Tag: Horbury

A Classic Cake

John Carr

It’s so hard to find a birthday card with a Horbury theme, so it was back to the drawing board for this one, celebrating local architect John Carr’s towering achievement, the classical confection that is the Parish Church of St Peter’s & St Leonard’s.

Happy birthday to Alex!

Carr topped the spire with that rather un-Christian symbol, a Grecian urn, but this crashed down and was replaced with a wrought iron cross. The urn, which was about 7 feet tall, was carefully pieced together again and, in my teenage years stood as an oversize garden ornament in a house on Cluntergate which I believe had once belonged to a Mr Green.

The Colours of Horbury

On a rainy mid-autumn morning I set the Art Filter on my Olympus E-M10 II to Key Line, to give a solid-colour pop art look to my photographs. I like the reflections on the wet roads but Blackburn’s Florists and Darling Reads’ bookshop provide some welcome bursts of colour on the High Street, as do the Handyman Supplies and The Green Berry on Queen Street.
The phone box has been converted to an art gallery but currently, due to restrictions, there’s no show in there. Social distancing is impossible in a phone box.

Links

Darling Reads bookshop

Blackburn Florist

Handyman Supplies

Lace & Co. Bridal Boutique

The Green Berry

Clifton Infant Teachers, 1955-58

Infant teachers

‘Draw your first teacher’ is the next prompt from Mattias in the ‘Memory Lane’ section of his Art of Sketching course.

I remember a surprising amount of details of the first couple of terms of my school life, in Mrs Clegg’s class at Wrenthorpe Infants, but we moved to Horbury before the end of the year and my sister Linda and I started at Clifton Infants, a newly-built school at the far end of Manorfields Estate.

Clifton Infants School

plan
  1. Go in the main entrance and turn left and you’d find yourself in Mrs (or Miss?) Birdhouse’s class.
  2. Mrs Wallis‘ class was nearest the school entrance, overlooking an oak tree and, beyond the school grounds, ‘The Reck’, Green Park recreation ground. In my sketch Mrs Wallis is holding a couple of the large, light greyish, wooden building bricks that we used. I remember building a model church with them and surrounding it with smaller wooden bricks to represent gravestones. I was into history even in my second year at infants school.
  3. The teacher holding the flash card had the classroom that faced you as you came in the main entrance. Unfortunately, I can’t remember her name. This was my penultimate class at Clifton. She’d made several of these flash cards, on sheets of sugar paper, each with a photograph from a magazine stuck at the top to give us a clue what the first word was as she held them up for the whole class to read.
    One sheet had just one word in place:
    “You like this one don’t you?!” she chuckled as she held it up.
    I believe that she was the teacher who specialised in music and, now that I’m remembering a bit more about her, I think that she had darker, longer hair than I’ve shown. She drove a car, which resembled a smaller version of the Austin Princess. The bonnet reminded me of the Rolls Royce. I remember this because she explained musical notes – minims, crotchets and semibreves – in terms of children, adults and her in her car, making their way to school.
  4. Finally Miss Marsh, our final class teacher, who became headmistress during my time there.

Carr Lodge Park, 1961

Carr Lodge Park, 1961

Carr Lodge Park, powder paint on grey sugar paper: a familiar subject to children at St Peter’s Junior School, Horbury. Probably painted when I was in Mr Lindley’s class, so about 1961, when I was ten years old. The reflections in the water are from my imagination, as I never remember there having been water in the ha-ha at Carr Lodge, although they did still fill the paddling pool, just up to the left, in the days before there was a danger that someone would leave broken bottles in it.

The view looks rather open without the avenue of trees along the path on the right but I suspect they hadn’t been planted at the time. I guess that we went along and sketched the scene in pencil, as powder paints would have been impossible on location.

You can see how fascinated I was by the texture of stone. I remember the sandstone of the wall in the school yard, which was weathered into crevices and crannies. One lad had discovered that you could put a marble in one hole and it would roll down through unseen passages and pop out from another hole lower down. He must have been a trustworthy boy, as I leant him one of my marbles for his demonstration.

I found the painting while retrieving a little sketchbook that had slipped down the back of my plan chest.

Remembering Thelma

St Peter's Church, Horbury

All that was missing was a flypast by the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster but, after the funeral service on Thursday at St Peter’s Church, a rainbow to mark our old friend Thelma Littlewood’s last journey away from Horbury seemed suitably stylish. Her husband Jack flew Lancaster bombers during the Second World War, surviving a full tour of duty of thirty bombing raids. He was 22 years old at the time. Meanwhile Thelma was working, sometimes on the nightshift, at Sykes’ mill (later Slazengers) on the lathes, making butts for Lee Enfield rifles.

Thelma once told me that she knew when Jack was setting out on a mission because he’d come out of formation and fly his Lancaster low over Horbury (or did she say he’d do that on his safe return? I think she said on the outward flight). I’m told that this story is unlikely to be true as the RAF would never have allowed it, but who knows what happened unofficially. Possibly a roundabout route from one of the bases in North Yorkshire, such as Dishforth or Leeming, could have involved a flightpath down the Calder Valley.

