A Short Break in The Cotswolds - Evesham

We're in the middle of several gigs with the band - our busy time. We had hoped to get away for a week, but then another booking came in for mid-week so we decided to make the most of it and went off on Sunday 4 June for three nights at a farmhouse B&B just outside Broadway in Worcestershire, but near the border with Gloucestershire. The weather was a bit wet but we managed to dodge most of it after the first day which involved getting drenched in Broadway itself. This did result in us nipping into the local museum which was excellent and well worth the modest entrance fee.

After an excellent breakfast at Smallbrook Cottage we looked at the rain and thought a larger town with shopping precincts might be our best bet for the day and Evesham was the nearest to us. This wonderful building on the Market Place is a branch of Nat. West, but somehow I don't think it was purpose built...

Another corner of the Market Place. We'll have a look at The Gateway Tea Rooms in the next article -I promise it will be worth it. Peeping over the rooftops is the Bell Tower of Evesham Abbey, not quite the only remains of the abbey, but perhaps the most impressive. We'll visit the Abbey Grounds in a few moments.

Also on a corner of the Market Place is the Town Hall with a dial wind direction indicator, thermometer and barometer. We didn't need any of them to know it was raining...

Evesham has some excellent black and white pubs in the town centre. We start with The Royal Oak.

Ye Olde Red Horse stands opposite a small triangular green upon which stands the old stocks - with a very uncomfortable-looking thin plank end-on for a seat. None of your cushy wooden benches here for miscreants... But at least a wooden gable structure provides shelter from the rain.

At the rear of the triangular garden was The Old Almonry, originally a part of Evesham's abbey.

We pass through the gateway in the Almonry and come to a group of churches that occupy spots previously taken by the various buildings of the old abbey. St Lawrence church is seen on the right, the Abbey Bell Tower centre and All Saints Parish Church is on the left.

Of the actual abbey itself notwithstanding the Bell Tower this is the biggest chunk of masonry left.

The Dissolution of Henry VIII was the death knell of the abbey and it's relics, but this modern altar-like monument is on the site of the original tomb of Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester (c.1208 – 4 August 1265). He rebelled against King Henry III and became for a short while the ruler of England. In the space of a year he called two Parliaments, one of which stripped the king of Absolute Power and the other included ordinary men from towns. Consequently he is regarded as inventing modern parliamentary democracy. However at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 he was killed by men loyal to the king.

Cotswolds Holiday Index

Creeping Guys With Guitars

In the past we have played a few gigs for a local car club so it was nice to get a call from their secretary the other week. 'We are having a meeting and social on Thursday 8 June,' she said 'and we asked the members what entertainment they wanted. They said "those two Creeping guys with guitars!"...'

Isn't it nice to be remembered! Ha ha! But of course, we don't take ourselves too seriously so we were only too pleased to go and play for their event. They have quite a few new members also since we last played for them so they were all seeing us for the first time and we got some great feedback. 'Your voices are great!' came one comment. 'It's quite rare for someone's voice to be so strong after 40...' Well, we'll let you know whether our voices change once we get there...

It was our first time playing at Fleetwood Cricket Club too - a nice venue with easy access and no stairs - that's what I like! I still have nightmares at the memory of having to carry our previous huge and heavy speakers down an unlit fire escape iron staircase one dark night because the club didn't want us on their front stairs. It was throwing it down with rain and the steps were very steep and slippery. We will not be playing there again!

But this night was not just about music - there were cars to be looked at and judged (thankfully by someone who knows more about them than I do...) This Morris Minor Traveller won the first prize, winning a hefty silver cup to be kept for a year by its owner.

I quite liked this Ford Consul Classic - the first UK car to have twin headlights if I'm not mistaken. I nearly bought one once for £60 when I was 17, but it was just that bit too expensive and I bought a Hillman Minx for £40 instead!

Heskin Steam Rally 2017

Creeping Bentgrass were out playing at the Heskin Steam Rally last Saturday night in the huge marquee. For the second year the event was held at Malt Kiln Farm in Eccleston.

We started playing just gone 8:00pm and came off stage around midnight - just a short set then...

Always one of our favourite gigs of the year, we had a great audience again as the seats were all filled and the crowd standing around the bar got deeper and deeper. The dance floor got busy as we moved into the faster numbers and of those not able or willing to dance, there were a few of the circular tables who were swaying from side to side with linked arms!

This shows just half of the marquee - it is really huge and as the light outside faded into night, the stars came out over the dance floor!

Another fabulous night. Our thanks to organiser Jack Gerrard for his continued support - this was our 13th year playing at this event.

