I’M ONE of the generation who can remember where they were when they heard the news of the assassination of President Kennedy (just returned from the Friday evening church youth group) fifty years ago but I’d forgotten that the following day saw a happier event when the first episode of Dr Who was broadcast.
I’m travelling back along my own timeline by digging out my 1963 Lett’s Schoolboy’s Diary from the attic. Unfortunately the only event that I recorded for November that year was bonfire night. Not very helpful in building up a picture of the era.
My shiny new 1964 diary.
I didn’t get into my stride with a diary until the following year but when, aged twelve, I started so enthusiastically (I dropped the colour after 3 weeks) we were still mid-way through the first series of Dr Who so a Dalek appears in my entry for Saturday 4 January;
‘Doctor Who was good today’.
I hadn’t quite got the hang of critical reviewing. In the previous year on the ‘Films seen during the year’ page of my diary I’d summed up Ben-Hur as ‘a good film’ but Tarzan goes to India got a more in-depth review; ‘some excellent elephant shots’. No wonder big screen spectaculars made such an impression on me as television was still 405 lines and black and white. But, as you can see from my postage stamp-sized sketch, the new science fiction series was a hit with me and I could imagine it bursting into colour.
At the barber’s, 2 January.
Unfortunately I no longer have two pieces of Dr Who memorabilia from the 1970s and 80s. One was a sketch that I made of one of the later Doctors, Sylvester McCoy, at a book awards event , the other a copy of Dr Who script editor Terrance Dicks’ paperback guide to the first ten years of the series. But where those two items ended up suggests the effect of the show on the creative imagination of children.
I’d asked Sylvester McCoy to sign the sketch for my nephew Damian, who was Dr Who mad and who would often wear a dressing gown and an extra long scarf, like his hero. And occasionally a piece of celery in his button-hole like Peter Davison’s Dr Who.
3 January, using my chemistry set, a Christmas gift from my parents.
Damian has apologised to me for losing the sketch years ago! But he is now an architect so if you think you can detect a Cyberman or Dalekian influence in a building, it could be one of his.
The paperback went to Wilfrid, the son of one of my art college tutors, who sometimes quizzed me about the early episodes as he could remember onlyas far back as Jon Pertwee. Wilfrid went on to create puppets for Spitting Image including an irradiated sea monster for the French version of the show which wouldn’t have been out of place in Dr Who.
The fondly remembered American science fiction series The Outer Limits also features in my diary. Much as I appreciated the Doctor, I liked the slicker (for the time) production values of The Outer Limits and I liked the way that, as a series rather than a serial, you would find yourself in a completely different imaginative world with each one hour episode.
The Beverley Hillbillies
Television shows feature a lot in the diary including includingThe Beverley Hillbillies (Friday 4 January). The six o’clock comedy slot on ITV, which included such series asMy Favourite Martian,Mr Ed and Petticoat Junction, was a feature of week-day evenings; a break between school, tea and an evening session homework.
Some things never change. January 4: ‘I did my homework with my new pen (3/6).’
Half a century later my search for the perfect pen, the one that’s going to improve my handwriting and my drawing, continues.
My fascination with any technology which would help me to see the world around me in a different way had already started too;
Looking out over the railway and Storrs Hill road.
2 January; ‘I went on a walk over Storrs [hill] down to Horbury Bridge. Tested telescope.’
This was a pocket-sized telescope/microscope but the sky was the limit as far as my ambitions were concerned and later in the year I saved up to buy a reflecting telescope kit (£7 from Charles Frank’s of Glasgow).
I remember the thrill of seeing the tiny points of light of the stars come into focus scattered against the inky blackness; that feeling of looking into the depths of space. And of course back in time too . . . perhaps the light from some of those stars had been travelling for fifty years . . .
15 September 1964; ‘Got 50 lines ughh! for not backing book. Did homework. At 8.15 pointed (with Mum’s help) the telescope at the moon. My mother pushed up the mirror too far and out of focus. Eventually we got it focussed. You could see the craters. With Dad out we looked at starfields invisible to eye.’
GEORGE AND SARAH ANN are back from their makeover and it’s been quite a transformation. Robin Taylor has cleaned them, removing as much of the old discoloured varnish as he could without damaging the paintwork. He’s touched up the blemishes (the ‘bullet-wound’ on George’s forehead has healed up nicely) and finally he applied a resin varnish which has restored the richness and depth of the colour.
I’m impressed by this detail of embroidery on the sofa arm in the portrait of Sarah. These are painted photographs so I’m not sure whether this has been meticulously painted or whether it is the original photograph showing through a transparent glaze of oil paint.
Although today we’d see basing a portrait so directly on a photograph as ‘cheating’ at the time this was a way of embracing a new technology. Robin, who was as surprised as we were by how well these battered old paintings have responded to restoration, describes the painting as a superior job.
The paintings are on card with a sheet of wood backing them. I was rather hoping that Robin would find an old document stuffed in the back of the painting. He tells me that he occasionally finds a page from a newspaper added as packing behind a painting in a frame.
