Category: History

Waterton’s Wall

CHARLES WATERTON completed his wall around Walton Park in 1821. It had taken five years to build and cost £9,000. Refusing to go into debt to complete it, Waterton, who as a teetotal Yorkshire squire was something of a rarity, quipped that he’d paid for it with the money he hadn’t spent on claret.

It seems a simple concept today but it had never occurred to anyone before to enclose an area with the sole purpose of providing a sanctuary for wildlife. Enclose an area to hunt wildlife, yes, but not to preserve it for the purposes of enjoying it for its own sake and studying its habits.

He also pioneered the concept of a country park by providing an area for picnics and outdoor concerts in a clearing in a small wood near the farm buildings known as the Grotto. Keeping some areas strictly for the birds and allowing open access to the public in others ensured that visitors didn’t unduly disturb the birds and animals in the perfect patch of unspoilt countryside (a rare commodity in the industrial districts of mid-Victorian West Yorkshire) that they’d come to enjoy.

Waterton been inspired by his experience of the wilderness of what is now Guyanna to recreate a pristine version of as many English natural habitats as he could fit into his park; lake, swamp, hedgerow and woodland. He regretted that he didn’t have an arm of the sea available to complete his selection.

He picked up ideas on his travels in Europe, notably the use of ivy to cover ruins which he’d seen in Italy in a park where pheasants could coexist with the throng of townsfolk taking a stroll because the birds had instant access to dense cover.

I’ve enjoyed working on this illustration even though I decided not to go on location to draw it, which is usually my preference. I’d taken a photograph of one of the few complete and uneroded sections of the wall in the summer, so I worked from that. As you can imagine drawing the sandstone blocks of the wall had a therapeutic effect on me. Unlike when I’m writing, I find that I can listen to the radio as I do this kind of step by step drawing, alternating from classical music on Radio 3 and news and documentaries on Radio 4. Bliss.

I don’t as yet know whether the final use for this illustration will be in black and white or colour so I took a high resolution scan before I started adding the watercolour. The illustration has to sit easily with nineteenth century engravings of the Park.

The line drawing was in Noodlers black ink, using an ArtPen with an extra fine nib.

Catching up with the Joneses

“The past is a foreign country:
they do things differently there.”

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

I DON’T LIKE to ramble on about my family history too much but I’m so pleased to have made what could be my big breakthrough in tracing my Welsh great grandparents John and Sarah Jones. Lauren posted a comment suggesting that I try www.freebmd.org.uk (BMD; births, deaths and marriages) then obtain a marriage certificate. It had just dawned on me that this could be the way forward.

I had an approximate date – the early 1870s – but it was only when I take a look at the old county boundaries that I realised that in previous searches for the Joneses I might have been looking in the wrong place. The family lived close to the English border and at one stage Sarah’s mum lived on the boundary, between Flintshire and Denbighshire.

Cross Reference

Searching on Free BMD, but not limiting myself to north Wales, I immediately tracked John Jones down as having married in Chester. As you can see from the map above this is the nearest big town to Connahs Quay. The Chester and Holyhead railway, part of the LNWR, ran through the town, putting Chester in easy reach and, in the other direction along the line, Rhyl, where I believe they might have spent their honeymoon.

What I didn’t grasp at first was how from a long list of John Joneses (right) who married in the first quarter of 1872, Free BMD had selected this particular record.

It had cross-referenced this record with the name of the bride I was searching for, Sarah George.

Her name appears in the register not next to John but amongst the Georges. Free BMD has picked out the two reference numbers; Chester, Folio 8a., page 569, the page where you’d find John and Sarah listed together.

But all I need is the approximate date – first quarter of 1872 – and their names and I can write to the Cheshire West and Chester registry office to obtain a copy of their marriage certificate.

Details such as their addresses prior to their marriage and occupations of both the fathers should be some help with the next step in my research.

