Betty Ellis

on her wartime Christmas Cake adventure

While chatting to my mother-in-law, Betty Ellis, in the spring of 2010, when the whole country had snow, and she said ‘It was snowing when John was born.’

‘Was it? – I never knew that.’ I said, and she told me the story and I asked her to write it down, just as she’d told me, so here, in Betty’s own words, is the story of 80 years ago, in March 1941.

Although they’d called her in unexpectedly, she ended up in Manygates Maternity Hospital longer than she expected.

When I was pregnant with John, I was 19 years old, I didn’t have much knowledge of that side of life.

I went to Manygates . . . but my mother having ill health, could not go with me, so a neighbour went with me. We went on the bus, while I was sitting there all I could think was, when I come home again I shall be a mother. It was the most wonderful and exciting thought.

Anyway, I was there about a week and when the Sister who came round the ward every day came and I heard her say “I think we can send her home, but first we will try castor oil” – and it worked John was born I think round 8 in the evening.

Just after he was born the Air Raid Siren went, I asked where my baby was, they said he had been taken to the shelter, but I said could I go too, but they said no, as I had to stay in bed.

The [bomb] that dropped down Thornes when I was in Manygates Mum told me after, that it lifted her from her chair to the other side of the room.

We had a few bombs drop, one doodlebug dropped in Aunt Annie’s spare bedroom it did a bit of damage but not much, I used to go and clean for her and I didn’t like going in that room after.

Another dropped in Ossett, Mum and I had gone up to see Aunt Sarah Elizabeth and Uncle Wilson, Mum was in the kitchen with Aunt Sarah and I went into the garden with Uncle Wilson, we heard the Plane then we heard the Bomb coming down, I ran into the house, it knocked Uncle Wilson off his feet into the side of his shed, but he wasn’t hurt but we were all shaken up.

It made you realise what People in London and places [were going through] where they were getting that all the time.

Christmas Cake

Betty as I knew her, still baking

It’s typical of Betty that when the bombs were dropping around her, she was thinking of other people who were having a harder time.

I think this last little story really sums up Betty’s character as it involves a bit of an adventure, a touch of mischief and, of course, baking.

Betty had met Bill at a birthday party. She’d gone with her friend from work, Kitty Hornby, who was going out with Bill’s elder brother Charlie at the time.

Bill Ellis

That was the beginning of our lives together. I didn’t see him for a few years when he went overseas, but we wrote each other, we were able to get married while he was still in this country.

I would go and visit him when I got chance which wasn’t very often. It was Christmas and I baked Xmas cake, he was near Sheffield so I went and took a Christmas Loaf, but when I got there it was all railed off, and was getting dark, but there was a soldier going round on guard, so I went and called him over and asked if I could see Bill, so he went to find out, but he said he couldn’t, anyway Bill when he knew I was there he came out although he wasn’t allowed to, so I gave him the Cake through the rails, and I had to leave in case some officer saw us.

It wasn’t very pleasant being alone in the dark and the blackout, in a strange place but I made it home okay.

Betty Ellis, writing in spring, 2010

The Old Stable

shed

There are plenty of pristine-looking sheds about, but I’m not drawing in technical pen with a ruler and set-square, so this much-patched, leaning shed suits my freehand dip pen and Chinese brush better.

I tried four different nibs when starting this drawing but the one I preferred was the Clan Glengarry. I also filled in a bit with bamboo pen.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

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.

Horse Box

horse box

Even George Clarke would struggle to restore this battered old horse box as an Amazing Space.

I drew it with a dip pen with a Clan Glengarry Pen nib, which has a rounded end, so you can draw it across the paper in any direction. It’s De Atramentis Archive Ink, which dries a lot quicker than regular Indian. I used a Chinese brush for the solid areas, which I dragged across the cartridge paper to give a suitably grungy tone.

Cheesy Grater

cheese grater

Catching up with birthdays today and this character has a walk-on part on one of my homemade cards. Not surprisingly he’s soon asked to walk-off again.

The Miss Mosleys

Miss Mosleys

The Miss Mosleys make an appearance in my Wakefield Women in History Month series of sketches, as representatives of the women naturalists, often on the botanical side, who have made such a contribution to our local natural history records. In the days before local and national government departments were set up to monitor the environment we relied – and still do rely to a large extent – on the observations made by amateur naturalists, the original citizen’s science.

As I understand it, the Mosley sisters were natural history royalty, the daughters (correct me if I’m wrong) of an outstanding naturalist of his day, Seth Lister Mosley (1847-1929), curator of the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield. He pioneered an ecological approach to understanding the natural environment. In October 1923 he was invited to the opening of Wakefield’s museum in Holmfield House, in the city’s park.

For many years, the Wakefield Naturalists Society held an unpublished manuscript of British butterflies and moths illustrated and written by Mosley, which has now been added to the archives at the Tolson Museum.

