William Baines – Wild Yorkshire

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.

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.

The Gaskell School

Gaskell School by William Baines — The old Gaskell School, drawn by William Baines, c. 1907? The original is in colour but I have only a black and white photograph, so in this case I’ve colourised it in Photoshop.

The old Gaskell School next to the gates of Carr Lodge Park, Horbury, was standing empty when William Baines made this drawing. I’m guessing that he’d be 8 or 9 years old, so this would have been 1907 or 1908.

The dedication stone is now built into the wall on New Street.

The initials of Daniel and Mary Gaskell are embedded in the apex of a double garage. Daniel was a Liberal MP for Wakefield, first elected in 1832.

William was a pupil at the Wesleyan Day School on School Lane, off Horbury High Street.

The boys’ and girls’ entrances have been blocked up and converted into windows, but you can still see the old stone step on the girls’ side, worn by years of use.

William Baines in Colour

Baines family — Mr and Mrs Baines with William and Teddy.

I’ve been experimenting with photo restoration and colourisation using the neural filters in Adobe Photoshop.

I like the patina of old photographs but the sepia-toned world that they evoke can put a bit of a barrier between us and them.

Besides, working on the images on the 27 inch screen of my iMac brings out details that I might miss in the original. The ‘neural filter’ seems to favour blue as the main colour for clothes. My guess is that there was more colour about.

It’s freshens up the scratchy surface of this photograph of Mr and Mrs Baines with friends. Are the two women sisters? No names on the back, just a pencilled ’33’. It’s possible that they are relatives of the Radley or Naylor families of Horbury. The family portrait and – as far as I remember – this walking group, were given to me by Mrs Nora Naylor, nee Radley, of Cooperative Street, Horbury.

For a while, the Baines family ran this shop, demolished in the early 1960s, next to St Peter’s Church. Ann North lent me the much-blemished photograph and I’ve colourised this version from my print of it.

Primitive Methodist School Feast, 1906

Again, the original of this postcard is black and white. William appears, aged 6 or 7, possibly the boy in the flat cap in the bottom left corner.

Thanks to ridiculously high res scan of the original – 2400 dpi! – I can zoom in on a small area to reveal long-gone shops.

I think this would have been a Whitsuntide feast, traditionally when people treated themselves to new clothes after the winter . . . and decorated straw hats of course.

Stan Barstow: William Baines in Horbury

Baines leaflet — This blog post is an extract from my 1972 leaflet ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’. I still have a few copies left if you’d like to order one, please contact me for details.

William Baines was born on Palm Sunday, 26 March, 1899, at 11 Shepstye Road Horbury.

Writing in 1972, on the 50th anniversary of William’s tragically early death, aged just 23, Stan Barstow, whose novel Joby describes a childhood in a town like Horbury, recalled:

I was born a few doors down along from William Baines in Shepstye Road, Horbury; but he had been dead for six years by the time I arrived on the scene. He was, in fact, exactly contemporary with my mother and its odd to think of her still alive and William dead all these years. But consumption and the like nipped off many a young life in those days: my mother’s talk of her youth is full of references to parents who “had eight and buried three”. And, of course, it’s tempting but futile to speculate upon how Baines’s talent might have developed had he survived and been with us, in his seventies, today.

‘I probably saw William’s father though I doubt that I ever heard him play the organ, for I went into the Primitive Methodist Chapel no more than a couple of times. The Highfield Methodist Chapel was where I spent the Sundays of my youth. There were four Methodist chapels within a couple of hundred yards along Horbury High Street in those days: the two I’ve mentioned and the Wesleyan and the Congregational. What their precise differences in belief and form of worship were I never knew, but it was only much later, after the Second World War, when their separate congregations began to fail, that three of them (the Congregational holding on to its independence) amalgamated for survival. A supermarket now stands on the site of the Primitive Methodist Chapel now [2022: currently Bistro 42 and the Lucky Flower Chinese takeway].

Mr Baines — William sits beside his father at the organ, my sketch from my ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’ leaflet, 1972.

