I’m missing our local Penguin colony on the High Street; lined up along their ledges with that evocative smell: fresh paperback. Bright plumage with distinctive orange stripes; a crisp riffle as you browse your way through and, on their backs, to make them even more attractive, each has a unique patch of blurb. I’m concerned because, these days, we don’t see many Puffins. York once had a thriving colony of them, nestling on stacks near the Jorvik Centre.
I can tell that the lockdown has gone on for too long because a few weeks ago I started reading – for the first time – a textbook from my college days Man and the Vertebrates: 1 by A. S. Romer. It was written pre-DNA studies, so really it’s out of date, but it’s interesting to go through a story that I’m familiar with through David Attenborough’s Life on Earth and other books and documentaries, but written from a different point of view. I don’t think that I’ll be going on to Volume 2, which is about human anatomy and evolution. We’ve come a long way since the book was reprinted in 1963 and even further since the original edition in 1933.
The cartoon is my weekend’s homework for my Mattias Adolfsson illustration course.
Here’s a story that I was told at a wedding reception in Thorpe on 4 September, 1982:
‘Graham Smithson and David Jones who were fishing at Walton Hall some ten years ago (so about 1972) found a log at the side of the lake. It was hollow and inside they found an old parchment and a diary. Yorkshire Television were doing a feature on Waterton at that time. They sent the material through the post and heard no more of it.’
From my pocket sketch/notebook, 1982
Graham was David’s best man at the wedding
An additional detail which I remember but didn’t add to the note is that the parchment referred to a land transaction. I have a vague idea that the documents might have been hidden in a compartment in an old tin, but I’m not sure on that one.
Owl house, c.1920, a photograph in the collection at Wakefield Museum, reproduced in Brian Edginton’s ‘Charles Waterton, A Biography’ and in my booklet on ‘Waterton’s Park’
What they’d found was probably one of Waterton’s bird habitat hollow trees. He had one enormous tree trunk moved to the lakeside and converted it into a combined nesting box and hide. Perhaps Waterton was in the habit of spending time there and for some reason kept a diary and a particular document there.
I’d love to know more. So, if you’ve been clearing out a cupboard at Yorkshire Television and you’ve come across an old notebook . . .
I’m planning an animation with a Charles Waterton character who will be a Wallace & Gromit-style Plasticine figure in a miniature stage set based on Waterton’s study at Walton Hall. Waterton enthusiastically describes his conservation efforts which are all on a rather grand scale. This is where my second character, Waterton’s sidekick ‘The Nondescript’ comes in: he comes up with simpler, smaller and-here’s-one-you-can-make-at home projects, which we can all tackle.
My version of Waterton’s famous creation is more down-to-earth than the Squire himself. He might be from the Deepest Jungles of South America but he’s no Paddington Bear. He’s part Spirit of the Forest and part trusty retainer, like John Ogden, Waterton’s gamekeeper, but he probably also has a hint of easy going rock star charisma about him (perhaps like Francis Rossi from Status Quo?). He’s developing into an interesting character.
I like the partners-in-crime camaraderie of the pair in my first sketch. I can imagine the duo getting into all sorts of scrapes as they create ‘The World’s First Nature Reserve’ at Walton Park.
I’ve already tackled the story of the nature reserve in one of my pocket-sized local guides, Waterton’s Park, and in Part III: The Defence of Nature in John Whitaker’s Charles Waterton, A Comic Book Adventure. When I drew the comic strip, I thought of it in terms of a storyboard for a live-action film, so this time it’s less period drama and hopefully more like Aardman’s The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, which featured Charles Darwin. That was a lot of fun, right down to the end credits. I must also try and take a look at Chris Butler’s The Missing Link, which featured a Nondescript character coming in from the wilds.
Mrs Wing-Nut came from a long line of Whitworth thread coach bolts. Sadly today she’s been cross-threaded. Nothing that a squirt of WD40 shouldn’t be able to remedy.
