#teacher training west midlands | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mvdipetsch · 5 years

Text

Outside of London; A Guide.

Hello, friends! I think there’s a semi-substantial amount of roleplays based around England, but honestly 90% of them are in London and while that’s great, England is made up of a lot of cities and I figured I’d show some #representation.

In this guide we cover: Housing in England, location and travel!

Disclaimer: This is based off of my experience and the experience of those around me. Most of my knowledge is concentrated around Birmingham, as that is where I grew up, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool and Liverpool so I feel that I have a semi-decent shot at helping out.

If you found this guide helpful, please reblog this as it helps to show me that there is interest and I’m not just shouting into a void. If you have any suggestions or comments about things I could/should cover in these guides please let me know! Any specific questions? Shoot me an ask and I’ll do my best to help you out.

Location, Location, Location.

England is divided into counties. There many of them, and realistically they don’t affect anything. All it really means is that your resources (police, fire, ambulance, charities, etc.) are organised by that one area. For instance - the buses in my city are all organised by Network West Midlands. They deal with every bus service (if it’s an NXBus) in the West Midlands. Ultimately, it doesn’t really affect anything.

From my city to my university, it’s a 3-ish hour drive. That is a long drive. I know some people regard that as nothing, but when everything is so close together, it’s a lot. It’s not really a drive that people would make a lot - this is why train transport (while not that big) tends to be used to get from city to city.

Only really in the inner cities are things that expensive. When you move away from the main city, things can get pretty affordable, but the inner city is still often really accessible via bus, driving or even train. When I’m at my boyfriend’s I’ll get the bus into the city centre, but when I’m at my mom’s sometimes it’s quicker to just jump on a train. Train tickets are also pretty inexpensive if you’re moving within the city. It’s when you’re heading to smaller cities that the problems arise. For instance, I can get to London for under £10, and to Liverpool for not much more. However, for me to get from Birmingham (a major city) to my University (a not-so-major city of about 200k) it’s £60+ with a change. On coach, it’s £14 with a change + it takes 5-ish hours (there are direct coaches that cost £30~ which is still significantly cheaper than the train) University students will commonly take a coach to and from their university to their hometown if it’s ridiculously priced.

The higher north you go, typically the cheaper it is. This is dependent upon where in that city you are, but the general consensus is that north = cheaper. Obviously if you’re in Manchester city centre then it’s going to be a bit more pricey, but the general cost of living / food / etc. is seen to be cheaper the more north you go. A good way to judge how expensive a place is, is by how much the bus fare is. Birmingham bus fare is £4.00 for a daysaver (one ticket, on the bus as much as you like) but when I was in Liverpool I paid something like £1.20 for an U18 ticket. That’s a big difference. (For reference - Birmingham is the smack-bang middle of England. Liverpool is about 2 hours north, near Manchester.)

Typically, when it comes to travelling;

Driving

Cars in the UK are predominantly manual (with a gear stick) but we can still get automatic cars. Manual cars are also cheaper than automatic and you can drive an automatic with a manual license but you cannot drive a manual with an automatic license.

My mom lives seven minutes from her work (she timed it, she’s got no life) but there are people who live up to thirty minutes away and have to take the motorway. This means that if there’s a massive accident, you can sit there for six hours, bored out of your skull

It’s also worth saying that if you live in a/the city centre, you’re not taking your car to work. It’s ridiculously expensive and parking is so few and far between, it’s really not worth it. People can and do drive, but plenty of people will also opt for a train or bus.

Buses

If you don’t drive the bus is often a very viable option. Buses will commonly run from 6:30/7 until 11:30/12 (at least where I am) but you can get night buses or buses that run later, they’re just a bit rare.

Students (in college or secondary school, typically) are VERY common on buses. As in public buses. Unless someone has an impairment and go to a special school suited to their needs, you make your own way. Which often means that you jump on that bus with every man and his dog.

Sunday service is real and it’s a pain in the arse. Buses that run every 10-ish minutes during the week drop to 20 between 9 and 5 and then drop to every 30 minutes after that (sometimes even every hour.) This means that if you miss your bus... you can be waiting for a very long time.

Trains

Train’s are far more common for longer commutes. Also trains aren’t really that common for secondary school students (they either get dropped off in a car, walk or take the bus) but college students can and do take the train. My best friend takes an hour’s train ride to and from her college every day, and a lot of my teachers will get the train to college (my college is in the city centre, so it’s pretty logical.) Regardless, trains aren’t as common.

Housing

Houses in England are attached. It is rare that you will see detached (stand alone) houses. Most houses will share their walls with their neighbours, unless they’re the end house in which case they’re called “semi-detached” cause... only half of them is attached. That tends to mean that if your neighbours have a baby, you can hear them crying. You can hear when the tv is too loud and all that kind of stuff.

When you move out, there tends to be a few options in terms of who actually owns where you live. The options normally are:

Council.

You sign up on the website, the council give you a priority rating and a set amount of points. These points are determined by the people in your household and your needs. A single mother with two kids will get more points than a single person with no dependants.

There is also a ‘bedroom’ tax, which states that you have to pay a tax if you live in a council property and are seen as having more bedrooms than you need. If, for instance you have two children of opposite genders that are aged seven and three, you have to pay extra tax for that third bedroom because it’s deemed as unnecessary. However if you have two children and they’re of different genders and one of them is over the age of ten (10) then you do not have to pay the tax. If they are of the same gender, then it is until one of them is sixteen (16).

Council and Housing Associations are most beneficial to those who are receiving benefits or are not working enough to cover rent by themselves.

Housing Association

The way a housing association works is effectively the same as a landlord and the council. You apply on the council website for the aforementioned points and begin to bid on properties. When this happens, you may bid on a property that happens to be owned by a HA. The HA then acts as your landlord. HAs are pretty okay, dependent upon the area + such. When you live in a HA, any housing benefit you receive will immediately be paid from the council to the HA. This can cause issues if your money gets fucked up (which is more common than not because the housing system in the UK is BROKEN.)

Private Rent

Private is when you have a landlord. I mean, that’s pretty self-explanatory really. You have an issue? Call the landlord. I’ve never had a landlord so I can’t really comment much on this. I will say that most landlords likely won’t accept housing benefit as a form of payment.

Private own.

This is just the whole mortgage, thing. You know how this goes.

There are a few different types of housing options when it comes to England and I’d imagine that this is pretty true for up and down the city.

Blocks of flats.

Blocks of flats are huge high-rises. They’re not as common anymore but there are still quite a few knocking about. If you remember the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, that was a high-rise.

Blocks of flats can be owned by the local council or be privately rented. I’ve never lived in a flat, so my knowledge isn’t the best. They all tend to have names and there’s normally at least two together.

A ‘flat’ is basically an apartment. So it’s a bunch of different flats (which, in high rises, commonly have two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and a bathroom) High rises have a lot of flats in them. Commonly there’s at least 13 floors, with between around four and six flats per floor. So you can get a lot of people in a high rise.

Maisonette.

A maisonette looks like a wide house. It’s normally one to two floors, with flats that have three (or more) bedrooms. Maisonettes are considerably bigger, in terms of the flats inside, and consist of maybe two flats per floor. Maisonettes can also be council, privately rented or housing association.

Bungalow.

A bungalow is a home without any stairs. They can be council, privately rented or privately owned. Bungalows aren’t that common anymore, but they’re great for people who have difficulty with stairs and such. Also most bungalows are actually pretty decent sizes too.

Houses.

Houses in the UK are broken down into one of three categories:

Detached

Semi-Detached

Attached

This is literally just based upon how many of your walls are shared with your neighbour. Detached houses are really uncommon in the UK and are usually found in richer areas. Semi-detached is mainly just the house at the end of your street, so semi-detached and attached are the main two.

Also it’s pretty common that you only have windows of two of the four house walls. Even if you’re in a semi-detached house, you’ll only have front and back windows.

Houses can be privately owned, privately rented, housing association or council.

Most houses follow a similar layout. Typically three bedrooms, with either one bathroom or a room just for the toilet + then the bathroom (with a bath + sink + such.) It’s also super common for one room to be a ‘box room’ which is normally pretty small. My room at my mom’s house is the ‘box room’ and it fits a 3/4 bed, a chest of draws, and a metal rack that I use as a bookshelf. There is not a lot of room in there.

And there you have it! I think I covered most things regarding transport and housing in the UK, and I really hope that it was as informative as possible. Stay groovy, my dudes.

#rpt #rpc #rph #CONTENT.#WH : LOCATIONS.#WRITING HELP.

