Tag: Sarah Ann Swift

Ernest Bowler, Castleton

Ernest Bowler
Moors somewhere near Castleton, Oil painting, Ernest Bowler, 1920s, canvas approximately 24×20 inches.

Does this moorland scene look familiar to you? I’m guessing that it’s somewhere near Castleton in the Peak District but I’ve never been able to pinpoint the exact location. Please let me know if you have any ideas.

Bowler’s painting of Peveril Castle in my 2006 book, High Peak Drifter, a sketchbook of the High Peak in spring.

My grandad Maurice Swift, a cabinet maker and funeral director from Sheffield, bought this painting and a another of Peveril Castle from Castleton artist Ernest Bowler in the 1920s.

My mum inherited both pictures in the 1960s so I’d long been familiar with them, although I didn’t get to visit the area until the spring of 2006 when I drew my High Peak Drifter sketchbook. I’d always wondered if Bowler had romanticised the view of the Castle but no, when I drew in Cavedale, I discovered that is pretty much the way it is.

The Secret Life of Paintings

I re-hung the moorland scene today, which gave me a chance to take another look at the back of the painting.

back of painting

A few years ago, Robin Taylor (see link below) cleaned the painting and revarnished it, bringing back colour to a moorland scene that had always looked rather dour and brownish. You can see from this back view of the canvas that it has been around for a while, but that’s understandable because we’re pretty sure that the painting was hanging in grandad’s house during Sheffield Blitz, 80 years ago last Saturday. The house was damaged beyond repair but grandad managed to salvage some of his possessions, including a boyhood portrait of his father George. This was also oil on canvas and was damaged in the raid but grandad repaired it using a puncture repair kit. The rubber patch is still in place on the back of the canvas.

label

The ‘fine art restorer’ George Wilkinson, who either framed the picture or repaired it after the bombing raid, was to crop up in grandad’s life a few years later in a rather dramatic fashion.

Sarah Ann

Sarah Ann

This is my great-grandma, Sarah Ann Swift (nee Truelove), doing her bit for the war effort by making dolls for the Penny-a-Week fund which raised money for hospitals. She lived next door to grandad in a substantial stone-built semi-detached house on Nether Edge Road.

Comic strip account of the air raid, drawn from my mum’s description when I was 14 years old.

As the Dorniers and Heinkels of the Luftwaffe flew over, my grandma and grandad and my mum sheltered in their air-raid shelter in the back garden but my great-grandma Sarah preferred to head for the shelter of her cellar, along with Queenie the Pomeranian and her pet bird. Great-grandma’s side of the house was so badly damaged that rescuers had to bring her, along with Queenie and the bird, out through the coal chute.

Sarah
Sarah at the time of her marriage to George Swift.

After the raid, grandad and grandma and my mum relocated to Bradway Road, while Sarah Ann not only bought her own house elsewhere in Sheffield but also another house to rent out as a source of income. This didn’t go down well with her only son, my grandad Maurice. He thought it was ridiculous for her to saddle herself with a mortgage at her age, so he bought the house for her.

A few years later when Sarah died, he might well have assumed that she would have left the houses to him. It didn’t turn out like that.

As the funeral cortege drove through the streets of Sheffield, it started snowing. Maurice’s driver, Billy Elliot, pulled in:

“We’ve lost the rest of the party Mr Swift, would you like me to wait for them.”

“Let the b*****s find their own way!” snorted grandad.

After the funeral, organised by my grandad (he was an undertaker, as I’ve said), family and friends gathered for a funeral tea.

A rather nervous solicitor got up and read Sarah’s will. Sarah had left a small savings book to Maurice, which probably didn’t cover his expenses in organising her funeral, but she had left her houses to two young ladies (but that’s another story).

“Does anybody have any questions?” the solicitor asked.

Grandad stood up: “Yes, I’ve got some questions!”

“This should be interesting!” my mum whispered to her friend.

So, the connection with Geo. Wilkinson, ‘fine art restorer’? He acted as one of Sarah’s executors. A brave man to face up to my grandad!

Ten or fifteen years ago, when my mum and I were researching the family tree, we ordered a copy of the will. In the family archive we’ve a letter to Maurice from his solicitors, explaining that although there were defects in the way his mum’s will was worded, it was a valid document.

Further Reading

books

High Peak Drifter Richard Bell, available from Willow Island Editions, ISBN 1-902467-16-7

book

Nether Edge in the Second World War compiled by the Nether Edge History Group, Second World War Research team, ISBN 09514003-2, paperback. You can order a copy, £10 plus postage, from the group via this e-mail: nenghistory@gmail.com

Sheffield Blitz

My thanks to Andy Beezer, member of the Nether Edge History Group, who a week ago, on the 80th anniversary of Sheffield Blitz, hosted an online Zoom tour of the air-raid shelter for my brother and sister and I. Grandad’s house may be long gone but the robustly-built concrete air-raid shelter survived.

Link

Robin Taylor, Bespoke framing and oil painting restoration services covering Wakefield, Leeds and Dewsbury.

Sheffield Blitz, 1940

Two pages from my ‘Exercise Book Encyclopaedia’, drawn in January or February, 1965, when I was aged thirteen. From my mum’s account I’m describing the bombing raid in which the family portrait Boy with a Hoop was damaged.

I can see the influence of the magazine ‘Look & Learn’ which I read as a schoolboy. I very rarely read it cover to cover but I always devoured the pictures and layouts and I can still recall many of the spreads.
blitzDecember 12th 1940; at 7.15 p.m. the sirens went. There had been some bombs before this . . .

