In a photograph in this week’s Radio Times, Maria Schrader’s character Lenora has the detached, intense look of one of a woman in a Stanley Spencer painting. Deutschland 89, a German-American spy drama, is currently showing on More4.
Emil Hostina is a Securitate agent, hunkered down with her in a safe house in Timisoara, Romania, at the time of the fall of the Ceausescu regime.
I love the theatricality of the production. I wouldn’t want to stay with these two if they opened and bed & breakfast in Scarborough, but they’re wonderful characters to draw. Perhaps Deutschland will be looking for an artist in residence for their next series?
Fiona Grayson, Liz White’s character in Chris Lang’s crime drama Unforgotten looks very much like the bobble-hatted people we’ve been meeting right through the winter on our regular lockdown walks. In the photograph in last week’s Radio Times that I’ve drawn her from she’s on location in the Peak District. Some of the scenes were filmed at Winnat’s Pass. We’re hoping that, before too long, as restrictions slowly ease, we’ll be able to walk there again.
Fiona is described by RT’s Alison Graham a character who ‘has been trapped by her guilt for most of her life and knows time is running out.’
Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
That makes it sound as if his work could be a bit tough, but he’s just as likely to get audiences laughing and applauding as he is to get them fired up with indignation or empathic and thoughtful.
Linton Kwesi Johnson, poet and best-selling reggae artist, is only the second living poet and the only black British poet to have his work published as a Penguin Classic.
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.
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 atthe Rickaro Bookshop on the High Street. Barbara worked there at the time.
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.
Chiwetel Ejiofor directed and starred in his 2019 film The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and wrote the adaptation of William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer’s tale, which was based on a true story. For his role he learnt Chichewa, the local Bantu language of Malawi.
As with the Sherlock drawing, this is from a photograph in this week’s Radio Times.
“A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Henry Lloyd-Hughes‘ Sherlock Holmes in Tom Bidwell’sThe Irregulars, appears to have indulged in stronger stimulants than ‘a sandwich and a cup of coffee’ on his journey to ‘violin-land’.
My thanks again to the Netflix team, including costume designer Edward K. Gibbon for the ruffled, threadbare portrait in this week’s Radio Times. The magazine is stuffed with beautifully turned-out, well-scrubbed celebrities, but obviously Holmes after an overdose of his seven-per-cent solution is more appealing to draw with my Lamy Vista and De Atramentis Document Ink.
We’re getting towards the end of Women in History month but I couldn’t miss out Lady Kathleen Pilkington of Chevet Hall. A visitor in 1913 described her as ‘a fearless rider’ with the Badsworth Hunt and ‘a splendid rifle shot’.
She is fond of racing and is specially devoted to birds and her collection of foreign birds is one of the best in England.”
Charlton Jemmett-Browne, The French Bulldog, USA, September 1913
Lady Kathleen Mary Alexina Milborne-Swinnerton-Pilkington (Cuffe) (1872-1938), appeals to me as a character to draw because she spans the era of Sherlock Holmes – she’d be the plucky young gel who Doctor Watson would fall for – right through to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction when, with her champion French Bulldog, Chevet Punch, she’d be the formidable matriarch in an Agatha Christie country house party murder mystery.
I’m grateful to the Wakefield Historical Appreciation Site (WHAS) on Facebook: thanks to Keith Wainwright for posting the photograph of the Pilkington family in 1906, about to set out on a bicycle ride around the Chevet Estate. Lady K. is wearing her hunting pink complete with top hat!
Chevet Punch & Daisy
MINIATURE BULLDOGS “Champion Chevet Punch” & “Chevet Daisy” Owned by Lady Kathleen Pilkington Painting by Maud Earl, 1910
Lady K. was so renowned for her Champion French Bulldogs (and who could resist Chevet Punch and Chevet Daisy?!) that American short story writer and poet Bret Harte once requested a puppy from her in verse:
"Which I have a small favour to ask you,
As concerns a bull-pup, and the same,—
If the duty would not overtask you,—
You would please to procure for me, game;
And send her express to the Flat, Miss,—
For they say York is famed for the breed,
Which, though words of deceit may be that, Miss,
I'll trust to your taste Miss, indeed."
