Category: History

Beyond Wuthering Heights

Top Withins

sign

MAPPING OUT a walk for my next book we make our way from Howarth up onto the moor-top plateau, crossing Dick Delf Hill, which rises to 452 metres up beyond the ruined farm of Top Withins, a remote cattle farm at the top end of the valley which is often suggested as the inspiration for the setting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

We return via an easier route along sections of the Pennine Way and the Brontë Way, a hill path that is unique in having footpath signs in English and in Japanese, although the parties of Japanese visitors that we passed on our walk today were back around the Brontë Parsonage Museum and main street in Howarth.

Cotton-tails

11.50 a.m., Sand Delf Hill, Haworth Moor; There are occasional drifts of cotton-grass, looking very much like the tail of the small startled rabbit that runs along the track in front of us.

round-upA shepherd is moving on his flock without the aid of a sheep dog, hooting and hollering as he drives his Land Rover across the moor.

Small Heath

small heathWith so much checking out to do, including a whole new section of the walk, there isn’t time to stop and sketch except when we take a break for a flask of coffee at Top Withins.

A small butterfly that flies low over the bracken in the valley below. It suns itself with it wings folded shut but we see enough to be able to identify it later as a Small Heath, a smaller cousin of the more familiar Meadow Brown but more typical of rough grassland, from coastal dunes up to 2,000 feet (600 metres) in the mountains.

The name of the butterfly is a neat description of the habitat where we found it.

tiger beetleAlso on a sunny bank, on the rocky path above the Brontë bridge, this Green Tiger Beetle is hunting.

My little Olympus Tough is useful for insects like this which will pause when you crouch near them but it’s not so handy for butterflies which are likely to take flight, which is why I stood a few paces away and quickly sketched the Small Heath, adding the colour later.

The Very Hairy Caterpillar

oak eggar caterpillarUp on the plateau Barbara spots this Oak Eggar Moth caterpillar. Despite the name it is equally at home on the moors as one of its alternative foodplants is heather. The name ‘eggar’ apparently means just what it appears to mean; that it’s a moth that lays its eggs on a particular plant.

oak eggar caterpillar

This caterpillar has stopped, motionless as we take a look at it. It’s just had a narrow escape as my size 13 hiking boots passed over it, so it’s a good subject for the macro setting on the Tough. I try to do a bit of ‘gardening’ to get a better shot of its head but when I try to gently lift up the heather twig it wraps itself around it. No chance of seeing either the head or the tail in this pose but at least I get a record of the black bands and white marks on its body.

The Old Mill

NewmillerdamI REMEMBER the low stone building on the bottom left, on the Barnsley Road by he dam head at Newmillerdam, being a popular Italian restaurant back in the 1980s. This was the old watermill, a successor to the medieval corn mill that gave the village its name. The waterwheel itself was preserved, dominating the centre of the room but sadly it was later destroyed in a fire. Enough of the shell of the building survived to allow its restoration.

Somewhere amongst the houses beyond there’s a show home which was exhibited in the Ideal Homes exhibition in Olympia in the late 1950s or early 1960s before being reconstructed here.

Further up the hill there’s a row of old stone-built terraced cottages that Barbara and visited when we were house-hunting. Despite the attractive location we had to cross it off our list as the ceiling was too low for me to stand upright. Much as I love period features, I couldn’t have coped with that.

I drew this with an ArtPen filled with El Lawrence brown Noodler’s ink and added the colour later, using a photograph that I’d taken as reference.

George and Sarah Restored

Sarah Ann

GeorgeGEORGE AND SARAH ANN are back from their makeover and it’s been quite a transformation. Robin Taylor has cleaned them, removing as much of the old discoloured varnish as he could without damaging the paintwork. He’s touched up the blemishes (the ‘bullet-wound’ on George’s forehead has healed up nicely) and finally he applied a resin varnish which has restored the richness and depth of the colour.

