We’re looking through old albums, putting together a short book of memories of Barbara’s brother John. Going back to the pre-digital 1960s, 70s and 80s are plenty of groups at parties, children standing on lawns and a couple of formal wedding groups, but for me the stand out images are by the street photographers in seaside towns.
The close up of John and Margaret reminds me of films from the Swinging Sixties such as Michael Winner’s The System, where Oliver Reed plays a seaside street photographer, but we need John on his own on the cover, so we’re going for another seaside town photograph.
The original of this photograph is small and in black and white but I couldn’t resist using Photoshop’s colourisation neural filter on it. I think that it’s worked well here.
Although Barbara has just pointed out that Margaret’s pink cardigan has one yellow sleeve. I better correct that.
Remembering John Morrisey, the lovely, larger-than-life neighbour of Barbara’s brother John, who died suddenly yesterday morning. Barbara’s brother John died early on Saturday morning, after 3 months in Pontefract Hospice that was expected, but the death of his neighbour John a few days later came as a shock.
On our walk via the canal and river to the Coffee Stop this morning: one drake goldeneye, 42 grazing wigeon, a pair of oystercatchers and, by the Navigation Inn, Rachel Modest – The Voice semi-finalist and leader of the Wakefield Community Gospel Choir – making a music video, assisted by vocalist and former roadie (to, amongst many others, The Smiths, David Bowie and Russell Watson) Oova Matique.
The fast food at the Falafel Street Kitchen was a tad too fast for me and this was as far as I was able to get in sketching the customers.
Luckily the pace at the Nats’ AGM was a little more sedate. Even so, these days we get through the business side of the evening in a little over fifteen minutes.
I’m currently catching up with a free FutureLearn course Genealogy: Researching Your Family Tree from the University of Strathclyde and thought that this oak in the Capability Brown parkland (drastically remodelled by the National Coal Board Opencast Executive in 1975!) at Temple Newsam this morning was perfect for a basic family tree.
On the course we’ve been warned about the dangers of getting sidetracked – in my case that would be my Truelove great uncles – especially one particular Great Uncle Joe who had a rather colourful life. Coming back to this basic tree with aunties and uncles excluded makes me realise where I need to put in a bit more research into the basic structure. I’ve probably got most of those missing great grandparents covered in my folders of research but this is all that I remember without riffling through the various census forms and birth, baptism, marriage and death certificates that I’ve accumulated.
But I do look forward to getting back to my ‘bad’ Great Uncle Joe and the wife, Mary Tinker who attempted to murder him . . .
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.
If, like me, you lived in a downstairs flat as a child, especially if the flat was in a one hundred year old Victorian villa, then an attic is somewhere that you’re desperate to explore. In children’s stories there were always mysterious boxes and chests stashed away up there, with the occasional drum or antique rocking horse dotted about in dusty corners.
I never got to explore the attic but we did get an opportunity to explore ‘The Mysterious Cellar’, as I recalled in my Exercise Book Encyclopaedia, on page 456 . . .
Stephen Cassidy and the rest of the club were inspired to go down the cellar.
Stephen lowered himself down the depression into the unknown. He opened the door to the cellar. The floor was not on level with the ground. Stephen decided not to risk jumping in.
I decided to go and jump down. It was death or glory.
Luckily it was glory – the floor was a few feet below.
We explored.
And had, for a while, a club in the cellar.
Original page from my exercise book, from spring 1965 when I was 14 years old.
The little wooden chair was one that we’d had as children. We just managed to manoeuvre it into the cellar but it must have expanded in the damp atmosphere as we could never get it out. The ‘bench’ was a table made from large Yorkshire flagstones. The stairs on the right led up to what had been the servant’s back stairs but they’d been boarded over during the conversion of the house into flats and our electric and gas metres were in an under-stairs room we called the lobby.
The candle is in a ham tin. Tins of Old Oak Ham were a staple of Christmas hampers.
On the wall opposite the hatch that we came in by, in large capitals written with the sooty smoke of a candle, was the graffiti inscription:
J ROBB 1946
We got busy with candles too to add decorations to the walls: an electric guitar and, at the entrance to the little passageway at the back:
‘Tunnel of Love’
Although I thought that wasn’t the sort of ambience that we should be aiming for.
