My father, Robert Douglas Bell trading with the Bedouin, colourised version. Bedouin tribesmen rescued my dad when he got trapped behind enemy lines when trying to rescue a wounded comrade during the Siege of Tobruk.
Tonight on BBC 1 there’s the first of a drama series about the origins of the SAS which, according to the Radio Times includes a punch-up in a bar in Cairo in 1941 between British Commandoes and Australian soldiers. Sounds pretty tough and, as SAS Rogue Heroes is written by Steven Knight, who also wrote Peaky Blinders, I’m sure that it will be staged with plenty of swagger.
So, when guys as tough as this get into a brawl, who do you send in to restore order?
Well in real life, this man, my dad, Robert Douglas Bell. A sergeant in the Royal Artillery, he evidently had to skills and the character to take on drunken SAS men and, for that matter, the local drug dealers too.
I’m still getting into colourisation using the neural filters in Photoshop and I’m not convinced that everyone wore blue – I feel that the tank top should be bottle green – but I do think that the process brings a small black and white print vividly to life.
Colourisation brings this corner of Cairo to life.
I’ve been experimenting with photo restoration and colourisation using the neural filters in Adobe Photoshop.
I like the patina of old photographs but the sepia-toned world that they evoke can put a bit of a barrier between us and them.
Besides, working on the images on the 27 inch screen of my iMac brings out details that I might miss in the original. The ‘neural filter’ seems to favour blue as the main colour for clothes. My guess is that there was more colour about.
It’s freshens up the scratchy surface of this photograph of Mr and Mrs Baines with friends. Are the two women sisters? No names on the back, just a pencilled ’33’. It’s possible that they are relatives of the Radley or Naylor families of Horbury. The family portrait and – as far as I remember – this walking group, were given to me by Mrs Nora Naylor, nee Radley, of Cooperative Street, Horbury.
Mr and Mrs Baines
For a while, the Baines family ran this shop, demolished in the early 1960s, next to St Peter’s Church. Ann North lent me the much-blemished photograph and I’ve colourised this version from my print of it.
Primitive Methodist School Feast, 1906
Again, the original of this postcard is black and white. William appears, aged 6 or 7, possibly the boy in the flat cap in the bottom left corner.
Thanks to ridiculously high res scan of the original – 2400 dpi! – I can zoom in on a small area to reveal long-gone shops.
Another close-up of the postcardI think this would have been a Whitsuntide feast, traditionally when people treated themselves to new clothes after the winter . . . and decorated straw hats of course.
This blog post is an extract from my 1972 leaflet ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’. I still have a few copies left if you’d like to order one, please contact me for details.
William Baines was born on Palm Sunday, 26 March, 1899, at 11 Shepstye Road Horbury.
Writing in 1972, on the 50th anniversary of William’s tragically early death, aged just 23, Stan Barstow, whose novel Joby describes a childhood in a town like Horbury, recalled:
I was born a few doors down along from William Baines in Shepstye Road, Horbury; but he had been dead for six years by the time I arrived on the scene. He was, in fact, exactly contemporary with my mother and its odd to think of her still alive and William dead all these years. But consumption and the like nipped off many a young life in those days: my mother’s talk of her youth is full of references to parents who “had eight and buried three”. And, of course, it’s tempting but futile to speculate upon how Baines’s talent might have developed had he survived and been with us, in his seventies, today.
Primitive Methodist Chapel
‘I probably saw William’s father though I doubt that I ever heard him play the organ, for I went into the Primitive Methodist Chapel no more than a couple of times. The Highfield Methodist Chapel was where I spent the Sundays of my youth. There were four Methodist chapels within a couple of hundred yards along Horbury High Street in those days: the two I’ve mentioned and the Wesleyan and the Congregational. What their precise differences in belief and form of worship were I never knew, but it was only much later, after the Second World War, when their separate congregations began to fail, that three of them (the Congregational holding on to its independence) amalgamated for survival. A supermarket now stands on the site of the Primitive Methodist Chapel now [2022: currently Bistro 42 and the Lucky Flower Chinese takeway].
William sits beside his father at the organ, my sketch from my ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’ leaflet, 1972.
How quiet Horbury must have been in William’s day. I remember it as quiet enough in mine, for although I was born into the age of the internal combustion engine it was half a lifetime before bypass roads and six-lane super highways. An attractive little town at that time, compact, stone-built, sitting on the hill above the Calder, with green fields all round it. In the evening a one-armed lamplighter made his rounds; in the the early morning you would be stirred out of sleep by the clatter of colliers’ clogs passing under the window. Not much different, on imagines, from William’s time, for although his youth and mine were separated by a terrible war, change came much more slowly than in the years since 1945.