83 notes · View notes

bountyofbeads · 5 years

Text

US mass shooters exploited gaps, errors in background checks

By LISA MARIE PANE | Published September 7, 2019 4:00 PM ET | AP | Posted September 7, 2019 6:10 PM ET|

Most mass shooters in the U.S. acquired the weapons they used legally because there was nothing in their backgrounds to disqualify them, according to James Alan Fox, a criminologist with Northeastern University who has studied mass shootings for decades.

But in several attacks in recent years gunmen acquired weapons as a result of mistakes, lack of follow-through or gaps in federal and state law.

Not all gun purchases are subject to a federal background check system. Even for those that are, federal law stipulates a limited number of reasons why a person would be prohibited from purchasing or possessing a firearm. Those include someone who has been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year in prison, has a substance abuse addiction, has been involuntarily committed for a mental health issue, was dishonorably discharged from the military or convicted of domestic violence/subject of a restraining order.

In 2018, there were more than 26 million background checks conducted and fewer than 100,000 people failed. Of those, the vast majority were for a criminal conviction. Just over 6,000 were rejected for a mental health issue.

Here are some of the ways mass shooters acquired their weapons:

MISTAKE IN DATA: CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, CHURCH

The gunman who killed nine worshippers in 2015 at Mother Emanuel AME Church acquired a handgun because of a combination of a mistake in the background database and lack of follow-through.

Dylann Roof had been arrested on drug charges just weeks earlier. Although that arrest should have prevented him from purchasing the pistol he used in the attack, the FBI examiner reviewing the sale never saw the arrest report because the wrong agency was listed in state criminal history records. After being told she had the wrong agency to review the arrest record and being directed to a different police department, she didn’t follow through.

After a three-day waiting period, Roof went back to a West Columbia store and picked up the handgun.

FBI examiners process about 22,000 inquiries per day, a Justice Department attorney said during a court case brought by relatives of the church victims.

DATA NOT UPDATED: SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, TEXAS, CHURCH

The man who killed more than two dozen churchgoers in 2017 in Sutherland Springs, Texas, was able to purchase guns because his past criminal record was not submitted to the FBI database.

Devin Patrick Kelley purchased four guns from federally licensed dealers in Texas and Colorado. The military veteran passed the required background checks because the Air Force never informed the FBI about an assault on his wife and her child that led to a court-martial, a year of confinement and a bad conduct discharge.

The Air Force acknowledged that in addition to failing to submit the information in the FBI database for Kelley, it found several dozen other such reporting omissions. The Air Force has blamed gaps in “training and compliance measures” for the lapses and said it made changes to prevent failures in the future.

LACK OF ENFORCEMENT: AURORA, ILLINOIS, WORKPLACE

When Aurora, Illinois, shooter Gary Martin failed a background check and was told to turn over his weapon, he never did and police didn’t confiscate it. Martin later killed five co-workers and wounded six other people at a suburban Chicago manufacturing plant.

An initial background check failed to detect Martin’s criminal record. Months later, a second background check found his 1995 aggravated assault conviction in Mississippi involving the stabbing of an ex-girlfriend.

He was sent a letter stating his gun permit had been revoked and ordering him to turn over his firearm to police, however he never gave up the .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun.

There’s no mechanism under federal law to seize firearms from people who are prohibited from possession or purchase. Most states allow police to seize a firearm when they encounter a prohibited person. Few states have a procedure to actively retrieve and remove firearms from prohibited people.

A 2018 report by the California attorney general, for example, said that more than 20,000 people in that state have failed to surrender their firearms as required. California is one of a handful of states that seizes firearms from prohibited people. California, Connecticut, and Nevada require prohibited people to provide proof they’ve complied and relinquished their firearms.

PRIVATE PURCHASE: WEST TEXAS RAMPAGE

The gunman who went on a rampage last weekend along a 10-mile stretch around Midland and Odessa, Texas, killing seven people and injuring about two dozen, had failed a background check in 2014. Authorities believe Seth Aaron Ator evaded the background check system by purchasing the weapon he used through a private transaction. They searched a home in Lubbock that they believe is associated with the person who supplied the gun.

Under federal law, private sales of firearms — such as between friends, relatives or even strangers — are not required to undergo a federal background check. Some 21 states plus Washington, D.C., have laws that require background checks on some private sales, but Texas isn’t one of them. Two other states — Maryland and Pennsylvania — require a background check for handguns but not long guns.

A study by Harvard University researchers published in 2017 found that 22 percent of current gun owners who acquired a firearm in the previous two years reported doing so without a background check.

While Americans are allowed to make their own firearms, they cannot do so commercially. It is illegal to make and sell guns as a business without being a licensed dealer or manufacturer. Some sales at gun shows also are not subject to a background check.

TOOK FROM RELATIVES: NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT; MARYSVILLE, WASHINGTON AND SANTA FE, TEXAS

The 20-year-old who killed 20 students and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, took the firearms he used from his mother’s collection. Adam Lanza killed her first in the home they shared before going to the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he carried out his attack in 2012.

In 2014, 15-year-old Jaylen Fryberg killed four classmates and wounded one other in Marysville, Washington, before killing himself. He was armed with a .40-caliber Beretta Px4 Storm handgun that he stole from his father. Fryberg’s father was later convicted of illegally obtaining the gun for failing to acknowledge on federal firearm forms that he was the subject of a tribal domestic-violence protective order. That order was never sent into the state or federal criminal databases.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a 17-year-old high school student in Santa Fe, Texas, is accused of killing eight students and two substitute teachers in 2018 with a shotgun and pistol he took from his father’s closet.

LEGALLY ACQUIRED: LAS VEGAS; AURORA, COLORADO; ROSEBURG, OREGON, AND ORLANDO AND PARKLAND, FLORIDA

The man who carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — the Las Vegas attack that left 58 people killed and more than 500 wounded in 2017 — legally acquired 33 of the 49 weapons between October 2016 and Sept. 28, 2017, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The gunmen who carried out attacks at a high school in Parkland, Florida; the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida; Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon and a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, all passed background checks and purchased their firearms legally.

#gun violence #gun control #guns #mass murder #mass shooting #us politics #politics #u.s. news #boycott nra #nra #the nra is a terrorist organization #trump administration #president donald trump #trumpism #trump

1 note · View note

stroudtimes · 2 years

Text

Stroud & Proud: Emma Wilkes on Susan Lynch influence and landing role in BBC hit Doctors

After living all her life in Stourbridge in the West Midlands, Emma Wilkes moved to Stroud in 2011 with her husband James and children. After joining Susan Lynch’s theatre group Rats in 2016, Emma felt the time was right to leave her career as a secondary school French and German teacher, and start a journey to becoming a professional actress. Since meeting Susan, she’s trained with other amazing…

View On WordPress

#Doctors #Emma Wilkes #Rats #Susan Lynch

1 note · View note

masterclassguitar420 · 3 years

Text

The Legendary Meeting of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page

0 notes

creativinn · 3 years

Text

Black History Month - Inside 'world's best micro-art exhibition' in Birmingham by artist who was told 'you'll never succeed' - Birmingham Live

A Black Country-born artist has spoken of his pride at setting up the "world's best micro-art exhibition" in his hometown of Birmingham.

Twenty five micro-sculptures crafted by Dr Willard Wigan MBE have gone on display permanently at Birmingham Contemporary Art Gallery.

Among the micro sculptures forming Willard's World Of Wonder Exhibition include world champion boxer Tyson Fury, saxophonist Charlie Parker, a motorbike inside a hair and 14 camels inside the eye of a needle.

READ MORE:Tyson Fury recreated in microscopic form by Wolverhampton artist Willard Wigan

Dr Wigan can spend up to eighteen hours a day on his artwork, sculpting between heartbeats and using microscopic tools like eyelashes to paint.

He told Black Country Live: "My work needed a permanent home.

"I have one in America but because I live in Birmingham I thought I would be good to bring it to this gallery because it is a beautiful location.

"I am proud I have got this exhibition here.

"The best micro-art exhibition in the world is here at Birmingham Contemporary Art Gallery."

At school growing up in Wolverhampton, Dr Wigan says he was told by teachers "you'll never succeed" because he was "slower at learning than other kids" due to his undiagnosed autism.

"I had this learning difference so I was singled out a lot by the teachers and taken around the school as an example of failure," he said.

"That traumatised me a bit."

But he is proud of who he is and says he would not be a world-renowned artist if it was not for his autism.

Dr Wigan, who received his honorary doctorate from University of Warwick, hopes his artwork can be an inspiration to others.

He also spoke about his Caribbean heritage and his pride at representing the community as Black History Month runs during October.

Born to Jamaican parents, Dr Wigan said: "My work belongs to everybody.

