A busy week for birthdays including, for Arden, some Secrets of the Underground beneath a Victorian villa. The map is 70% accurate: the Victorians did a lot of groundwork when they built their villas.
Paul Simon at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival. Photo Credit: Rett Rogers, Newport Folk Festival, Newport Buzz website.
Less accurate: Paul Simon didn’t, unfortunately, include the exciting new ballad Dave in his surprise set at the Newport Folk Festival. My nephews James (happy birthday today), Richard and Tom gave its world premiere last month, at Dave and my sister Lin’s golden wedding celebrations.
It opens with Dave on his trusty NSU Quickly moped phut-phutting to the rescue with nothing to sustain him on his journey except a raw onion, hence the chorus, ‘Bite! Bite!’.
Performing alongside the Ingham brothers, my great-nephew Dylan, who also celebrated a birthday during this last week.
Happy birthday to Sue (a few days ago) who, as a member of our local wild flower group, follows in the footsteps of Thomas Gissing, pharmacist of Westgate, Wakefield, father of novelist George.
Das Hardwood Modelling Tools, made in Italy by F.I.L.A., Pero (Milan)
I bought these just before the pandemic to model ‘Plasticine’ Wallace and Gromit-style puppets for an animation project that never got the go-ahead. Shame, as I’d asked Karen Chalmers if she could do the music, as she did with my Rhubarb Festival animation, and she’d already come up with a few suggestions of how we might do it.
My unfinished (well, never even started) ‘Waterton and the Nondescript’ stop motion animation project.
It might be time to give it a try although sculptor Wilfrid Wood recently posted a photograph on Instagram showing the effect of a heatwave on Plasticine: his carefully carved head-and-shoulders portrait had been transformed into something that resembled one of The Abominable Dr. Phibes’ waxworks. A shame that Vincent Price isn’t still around to play Wilfrid if there’s ever a bio-pic.
I’ve gone for Newplast for my modelling material.
I’m sure I’ll work out what all those wooden knives, scrapers, probes and spatulas are supposed to do.
In the waiting room at Specsavers and couldn’t draw anyone without them spotting me so it was back to drawing my hand in my A6 landscape sketchbook.
iPad drawing in Clip Studio Paint
I was in for micro suction wax removal so I’ve done a few sessions in preparation lying on the sofa with olive oil in my ear. That’s an awkward angle for drawing and I realise that the Paperlike screen protector has lost its texture after eight months of use so my Apple Pencil was slipping about as I drew, so it’s time to renew it using the spare sheet that came in the pack.
iPad drawing in Clip Studio Paint
I’ve never replaced the drawing tip of my Apple Pencil so that’s something worth trying to give more traction and feedback from the drawing surface.
Fifty years ago today my exhibition, The Yorkshire of William Baines, marking the 50th anniversary of the death of the composer was in its second (and final) week at the Harrogate Festival. According to my diary William’s music and my show were getting a good reception.
I’ve been here before; coming through the darkened room with the piano and sitting down and watching. I definitely remember some of the slides particularly.
“I’ve been here before;” was the reaction of one young visitor, “coming through the darkened room with the piano and sitting down and watching. I definitely remember some of the slides particularly.”
His parents were equally enthusiastic; his mum thought ‘the music was marvellous’ and his dad mentioned that he had a friend who interviewed for Radio 3.
People had been so helpful as I prepared the show, loaning pictures, objects and manuscripts connected to the composer.
Helen Millifanti, curator of the Pump Room Museum, found me an Edison phonograph which we got working. It stood in a mocked-up parlour with an upright piano also on loan from the museum alongside a framed photograph of William as a toddler standing next to an Edison Bell Phonograph. I think that I remember that Mr Baines, William’s father, George William, sold them in his shop on the High Street; the latest technology in his day.
Radio Leeds
Ringing one of the Horbury Handbell Ringers’ bells in a Radio Leeds interview
Radio Leeds had just celebrated its fourth birthday. My interview with Peter Hawkins went well and they invited me to write and introduce a radio documentary on Baines to coincide with the anniversary in November.