Family Postcards

I know! A full month without a post! You lucky people! But here I am again, having spent a number of weeks with my brother trying to get to a state where we could sort out the probate following the death of my unmarried uncle. Until that happens there will be scant news of the process and findings, but I now know where my hoarding genes come from. Not just the collections of my uncle but of family members I have only just found out about... I never knew the names of my great-grandparents until we started on this, but now I've started to draw up a family tree. How long before I find myself out on a limb, I wonder...

Anyway, I can't see any harm in having a quick look at some postcards from the 20th century that various family members sent or received. There could be more of these to come...

Sent home to Castleton, Rochdale from Southport by my Great-Grandad to my Great-Grandma who, for whatever reason, had been left at home. 24 September 1906. "Arrived safe about 1/2 past 1 o'clock. The weather is grand here. Yours W.T.B."

W.T.B. was William Thomas Burke, my Great-Grandfather. He's not exactly pouring his heart out here, but it would be too easy and perhaps unfair to draw conclusions from so few words. Funny though that I never even knew his name until now... The rides are long since gone from Southport, but just up the coast in my own home town of Blackpool the Pleasure Beach still has their own version of Sir Hiram Maxim's Flying Machine still in operation. Sir Hiram originally wanted to install controls so that riders could send the gondolas up or down but with thoughts of cars stalling and diving or simply being too low when the ride slowed and crashing into the landing stage, the request was denied, leading to the designer dismissing the ride as "merely a roundabout".

Sent by "Emily" to my Great-Aunt Cissie on 19 August 1907. "Dear Cissie, I arrived on Saturday at 11:30am. Enjoying myself very well and I hope you are, though you are at home. The weather is nice so I hope to return in the best of health. Your affectionate friend, Emily." Cissie was my Grandad Burke's sister.

Another Blackpool postcard sent by my Great-Great-Aunt Florrie home to her mother in Rochdale on 22 August 1907. "Dear Mother, I am still enjoying myself. Yesterday we went on the Helter Skelter and got stuck in the middle. On Thursday we kept having showers, but never keeps us in. Florrie". Florrie Woolfenden was the sister of my Great-Grandmother on my paternal grandmother's side.

Manchester Piccadilly - somewhat different to the present day! This card was another sent by "Emily" to my Great-Aunt Cissie in Castleton, Rochdale on 29 November 1907. "Dear Cissie, I was glad to hear from you and will meet you at quarter to seven. Please bring programme if for entrance. All are well, have plenty of time to talk tomorrow, your loving friend Emily." Cissie at this time would have been aged somewhere between 10 and 14 I think. I only remember her as a quite wrinkled old lady who had never married and who chain smoked unfiltered cigarettes. I rather think though that she was quite a character during her youth and there's a super photo of a very confident young woman in full 1920s flapper-style complete with head dress that will no doubt find its way onto the blog at some point.

Five years later Cissie sent this card from Colwyn Bay back to her mother (my Great-Grandma Burke) in Castleton, Rochdale on 17 August 1912. "Dear Mother, Arrived here quite safely, got lovely digs. Rained here this afternoon, fine now. We are rather a long way from Colwyn Bay centre but in a nice position lovely scenery. With love from Cissie."

A local postcard sent from their home town on 7 September 1961 by my Grandad and Uncle Geoff to my Grandma who was on holiday at Morecambe Bay Holiday Camp, Heysham. "Dear Mum, Hope you are having a good time. Have you won anything at you know what? We expect to arrive on Saturday between 2-00 and 2-30. Love Geoff and Dad"

The mention of winning refers to whist drives - she would play every night if possible and would sometimes tut or grumble under her breath if my Mum and Dad insisted we play for matchsticks not pennies when she played cards with me and my brother when we were small! Yet she would have gone mad at the thought of gambling in any other way. Inflation has gone mad here - all the postcards from 1906-12 were sent for a ha'penny (a halfpenny - pre-decimal coinage. 24 of them would be the equivalent to a 5p coin today, though that ignores inflation). In 1961 it cost tuppence ha'penny or 2½d, equivalent to 0.521 pence of today's money without inflation. Just to be clear, that's £0.00521 pence... Add in the effects of inflation and today it costs 56p to send a postcard second class or 65p first class. There was only one class of postage in 1961 and post was delivered twice a day.

Comments on a postcard please...

Found Photos, 35mm 828 Format Film Negatives

We recently suffered a death in the family and it's fallen to my brother and I to sort out the estate and possessions. My Uncle Geoff had been a keen photographer in the past and whilst few have surfaced so far, I was rather hoping to come across a collection of old photos of family and views showing elements of social life no longer with us.