I’m impressed by this detail of embroidery on the sofa arm in the portrait of Sarah. These are painted photographs so I’m not sure whether this has been meticulously painted or whether it is the original photograph showing through a transparent glaze of oil paint.

chair

Although today we’d see basing a portrait so directly on a photograph as ‘cheating’ at the time this was a way of embracing a new technology. Robin, who was as surprised as we were by how well these battered old paintings have responded to restoration, describes the painting as a superior job.

labelThe paintings are on card with a sheet of wood backing them. I was rather hoping that Robin would find an old document stuffed in the back of the painting. He tells me that he occasionally finds a page from a newspaper added as packing behind a painting in a frame.

The printed label on the back of each portrait states that Geo. Wilkinson & Son of 98 Devonshire Street, Sheffield (two doors down from Westfield Terrace) offer the following services:

Oil Paintings, carefully cleaned, re-lined and restored
Water Colour, and other drawings cleaned and mounted
Engravings, cleaned – mildew and damp stain effectively removed

The Bride in Black

SarahI’m sorry that photographer and picture restorer George Cecil Wilkinson and his oil painter colleague J H Ainley aren’t still around to see how well these portraits are looking a century and a quarter after they produced them.

My mum tells me that George Wilkinson married a cousin of her dad’s and I believe that Ainley too was either a friend or in-law. They were to play a part – a controversial part – in the story of my family at a later date.

I was wondering why Sarah Ann should be wearing black. Had she recently lost a member of her family and gone into mourning. Apparently not; this was before a white wedding became the norm and black was often worn by brides. George and Sarah were married in the mid 1870s but, if they were photographed at the time, it seems that the paintings were produced some years later as the Geo. Wilkinson label reads ‘established 1879’.

I’m taking these two portraits as a starting point, a re-starting point, for my family tree research and I’m going to put together a little biography of George, a Sheffield spring-knife maker, and his wife Sarah Ann who started her working life as a home help aged 11. Sarah, I feel is a key characters in the story of that branch of the family. She was born when the industrial revolution was still at its height in the city and she lived long enough to get caught up in the Sheffield Blitz.

Song of the Slave

She reminds me in this portrait of one of the young women who Mrs Hudson ushers into the consulting room at 221b Baker Street at the start of a baffling case for Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. But this time it’s up to me to observe the details and to attempt to piece to together  something of the story of her life.

Is there some significance in the way she is holding her pocket watch?

Sarah’s fingers, my mum tells me, were as chubby as shown as a result of all her domestic duties but she was taught to play the piano by one of the families she worked for. One of the pieces that she learnt was The Song of the Slave. We still have the sheet music. This brings home the historical context; born on Boxing Day 1850, Sarah was learning to play the piano in the days immediately before the American Civil War and the subsequent emancipation of the American slaves.

George doesn’t give much away in his sober Sunday best suit but I’m looking forward to hearing what my costume expert friends can tell me about him.

George Swift

The candid camera photograph (which I’ve already featured in this diary) of George that is son took around 1900 is more revealing of his background and domestic circumstances.

Link: Robin Taylor Fine Arts

George and Sarah Ann

Sarah AnnIT’S UNUSUAL to be able so see your Victorian ancestors in colour but these two portraits that have been stored away since my mum inherited them in the 1960s give me an opportunity to do that. I’ve decided that, whatever their merits as paintings, it is worth giving them a new lease of life because they’re such central characters in the family sage that I’ve been unfolding in my genealogical research re so I’ve taken them to Robin Taylor in Wakefield for restoration.

georgeRobin tells me that they’re painted photographs. The budget version of this would be a photograph with some of the features such as eyebrows picked out in charcoal by the photographer so these fully overpainted photographs would have been a more expensive option.

These aren’t wedding portraits because George and Sarah were married in the 1870s and the label on the back of the portraits suggests that they were photographed, then painted, in the 1880s.

 

 

In Search of Uncle Fred

A Google search soon turned up images of the steamship Tuinai.
A Google search soon turned up images of the steamship Tuinai (see links below). I’m guessing that Fred and Heather didn’t enjoy the opulent surroundings of the First Saloon.

WHATEVER HAPPENED to great uncle Fred?

