Category: People

Mary Creagh

Mary Creagh

Mary Creagh was Wakefield’s first woman MP, elected in 2005, so she’s one of my local Women in History. She’s invariably more upbeat than in my drawing but this is from a still from a Channel 4 interview, live from the Palace of Westminster, in December 2019, a week after she lost her seat to Imran Nasir Ahmad Khan, our current MP, who was literally parachuted in – yes, really, landing on a school playing field – to stand for the Conservative Party.

In the interview she reflected that the then Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn had been guilty of ‘preening narcissism’, so here she reminds me of a distraught character in a Samuel Beckett play or as Cordelia, banished by the folly of her father, in King Lear.

Mary Creagh has always taken a keen interest in environmental issues and during her time at Westminster she was chair of the Environmental Audit Select Committee. She’s now chief executive of the national walking charity Living Streets.

Link

Living Streets the UK charity for everyday walking

Kate Taylor

Kate Taylor

Hard to believe that it’s now six years since I last saw Kate Taylor, Wakefield historian. On Saturday mornings, she and archivist John Goodchild used to treat themselves to breakfast at the Cottage Tearooms in Horbury then call in at the Rickaro Bookshop on the High Street. Barbara worked there at the time.

Kate Taylor

In the 1970s Kate wrote articles on history and architectural heritage for the Wakefield Express, so it was a big thing for me when she called to interview me when my first book A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield was published. It meant a lot to me that she took my work seriously.

I liked Kate’s uncompromising support for architectural conservation and always felt that she had an air of quizzical scepticism about her and a twinkle of mischief. She was force to be reckoned with and I couldn’t finish my Wakefield Women in History month without including her.

Oti Mabuse

Oti Mabuse

In the last of this series of live sessions on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week, current Portrait Artist of the Year Curtis Holder drew dancer Oti Mabuse.

Oti and Curtis

Also briefly appearing, Curtis’s sleepy whippet and Oti’s little terrier.

Jill Nalder

Jill Nalder

Jill Nalder, actress and activist, was this week’s sitter, painted by Gregory Mason on Portrait Artist of the Week.

Jill Nalder

Jill has been taking part in hedgehog surveys in Regents Park. In the area between Primrose Hill and Regents Park she says there should be about 300 hedgehogs but the surveys have revealed that they’re down to just 27 individuals. Rather than doing a hedgehog rescue, the group are looking at ways to ensure the population is sustainable.

Jane Bagshaw, Kitchen Maid

kitchen maid

I was at ‘The Towers’ working for Doctor Fred Walker. He had a surgery out at the other side of the road, some distance away. As kitchen maid I didn’t get out much. The housemaid used to take the child out, so she got out more.

I had a weekend off each month and then I’d go back home. No, I don’t think there were any trams. The doctor had a pony and trap and a groom to look after it.

No, I haven’t seen Upstairs, Downstairs . . . the people next door say I ought to look at it.”

Jane Bell, 7 March, 1974

This was my grandma on her 91st birthday, when we visited her at Sutton-cum-Lound in Nottinghamshire on Thursday, 7 March 1974, reminiscing about the brief period in her life when she worked in Wakefield. I’d been showing her Harold Speak and Jean Forrester’s book of photographs of Old Wakefield. From what she said, it’s hardly surprising that she didn’t have more memories of the city at that time.

By the time of the 1901 census she’d moved up to being cook, for a family in Sheffield, so her time in Wakefield must have been towards the end of the 1890s or 1900.

diary
Extract from my diary for 7 March 1974. I’d travelled up on the train from my student accommodation near the Royal College of Art that morning.

Russell Tovey

Russell Tovey

Thanks to Sky Arts, I got a chance to draw actor and one of this year’s Turner Prize judges, Russell Tovey, today in a one-hour session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I won’t be standing by the phone next week to find out if I’ve won the coveted title as I’ve already seen some of the competition, however some artists had an advantage as they took the chance to start 3 hours earlier as the live programme was preceded by a podcast session. One hour drawing from a screen was enough for me.

At first I thought that perhaps I’d do better if he just sat still instead of chatting to the artist painting his portrait but really that was the point of the session. I could have drawn from a photograph otherwise. The way his expression changed and the way the light changed made the session feel similar to drawing someone in real life.

Home Movie Moments

movie moments birthday card
home movie actors

My latest homemade birthday card is for my great nephew Zach. It celebrates the home movies that my brother, sister and I made in the days of Standard 8 cine. As you can see, Bill took the action roles, often at risk to life and limb, with my sister guest starring as the ‘Hostile Alien’, ‘The Thing’ and, no doubt hoping to break out of being typecast, a World Security agent scanning the skies for invaders from outer space.

Our friends were regularly in the cast, launching flying machines and hatching dastardly plots for world domination. Mostly we filmed in our garden; the rhubarb patch made a suitably lush jungle but for a more dramatic setting we headed for the local quarry.

But we did consider health and safety. I remember us discussing the possibility that our flying machine might overshoot and end up crashing down onto the railway line. In the event it plummeted vertically downwards when we launched it from the top of Horbury Quarry although I stood well back when filming, just in case.

birthday greeting

John Lennon in Wakefield

It would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday this week, on the 9th, so I’ve dug out this four-second snippet, filmed in very shaky Standard 8 cine from our black-and-white television, when John and Yoko were appearing on a chat show, probably The Eamonn Andrews Show in the spring of 1969.

I was surprised when my friend Hilary told me that in the early 1960s she’d been at the Saturday morning ABC Minors’ matinee at the ABC Regal cinema in Wakefield when The Beatles made an appearance. About twenty years ago I met a woman who had worked at the Regal at the time and who remembered telling off John when, after the performance, he offered her young daughter a cigarette.

My painter friend Jill told me that one of her tutors at art college (this would have been Manchester, 1969-1972) had previously been a tutor at Liverpool and had caught the young Lennon urinating down the lift shaft.

Finally, as a teenager, my brother’s daughter Hannah learnt the drums from at musician who’d been on the northern circuit in the early 1960s. His group had appeared on the same bill as The Beatles (possibly in Doncaster?), so after the show he’d approached John to say how much he liked their music.

“I especially like Yesterday“, he enthused.

“One of McCartney’s.” said John, and turned away.

Laurel & Hardy in Wakefield

Almost a decade before The Beatles performed at the Regal, Laurel & Hardy made a brief appearance, again at a children’s matinee. My friend Richard Knowles was taken by his uncle and remembers two elderly men coming onto the stage and waving at everyone, although at the time he didn’t know who they were.

Remembering Karen

Naturalists
Wakefield Naturalists’ September field trip to St Aidans.

We’ve been saddened to hear of the untimely death of a member of Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, Karen Nicklin, who also – as in my cartoon – volunteered at the RSPB St Aidan’s reserve.

“As a really keen walker and hiker, Karen spent time planning and undertaking walks that combined nature and the landscape and I remember well the talk she gave recently at our members’ evening when she wowed us with views of the spectacular scenery and wild flowers from a recent trek in the Austrian Alps.”

John Gardner, President, Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, wakefieldnaturalists.org

It’s just three weeks ago that we last saw her on that pre-‘Rule of Six’ Naturalists’ field trip to St Aidan’s. As she served me a socially-distanced shade-grown coffee (shade-grown saves trees) afterwards, I asked her what the news was from the Loch Garten ospreys. She replied that, because of Covid, she’d missed out on volunteering there for the first time since 2004. She told me that she hadn’t even managed to add an osprey on her year list. She was obviously missing them, and we’ll miss her.