Fifty years ago today my exhibition, The Yorkshire of William Baines, marking the 50th anniversary of the death of the composer was in its second (and final) week at the Harrogate Festival. According to my diary William’s music and my show were getting a good reception.
I’ve been here before; coming through the darkened room with the piano and sitting down and watching. I definitely remember some of the slides particularly.
“I’ve been here before;” was the reaction of one young visitor, “coming through the darkened room with the piano and sitting down and watching. I definitely remember some of the slides particularly.”
His parents were equally enthusiastic; his mum thought ‘the music was marvellous’ and his dad mentioned that he had a friend who interviewed for Radio 3.
People had been so helpful as I prepared the show, loaning pictures, objects and manuscripts connected to the composer.
Helen Millifanti, curator of the Pump Room Museum, found me an Edison phonograph which we got working. It stood in a mocked-up parlour with an upright piano also on loan from the museum alongside a framed photograph of William as a toddler standing next to an Edison Bell Phonograph. I think that I remember that Mr Baines, William’s father, George William, sold them in his shop on the High Street; the latest technology in his day.
Radio Leeds
Ringing one of the Horbury Handbell Ringers’ bells in a Radio Leeds interview
Radio Leeds had just celebrated its fourth birthday. My interview with Peter Hawkins went well and they invited me to write and introduce a radio documentary on Baines to coincide with the anniversary in November.
Goodnight to Flamboro’
Surprising one of the visitors
The Man from Groves Dictionary
To celebrate William’s sea piece Goodnight to Flamboro’, I painted one of the sections of the clip together displays we’d assembled for the exhibition.
Highlight of the week was a recital by Eric Parkin on Friday 4th August. Peter Hawkins interviewed a cousin of William’s Elsie Hargreaves and his school day’s friend Ernest Hindle and I’m pleased to say that we still have a couple of brief clips in my Hat’s Off Gentleman – A Genius! documentary.
Miss Tiffany, a volunteer who often manned the desk at my Baines exhibition.
Amongst the audience was, according to my diary, a ‘Chorister from York’. That must have been Robin Walker, now a composer himself who has been busy producing a new recording of William’s music to launch this autumn for the 100th anniversary.
Bird and Wells
I got to meet Linda Kitson who was energetically working as artist in residence at the Festival. Drawing at events and recitals during the day and posting the results on a board in the Majestic Hotel in the evening. The ‘Writers Talking’ sessioin on Saturday 5 August included Stan Barstow and Terence Dicks. While Stan’s work is definitely inspired by gritty reality, Terence Dicks, script editor on Dr Who, explained that his ‘life has been free of super villains, space monsters and Cybermen’.
My life has been free of super villains, space monsters and Cybermen
All the while Linda Kitson was squatting on the floor, moving about to to draw the various speakers. I wished that I could be so fearless when out with my sketchbook. She assured me that I’d love working at the Royal College of Art. She’d recently graduated but she said she often dropped in, using the place as ‘her club’. I became a good deal more at ease drawing in public thanks to the weekly sessions drawing at London Zoo during my time at the RCA.
Surprise visitors: John Bird and John Wells
I was most star struck though meeting satirists John Bird and John Wells who’d come in to the Royal Baths, where my exhibition was held, to escape from the rain.
Gilbert Mills
A satisfied customer!
On Thursday, 10th August, veteran pianist Gilbert Mills introduced himself. Born ten years before William (so that would be about 1889) he championed William’s music in the very earliest days of radio, before the BBC was founded, giving recitals on 2LO, as it was called.
He demonstrated on the old upright piano in my mock-up of the Baines parlour. He insisted that Eric Parkin hadn’t got it right in his recording of Blackbird Singing in a Convent Garden. He played it with the trilling lilt that you get when a blackbird sings.
he was an odd bod. He was reckoned to be something of a genius even when he used to wander about Cleckheaton; gaunt-looking and huge hands, long fingers he had
A visitor on the final day of the exhibition who knew William