How quiet Horbury must have been in William’s day. I remember it as quiet enough in mine, for although I was born into the age of the internal combustion engine it was half a lifetime before bypass roads and six-lane super highways. An attractive little town at that time, compact, stone-built, sitting on the hill above the Calder, with green fields all round it. In the evening a one-armed lamplighter made his rounds; in the the early morning you would be stirred out of sleep by the clatter of colliers’ clogs passing under the window. Not much different, on imagines, from William’s time, for although his youth and mine were separated by a terrible war, change came much more slowly than in the years since 1945.

Primitive Methodist Chapel, photography by Chappell and Hill, Horbury

Stan Barstow's autobiography — Stan Barstow’s autobiography, ‘In My Own Good Time’

A puritanical town, of course. What other could it have been under that great weight of Methodism? Drink was a blatant evil, sex a vast unmentionable mystery. It’s perhaps fortunate that William was a composer, rather than a writer, for music carries few of the moral associations of literature. He’d have had a hard time putting the truth on paper in those days. His departure from his birthplace was not the kind of exile D. H. Lawrence had to seek from a not dissimilar environment, and his future, had he lived, would surely not have been plagued by the kind of persecution Lawrence suffered. But that is speculation again, and we should be grateful for what, in his short life, he left us to enjoy.’
Stan Barstow, ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’, Harrogate Festival 1972

Baines shop — Mr Baines opened a music shop directly opposite the Primitive Methodist Chapel on Horbury High Street.

William Baines Poster

Yesterday’s Baines recital in Ripon Cathedral went well so next up is the recital in his home town Horbury on the anniversary of his tragically early death, aged just 23 years, two weeks on Sunday, on 6th November.

I’ve designed some A4 posters for the library and the local shops and also printed some postcard-size handbills. Please spread the word . . . and if you’re local and you can display a poster, I’d be glad to drop one in.

William Baines, Harrogate, 1972

Fifty years ago today my exhibition, The Yorkshire of William Baines, marking the 50th anniversary of the death of the composer was in its second (and final) week at the Harrogate Festival. According to my diary William’s music and my show were getting a good reception.

I’ve been here before; coming through the darkened room with the piano and sitting down and watching. I definitely remember some of the slides particularly.

“I’ve been here before;” was the reaction of one young visitor, “coming through the darkened room with the piano and sitting down and watching. I definitely remember some of the slides particularly.”

His parents were equally enthusiastic; his mum thought ‘the music was marvellous’ and his dad mentioned that he had a friend who interviewed for Radio 3.

People had been so helpful as I prepared the show, loaning pictures, objects and manuscripts connected to the composer.

Helen Millifanti, curator of the Pump Room Museum, found me an Edison phonograph which we got working. It stood in a mocked-up parlour with an upright piano also on loan from the museum alongside a framed photograph of William as a toddler standing next to an Edison Bell Phonograph. I think that I remember that Mr Baines, William’s father, George William, sold them in his shop on the High Street; the latest technology in his day.

Radio Leeds

radio interview — Ringing one of the Horbury Handbell Ringers’ bells in a Radio Leeds interview

Radio Leeds had just celebrated its fourth birthday. My interview with Peter Hawkins went well and they invited me to write and introduce a radio documentary on Baines to coincide with the anniversary in November.

Goodnight to Flamboro’

The man from Groves — The Man from Groves Dictionary

To celebrate William’s sea piece Goodnight to Flamboro’, I painted one of the sections of the clip together displays we’d assembled for the exhibition.

Highlight of the week was a recital by Eric Parkin on Friday 4th August. Peter Hawkins interviewed a cousin of William’s Elsie Hargreaves and his school day’s friend Ernest Hindle and I’m pleased to say that we still have a couple of brief clips in my Hat’s Off Gentleman – A Genius! documentary.

Miss Tiffany, a volunteer who often manned the desk at my Baines exhibition.

