Tag: Horbury

Educating Horbury

Educating Horbury

My thanks and congratulations to Helen Bickerdike and the Horbury People’s Museum team for putting together the latest exhibit in the display cases in Horbury Library.

St Peter's School staff

It features the surprising number of educational institutions associated with the town over the years, including St Peter’s Church of England primary school, where I was lucky enough to have a series of remarkable form teachers between 1958 and 1962:

  • Miss Andrassy, who was so keen on art
  • Mr Harker who took us rambling and Youth Hostelling
  • ex-professional footballer Mr Thompson who was a terrific storyteller (even when he was really supposed to be teaching us whatever the curriculum was at that time)
  • Mr Lindley who encouraged us in drama, puppet shows and giving short talks to the whole class in the regular Friday-afternoon Storyteller’s Club
  • keen fell-walker Mr Douglas, the perfect example of a pipe-smoking headmaster with a voice like Gandalf with a Yorkshire accent.
junior artowrk
Clay head from my third year in Mr Thompson’s class, booklets and painting of the rebuilding of Golden Square, Horbury, from my fourth and final year at St Peter’s in Mr Lindley’s class (called 4D rather than 4L, we might not have been the perfect class, but we weren’t that bad).

Link

The Horbury Tapestry

Homecoming Cake, 1946

Betty and John

My mother-in-law Betty Ellis didn’t feel much like celebrating on VE Day, eighty years ago. Her husband Bill was still in Italy, south of the River Po, and would soon be posted to North Africa and later to Northern Italy, close to the border with Yugoslavia.

The celebrations came a year later, as Betty and Bill recall in this short extract from a 45 minute cassette tape, which I recorded at the time of the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995.

There are a few comments from me and my mum in the background.

Betty lived on Gervaise Road, Horbury. Hagenbach’s baker’s was on the High Street, in the shop which is now the Darling Reads bookshop.

Bill returned to Westgate Station, Wakefield.

My thanks to George Senior, one of her great-grandsons, for restoring the sound quality on this recording.

My sketch of Betty baking in her kitchen at Manorfields Drive, Horbury, in the 1980s.

The Weeping Birch

sketchbook page

Stan Barstow Memorial Garden, Queen Street, Horbury, 2.30 pm, 65℉, 17℃: As soon as I sit on a bench beneath a weeping silver birch, aphids and plant bugs start trundling about on my knee and over my sketchbook page.

On Stage at Horbury School . . .

cartoon

Great celebrities who trod the boards at Horbury School:

  • David Munrow, early music historian
  • R. D. Woodall, local historian and head teacher
  • Jane McDonald, singer, who appeared as Snow White in a Pageant Players’ pantomime (she’s now starring in pantomimes at the London Palladium, so we taught her well!)
  • Sir Christopher Chataway, runner (one of the pacemakers for Roger Bannister when he ran the first 4-minute mile), who officially opened the school in 1963 when he served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education in Harold Macmillan’s government
  • Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist

. . . and not forgetting:

  • My brother Bill who played a pirate on the Hispaniola in the Pageant Player’s performance of the Mermaid Theatre version of ‘Treasure Island’ (we used their scripts and Bill told me that one of them was dotted with odd doodles: we suspect it was the script Spike Milligan used when he played Ben Gunn)
  • My sister Linda, who played Lucy Lockit in the Ossett Grammar School production of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (a new assembly hall was under construction at Ossett so they used Horbury’s stage for several years)
  • And me. I never performed on stage but I painted scenery for the Pageants for 40 years and, as a young member of the Horbury Concert Society, I illustrated and designed posters, leaflets and programme covers, including those for David Munrow and Allan Schiller

Happy birthday to Zac, who may get tread the boards at Horbury Academy in the next few years.

Link

Jane MacDonald, singer and BAFTA award winning TV presenter

Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist

Horbury Pageant Players

Horbury Academy

Threads

At Horbury Library this morning the Friends of the Library group launched the Horbury Tapestry website, featuring an ultra-high resolution interactive version of the tapestry which was created twenty years ago to celebrate the centenary of the town’s Carnegie Free Library.

Horbury library
In the group creating the tapestry (centre, top) that’s my mum on the left and her friend Olive Sergeant on the right.
My mum used a drawing I’d made of Carr Lodge for her emboridery.

My mum, Gladys Bell, was one of 70 stitchers led by Janet Taylor who between them created more than 200 pieces of embroidery celebrating the life of the town.

Link

www.horburytapestry.co.uk designed by the One to One Development Trust

High Street

High Street

Horbury High Street drawn from Auckland Opticians this morning.

John Carr’s Birthplace

John Carr

Spotted at the Øl hygge café bar, High Street, Horbury, this morning: to celebrate his 300th birthday last month, John Carr makes a brief visit to his birthplace, the cottage at the left-hand end of this Grade II-listed former farm house, which dates from 1637.

John Carr display

After his extended stint as architect in residence at the Redbox Gallery, Queen Street, the John Carr roadshow was moving on to its next venue . . . at the other end of Horbury, in the Carnegie Free Library.

Addingford in May

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