Primitive Methodist Chapel, photography by Chappell and Hill, Horbury
Stan Barstow’s autobiography, ‘In My Own Good Time’
A puritanical town, of course. What other could it have been under that great weight of Methodism? Drink was a blatant evil, sex a vast unmentionable mystery. It’s perhaps fortunate that William was a composer, rather than a writer, for music carries few of the moral associations of literature. He’d have had a hard time putting the truth on paper in those days. His departure from his birthplace was not the kind of exile D. H. Lawrence had to seek from a not dissimilar environment, and his future, had he lived, would surely not have been plagued by the kind of persecution Lawrence suffered. But that is speculation again, and we should be grateful for what, in his short life, he left us to enjoy.’
Stan Barstow, ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’, Harrogate Festival 1972
Mr Baines opened a music shop directly opposite the Primitive Methodist Chapel on Horbury High Street.
Yesterday’s Baines recital in Ripon Cathedral went well so next up is the recital in his home town Horbury on the anniversary of his tragically early death, aged just 23 years, two weeks on Sunday, on 6th November.
I’ve designed some A4 posters for the library and the local shops and also printed some postcard-size handbills. Please spread the word . . . and if you’re local and you can display a poster, I’d be glad to drop one in.
The rebuilding of Coxley Mill in 1886 wasn’t without its problems. Contractor Edward Mercer and clerk of works Alfred Tate came to blows over the quality of mortar used and it seems that Tate threatened to ‘stop the engine’ – the mill had a steam-powered beam engine – which presumably would have brought work at the mill to a standstill.
Mr Tate ended up with head injuries including two black eyes and lost a tooth.
The online British Newspaper Archive, available through Find my Past, has just added The Building News to its collection. It reported Victorian progress in Horbury, such as road widening, commissioning pipework and building chapels but in 1855 it seems that an ‘incendiary’ – an arsonist – struck at Horbury Junction Station.
Better news from the Junction came 32 years later when work was started on a new Wesleyan chapel, right next to the station opposite St Mary’s Church on the other side of the bridge across the railway.
Yesterday morning I followed a woodland path alongside Bushcliff Beck up beyond the top end of the lake at Newmillerdam but a tree had fallen and I diverted through the undergrowth, dodging between some old elder bushes.
Ordnance Survey 25 inch, surveyed 1891, published 1893. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, maps.nls.uk
I’d walked into an area of ruined buildings marked as The Menagerie on Victorian maps.
I came across the remnants of this structure; perhaps these are the walls of two outbuildings built against the estate boundary wall. They’re not indicated on the 1891 map.
This hatch, which is a little over 2ft square, gives access from the outside. Beyond the vegetation is an arable field.
On inside edge of the slab at the base of the opening you can see the remnants of a layer of plaster or cement.
From the outside it appears that the opening originally had a stone lintel.
I couldn’t see any trace of where a frame for a door might have been fitted, but presumably there was originally some way of closing the gap. Perhaps the opening was used when mucking out the animals kept in the Menagerie enclosures.
Ruined building alongside the track that leads into the woods. This is the northern end of the largest building shown on the 1891 map.
I’d always thought that these ruins were the remains of an entrance lodge to the Chevet Estate but the map from 1893 shows what look like animal enclosures – kennels perhaps – alongside a small reservoir.
Birds and Bulldogs
Twenty years after the map was published, in 1913, a visitor wrote that Lady Kathleen Pilkington of Chevet Hall was ‘a fearless rider’ with the Badsworth Hunt and ‘a splendid rifle shot’.
She is fond of racing and is specially devoted to birds and her collection of foreign birds is one of best in England”
Charlton Jemmett-Browne, writing in ‘The French Bulldog’, USA, September 1913
Lady Kathleen’s favourite breed of dog was the French Bulldog. I’m guessing that she kept them closer to Chevet Hall but perhaps at that time she kept foxhounds or even some of her foreign birds at the Menagerie. The Menagerie was marked on an earlier Ordnance Survey map in 1841.
When did the last St Pancras* to Dewsbury train pass under this bridge?
It’s at the southern corner of Newmillerdam Country Park, as you follow the old railway out of the park, along the Chevet Branch Line nature reserve, heading south east towards Notton and Royston.
Find My Past, British Newspaper Archive
The first scheduled train on the line must have passed beneath it at about 6.30 a.m. on Thursday, 1 March, 1906.
Find My Past, British Newspaper Archive
Despite the crowd and officials greeting the train at Dewsbury Station, I get the impression that the Midland Railway was keen to emphasise the goods side of things rather than passenger traffic, preparing to deal with ‘all descriptions of merchandise, live stock and mineral traffic’ at their new stations at Crigglestone and ‘Middlestown-for-Horbury’, further up the Calder Valley to the west of Newmillerdam.
According to the website Lost Railways of West Yorkshire, the line closed on Monday 18 December 1950.
*Oh! Mr Porter
I’d originally suggested that Euston would be the starting point of the line to Dewsbury via Newmillerdam so thank you to John Farline on the Wakefield Historical Appreciation Site on Facebook, who put me right:
The Midland Railway ran north from St. Pancras, not Euston. Your date for the line’s closure is likely to be the date when the passenger service was withdrawn. The line continued with goods services through to 1968 when Criggleston and Middlestown (goods only) stations were closed. I certainly remember seeing goods trains going onto and coming off the branch line in the 1950s.”