Amongst the audience was, according to my diary, a ‘Chorister from York’. That must have been Robin Walker, now a composer himself who has been busy producing a new recording of William’s music to launch this autumn for the 100th anniversary.

Bird and Wells

I got to meet Linda Kitson who was energetically working as artist in residence at the Festival. Drawing at events and recitals during the day and posting the results on a board in the Majestic Hotel in the evening. The ‘Writers Talking’ sessioin on Saturday 5 August included Stan Barstow and Terence Dicks. While Stan’s work is definitely inspired by gritty reality, Terence Dicks, script editor on Dr Who, explained that his ‘life has been free of super villains, space monsters and Cybermen’.

My life has been free of super villains, space monsters and Cybermen

All the while Linda Kitson was squatting on the floor, moving about to to draw the various speakers. I wished that I could be so fearless when out with my sketchbook. She assured me that I’d love working at the Royal College of Art. She’d recently graduated but she said she often dropped in, using the place as ‘her club’. I became a good deal more at ease drawing in public thanks to the weekly sessions drawing at London Zoo during my time at the RCA.

Surprise visitors: John Bird and John Wells

I was most star struck though meeting satirists John Bird and John Wells who’d come in to the Royal Baths, where my exhibition was held, to escape from the rain.

Gilbert Mills

On Thursday, 10th August, veteran pianist Gilbert Mills introduced himself. Born ten years before William (so that would be about 1889) he championed William’s music in the very earliest days of radio, before the BBC was founded, giving recitals on 2LO, as it was called.

He demonstrated on the old upright piano in my mock-up of the Baines parlour. He insisted that Eric Parkin hadn’t got it right in his recording of Blackbird Singing in a Convent Garden. He played it with the trilling lilt that you get when a blackbird sings.

he was an odd bod. He was reckoned to be something of a genius even when he used to wander about Cleckheaton; gaunt-looking and huge hands, long fingers he had
A visitor on the final day of the exhibition who knew William

William Baines Centenary Recital

Robin Walker tells me that we’ve now got a date for a recital to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Yorkshire composer William Baines. After the recital I’ll be leading a walk to some of the Bainesian corners of Horbury.

Thanks to Horbury Civic Society and Horbury Methodist Church for their support.

In Memory of William Baines

My thanks to Keith Bosley (1937-2018) for letting me have a copy of his poem of a visit he made to Horbury over half a century ago.

In Memory of William Baines
(1899-1922)

Is this the church
we asked the caretaker
where there is a plaque
to William Baines?
It is, he said.

We had travelled north all day
to Yorkshire, to smell
and taste the soot
of Wakefield, to see
the pitheads, the slagheaps
the houses facing
two grey ways at once, to hear
people with grit on their tongues
giving a civil answer
a guarded edge:
we had come to find
what was left of a boy
in the village where he lived
fifty years ago -
this stern suburb, Horbury
hugging the hillside
above the city.

We had read old journals
proclaiming his debt
to Debussy and Skryabin
(the sea and the fire)
calling him a genius
and reporting his death
at the age of twenty-three:
we had met distant
relatives who told
of meagre schooling
of work with his father
playing in the picture
palace and the Primltive
Methodist chapel
and of consumption
and poverty that kept him
in the garden shed
till the hospital at York
could do nothing for him.

We had studied tattered
scores long out of print
from Paradise Gardens where
he walked at sunset
to Pool-Lights, whose last phrase
rises to silence
taking his bearings meanwhile
from his own Flamboro' Head
and sailing out
alone beyond the beacons
where no one was to follow.

This is William Baines
but the caretaker
unlocked the door and showed us
into gloom. Upstairs
he sald. We trod, fingered
grime and there it was
with laurels and flaming
torches carved in oak
an inscription
in the taste of the time
and at the bottom
a scroll in bronze
with a piano Prelude
engraved in full
chosen for its
brevity and because
they called it the
Amen Prelude.

He fetched us a triptych
of photographs
from the organ loft:
- a printed title page
with two corners
turned down and shaded
- a dark young man
with plain strong features
creased down the middle
- A page of manuscript
marked Labyrinth
a deep sea cave.