Thelma (1924-2018), was a great friend of my mother’s during their retirement years, getting into all sorts of adventures on their travels, including being so keen not to miss their stop on a rail journey to the Lake District, that Thelma ended up swinging on the door of the carriage, leaning out of the open window, as the train came to a halt in the station.

As we lived not far from each other on Jenkin Road, I often walked to St Peter’s Junior School with her son, my contemporary, Adrian, especially in our third year when we were both in Mr Thompson’s class. Sadly, Adrian died over twenty years ago, in the early 1990s. Like his mother, Adrian had a sense of style and I remember being rather envious of his special pet, a beautifully marked garden cross spider, which he kept for a while in a makeshift vivarium in a mini-habitat of twigs and leaves in a Gales Honey jar with air holes punched in the brass-coloured lid. He called it Arthur (although I now realise that ‘it’ must have been the larger female of the species).

Horbury’s Station Clock

station clock

From my diary for Wednesday, 8 September, 1971, Horbury, West Riding of Yorkshire:

On our way back [from visiting grandparents in Nottinghamshire] I noticed that Horbury Station was half demolished. I cycled down and asked them for the clock – they let me have it.

demolition man

Man in charge of demolition (note: in my drawings no-one is wearing a hard hat!):

“Ahh, you like old stuff, do you? We demolished an old place in Leeds with faces and things carved on it. All in stone and they’re just going to put an office block up there. This thing would have stood while the new buildings fell. I had an old watch, a little silver one, from a site in Leeds.”

The clockwork was missing, I soon lost the wooden frame, which was in comb-jointed sections and, if I remember rightly, was painted in a dull turquoise. I suspect my father might have thrown the pieces out. My brother-in-law Dave found me an electric motor, but it drove the hands in reverse. Eventually, on my move away from Horbury, the glass, which I suspect was Victorian float glass, got smashed and I’m afraid that in a clear-out a few years later, I disposed of the clock-face.

There was no maker’s name and the numerals were Roman.

J Armitage, Dramatist

J Armitage
My first drawing using a vector pen in Clip Studio Paint.

Leeds Mercury, 7 June 1913, copyright Johnstone Press, image created courtesy of the British Library Board.

J Armitage was a dramatist, whose plays ‘received the compliments of many distinguished people’ according to a photo feature in the Leeds Mercury, dated Saturday, 7 June, 1913.

A Jesse Armitage appears in the 1911 census for Horbury; then aged 24, he was employed as a railway clerk. He lived in the family home, at 4 Mortimer Row, Westfield Road with his parents Sarah, aged 50, and John, aged 55, a railway platelayer. Also still at home, his younger brother Harry, aged 20, worked as a house painter and decorator.

Ten years earlier, in 1901, Jesse, then aged 14, was working as a railway telegraph boy. When Jesse started at school, aged 4, the family had lived on Queen Street, Horbury. In 1913 he married Amy Bower, aged 25 or 26, a dressmaker from nearby Tithe Barn Street.

There’s a record of the death of a Jesse Armitage, aged 40, in the Wakefield area, registered in the first quarter of 1927.

And that’s about all I’ve been able to find out about our local dramatist so far. I’d love to know whether he wrote dramas or comedies.

Leeds Mercury
Leeds Mercury, Saturday, 7 June, 1913, copyright Johnstone Press, image created courtesy of the British Library Board.

Rickaro Bookshop

Bookshop window

Book coverIf you’re trying to track down one of my books, this bookshop on Horbury High Street is a good place to start. In addition to my local booklets, walks guides and sketchbooks, bookseller Richard Knowles often has copies of my long out-of-print titles such as my first, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield; I spotted two copies of the paperback version on his shelves recently.

This is the first time that I’ve tried the Adobe Illustrator trace option on a colour photograph. The results remind me of the British Library’s reprints of vintage detective fiction, which often have a period travel poster or similar artwork on the cover, hence my book cover design (all I’ve got to do now is write the mystery novel to go with it).

Bookshop

I could learn something from Illustrator when it comes to being bold and confident in the use of colour. In comparison with this posterised effect, my watercolour is soft and tentative. Not always a bad thing but bold and confident would be good from time to time.

Link

Rickaro Bookshop, High Street, Horbury

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

Teachers

 

Continuing to experiment with drawing comics in line only, I’ve made a start on trying to capture memories of my class teachers from junior school days.

Miss Andrassy – I think she was ‘Miss’, not Mrs – was our teacher when we started at St Peter’s Juniors in Horbury.

Miss Andrassy was keen on art and I remember her setting up a still life for us to draw.

In our second year, Mr Harker, then in the pre-fab in the playground, was the teacher who first introduced us to dip pens and joined-up writing.

I’ve got strong mental impressions of these characters but some details of their appearance are guesswork, for instance did Miss Andrassy wear glasses?

I’ll come back to her after I’ve drawn Mr Thompson (third year) and Mr Lindley (fourth year), as I’m sure I could get nearer to the character I see in my mind’s eye.

Mr Harker didn’t tax my memory to the same extent as I saw him earlier this year in Debenham’s cafe in Wakefield, and he’s very much the same personality that I remember from almost sixty years ago.