Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
More progress with my St Peter’s spire model the the John Carr display. I’ve done it all by eye but as I added frieze, balustrade and pilasters to the belfry I realised that even adding a slither of card to my model would change the proportions. I’ve been working from a photograph and one of my drawings made close to the church so the spire isn’t as tall and soaring as it appears when seen from a distance across the valley.
There are two vital skills that you need if you’re going to design a logo based on an architectural facade: organisation and analytical thinking. Despite my shortcomings in those departments, I have managed what I think will be a usable logo for the friends of the local library.
After struggling with Procreate I’ve constructed this, layer by layer, in the program that I’m most familiar with, Adobe Photoshop, with a bit of help from Adobe Illustrator for those carved panels and, my favourite detail, the curly ironwork on the newly restored weather vane.
This afternoon on the Baines centenary walk, from his birthplace in a terraced house on Shepstye Road to his grave in Horbury Cemetery, we called at the Stan Barstow Memorial Garden on Queen Street. Just over the wire fence at the far end there’s this little patch of overgrown garden, behind Mr Pimm’s dress shop at number 17.
Gordon Pullin, who had performed William’s songs at the recital, read a letter that William had written to his pianist friend Frederick Dawson from this garden.
17 Queen Street,
Horbury,
Nr. Wakefield.
8.8.21
Dear Mr. Dawson,
I like writing this in a gently swinging hammock – underneath a fruit burdened apple tree – a lurid hot blue sky above.
I almost wish that it was apple blossom time . . . . I would love this tree that I am under to shed its snow on me. but, I must be careful not to get a wallop from a frisky apple on my head . . . . the trees are loaded.
I am delightfully lazy! I can smell the ripening raspberries . . . . and the delicate scent in the shade is wonderful . . . .
I might add that a hammock is certainly no the most comfortable place to write in. There is a certain amount of adventure about it . . . . . I might roll over the side before I have finished . . . If I make a blot you will know what has happened.
There is a stolid Yorkshire fly . . . . that will persist in alighting on my nose. ’Tis a bother!
You will notice by the address given on the other side . . . . that I am at my birthplace.
I am staying with an aunt just on the fringe of the village – and everything is quite primitive. No gas – and only well water . . . I almost feel like growing a beard here!! I am the returned native . . . .
As a boy I used to think that the tower of Horbury Church must almost touch the sky. There it stood with its huge finger pointing upwards . . . .
On Shrove Tues:- pancake day as we called it . . . . we were told that at 12 o’clock pancakes were thrown over the steeple. I never saw it happen . . . . . but I thought what a wonderful thing it was to be able to perform such a feat.
But I am wandering from what I intend writing about. Augers have returned my pieces – they inform me that they must wait and see the results of my “4 Poems” . . . . .
These publishers put years on to me.
I have sent them to Elkins – he wants to know my terms? (I have also written to Elikins to see if there is “anything in” its £75 a year royalty story) – If not – what would you say. A royalty on every copy or sell them outright? I must have them out.
Re. “Glancing Sunshine” – my friend Wood has written a verse on it:-
Lying in an emerald glade
Lying in the scented shade –
(Lying, dreaming, as one must)
Glancing through the Fairy Dust –
Seeing a rill floating down,
Dancing in his airy gown:
Singing silver music there
Through the dreamy, dusty air.
Do you like it?
Or does this appeal to you more:-
“In the glancing beams that streamed through the trees the dust danced and was golden”.
This is a piece of Oscar Wilde-Baines.
Last Friday afternoon I journeyed to Harrogate, to see Dan Godfrey . . . . In the train I read a most entertaining book “Set down in Malice” by Gerald Cumberland. I was particularly entertained with one chapter called “Music in Berlin” -!
I can hear someone calling me to tea . . . . tea in this boiling sun! I must away – and get off my perch.
Yours,
P.S. Shall be here until the middle of next week.
The old Gaskell School next to the gates of Carr Lodge Park, Horbury, was standing empty when William Baines made this drawing. I’m guessing that he’d be 8 or 9 years old, so this would have been 1907 or 1908.
The dedication stone is now built into the wall on New Street.
The initials of Daniel and Mary Gaskell are embedded in the apex of a double garage. Daniel was a Liberal MP for Wakefield, first elected in 1832.
William was a pupil at the Wesleyan Day School on School Lane, off Horbury High Street.
The boys’ and girls’ entrances have been blocked up and converted into windows, but you can still see the old stone step on the girls’ side, worn by years of use.
We’re hoping for a good turn out for the William Baines Centenary concert on Sunday at the Methodist Church Hall in Horbury, but we probably won’t have the numbers who attended the stone-laying ceremony on Saturday, 23rd June, 1906, which included a procession starting from the Primitive Methodist Chapel at 2.30 p.m., tea at 4.30 p.m. (capitalised as ‘TEA’ in the advertisement in the Leeds Mercury, indicating this was one of the main attractions), followed by a ‘Great PUBLIC MEETING’ in the Chapel.
Who was there? Mr Jonas Eastwood laid a stone on behalf of the Sunday School.
We’re lucky to still have the building and that it has been so successfully restored recently in connection with the rebuilding of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. The Primitive Methodist Chapel is long gone, but I’m not complaining as a Chinese Takeway and Bistro 42 now occupy the site. Bistro 42 the one place that you can still get a coffee between Horbury’s cafes closing and the pubs opening.
