Category: History

Roofina the Gargoyle

 Blacker Hall Farm Shop Cafe

gargoyle Blacker Hall farm cafe

gargoyle Blacker HallYou ask me why the stony face?
Well, you’d look like that in my place;
I sit at table 23
But no one seems to notice me.
Five hundred years at Blacker Hall
And now I’m stuck here in this wall!
Most gargoyles have a tusk or horn,
No wonder I feel so folorn;
They gave me something else instead,
A bloomin’ ridge-tile on my head!

gargoyle sketchesgargoyleI hadn’t spotted this small carving in the converted barn at Blacker Hall until we happened to sit at table 23 in the farm shop cafe.

Drawing from the left side I assumed this was a clean-shaven man or a child. It was only when I drew the pencil sketches above from some photographs we’d taken that I realised, especially when seen from the right, that this looks more like gargoylea woman.

She reminds me of Tenniel’s drawing of the Queen of Hearts in the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland. A Wikipedia article suggests that Tenniel based his drawing on a stained glass window painting of of Elizabeth de Mowbray, Duchess of Norfolk (c. 1442-1507)

Tenniel's Queen of Hearts
Tenniel’s Queen of Hearts

which means that roof-shaped headpieces were in fashion towards the end of the Wars of the Roses. I’m sure that Blacker Hall dates back to that time and the weathering on the bedding in the sandstone suggests that the carving has been subject to the elements for hundreds of years.

gargoyle cartoon

I’ve been trying to imagine what kind of character ‘Roofus’, or as I now realise ‘Roofina’ would be.

We went to see the Aardman Animation movie Shaun the Sheep today and I thought that I’d try to work up the gargoyle into an Aardman style character. That’s not so easy as they make it look. If you do get to see the movie, it’s worth making the effort to sit out the credits as they’re illustrated with what look like production sketches of the characters.

gargoyle

RoofinaIf I had the time and enough Newplast modelling clay I’d try modelling her.

Developing Roofina as a medieval character didn’t seem to work. I think that it’s important that she remains a gargoyle (although I guess intended to be a fashionably dressed lady of the period, not anything scary).

RoofinagargoyleI imagined the male version of the character, Roofus, grumbling about his film career as a gargoyle extra;

‘I auditioned for The Lion in Winter and, would you believe it, they used French gargoyles for that title sequence! Talk about overacting! And a couple of them hadn’t even called in at make-up to get their cobwebs removed!’

 

 

Wakefield’s Old Park

  • Stanley Hall.

This walk, which starts and finishes at Wakefield cathedral and passes Pinderfields, the Old Park and the Chantry Chapel. There are a number of Robin Hood connections, including a sculpture of his sparring partner George-a-Green, the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield. On 25 January 1316 the maidservant of Robert Hode, was fined two pence for taking dry wood and green vegetation from the Old Park. This walk must pass very near the scene of the crime!

More about Robert Hode and the early Robin Hood ballads in my Walks in Robin Hood’s Wakefield, available in local bookshops, visitor centres and some farm shops. Also available online, post free in the UK, from Willow Island Editions, price £2.99.

The walk passes the site of St Swithen’s chantry chapel. Walk it while you can because there are plans for a relief road which it is proposed will go through the Old Park, later the site of Parkhill Colliery, linking with the roundabout near Wakefield Hospice at Stanley Hall.

The Baines Family, 1912

Baines family
The Baines family, c. 1912; George William (who would then have been 39), William (13), Edward Henry (5) and Mary Alice (37).

plaque2While researching the life of composer William Baines for a college project in 1972, I was lucky to be able to interview a number of his contemporaries including a friend of the family, Nora Naylor.

Mrs Naylor who lived at 45 Cooperative Street, Horbury gave me this photograph of the Baines family, sent as Christmas card c. 1912.

baines-xmas2

It looks to me as if William has written the Christmas message as I’m sure that I recognise that handwriting from his early manuscripts and possibly the ‘To Nora Radley’ (her maiden name) in pencil.

Born in 1908, Nora told me that she remembered William and his tragically early death on 6 November 1922. Just as she was telling me this, her aunt, then aged 96 walked in and said ‘I remember when his parents were married.’

In the 1911 census, Nora’s aunt, then 35, is listed as a yarn reeler at a worsted manufacturer. Nora’s father, a widower aged 34, was an iron turner at the railway wagon works.

baines-parents

I didn’t keep meticulous records but I’m pretty sure that this photograph of Alice and George William was also given to me by Nora. It might have been taken at a roadside or railway cutting somewhere near Horbury – or perhaps on an excursion to the coast?

