Portrait of the Artist

I’ve written about this particular artist, my late father,  before, in We All Shine On and A Boyhood Backyard amongst others. His sketches, paintings and illustrations are scattered throughout my other blogposts as well.

He was a founder member, and later President, of his local art society, a group of hobby artists who enjoyed getting together for talks, field trips and practical painting and sketching classes. In the first photo above he’s receiving an award of some sort from the mayor. The picture at the top right shows him with fellow members in a recruitment drive in town, and the third picture is of a field trip to a local park.

He’s concentrating very hard in the first picture above, to produce the painting below, based on a slide of one of his holidays to Spain. The other photos show him out on more sketching trips and chatting to fellow members of the group.

Dad wasn’t a brilliant artist, and human figures and animals were not his strong point, but I think the scene above has a naive charm about it. It shows a group of two Spanish ladies busy making, or mending, something lacy, whilst the other tow people are obviously there to offer advice or simply gossip.

I chose four of his paintings for the above Four Seasons collage, all of which are favourites of mine.

Join us this week at Sepia Saturday where our prompt image is an art class.

Come Feed the Little Birds

Come feed the little birds, show them you care

And you’ll be glad if you do

Their young ones are hungry

Their nests are so bare

All it takes is tuppence from you.

So sings 'the little old bird woman’ on the steps of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, in the enchanting film of Mary Poppins. Of course it’s Mary doing the actual singing, but she is giving voice to the old lady who sells her bags of breadcrumbs for people to feed the birds.

When I was a child it was my delight, when visiting my grandparents at Notingham’s Trent Bridge, to take such a bag of stale bread with which to tempt the swans who sailed up and down the River Trent.

In the first picture I appear to be throwing the bread ‘at’ rater than ‘to’ the poor birds. My brother, standing beside me, has a better technique; waiting for the swans to swim close he throws it at his feet.

I think these pictures were taken some time around Christmas 1957, when I was four, but I remember the ritual of feeding the swans well into my teenage years.

We would also feed the pigeons in Slab Square , in Nottingham’s City Centre.

A generation later, and my daughter generously shares the remnants of her picnic with the hungry pigeons, whilst her granddad looks on. This is the grounds of Nottingham Castle, on a day out in May 1988 with my Mum and Dad, during the school summer half term holidays .

A couple of years later and we’re back in our own home territory, visiting one of our favourite riverside pubs, The Bridge at Woodford, near Salisbury. Once again it’s stale bread that the swans are enjoying. 

Oh and burnt toast, which my son can’t resist having a a sneaky bite of, much to his sister’s disapproval.

This is me about twelve years ago, being watched by my Dad whilst I feed the ducks; this time, however, it’s not bread that I’m offering. I’d joined the RSPB by then and was buying all my wild bird food from them, including for the swans and ducks. This is a special duck and swan food which consisted of tiny dried pellets. I was better educated by then too, and knew that bread was the wrong thing to feed the ducks.


There’s a campaign by the Canal and River Trust to discourage bread being thrown to the birds. Not only does it clog up the rivers, but it can cause lasting damage to waterfowl.

In some cases they develop a condition called ‘angel wing’ which is incurable and leads to the inability to fly and to certain death.

This is Canada Goose in London’s Kelsey Park; it would seem he has been eating too much bread.




So the message is, feed the birds by all means, but preferably with the right kind of food. The garden birds too have different dietary needs of specific nuts and seeds, and it’s worth putting the relevant mix on the bird table to attract some delightful little visitors. No need for the services of the the old bird woman then.

Our Sepia Saturday prompt image this week is a group of children feeding the pigeons, whilst the grandparents look on.  It’s from the Royal Library of Denmark, via Flickr Commons, but it’s not known where and when the photo was taken, other than the sometime in the 1940s or 50s. The children have paid 10 øre for a bag of pigeon food; let’s hope it wasn't just breadcrumbs!

Underneath the Arches

The kids and I in 1988 enjoying spectacular views over the North York Moors. We are standing in one of a series of ruined ‘arches', remnants of a once thriving iron industry of Rosedale. The arches are actually calcining kilns and they and the associated iron mines and the railway are listed monuments due to their historic importance. Calcining (roasting) was necessary to convert the carbonate ores into an oxide prior to smelting. You can find out more by clicking the link.

Fun to scramble down or clamber up!

In the mid-1990s a huge three year conservation project was carried out after it was revealed that one of the kilns’ firebrick linings had collapsed during the Winter. The work continues today and I would imagine that it is no longer possible to scramble over, around and under these huge monuments.

You can read in 'The Press’ about the £2.8 million Heritage Lottery Fund for a major project which is going to transform the area.

"Pioneering railwaymen, ironstone miners, steelmakers and railwaymen created a unique landscape in remote valleys across the moors during Victorian times.

The new scheme, entitled ‘This Exploited Land’, will tell about the heritage's importance in a sweeping arc of land stretching from Goathland and Grosmont through Eskdale to Kildale, Rosedale and Rosedale Abbey.

It will also encourage rare wildlife, ancient woodlands, wild daffodils and the special species of the River Esk.”

Join other contributors to this week’s Sepia Saturday to see what they made of the image prompt which gave us arches and steps.

The view from above the kilns is © Christine Matthews  courtesy of geograph SE7294 under the Creative Commons Licence.