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
“Do you draw people?” the editor asked me as she looked through my sketchbooks.
Ocelot, student sketchbook
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.
iPad drawing using Apple Pencil in Clip Studio Paint, drawn with the ‘Textured pen’ and the ‘Watery ink’ brush.
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.
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.
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.
Brown and Borlik
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.
Margaret Nortcliffe, our guide at Kirklees Priory and Robin Hood’s Grave
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
