Tag: Queen Street

Secret Garden

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.

Overgrown garden

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.

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 . . .

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

Newsagents in Colour

Here’s the coloured version of Kershaw’s Newsagents, now no. 7, Queen Street, Horbury.

I’ve been able to narrow down the dates of the postcard that I drew this detail from to 1938-1939, so immediately before World War II.

The Savoy Cinema

It was the cinema poster than gave me my first clue. The Savoy was an out-of-town cinema, latterly a bingo hall, next to the Whinney Moor Hotel on Horbury Road, Wakefield.

I walked past it on what turned out to be its last night, walking back from an evening class in Wakefield. It burnt down that night and was eventually replaced by the Lupset Medical Centre. My evening class ran from September 1990 to June 1991, but I can’t remember the date of the fire.

Anyway, getting back to dating that poster:

Bank Holiday was a British drama film directed by Carol Reed and starring John Lodge and Margaret Lockwood. It was released 27 January, 1938. Being out-of-town, I suspect that the Savoy showed movies a week or two after their initial release.

Love Under Fire must have been showing well after its first screening on 20 August, 1937. An American drama, set during the Spanish Civil War, it starred Loretta Young and Don Ameche. Don Ameche had a long film career; he starred in Cocoon: The Return in 1988.

Radio Times

Despite being able to browse through every copy of The Radio Times for that period (see link below), I haven’t been able to spot a specific issue which featured the first broadcast of Elizabeth, the Queen Consort, (better remembered by my generation as The Queen Mother).

There was a lot of coverage of various royal visits in the Radio Times during 1938. This was probably due to the Government and Buckingham Palace trying to undo the potential damage caused by the recently abdicated Edward VIII and his wife (Wallis Simpson, as was), visiting the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, in October 1937.

If you do take a look through the Radio Times for that period and you spot a broadcast billed as Elizabeth’s first, please let me know.

Pearson’s Magazine

I can only decipher the title of one of the periodicals on display, Pearson’s, a magazine of speculative fiction and predominantly left wing political comment, which at that time was edited by John Reed Wade, who had been in charge since 1920. W.E. Johns, author of the Biggles stories, took over as editor in May the following year but the magazine ceased publication in November, which confirms that the photograph must have been taken pre-war.

The magazine or poster to the left of the news-rack, in the doorway, which is also visible in the window, shows a large ship with a crane in the background, so I’d guess that this is a feature about the building of the liner RMS Queen Elizabeth, which was launched by Elizabeth, the Queen Consort, at Clydebank, Scotland, on 27 September, 1938.

There’s what could be a comic in the middle of window. The Beano was already established at the time (although Leo Baxendale’s Bash Street Kids wouldn’t appear for another fifteen years, so probably not worth bothering with).

Queen Street Today


The Kershaw’s Newsagents is now Bike Medic, but there’s still a barber’s, Mister Lister’s next door. The shop fronts have changed a little but the drain pipe – and its top funnel – is still the original!

Before taking the photograph, Barbara and I had called for coffee and freshly baked scones (cherry, this morning) at the Rich & Fancy cafe, three doors up from the bike repair shop.

Local Colour

I couldn’t find any colour reference so I decided to try a bottle green for the newsagent’s, which I believe was a popular colour at that time.

For me it doesn’t ring true, even though I’ve faded it out a bit in my colour image (top), however the advantage of having drawn it as a digital image is that I could change the colours on the paint layer if I wished, without damaging my line drawing in any way.

I can also easily output the drawing in line, black and white half-tone or sepia.

I like the sepia but it does make the scene look too cosily Victorian, rather than Britain on the eve of war.

Links

Savoy Cinema

Bank Holiday, film, 1938.

Love Under Fire, film, 1937

Radio Times, the 1930s

Pearson’s Magazine

Newsagents, 1938

Tracing from a vintage postcard in Clip Studio Paint.

I recently joined a local history group on Facebook, focussing on Horbury and neighbouring Sitlington. This newsagents caught my attention; it appears in the left-hand corner of a postcard of Queen Street, Horbury, one of series which Helen Bickerdike, administrator of the group, has been posting.

I’ve been doing a bit or research into the film titles on the poster for the Savoy Cinema and into what I can decipher of the newspapers and journals. I’ll explain more when I finish the picture and can pick out some of the details but it must have been taken a year or two before the outbreak of World War II, perhaps in January, 1938.

The shop, which was Noble’s Newsagents in until the late 1960s, appears, second from the left, on the cover of my booklet.

Like the digital painting of Coxley Beck which I posted the other day, I’m doing this as a way of getting thoroughly familiar with the program Clip Studio Paint.

When I was writing my local history booklets, such as Around Old Horbury (1998), I did a lot of drawings like this, initially by sitting on street corners with my sketchbook, but later using my own photographs as reference.

I had a unique opportunity when I redrew the cover illustration as a wrap-around design for a china mug. When I arrived in Horbury, one Sunday morning, I discovered that they’d closed the High Street for resurfacing and I was able to sit on my fishing stool in the middle of the road, to get a perfect view of the sweeping curve at the lower end of Queen Street.

Link

Around Old Horbury on my Willow Island Editions website (£2.95, post free in the U.K.)