Last summer, I found a 1901 census record for my great grandad, George Swift, his second wife Sarah Ann and their youngest son, my grandad, Maurice, then aged 24, living at 198, Hanover Street, Sheffield. Just as I’d expected; but I’d never heard any mention of their son Frederick James Swift, aged 36, also recorded on the form, who was then working as a ‘Stock Brokers Clerk CC’.

Time to phone someone who’d be sure to know;

‘Mum, you remember your Uncle Frederick? . . .’

‘What Uncle Frederick? I never had an Uncle Frederick. There was a George and a John . . .’

We’ve been puzzling over this mysterious missing uncle ever since. Taking census records as our starting point, we requested copies of the his certificate (19 October 1864), his marriage certificate (to Heather May Harrison, 30 April 1903) but after that he disappears. Reports of his death in 1914 proved to be exaggerated; it just happened that a Frederick Swift of the same age died in the same town in December of that year.

Swifts on Migration

Maurice Swift's note on the back of a photographLuckily, flipping over a photograph in an album, I discovered in a caption written by my grandad Maurice recording that ‘Fred Swift’ died on 8 July 1948, aged 84.

Having drawn a blank searching for death certificates in the British records, it dawned on us that we should try checking passenger lists. Within minutes on findmypast.co.uk. we discovered that Fred, then aged 61, and Heather, 52, had boarded the steam passenger ship Tainui at Southampton on 8 October 1926 and set sail for a new life in Wellington, New Zealand.

As a young girl, my mum remembers talk of an uncle who emigrated to New Zealand but she always assumed that this was her uncle John. Why were her uncle Fred and auntie Heather in New Zealand never mentioned?

I hope that I can find out a little more about their retirement in New Zealand. Perhaps Fred or Heather worked there for a while in Wellington when they arrived. Perhaps Heather had family out there already. Was my mum right after all and did great uncle John join them out there?

So why have we heard so little of great uncle John? Or John Bellman Thomson Swift, to give him his full name. I’ve requested his birth certificate and marriage certificate (to Lydia Coupland) which will hopefully provide some clues.

U-boat

The steamship Tuinai was rescued from the breakers’ yard during the second world war and had a second incarnation as the Empire Trader. Falling behind in a trans-Atlantic convoy she was torpedoed by the U-boat Adof Oelrich.

In Sheffield Fred’s stepmother’s (my grandma’s) house received a direct hit in the Sheffield Blitz and she moved in with my grandad and grandma and my mum. I’m afraid that I’d have been with uncle Fred, setting sail for New Zealand as Europe started heading towards the next world war. But that’s with the benefit of hindsight. It was a big decision to make and I’d like to know more about how things turned out for Heather and Fred.

Tainui passenger list 1921Links; My thanks to the people who took the trouble to make postcards, poster and passenger lists for the Tuinai available online. It brings a previously unknown episode in my family history vividly to life.

Sources: Early Days in Kerikeri, Shaw Savill Line – Ocean Liners, Tainui passenger list 1921 (left), Shaw, Savill & Albion poster 1926-27 and the sinking of the Empire Trader.

www.findmypast.co.uk. www.ancestry.co.uk, both of which have links to www.freebmd.org.uk, which, as the name suggests you can use without a subscription.

Old Rugged Cross

TODAY RICK, a freelance scenic painter, is putting the finishing touches to the Saxon Cross exhibit in the new Wakefield Museum. The last time that you’d have seen a man painting this cross in Wakefield would have been over a thousand years ago.

In this reconstruction what remains of the shaft of the original, covered in plastic sheeting in my drawing (and no, Rick’s not going to paint that bit!), is in a plain Anglo Saxon knotted tendril design, with no birds, beasts or warriors popping out from the tracery. It might date from any time from the 800s to just before the Norman conquest.

Saxon crosses were painted and, judging from surviving artwork of the period, such as The Lindisfarne Gospels, they would have used the brightest colours available. We’re used to seeing monuments of such antiquity in worn, mellow stone so this reconstruction reminds us that, in a world where these brighter colours were the exception, this was intended to be a focus of attention – like the sign of a MacDonald’s restaurant today.