Stay abreast with the very latest from the region with our Black Country Email Updates

"And it is good for people to understand what the Caribbean community has contributed to the UK, and I think people should know that, working in the hospitals, jobs most people wouldn't do, working on the trains, buses, helping to build the country after the war. They should be remembered for that.

"And I have contributed to it with this. I have become the greatest micro-artist of all time. I was born in the UK, the West Midlands.

"I have bought this exhibition here so I have done my bit, so it is an inspiration for everybody.

"I believe in diversity, we are all human beings, that's what we are."

He has been recognised by the Guinness World Records as being the artist as the sculptor of the world’s smallest works of art made by hand.

But creating such tiny pieces takes a lot of time and patience.

Dr Wigan, who received his MBE title for his service to art, said: "Once I create this artwork, I don't like to look at it anymore because it causes me so much pain and stress doing it.

"I have sleepless nights working 16 hours-a-day, 17, 18 and even more.

Stay abreast of the latest on days out, nights out, shopping and more with our Daily What's On Email updates

"Sometimes I work on six to seven pieces at a time, I will control my heart rate and work between beats.

"I will make all types of microscopic tools and paint with my eyelash.

"Sometimes I forgot to eat so all of these things are part of my journey, the stress to make this work.

"What gives me satisfaction is the reaction when people see it."

His very first micro sculpture that has survived since childhood is also on display, showing an ant house.

Meanwhile, one of his favourite pieces is of Tyson Fury, whom has been inspirational to him.

He added: "I might Tyson Fury when he was emerging and I knew he was going to be one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time.

"When I met Tyson Fury, it was amazing to meet such a gentle giant.

"He got knocked down with mental health and got back. He got knocked down by Wilder and got back up.

"Whenever in life, we got knocked, we get back.

"And Tyson is a great inspiration and to everybody else to see what he was capable of doing."

He is now working on a piece for the upcoming Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.

The exhibition costs £10 to enter, while the gallery itself is free.

This content was originally published here.

0 notes

hennes-maurits · 3 years

Text

How to Find an Affordable Driving School Near You

About Cheap Driving School. When you're thinking of choosing a driving school in Australia for yourself or your child, you have many options to choose from. You can decide on a driving school that is affordable, one that is within your budget and one that will provide the safest lessons for your children. There are many lessons available for kids of all ages that will provide them with the skills they need to drive safely and responsibly. Some of the lessons offered include defensive driving, motorcycle driving, first aid, driving theory, advanced driver training, driving instructor courses, vehicle safety, and many other driving lesson options.

Compared to driving lessons available in the US or other countries, the lessons that are offered in Australia are actually quite reasonable. Solo Driving Training provides outstanding driving lessons in all areas of Melbourne including, market town, eastern region, outer banks, outer midland, south east region, south west suburbs and more. Unlike many other driving schools which claim to be the cheapest around, Solo Driving Training provides the very best quality of instruction at an affordable cost. This is because unlike other driving schools that offer classes only at a high price, Solo Driving Training also offers lessons in all areas of Melbourne.

Apart from cheap school lessons, a lot of schools that offer driving lesson are able to provide a good driving experience for their students. However, while you search for the very best driving school lessons Melbourne, you must also make sure that the school you select is able to give you the very best driving experience. For example, some schools provide driving lessons but the school grounds are not clean, some of the teachers are not experienced enough, and other such issues. So before you enroll your child in any school for driving lessons, you should check on the environment, and the efficiency of the teachers and other staff members.

Apart from cheap lessons, driving school that provides excellent quality driving lessons also provides a lot of value for money. Some schools provide instructors that can help you improve your driving skills by prescribing new driving techniques and helping you overcome certain road and weather problems. You can also interact with experienced instructors in Melbourne who will help you understand your mistakes. Some instructors will also prescribe new driving techniques based on the kind of accidents you have encountered in the past, so you can avoid them in the future.

Apart from cheap lessons, female driving instructors are also available in every part of the country. Some of the driving instructors in Melbourne are available only during weekends or in the evenings. Female instructors will be more experienced as compared to male driving instructors. Female driving instructors will be able to teach you how to handle your vehicle better, what safety measures need to be taken in certain situations, and they will also be able to instruct you about the proper way to use your car key. They can teach you how to drive at different speeds, and they can also teach you the proper way to drive your vehicle.

Most driving schools in Melbourne offer a wide range of driving lesson packages at affordable prices. The prices of the packages may differ according to the driving instructor and the length of the lesson. You can choose an affordable driving school in Melbourne according to your budget. If you want to improve your driving skills in no time, choosing the right driving school in Melbourne is a must. You can also save money by taking the lessons online.

Read more https://infosurfworld.com/things-that-make-you-love-and-hate-driving-school-near-me/

#cheapest driving lessons melbourne

0 notes

cohorttuition · 4 years

Text

Are You Looking for A Good Maths Tutor in The West Midlands?

At some point, your child may experience some difficulty with mathematics. Perhaps they failed a test or two or are confused and unable to understand the lessons with confidence. Hiring a maths tutor in the West Midlands may be a good way to improve your child’s performance and regain their confidence to ace the subject.

But before you hire a tutor, it is important to identify whether it is necessary or not. The obvious signs that your child needs help include failing grades, the inability to complete homework, or your child suddenly began disliking the subject. However, be sure to talk to your child about your intention to hire a maths tutor, so they can understand that it is okay to get help and be guided by a maths teacher who can improve their performance.

That being said, here are some tips to help you find the best maths tutor for your child:

Look them up — You can easily find a maths tutor at a reputable tuition centre in the West Midlands. Be sure to verify their reputation and credibility in providing tutorial services to children in your child’s age bracket or grade level. A good tuition centre is OFSTED registered, with at least a decades’ worth of proven results in helping children improve in their learning.

Get to know the tutor — The maths tutor needs to be dedicated and passionate with the subject, but make sure that they are subject specialists and that they are highly trained. It is also crucial for tutors to be fully vetted through the Disclosure and Barring Service. Verify that the tutor is friendly, kind, and patient with young learners.

Find out how they teach — A good tutor understands every child is unique, so they will create a personalized tuition programme that can cater to your child’s learning requirements and style. Lessons must be tailored to follow the National Curriculum, as well as relevant exam specifications.

Read independent reviews — You may be able to verify the qualities and the capabilities of the maths tutor in the West Midlands by reading the reviews made by other parents and students about them. However, do take them with a grain of salt.

#maths tutor

0 notes

1dreality · 7 years

Link

It must have been well over a year ago now, when Liam Payne realised he had absolutely nothing interesting to say. The singer, known to most as ‘Liam from One Direction’ until the group’s indefinite hiatus in January 2016, had returned to the studio, settled into the idea of being a solo artist for the rest of his days, and promptly drawn a blank. He was, he says, just too darned happy to think of anything.

Everything in his life had fallen into place. He’d found love, moving in with Cheryl (formerly Cole), a fellow junior royal of the Top 40. Their first child, a son named Bear, was well on the way. He had signed a huge record deal with Capitol. He felt fitter and healthier than he had in years. And, yes, there’s no denying it: he was pretty pleased that he no longer had to be in the biggest boyband in the world.

‘I had a bit of a problem formulating what was going on in my brain into the music at first,’ he says, ‘because I was so content with everything in my personal life. It’s easy to spill your guts out on a ballad. But I was thinking, “Oh God, I’m really happy – what am I going to write about?!”’

More than 12 months on, the answer to that question still isn’t entirely clear. Payne’s debut album, as yet untitled, won’t be released until early 2018. There have been two singles, though, with a third, the unsubtly titled Bedroom Floor, arriving next month.

Of those we’ve heard, the first, Strip That Down, a R&B-inflected club hit released in May and co-written with Ed Sheeran, marked a departure from One Direction’s stadium pop-rock. It was also chock-full of hoary by-the-way-I’m-an-adult-now signposts: there are references to nightclubs, drinking rum and coke, driving Ferraris and having girls ‘grind’ on him. And mixed in with all that were lyrics that caused a minor stir among his acolytes: ‘You know I used to be in 1D, now I’m out, free / people want me for one thing, that’s not me’. Payne, it seems, is keen to reintroduce himself.

‘When I left the band, I felt a bit stranded,’ he says, when we meet in an enormous boardroom at his management’s offices. ‘It took time, but I know as an artist I am starting fresh now.’ He slaps the table with melodrama. ‘This is Moment One. It’s the start line.’

Liam Payne is 24 years old. He is athletically built, as anyone who has seen his shirtless Instagram posts will know, and kind of everyday handsome, in a Love Island, former-youth-footballer way. Both his arms and hands are almost entirely upholstered in tattoos, highlights of which include some thick black arrows on one forearm that look like road markings; the number ‘4’, in reference to One Direction’s 2014 album of the same name, on his ring finger; and, on his left arm, a scale depiction of Cheryl’s eye, that appears to follow you around the room as he gesticulates. ‘It’s so my missus can always keep an eye on me,’ he likes to say about that one.

