Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
MAUNDER, talk incoherently, or in a low tone, grumblingly. “What are teh maundrin thear abaht?”
Wakefield Words, William Stott Banks, 1865
A Clip Studio Paint animation of a page from my illustrated version of William Stott Banks Wakefield Words, A List of Provencial Words in use at Wakefield in Yorkshire 1865.
Wakefield Words, paperback, available post free in the UK from Willow Island Editions.
After completing the animations based on my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, I’ve now turned to my 2011 paperback Wakefield Words based on Wakefield solicitor William Stott Banks’ 1865 collection of ‘Provincial Words in use at Wakefield. When I was working on the book, I enjoyed drawing the variety of subjects that he’d included. The pen and ink format is ideal for exploring various animation techniques that I want to try.
I’m surprised in this one that Banks records ‘toathre’ as meaning ‘two or three: a few’ as I would have thought it would have had the same meaning as ‘t’other’, meaning simply an alternative: ‘one or the other’.
PLOO STOTS (stot: a staggering, clumsy person), plough stots, farm servants, having patched dresses and ribbon ends on hats and clothes, a blowing cows’ horns, going round begging on Plough Monday (the first after Twelfth Night), with a plough-frame steered by the last married man, the two youngest lads being drivers, two of the eldest being the beggars, and the rest taking place of horses. The practice is almost gone out now, though one party, without plough, came into Wakefield in 1865, but on the wrong Monday – namely, a week too soon.
William Stott Banks, 1865, quoted in Richard Bell’s illustrated ‘Wakefield Words’, 2011
Richard Knowles of the Rickaro Bookshop in Horbury recently came across these photographs of Victorian Wakefield. They were probably used as business cards by George & John Hall, photographers, who had premises at 26 Westgate.
Someone, presumably George, has dated three of the photographs Saturday, 15 July 1876.
The Butter Cross was built in 1707 and, according to some sources, demolished in 1866/67, but that was ten years before the date on the photograph. Wakefield council still have one of those pillars but I’m not sure where it is kept since the old art gallery, where it was displayed in the garden, closed.
The medieval Chantry Chapel now has a mid-twentieth century facade so these photographs are a valuable record of these buildings but it’s the incidental detail that I particularly like.
The shops by the Butter Cross would be a useful reference if I was illustrating Dickens or painting the Paddington Green backdrop for Oliver!
The Six Chimneys, an Elizabethan house, stood on Kirkgate, on the site of the present roundabout and pedestrian underpass. It collapsed following structural alterations at 7.45 p.m. on 16 May 1941.
To judge by the shadows, this was taken on the Saturday afternoon. Holden’s (the butchers?) has more or less sold out apart from a flitch of bacon and a single sausage (if that’s what it is!). There doesn’t appear to be any glass in the window, unless Mr Holden had gone to the expense of fitting plate glass.
Bell’s the coopers are displaying an impressive array of baskets and barrels, no doubt all made of locally sourced materials, most of them biodegradable.
The parish church wouldn’t become a cathedral until 1888.
Considering that this is the centre of town at half past eleven on a Saturday morning Wakefield seems uncannily quiet. Where is everybody?
Three boys eyeing the camera and this porter or street-sweeper has stopped to chat to a woman who appears to be carrying a bag.
Handcarts seem to be a common feature around town. It probably wasn’t worth the trouble of loading barrels, baskets and boxes onto a horse drawn cart for delivery around town, so the porter and the delivery boy would have been a familiar sight.
I remember local author Stan Barstow telling me that one of his first jobs was to take a handcart as far as Lupset on the Saturday morning delivery round for one of the Horbury butchers. From a later period, I remember a big black butcher’s bicycle with a large rectangular basket between the handlebars, parked outside one of the High Street butchers in Horbury.
Finally, here are a couple of Saturday morning strollers, stopping for a chat on the Chantry Bridge.
As we’re looking down on them, this must have been taken from the Kings Mill.