My grandma and grandad Swift were having tea, my mother was reading at 77 Netheredge Road. Hearing the sirens they downed everything and headed for the shelter in the garden.

They went into the shelter grandad designed. Next door my great grandma.

[Note what appears to be a periscope my grandad added to the shelter. Or is it a ventilator? I like his ingenuity. Wish I’d known him better!]

blitzMy grandad remembered he had left some rum in the house. He decided to go back for it.

Just as he is almost at the house an unearthly lot of bombs drop nearby.

He goes back to the shelter.

[Great] Grandma had stayed in her house. It was bombed. An incendiary was dropped near the shelter.

When they got back to the house after the raid there was a mess. The bathroom wall was on a slant.

They got grandma out of her cellar [via the coal chute as the house had been flattened]. She went to a rest home. When she got there she sent them back for her bird who was a little shaken. My mum, grandad and grandma went to the country.

Mum; Gladys Joan Swift, aged 22 in 1940.
Grandad; Maurice Swift.
Grandma; Ann Swift, nee Jones.
Great Grandma; Sarah Ann Swift, nee Truelove, widow of George, the Boy with a Hoop.

George and Sarah Restored

Sarah Ann

GeorgeGEORGE AND SARAH ANN are back from their makeover and it’s been quite a transformation. Robin Taylor has cleaned them, removing as much of the old discoloured varnish as he could without damaging the paintwork. He’s touched up the blemishes (the ‘bullet-wound’ on George’s forehead has healed up nicely) and finally he applied a resin varnish which has restored the richness and depth of the colour.

I’m impressed by this detail of embroidery on the sofa arm in the portrait of Sarah. These are painted photographs so I’m not sure whether this has been meticulously painted or whether it is the original photograph showing through a transparent glaze of oil paint.

chair

Although today we’d see basing a portrait so directly on a photograph as ‘cheating’ at the time this was a way of embracing a new technology. Robin, who was as surprised as we were by how well these battered old paintings have responded to restoration, describes the painting as a superior job.

labelThe paintings are on card with a sheet of wood backing them. I was rather hoping that Robin would find an old document stuffed in the back of the painting. He tells me that he occasionally finds a page from a newspaper added as packing behind a painting in a frame.

The printed label on the back of each portrait states that Geo. Wilkinson & Son of 98 Devonshire Street, Sheffield (two doors down from Westfield Terrace) offer the following services:

Oil Paintings, carefully cleaned, re-lined and restored
Water Colour, and other drawings cleaned and mounted
Engravings, cleaned – mildew and damp stain effectively removed

The Bride in Black

SarahI’m sorry that photographer and picture restorer George Cecil Wilkinson and his oil painter colleague J H Ainley aren’t still around to see how well these portraits are looking a century and a quarter after they produced them.

My mum tells me that George Wilkinson married a cousin of her dad’s and I believe that Ainley too was either a friend or in-law. They were to play a part – a controversial part – in the story of my family at a later date.

I was wondering why Sarah Ann should be wearing black. Had she recently lost a member of her family and gone into mourning. Apparently not; this was before a white wedding became the norm and black was often worn by brides. George and Sarah were married in the mid 1870s but, if they were photographed at the time, it seems that the paintings were produced some years later as the Geo. Wilkinson label reads ‘established 1879’.

I’m taking these two portraits as a starting point, a re-starting point, for my family tree research and I’m going to put together a little biography of George, a Sheffield spring-knife maker, and his wife Sarah Ann who started her working life as a home help aged 11. Sarah, I feel is a key characters in the story of that branch of the family. She was born when the industrial revolution was still at its height in the city and she lived long enough to get caught up in the Sheffield Blitz.

Song of the Slave

She reminds me in this portrait of one of the young women who Mrs Hudson ushers into the consulting room at 221b Baker Street at the start of a baffling case for Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. But this time it’s up to me to observe the details and to attempt to piece to together  something of the story of her life.

Is there some significance in the way she is holding her pocket watch?

Sarah’s fingers, my mum tells me, were as chubby as shown as a result of all her domestic duties but she was taught to play the piano by one of the families she worked for. One of the pieces that she learnt was The Song of the Slave. We still have the sheet music. This brings home the historical context; born on Boxing Day 1850, Sarah was learning to play the piano in the days immediately before the American Civil War and the subsequent emancipation of the American slaves.

George doesn’t give much away in his sober Sunday best suit but I’m looking forward to hearing what my costume expert friends can tell me about him.

George Swift

The candid camera photograph (which I’ve already featured in this diary) of George that is son took around 1900 is more revealing of his background and domestic circumstances.

Link: Robin Taylor Fine Arts

George and Sarah Ann

Sarah AnnIT’S UNUSUAL to be able so see your Victorian ancestors in colour but these two portraits that have been stored away since my mum inherited them in the 1960s give me an opportunity to do that. I’ve decided that, whatever their merits as paintings, it is worth giving them a new lease of life because they’re such central characters in the family sage that I’ve been unfolding in my genealogical research re so I’ve taken them to Robin Taylor in Wakefield for restoration.

georgeRobin tells me that they’re painted photographs. The budget version of this would be a photograph with some of the features such as eyebrows picked out in charcoal by the photographer so these fully overpainted photographs would have been a more expensive option.

These aren’t wedding portraits because George and Sarah were married in the 1870s and the label on the back of the portraits suggests that they were photographed, then painted, in the 1880s.