Bret’s ‘Flat’ was at 72/74 Lancaster Gate, Bayswater, so the bull-pup was going to a good home: Kensington Gardens is just five minutes walk away.
Leopold Harrison Osterfield), Bea (Thaddea Graham) and Jessie (Darci Shaw)
Sherlock Holmes’ streetwise Baker Street Irregulars were adept at making discrete searches of riverside wharves and back alleys and the new gang in Tom Bidwell’sThe Irregulars, launching tomorrow on Netflix, shouldn’t have any problems blending seamlessly into the crowd, provided they’re making their enquiries during the height of London Fashion Week.
Royce Pierreson’s ever-discrete Watson has dug out his old service revolver – perfect for undercover work – while Billy (Jojo Macari) walks softly and carries an enormous drumstick. Spike (McKell David), a character who appears to be as moody as Heathcliff but who dresses like Harpo Marx, favours a large blunderbuss.
The cast in costumes designed by Edward K. Gibbon appear in this week’s Radio Times, as does Sherlock (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) himself, who doesn’t appear until several episodes into the series.
Lloyd-Hughes looks very much as I picture the original Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes also features in the article.
As does the actor who appeared in more screen adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories than anyone else, Jeremy Brett. We were lucky to get to see Brett alongside Edward Hardwicke as Dr Watson in The Secret of Sherlock Holmes at Bradford’s Alhambra Theatre. The Irregulars have a tough act to follow, but it looks as if it will be a lot of fun.
There’s trade war with France, the pandemic is peaking on the continent and Scotland is making a bid for independence.
Yes, we’re going back 650 years for today’s Wakefield Woman in History, the formidable Annabel Grenehod. She could certainly put over a convincing case at the Manor Court which was in the middle of town, right opposite the main entrance to the parish church (now the cathedral) on the site now occupied by the former BHS store.
On Thursday, 18th November, 1350, there were more than a dozen cases for the attention of for R. (Robert?), son of John the Steward, including debt, trespass, a runaway servant, straying animals and the theft of a crop of oats. First up was Elizabeth Pellesondoghter, who was fined for not prosecuting a trespasser, but in the next case Annabel proved more determined. The Wakefield Court Rolls record that:
John del Rode failed to make the law which he waged against Annabel Grenehod, executrix of the will of John Grenhod chaplain: therefore it is judged that she should recover against the said John del Rode 1 stone of wool which she claimed against him in the preceding court, and he is amerced (fined).
Wakefield Court Rolls, Thursday, 18th November 1350
At that previous court on the 21st October, Annabel had claimed 2 stones of wool, price 8s, against John del Rode. Eight shillings would be about about £230 today, enough to buy a cow or a quarter of a ton wheat. John had admitted to owing one stone of wool but had disputed the second.
That seemed to be the case settled, so presumably Annabel reclaimed the rest of her wool, but it wasn’t the end of her legal tussles because at the next court, on 18th November, she was chasing Robert de Bothe for a debt of sixpence (£14 or £15, the daily wage of a skilled tradesman). Again she won the case.
Unusually, the Lord – or Lady? – of the Manor of Wakefield at the time was the equally feisty Matilda de Neirford, Countess de Warenne, who had been in a long term relationship with the late John, Earl de Warenne, but their children were considered illegitimate, so he was the last of his line of the Norman Lords of the Manor of Wakefield.
A Stone of Wool
From, ‘The Statutes at Large’, Owen Ruffhead, 1761, available as an eBook from Google Books
In the year that Annabel’s case came up, Edward III turned his attention to weights and measures, insisting that the Stone – which he specified as 14 pounds weight – should be used as a measure of wool, using a ‘Beam of the Balance’, rather than the Auncel, a balance scale with a movable weight, which made it easy for a merchant to falsify the weight.
Wool was so important to the kingdom’s economy that Edward insisted that his Lord Chancellor should sit on a bale of wool – the Woolsack – a tradition that continued in the House of Lords until 2006. The tradition continues to this day with the Lord Speaker now sitting on ‘The Woolsack’.
One of the reasons that Edward III’s ‘Hundred Year War’ got started was to protect England’s wool trade routes. Battle of Crécy in 1346 gave Edward an early victory.