In the 1911 census the Baines family were living at 16 Church Street, Horbury, since demolished. He described his occupation as ‘Grocer and Music Teacher’. Considering their modest circumstances, I was surprised that the family employed a domestic servant; Annie Elizabeth Bradbury, 17, who was born at New Whittington, Derbyshire.

William Baines

William evidently learnt his musical skills from his father but I get the impression that his creative side owed a lot to his mum.

From these photographs you can also see that William inherited a certain sense of style from his father. In the earlier photograph George William reminds me of Pagget’s illustrations of Doctor Watson in the Strand Magazine.

The Old Kit Bag

old-kit-bagSergeant Robert Douglas Bell, c. 1939We’re remembering my dad Robert Douglas Bell 1918-1990, who died twenty-four years ago today.

We’re lucky to have a number of group photographs of him in the early days of World War II taken when he was part of a light anti-aircraft unit in a Territorial Army regiment of the Royal Artillery.

I was fascinated to find a photograph of his kit laid out for inspection taken somewhere in England. He’s labeled the items on the surrounding card mount and I’ve superimposed his labels in white on the photograph here.

He never took much interest in drawing so I was surprised by his neat hand-lettering but his pre-war job was as an accountant so that must have demanded meticulous accuracy on ledgers and on balance sheets, which in those days would have been mainly, if not entirely, entered by hand.

Special Investigations

desert, 1941

His regiment were soon sent to North Africa, via the Cape of Good Hope, and in one of the later group photographs, taken near Cairo, you can see the base of a pyramid in the background.

When he talked about extreme heat, he often used the expression ‘stinking hot’. I can imagine that it was stinking hot out there.

There was something of a lull in the desert campaign and my father found himself transferred to the Special Investigations Unit. He didn’t talk much about it but his cases included one in which two servicemen – presumably somewhat inebriated servicemen – challenged each other to a race down from the top of a pyramid, with predictably fatal results.

Perhaps my father’s reports on such incidents are preserved in an archive somewhere, written up in his meticulous hand.

Sophia’s Cranford

Sophia Barnet's school prizecranfordWho was Sophia Barnet?

She’s definitely not the soulful young woman on the card, kept in this old book, which is of a late Millais painting, The Disciple. The model here is thought to be Mary Lloyd, or an imaginary woman inspired by her classical looks.

Mary was born c. 1863, in Shropshire, the daughter of a once wealthy but later bankrupt country squire. Making the move to London, she took up modelling towards the end of an era for the Pre-Raphaelites and classically inspired historical painting.

Whistler and Sickert were already ‘flinging and pot of paint in the public’s face’ and making grunge look good.

Catching up with the seventy-year-old Mary in 1933, the Sunday Express described her as the model ‘who had the face of an angel but outlived her luck’.

School Prize

portrait of a lady
Portrait of a lady that Sophia kept in the book

But coming back to Sophia, my starting point is that she was presented with this copy of Cranford for regular attendance in the Senior Department of Greenside Council School, Pudsey, near Leeds.

fashion 1910I suspect that she might have ended her days somewhere near Wakefield as I came across this book in a secondhand shop in Horbury in the early 1970s.

A search on Ancestry.co.uk reveals that in 1904 Sophia would have been then ten years old and that her father was a platelayer on the Great Northern Railway.

Seven years later, in the 1911 census, she’s recorded as working as a worsted mender (worsted is a closely woven woollen cloth with no nap) but to judge by the clippings that she kept in her book, she had aspirations and dreams.

Sutro and Smiler

Edwardian fashion plate
Edwardian fashion plate

The book is a little time capsule as, in addition to the Millais print, Sophia (I assume it was Sophia) has folded a handful of magazine and newspaper cuttings between it’s pages.

Future generations won’t get that if they ever come across a copy digital book treasured by an ancestor!

SutroThere are Edwardian fashions, an elegant interior and an illustration from a children’s book, subjects that you might expect a young woman to take a passing interest in, but then there are the odd items, like this portrait of mayor of Chicago Adolph Sutro, famed for his tunnel building scheme.

How did he get in there?

smiler 1917

Sutro
This portrait of Sutro reminds me of Paget’s illustrations of the clients who called on Sherlock Holmes at 221b!

And I wonder what especially tickled her about this single panel from an early comic strip which features a character called Smiler, who looks as if he’s stepped out of a music hall act or an early silent film.

kangarooThe kangaroo has hopped into Sophia’s selection by accident; he’s on the reverse side of the Rackamesque illustration (below) of the children coming across the fairies. 

Hoppy Chivers and the ‘Peace Crank’

We’re three years into the horrors of World War I and on the reverse of the Smiler cartoon is something altogether more disconcerting; the last few paragraphs of a ‘Hoppy Chivers yarn’, in which Hoppy and his chum chase a ‘peace crank’ who falls head-first into a lake, swallowing ‘two gallons of water and twenty-nine tiddlers’.