The other day I found a tiny metal canister and it turned out to have a roll of black and white negatives in it. The film was 35mm wide but with only a single sprocket hole for each frame along the bottom edge of the strip. There were no sprocket holes at all along the top edge. A bit of research tells me this is 828 format film, created by Kodak in 1935 for their Bantam range of cameras.

The image format was 40x28mm, a touch bigger than the standard 35mm film, which itself had only been introduced the previous year in 1934. This is a full-frame from one of the photos. Locomotive 4478, named Hermit was built for LNER at Doncaster, entering service in July 1923.

I've no way of dating these photos but guess they are from the late 1940s or early 1950s. There appears to be evidence of an itchy trigger finger...! Winding on the film would not be as simple as a single action of a lever and would certainly not be motor-driven!

Whilst 35mm film came in its own canister which went into the camera, 828 film was a roll film with backing paper. The spool of film had to be held tight to stop light from getting to it as you loaded it into the camera and then threaded the loose end of the film onto an empty take-up spool - which had come from the previous film to have been shot. Depending on the camera either you wound the film on after taking a shot until the single sprocket encountered a pin that stopped any more film advancing, or you wound it on until the next frame number, printed on the back of the backing paper, showed through a tiny red plastic window in the back of the camera.

The remaining shots are of bands parading through Manchester town centre.

This is Manchester in the immediate post-war years. Gaps in streets are evidence of the work of Hitler's Luftwaffe. Bomb sites in and around Manchester remained common through until the end of the 1960s and sporadically even afterwards.

In the area of Piccadilly Gardens this shot has the Littlewoods department store in the background.

I quite like this shot though as it shows some of Manchester's trolleybuses. I can just about remember riding on them as a child. Manchester had nine routes covered by a total of 189 trolleybuses. Introduced in 1938 the last trolleybuses were withdrawn on 31 December 1966.

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More Pastel Artwork

After the success of the oil pastel larger scale painting of Villefranche on the French Riviera, I felt curious as to how it would be to use the hard pastel crayons I bought. So over the past few weeks I've experimented and completed a couple of A4-sized sketches. The set of pastel pencils I have is a Derwent set of 12, so it leaves me with a quite limited palette. But I did find that they were quite easy to blend together - certainly much easier than the oils had been to overlay colours and fade from one to another.

This sketch from one of my photographs of a Venice backwater took just two days to complete. This a decidedly sketchy drawing - the overlays are glaringly obvious but it also contains two elements that I usually find very hard to draw. People and water.

The second one was taken from a postcard and is of The Shambles in York. I took a bit more time with this, which was started on 20 March and finished on 9 April. Because of the narrow nature of the street, in real life I have never seen it in anything but deep shadow at this particular point where two medieval buildings look almost to touch across the street. I didn't want to make this a drab painting, so introduced somewhat more colour with the beige than there is in the actual buildings. The brickwork of the building on the right presented its own challenges as the bricks are worn and some of them are almost as smooth as porcelain and tend to reflect light, looking almost blue rather than the dull red that we associate with bricks. The perspective of the rows of bricks was also quite a challenge to me as I tend to draw everything freehand and not think too much about where lines might converge. I made a special effort here! It's not exact and the shop is definitely not called Green's in real life but hey - it might have been once?

I have in mind another larger painting using either the oil pastels or actual oils - I have some paints and brushes but so far the thought of mess is putting me off... For the subject I've got an old early 20th century postcard of Studland in Dorset.

This presents a number of difficulties and challenges. For one thing I'll have to choose the colours myself as the postcard is in sepia monochrome. Then there is going to be so much green, will it swamp the painting? Can I get enough detail into shrubbery and trees? And I've never attempted to cope with drawing a horse before. There are two here, but the format of my painting will not be quite so widescreen and I have in mind to have the cart drawn by just one horse, thus moving the cart forward and away from the edge of the image. It could take a long time and there could be other projects finding themselves squeezed in the middle to let me recharge and take a fresh look at how it comes along.

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World War One Era Autograph Book, Part 3

Another look at the autograph book from 1915-1919 bought at a book fair in February 2017. There are more blank pages than used ones and it contains both photographs and pencil sketches besides autographs. The autographs it does contain are of friends and family of whoever owned it rather than of famous people.

We start off this time with a couple of photographs. I've no idea who they are of course, but here are two ladies sitting on a jumble of rocks at the bottom of a sloping field, seen through the gate behind them. The lady on the right is smiling for the camera whilst the lady on the left seems lost in the reverie of a moment as she enjoys the view before her.

A simple sketch of flowers (pansies?) by E.H., some of whose work I've featured from the album before.

