Tag: Diary

Cross Country

Not surprisingly, my earliest attempts to keep a diary were illustrated, although not usually as elaborately as this account of the school cross country run. Cross country was a brilliant excuse for me and my friend John to get out of football, run off down towards the gasworks, then saunter along the canal towpath enjoying the Calder Valley countryside that still provides the subject matter for my sketchbooks. Obviously, in that annual race, we had to put a bit more effort in. Thirty-sixth isn’t bad!

The reference to the ‘Hostile Alien’ (top right) was to a home movie that my brother and I had made starring my sister in the title role – disguised in a papier-mâché bug-eyed monster head – zapping the soldiers of the World Security Force with a ray gun fashioned from my dad’s chromium-plated torch. Difficult to operate with the boxing gloves that she had to wear.

I’d evidently doctored a Christmas card that we’d sent to Mrs Ruby Jefferies, who had been my Latin teacher at the school – Ossett Grammar School – for a couple of years and who, along with her husband, had rented the upstairs flat in my mum and dad’s large Victorian house.

Our Hostile Aliens, Flying Machines and a secret agent were transferred to video in the 1980s and we’ve since gone back to the original Standard 8 films and had them professionally transferred to DVD and memory stick.

I was approaching my fifteenth birthday at the time and my ‘O’-levels were already looming, so it’s amazing, reading the diary, how much time I was able to spend movie-making, writing, drawing, printing magazines, making models and staging plays and exhibitions. This might account for my rather moderate success in the following year’s exams but my indulgently creative adolescence was a perfect grounding for my years at art college and for my subsequent career which has included elements of all those activities.

With my friends Derek (‘Chic’) and John watching the hockey, with my sister blowing the whistle. Mr ‘Perry’ Mason was our form teacher.
‘Silent Spring – Bill got into fix with plugs. Mum said better than Shakespeare’ (our previous production, Richard III)

In the evening of the day of the cross country my brother and I staged our Silent Spring exhibition, a series of scenes from Rachael Carson’s book, mainly homemade dioramas, illuminated in succession, with a soundtrack that we’d recorded on tape. No role for my sister in that, but she had been referee at the school v. staff hockey match in the afternoon.

Living in the Past

old diaries

I came across the diaries during a pre-Christmas clear up in the studio. Taking a box of slides back up into the attic, I found a cardboard carton which contained five fire-damaged diaries from my school and college days, dating from 1963 to 1969. I’m so glad that despite their charred edges, I kept them. Because of their condition, I haven’t taken a proper look at them for fifty years.

As I like to keep pointing out to my brother, it was his homemade amplifier, our first-ever experience of stereo, that caused the blaze on the metal shelf-unit in our shared bedroom. In return, Bill likes to remind me that when I showed the insurance assessor his partially-melted Jethro Tull albums, I should have questioned his professional opinion that they were still all perfectly playable!

Four of the diaries are National Coal Board staff issue, which my father brought home from work, and the fifth was evidently a promotional item from an engineering firm.

leaflets
My after-school job: On that day I got paid for delivering 1500 leaflets for the Lion Stores supermarket around Ossett. Glad there weren’t more to deliver!

My Dr Who Diary

Lett's Schoolboy's Diary

I’M ONE of the generation who can remember where they were when they heard the news of the assassination of  President Kennedy (just returned from the Friday evening church youth group) fifty years ago but I’d forgotten that the following day saw a happier event when the first episode of Dr Who was broadcast.

Dr WhoI’m travelling back along my own timeline by digging out my 1963 Lett’s Schoolboy’s Diary from the attic. Unfortunately the only event that I recorded for November that year was bonfire night. Not very helpful in building up a picture of the era.

My shiny new 1964 diary.
My shiny new 1964 diary.

I didn’t get into my stride with a diary until the following year but when, aged twelve, I started so enthusiastically (I dropped the colour after 3 weeks) we were still mid-way through the first series of Dr Who so a Dalek appears in my entry for Saturday 4 January;

‘Doctor Who was good today’.

I hadn’t quite got the hang of critical reviewing. In the previous year on the ‘Films seen during the year’ page of my diary I’d summed up Ben-Hur as ‘a good film’ but Tarzan goes to India got a more in-depth review; ‘some excellent elephant shots’. No wonder big screen spectaculars made such an impression on me as television was still 405 lines and black and white. But, as you can see from my postage stamp-sized sketch, the new science fiction series was a hit with me and I could imagine it bursting into colour.

At the barber's, 4 January.
At the barber’s, 2 January.

Unfortunately I no longer have two pieces of Dr Who memorabilia from the 1970s and 80s. One was a sketch that I made of one of the later Doctors, Sylvester McCoy, at a book awards event , the other a copy of Dr Who script editor Terrance Dicks’ paperback guide to the first ten years of the series. But where those two items ended up suggests the effect of the show on the creative imagination of children.

I’d asked Sylvester McCoy to sign the sketch for my nephew Damian, who was Dr Who mad and who would often wear a dressing gown and an extra long scarf, like his hero. And occasionally a piece of celery in his button-hole like Peter Davison’s Dr Who.

3 January, using my chemistry set, a Christmas gift from my parents.
3 January, using my chemistry set, a Christmas gift from my parents.

Damian has apologised to me for losing the sketch years ago! But he is now an architect so if you think you can detect a Cyberman or Dalekian influence in a building, it could be one of his.