Goodnight to Flamboro’
Surprising one of the visitors
The Man from Groves Dictionary
To celebrate William’s sea piece Goodnight to Flamboro’, I painted one of the sections of the clip together displays we’d assembled for the exhibition.
Highlight of the week was a recital by Eric Parkin on Friday 4th August. Peter Hawkins interviewed a cousin of William’s Elsie Hargreaves and his school day’s friend Ernest Hindle and I’m pleased to say that we still have a couple of brief clips in my Hat’s Off Gentleman – A Genius! documentary.
Miss Tiffany, a volunteer who often manned the desk at my Baines exhibition.
Amongst the audience was, according to my diary, a ‘Chorister from York’. That must have been Robin Walker, now a composer himself who has been busy producing a new recording of William’s music to launch this autumn for the 100th anniversary.
Bird and Wells
I got to meet Linda Kitson who was energetically working as artist in residence at the Festival. Drawing at events and recitals during the day and posting the results on a board in the Majestic Hotel in the evening. The ‘Writers Talking’ sessioin on Saturday 5 August included Stan Barstow and Terence Dicks. While Stan’s work is definitely inspired by gritty reality, Terence Dicks, script editor on Dr Who, explained that his ‘life has been free of super villains, space monsters and Cybermen’.
My life has been free of super villains, space monsters and Cybermen
All the while Linda Kitson was squatting on the floor, moving about to to draw the various speakers. I wished that I could be so fearless when out with my sketchbook. She assured me that I’d love working at the Royal College of Art. She’d recently graduated but she said she often dropped in, using the place as ‘her club’. I became a good deal more at ease drawing in public thanks to the weekly sessions drawing at London Zoo during my time at the RCA.
Surprise visitors: John Bird and John Wells
I was most star struck though meeting satirists John Bird and John Wells who’d come in to the Royal Baths, where my exhibition was held, to escape from the rain.
Gilbert Mills
A satisfied customer!
On Thursday, 10th August, veteran pianist Gilbert Mills introduced himself. Born ten years before William (so that would be about 1889) he championed William’s music in the very earliest days of radio, before the BBC was founded, giving recitals on 2LO, as it was called.
He demonstrated on the old upright piano in my mock-up of the Baines parlour. He insisted that Eric Parkin hadn’t got it right in his recording of Blackbird Singing in a Convent Garden. He played it with the trilling lilt that you get when a blackbird sings.
he was an odd bod. He was reckoned to be something of a genius even when he used to wander about Cleckheaton; gaunt-looking and huge hands, long fingers he had
A visitor on the final day of the exhibition who knew William
Sketching the ducks, cormorant, Canada geese and in-between black-headed gulls, some juveniles, some adults beginning to lose their black heads. We were surprised how few – if any – there were at the black-headed gull colony at St Aidan’s last week. They’d been so noisy in the spring and early summer. Now I guess they’ve dispersed with a hundred or more – perhaps St Aidan’s birds – turning up at Newmillerdam, where they can perch on fallen willows on the quieter bank of the lake and keep an eye out for hand-outs on the war memorial side.
And yes, I might have drawn more of them if I hadn’t been sidetracked by a Danish cinnamon pastry at the Boathouse.
These coots have raised a brood at the nest site I drew last year near in the corner by the outlet of the lake.
Thanks to instant communication, I was able to message my photograph of the Danish pastry to the far end of the lake as a warning to Barbara that I’d got tied up on essential business, however I beat her and her brother back to the car park and had time to draw two of the chimney stacks of the Fox and Hounds, adding the colour later from a photograph.
Writing in The Wakefield Free Press, ‘The Rambler’ recalls a visit to Coxley Valley, Sunday 22 July, 1888.
Strolling in Coxley Valley
Haymaking, Coxley Valley
I arrived at this much talked of “beautiful and charming resort” with senses refreshed by the newly-made hay and the various wild flowers that send forth their perfume from the woods up the slope. A turn of the road soon brought me in sight of “Belmont Shanty” as it is called, and as I read a bill on the boards my spirits began to revive. Here is a copy of it:
“This way to Belmont Gardens.”
