Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
www.horburytapestry.co.uk designed by the One to One Development Trust
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).
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.
The 1911 census records that the couple had one child who died in infancy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amongst my 1965 negatives, the shots that I took to start or finish off a film are often everyday scenes from home life that wouldn’t normally get recorded. This shot, which comes just before the Richmond Castle photographs, is my mum’s car, a Triumph Herald Coupé taken in our back yard.
We did once fit our family of five into mum’s coupé, even though there were no seats in the back. More comfortable was dad’s Standard Vanguard Estate, registration RHL 777, which he bought from our friend Jack Buckle’s garage.
My Letts School-Boys Diary, Monday, 5th April, 1965: ‘Cross country – Stef and Fred running on intermediate. Got photos of them (3 in all).’
Other than rather poor contract prints, I haven’t been able to get any images from my 127 negatives until now, using my scanner. Once again, I’ve coloured them in Photoshop.
Lucky me, I’d got out of running, perhaps because I’d been off with tonsillitis a week earlier or, more likely, because the school houses, Marsden, Pickard, Haig and Bentley were entering more energetic runners, such as my friends ‘Stef’ (above) and ‘Fred’ (below).
With the start of the Easter Holidays, this was a busy week for me, finishing off an astronomical telescope kit and planning our next home movie, a science fiction epic:
Bill and I also had our club magazine to print, featuring an article on a ‘whirlwind’ at Painthorpe, reported by ‘Stef’ and a fire at school:
FIRE AT OSSETT GRAMMAR SCHOOL
Smoke poured out of a workman’s hut at O.G.S.
Workmen fled in terror. 5 yds away stood a tank of petrol. It took 2 fire engines 10 minutes to get the blaze under control. Thanks to Ossett Fire Brigade no one was hurt.
R.A.B., HJNC News, no.4, April, 1965
The big news though was our alien invaders movie going into production:
All sorts of special effects, tricks and camera angles were used. In filming one scene in which a soldier, R. Ryan, was burnt I, the camera man , was engulfed in flames. The most effective scene was one in which a model vehicle moved towards the alien’s rocket.
The best angle short showed soldiers running off the top of the picture.
As yet the film is not complete the second half will be filmed soon.
R.A.B., HJNC News, no. 5
Rather like the young Steven Spielberg character in The Fabelmans, I persuaded my sister to guest star as the ‘Hostile Alien’, complete with papier-mâché head which I shaped around an old bucket that my dad used to force rhubarb. My brother Bill meanwhile drafted in friends to play the ill-fated World Security Patrol, joined, as in most of our films, by my friend John as an action hero.
At that time there were always a few wartime helmets still kicking around. For the final scene involving an ‘Atomic Cannon’, we had to wait until autumn, when fireworks became available.
With a bit of help from the Adobe Illustrator this is me in January 1965 with my leg in a cast after breaking my leg hurrying home on an icy Boxing Day evening to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe.
My mum had added a long zip to my trousers to fit over the cast. I rather liked the new ash-wood walking stick which Pinderfields Hospital had loaned me so I was not pleased when some of my classmates used it for an improvised game of golf, scratching the handle 😮
I’d like to say that the grainy quality of the photograph was deliberate but it was probably caused by thermal shock to the film in my early attempts at developing it in a Paterson’s developing tank.
The Broken Leg, my comic strip diary from that time