He is impossibly nice. Before we meet, he plods through the office, saying hello to everybody in the building individually, and in most cases remembering something about them: that they beat him at Fifa last time he dropped by, so they must have a rematch before he leaves (‘I’ll whoop ya with West Brom!’), or they’ve surely had a haircut, haven’t they? (‘It looks really great anyway, man!’). It is the manner of somebody both impeccably raised and intensely keen for people to like him, and it appears genuine and successful.

To an extent, Payne says, the five members of One Direction – or four, after Zayn Malik left the band in 2015 – ended up playing characters over the six years they were together. Whereas the Beatles (arguably the only other group with a comparable scale and speed of world domination), grew increasingly cantankerous towards the end of the 1960s, One Direction stuck resolutely to the caricatures that fans and management assigned them right to the end.

Malik was brooding and mercurial, Harry Styles was a cool, flamboyant ladies’ man, Niall Horan was charming and laid-back, and Louis Tomlinson, who has since admitted to feeling a little redundant, was fun and energetic. And Payne? Well, Payne was The Responsible One.

‘I’ve always been a bit of an older soul,’ he says, mulling over his place. ‘It’s funny: there’s a thing on the net where the fans put what they think are our mental ages. All the boys were around their real ones, but then they put me at about 37.’

Payne admits to feeling a little daunted in 2010, when Simon Cowell thrust the band together on X Factor after they’d auditioned as solo artists. Keeping up with the other personalities in the gang was exhausting, so his coping mechanism was to attempt to rein them in as best he could, and work with management in doing so. Like the popular schoolboy teachers identify as mature enough to be a trusted emissary for his recalcitrant friends, Payne carved himself a valuable niche.

‘I was put with a group of rowdy teenagers, and when I was a teenager, I had mates, but I was always with my dad. I’d go out to the pub and chat with him. So when I was stuck with these boys I was thinking, “F— me, I don’t know how to do it.”

‘When something was going wrong, I’d get a phone call. If there was an apology needed, it was me. I was the spokesperson for the band, as it were, with the press and the label.’

Along with Tomlinson, Payne shares comfortably the most writing credits of the band on One Direction songs. Over their five albums, dozens of songwriting collaborators contributed to the group’s success, but it seems nobody worked harder than the two least-heralded members. Neither was the showiest or best singer; but they kept things ticking over.

One Direction’s hordes of fans around the world noticed the assumed roles, and nicknamed Payne ‘Daddy Directioner’. He lived up to it with them, too. In 2013, on tour in Australia, Payne tweeted a message to warn girls waiting outside the band’s hotel of snakes living in the surrounding fields. ‘It’s just not worth it someone’s gunna get hurt [sic],’ he pleaded.

Two years later, he gave an interview lamenting the fact he and the other boys were being sent sexually explicit pictures of themselves drawn by underage admirers. While the rest of the band seemed to find that funny, Payne called it ‘the sad and sorry side of what we’ve done.’ Yeah, all right, Dad.

Becoming a real-life father has at least given the nickname some purchase. Rumours swirled at the end of 2015 that he had started dating Cheryl – formerly Fernandez-Versini and Cole, née Tweedy – after her second marriage ended in divorce. By the next summer, she was pregnant with the second One Direction baby (Tomlinson, the eldest of the bunch, had one first).

The couple live in a mansion near Woking, Surrey, and aren’t married, but he considers them ‘basically at that stage’. Bear, with whom Payne is besotted, was born in March, and named for the growling noises he was making during his first sleeps. So far, no photographs have been released, but he instantly shows me one on his phone. And here, I can exclusively reveal that the heir Bear is – as you’d expect of a baby with that name, born of two professionally good-looking parents – very cute.

‘We’ve only shown him in glimpses,’ Payne says, explaining their decision to shield him. ‘We don’t want him to have the pressure that me and Cheryl have, as household names. We want him to enjoy himself first and then figure it out.’

Born and raised in Wolverhampton, Payne has an unexpectedly thick Midlands accent that gets thicker the longer he talks – which is a lot. His preferred conversational feature is the anecdote, resulting in a version of the phrase, ‘I remember, there was this one time…’ prefixing the majority of his utterances, which are in turn regularly punctuated with singular handclaps of self-incredulity. It can be mildly alarming, like interviewing a young, heavily-tattooed Ronnie Corbett, but I suppose it speaks to the amount of life experience he has already accrued.

Growing up, Payne’s father, Geoff, worked as a fitter, while his mother, Karen, was a nursery nurse. Money was tight and the house small, but he remembers it as a happy one.

‘My place was on the floor with the dog, there was no space on the sofa. It was great, though we didn’t have much. Dad was in debt, but they did the best they could. It makes you dream a bit, you know?’

As a child, he had two routes to possible stardom, both of which Geoff pushed hard for. One was singing, the other was long-distance running. For a time in his teens, Payne was one of the fastest 1500m runners in the country, getting up to train before school and seconds from qualifying for the London 2012 squad. It was before that, as a 14-year-old in 2008, that he first applied for X Factor.

Auditioning with Fly Me To The Moon, since it was one of the few songs he could manage while his voice was breaking, that year he got as far as the ‘judge’s houses’, before Simon Cowell told him to come back in two years and try again. He became a mini-celebrity back home in that between-period, and carried on performing around town. The adulation was short-lived, though.

Once, performing a Justin Timberlake cover at an under-18s gig in Oceana Wolverhampton, somebody lobbed a coin at his face and managed to draw blood. He laughs about it now. These days – admittedly a largely cashless society – it’s only bras and knickers they fling.

‘I had become less and less famous. One time, I was in McDonald’s with a girlfriend and someone shouted ‘X Factor reject!’ at me. The whole restaurant turned. It was like coming out of fame. So I knew what it was like at 15, and it helped me.’

Following Cowell’s advice, he returned to X Factor in 2010 and found himself shoved into One Direction with the four other boys, eventually finishing the competition in third place, but with easily the brightest future. Within weeks, he had moved out of his Wolverhampton bedroom and into a penthouse apartment in Canary Wharf.

And six years later, One Direction had sold more than 20 million records, become the first band in history to have their first four albums go to number one in the US, touring the world numerous times, and earned a preposterous amount of money in the process. Payne is now estimated to be worth £40 million. He hasn’t been back to Wolverhampton in a long time, but he paid off his father’s debts years ago, and bought his parents a new house in addition to funding the renovation of their family home. He refers to his time spent in One Direction as ‘like uni’.

When they were in the thick of things, all the boys used to obey Cowell’s omertà – relentless enthusiasm at all times, please – and never discussed any negative aspects of their experience. Now safely out the other side, Payne is frank on matters of burnout and claustrophobia.

‘Cabin fever. It sent me a bit AWOL at one point, if I’m honest. I can remember when there were 10,000 people outside our hotel. We couldn’t go anywhere. It was just gig to hotel, gig to hotel. And you couldn’t sleep, because they’d still be outside,’ he says, before telling several stories of how he and Tomlinson would sneak out of hotels just to feel freedom, only to find themselves bored once they got out.

‘People were speaking to me about mental health in music the other day, and that’s a big issue. Sometimes you just need some sun, or a walk.’

Every stop on tour became the same. Earlier this year, Payne was asked which was his favourite city of those he visited with One Direction. ‘One in Italy with a big white cathedral,’ he responded.(The band performed in Milan at least five times.)

‘One of the problems was that we never stopped to celebrate what we’d done. I remember us winning loads of American Music Awards and then having to get on a plane straight away. It got to the point where success was so fluid. I don’t even know what happened to our songs, we just sang them, then sang some more. It was like a proper, hard job. Non-stop. I can concentrate a lot more now.’

The paparazzi and fan attention sounds just as draining. It must feel weird having a Twitter following larger than the population of Australia, as he does, but especially odd to have fans so obsessed that they’ve set up multiple fake profiles pretending to be your mother, for some reason.

Moreover, footage of One Direction out and about makes A Hard Day’s Night look tame: thousands of screaming fans all over them, police escorts everywhere they went, an unending run of selfie requests... It came to a head in New York in 2012, when Payne was walking to a restaurant with his parents and a paparazzo accidentally pushed his mother over. He was incensed.

‘I was like, “Oh, f— this. F— this s—t.” There was a swarm of them and I just wanted a burger with my parents,’ he says, unsmiling for a moment. ‘I cried my eyes out. I thought, “I can’t do this”, and really hated my life.’

He soldiered on, but it wasn’t a healthy lifestyle; none of them seems to miss it now the ‘break’ is on.