When this cross was erected in Wakefield’s market place there might have been a Saxon Church in Wakefield but I suspect that it stood alone as a focus of community life and worship. Paulinus, the Roman missionary who became the first Bishop of York, is said to have preached to the pagan Anglo Saxons at Dewsbury in 627 A.D. The last pagan king in Englad, Penda of Mercia, had been defeated and killed in 655 at the Battle of Winwaed, which was possibly alongside the River Went at Ackworth.

The cross was still standing in 1546 but then disappeared until 1861 when Edmund Waterton, son of the naturalist Charles, rescued it from the demolition of an old butcher’s shop, which stood on the site of Unity Hall, Westgate. It had been used as a doorstep.

Rick painted jungly scenic backdrops for the 1990s revamp of the (Charles) Waterton exhibit Wakefield Museum and he’s painted a fresh jungle backdrop for the new exhibit here in the Museum’s new quarters at Wakefield One. My acrylic on canvas Waterton’s World mural, painted for the 1980s Waterton gallery at the Museum is now in the collection of the Hepworth art gallery. As well as museum work Rick, who lives in Wensleydale, has worked as a scenic artist on numerous Yorkshire Television and Granada series such as Emmerdale and Heartbeat.

As I sketched him, Rick worked mainly with a brush, as his Anglo Saxon predecessors would, but occasionally, to build up a transparent shadow, he’d add a touch of airbrushing.

I’m sure that many visitors will, at a glance, assume that the reconstructed head and base of the cross are three dimensional. The touch of trompe d’oeil that impressed me most were the chipped edges of the base. They look convincingly three-dimensional to me but go close enough and you’ll see that they’re freely painted in blobs of colour.

The Old Windmill

THE OLD WINDMILL just up our road, here in Middlestown, was already disused and converted to a dwelling when this photograph was taken about one hundred years ago. It had evidently been a good year for cabbages.

On most of the photographs that I’ve been drawing from, I don’t get an opportunity to put a name to the face but in this case it shouldn’t be difficult to look up the old mill in the 1911 census records to find out the names of, I’m guessing, mum and dad and their two daughters.

I’d love to know the names of these two boys (and their dog) who appear in the corner of the postcard of the haymakers that I drew yesterday. If I was the photographer, I’d have been annoyed that my timeless scene of rural life had been infiltrated by these Artful Dodgers but looking back after a hundred years they’re probably the best bit of the photograph. They’re so spontaneous and full of character. Looks as if they might be planning some minor mischief.

Unless they lied about their age and enlisted towards the end of the conflict, they should have escaped the horrors of World War I. It’s possible that in the past I’ve walked past them on the street but they’d have to be about 107 years old to still be with us today.

Making an altogether more elegant pair, these two girls are part of a group dressed in their Sunday bests strolling by Coxley Dam.

Straw hats were the thing to wear in those long gone Edwardian summers. I’ve found a young women in the 1911 census returns for Coxley Valley listing herself as a milliner.

Haymaking

IT HASN’T BEEN haymaking weather today, with a month’s rain falling in 24 hours in some places; these men were photographed making hay while the sun shone in Coxley Valley during one of the long remembered glorious summers of the Edwardian that preceded World War I.

It wasn’t just nostalgia for the days before the horrors of the war that made a generation remember golden summer days, apparently there really was a series of better summers at that time.

This is another of my sketches for the article that I’m writing for the village newsletter/magazine, taken from an old postcard in the collection of Horbury historian Christine Cudworth.

I found the simpler forms of the farm hands easier to draw than the laces and faces of the mums and children watching the procession at the Netherton Carnival in another postcard in Christine’s collection, dated 1910.

The girls are holding cards and wearing decorated straw hats – had they entered an Easter bonnet competition? It’s more likely that the parade would mark Whit Sunday, the time when people habitually packed away their dowdy winter clothes and treated themselves to new outfits.


Leaning on a Lamppost

I’M WRITING an article for a local magazine/newsletter and decided to take a closer look at the people that you see in the photographs and postcards of a century ago. Sometimes they’re going about their everyday business but more often they’re aware of the photographer, like this man leaning on the lamppost at Middlestown crossroads.

