still working as an ‘Iron & Steel Polisher’ in the Raleigh Bicycles factory in Nottingham. They’ve moved to 5 Edith Terrace, Radford, and mother-in-law Sarah, now 73, has moved in with them.
We’ve been out on location researching my September article for the ‘Dalesman’ magazine and I thought I’d go for an IMAX-style panorama of Charles Waterton’s nature reserve at Walton Hall, Wakefield, which, as you can see from the 1865 engraving, has now been restored to its former glory, thanks to extensive tree-planting and landscaping by the Waterton Park Golf Club.
Charles Waterton wrangling a cayman on the River Essequibo, Guyana.
I’ve dropped in contemporary engravings of Waterton’s adventures – a bit of a comic-strip version of the life of a complex character, imagining it as if it was a magic lantern show of his exploits.
Waterton getting a closer view of the Bempton Cliffs seabird colony.
As a graphic designer/illustrator, I’ve gone for layout first, text to follow. The placeholder text is a corrupted version of a text by Cicero, which I feel that Waterton might approve of as he had a habit of dropping Latin quotes into his natural history essays.
A cool-headed Waterton returns an escaped rattlesnake to its cabinet at a scientific meeting at Dr Hobson’s house at Park Square, Leeds.
As a military policeman, Doug’s beat included the pyramids and the ‘Sweet Water Canal’ (Ismaïlia Canal).
A time capsule in a small leather pouch: thanks to my cousin Kathleen Finlayson I’ve been able to read a letter that my father wrote in the YMCA in Jerusalem in the final months of World War II. Doug – Robert Douglas Bell – was then aged 25.
Doug’s niece, Kathleen Bell, as she then was, was aged 14. She hand-stitched the pouch herself when leather became available again at the end of the war.
Those initials after his service number indicate that Doug was:
CSM: a Company Sergeant Major
SIB: in the Special Investigations Branch
CMP: of the Corps of Military Police
MEF: part of Great Britain’s Mediterranean Expeditionary Force
1432272 CSM Bell RD
SIB, CMP, MEF.
24 Jan 1945
Dear Kathleen,
I hope you will excuse me for writing in pencil and also if the writing becomes a little unintelligible.
The reason is that I am writing in the Y.M.C.A. Hostel in Jerusalem. All the writing tables are in use so I am writing in an easy chair whilst balancing the pad on my knee.
Well, I am now on the 5th day of my leave, but as it took me a day to get up here, it’s only my fourth day in the Holy City. Like most places it has a modern side as well as new. The old city is still surrounded by a wall and has to be entered by various gates. The streets are very narrow and cobbled, and being built on a hill are very steep.
In Cairo
On Monday, which was my first full day in Palestine, I went to Bethelhem which is about eight miles away. I saw the Church of the Nativity and the Bethlehem Xmas bells, also the native craftsmen who work in pearl, ivory and silver. Their work is really skilled, having been handed down from one generation to another.
Mother of pearl brooch from Bethlehem which Doug bought for his mum, Jane Bell.
I don’t know whether this will arrive before the letter I sent home, but I have sent your Grandma some sets of photos which show the various places around here. She will show you the snaps of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, etc which will show you the places far better than I could ever express in words.
An earlier set of Will’s Cigarettes cards: Garden Flowers New Varieties (Series 2). 1939.
It is very cold here, but the air is very pure and clear so that visibility extends for miles. Before my leave’s over I hope to visit the sea and the Dead Sea. I enclose a few flower cards which I thought you might like. Perhaps you will give Dorothy one or two. Well, I must close now. I hope you are still enjoying your job.
Please give my best wishes to all,
Be seeing you soon,
Doug
Later that year, on the 23rd May, 4 years and 232 days since he enlisted, Doug left the Middle East and according to his record he was ‘HOME’ the next day. He’d arrived in the Middle East shortly before the outbreak of World War II on 24 August 1939.
Impending Release
He was given a glowing reference on his impending release from the army:
A very smart and competent W.O. who has been of great service to the Corps. Has a very high organising ability and has handled his duties with tact and skill. Has a very marked aptitude for man management and could be employed to advantage in a supervisory capacity.
