Robert Bell, I don’t have a photograph of Jane from that time.
St. Judes, architect’s drawing by T. J. Flockton and Abbott, August, 1865.
St Jude’s, Eldon Street, stood ten minutes walk from Sheffield city centre. On Sunday, 22 June, 1902, Robert and Jane – my grandad and grandma made there way there from nearby Fitzwilliam Street.
Jane & Robert
It’s good to have Robert’s and Jane’s signatures on the Marriage Certificate. At the time Robert, then aged 24, was a conductor on the Sheffield Trams. When he’d started work, the trams were still horse-drawn. In the previous year, at the time of the 1901 census, he’d been employed as a groom at Bawtry Hall, 25 miles east of the city.
Jane, 19, lists no occupation on the wedding certificate. In the previous year she was working as a cook in a household somewhere in Sheffield. In the census returns the only likely match that I’ve found is a Jeannie Bagshawe, aged 22.
Jane and her relatives who act as witnesses spell their surname with an ‘e’ at the end, in every other document I’ve come across it’s down as Bagshaw without the ‘e’.
Frederick was an older brother, Ruth as younger sister.
Her father was William Bagshawe, a maltster.
We recently visited Blako Hill Farm, Mattersey, where Robert’s father, John, worked as a gardener.
The Rev. George Wakefield Turner
Image from Sheffield and District Who’s Who (W. C. Leng and Co., 1905) (page 74) (Sheffield Local Studies Library: 920.04274 SST). Enhanced and colourised by me in Photoshop.
The Rev. George Wakefield Turner (1850 – 1932), M.A., Vicar of St. Jude’s, performed the ceremony. The Rev. Turner had been a member of the Sheffield Education Committee since its inception.
My grandad Robert Bell’s family: the Bells of Blaco Hill, Mattersey. That’s grandad, back row on the right.
According to my diary (above) Grandma gave me the photograph 50 years ago today when we called at Sutton-cum-Lound on Christmas Day 1972. My dad’s elder brother, Uncle Fred, was also there.
Robert Bell
Grandad and Grandma had such large families that my father claimed that he could never sort out who all his aunties and uncles were. Somewhere I’ve got a key to the photograph but until I put my hands on it I’m as clueless as my dad was.
At least I know that this is my great grandfather, John Bell, born 1842, an agricultural labourer, later working as a groom at Blaco Hill.
And this is great grandma Helena Bell, born in 1845.
Look forward to finding out more about the Bells and my grandma’s family the Bagshaws as I’ve been so involved with the other side of the family, the Swifts and the Trueloves of Sheffield.
Link
Blaco Hill Cottages – looks like the perfect location for a Bell Family reunion!
Robert and Jane Bell at Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound in the 1950s. Colour added at colourise.sg. In real life the bricks and pantiles were terra cotta red, the paintwork green and creamy white.
My grandma, Jane Bagshaw, met my grandad Robert Bell at a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, on Tuesday June 15th 1897 at 3 o’clock at Serlby Park, Nottinghamshire. He was then aged 19, working as second coachman to the Galways at Serlby. Jane, a domestic servant was 14.
After living in Sheffield, the couple retired to Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire in the 1950s.
As you might guess from the photograph of them, standing amongst the hollyhocks in front of the cottage, they were the kind of grandparents that you might encounter in a children’s story.
The ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’ prompt in my writer’s notebook.
Taking my cue from a prompt on the Start Writing Fiction course that I took this autumn, I’ve recalled some of the features of Vine Cottage, as I remember them from my childhood, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when they left the cottage and moved to a bungalow at the other end of the village.
Grandma’s Cupboard
The prompt on the fiction course was to write about ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’, so let’s start with the shelves in the narrow scullery at the back of the cottage.
Grandma lined the shelves with newspaper, cutting a decorative zig-zag on its trailing edge. My father saved copies of The Times for her. At that time it was a broadsheet consisting almost entirely of text so it gave the shelves a more uniform effect than her own Weekly News, a popular tabloid. She always saved The Weekly News for me because I liked the cartoons in it. And they would sometimes also pass on a copy of the Salvation Army’s newsletter, which featured a comic strip of The Adventures of Black Bob, featuring a hill shepherd and his faithful border collie.
I remember as a child coming across this 1932 Methuen’s English Classic edition of Eothen by Alexander William Kinglake in the bookcase amongst my parents’ old books. It looked rather impenetrable but it’s actually a colourful traveller’s tale of a tour of the Middle East in 1834.
This copy is peppered with pencilled notes, underlined passages and notes for revision but with, no name inscribed on the endpapers, I was beginning to wonder if it really had belonged to my father. Then I spotted ‘R.D.BELL’ pencilled in block capitals across the bottom of the book.
It was destined for the charity shop but because of the family connection I’ll hang on to it. Perhaps some day I’ll read it.
In 1932 my father would have been thirteen or fourteen years old and attending what is now High Storrs School in Sheffield. He didn’t always have his mind on English literature. Two drawings seem to indicate that at times he would rather have been playing snooker. As far as I know these two doodles are the only drawings of his that survive.
Whenever he decided to draw for us it was always the same thing; a cup and saucer with the light shining from the left. I’ve since discovered that there’s a connection between John Ruskin and that perennial favourite cup and saucer drawing of my dad’s. Ruskin was involved in setting up educational institutions in Sheffield. He believed that we would all benefit from drawing every day but far from that being a mad half hour of creativity he believed that we should learn the skills that would help us depict the world around us. The cup and saucer drawn in a sidelight was one of the exercises that he recommended.
In 1932 there would still have been teachers around who were part of that Ruskinian educational initiative.
The Old Bazaar in Cairo
This list of revision notes on the front endpapers of Eothen is poignant. Ten years later, as a military policeman, my dad’s beat around Cairo as a special investigations officer included the pyramids (and, less glamorously, the Sweet Water Canal). I still have the pass that allowed him leave to visit Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.
The bazaar must have been familiar to him. Prior to his transfer to the military police, when travelling in the desert, his Bofors gun anti-aircraft unit in the Royal Artillery acquired a reputation for fair trading amongst the Arabs so they always had the first offers of provisions – such as fresh eggs – from the locals.
He brought a pebble back from the Dead Sea which I vaguely remember being kept in the top ‘secret drawer’ of the chest of drawers in our bedroom. What happened to it, I’m not sure, although father believed that we children had lost it when playing with it. If we came across it now, I’m not sure how we would recognise it as anything special.
