Category: People

Wakefield Market

I’m hoping that this acrylic on canvas, 5ft x 2ft painting of Wakefield Market might soon get a second showing as it was last exhibited in 1982.

market trader

I think this is my favourite corner of the painting. I can reveal that Barbara played the role of ‘old lady in striped coat’. I’d drawn a figure on location and took a Polaroid of Barbara in as near to the striped coat and dotted headscarf as I could find.

market stall

The painting is unfinished: that case should contain a random selection of 1970s/80s ladies’ shoes! I’d sketched a children’s tricycle on one of the stalls and was able to borrow a similar one from the Ebenezer Hall play group in Horbury to paint.

market

My ambition was to make it into a triptych, a wrap-around experience like the market itself, which was a bit of a maze in those days.

‘Cockney Mick’

fruit and veg stall

‘Cockney Mick’ Lawton had his fruit and veg stall at the entrance to the covered meat market. He spotted me drawing and liked the drawing, so I did a him a photocopy of it. In return he got one of his assistants to fill a small paper sack with every kind of fruit from the stall. He was going to send her around with another bag for a selection of veg too, but I told him it would take me a week to finish the fruit.

Meet the Guys

At that time the first row of stalls nearest the old Cathedral School were all fruit and veg. I sat on the wall in front of the school and thought I’d be able to work unseen. No such luck:

“Penny for the Guy, Mister?”

I made a deal, I’d give them a very small amount if they’d sit for me to draw them.

I’m guessing that Kelly, Banger and Mizzy are now successful entrepeneurs.

On Stage at Horbury School . . .

cartoon

Great celebrities who trod the boards at Horbury School:

  • David Munrow, early music historian
  • R. D. Woodall, local historian and head teacher
  • Jane McDonald, singer, who appeared as Snow White in a Pageant Players’ pantomime (she’s now starring in pantomimes at the London Palladium, so we taught her well!)
  • Sir Christopher Chataway, runner (one of the pacemakers for Roger Bannister when he ran the first 4-minute mile), who officially opened the school in 1963 when he served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education in Harold Macmillan’s government
  • Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist

. . . and not forgetting:

  • My brother Bill who played a pirate on the Hispaniola in the Pageant Player’s performance of the Mermaid Theatre version of ‘Treasure Island’ (we used their scripts and Bill told me that one of them was dotted with odd doodles: we suspect it was the script Spike Milligan used when he played Ben Gunn)
  • My sister Linda, who played Lucy Lockit in the Ossett Grammar School production of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (a new assembly hall was under construction at Ossett so they used Horbury’s stage for several years)
  • And me. I never performed on stage but I painted scenery for the Pageants for 40 years and, as a young member of the Horbury Concert Society, I illustrated and designed posters, leaflets and programme covers, including those for David Munrow and Allan Schiller

Happy birthday to Zac, who may get tread the boards at Horbury Academy in the next few years.

Link

Jane MacDonald, singer and BAFTA award winning TV presenter

Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist

Horbury Pageant Players

Horbury Academy

Joe & Jim, Nellie & Hannah

bell family members

A smelter, a cook, a domestic servant and a chauffeur. Joseph, Hannah, James and Helena – my great uncles and aunts – stand alongside my Grandad Robert on the back row of the c.1904 photograph of the Bell family of Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire, which I’m currently researching.

The handwriting that I’ve added is that of the 1891 census enumerator for Lound, John Wragg, 54, Certificated Teacher at the School House, Sutton-cum-Lound Church of England School.

Continue reading Joe & Jim, Nellie & Hannah

Sarah Bell

Sarah Bell

My Great Aunt Sarah, was born in the year that the Penny Farthing Bicycle was invented and died in the year that the first man walked on the moon. She lived to celebrate her 97th birthday, but sadly although she lived just up the road from my Grandad Robert Bell, her younger brother, I don’t remember ever having met her.

