Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve been adding shading and hatching to the aerial view of Sandal Castle to create a more three-dimensional effect. I had intended to fade out the hedgerows around the perimeter but as the earthworks are looking so solid, I think that might be too much of a contrast.
I’ll probably add a few figures for scale and a few cars in the car park. I’m drawing with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, using the program Adobe Fresco.
My grandma, Jane Bagshaw, met my grandad Robert Bell at a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, on Tuesday June 15th 1897 at 3 o’clock at Serlby Park, Nottinghamshire. He was then aged 19, working as second coachman to the Galways at Serlby. Jane, a domestic servant was 14.
After living in Sheffield, the couple retired to Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire in the 1950s.
As you might guess from the photograph of them, standing amongst the hollyhocks in front of the cottage, they were the kind of grandparents that you might encounter in a children’s story.
Taking my cue from a prompt on the Start Writing Fiction course that I took this autumn, I’ve recalled some of the features of Vine Cottage, as I remember them from my childhood, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when they left the cottage and moved to a bungalow at the other end of the village.
The prompt on the fiction course was to write about ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’, so let’s start with the shelves in the narrow scullery at the back of the cottage.
Grandma lined the shelves with newspaper, cutting a decorative zig-zag on its trailing edge. My father saved copies of The Times for her. At that time it was a broadsheet consisting almost entirely of text so it gave the shelves a more uniform effect than her own Weekly News, a popular tabloid. She always saved The Weekly News for me because I liked the cartoons in it. And they would sometimes also pass on a copy of the Salvation Army’s newsletter, which featured a comic strip of The Adventures of Black Bob, featuring a hill shepherd and his faithful border collie.
My brief, for this illustration of life in a castle, is to draw ‘someone using a well’.
Following the restoration of Pontefract Castle, there’s now a scheme to improve access and restore the ruins at Sandal. I’ll be illustrating various features including the twelve-metre deep well, excavated in the bailey, conveniently close to the privy chamber, the castle’s private apartments.
I’ve tried to imagine the kind of servant who would have been assigned the task of hauling buckets from the well. Although the shaft of the well has been preserved, we can only guess at the arrangement of pulleys or rollers that were used but I’m sure that it would have involved a bucket and rope.
I’ve drawn the character on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in the Adobe Fresco drawing program but for the pose I’ve used a 3D figure in Clip Studio Paint, tweaking the pose and the proportions. I felt that he would have developed broad muscular shoulders because of all that heavy lifting.
I’m still at the rough stage but this should give the team designing the interpretation a clear idea of what I have in mind. Just fourteen more illustrations to go . . .
In the days before computers, I’d occasionally use a Polaroid camera to take a photograph of a friend in a particular pose or I’d establish the proportions by setting up an artist’s lay figure, an articulated wooden doll.
Both these methods had disadvantages: under my direction, the friend would be likely to adopt a static self-conscious pose and the lay figure inevitably looked stilted and wooden.
My favourite way to draw people is to go out with a sketchbook and to try to capture their movement and character.
I’ve got a bewildering number of virtual brushes available to me in Fresco including instant cross hatching and screen tones (left).
For the Sandal rough, after tracing the 3D figure with a virtual pencil, I’m going for a quick pen drawing – the one I used here is ‘vintage inks’.
The flat colour goes on a layer below the pen and ink. I outline each area of solid colour with a vector brush – such as ‘basic round’ – then fill using the paint bucket tool.
From my diary for Wednesday, 8 September, 1971, Horbury, West Riding of Yorkshire:
On our way back [from visiting grandparents in Nottinghamshire] I noticed that Horbury Station was half demolished. I cycled down and asked them for the clock – they let me have it.
Man in charge of demolition (note: in my drawings no-one is wearing a hard hat!):
“Ahh, you like old stuff, do you? We demolished an old place in Leeds with faces and things carved on it. All in stone and they’re just going to put an office block up there. This thing would have stood while the new buildings fell. I had an old watch, a little silver one, from a site in Leeds.”