This looks like a snapshot taken on a day's outing. I don't know where this is, but whatever the building is, there are several benches for people to sit on outside and under the canopy there is a deck chair and further to the left, almost merging with the row of bushes and trees lining the road where the cameraman is standing, a further group of people are sitting at the very edge of what we can see of the building.

A little bit of World War I humour! A list of "hymns" from the front line.

6:30am - Reveille - Christians Awake
6:45am - Rouse Parade - Art Thou Weary
7:00am - Breakfast - Meekly Wait and Murmer Not
8:15am - Company Officer's Parade - When He Cometh
8:45am - Manouvres - Fight The Good Fight
11:45am - Swedish Drill - Here We Suffer Grief and Pain
1:00pm - Dinner - Come Ye Thankful People, Come
2:15pm - Rifle Drill - Go Labour On
3:15pm - Lecture by Officer - Tell Me The Old-Old Story
4:30pm - Dismiss - Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow
5:00pm - Tea - What Means This Eager Anxious Throng
6:00pm - Free For The Night - Oh Lord, How Happy We Should Be
10:00pm - Last Post - All Are Safely Gathered In
10:15pm - Lights Out - Peace, Perfect Peace
10:30pm - Inspection of Guards - Sleep On Beloved

Initialled N.M. and dated March 16, 1918

A Tail of Woe! A charming little pencil sketch by E.P. and drawn 21 April 1918.

And here the ladies, in best hats and gloves, take their seats in the charabanc - an open-air early motor coach - perhaps for the return journey from the house we saw earlier. They look well pleased with themselves - I suspect a measure of brown ale or milk stout has been involved somewhere along the line...

We will return one last time to this album sometime soon.

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Golden Wedding Gig With Creeping Bentgrass

Last night we were out on the edge of the Trough of Bowland - a beautiful area of countryside, forests and rivers in Lancashire.

We were playing for the Golden Wedding celebration of Jack and Margaret and the night was a great success.

The Priory at Scorton was the venue for the night. The audience were in fine voice and singing along to all the songs, which is always a good sign!

Then we were asked for The Twist which we have never played before, but I found a suitable backing style on the keyboard and we surprised ourselves - I even pulled off a passable piano solo! Certainly it filled the floor so you can look forward to us playing it at future gigs!

World War One Era Autograph Book, Part 2

A second look inside the old autograph book, picked up at a book fair recently.

I mentioned the last time that I thought this book had been carried through the war. All dated entries fall between 1915 and 1919 but there are far more blank pages than used ones. A few have a military theme and here is one of those...

I suspect now that the book was in use during the war, but not actually taken to the front. It's in far too clean and undamaged a state. There are no mud - or blood - stains and no torn or scuffed pages. Perhaps the references to the war were completed during periods of leave or just after demobilisation?

This pencil sketch is titled Directing The Way At The Front and shows one soldier saying "Yer knows the dead 'orse 'cross the road? Well keep straight on till yer comes to a p'rambulation 'longside a Johnson ole."

A Johnson hole was a particularly large shell crater. Named for its size and referring to the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion to 1915, Jack Johnson.

Here's a small photograph print gummed into the book.

I'm no motorbike expert I'm afraid. The closest model to this that I've been able to find going through Google images is of a Sunbeam - see advert below.

This advert dates from 1915 so is the right era. Seventy guineas is £73.50, a considerable sum in those days. You would have to spend roughly £106 in 2017 to buy something that cost £1 in 1915. So today such a motorcycle would cost £7,791 give or take a groat... On the other hand, what would that same 1915 motorcycle be worth now in working condition?

Ah... hang on - a message has flooded in! The motorcycle in your photo is a 1915 AJS D1 750cc 2cyl side valve. You can just make out the AJS logo on the side of the tank. They usually had a rear pillion but this one looks to have a luggage rack instead. All the very best Chris Hartley. Many thanks Chris!

Agh! This photograph has been gummed over some existing writing on the page. The bottom of the page is signed A Waring, May 30th 1918. I was despairing of ever being able to remove the photo safely without damaging what was under it when I had an idea. I took out a bright LED torch and shone it through the page from the other side. A word at a time, moving the LED along the lines I eventually made out this:

I slept and dreamt that life was beauty
I woke and found that life was duty
Never say die
Up man and try

The first two lines come from a poem by Ellen Sturgis Hooper. I've had less success identifying the origin of the, perhaps more familiar, last two lines. They seem to go back to proverb and idiom. If anyone knows better, please let me know!

Along similar poetic lines here's my closing look at the old autograph book for this time.

When it comes your wedding day
A new broom I will send
In sunshine use the bushy end
In storm the other end

Margaret Salt, 12 June 1919

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