Category: History

Return to Waterton’s Park

Walton Hall
Walton Hall

I painted this watercolour of Walton Hall, the Water Gate and the Iron Bridge in July 2004 as an illustration for the cover of a menu for the restaurant in the Waterton Park Hotel.

pages from 'Waterton's Park'

I’m currently transferring my Waterton’s Park booklet from the original Microsoft Publisher version to a new Adobe InDesign version on my iMac.

Waterton spread, new version

The content will be the same but I’m taking the opportunity to make a few tweaks to the design. I’m sticking to one versatile typeface, Adobe Caslon Pro. It’s got a slightly more spiky and crisper look that Dolly Pro which was my previous favourite typeface for booklets. I like Caslon’s semi-bold italic for the headings in place of the Viners Hand that I used in the original.

I felt that the quiver of blowpipe arrows would sit better in the bottom righthand corner, where it’s right next to the appropriate paragraph, so Waterton capturing the cayman gets pride of place at the top of the page.

Around Old Ossett

Around Old Ossett

I’d normally settle down to a session on InDesign on a rainy day but it’s a heatwave keeping us grounded today. In the transfer from my old defunct PC to my iMac, I’m taking advantage of it being easier in InDesign to take images across the gutter.

I’m pleased with how the vectorised place name cartoons have reproduced, slightly simplified into blocks of solid colour, like little woodcuts.

Link

Around Old Ossett at Willow Island Editions, £2.95, post free in the U.K.

William Baines Centenary Recital

Robin Walker tells me that we’ve now got a date for a recital to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Yorkshire composer William Baines. After the recital I’ll be leading a walk to some of the Bainesian corners of Horbury.

Thanks to Horbury Civic Society and Horbury Methodist Church for their support.

Osla’s Camp

Osla

Ossett is a Viking place name, which might mean ‘Osla’s seat’ or ‘ridge camp’.

Chickenley: ‘chicken meadow’

I’m transferring my 1998 booklet Around Old Ossett from the Microsoft Publisher version on my now defunct PC to Adobe InDesign on my iMac and taking the opportunity to spruce up my cartoons of local place names in Adobe Illustrator.

In my original booklets I wanted the blackest of blacks possible so I went for bit map format where each pixel is either black or white – never grey but this gives a slightly pixelated image. In Illustrator I can use the ‘Image Trace’ function set to ‘Black and White Logo’ to get a smoother effect.

Gawthorpe: ‘Gauk’s (an ugly person’s hamlet)
palce names page

Robin, Hudds

Classics Illustrated Robin Hood

I’m delighted to have my Robin Hood artwork featured in an exhibition, closing next Friday, at Huddersfield University alongside – amongst others – Louis Zansky’s comic strip version. It was first published in 1942 in what was then the ‘Classic Comics’ series so, not surprisingly, there’s more than a hint of Errol Flynn’s 1938 Technicolor movie, The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Robin Hood exhibition

Dr Todd Borlik and students in the School of Arts and Humanities have examined Robin Hood in history and literature, especially in the early ballads set in Yorkshire locations such as Sayles and Barnsdale near Pontefract.

My Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire tours locations mentioned in the ballads and follows the career of a Robert Hode who features in the Manor Court Rolls of Wakefield. It’s likely that he was outlawed after fighting on the side of the rebels – led by Thomas of Lancaster, the Lord of the Manor of Wakefield at the time – at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322.

Robin Hood at Kirklees Priory
Robin Hood and Little John at Kirklees Priory and my map from the Hartshead walk in ‘Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire’.

Kirklees Priory is the scene of the story of Robin Hood’s death at the hands of his cousin, the Prioress and her lover Roger of Doncaster, who, according to a caption in the exhibition, may actually have been a ‘Roger of Huddersfield’.

Death of Robin Hood

The story gets a sumptuous Victorian gothic makeover in a stained glass window designed by Chance & Co. of Birmingham.

Robin Hood in literature from Piers Ploughman to lavish Edwardian children’s books.

Link

http://www.willowisland.co.uk/robin.html

My Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire is available from Willow Island Editions, £2.99, post free in the UK.