My grandad Robert Bell who for just one week worked as a porter at Sheffield Midland Station.
I should have realised that the line must have started at St Pancras because that’s the route that goes via Sheffield Midland Station.
My grandad briefly worked as a porter, before going for a job with the then horse-drawn trams at the big tram company stables across the road. He’d worked with horses as a groom and he told me that, as a country lad, he found walking all day on the hard surfaces too demanding.
When we ran the Ossett Grammar School cross country in the 1960s (well, ran until out of sight of the school, then sauntered around exploring) I remember occasionally seeing coal trucks on the line from the bridge near Thornhill Hall farm.
Google Maps, Street view.
‘DEWSBURY’ is one of the stations with its name carved into one of the cornerstones of this entrance lodge at Euston Station, now The Euston Tap, a ‘dedicated cider bar with cask ales and draught beers, in a Victorian gatehouse with beer garden.’
Euston was the headquarters of the London and North Western Railway, so their route to Dewsbury would be via Birmingham, changing at Crewe for Dewsbury, a route celebrated in the Marie Lloyd music hall song Oh! Mr Porter:
Oh! Mr Porter, what shall I do? I want to go to Birmingham And they’ve taken me on to Crewe, Take me back to London quickly as you can. Oh Mr Porter, what a silly girl I am!”
In June 1977 the Silver Jubilee Days on the Queen’s Official Birthday marked the 25th anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II on 6 February 1952. Architect and designer Margaret Casson organised a small exhibit ‘The Graven Image’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum and invited me to take part.
Henry VII
In the April of that year I headed to London and decided to give myself a bit of a challenge and I drew the interior of the Chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey.
Royal standard
I found a corner stall and settled down for a long session drawing with dip pen and Pelikan ink (the original drawing is in Pelikan Special Brown).
Henry VII Chapel
I hadn’t realised the significance of the rather elaborate end-of-the-row stall that I’d set myself up in.
Guides would come in and point to the ceiling, and their group would look up, suitably impressed; then the tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York (the couple who effectively brought the Middle Ages to a close by uniting the Houses of York and Lancaster) and finally, to bring things up to date, the guide would point to Prince Charles’ seat in the corner . . . the stall where I was sitting, scribbling away. I got some curious looks.
I’m struggling to remember the other items in the ‘Graven Image’ show which was in a corner of the entrance hall to the V&A but as I brought in my framed sketchbook spread, a stone carver staggered in with a large block with a beautifully carved inscription, a suitably graven image.
On the front page of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Monday 26 November 1860, between a notice about a Full Dress Assembly at the Bath Saloon and an invitation from the new landlord of the Newcastle Arms comes this notice from my great, great, great uncle Joseph Truelove that from that date forward he’s not going to be responsible for his wife Mary’s debts.
Joseph had a colourful life. He had married Mary Tinker twelve years earlier on Christmas Eve 1848 at Sheffield Parish Church. By 1860 they were both in their early thirties and evidently the marriage wasn’t going smoothly. Unfortunately things were going to get worse.
I don’t have a photograph of Joseph and Mary but here’s his elder brother, William, born 1825, my great, great grandfather.
1895 Joseph’s brother William, born 1825, (centre), with my great grandad George Swift on his left and his wife, my great grandma, William’s daughter Sarah Ann standing behind him. On William’s right Joseph’s nephew, another Joseph Truelove with his wife Mary Jane standing behind him.
A ‘Curious Charge of Assault’
By 1868 Joseph was away in America and Mary was, according to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, living with George Baxter, a beerhouse keeper in Attercliffe. Bringing a charge of assault against him, Mary claimed that Baxter had assaulted her and had threatened to shoot her. A servant girl from the beerhouse and a woman who Mary called as a witness denied that George had ever used violence towards Mary.
As Mary had called the unnamed woman as a witness, presumably to back up her claims, I can’t help wondering if someone had persuaded the woman to change her story.
Attempted Murder
By Wednesday 26 October 1870 we know that Mary was back with Joseph in Allen Street near the centre of Sheffield. They were both ‘the worse for liquor’ and after a quarrel she attempted to murder him, stabbing him in the neck with a pair of decorator’s scissors. Pleading guilty, she was sentenced to penal servitude for life.
A condition of her release on 19 January 1881 was that she should remain in Lincolnshire but she immediately started to make her way back to Sheffield.
George had remarried, again to a woman called Mary. I’d love to know what happened next.
Joseph died in 1883, the same year that his new wife Mary gave birth to a daughter.
I’m hoping that some day I might come across a photograph of Joseph’s first wife, Mary Tinker, amongst her prison records.
Today Brodsworth Hall was the appropriate setting for a Victorian falconry (and hawking, there is a difference) display by Raphael Historic Falconry. Also featuring the equally impressive Cosmic the black Labrador, currently being trained as a falconry dog (falcons and hawks don’t have a sense of smell).
