Tag: Harrogate Festival

William Baines, Harrogate, 1972

Diary, 30 July, 1972

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.”

visitors

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.

phonograph

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

radio interview
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
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
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

Gilbert Mills
customer
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

William Baines Leaflet

Following a discussion on the Horbury and Sitlington History Facebook page, I looked out a copy of my leaflet, The Yorkshire of William Baines, produced as part of my Major Project on the Communication Design (graphic design) course at Leeds College of Art.

The project grew and grew until it included an exhibition and a recital by pianist Eric Parkin at the Harrogate Festival in August 1972, followed by another recital in Horbury, Baines’ home town, in the November (the 50th anniversary of his death, aged just 23), when Parkin was joined by contralto Caroline Foster, who performed five songs by Baines. I transcribed the songs from copies of the original manuscripts but fortunately pianist and singer were able to perform despite my inevitable errors.

Since my degree show days, my enthusiasm for pen and ink drawing and my interest in local history remain undiminished, but I’m so glad that my struggles with Letraset Times New Roman are a thing of the past. Letraset was rub-on lettering supplied on a plastic sheet, which was almost impossible to apply successfully. I wish that I could have had access to a time machine to pop forward 46 years to set up the project on my current iMac!

Victor Ambrus

My pen and ink style was heavily influenced by Victor Ambrus, at that time a prolific illustrator of history and children’s books, and later a regular on Channel 4’s Time Team. He incorporated finger prints into his drawings, so, so did I. I felt that if I could use the same pen and the same paper as he did, I might be able to achieve the assured springiness of his line.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to ask him about his technique when he did a session at a Children’s Book Fair in Leeds. I remember him telling me that he used layout paper for pen and ink work, and some readily available dip pen nib (if I remember rightly, he didn’t use a mapping pen).

Gathering material for the leaflet, I borrowed photographs and drawings from residents and former residents of Horbury and ordered copies of documents and photographs from the Baines archive in the Additional Manuscripts department of the British Library, which was then housed in the British Museum.

The publication was to be a booklet, but one of my graphic design tutors, John Daffern, persuaded me at a late stage to try something more adventurous, so it became two broadsheets in a card cover plus a facsimile of a career-changing telegram that Baines received from composer Arthur Eaglefield Hull. All this in a decorated envelope, that I sent out mail order, stamp stuck over the price tag – 5p – in the top right-hand corner.

The leaflet is currently available from the Rickaro Bookshop, Horbury.

Links

Rickaro Bookshop

Horbury and Sitlington History Page Facebook group