Tag: Horbury

Horbury High Street

High Street

Much as we like our homemade bread it doesn’t keep long at this time of year so while the wood pigeon tucked into that (see the greatest hits from of the 103 selfies it took of itself on my new trail cam in my next post), we enjoyed the roast Mediterranean veg sandwich at the Cafe Capri.

The storks in their natural habitat

While we’re in Horbury, we check out my Addingford display in the Redbox Gallery in the old telephone box on Queen Street. I’m pleased that the foamboard artwork isn’t buckling too much under the summer sun and that I can see the Addingford Steps artwork and map so well on the back wall, then I realise that the reason that I can see them is because the two stork cut-outs, suspended on fishing line, have fallen down behind Joby’s riverbank.

I’ll reinstate them, but I’ll draw the birds again at half the size, so they don’t blot out the display at they did previously.

Redbox Show

Redbox Gallery
chimnies

Thanks to my scale model, we found that my Addingford and Joby cut-outs just fitted into the Redbox Gallery, although we did have to do a bit of jiggling about with the lengths of 10lb breaking strain fishing line that are holding up the storks cut-out and the speech bubbles.

Redbox Gallery show
St Peter's Church, Horbury

On Tuesday I drew St Peter’s Church spire from the dentist’s waiting room, which is just around the corner from the Redbox.

Out of the Box

Redbox model

My first one-man show for over 25 years . . . and I’ve got to fill the entire gallery! The good news is that it’s the Redbox Gallery on Queen Street, Horbury: the box that appears on the cover of my local history booklet Around Old Horbury.

I’ve seen documentaries about how the Royal Academy prepares for a big show and it involves making a cardboard model of the gallery space, so here goes . . .

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.