Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
John Carr’s Corinthian columns give Horbury’s parish church of St Peter & St Leonard’s an air of grandeur, in contrast to the old parish church, demolished in 1791, which, in his talk today, Keith Lister suggests may originally have been a timber building, like some surviving thousand-year old Scandinavian churches.
Keith’s talk as part of Horbury Heritage Weekend is ‘Horbury in the time of Baring-Gould, 1864-7’.
During his time at the Mission at Horbury Bridge, from 1864 to 1867, the newly-ordained Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn Onward! Christian Soldiers, met and fell in love with mill girl Grace Taylor and wrote The Book of Werewolves (1865), which Bram Stoker considered the definitive account of lycanthropy (Bram Stoker had heard rumours that there was to be a sequel on vampires, but sadly that didn’t happen).
There is no evidence that Sabine had to fight any werewolves during his time as a curate, working alongside Canon Sharp, but how could I resist him as a subject for the latest challenge from Swedish cartoonist Mattias Adolfsson in my Art of Sketching online course. We were asked to show aspects of a character’s biography through tattoos.
I’ve redrawn the scene for my poster and added watercolour. By keeping the background figures rather muted I’ve been able to make Sabine Baring Gould stand out from the crowd.
Horbury Bridge’s hard-drinking tough guy, ‘Old Nut’, is leaning nonchalantly against the wall of the Horse and Jockey viewing the proceedings with mocking disdain. It’s difficult to get someone to look as if they’re leaning nonchalantly! He looks rather awkward but he’ll do as an onlooker for the purposes of the poster.
This illustration is a one-off but I’m looking forward to exploring the possibilities of comic strips a bit more, perhaps returning to the exercises in Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, the ‘definitive course from concept to comic in 15 lessons’ by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden.
We’ve got a recital coming up of hymns written by Sabine Baring Gould, including Onward Christian Soldiers, which he wrote during his time as a curate at Horbury Bridge. For the poster I’m showing him handing out copies of the hymn at the start of the Whit Walk from the mission at Horbury Bridge to the mother church, St Peter’s, in Horbury.
I drew the figures separately, scanned them into Photoshop then rearranged them on separate layers to get a coherent crowd scene. To break up the rhythm of figures, I added a dog, tail wagging, one ear cocked, listening to the band striking up.
I considered putting the focus on Baring Gould by having him running towards camera, doffing his hat to greet us and clutching a wad of sheets of his newly printed hymn beneath his arm but I think that it’s more appropriate to emphasise the community involvement which was the whole point of him writing his ‘hymn for children marching with banners’ in the first place.
I’ve been writing my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for the Dalesman for more than two years but the article that I’m working on now for the 150th anniversary of the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers is rather different and I’m struggling a bit to decide what approach I should use. I’ve used a program called Scapple to pull my ideas together. Scapple is like a looser version of Tony Buzan’s mind-mapping technique where you start with one idea and make all kinds of connections to it.
Certain aspects of the story stand out vividly for me; the encounter between Sabine Baring Gould (who wrote the hymn) and local tough guy ‘Old Nut’. Or the way meetings in the upstairs Mission room were sometimes interrupted by street urchins throwing stones or even dead cats through the window.
I like the way that Baring Gould later used his literary talents to exact a fitting revenge on ‘Old Nut’s’ favourite pub, The Horse and Jockey. In his novel Through Fire and Flood, which is based on his experiences at the ‘Brig’, he has the pub swept away in a flood. He evidently derived so much satisfaction from this literary method of settling old scores that he introduced a thinly disguised version of The Horse and Jockey into a later novel, The Pennycomequicks, and, would you believe it, it too gets swept away again by the raging waters of the River Calder!
Links
Scapple, the mind-mapping program, seems very versatile. I printed out my mind-map and added the cartoons by hand.