From my 1964-65 negatives, this is one of the two coal staithes (loading bays) at Hartley Bank Colliery.
The original (left) was in such a poor state that I’ve coloured it to make it more readable.
The same scene today is more green and rural, so I’ve superimposed my original 50 mm 127 frame on a wide angle iPhone shot of the same view today, taken from the bridge at the bottom of the Balk.
Apologies to ‘Ghosts of Horbury’ on our Horbury and Sitlington History Group Facebook page. I now realise how difficult it is to match up the perspective!
The Calder Valley at Addingford, down Addingford Steps from Horbury, is looking at its best now with hawthorn and cow parsley in flower.
I was intrigued by the old building in Fearnside’s Yard (now renamed Fearnside’s Close) off Horbury High Street. There’s no trace that it was ever half-timbered but it looks very old to me. Those rows of through-stones make me wonder if it was originally faced with stone too.
I got a chance to re-photograph the boy’s entrance to the Wesleyan Day School on School Lane, opposite Fearnside’s Yard on the south side the High Street. When I photographed it for William Baines’ centenary in November there was a skip in front of the window (previously the door for the boys’ entrance).
A new route for the footpath was recently excavated alongside the mineral railway. The embankment’s shale, sandstone and occasional lumps of coal, has been exposed. This kind of debris was once a common sight on colliery spoil heaps and there was always the chance that you might spot a fossil plant such as the bark of a giant clubmoss or horsetail, a reminder of the lush forests that grew here – when this part of the Earth’s crust was close to the equator – 300 million years ago.
Link
The Gaskell School, more about the Wesleyan Day School and William Baines
This morning we walked alongside this meander of the River Calder although in the 45 years since I drew this trees have grown up along the bank, obscuring the view across the river.
My room at 14 Evelyn Gardens, October 1972
It’s rare for me to bump into anyone who I remember from 50 years ago at the Royal College of Art when we’re down by the river but this morning we stopped and had a chat with Sarah, Gardner as was, who lived in a slightly larger room than mine (above) in the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington.
She doesn’t remember me from that time but she was just 4 months old as the term started, so that’s not surprising. Her dad Roger was in his second year in the painting department.
This drawing was in my A4-sized notebook, so the drawings in it are mainly doodles that I got distracted by when I should have been getting on with some writing. I wish that I’d taken the doodles further, I prefer the playfulness to some of my more serious work from that time.
The drawing of my table is so evocative, a reminder me of once-familiar objects such as a pint-sized milk bottle, my long-gone brown teapot and the small transistor radio which wasn’t really up to the job and which I soon replaced, calling in an electrical shop on the Edgeware Road to choose it.
That looks like a plastic butter dish in the foreground, I’d forgotten that. In those days margarine came in a silver paper wrapper rather than in a plastic tub.
Finally, from that same notebook, an early rough for my mural of birds in the college greenhouse on the top floor of the RCA’s Kensington Gore building. You can see that I was keen to include lettering. I think that I was in awe of the work I saw in the painting school, suffering ‘agonies of diffidence’ (to quote comic artist Frank Bellamy when he found himself in a similar context) when I took my work in there.
The lettering was my way of saying this is intended as an illustration, a drawing that’s here to do a specific job – help people identify the birds – not a serious painting.
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.
‘It’s taking a long time to drain off.’ says a dog walker as I drawn the Strands, a field between the river and the canal, ‘I came down on Boxing Day and the path by the old railway was half underwater. It’s underwater again today.’
I thought that I’d heard a horse clip-clopping across the field but it was a mute swan taking off at the top end of the lagoon. I think the noise must have been its wing-tips clattering as they hit the water.