The paperback went to Wilfrid, the son of one of my art college tutors, who sometimes quizzed me about the early episodes as he could remember only as far back as Jon Pertwee. Wilfrid went on to create puppets for Spitting Image including an irradiated sea monster for the French version of the show which wouldn’t have been out of place in Dr Who.

The fondly remembered American science fiction series The Outer Limits also features in my diary. Much as I appreciated the Doctor, I liked the slicker (for the time) production values of The Outer Limits and I liked the way that, as a series rather than a serial, you would find yourself in a completely different imaginative world with each one hour episode.

The Beverley Hillbillies

The Beverley Hillbillies Television shows feature a lot in the diary including including The Beverley Hillbillies (Friday 4 January). The six o’clock comedy slot on ITV, which included such series as My Favourite Martian, Mr Ed and Petticoat Junction, was a feature of week-day evenings; a break between school, tea and an evening session homework. pen

Some things never change. January 4: ‘I did my homework with my new pen (3/6).’

Half a century later my search for the perfect pen, the one that’s going to improve my handwriting and my drawing, continues.

My fascination with any technology which would help me to see the world around me in a different way had already started too;

telescope
Looking out over the railway and Storrs Hill road.

2 January; ‘I went on a walk over Storrs [hill] down to Horbury Bridge. Tested telescope.’

telescope

This was a pocket-sized telescope/microscope but the sky was the limit as far as my ambitions were concerned and later in the year I saved up to buy a reflecting telescope kit (£7 from Charles Frank’s of Glasgow).

I remember the thrill of seeing the tiny points of light of the stars come into focus scattered against the inky blackness; that feeling of looking into the depths of space. And of course back in time too . . . perhaps the light from some of those stars had been travelling for fifty years . . .

15 September 1964; ‘Got 50 lines ughh! for not backing book. Did homework. At 8.15 pointed (with Mum’s help) the telescope at the moon. My mother pushed up the mirror too far and out of focus. Eventually we got it focussed. You could see the craters. With Dad out we looked at starfields invisible to eye.’

Student Days

23 June 1972: Working on my degree show at Leeds College of Art. Harpo and Chico.

MY OLD DIARIES and sketchbooks sit on a shelf in the attic and it’s only on odd occasions, such as looking up the details of my first meeting with Stan Barstow (see previous post), that I take a look at them. While I have my 1972 diary down here by the scanner, I can’t resist showing you a few more of the drawings from it. I can see the influence of Victor Ambrus in my pen and Indian ink drawing (above).

In some ways I prefer these playful attempts to catch the events of everyday life to my self-concious efforts as an art student.

Time Capsule

College work, films, television programmes, concerts, books and my dreams all appear in the diary. The Marx Brothers and Dr Who keep cropping up and this Jon Pertwee episode from a story of a 30th century World Empire, screened on Saturday 8 April 1972, seems appropriate as it involves a capsule from the Time Lords which ‘can only be opened by the one for whom it is intended’.

Before watching that episode of Dr Who, I’d been browsing the secondhand books on Wakefield Market and climbing Storrs Hill ‘the hard way’ (right).

I wish that my time capsule of a diary could be more of a two-way process as I’d have one or two pieces of advice to my younger self!

Looking at a diary is a different experience to looking back at one of my sketchbooks. Drawings in my sketchbooks bring back memories of particular places or incidents but as the diary is more about what I was thinking it makes me remember what it felt like to be me. Unlike the sketchbooks, the diaries were never intended to be seen by my tutors as part of my college work nor were they ‘secret diaries’ full of angst. Almost all the drawings were drawn from memory as I wrote up each day’s events.

Greenhouse Mural

It was the year of my 21st birthday and in the September I started at the Royal College of Art. After a few weeks, on Wednesday 4 October, I came up with an ambitious idea for a painting that would take me, on and off, the rest of my 3 years in the Illustration Department to complete:

I did some sketching of plants and birds in the Conservatory. Well it wasn’t too bad doing them in ink. But, after lunch I decided I would have a go with my designer acrylic gouache. A disaster. Perhaps it was too hot to work with paints. But the difficulties; of making the brush go where you want it to – you can’t push it; of mixing the paint and of having no black or white.

I gave up and stormed down to the room (like Van Gogh returning from a cornfield) and did a sketch from imagination of the proposed identification chart which I thought that I might do as a large painting – in emulsion of course!

 Tutorial: ‘Cheat like mad!’

I favoured emulsion because I was so used to using it for scenic painting. Fortunately painting tutor Bateson Mason persuaded me that acrylics would be more suitable. From then on the illustration tutors had to make there way up to my room at the Kensington Gore building if they wanted to keep up with my painfully slow progress on the 4ft x 8ft acrylic on chipboard painting. I remember Bryan Robb chuckling and heartily endorsing Quentin Blake’s advice to ‘cheat like mad’. That’s my natural history illustration tutor John Norris Wood on the right.

I particularly like this drawing of me busily finishing an overdue article for Yorkshire Life in my narrow room at the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington, only 10 minutes walk from the college. It brings back that feeling of having a room of my own for the first time and having lots of time allocated to creative work.

Mid-term, I was invited back to Yorkshire for the Morley Operatic production of Pickwick, to see the scenery for  that I’d painted during the summer vacation (how did I fit that in?!). You can see, in this entry from my diary for the following day, when I had time for a walk around the valley, that after just two months in London I was glad to be back home and that I was feeling a nostalgic pull from my home patch.