Shoppers and mannequins at the White Rose this morning.
Shoppers
Category: People
Can you draw people?
“Do you draw people?” the editor asked me as she looked through my sketchbooks.
If I could draw gorillas surely it would be obvious that I’d be able to draw people too? But I decided to make a special effort.
I enrolled on a weekly life drawing evening, which I kept up for years and I set off to the local market and, over the period of several weeks, filled it with drawings of people. Wakefield had a large open market and a market hall and you got a full range of different people shopping or just browsing there.
Family Album
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dodgson & Bickerdike
There are still a couple of candidates I haven’t drawn and it’s the Wakefield by-election tomorrow but here’s Mick Dodgson, standing for the Freedom Alliance and Paul Bickerdike of the Christian People’s Alliance.
I didn’t get around to drawing Therese Hirst, standing for the English Democrats, but here she is in a drawing I made when she was standing in the election for a Mayor for West Yorkshire a year or so ago.
Gaskell & 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.
Akbar, Routh & Walsh
No, I’m afraid that Akef, Ashley and Chris aren’t the hosts of the latest hit podcast, although perhaps they should give it a try as there’d definitely be some lively banter.
Jamie Needle
Jamie Needle our Liberal Democrat candidate. Today we had another seven candidates’ leaflets drop through the letterbox, so we can’t complain that we’re not being given a choice.
David Herdson
Apologies to our Yorkshire Party candidate, David Herdson, in the upcoming Wakefield by-election, as I’ve made him look a bit like me, however Barbara thinks he does look a bit like me anyway. Sorry about that David!
Ahmed & Lightwood
Nadeem Ahmed and Simon Lightwood are our Conservative and Labour candidates for the Wakefield by-election, coming up a week next Thursday on the 23rd. I’ve got my work cut out if I’m going to draw all the candidates as there are 15 of them in total (and there are some great faces to draw amongst them).
There are plenty of smiling photographs of the Labour and Conservative hopefuls but these are from the only two photographs that I could find of them looking serious on Google. Perhaps a bit too serious: Nadeem’s expression reminds me of Peter Jones on Dragons Den when he’s grilling a would-be entrepreneur about shortcomings in a business plan and Simon reminds me of a headmaster telling the assembled pupils that they’ve not only let themselves down, they’ve let the school down too (yes, I’m afraid this did occasionally happen during my school days, but usually only once a term, I’m glad to say).