Jones the Blacksmith

WHILE THE Sheffield side of my family tree is turning up plenty of clues, the Welsh side of my mum’s family is proving difficult to research. So far I can find only two records of my great grandfather John Jones, born about 1846 in Prestatyn; my grandma Ann Jones’ birth certificate and the 1881 census.

Until I tracked those down we thought that he was William Jones.

As you can imagine, there’s no shortage of John Joneses in the records for Wales but working out which of them might be our John Jones is tricky.

From my two definite records I know that he was a blacksmith, living near the Coach and Horses (still there over a century later) on Quay Road, Wepre, Connahs Quay, Flintshire.

My mum identifies this photograph in one of our Victorian albums as being of John and his wife Sarah (maiden name George) and I think she’s right because it was taken by ‘J. Brown, Photographic Artist, 3 Kinmel Street, Rhyl’. Rhyl is only 20 miles along the coast from Connahs Quay.

According to my mum they were Welsh speakers but their children all attended the English school so if John and Sarah wanted to keep something to themselves they would discuss it in Welsh.

It seems rather dour to modern eyes but could this be a wedding portrait? From the age of their children, I’d guess that they were married in the early 1870s, so John would be in his mid twenties and his bride Sarah George in her early twenties.

Betty and Arthur Jones. I’m guessing that this was taken c. 1900 – 1914. I can see a resemblance in the shape of Betty’s face and in her eyes to her grandma Sarah.

My mum identifies these two children (below, left) as Betty and Arthur Jones, grandchildren of John and Sarah.

Their father William Jones, born in Wepre in about 1875 worked as an engine driver . . . in the days of steam trains. Wish that I could have joined him on the footplate!

If one of these children looks like your grandparent, great grandparent or, for that matter, parent, we might be related!

I’m hurrying to finish this post because I’m going to watch the latest programme in the BBC genealogy series Who do you think you are?

If only I had a film crew and a team of researchers to help me . . .

But really the fascination is finding loose ends then following the threads.

Travelling in Hope

This engraving is from Coal & Iron, published in 1860, so this is the world my Welsh ancestors must have known.

I’M RESEARCHING my family tree and in my search for my great-great grandma, Francis George, I’ve just found my way, following a search on the Find My Past website, to the Welsh mining village of Hope on the county boundary of Denbighshire and Flintshire, close to the English border.

All that I’ve got so far is an 1861 census record but I think that there’s a good chance that this is my Francis George, as it’s a fairly unusual name and she was born in the right year in the right place, Hope.

I’ve tracked her down via:

  1. A marriage certificate (my mum’s parents)
  2. A birth certificate (my mum’s mum)
  3. A census record (Wepre, Connahs Quay, 1881)

In the 1881 census Francis is a widow aged 75, living with her daughter and her family (including my grandma then aged one year old) and sadly, going back twenty years to 1861, she was already a widow, then aged 55. My mum’s grandma (Sarah) isn’t listed in the household. She would then have 12 and could have been living with relatives, or equally likely, she might have gone ‘into service’ working as a maid. Or I might have the wrong family, of course.

Hope Colliery

The census lists three families with the surname George in three adjacent houses. The sons, mainly in their teens and 20s, are working as coal miners or sawyers. One 12 year old boy is a ‘colliery lad’ and a teenage girl is listed as a dressmaker. Robert George, aged 29, head of the house next door to Francis, is a wheelwright.

It isn’t just ‘my’ Francis who is a widow; her next door neighbour but one, Mary George,  aged 50, is also listed as a widow. Was there an accident at the colliery that killed both men?

My guess would be that Mary and Francis are sisters-in-law.

From the ages of her sons, John, aged 24, a sawyer and Robert, 15, a coal miner, Francis might have married about 1836. It wasn’t until 1837 that it became a requirement to register all marriages, births and deaths.

Alias Swift and Jones

WE’RE OUT to solve a mystery today, a family history mystery surrounding my grandma (my mum’s mum), Annie Swift, née Jones, who was born at Connah’s Quay, Flinstshire, on 8 June 1879.

