It’s those poachers again: Dewsbury lads, Henry Smith, William Crowther and Alfred Grace caught ferreting at Newmillerdam in October 1870. Gamekeepers to follow.
The Bold Poachers
The Boathouse
To my mind the prettiest village is Newmillerdam, four miles from Wakefield. The scenery is in the village, not outside . . .
In summer people are allowed to walk round the lake, and admire the beautiful trees and ferns and flowers. In winter, when everything is covered with snow, and skaters are gliding along the lake, which is about a mile in length, it is a picture worth painting.”
Florence E. R. Clark, letter to the Leeds Mercury, 10 August 1907
British Newspaper Archive
Newmillerdam was ‘the ice skaters’ mecca in the Wakefield district’, according to the Yorkshire Evening Post, in January 1946, but they warned that although the surface was strong, it was ‘far from smooth’.
Spare a thought for the Chevet Estate gamekeepers, George Stephenson and William Mellor, who in October 1870 spotted a familiar trio of poachers – Henry Smith, Alfred Grace and William Crowther – in the Boathouse Plantation, sending a ferret down a rabbit hole. While Smith ran away, Crowther picked up a stone to strike the keepers with. They admitted poaching but said that they’d go to Sir Lionel Pilkington and ask to be let off. At Wakefield Court House, they were fined £2 each plus costs or two months imprisonment.
£2 in 1870 would be equivalent to £220 today.
The Lumping Hammer
“I’ll bring my lumping hammer!” was a typical response from Barbara’s dad, Bill, when I was explaining some garden DIY job that I had in mind.
Lump in Middle English is a ‘shapeless piece’. In Swedish it could mean a ‘block’ or ‘log’. Lumping stuff about in Yorkshire dialect refers to carrying heavy loads from place to place.
The other hammer was my dad’s and I think this is the one referred to as the ‘coal hammer’. As he worked for the National Coal Board he was entitled to concessionary coal deliveries. Our Victorian house had two coal houses and, if I remember correctly, the far coal house was the one with the larger lumps of coal which occasionally needed breaking up with the hammer.
Gardening Gloves
I’ve been working in brown ink for a month, so I was ready for some black inkiness again. My gardening gloves made a suitable subject. Drawn with my Lamy Al-Star with the F nib and a Pentel Brush Pen.
Sage
The leaves of this purple sage proved a bit tough when Barbara was making the stuffing this Christmas but a clump of the regular sage-green variety, growing at the end of our herb bed had smaller, more tender, leaves. It gave an aromatic lift to the stuffing, made to recipe Barbara’s mum, Betty, used every year. And it lasted until Boxing Day to go in our chicken sandwiches.
Photos Diary
It’s been a tough kind of year but looking back through my photographs makes me realise that we’ve done a lot despite restrictions and made the most of our home patch.
I’ve just been searching back through my photographs for a short video that I took of drake mallards fighting as some reference for an illustration and I’m impressed with how the Photos app on the Mac presents them. I remember what sorting through slides and colour prints was like. This is from the Photos app monthly view.
I never get around to doing all that I’d like to do with my thousands of photographs but even if I’ve just been snapping away on our regular walk, they’re all there in date order and the ones that I take on my iPhone have GPS with the exact location marked on a map.
Squirrels Behaving Oddly
Perhaps spring was the reason for the strange behaviour of a group of five grey squirrels, which we saw capering about under the beeches and oaks at Newmillerdam last February. We watched as they bounded playfully and rolled about on their backs. They weren’t bickering or chasing each as you might have expected at that time of year and they weren’t foraging or going through a grooming routine. They reminded me of children let loose in a soft play ball pool.
We couldn’t guess what they’re doing and nor could a dog, which stood motionless a few yards away, transfixed by their antics. Could that be a reason for their forest-floor frolics: to confuse predators?
If it had been the dog rolling around, I could have understood that, as they like to gather scents as a kind of badge of honour, but would squirrels do that?
In the Shelter
Eighty years ago this month, at about 7.30 pm on 12 December 1940, my mum, Gladys Swift as she was then, my Grandad Maurice and Grandma Ann, rushed for this air raid shelter in the back garden of their house at 77 Nether Edge Road, as the alarm sounded at the start of the Sheffield Blitz. They hadn’t finished their tea (the term for early evening meal at the time) and my mum grabbed the pan of stew from the stove, so that grandad wouldn’t miss out.
An incendiary landed within yards of the shelter, causing irreparable damage to my grandad’s house and to the joined-on semi-detached house of his mother, Sarah Ann Swift, next door. Another bomb that landed nearby wiped out a whole family with direct hit on their house, so I feel lucky to be here really (I would be born 10 years later).
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to listen to my mum’s stories about her experience and try to picture the interior of the shelter but I never dreamed that I’d get to see it, so my thanks to Andy and Neil who on the day of the 80th anniversary invited my brother, sister and I to a Zoom meeting live from the shelter (or rather from the coach house next to it as the wi-fi couldn’t penetrate those built-to-withstand-a-bomb concrete walls).
On the the guided-tour phone footage that they showed us, I was impressed by the original concrete door, still in place on rusty hinges on one of the entrances.
This door led to a flight of stairs (now blocked with rubble) which was intended as an entrance for my great grandma Sarah Ann, who, as I’ve said, lived next door. On that evening though, she took shelter in her cellar along with her pet bird and her Pomeranian, Queenie. The rescuers brought her out of the wrecked house through the coal chute, along with the bird and the dog.
I imagined there were rudimentary bunks in the shelter but there isn’t as much room in there as I expected. Probably they sat it out, as I remember my mum saying that she once fell asleep down there in a deckchair and had the most extreme form of pins and needles imaginable when she woke because the cross-bar had been digging in behind her knees.
Links
Sheffield Blitz my comic strip version of the air raid, drawn when I was 14 years old.
Ernest Bowler, Castleton: a painting belonging to my grandad, which survived the raid.
Nether Edge in the Second World War compiled by the Nether Edge History Group, Second World War Research team, ISBN 09514003-2, paperback. You can order a copy, £10 plus postage, from the group via this e-mail: nenghistory@gmail.com
Lift-off
It’s all systems go for Henry’s Robot Wars card as it dawned on me that, for a symmetrical pop-up shape, all I needed to do is fold down the middle of the card and cut both halves at once. Yes, it really did take me two birthday cards to work that one out. But how about asymmetrical pop-ups? There must be a simple way for working those out . . .
One detail that doesn’t show up in this photograph is that Henry’s command module features transparent windows (cut from the packaging of Sainsbury’s Deep Filled Mince Pies. Of course, I had to eat the mince pies first). And, yes, Henry is wearing his pyjamas rather than the traditional space suit, so I guess that he’s planning on going into suspended animation on his interplanetary journey.
Out of the Box
My birthday-card technology continues to evolve: with this card for our great-nephew Ralph, I’ve done some out-of-the-box thinking and burst into 3D, which is appropriate as this card is based on a real-life incident.
No, his parents didn’t actually transport Ralph in a box when they moved house shortly before Christmas, but with so many packing cases around, he did enjoy trying one out for size.