‘It’s great that people can see what we’re really like away from each other,’ Payne says. ‘It got to a point in the band where we were just playing characters, and I was tired of my character. Apart from the daddy thing, I was really loud and bubbly. There were a lot of personalities in the band to keep up with, so I had to be all, ‘Ey!’, the rowdy lad, and I don’t have to now.’

There were times when the band would celebrate hard, and in that, Payne had catching up to do: as a child, he was diagnosed with a scarred kidney, meaning he didn’t taste alcohol until he was given the all-clear at 19. Tell a teenage millionaire they can now safely drink, and they’ll go for it. He admits ‘the floodgates opened’ that year.

‘I wasn’t happy. I went through a real drinking stage, and sometimes you take things too far. Everyone’s been that guy at the party where you’re the only one having fun, and there were points when that was me. I got to 13 stone, just eating crap. I got fat jibes, and it affects your head. I have nothing to hide about it…

‘As I say, it was like a musical university. We were pretty reckless, but I got it out of my system. I had my fun.’

The hiatus seems to have come at just the right time. But before he could take a breath, Payne lurched on in life, becoming involved with Cheryl almost at once.

Nobody asks how they met; their introduction is on YouTube for all to see. Ten years his senior, she was an X Factor judge in 2008 when the 14-year-old Payne shuffled in, all mop-hair and waistcoat, to perform his Sinatra number. He winked at her, she called him ‘cute’, they bumped into one another over the years, ended up working on a remix of one of her songs in 2014, and the rest is recent pop history.

Not everybody was happy when the relationship was initially confirmed. That Cheryl was in a quasi-pastoral role when they met raised eyebrows in the usual eyebrow-raising camps, as did the couple’s decade-wide age gap. Liam doesn’t care. In fact, he can still barely get over the fact she’s his girlfriend.

‘It’s a ridiculous place to be in,’ he says. ‘She’s even more amazing than I thought. I was watching her do Fight For This Love [her debut solo single, from 2009] when I was a kid, and now we’re together with a kid. I feel like I’m X Factor’s biggest winner.’

It helps having Cheryl around to ask about business matters. Like Payne, she was scouted on a TV pop contest (2002’s Popstars: The Rivals), had massive success in a group (Girls Aloud), and then went solo with a more urban sound. She is also the unlikely possessor of the record for number-one singles by a British woman.

‘We think about the same things. She understands what my life is like. She knows what it’s like to sit on the Graham Norton couch [or] we can talk about her L’Oréal work. It’s not that we’re “a brand” as a family, but we can help each other.’

In Who We Are, one of One Direction’s seven books, published in 2014, Payne writes in his chapter that he’s ‘worried about the idea of failing outside of this band’ and declared he’d become a low-key songwriter, because ‘there would be less attention on my life’.

The opposite of that is what’s happening, I inform him.

‘Yeah, that was a point when I was scared of our success, and we didn’t want to take a step back from it,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to be a songwriter and not be famous, but happy. Then Simon and Cheryl told me this is where I am supposed to be, and I’d miss the stage. The pressure of what was coming next was scary, but they talked me down.’

The solo product he’s come up with is the sort of music he’d always wanted to make: radio-friendly R&B in the style of his heroes, Justin Timberlake, Usher and Pharrell Williams, and more informed by the rap music he listens to than the pop he’s famous for. Who knows if he can shake the ‘embarrassing dad’ brand to pull it off, but the signs point to success. Strip That Down has been streamed more than 300 million times on Spotify alone.

‘I wanted this to be for people my age. The themes are a bit older, but you have to grow up with your fans. I can’t make bubblegum pop any more,’ he says.

One Direction fans needn’t despair. They might have dispersed and almost all signed elsewhere, but Payne is excited about the idea of a comeback gig in years to come. As, I’m sure, are the band’s accountants.

But that won’t be for a little while, if Payne has it his way, because – as he keeps on telling me – he is just far too happy with his lot at the moment to take a step backwards. When it reaches our time to wrap up, he’s still at it.

‘I feel great about what’s going on in my life,’ he says, giving it one last handclap and springing to his feet. ‘I’m extremely lucky. I feel like I’m in a comatose dream. I’m like, “when did I last bump my head?” because I can’t believe this…’

Liam Payne’s next single, Bedroom Floor, is out on 20 October

#liam payne #liam's solo project #liam's promo #liam for the telegraph #liam & cheryl #dad liam #baby payno #1d hiatus or split?#liam about 1d #liam about simon #liam's album #Wow Liam could have been an Olympian... That's pretty impressive #That was a great interview where he finally let go and was honest. The guy must have had so much pressure while in the band #reading this once again reaffirms that what Zayn said first and was hated for has been corroborated by other members now that they are solo #I hope that fans realize now that people see what you write about them or hear about it.. Poor guy he must have felt like shit when people #were making fun of his weight.. Or every single time fans tweeted at him in outrage for something problematic. Like these boys are human #Also him kind of letting you know listen what you saw onstage while there was a bit of us in there it was mostly characters that we had to #keep on playing....Also him talking about the lack of recognition even though him and Louis had the most songwriting credits #Him confirming that the 4 his for their album FOUR which I guess holds a special place in his heart #And he reiterates that he is in a period of his life where he is blissfully happy. He has a child with a partner that understands & support #him and it looks like he has found what he wants to do career wise and is getting his footing as a soloist #Interestingly enough in this interview he is letting you know that the reunion if it overcomes it's not going to be anytime soon

167 notes · View notes

drbschools01 · 3 years

Link

headteacher training Birmingham

#headteacher training Birmingham #ofsted inspector training courses #governor training Birmingham #teacher training west midlands #Leadership Training birmingham

0 notes

ourmusicmaker · 5 years

Text

The Rubaiyat of E.Joyce Francis

The Rubaiyat of E. Joyce Francis

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, The Astronomer–Poet of Persia, Translated into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald with “engraved headpieces by E. Joyce Francis”, was published as no.6 of the Ebenezer Baylis Booklets, in Worcester in 1934 (1). It was a limited edition of 500 copies. Using FitzGerald’s first edition, it contained five headpieces and one tailpiece, these being shown as Figs.1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1e & 1f. Mostly the illustrations seem to be generic rather than related to specific verses, though Fig.1a is clearly the dawn associated with the opening verse, and Fig.1f clearly depicts the turning down of an empty glass in the closing verse. Fig.1e, for example, is clearly a generic depiction of Omar and his Beloved, in the booklet somewhat incongruously located towards the end of the Potter’s Shop interlude. Again, Fig.1b could refer either to verse 33 (“Then to the rolling Heav’n itself I cried...”) or to verse 52 (“And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky...”), neither of which is anywhere near the illustration. The colophon of the booklet is shown in Fig.1g. This lists the consultant–typographer as Leonard Jay, whose name we shall encounter later in connection with the Birmingham School of Printing. We shall have more to say about the other books she illustrated in this series below, but meanwhile, who was E. Joyce Francis ?

Biographical

There is little or no information readily available about her and her work. She gets no mention at all in either Brigid Peppin’s and Lucy Micklethwait’s Dictionary of British Book Illustrators: the 20th Century (1983) or in Alan Horne’s Dictionary of 20th Century British Book Illustrators (1994). Nor is she mentioned in Albert Garrett’s book A History of British Wood Engraving (1978). But thanks to some online research of ancestry records, and more particularly, thanks to contacts with her daughter–in–law, Sylvia Goodborn; her niece, Barbara Chisholm; with Joyce’s friend of many years, John Perfect, and his wife Sue; and with Jane Dew, who likewise knew Joyce for many years, we can rectify that.

Eleanor Joyce Francis was born in West Bromwich on 6th June 1904. In the 1911 census we find her, age 6, living with her family at 57 Bayswater Road, Handsworth, Birmingham. Curiously her name is spelt Elinor on the census return (as it is elsewhere, for that matter – see below – though on her birth certificate it is Eleanor.) Her father is Harry Morris Francis, age 38, an Assistant Secretary at the Birmingham and Midland Institute (the BMI still exists today); her mother Charlotte Francis, is also age 38; and she has an older sister, Margery Francis, age 10. The family is prosperous enough to have a general servant or domestic called Rachel Williams, aged 47.