The Dickensian huddle of buildings behind him was later replaced by the buildings of the local Co-operative Society, including a cinema. The village’s fish and chip shop, The Grumpy Friar, and the pharmacy now stand there. I don’t remember it myself, but I believe that Middlestown Church stood on the corner to the right.

The sign points to Wakefield and Huddersfield to the northeast and southwest, Thornhill Edge and Overton to the left and the right.

Tinker the Mystery Cat

I’ve been puzzling over this undated sketch in my everyday sketchbook, the 8 inch square format, that I usually use for pen and ink, that I often have with me on urban errands.

But I couldn’t remember visiting a cafe or a shop that had cats, nor had we been in anyone’s home who kept cats. But we’d obviously been introduced to Tinker, since cats don’t readily tell you their names (see T. S. Eliot).

Then I remembered that we hadn’t met Tinker indoors; he (or she?) is one of Paul the gardener’s cats, or perhaps I should say Paul the gardener is the cats’ Human, that seems to be the way it works, and Tinker, a rather sociable cat, was enjoying the morning sun in his garden in Horbury.

He’s a pretty laid-back cat.

Line and Tone

I was reading an introduction to a How to Draw the Human Figure by Victor Ambrus about figure drawing recently.

For me springy line is the trademark of his work but surprisingly he warned his readers off focusing on line when drawing people.

I’m used to Ruskin’s advice that you should draw outlines (such as the branches of a tree) with as much care as you would make a map (of a river delta, for instance) for a group of pedantic and litigious landowners.

Ambrus’s drawings have that kind of precision and you’d think that he’d have a similar method in his mind as he drew but he points out that you shouldn’t be looking for outlines as such. If you’re drawing a nearby figure (as opposed to a distant tree) you’re seeing three-dimensional forms, which, if you’ve got vision in both eyes, don’t have a precise edge. So, I guess he’s saying, draw the forms not the edges.

He also points out that tones don’t stop abruptly at the edges of the form. I’ve always thought of this as a problem (for instance when my grizzled, not to say white, hair blends seamlessly into a white background on a passport photograph!) but it’s something to look out for as you draw. We don’t live in a world that resembles a paint-by-numbers colouring book, with precise edges and abrupt transitions of tone and colour.

I tried to keep all this in mind as I drew my left hand!

Waterton’s Watchtower

I’D ALWAYS assumed that the stone watchtowers that Charles Waterton(1793-1865) built around Walton Park were primarily birdwatching hides where Waterton, accustomed to life in the tropics, could take shelter on walks around his nature reserve but when I read an account of a visitor to the Park in 1835, I realised that these were intended as sentry boxes. It was all very well for Waterton to enclose his sanctuary with a long high wall but in order to ensure that his pheasants and wildfowl wouldn’t be disturbed by gangs of poachers from the local towns, he had to organise night patrols.

I believe there were four towers originally of which I’ve seen three. Two of them were in ruins and have now disappeared without a trace but the third has been restored. They are positioned in strategic points such as where the stream flows out of the Park under the wall and at the diagonally opposite corner with a view down the slope to the Lake.

On an evening visit to a neighbouring wood Waterton once surprised a poacher. In the ensuing fight Waterton, who was on his own, without the support of his trusty gamekeeper, John Ogden, was wrestled to the ground. Fortunately he fought off his assailant by grabbing him by the cravat and choking him until he ceased his attack and fled.

Again for this illustration I’ve worked from reference, this time from two photographs kindly supplied by John Whitaker, curator at Wakefield Museum. I hadn’t realised that the towers originally had a conical turret roof. When the watchtower was restored a few years ago the roof was omitted, I guess for structural reasons, but what a difference it made when I reconstructed the tower with the roof in place. It changed from looking like a military installation to looking like something out of a fairy tale, the sort of enchanted little tower that a traveller would find on a walk through the woods.

No doubt one or two gangs of poachers were in for a big surprise on the night that they they went down to the woods and first came across the tower and the band of guardians that presumably hid inside it.