The old Gaskell School, drawn by William Baines, c. 1907? The original is in colour but I have only a black and white photograph, so in this case I’ve colourised it in Photoshop.
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.
Van and phone lines removed in Photoshop!
William was a pupil at the Wesleyan Day School on School Lane, off Horbury High Street.
Boys entrance to the Wesleyan School.
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.
Tower of the Ebenezer Hall (Horbury Methodist Church Hall) Primitive Methodist Sunday School, 2022
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.
Entrance to the Ebenezer Hall at it is today, with the new Wesleyan Chapel on the left and the 1906 Sunday School on the right.
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.
Mr and Mrs Baines
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.
Primitive Methodist School Feast, 1906
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.
Another close-up of the postcardI think this would have been a Whitsuntide feast, traditionally when people treated themselves to new clothes after the winter . . . and decorated straw hats of course.
This blog post is an extract from my 1972 leaflet ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’. I still have a few copies left if you’d like to order one, please contact me for details.
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.
Primitive Methodist Chapel
‘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].
William sits beside his father at the organ, my sketch from my ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’ leaflet, 1972.
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.
Primitive Methodist Chapel, photography by Chappell and Hill, Horbury
Stan Barstow’s autobiography, ‘In My Own Good Time’
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
Mr Baines opened a music shop directly opposite the Primitive Methodist Chapel on Horbury High Street.
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.
Teddy is a puggle – a cross between a pug and a beagle – which, according to his minder (his owners are away on holiday), means that he always looks slightly bad tempered. On the contrary, he keeps his cool when a passing border collie challenges him with a barrage of barking, looking the over excited passer by as he was thinking just what is the matter with you.
Robin Walker tells me that we’ve now got a date for a recital to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Yorkshire composer William Baines. After the recital I’ll be leading a walk to some of the Bainesian corners of Horbury.
Thanks to Horbury Civic Society and Horbury Methodist Church for their support.
Once known as Four Lane Ends, this is the view as it was in 1967 from Tithe Barn Street looking across Westfield Road to Jenkin Road, with Arnold Tattersfield’s newsagents on the left, Lee & Briggs ironmongers on the right. The fourth ‘lane’ on the near right is Manor Road.
I drew the little sketch that it’s based on while sitting at the Tithe Barn Street back entrance to the old Congregational Chapel (extreme left) while working as a teller when my dad was standing for Horbury Urban District Council. I had to politely ask every voter as they walked in for their number on the electoral roll. Towards the end of the day the local ‘independents’ (really Conservatives) would go around rounding up anyone who had promised to support them but hadn’t yet turned up.
The original of linocut was black on white but I like this reversed version, made by going for the wrong keyboard shortcut in Photoshop (Control+I instead of Control+Alt+I. After all these years I still get that wrong when I’m resizing an image). I’m currently re-scanning drawings of Horbury for a reprint of my local guide to the historic buildings of the town.
I was influenced by Daily Mail cartoonist Trog’s bold pen and ink drawings in the paper’s long-running cartoon strip Flook.