Sir William Bruce

William Bruce

It’s likely that this albaster effigy of a cross-legged knight in Pickering church is Sir William Bruce (c.1295-c.1345) who founded a chantry chapel there on the Feast of St John the Evangelist Saturday 27 December 1337.

He’s said to have fought at the Battle of Boroughbridge (or possibly at a tournament held there). His family home was at Beck Isle, Pickering, where there’s now a museum of rural life.

Family Album

George Swift

My favourite photograph of great grandad George Swift, sneakily taken, I’m guessing, by a teenage photography enthusiast: my grandad Maurice (I bet that’s his thumb print from when he developed the plate negative). George was a third generation spring knife maker in Sheffield but times were hard in the 1880s so he and Sarah Ann opened a corner shop as a sideline (note the Peek Freans ad, board). Must have been an exhausting business.

Betty baking

What do you do in a family crisis? Yes, bake scones. Here’s my mum-in-law Betty Ellis in a sketch of mine from the 1980s in her kitchen baking at her fold-out Formica-topped table. She once told me about cycling 25 miles through the black out to deliver a Christmas cake to husband-to-be Bill at his temporary camp in Sheffield when he enlisted in the army in 1939. So glad that I persuaded her to write it down.

The Nation’s Family Album

I’m submitting these images to The Nation’s Family Album: the National Portrait Gallery and Ancestry.co.uk are creating a special display at the gallery in 2023, so hope that Betty and George will be featured.

The Yorkshire Robin Hood

Dr Todd Borlik and an online Dr Alex Brown were the speakers at The Yorkshire Robin Hood talk and discussion at Huddersfield University yesterday.

Todd, a Shakespeare scholar with a special interest in Renaissance Ecocriticism put the tradition of Robin Hood’s death and burial in Kirklees into context. He mentioned that shortly before Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, set in the Forest of Arden, a Robin Hood play had been performed in the Rose Theatre, just across the road from the Globe.

Brown and Borlik

In his talk Riding the Wheel of Fortune with Robin Hood, Alex looked at how the fear of downward social mobility in post pandemic medieval England is taken up in some of the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballads, particularly in the story of the poor knight Sir Richard of the Lee in A Lyttell Geste of Robyn Hode.

Kirklees guide
Margaret Nortcliffe, our guide at Kirklees Priory and Robin Hood’s Grave

In the afternoon we got a chance to visit Robin Hood’s Grave and the gatehouse of Kirklees Priory, recently restored as a private home.

kirklees guide

Four Lane Ends

Lee and Briggs lino cut

Once known as Four Lane Ends, this is the view as it was in 1967 from Tithe Barn Street looking across Westfield Road to Jenkin Road, with Arnold Tattersfield’s newsagents on the left, Lee & Briggs ironmongers on the right. The fourth ‘lane’ on the near right is Manor Road.

I drew the little sketch that it’s based on while sitting at the Tithe Barn Street back entrance to the old Congregational Chapel (extreme left) while working as a teller when my dad was standing for Horbury Urban District Council. I had to politely ask every voter as they walked in for their number on the electoral roll. Towards the end of the day the local ‘independents’ (really Conservatives) would go around rounding up anyone who had promised to support them but hadn’t yet turned up.

The original of linocut was black on white but I like this reversed version, made by going for the wrong keyboard shortcut in Photoshop (Control+I instead of Control+Alt+I. After all these years I still get that wrong when I’m resizing an image). I’m currently re-scanning drawings of Horbury for a reprint of my local guide to the historic buildings of the town.

I was influenced by Daily Mail cartoonist Trog’s bold pen and ink drawings in the paper’s long-running cartoon strip Flook.

Gaskell & Jones

Christopher Jones

Two more of our candidates in the Wakefield by-election: Christopher Jones, Northern Independence Party and Jordan Gaskell, UKIP. If Jordan gets elected on Thursday he’ll be the first Gaskell to represent Wakefield since Daniel Gaskell, who represented the borough as a radical independent from 1832 to 1837.

Jordan Gaskell