Blaco Hill
From the 1871 census
Continue reading Sarah Bell

Ernest Bell

ernest

My Great Uncle Ernest spent much of his career working underground as a ‘coal getter’ and ‘hewer’ but in retirement he described his former profession as ‘Farmer’.

Ernest Bell was born at Blaco Hill Cottages, near Lound, Nottinghamshire on 22 August 1869. In the 1881 census, aged 11, he is already working as an agricultural labourer.

Mexborough

Ernest

On 9 November 1891 he married factory hand Elizabeth Cunningham of Mexborough, daughter of Harriet Cunningham, widow, and her llate husband John, a waterman. Mexborough lies 20 miles to the north-east of Blaco Hill in the Don Valley, mid-way between Sheffield and Doncaster. Ernest is working as a ‘miner’, later (1901) describing himself as a coal hewer.

The witnesses are John’s brother George William Bell and Elizabeth’s younger sister Edith, 18, who worked as a servant in a beerhouse.

He and his wife Elizabeth have five children, Ellen aged seven and her four younger brothers: Ernest, 5, George William, 3, Charles, 1, and James, aged 4 months. All were born in Mexborough.

In addition to the children, they have lodgers: fellow coal hewer Harry Smith, a widower from Worcestershire, and his seven-year old daughter Harriet.

Ernest and Elizabeth were married for 18 years and had 9 children, of which 6 survived but by 1911 George is a widower with a fifth son, Robert, aged 4 to look after. Agnes Knott, 50, born in Belper, Derbyshire, has moved in as ‘housekeeper’.

The Barnsley-British Cooperative Society

Church Street
Google Street view (2022) of the George and Dragon and George’s Buildings, 1878, Church Street, Mexborough.
The Co-op warehouse, Mexborough and Swinton Times February 17, 1928

By 1921 Ernest has married Agnes and they’ve moved to Church Street, Mexborough. Ernest now works as a labourer for the Barnsley British Cooperative Society. The society had a warehouse at Mexborough and a pencilled note on the census form suggests to me that Ernest worked on the ‘Engine’ – presumably a stationary steam engine – there.

Google Street view (2020) of John and Edith’s house on Arnold Crescent, Mexborough.

In the 1939 Survey Ernest is now married to Edith, born 16 April 1891. They’re living at Arnold Crescent, Mexborough, and he describes himself – despite spending so many years as a coal hewer and as a labourer at the co-op – as ‘Old Age Pensioner, Farmer’. Edith is a ‘Housewife’.

Ernest died on 1 January 1957.

Threads

At Horbury Library this morning the Friends of the Library group launched the Horbury Tapestry website, featuring an ultra-high resolution interactive version of the tapestry which was created twenty years ago to celebrate the centenary of the town’s Carnegie Free Library.

Horbury library
In the group creating the tapestry (centre, top) that’s my mum on the left and her friend Olive Sergeant on the right.
My mum used a drawing I’d made of Carr Lodge for her emboridery.

My mum, Gladys Bell, was one of 70 stitchers led by Janet Taylor who between them created more than 200 pieces of embroidery celebrating the life of the town.

Link

www.horburytapestry.co.uk designed by the One to One Development Trust

‘Jack’ Bell

John Bell

I never met my Great Uncle ‘Jack’, grandad’s elder brother. He was christened John Theodore Bell but probably got Jack because his father was also a John.

This photograph, part of a family group, was taken at Lound around 1901 (and colourised by me in Affinity Photo 2 on the iPad).

John

At that time, aged 27, he was working as a steel polisher in New Radford, Sherwood, on the north side of Nottingham. He had married Fanny Taylor, 26, and was living at 16 Deligne Street, with his in-laws, Leicester-born Edward Henry Taylor, 59, an army pensioner and his wife, Chelmsford-born, Sarah Taylor, 54, a lace worker specialising as a clipper – cutting away the connecting threads at the edges of the lace.

John's signature 1911

The 1911 census records that the couple had one child who died in infancy.

John's signature, 1921

In the 1921 census he is still working as an ‘Iron & Steel Polisher’ in the Raleigh Bicycles factory in Nottingham. They’ve moved to 5 Edith Terrace, Radford, and mother-in-law Sarah, now 73, has moved in with them.