 ‘. . . we’ve got the Huns whacked!’ says Hoppy’s pal Archie. ‘It’s only really ignorant clods, like this chap we’ve come after, who don’t know the truth. They haven’t got the pluck of worms. Anyway, we’ll soon finish off this idiot.’

There’s a happy ending of sorts; the ‘peace crank’ runs to the nearest recruiting office and signs up immediately.

aviatorsShe also clipped this item from the newspaper. The German aviator looks very much like the portrait of Sutro.

Sophia would then have been 21 years old. In the days before boys bands with their extravagant hair styles, perhaps she thought those goatee beards looked pretty cool! The leather jacket gives him a certain rock and roll credibility too.

In Search of Fairies

fairiesChildren coming across fairies in the wood might seem a bit far-fetched to appeal to a young woman in the middle of the a world war but 1917 is when Elsie Wright, 16, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, 9, first photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden at Cottingley, just eight miles from Sophia’s home in Fartown, Pudsey.

The photographs were made public in 1919 and in an article in the Strand magazine for Christmas 1920 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declared them genuine. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the cousins admitted that they were faked.

A Dream of Lamb’s

Lamb's ClubOne final clipping, the elegant interior, which might illustrate an article about Lamb’s Club, New York, as a photograph of its facade appears on the reverse.

It would be a perfect setting for Margaret Dumont’s character in the Marx Brother’s films, the society lady who was the butt of so many of Groucho’s put-downs;

‘I could dance with you till the cows come home!
Better still, I’ll dance with cows and you come home.’

But in Sophia’s day, this interior wouldn’t be seen as so stuffy and elitist, not compared with the heavy Victorian styles that preceded it. It was the latest word in fashion and I’m not surprised, as she worked in a mill in Pudsey mending worsted cloth, that she seized upon these photographs in some American magazine she’d come across as a window on another, more elegant, world.

Meat needs Mustard

Meat needs MustardDetail from the background of a wartime family photograph, of which more later. A Google search reveals that the poster;

Your Inner Man warns you
Meat needs Mustard

dates from 1940. 

Clay Pipe

clay pipe
2.5 x 1.8 cm

I spotted this fragment of clay pipe when I went out at sunset to see if I could catch the slug that’s been eating our French bean seedlings. In thirty years of digging I find it surprising that this is the first time I’ve spotted it. I’ve found pipe fragments before but never anything as elegantly decorated as this.

I’m assuming that it was dropped here as we haven’t ever imported topsoil. The style of the lettering makes me think 18th rather than 19th century so I’m surprised that it looks so fresh after having been in the topsoil for a couple of centuries.

Perhaps the brown rats have brought it to the surface. They’ve been active under our compost bins and we recently spread compost on this bed.

Who the ‘JG’? This was farm land so could it have been one of the Gemmels, a local farming family?

As we’re only 40 yards from a ford that ran along Coxley beck it could have been dropped by any drover, wagon driver, traveller or labourer who happened to be passing by.

J Gambier

A Google search reveals that one of the biggest pipe manufacturers was J Gambier of Paris, a firm which offered its customers over 2,000 different kinds of pipe.

Link; Dawnmist Studio Clay Pipe Gallery

Wakefield Street Life, 1876

The butter cross, Cross Square, WakefieldCross Square

Richard Knowles of the Rickaro Bookshop in Horbury recently came across these photographs of Victorian Wakefield. They were probably used as business cards by George & John Hall, photographers, who had premises at 26 Westgate.

Someone, presumably George, has dated three of the photographs Saturday, 15 July 1876.
Reverse side of the Chantry Chapel photograph.

The Butter Cross was built in 1707 and, according to some sources, demolished in 1866/67, but that was ten years before the date on the photograph. Wakefield council still have one of those pillars but I’m not sure where it is kept since the old art gallery, where it was displayed in the garden, closed.

The medieval Chantry Chapel now has a mid-twentieth century facade so these photographs are a valuable record of these buildings but it’s the incidental detail that I particularly like.

The shops by the Butter Cross would be a useful reference if I was illustrating Dickens or painting the Paddington Green backdrop for Oliver!

G & J Hall, photographers, were awarded a medal in the highly successful Wakefield Industrial and Fine Art Exhibition, 1865.
G & J Hall, photographers, were awarded a medal in the highly successful Wakefield Industrial and Fine Art Exhibition, 1865.