The clockwork was missing, I soon lost the wooden frame, which was in comb-jointed sections and, if I remember rightly, was painted in a dull turquoise. I suspect my father might have thrown the pieces out. My brother-in-law Dave found me an electric motor, but it drove the hands in reverse. Eventually, on my move away from Horbury, the glass, which I suspect was Victorian float glass, got smashed and I’m afraid that in a clear-out a few years later, I disposed of the clock-face.
There was no maker’s name and the numerals were Roman.
George Wood joined up at the same time as my father at the start of World War II.
“They both came around to see us in their uniforms,” my cousin Margaret recalled at a family get-together in Sheffield yesterday, “George was a gunner in the RAF but just a few weeks later he was killed.”
As it’s Remembrance Day, one hundred years since the Armistice that ended World War I, I’m doing a little research into a friend of my father’s who I never got to meet.
When he sent this photograph back home to Sheffield, my father, Robert Douglas Bell, then a sergeant in a light anti-aircraft unit, stationed in the Western Desert, North Africa, wrote on the back:
‘The Egg Market (remember) taken in Feb. 1941’
Years later he told me about setting up this pop-up trading post. He’d been an accountant before his call-up and a keen sprinter and footballer, so he, and his unit, realised that the best way to barter with the locals was to be organised and scrupulously fair. Other units preferred to haggle and to try to get the better of the locals, so they soon found themselves sidelined and a queue formed at the packing-case desk that my father’s team operated.
My father is manning the desk and it looks as if he’s hung his shirt on the end of the bargeboard before getting down to business.
It’s amazing to have this photograph of ‘The Egg Market’, which my late mother thoughtfully added to a family history album.
The following year, in Cairo, my dad was transferred to the Military Police.
‘The moustache is not really as untidy as it may appear,’ he wrote, ‘It’s slightly bigger now.’
Thank you, father, that’s just the sort of nugget of information which will be so useful to future historians. He rose to be colour sergeant major in the Special Investigations Branch of the Corps of Military Police, Cairo. His beat included the Pyramids and the Sweet Water Canal (which was anything but, he told me) and he had some input into security for the November 1943 Cairo Conference, attended by Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek. Roosevelt and Churchill went on to meet up with Josef Stalin in Tehran two days later.
In my childhood years, we had a battered light-tan leather case which had been confiscated from hashish smugglers and I still have father’s sergeant’s baton. My mother used to keep it handy by the back door on top of the three coat-hooks in the porch, in case she ever had to beat off a doorstep attacker. Fortunately she never had cause to use it in anger. She could easily control us with a well-aimed tap with the back of the Hush Puppies brush.
My father was born one hundred years ago today on 29 October, 1918, just a couple of weeks before the end of World War I.
Corps of Military Police, Cairo, 1939 Sept.- 1940 Dec., The National Archives, Kew. Do records for 1942 – 1945 still exist? Please let me know if you’ve been researching the subject and you can point me in the right direction. I’d love to read some of my father’s case-notes, if they still exist.
I’ve drawn the old scouring mill at Horbury Bridge several times this year, not because I’m particularly interested in the old buildings but because of the attraction of overlooking the mill, scribbling in my sketchbook as we wait for coffee and croissants at Di Bosco, just across the road.
Overlooking and scribbling . . . (with apologies for that terrible link) . . .
Arthur Pearson, a scribbling overlooker, worked in one of the woollen mills at Horbury Bridge until shortly before the start of World War I, when he started working for a large woollen cloth manufacturer in Freiburg, Bohemia. After getting into an argument about the Emperor and the Kaiser in the local barber’s, he was interned from March 1915 until December 1918, when he made his way back to Yorkshire.
Speaking to a reporter from the Leeds Mercury, he said that in Vienna ‘food and clothing were only purchasable by the very rich people; in fact, money at times could not buy food, and he had seen gold watches given in exchange for a loaf of black bread.’
Tea was selling at £2 per lb, salmon 30 shillings a tin, jam 25 shillings per jar and rice £2 per lb. A suit of clothes sold for anything from £80 to £120, but, Mr Pearson noticed, ‘the cloth was of very poor quality’.
Scribbling was the initial process of combing the wool prior to spinning it into yarn.