John was born on 1 April 1874.

My Long Lost Uncle

Florence and Maurice
Uncle Maurice and Aunt Florence at my mum and dad’s wedding, Sheffield. That’s Grandad Swift on the left, giving them the cold shoulder.

I never met my Uncle Maurice and Aunt Florence, pictured here at my mum and dad’s wedding, and my mum hardly knew them either because, following some family falling out, he left home when my mum was still a toddler. He and my grandad never spoke to each other and, as she grew up, my mum realised that she’d be in trouble if she ever contacted him.

“I don’t know how you put up with him,” said Maurice, on a rare occasion when he saw her walking home from school and pulled up in his car. My mum looked around nervously, hoping that no one would spot her speaking to her banished brother and relay the news back to her father.

Rivals

Telephone directory: Grandad’s firm, Swift & Goodinson, had some competition from Maurice Swift junior (in column 3). Copyright Ancestry.com

As I’ve explained previously, it didn’t help that my uncle, Maurice T Swift, set up a rival funeral directors business to his father’s and, as he had the same name, there was then confusion about which business was which.

The rivalry extends into the 1939 telephone directory with Maurice T’s listing dwarfed by a masthead banner from his father insisting that ’85, Headford Street’ is the ‘ONLY ADDRESS’ for Swift & Goodinson’s complete funeral furnishers.

1939 register
The 1939 survey, image from Find my Past.

The 1939 survey, the nearest we have to a wartime census, provides a valuable snapshot of my long lost uncle’s life.

He a ‘Coffin maker, own a/c’ and Florence, ‘Shroud maker’ are living at 54 Hereford Street, not far from The Moor in the centre of Sheffield.

The Crerars

They’ve got lodgers; a family of variety artists, the Crerars: Peter and Elizabeth Crerar, aged 52 and 42, and their children, James, 21, Peter, 19 and Katherine, 17, all listed as variety artists, and Alexander, aged 10, who is still at school.

In the 1939 survey James and Peter have taken jobs in the steel industry and Katherine is a glazing machinist.

I’ve been unable to find any reference to members of the family on the variety circuit.

A year in December, 1940, James has enlisted but, along with a fellow soldier, Samuel Reynolds, aged 27, he’s remanded in custody in Rochdale Magistrates Court, charged with ‘having had carnal knowledge of a girl aged 15 years’.

Peter also enlisted as a gunner with the Royal Artillery. On 8th October 1941 he is listed as a casualty in the ‘Middle East’.

Hostile Aliens

production still

Hard to believe that I didn’t become Yorkshire’s answer to Steven Spielberg when you look at these 1965 production stills from our ambitious science fiction home movie Hostile Aliens. Thanks to Adobe Photoshop, I’ve been able to print this hopelessly badly developed negative for the first time. Richard Ryan’s stand-in dummy is about to be incinerated by the Alien’s heat ray. Alien played by my sister Linda in my dad’s oilskin and waders (plus papiere mache mask when the camera was rolling.

discussing scene

Linda also played the World Security observer responsible for monitoring outer space for alien invaders. In real life the emergency telephone put you through to the telephone exchange at the top end of Wensley Street.

stop action filming

For a stop action shot of the World Security armoured personnel carrier trundling towards the alien landing site, Lin pressed the cable release while I moved the model inch by inch across our garden rubbish heap.

The Old Gang

lead mine spoil heap
As usual, don’t rely on the colour, as I’ve colourised my original black and white 35mm shot in Photoshop.
Swaledale trip

One last snapshot from our 16 July 1965 third form trip to Swaledale. Sorting through the old gang (‘gangue’ = waste) near Hurst, Swaledale are my two school friends Derek Stefaniw examining a chunk of mineral – perhaps fluorite or galena? – alongside cool dude Paul Copley.

Swaledale trip
From this distant view, I can’t identify any of the teachers or pupils examining the lead mining waste heap.