Enrolling on Mattias Adolfsson’s Sketching course can seriously undermine your grip on reality . . .
A post about the Hartley Bank Colliery mineral railway on the Horbury and Sitlington Facebook page today prompted me to go up into the attic to look out this spread from the spring of 1962. This must have been the first time that my brother Bill and I explored so far in Addingford, with our friends, the Cassidy brothers, Steven and David. We dressed for the occasion, armed with a couple of garden canes and with two of us wearing World War II tin hats.
My Exercise Books from 1960 to 62.
I’m glad still to have these exercise books, but unfortunately they don’t often take a diary form like this: I was more likely at that time to be turning the latest Biblical epic into a cartoon strip. I drew hundreds of Roman soldiers. Having said that, I have a complete run of diaries from my Grammar School years.
“It may not have been a long walk we went on but when we were back we had the benefit of playing commandos and learning how to swing on trees, seeing frogs mating, toads and a canal salvage boat in action.”
My summing up of the ramble (spelling corrected), spring, 1962
I don’t mention it in my comic strip but ‘learning how to swing on trees’ reminds me of an occasion, perhaps later that day, when all four of us were swinging over a water-filled ditch by the canal near our ‘Frogtown’. I ended up in the water and stormed off back home on my own, blaming Steven for my downfall.
The canal near Horbury Bridge, this morning.
Notes on the Panels
Panel 1: Gathering together at the end of our driveway, Smeath House, Jenkin Road, Horbury. Our family lived in the ground floor flat, the Cassidys in the first floor.
Panel 2: Setting off via Grove Road, crossing Westfield Road and down Addingford Lane (the A642 Southfield Lane Horbury bypass was constructed a few years later).
Panel 3: Addingford Drive hadn’t been built at the top of the slope, so the woods and scrub alongside Addingford Steps, with steep paths running through them were ideal for a game of commandos.
Panel 4: Crossing the bridge over the railway, the footway alongside the Hartley Bank mineral railway and the bridge over the canal at the foot of the Balk.
Panel 5: The open-ended shed is one of the coal loading bays alongside the canal at Hartley Bank Colliery.
Panel 6: Repairs to the canal. They did a good job: over half a century later, these interlocking steel sections are still holding up this section of the canal bank.
Panel 7: Steven.
Panel 8: Welder at work, note the goggles.
Panel 9: I think that this is my brother striding by in the foreground with long socks, short trousers and yellow pullover.
Panel 10: ‘Frogtown’, a notch cut in the canal bank to allow coal barges using the British Oak loading chute to turn around. This effectively cut off a stretch of a public right of way. The route of the footpath is still marked on the OS map but, 60 years later, the route hasn’t been reinstated.
Three weeks ago the hawthorn had burst into fresh green leaf and our local ponies were tucking into it. My comic strip is based on actual events: we were following two ponies along the lane, one of which whinnied and backed along a track when surprised by a blackbird bursting out of the hedge.
I was asking the rider of the other pony why hers, which was unruffled by the blackbird incident, kept so close to the hedge:
“It’s the hawthorn, he likes anything he can get his mouth around!”
As we stood back to let the ponies go by, a couple of the people who live by the stables were standing nearby drinking their morning coffee.
“Some of the ponies around here could do to see a psychologist!” I suggested.
“Not just the ponies,” the man agreed, “Some of the people too!”
I’ve struggled with this comic strip. I started drawing on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, then decided that I’d be better drawing with pen on paper and finally, for the last two panels, I went back to my iPad. As you can see from my rough, I thought about including the blackbird incident and the hawthorn nibbling as panels but then I decided that, rather like a situation comedy, this strip should focus on the relationship between the two ponies on their home turf.
On balance, I probably prefer the extra action in my original rough, but it’s time to leave this strip and go on to a fresh one, and I have got plans to take the characters further afield.
It’s good to have a new sketchbook and to have an aim in mind. Alongside my fantasy pen illustrations for the Mattias Adolfsson’s course, I also need to draw everyday objects, which will be my starting point for more imaginative drawings.