Joyce (for so she was familiarly known) attended Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts between 1921 and 1935, but with a gap in her studies in the year 1924–5 (the academic year ran from September of one year to the end of August the next), and another between 1927 and 1929. (No–one seems to know what she did in the gaps.) Records there show that she studied elementary art in 1921–2; general drawing in 1922–3; book illustration in 1923–4; craft in 1925–6; wood cuts in 1926–7; and drawing & painting in 1933–4. Details for the other years she attended the School are scant, unfortunately, being restricted to enrolment date and such like. As for the somewhat vague heading of crafts, it would appear that it included book–binding, pottery and textiles. Her skills in book illustration and the creation of wood cuts, were, of course, put to good use in the Ebenezer Baylis booklets mentioned above, and of which we shall have more to say below. During the period 1921–1933 she was living with her family at 152 Hamstead Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, but sometime during the academic year 1932–3, the family moved to 82 Hagley Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, where they were still living in 1935 (2).

In the third quarter of 1938 Joyce married Arthur Thomas Goodborn in Birmingham, and though she was now Eleanor Joyce Goodborn she continued to use Eleanor Joyce Francis as her professional name. In the 1939 electoral roll the couple are recorded as living at 8 Colinette Road, Putney. London SW15, for reasons possibly connected to her husband’s family – he had been born in Lambeth, London in 1905. In the second quarter of 1939 their daughter Marianne was born in Wandsworth. Some time after that they moved to Loughborough, where her husband was the Senior Tutor in the Department of Teacher Training at Loughborough College. It was in Loughborough that their son John was born in November 1943. Some time after that, they moved to Birmingham, where he had been appointed the Arts and Crafts Inspector for Schools in the Birmingham area, and where she was to teach Arts and Crafts in the Education Department of Birmingham University. Of their two children, Marianne was to remain unmarried, dying in 1998, as we shall see, but John, who died in 2016, was to marry twice. Sylvia being his second wife, she only got to know Joyce from 1973, by which time Joyce had left Birmingham to live in Wales, on which more presently.

As for Joyce’s husband, Arthur Thomas Goodborn, he died in Handsworth, Birmingham, in 1952, aged only 46. Probate records give the couple’s address as 35 Wyecliffe Road, Handsworth, his effects of £5425 16s 6d being left to his widow, Elinor (sic) Joyce Goodborn – not a fortune, but quite a lot of money in those days.

A number of photographs of Joyce have survived, and one of particular note is that of Fig.2a. It is undated, but has the feel of the 1960s about it, and shows Joyce teaching a pottery class (presumably at the University.) The photo was supplied by Sylvia Goodborn, who describes it as “absolutely her.” For comparison, the photograph of Joyce in Fig.2b was taken at Jane Dew’s wedding in 1968. The somewhat dark photograph of Joyce shown in Fig.2c, supplied by Barbara Chisholm, was clearly taken much later, probably at Cae Newydd (of which more below.) Barbara also supplied the photo of Joyce as a little girl, shown here as Fig.2d.

In the late 1950s John Perfect met Joyce through the Youth Fellowship of St Michael’s Church, Handsworth, where she often used to give talks about art. He was in his mid–teens at the time with ambitions to go to art school, so they had something in common and struck up a lasting friendship. (Sue Perfect, incidentally, got to know Joyce somewhat later, from about 1968.)

According to John, St Michael’s Church and Joyce’s talks were attended by the professional people that lived in the Handsworth of those days – doctors, journalists, business people and such like.

Handsworth was a safe Tory seat. The MP was Sir Edward Boyle whose idea of electioneering was to cruise round the area, waving from his Rolls Royce.

As for 35 Wyecliffe Road, it was “a large semi–detached house of an art nouveau style, probably built in the twenties or early thirties.” It is still there today.

Jane Dew told me:

I met Joyce and her daughter and son in the late 1950s when my parents moved back to Birmingham from South Devon. Joyce lived in the same road (Wyecliffe Road) and my mother soon made friends with her. I was still at Secondary School but Joyce knew l really wanted to train in the Arts.

She regularly taught me, informally, techniques and history, lending me books and taking me to exhibitions. She knew a wide range of people and her house was regularly full of musicians, actors and artists. I made friends with her daughter, older than me by a decade, and her son, just a few years older than me.

But, John goes on:

Joyce didn’t care for Birmingham and for some time before I knew her she and her husband had rented a cottage on the hilltop behind Aberdovey in Wales. Called Cae Newydd, it is clearly marked on the ordnance survey map for the area.

Jane adds that Joyce and her husband began to rent Cae Newydd in the early years of World War 2, so that if Birmingham was bombed, the family had a safe haven. Come the late 1950s, Jane adds:

Knowing l missed the countryside, she invited me to stay with them during the school holidays.

I stayed with them for many years and grew to love the area. I regularly accompanied Joyce, with her son, to deliver her paintings to galleries, and help with the unpacking/packing. She also allowed me to draw in her studio, sitting away from each other and working in comparative silence!

She was immensely generous and encouraging, especially when l gained a place at Birmingham College of Art & Crafts (now Birmingham City University). My career as an embroiderer was greatly influenced by Joyce, and I remember her showing me how to design a repeat lino/woodcut to produce an effect like that shown here (Fig.3).

Aberdovey (or Aberdyfi as it is known now) is on the west coast of Wales, about 8 miles north of Aberystwyth. After her husband’s death she continued to rent the cottage, and to stay there as often as she could escape from Birmingham. As for getting back and forth between Birmingham and Aberdovey, John tells us:

Transport was a problem and she bought a succession of rather scruffy vans and cars. She’d load her painting gear into them and take off. Amazingly they never let her down, though she did have a man who maintained them for her. By far the nicest was a Ford ten of late 40’s vintage that had a wood–panelled body that used to be described as a shooting–brake or woody style. I remember the bonnet being opened to reveal an engine that appeared to be smaller than the battery; also, it had pre–war pattern, rod–operated brakes, so it was fortunate that it didn’t go very fast.

John’s first trip to Cae Newydd was in one of Joyce’s vans, when he was in his late teens, and he was to visit it many times thereafter. On occasion he even looked after the cottage, when Joyce was away teaching in Birmingham. His picture of the cottage, done from a photograph taken in about 1980, is shown in Fig.4.

His pen–picture of Joyce back then is wonderful and tallies with Figs.2a & 2b:

She was a woman of ample proportions and wore her long grey hair tied in a bun at the back. She wore long, floppy skirts, frilly blouses, often fastened with a cameo brooch, and a man’s wrist–watch that had probably belonged to her husband. All very Margaret Rutherford.

In 1960 Cae Newydd came up for sale and Joyce bought it. It was, shall we say, very basic – there was no running water (that had to be brought in from a nearby stream, and boiled before use), and there was no electricity supply until poles were put up for the farms in the area in the early 1960s. Thus for quite some time there were only oil lamps for lighting, for example, and log fires for heating. As for the toilet, it was a slate–built shed outside the cottage. A mountain stream entered and exited through holes in the walls, and there was a wooden seat by way of luxury. Joyce apparently referred to it as having a “two hole perpetual flush.” But to her the cottage was idyllic and she regarded it is her spiritual home. John goes on:

To get on with Joyce it was necessary to pass the Cae Newydd test. Those who liked the place despite its privations were in. Those who didn’t, and they were many, were regarded rather differently.

But in 1973, finances dictated that if she wanted to keep Cae Newydd, Joyce had to sell her Birmingham home. With her daughter, Marianne, she moved to Aberdovey, and bought a small shop in New Street there which also had living accommodation. There, they opened what we would now call an Arts & Crafts café, in which they sold a variety of home–made goods as well as pictures by Joyce. Sue Perfect told me:

I remember the goods at the tearoom as being mostly the patchwork quilts, the woollen blankets and the occasional rag rug. The material was mainly recycled not the sort of material one can buy on a bale. Ultimately it was a source that would sooner or later outstrip supply but for the while the tweeds were matched and separated from the cottons so that the finished article was colour and weight matched. The rag rug pieces were poked and drawn through individually onto hessian or sacks, not the prepared backs that one can purchase from craft shops today. Joyce and Marianne were incredibly resourceful and would use anything that would bring a creative pleasure to them and others.

To this account of early recycling, Jane Dew added that the blankets were knitted from wool which in part had been collected from the wire fences of nearby farms, having been scratched off the backs of passing sheep!

Joyce also used to run craft workshops there – patchwork and spinning were two popular examples. The café side of things was run by Marianne. The business was very successful, but neither Joyce nor her daughter were temperamentally suited to a 9 to 5 lifestyle, and, at least on the arts and crafts front, demand rapidly outran supply – at one point Joyce sold the quilt off her own bed to one insistent customer. So, having made sufficient money, Joyce decided to sell the shop and spend the proceeds on Cae Newydd. That was when the real problems began.