William Baines’ father, George William Baines, opened a music shop at what is now 37 High Street, Horbury, and the family lived here for a while. As you can see it’s just across the road from the grounds of the Wesleyan Chapel (I took this from the chapel car park) and what is now the 42 Bistro Bar, the former site of the Primitive Methodist Chapel, where George William was the organist.
I’ve been colourising old black and white photographs so I’ve gone the opposite way with these photographs taken on my iPhone on Monday. Perspective straightened up in Adobe Lightroom.
I’ve been experimenting with photo restoration and colourisation using the neural filters in Adobe Photoshop.
I like the patina of old photographs but the sepia-toned world that they evoke can put a bit of a barrier between us and them.
Besides, working on the images on the 27 inch screen of my iMac brings out details that I might miss in the original. The ‘neural filter’ seems to favour blue as the main colour for clothes. My guess is that there was more colour about.
It’s freshens up the scratchy surface of this photograph of Mr and Mrs Baines with friends. Are the two women sisters? No names on the back, just a pencilled ’33’. It’s possible that they are relatives of the Radley or Naylor families of Horbury. The family portrait and – as far as I remember – this walking group, were given to me by Mrs Nora Naylor, nee Radley, of Cooperative Street, Horbury.
For a while, the Baines family ran this shop, demolished in the early 1960s, next to St Peter’s Church. Ann North lent me the much-blemished photograph and I’ve colourised this version from my print of it.
Again, the original of this postcard is black and white. William appears, aged 6 or 7, possibly the boy in the flat cap in the bottom left corner.
Thanks to ridiculously high res scan of the original – 2400 dpi! – I can zoom in on a small area to reveal long-gone shops.
William Baines was born on Palm Sunday, 26 March, 1899, at 11 Shepstye Road Horbury.
Writing in 1972, on the 50th anniversary of William’s tragically early death, aged just 23, Stan Barstow, whose novel Joby describes a childhood in a town like Horbury, recalled:
I was born a few doors down along from William Baines in Shepstye Road, Horbury; but he had been dead for six years by the time I arrived on the scene. He was, in fact, exactly contemporary with my mother and its odd to think of her still alive and William dead all these years. But consumption and the like nipped off many a young life in those days: my mother’s talk of her youth is full of references to parents who “had eight and buried three”. And, of course, it’s tempting but futile to speculate upon how Baines’s talent might have developed had he survived and been with us, in his seventies, today.
‘I probably saw William’s father though I doubt that I ever heard him play the organ, for I went into the Primitive Methodist Chapel no more than a couple of times. The Highfield Methodist Chapel was where I spent the Sundays of my youth. There were four Methodist chapels within a couple of hundred yards along Horbury High Street in those days: the two I’ve mentioned and the Wesleyan and the Congregational. What their precise differences in belief and form of worship were I never knew, but it was only much later, after the Second World War, when their separate congregations began to fail, that three of them (the Congregational holding on to its independence) amalgamated for survival. A supermarket now stands on the site of the Primitive Methodist Chapel now [2022: currently Bistro 42 and the Lucky Flower Chinese takeway].
How quiet Horbury must have been in William’s day. I remember it as quiet enough in mine, for although I was born into the age of the internal combustion engine it was half a lifetime before bypass roads and six-lane super highways. An attractive little town at that time, compact, stone-built, sitting on the hill above the Calder, with green fields all round it. In the evening a one-armed lamplighter made his rounds; in the the early morning you would be stirred out of sleep by the clatter of colliers’ clogs passing under the window. Not much different, on imagines, from William’s time, for although his youth and mine were separated by a terrible war, change came much more slowly than in the years since 1945.
A puritanical town, of course. What other could it have been under that great weight of Methodism? Drink was a blatant evil, sex a vast unmentionable mystery. It’s perhaps fortunate that William was a composer, rather than a writer, for music carries few of the moral associations of literature. He’d have had a hard time putting the truth on paper in those days. His departure from his birthplace was not the kind of exile D. H. Lawrence had to seek from a not dissimilar environment, and his future, had he lived, would surely not have been plagued by the kind of persecution Lawrence suffered. But that is speculation again, and we should be grateful for what, in his short life, he left us to enjoy.’
Stan Barstow, ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’, Harrogate Festival 1972
The rebuilding of Coxley Mill in 1886 wasn’t without its problems. Contractor Edward Mercer and clerk of works Alfred Tate came to blows over the quality of mortar used and it seems that Tate threatened to ‘stop the engine’ – the mill had a steam-powered beam engine – which presumably would have brought work at the mill to a standstill.
Mr Tate ended up with head injuries including two black eyes and lost a tooth.
The online British Newspaper Archive, available through Find my Past, has just added The Building News to its collection. It reported Victorian progress in Horbury, such as road widening, commissioning pipework and building chapels but in 1855 it seems that an ‘incendiary’ – an arsonist – struck at Horbury Junction Station.
Better news from the Junction came 32 years later when work was started on a new Wesleyan chapel, right next to the station opposite St Mary’s Church on the other side of the bridge across the railway.
Sketches from Newmillerdam, Harrogate and Queen Street, Horbury, in my pocket-sized A6 landscape Seawhite Travel Journal. Lamy and TWSBI EcoT pens, De Atramentis ink (a mix of brown and black as both were running out).
Chimney of Victoria Hair Salon, High Street, Horbury. They still have the brick fireplace with a stone lintel on the ground floor. Drawn over a latte and a toasted panettonne with honey at the Caffe Capri.