What were they chatting about? Wakefield is lucky in that one of my predecessors William Banks who, like me, wrote a book of walks around Wakefield, took the trouble to make a note of the town’s dialect and phrases.
So they could well have been saying;
‘Hah goes it? Owt fresh?’
‘Naah, nowt; what’s t’best news wi’ thee?’
So, if you’d like to know a little about the words these street folk of old Wakefield used for weather, food, childhood and schooldays, the countryside, proverbs and a few supernatural tales, you can order a copy of my book Wakefield Words.
Price £3.99, post free (and as it’s a small paperback, for once I can make that post free outside the UK too).
If they ever invent a time machine and you get whisked back to Victorian Wakefield, it might make a useful phrase book! I was fascinated by William Banks collection of words and phrases and, as you’ll see from the book, I had fun adding cartoon illustrations to bring them to life. I’d always wanted to do a real little paperback book and I’m really pleased with this one. It’s quite jolly and I love the smell of a fresh paperback. Mmm! – you don’t get that with a digital version, do you?
More of my publications can be found at Willow Island Editions or, if you happen to be in Horbury, you can find the full range of titles at the Rickaro Bookshop.
My thanks to Richard Knowles of Rickaro for the loan of these evocative photographs.
Link; Rickaro Bookshop, Horbury
I’VE BEEN at the Victorian Fair in Wakefield for a few hours each day on the Tourist Information stall, launching my new paperback Wakefield Words. When the morning fog has melted away it’s been sunny enough to make Wakefield look just as it does in the publications that the Tourist Information people are handing out. A pair of stilt-walkers in crinolines and a three-piece oom-pah band come strolling by today. We’ve seen dozens of people we know and met people keen to discuss the old local words that are the subject of my book. One man, an ex-councillor tells me that one of his ancestors from Barnsley had a business card describing himself as a ‘Sparable Maker’.
Sparables, he discovered, are the small nails used to fix the sole of a shoe in place. There’s a Sparable Lane in Sandal.
Out of the sun, on the stall, it isn’t all that warm when you’re just sitting there for any length of time. There’s dampness in the air after the morning mist so I’m sitting there in
Victorian costume – top hat, black coat, paisley scarf – concentrating on keeping my hands warm in my fingerless Scrooge-style mittens, when I hear a woman answering a question that her friend has just whispered to her;
“Of course he’s real!”
I decide that I better keep active so that people don’t mistake me for a mannequin and I draw the Cathedral tower and porch as seen from our stall on the precint.
Like most of my drawings, this started as pen and ink line, but it was when I added that patch of blue – French Ultramarine – that I could see between the sandstone finials of the Catherdral porch and the awning of the stall, that the drawing came to life.
A large flock of town pigeons were soaking up the sun on the roof of a shop on Upper Kirkgate and we saw a Sparrowhawk circling briefly but I didn’t hear or see a Peregrine, a falcon that has often been seen around the Cathedral and blocks of flats in the centre of the city.
IT SEEMS STRANGE to sling my art bag over my shoulder and set out as I’ve been completely out of the habit of doing that recently; I’ve had to put in about three weeks – weekday and weekend alike – in order to get my latest book off to the printers on time. As it is, I’m setting off to the local bookshop to meet the photographer from the Wakefield Express but, as he’s late, I get a chance to draw Tilly, the resident Welsh border collie at Rickaro’s.
I’ve gone for a really simple cover this time. It’s actually in full colour but I decided to limit the text, illustration and border to just one colour. The background is a piece of scanned textured brown card with the colour balance changed in Photoshop to make it look like parchment.
I think the simple cover works because this is a simple subject (but with a lot of resonance) and I’m happy that it effectively communicates the period that its set in and indicates that the material is treated in a clear but reasonably light-hearted way, rather than being an academic study.
I’m looking forward to starting on the sequel, the working title being, rather unimaginatively, More Wakefield Words. But I’m not going to be caught out by a deadline this time!