Objects do have a character, a life of their own. This selection from my drawer includes a homemade clinometer, used to measure the angle of dip of strata, which dates back to when I was taking an A-level in geology, but didn’t have the funds to treat myself to the real thing. I bought a cheap plastic geometry set from the Eagle Press in Wakefield, stuck the protractor to an offcut of hardboard from an unfinished acrylic painting and added a plumb line made from a thread with a small nut attached. The larger compass-like instrument in the foreground is a map measurer. It’s so much easier to plan routes for walks in these days; I’m spoilt for choice for digital maps, the Ordnance Survey is my current favourite.
Despite all the advances in technology my Olympus Pearlcorder microcassette recorder still has its uses. Yesterday I recorded a list of plants as we walked along between the hedges of a sunken lane. It was a cool morning but I can operate the Pearlcorder even with my gloves on. In contrast, when I’m using my iPhone, which I love, as a camera I still occasionally brush against some peripheral icon and end up getting a screen with my Twitter feed and messages on it. The Pearlcorder has reassuringly chunky buttons.
When I left art college and set myself up in my first flat, I decided that anything that I bought – for instance a bread knife, a bowl or a bread knife – had to be practical but also drawable, which for me meant the sort of object you might see in a storybook. So instead of going for the latest shiny designer teapot with its chrome and pyrex, I would go for the traditional brown ceramic version. The veg brush on the right has my ideal combination practicality and drawability and it we bought it at what must surely be the most design-conscious retail outlet in the Peak District: the shop at the David Mellor cutlery factory at Hathersage. Look forward to visiting it again after the lockdown.
Crafts
Finally, here are a couple of Barbara’s lockdown craft creations: a tote bag using curtaining material from a bag of remnants from the much-missed Skopos in Batley and, a new venture for her, an embroidery based on some natural forms she’s been drawing recently.
As today would have been the first of our Wakefield Naturalists’ Society outdoor meetings, Richard and I decided we would spend our one hour walk to Smithy Brook recording the species we saw. After all the glorious sunny weather over the last six weeks, today was disappointingly overcast, breezy and quite cool, however it actually made it easier to stop and identify the plants as no-one else seemed inclined to be out and about. We counted 59 plant species but only eight birds, as the cooler weather seemed to have dampened their spirits: we usually get skylark, sparrows and various finches and tits along the lane but today we heard chiff-chaff and yellow hammer and watched a buzzard soaring over the fields. Because of the cooler weather we didn’t see a single butterfly. We would normally see speckled wood along the sunken lane, then peacock, small tortoiseshell and orange tips along the more open stretch.
Smithy Brook Valley.
When we looked closer at the wild flowers, we spotted common vetch alongside the more conspicuous bush vetch and we almost missed a patch of ground ivy, nestling among the grass and herbage on the sunken lane. Over the last few weeks we have watched the countryside changing as the hawthorn hedges turn from fresh green leaf to frothy white blossom, giving off that wonderful musky sweet smell of spring. Bluebells, white and red campion and Herb Robert were just a few of the species along the lane with wild garlic, white comfrey and yellow flag alongside Smithy Brook. A field dotted with meadow buttercups and the bright yellow of a patch of birdsfoot trefoil add a little brightness to the morning.
As well as the fantasy pens, I’ve been adding to this A3 sheet of pen studies over the last week. The red fountain pen, the Osmiroid B2, is one that I probably haven’t used for decades but I found that I still had a cartridge that fitted it, so I cleaned it out and drew the Osmiroid ‘tipped medium soft’ with it to finish off the sheet.
And here’s the final sketchbook spread of my fantasy pens. I had a space bottom left to fill so I finished off with a Metamorphosis Pen (apologies for my spelling) and Big-Fish-Eat-Little-Fish Food Chain Pen.
I’m looking forward to Lesson 2 of my online illustration course. Luckily there’s no time limit on completing assignments.