Cae Newydd was, as already indicated, one of those homes which sounds idyllic, and indeed was so, for a short stay in summer. But in the winter, with wind, rain & snow blowing in from Cardigan Bay, it was cold, damp, and with no running water and only a primitive outside toilet, it was far from idyllic. The stresses and strains eventually had their effect. Joyce suffered a major stroke and was admitted on a permanent basis to Towyn Hospital, where she died in 1985. Marianne stayed on, but she too was “eventually invalided out” (as John puts it), and she died in the same hospital as her mother in 1998.

Joyce was an active member of the Aberdovey / Aberdyfi Art Society, which still exists today. Unfortunately, despite diligent enquiries by Stewart Jones, Kate Coldham and others, none of the current membership approached remembered much if anything about Joyce, which is perhaps not surprising given that she died over thirty years ago.

Books Illustrated: the Birmingham School of Printing

Joyce was closely associated with the Birmingham School of Printing, which was housed in the Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts, in Margaret Street, in the city centre. (In 1971 the School of Arts and Crafts was absorbed into Birmingham Polytechnic and subsequently into Birmingham City University, the Margaret Street building now being BCU’s Department of Fine Art.) Prominent in its history was Leonard Jay.

Jay was born in Bungay, Suffolk in 1888 into a family which had been much involved in printing. His family moved to London in 1893, and by 1905 he had left school and become an apprentice printer. In 1912 he joined the part–time staff of the London County Council School of Arts and Crafts, becoming a full time member of staff in 1924. He was appointed as the first head of the Birmingham School of Printing in 1925, a post he held until he retired in 1953. He died in 1963 (3a). Under Jay’s overall direction, students, guided by their teachers, produced no less than 192 books and pamphlets between 1926 and 1953 (3b), these including three editions of The Rubaiyat (3c).

In the 1930s Joyce produced illustrations for six booklets for the Birmingham School of Printing. Perhaps not surprisingly, three centre on John Baskerville (1706–1775), who is principally known today as the Birmingham–based printer and designer of typefaces.

Baskerville is worthy of an Omarian aside. Despite being a confirmed atheist, in 1763 he printed what was to become one of the classic editions of the Bible. It was, of course, an exercise in Printing, not Devotion – with equal ‘piety’ he had printed an equally classic edition of Horace in 1762. (I can sympathise with that: my own religious views are similar, yet I wrote a book on religious medals.) But of greater interest is the fact that, in accordance with his wishes, when Baskerville died in 1775 he was buried, in an upright position, beneath a conical monument of his own design (formerly a windmill, apparently), deliberately situated in the unconsecrated ground of his own estate. This was, as the epitaph of his own composition made clear, in protest at “the Idle Fears of Superstition and the Wicked Arts of Priesthood.” Alas, in 1821, he turned out to be in the way of an ongoing canal construction: his monument was dismantled, and his body was, to cut a lengthy story short, moved, in defiance of his wishes, to the consecrated ground of the crypt of Christ Church, Birmingham. Arguably Baskerville got his revenge, though, for in 1897 the church had to be demolished. Unfortunately, his revenge was short–lived, for his body was then moved to a vault under the chapel of the Church of England Warstone Lane Cemetery, again in consecrated ground (4a). There matters rested until 1963, in which year a petition was presented to Birmingham City Council arguing that the wishes of one of their most prominent citizens should be respected, and that his remains should be removed to unconsecrated ground. After all, it wasn’t just Baskerville's wishes that had to be respected: it was argued that the devout Christians alongside whom Baskerville had been buried might not like the idea of having an atheist in their midst! Alas, the petition seems to have been signed by only about a dozen people, none of whom was related to the deceased, so the Council decided, in view of the difficultes involved in finding some legally suitable unconsecrated ground, to leave poor Baskerville where he was, atheist or not (4b)

But to return to the publications of the Birmingham School of Printing, the three Baskerville booklets in which Joyce had a hand were, in order of publication date:

Letters of the famous 18th century printer, John Baskerville of Birmingham: together with a bibliography of works printed by him at Birmingham collected, compiled and printed under the direction of Leonard Jay(1932), for which Joyce did the frontispiece portrait of Baskerville (Fig.5a). (The portrait is seemingly based on a 1774 portrait of Baskerville by James Millar in Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery.) (4c)

Dr Hans H. Bockwitz, Baskerville in Letters, translated by Herbert Woodbine (1933). The cover illustration was as in Fig.5a, but printed in red ink on a pale blue background (Fig.5b).

Dr Hans Bockwitz, John Baskerville in the Judgement of German Contemporaries, translated by A.B. Hill (1937). The cover illustration was as in Fig.5a.

The three other booklets illustrated by Joyce for the Birmingham School of Printing were, again in order of publication date:

William Shakespeare – Venus and Adonis (1934). Its fine front cover is shown in Fig.6a and its four headpieces by Joyce are shown in Fig.6b, 6c, 6d & 6e. These are my personal favourites amongst Joyce’s book illustrations. Curiously this booklet does not appear in either of the bibliographies cited in note (3b).

Benjamin Walker, Saint Philip’s Church Birmingham, and its Groom–Porter Architect (1935), for which Joyce did the frontispiece (Fig.7).

William Bennett, Richard Greene, the Lichfield Apothecary & his Museum of Curiosities (1935), for which Joyce did the cover portrait of Richard Greene (Fig.8). This was one of a series titled Johnsoniana: Dr. Samuel Johnson & his friends, though Joyce only illustrated this one.

Books Illustrated: Ebenezer Baylis & Son, Worcester

Ebenezer Erskine Baylis, the founder of the firm in 1858, was born in Worcester in 1834 and died in London in 1920. In the census return for 1851, living with his family in Worcester; he is recorded as being a printer’s apprentice. In 1856, in the Parish Church of Edgbaston, Birmingham, he married Sarah Elizabeth Lane, also born in Worcester. At the time of the marriage, he was a printer living in Birmingham. Their first child, Marion Jesse Baylis, was born in Birmingham in 1857. Shortly after, in 1858, as noted above, he founded his printing firm. In the 1861 census, he and Sarah were now living in their own house in Worcester. Besides their daughter Marion, they now had a son, Frank Edwin Baylis (born in 1859.) In the Census Return Ebenezer is listed as a Printer Compositor. At the time of the 1871 census, they were still living in Worcester, though at a different address, Ebenezer being recorded as a printer employing three boys. By now, besides Marion and Frank, they had another son Ralph Archibald Baylis (born 1865), plus another daughter, Ruth L. G. Baylis (born in 1866).

It was Frank Edwin Baylis who was to become the “Son” in “Ebenezer Baylis and Son.” By the time of the 1911 census he was a master printer, bookbinder and wholesale stationer in Worcester, married with five children, three of whom seem to have been employed in the family business. As noted above, Ebenezer Baylis died in 1920, and in 1924 the firm, now with Frank Edwin Baylis as its director, was registered as a limited company. He was to die in 1935, after which the business seems to have passed to his son, Frank Russell Baylis, who by the time of the 1911 census, at the age of 22, was already a master printer, and who was listed as the second major shareholder, after his father, in the application for limited company status in 1924. The two other lesser shareholders were two of Frank Edwin’s other children, Clifford Erskine Baylis, Printer, and Marion Dora White Baylis, Cashier.

The firm continued under the name of Ebenezer Baylis and Son Ltd until 2001, after which its history need not concern us.

Our main concern here, of course, is with the series of twelve Ebenezer Baylis Booklets published between 1933 and 1935 (5), years after the death of Ebenezer, as follows:

No.1 – Fine Printing by Leonard Jay (1933) No.2 – Christmas by Washington Irving (1933) No.3 – Baskerville in Letters by Dr. Bockwitz (1934) No.4 – ABC by Geoffrey Chaucer (1934) No.5 – Parables taken from the Authorised Version of the Holy Bible (1934) No.6 – Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1934) No.7 – The Book of Ruth (1934) No.8 – Gray’s Elegy (1934) No.9 – Preface to Milton’s Paradise Lost by John Baskerville (1935) No.10 – Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity by John Milton (1935) No.11 – Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (1935)/p No.12 – The Bible in Type by John Stone (1935)

All of these were published in association with the above-mentioned Leonard Jay of the Birmingham School of Printing, no.3 being essentially a reprint of the booklet published a year earlier by the School, and mentioned in the last section. Joyce contributed illustrations to six of the booklets as follows:

For no.2 she did a woodcut as a headpiece for the first page (Fig.9)

For no.3 she did the front cover illustration (effectively Fig.5b)

For no.4 she did a woodcut for the front cover (Fig.10)

For no.6, as we have seen already, she did six illustrations (Figs.1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1e & 1f)

For no.7 she did four woodcuts (Figs.11a, 11b, 11c & 11d)

For no.11 she did the frontispiece (Fig.12)

An interesting aside, relevant to the firm though not to Joyce, is perhaps worth mentioning here. In 1934, the firm of Ebenezer Baylis & Son, who by then had a London office in EC1, were involved in a libel case at the High Court of Justice, Hodgkinson v. Powys and Others. John Cowper Powys was the author of a novel, A Glastonbury Romance, published by John Lane, the Bodley Head Ltd, and printed by Ebenezer Baylis & Son Ltd. Capt. G.W. Hodgkinson thought that the rather dissolute character, Philip Crow, in this ‘saucy novel’, might be unjustifiably identified with him, as indeed he might given the details, though it is clear that any resemblance was purely accidental. Author, publisher and printer readily expressed unintended liability, great regret, and settled out of court (6).