War Office Casualty lists for 8 October 1918, a little over a month before the end of hostilities, listed Private B Clark, 46532, of Horbury, who was serving in the Durham Light Infantry. In the previous month Private J Heald, 40981, of Horbury Bridge was listed as a casualty on the 10th.
In June two soldiers from Horbury Bridge had been listed as casualties, Private W H Osterfield, 48495, of the West Yorkshire Regiment and Private D Hall, 242319, of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.
J Armitage was a dramatist, whose plays ‘received the compliments of many distinguished people’ according to a photo feature in the Leeds Mercury, dated Saturday, 7 June, 1913.
A Jesse Armitage appears in the 1911 census for Horbury; then aged 24, he was employed as a railway clerk. He lived in the family home, at 4 Mortimer Row, Westfield Road with his parents Sarah, aged 50, and John, aged 55, a railway platelayer. Also still at home, his younger brother Harry, aged 20, worked as a house painter and decorator.
Ten years earlier, in 1901, Jesse, then aged 14, was working as a railway telegraph boy. When Jesse started at school, aged 4, the family had lived on Queen Street, Horbury. In 1913 he married Amy Bower, aged 25 or 26, a dressmaker from nearby Tithe Barn Street.
There’s a record of the death of a Jesse Armitage, aged 40, in the Wakefield area, registered in the first quarter of 1927.
And that’s about all I’ve been able to find out about our local dramatist so far. I’d love to know whether he wrote dramas or comedies.
I had airbrushed cigarette card portraits of football stars of the 30s and 40s in mind as I traced this newspaper photograph of Lincoln City full back (1939-1947), Alex Thompson (who would later be one of my teachers at junior school). You can see the coarse dotted screen tones of the original in the background of my drawing.
Unfortunately, by enlarging the photograph, I’ve lost clues to the shape of the face that you can pick up in the small version. They get flattened into amorphous grey areas of pixels when enlarged.
If you allow for his face filling out since his lean, fit footballing days, I don’t think that my drawn-from-memory brush and ink of him as a teacher was too far off the mark. I drew this before I came across the photograph.
Thanks to Find my Past and its links to the British Newspaper Archive, I was soon able to piece together Thompson’s career:
My grandad, Robert Bell, always referred to my grandma Jane as Ginny. That name must have gone back a long way because, delving back into my family tree on Find My Past, I’ve found that she was entered on the 1901 census as ‘Jennie Bagshawe’ (in fact, that should be Bagshaw, but I think that extra ‘e’ adds a certain cachet).
Then aged 22, she was working as cook in the household of Helen Taylor, widow, alongside Clara Holmes, 21, housemaid, who was born in Eckington, Derbyshire. Also resident at Mrs Taylor’s was her son, Joseph G Taylor, aged 37, a saw manufacturer.
Sheffield was heavily bombed during the World War II Blitz so many of the homes of my ancestors, including my mum’s family home and my great-grandma’s home next door, were destroyed, so I was delighted to find that the house where grandma cooked so many meals was still intact, along with its gateposts.
I can imagine Jennie and Clara sharing the attic room. I once asked grandma what was involved in domestic work and she recalled that it was a long day, starting with setting the fires very early in the morning.
I remember that she was a good cook and it was amazing how she and Robert could create a Sunday dinner, Yorkshire puddings included, for seven at Vine Cottage with just a single ring on a paraffin primus stove and the oven in the cast iron range, heated by a coal fire. The kettle, with its handle insulated by string wound around it, went on some kind of a rack in front of the fire.
In 1975 or 76, I cooked her my signature dish at the time, lasagne, and I think that she was quite impressed. As she made her way back down the stairs from my first floor flat, she fell and rolled down several steps at the bottom of the first flight but just picked herself up on the landing, giggling. She was in her nineties at the time!
I once asked grandad why, as a country boy, with a job in the stables of a big house, he’d headed for Sheffield.
“Because a certain young lady had gone there!” he replied.
It’s all rather romantic and I’m glad he made the journey as, otherwise, I wouldn’t have been here today.
Now, thanks to Google Maps and Find my Past, I know where she worked at the time. Did she ever look out of that arched window and spot young Bob coming to call on her on her day off?