One mystery is that a Sheffield historian recently informed me that she appears as Annie Tofield on her marriage certificate, the other that Flintshire registry office tell me that they don’t have an Annie Jones (or, for that matter, an Annie Tofield) on their records born that year; they have an Annie Emily Jones, and Annie Lavinia Jones and an Annie Stockton Jones but none of those have parents called William and Mary.

We made some progress on mystery 1 this morning when me made the trip to Sheffield Registry Office; there is a certificate of marriage of a Maurice Swift and Annie Jones from December 1903, so the Swift/Tofield marriage of that year must be someone else; there were several branches of the Swift family in Sheffield at the time. They will send us a copy of the certificate in the next week so we’ll then get a lead on if my grandma was actually born in Flintshire in June 1879.

We can work our way gradually back from the known to the unknown.

Why doesn’t my mum have this information already? She has loads of information on the Swift side of the family but her mother never told her much about the Jones side, even though my mum met all her aunties (I think there were three of them) and uncles (she tells me one was an engine driver).

As we had to be in Sheffield, we thought we might as well have lunch at the Cafe Rouge. Tough work this genealogy.

While we were in the Meadowhall Centre, I scoured Waterstones, Smiths and Paperchase for an extra small sketchbook to fit in my mini-art-bag. The pocket Moleskine is just too big. There are diaries that would pop neatly in the bag but so far no sketchbooks. The Hahnemuehle travel booklet that I’ve been using is just a shade too big and it’s now curling at the edges.

‘I told you to buy the sketchbook first then the bag!’ Barbara reminds me.

Now why didn’t I think of that? I think the easiest thing would be to make my own little sketchbook by folding up and stapling a piece of cartridge. Simple.

Corfu Town

OUR FINAL full day and we walk up via the hairpin bends through the olives and pines for a last coffee at the Garden of Dreams, at the San Merino wine and snack bar at Milia, on the terrace opposite the Achillion Palace. Theodorus Vassilakis the owner (above) treats us to a glass of red wine made with grapes from his vineyard, a five year old vintage, and a toasted olive sandwich – his own olives of course – which is delicious. He sits patiently as I draw him. He runs a traditional Corfiot distillery, producing kumquat liqueur, which you can sample here.

After lunch we’re probably a little overenthusiastic as we set off along the road to Corfu town, a walk that takes us about 3 hours to complete and which takes us alongside one of the islands busiest roads with no pavement in several places.

We stop at a small bar halfway and manage by gestures to make the barman understand that we’d like two mugs of tea but, when he brings them, we have the problem of asking for the milk. In the three weeks before the holiday I made a half-hearted attempt to learn some basic Greek phrases but I had to resort to an internationally understood impression to make myself understood by saying ‘MOOoooo!’

We find our way to the Liston Square, where we sit at a cafe table at the Libro d’Oro in an arcade overlooking the park in front of the fortress and have a fresh fruit salad, which is something of a work of art. I try the honeyed tea. The waiter speaks English so there’s no need to do my impression of a bee.

We walk back through the old town along streets wide enough for two donkeys to pass each other then take the bus back to Benitses.

Link Vassilakis and Sons

Vine Cottage

ACCORDING TO my mum’s note in block capitals pencilled on the strawboard back of this little picture, this is ‘Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound, Retford, Notts. (As it was until 1969)’ It’s also signed on the back in ballpoint pen ‘Drawn by Richard A Bell’.

It was drawn in the early 1970s, when I was at Leeds College of Art. At that time my grandma and granddad (my dad’s mum & dad) had moved out of the cottage to a bungalow so, when granddad asked me to repair a cardboard box that he used to keep his hearing aid in (hearing aids were rather cumbersome in those days), I decided to decorate it with a drawing of their old home. I pasted a hand-coloured photocopy of it on the box lid. I often used a fine Gillot 1950 nib at that time and Special Brown Pelikan Indian Ink. Those comma-like dots above the roof are thrips or thunder-flies which found there way into the frame when the picture hung in the bungalow.