The printed label on the back of each portrait states that Geo. Wilkinson & Son of 98 Devonshire Street, Sheffield (two doors down from Westfield Terrace) offer the following services:
Oil Paintings, carefully cleaned, re-lined and restored
Water Colour, and other drawings cleaned and mounted
Engravings, cleaned – mildew and damp stain effectively removed
The Bride in Black
I’m sorry that photographer and picture restorer George Cecil Wilkinson and his oil painter colleague J H Ainley aren’t still around to see how well these portraits are looking a century and a quarter after they produced them.
My mum tells me that George Wilkinson married a cousin of her dad’s and I believe that Ainley too was either a friend or in-law. They were to play a part – a controversial part – in the story of my family at a later date.
I was wondering why Sarah Ann should be wearing black. Had she recently lost a member of her family and gone into mourning. Apparently not; this was before a white wedding became the norm and black was often worn by brides. George and Sarah were married in the mid 1870s but, if they were photographed at the time, it seems that the paintings were produced some years later as the Geo. Wilkinson label reads ‘established 1879’.
I’m taking these two portraits as a starting point, a re-starting point, for my family tree research and I’m going to put together a little biography of George, a Sheffield spring-knife maker, and his wife Sarah Ann who started her working life as a home help aged 11. Sarah, I feel is a key characters in the story of that branch of the family. She was born when the industrial revolution was still at its height in the city and she lived long enough to get caught up in the Sheffield Blitz.
Song of the Slave
She reminds me in this portrait of one of the young women who Mrs Hudson ushers into the consulting room at 221b Baker Street at the start of a baffling case for Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. But this time it’s up to me to observe the details and to attempt to piece to together something of the story of her life.
Is there some significance in the way she is holding her pocket watch?
Sarah’s fingers, my mum tells me, were as chubby as shown as a result of all her domestic duties but she was taught to play the piano by one of the families she worked for. One of the pieces that she learnt was The Song of the Slave. We still have the sheet music. This brings home the historical context; born on Boxing Day 1850, Sarah was learning to play the piano in the days immediately before the American Civil War and the subsequent emancipation of the American slaves.
George doesn’t give much away in his sober Sunday best suit but I’m looking forward to hearing what my costume expert friends can tell me about him.
The candid camera photograph (which I’ve already featured in this diary) of George that is son took around 1900 is more revealing of his background and domestic circumstances.
I NOTICED when I was drawing my assignments for Drawing Words, Writing Pictures that when it came to making up a cartoon situation I invariably;
imagined male characters
gave them very generalised costumes
I realised that I needed to feed my imagination a bit by drawing particular people in the real world so, when we had to call at the doctors, I sat a the back of the waiting room and made some visual notes. I thought that notes on colours might help too as I think that I’ve got a tendency to revert to a habitual, limited palette. There wasn’t time to get out my watercolours and I was using a fountain pen containing water soluble ink so I couldn’t have anyway, so I made brief notes.
It’s great to have a procession of people of different sizes, shapes and sexes, although I would have appreciated a bit more time to build up character. Because of the angle that I was drawing from, the next person joining the queue regularly blocked my view of the person I’d just started drawing.
I realised that the best way to proceed was to assume that I’d have only a few seconds for each character and to draw in the basic shape very quickly, then work up the the drawing if I got did happen to have an unrestricted view for a minute or two.
I feel that fountain pen is the quickest medium for this situation. Fibre tips pens don’t flow quite as freely. Pencil, the way I use it when I’m in a hurry, is too messy.
When the supply of queuers temporarily dried up, I reverted to my old standby; drawing my left hand.
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.
AS YOUNG babies don’t run about you’d think that they’d make ideal subjects for drawing but, as our latest great-niece, Holly, demonstrates, they tend to be constantly active. She was moving her hands continuously in subtle gestures, like a Balinese dancer.
It’s easier, as always, to draw my own hand, because I can keep that still.
As I mentioned the other day, I’ve now filled one of my ArtPens with ArtPen ink and I think this is freer flowing than the Noodler’s ink that I use when I’m adding watercolour, making it ideal for a fluid subject like a baby. And of course I can dab the line with with my water-brush for a wash effect, as I did with my drawing of my hand.
I’d like to draw people more but I’d prefer to draw in some public place like at a street market, rather than at a family gathering.
Later, at my mum’s I draw cushions and newspapers.
I’m travelling back along my own timeline by digging out my 1963 Lett’s Schoolboy’s Diary from the attic. Unfortunately the only event that I recorded for November that year was bonfire night. Not very helpful in building up a picture of the era.
Television shows feature a lot in the diary including including The Beverley Hillbillies (Friday 4 January). The six o’clock comedy slot on ITV, which included such series as My Favourite Martian, Mr Ed and Petticoat Junction, was a feature of week-day evenings; a break between school, tea and an evening session homework. 