 Six Chimneys

The Six Chimneys

The 6 chimnies, Kirkgate, Wakefield

The Six Chimneys, an Elizabethan house, stood on Kirkgate, on the site of the present roundabout and pedestrian underpass. It collapsed following structural alterations at 7.45 p.m. on 16 May 1941.

To judge by the shadows, this was taken on the Saturday afternoon. Holden’s (the butchers?) has more or less sold out apart from a flitch of bacon and a single sausage (if that’s what it is!). There doesn’t appear to be any glass in the window, unless Mr Holden had gone to the expense of fitting plate glass.

Bell’s the coopers are displaying an impressive array of baskets and barrels, no doubt all made of locally sourced materials, most of them biodegradable.

Parish Church

Cathedral 1876

The parish church wouldn’t become a cathedral until 1888.

Considering that this is the centre of town at half past eleven on a Saturday morning Wakefield seems uncannily quiet. Where is everybody?

handcartThree boys eyeing the camera and this porter or street-sweeper has stopped to chat to a woman who appears to be carrying a bag.

Street Urchins

Wakefield’s street urchins gathering at the Butter Cross. Was that ladder used by the town’s lamp-lighter?

handcartHandcarts seem to be a common feature around town. It probably wasn’t worth the trouble of loading barrels, baskets and boxes onto a horse drawn cart for delivery around town, so the porter and the delivery boy would have been a familiar sight.

I remember local author Stan Barstow telling me that one of his first jobs was to take a handcart as far as Lupset on the Saturday morning delivery round for one of the Horbury butchers. From a later period, I remember a big black butcher’s bicycle with a large rectangular basket between the handlebars, parked outside one of the High Street butchers in Horbury.

Wakefield Words

on the Chantry bridge

Finally, here are a couple of Saturday morning strollers, stopping for a chat on the Chantry Bridge.

As we’re looking down on them, this must have been taken from the Kings Mill.

What were they chatting about? Wakefield is lucky in that one of my predecessors William Banks who, like me, wrote a book of walks around Wakefield, took the trouble to make a note of the town’s dialect and phrases.

Wakefield Words page 77

So they could well have been saying;

‘Hah goes it? Owt fresh?’

‘Naah, nowt; what’s t’best news wi’ thee?’

Wakefield WordsSo, if you’d like to know a little about the words these street folk of old Wakefield used for weather, food, childhood and schooldays, the countryside, proverbs and a few supernatural tales, you can order a copy of my book Wakefield Words from my www.willowisland.co.uk website.

If they ever invent a time machine and you get whisked back to Victorian Wakefield, it might make a useful phrase book! I was fascinated by William Banks collection of words and phrases and, as you’ll see from the book, I had fun adding cartoon illustrations to bring them to life. I’d always wanted to do a real little paperback book and I’m really pleased with this one. It’s quite jolly and I love the smell of a fresh paperback. Mmm! – you don’t get that with a digital version, do you?

My thanks to Dave Russ, who tells me that William Stott Banks’ book was exhibited at the 1865 Wakefield Industrial and Fine Art Exhibition (Section XI, Stationary, Printing, Bookbinding, Penmanship). It won a second class certificate, with a judges comment of “A work of local interest, well arranged”.

More of my publications can be found at Willow Island Editions or, if you happen to be in Horbury, you can find the full range of titles at the Rickaro Bookshop.

My thanks to Richard Knowles of Rickaro for the loan of these evocative photographs.

Link; Rickaro Bookshop, Horbury

Kings Cross 1860s

Kings Cross, c. 1860Kings Cross 2005I’ve often sketched at Kings Cross as I waited for the train back to Yorkshire (left), so this engraving caught my attention as I leafed through a copy of Cassell’s Popular Educator, which I believe was published in the 1860s. I like to imagine A Williams, the artist sitting there a century and a half before me, drawing the same supporting struts.
As a slice of life he can’t compete with William Powell Frith’s Railway Station of 1862, which showed Paddington, but I like his group of passengers and porters on the left.
My grandfather worked briefly as a railway porter at Sheffield station at the end of the Victorian era. Kings Cross‘In some instances,’ Cassell’s informs us, ‘as in the termini of the Great Northern and Midland Railways at King’s Cross, these [arched] roofs are of great span and proportions. One of the two which form the terminus of the Great Northern Railway is depicted in our first illustration. This roof is supported by large semi-circular girders, formed of battens of wood jointed by iron bolts, and crossed transversely by horizontal iron rods, which complete the framework for the covering. As an example of the use of wood in this form, this station is very remarkable ; but in later constructions of the same kind, iron has quite superseded the other material and the roof is currently in progress of reconstruction in wrought iron.’ SidingsKings Cross had been built in 1851-52 and, as shown here, originally had only one platform, the rest of the space was used for sidings.