I was able to reconstruct the appearance of the cottage by looking at various old photographs of members of the family standing in front of various corners of it. I made the frame too. I was quite handy in those days.

Mother’s Day Album

My sister Linda, mum and boxer puppy Nina at Vine Cottage.

With Mother’s Day (the British version) coming up soon, I’ve been going through some of those photographs today, scanning original box camera negatives, for a little album.

One or two of the negatives have probably never been seen as they were half frames at the end of the roll, so I hope my mum gets some surprises looking through these.

Looking at them on my new monitor, I’m seeing them as they’ve never been seen before, as the negatives were always contact printed same size, a little over 2 inches by 3. On the screen I feel they take on a 1950s cinematic quality. They’ve got a more sophisticated patina to them than the colour prints that would replace black and white ‘snapshots’ in the 1960s and 1970s.

Storybook Granny

I feel as if they are stills from a movie, a movie with a meticulous art department because all the costumes and props are so perfectly of the period. And (if it had been a movie) the casting director had an eye for character. I feel that my Grandma Bell is the perfect storybook granny, rosy cheeked and twinkly eyed, saying things like ‘Ho, ho, hum!’ and ‘Where the Dickens had he gone?!’ and even ‘Who’s been leaving all these tranklements about?’ (tranklements being an old dialect word for ‘bits and pieces’).

She’s even wearing a gingham dress – regulation country granny costume, i would guess – in this photograph, standing by the towering hollyhocks in the tiny front garden, with granddad sitting in rustic porch in the dappled shade of the vine (or is it a creeper?) that gave the cottage its name.

Billy the Pig

Grandma and granddad were given a piglet, the runt of the litter, to rear and I was delighted when I came across the negative of this photograph of my dad looking at the pig, Billy, in his sty on my granddad’s allotment.

When Billy’s time came, every bit of the pig was used. I remember that one of my grandma’s favourites was brawn, a kind of potted meat made from the pig’s head.

The majority of these old photographs are simply of relatives posing self-consciously for the camera but for the album I’ve looked for anything that doesn’t come into that category.

This sun-drenched photograph of granddad, my mum’s old school friend ‘Auntie’ Jean and my dad, is so unlike most of the other snapshots, which rarely show any adults behaving naturally. Jean is evidently, as I always remember her, making some drily witty comment, causing even my generally serious-looking granddad to smile, while my dad sits drinking tea, smoking a cigarette and looking into the middle-distance, very much as you’d expect an ex-army man who has spent several years in the North African desert to do.

You are what you ate

I’M AT SANDAL CASTLE visitor centre for this year’s Rhubarb Festival and today I’ve got a chance to sample the kind of food that they would have prepared in the castle kitchens in the medieval period.

I try the Tarte de Bry (Brie tart) and Pylets yn Sarcene (Meatballs in Saracen sauce). The Saracen sauce is spiced with ‘clowys, macys and reysons of corance’ (ground cloves, ground mace and currants, which were imported from Corinth) with ‘a percyon of sawndrys to colour hit Sarcene colour’ (red food colouring).

On an open fire nearby a medieval cook is preparing a cauldron of potage; a soup or stew of buttered vegetables. It was a staple food; just what you would have needed after a hard day in the fields. The vegetables are stirred in butter – not fried – in the cauldron before the liquid is added and this gives essential nourishment.

I’ve drawn some of the high status food including this sugar loaf. I’d thought that honey was the only sweetener available but cane sugar was available in this form, imported from southern Europe.

Wardonys in Syrup

To finish I can’t resist the Fretoure (apple fritters) and a measure of  Lamb’s Wool, a creamy, spicy drink based on cider (or apple juice for today’s family friendly version) and they were serving this as a kind of dessert by adding Wardonys in Syrup (Pears in wine syrup) with an additional dollop of thick cream.