In 1999, Miss A Allen, former leader of Wakefield Naturalists’ Plant Section, recalled the Society’s meetings of half a century earlier:

After the opening formalities at each of our monthly winter meetings, and before we settled down to enjoy the illustrated talk, individual members would tell us of any interesting observations – one of my friends likened this to a Prayer Meeting! We took ourselves seriously, guided by the 60 and 70 year olds in charge.

The summer outings were less formal. The leader for the occasion would have walked the route a few days earlier to ensure that we missed nothing of interest on the Saturday afternoon. Apart from that we just among ourselves and made our own observations.

I was 40 when the 1951 survey was made the Naturalists’ was only one of many leisure pursuits. Looking back, I marvel that I was able to do so much.”

Miss A Allen
Wakefield Naturalists at St Aidan’s last autumn (we were actually more socially distanced than I’ve shown here!)

So Nats meetings were pretty much the same then as they are now! Sadly because of restrictions, we managed just two indoor and two outdoor meetings last year.

Naturalists meeting

In recent years a Wakefield Flower Group was started by the late Pauline Brook. Pauline really would deserve a post of her own. What particularly fascinated me was that, in her younger, hippy years, she had for a while lived in a cave below The Acropolis, Athens. A fascinating and funny lady.

Link

Wakefield Naturalists’ Society

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Ann Hurst

Ann Hurst

According to the blue plaque erected by Wakefield Civic Society this week:

Ann Hurst
(1772-1832)

Wakefield’s first female newspaper owner and proprietor. (1823-1830) Played a leading role in the promotion of the abolition of Slavery and was an active supporter of early medical provision for women and the poor. Her paper ‘The Wakefield & Halifax Journal’ was distributed from this property at 56 Westgate

Wakefield Civic Society, 2021, with Dream Time Creative.
Ann Hurst

I’m not sure if a portrait exists of her, so I imagined her reading galleys from her paper. I’m guessing that to do all she did, she must have been quite a commanding figure, so I thought of Anne Reid’s character, Lady Denham, in the recent television version of Jane Austen’s Sanditon. Hopefully Ann Hurst wasn’t quite so intimidating.

Angelica Kaufmann

Angelica Kaufmann

Angelica Kaufmann’s self-portrait hangs in the house at Nostell Priory and it is possible that she had a hand in the decorations, working alongside Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale. The self-portrait sees her torn between her twins passions – for music and for painting, who she paints as muse-like figures.

Swiss-born Angelica (1741–1807) worked in England for fifteen years and in 1768 became a founder member of the Royal Academy. It would be another 150 years until the next female artist was elected as an academician.

Angelica Kaufmann

If we can believe the portraits of her, Angelica looked impossibly glamorous, in a Dangerous Liaisons kind of way when she painted but I can’t believe that she dressed like that when she painted murals at Nostell, so I’ve borrowed Kate Winslet’s landscape gardener’s outfit from A Little Chaos.

High-speed Still Life

sketches

Don’t get me wrong, I like slow drawing. I love to follow a contour at the speed that an ant would trundle along it. I find cross-hatching, bracelet shading and stippling mindlessly absorbing – or should that be mindfully?

But, as I’ve recently been taking a close look at the work of Quentin Blake, I can also see that it can be liberating to have a change of pace and to lighten up a bit, so each of these little details was completed in a minute or so. No shading, just outline.

As we reach a milestone on what we hope might be a steady return to some kind of normality, I should explain that I’m drawing these on location only because we’re in my brother-in-law John’s support bubble, on our regular socially-distanced visit. Monday morning walking around Illingworth Park with John is the social highlight of our week.

Eliza & Helen Edmonstone

Eliza and Helen

For World Women’s Day, two local heroes, Eliza and Helen Edmonstone, who did what they could in an attempt to preserve the legacy of their brother-in-law Charles Waterton: his museum and nature reserve at Walton Hall, near Wakefield.

Eliza (1807-1870) and her younger sister Helen (1813-1879) were of Scottish/Caribbean descent.

The margay was trained to hunt rats at Walton Hall. I’ve read that Waterton trained it to run with foxhounds.

According to a story that I heard via my tutor, Professor Bryan Robb, at the Royal College of Art, whose wife was related to Waterton, a tame crow (or possibly a raven?) once interrupted mass in the small chapel at Walton Hall, wandering in during the service and causing mayhem.

Charles Dickens consulted Waterton when researching the habits of Grip, the pet raven in Barnaby Rudge.

By the way, a credit to another of my tutors at the Royal College, Quentin Blake, who, amongst other things, did what he could to find me work on BBC television’s Jackanory and who tried to broaden my outlook by getting me to draw zoo animals in the way that Ted Hughes might see them. I now realise that I could have learnt a lot from him, so I’m currently taking another look at his work and trying to free up my pen and wash. When he’s adding wash, he never works exactly to the outline and in this drawing I tried hard to do that, but it’s difficult for me with my rather literal approach to illustration.