Call him up, call him back
from the lonely places:
here in his England
his Yorkshire where men
have died for a hard living
let this fiftieth autumn
flare in his honour, for here
is small treasure, here
is filigree of iron.

Keith Bosley

Plaque from the Primitive Methodist Chapel, now preserved in the Methodist Church, Horbury.

Blue plaque at Baines’ birthplace, Shepstye Road, Horbury

The Lone Wreck

I am working for my Pianoforte recital at Horbury (Nr. Wakefield) which is on the 16th of this month — how I look forward to these occasions. Oh! music — what a delight you are to me — it is one thread between man — & spirit.
For “bread money” — I play as “relief pianist” at the Electric Theatre (Picture House) (York) — hours 4.30 to 7 o’clock.
It does not take up too much of my time — what a blessing! !”
William Baines, 1899-1922, in his diary for Wednesday, 2 January, 1918

Baines biographer Roger Carpenter thought that William Baines’ 16 January 1918 recital would have been only the second public recital that the 18-year old composer gave. I’ve met people who remembered William playing at the Primitive Methodists’ Ebenezer Hall, so probably that was the venue.

Tomorrow lunchtime at a recital in Ripon Cathedral Robin Walker performs William’s Tides, two sea pieces for piano, The Lone Wreck and Goodnight to Flamboro’ in a program that also includes performances of William’s Five Songs.

Fifty years ago, for my ‘major project’ at Leeds School of Art I was organising a Baines exhibition and a biographical leaflet. Looking back through my file today I like the inky roughs that I produced on layout paper. Unfortunately the finished publication was in two colours only, so I didn’t take those any further.

Flamborough cliffs — My drawing, from an old postcard, of the cliffs at Flamborough, for Roger Carpenter’s 1977 biography of Baines, *Goodnight to Flamboro’*.

Goodnight to Flamboro’

Another link with Yorkshire composer and pianist William Baines (1899-1922): Alan Cuckston’s 1990 recording of a selection of his piano music is the only CD that I’ve ever provided the cover artwork for; a pencil and watercolour of one of Baines’ favourite places, drawn on location at Flamborough Head.

The centre piece of Cuckston’s recital, recorded at Leeds Grammar School on a Steinway piano, are two sea pieces, published as Tides (1920):

“Tonight I have written a lovely mind’s-eye impression. . . Goodnight to Flamboro’. The waves persistantly roll on the rock and in the caves. . . A beautiful ecstatic sorrow surrounds everything about. . .”

William Baines, 1/7/1920

“This is an important disc,” Baines biographer Roger Carpenter tells me, “because it includes several items not otherwise issued commercially, such as Glancing Sunlight and Island of the Fay.”

At the Grave of William Baines

In 1995 Eric Parkin recorded a CD of the Piano Music of William Baines, which includes the Seven Preludes (1919) and Twilight Pieces (1921).

There’s a Baines connection to the music included on Robin Walker’s CD, I thirst. His piano piece At the Grave of William Baines was composed in 1999 to mark the centenary of Baines’ birth in Horbury. Walker writes:

“He was a composer who lived in his own reality, was solaced by Nature, and composed with a wild spirituality that always retained musical integrity.”

Tag: William Baines

Secret Garden

The Gaskell School

William Baines in Colour

Primitive Methodist School Feast, 1906

Stan Barstow: William Baines in Horbury

William Baines Poster

William Baines, Harrogate, 1972

Radio Leeds

Goodnight to Flamboro’

Bird and Wells

Gilbert Mills

William Baines Centenary Recital

In Memory of William Baines

In Memory of William Baines
(1899-1922)

The Lone Wreck

Goodnight to Flamboro’

At the Grave of William Baines

Links

Primitive Methodist School Feast, 1906

Radio Leeds

Goodnight to Flamboro’

Bird and Wells

Gilbert Mills

In Memory of William Baines(1899-1922)

At the Grave of William Baines

Links

In Memory of William Baines
(1899-1922)