Pleasure Boats
Proposed scheme; there’s no evidence that there was ever a steam launch operating on Coxley Dam.
Following the directions thus pointed I failed to find any, but continuing down the western slope, I reached the bottom, when lo, I beheld a small lake, and on it several pleasure boats plying their living freight, as busy as if Sunday was of no moment to them.
The Photographer
The Charlesworth family photographed in Coxley Valley
In disgust at the sight, I went on my way until I came in close quarters with a photographic establishment, the proprietor of which, finding six days’ work not sufficient, continues to labour on the seventh.
‘Terrible Red Dwarfs’
Danger! Red Dwarfs at work in Coxley Valley!
‘Sad at heart’ (artist’s impression: I haven’t yet discovered the true identity of ‘The Rambler’).
I certainly expect when his plate of the concert of last Sunday becomes fully developed, I shall be immortalised in the same, with a book in hand and sad at heart.
Yes, sad at heart, pained in mind, and trembling for the awful doom that awaited those “terrible red dwarfs” seen in Coxley Valley last Sunday.
And were there really some in the Valley? Yes, and of all the dwarfs that ever did live these certainly did the most harm.
‘Rambler’ is quoting from a satirical book, ‘The Terrible Red Dwarf’ by M. Guy Pearce, popular with the Temperance Movement.
This was all the more wonderful because they were so ridiculously small, measuring only a few inches in length. Then I noticed that the caves in which they lived were dark, low arched, but strongly guarded. Then there were two ivory gates shut them in fast, and outside there were two other gates that were made to fasten quite closely.
There was no other in all the land that was so secured; and yet, in spite of all this, there was not another dwarf that it was so difficult to shut up.
Their conversation from beginning to end was discussing that all-important event to come off shortly between Horbury Bridge St. John’s and Thornhill cricket teams for the Challenge Cup.
The Band Stand
Finding no cessation of their obscene language, I left the dwarfs’ quarters and wended my way to the band stand, when, by the strains of sweet music played from the heart and soul by the bandsmen, my frame of mind came back again to its former self, and for the the rest of the afternoon I delighted myself in listening to the various selections and enjoying the beautiful scenery up the slope, and the warbling song of birds.
Projected scheme by George F. T. Charlesworth for Coxley Valley pleasure gardens. Only the right-hand bay of the building below Sun Wood was ever constructed.
The band, which consisted of about 21 performers, played remarkably well, under the conductorship of Mr Wm. Atkinson, the bandmaster, andd the following programme was gone through :- The “Gloria,” from Mozart’s 12th Mass; chorus, “Maritana,” by Wallace; “Hallelujah Chorus”; rect. &c., “Comfort ye my people,” “And the glory of the Lord,” “The hours of beauty,” concluding with the National Anthem.
Wicken Tree Hall
Wicken Tree Hall and the ‘Rose Garden Pleasure Grounds’, Coxley Valley, from the Ordnance Survey 6 inch map 1888-1913, National Library of Scotland.
During the performance a collection was made in aid of the band funds, and, it now being turned four o’clock and threatening water clouds hanging overhead, I drew myself together, went on to the old well-established Wigantree* Hall (kept by an old lady over 80 years of age, and her daughter), refreshed myself with a cup of good tea, and after becoming the recipient of a bit of grand-motherly advice from the old lady, I made my way back home again, and on the journey determined to let your readers know about the Sunday visit to Coxley Valley of the poor, old “Rambler.”
*Wicken Tree Hall, probably a transcription error from ‘Rambler’s’ handwritten article.
Extract form The Wakefield Free Press, Saturday 28 July, 1888
Link
Coxley Valley I’m reprinting my A6 booklet later this month
Teddy is a puggle – a cross between a pug and a beagle – which, according to his minder (his owners are away on holiday), means that he always looks slightly bad tempered. On the contrary, he keeps his cool when a passing border collie challenges him with a barrage of barking, looking the over excited passer by as he was thinking just what is the matter with you.