During the morning visitors were invited to take a turn at churning cream to make butter, using a small wooden churn. When this thickened the buttermilk was drained off by straining it through a piece of muslin, producing a ball of thick, creamy yellow butter.

Despite this event being part of the Rhubarb Festival there was no rhubarb for dessert. At that time rhubarb – usually the powdered rootstock – was used for medicinal purposes only.

Link: You are what you Ate at Leeds university.

The Snows of Yesterday

I’VE WRITTEN several times about my great grandfather George who worked in the cutlery trade in Sheffield. Here’s a watercolour by his son Maurice Swift, my grandfather. It’s signed ‘M. Swift age 13’ so that means that he painted it around 1900.

The farmhouse on the hillside with its shelter belt of trees could be a real location on the Peak District side of Sheffield, or perhaps it is imagined with that kind of country in mind. I phoned my mum to say that I’d been surprised to come across it in a drawer in my plan chest – I’d forgotten all about it. She suggests that it might be a copy of a picture and remembers that it was once framed. It’s mounted on a kind of brittle card, 2 or 3 millimetres thick, which is typical of that period.

Like so many family treasures, my mum had put it in an anonymous brown envelope, (postmark dated December 1986, which I guess might have been about the time that she handed it to me; she’s pencilled my name in block capitals on the back of the envelope).

Sam Swift

I WROTE about my great-granddad George Swift in my diary for 7 August 2010. He’s pictured here between his younger brothers Arthur and Fred in front of Joseph Rodgers, the Sheffield cutlers where all three worked.

His father Samuel Bergin Swift (1814-1878) also worked there. Since I wrote that diary, a distant cousin of mine (a great-grandson of Arthur on the left) has e-mailed me and I’ve taken a photograph of Samuel’s obituary notice from The Ironmonger, March 1878 (below) for him. I’d love to have a photograph or drawing of Sam’s workshop but this word picture is the next best thing and I’m delighted that someone took the trouble to describe it and that it has survived.

Sam’s most prestigious commission was to design a set of cut-throat razors for Napoleon III, which I featured on an additional page of my diary for 7 August. I say his most prestigious commission but it’s likely that he worked on similar pieces for equally illustrious historical figures. I featured razors designed and made by George in my diary for 20 January 2011.

The Swifts were evidently well thought of in the cutlery trade but in his genealogical research my distant cousin has located a black sheep of the family from the Victorian period! I’m looking forward to hearing more.

DEATH OF A NOTED WORKMAN
(SPECIAL)

Taken from the IRONMONGER, MARCH, 1878

Many of our Sheffield friends will read with regret this announcement:—“ On Saturday, the 12th instant, Samuel Swift, cutler, of Meersbrook Heeley, aged 64 years.” The deceased was a most ingenious workman, and had been in the service of Joseph Rodgers & Sons for 40 years. He was a thoughtful, industrious workman, and inherited the skill of his father, “Billy Swift”. For many years the deceased had been a “day” worker, contrary to the usual practice of piece working in the cutlery trades. Almost all manner of curious articles taken to the show-rooms of Rodgers & Sons to be repaired were transfered to Swift, whose ingenuity was seldom overeached. He possessed tools (many of his own making) sufficient to have stocked the “Old Curiosity Shop.” Working in steel, silver, gold, or pearl, came to him most readily. He was indeed, in scriptual phrase, a “cunning workman,” and it is such men as he who have built up and sustained the reputation of Sheffield. To the young workman Swift was ever ready to give the benefit of his great experience. It was no uncommon thing for workmen in mechanical or other working emergencies to be advised to “ask Sam Swift,” as his more familiar friends usually called him. He was a genial, kindhearted man, whose days were spent in the workshop, and his leisure hours cultivating his little freehold, in which for many years, he took a laudable pride. He was a noble example of an English artisan, and his moral worth and ability will long be remembered by his relatives, friends and fellow‑workmen.