What is not clear at the present time is how the company of Ebenezer Baylis & Son came to be associated with Leonard Jay and the Birmingham School of Printing. By the time Jay took up his post in Birmingham in 1925, Ebenezer Baylis had been dead for some years, and his son Frank Baylis was in charge. As indicated above, Ebenezer spent some time in Birmingham, and presumably had (family ?) connections there. This plus the common involvement in printing, may explain the connection between the firm and Jay. It may well be, too, as Caroline Archer of the Typographic Hub at Birmingham City University has suggested, that the firm, which was apparently a sponsor / supporter of the Birmingham School of Printing, took some of its apprentices from the School. However, at the moment no precise details are available.

Books Illustrated: Other

It is interesting that all of the foregoing works illustrated by Joyce were done in the 1930s. With one exception, to which we will turn later, I know of no work illustrated by her later than the Baskerville booklet, mentioned above, published in 1937. Whether this had anything to do with her marriage in 1938 and the birth of her daughter in 1939, I do not know, but certainly, back then, when women artists married and started a family, art sometimes took something of a back seat, though, as we shall see, Joyce certainly continued to paint.

Besides the illustrated works listed in the last two sections, there are only two other books illustrated by Joyce that I know of.

The first is of a totally different nature to any of the foregoing: Boccaccio’s Decameron, produced in two hefty volumes, printed at the Shakespeare Head Press, Saint Aldates, Oxford, and published for the Press by Basil Blackwell – vol.1 in 1934 and vol.2 in 1935 (again in the 1930s, note.) It was a limited edition of 325 copies (of which 300 were for sale), with another 3 copies printed on vellum. It was a sumptuous and exclusive edition, in other words, which today fetches high prices.

As the colophon at the end of vol.1 tells us:

The text of this first volume of the Decameron has been prepared from that of the first English translation, printed by Isaac Jaggard for Mathew Lownes in 1625, and compared with the first edition of 1620. The wood engravings have been recut by R. J. Beedham and E. Joyce Francis from those in the edition printed by the brothers Gregorii at Venice in 1492.

But we have to turn to “A Note on the Illustrations” at the end of vol.2 (p.267–8) to find out just who re–cut which wood engravings:

The illustrations which add both beauty and interest to the foregoing pages have been copied in facsimile with a very slight reduction from the woodcuts in the edition of the Decameron printed at Venice by the brothers Gregorii in 1492. They have been re–engraved on wood for the present edition – most of them by Mr R.J. Beedham but the engraving of those for the Second and Eighth Days is the work of Miss Joyce Francis.

Vol.1 covers the first five days of The Decameron, and vol.2 the last five, so, in effect, Joyce did one day in each volume, or about a fifth of the engravings. She did eleven engravings for the Second Day, three of which are shown here as Figs.13a, 13b & 13c. She also did eleven engravings for the Eighth Day, three of which are shown here as Figs.14a, 14b & 14c.

An image of vol.1, open at the title–page spread, was used to head the Printing section of British Art in Industry – 1935 (p.82), a souvenir booklet of an exhibition held at the Royal Academy that year. The exhibition, which took two years to set up, was supported not only by the Royal Academy, but also by the Royal Society of Arts. The front cover of the catalogue is shown in Fig.15a and an image of p.82 in Fig.15b.

How Joyce came to be involved in the publication of The Decameron is, alas, unknown at present. It may have been that she had contacts at the Shakespeare Head Press in Oxford, but it would seem more likely that her involvement came via her ‘senior’ co–worker on the project, R. J. Beedham. (7a)

Ralph John Beedham (1879–1975) was a master of the woodcut, his book Wood Engraving, with an Introduction and an Appendix by Eric Gill, having first been published by St. Dominic’s Press, Ditchling, Sussex, in 1921. In fact Beedham wrote the book at Gill’s suggestion (7b), though neither the Introduction nor the Appendix gives any details as to how this came about. Subsequently the book’s publication was taken over by Faber and Faber, though it was still printed at Ditchling, a fifth edition of it appearing in 1938.

Gill was instrumental in founding the Catholic Crafts Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic at Ditchling in 1920, St Dominic’s Press being its publishing arm. Though Beedham was certainly associated with Ditchling, it is not clear how much time he actually spent there. He was born and spent most of his life in London (7c), and indeed earned his living there, teaching at the London County Council School of Arts and Crafts. He had some connection with Ditchling as early as 1917 (7d) and may have spent some time at Ditchling in the early 1920s (7e), but this may well have been in School vacation times, and some of his work there may have been done by commuting from London. (Gill is known to have commuted from Ditchling to London as business dictated.) At any rate, Beedham’s role at Ditchling was not prominent enough for him to feature in Fiona MacCarthy’s detailed biography Eric Gill (1989), though he clearly impressed Gill enough to contribute to and publish his book.

As the book is a practical guide to the techniques of wood engraving, and as it was clearly popular enough to have run to a fifth edition by 1938, it appears highly likely that Joyce owned a copy. Since Beedham was 25 years older than Joyce, and since his teaching career was at the London County Council School of Arts and Crafts, rather than in Birmingham (where, as we saw earlier, Joyce studied Woodcuts in the academic year 1926–7), it would appear she was never a student of his, and so they must have come together via a different route. One possibility, of course, is that she simply wrote to the author of a book which she had found very useful, and he, impressed by her talent and enthusiasm, invited her to help him out with the large number of woodcuts required for the Boccaccio volumes. Another possibility is that she got to know Beedham via Leonard Jay, who, before taking up his post at Birmingham, had taught, like Beedham, at the London County Council School of Arts and Crafts.

[Beedham did have some connections with publishing in Wales (7f), but since these occurred well before Joyce and her husband took to living in Aberdovey, it is highly unlikely that they have any bearing on the Boccaccio.]

The one book (so far as I know!) which was illustrated by Joyce and which dates from well after the 1930s, was S. Malcolm Kirk’s Operation Panpipes published by Peter Nevill Ltd of London and New York in 1949. For it Joyce did a coloured frontispiece (Fig.16a) and ten black and white illustrations, five of which are shown here (Figs.16b–16f.) It is a children’s story set in post–war Britain (rationing is still in force!) and centres on three children, David, Jim and Margaret, who spend their annual holidays at Carrig on the West Coast of Scotland. Unfortunately their freedom to roam is severely restricted when the War Department decides to set up a Military Training Camp there, with artillery ranges and tank manoeuvres. One day, when the children are out playing, they meet the ancient god Pan (Fig.16a), who had fled from Greece to Scotland to escape the war, getting there by riding on the back of the winged horse, Pegasus. When he learns of the Military Training Camp he and the children hatch a plot (code name: Operation Panpipes) to drive the army out and restore the peace. The plot involves Pan enlisting the aid of the forces of Nature. Thus the Naiads (Nymphs of rivers, springs and ponds) flood the camp; the Nereids (Sea Nymphs) disrupt a naval landing exercise and the Hamadryads (Wood Nymphs) entangle the tanks in foliage. When the tanks are cut free and set out on a training exercise, the ground gives way under them because the Gnomes have hollowed out the earth below. At one point in the plot, the children get to ride Pegasus (Fig.16b) and at another, the Brigadier of the Camp gets assaulted in the rear by a Unicorn ridden by Pan (Fig.16c). During a peaceful interlude, the children and the animals of the wood are treated to a performance by Pan on his Pipes (Fig.16d), then it is back to business with the Loch Ness Monster deluging the soldiers with water (Fig.16e). Operation Panpipes works – the Army abandons the Carrig base – and peace is restored. There is a general celebration, this being shown in Fig.16f, probably the most interesting illustration in the book: Pan plays the bagpipes for a change, watched by (in the foreground) the wood nymphs (left), water nymphs (centre) and gnomes (right). The three children are in the audience, of course, along with various woodland creatures, and Mr and Mrs Pegasus are in the background, with their two foals, Black Spot and White Spot. Even the Unicorn is there, though by now the Loch Ness Monster has gone home. Note the EJF monogram in Figs.16a, 16b & 16e. We shall meet it again in the next section.

Why and how Joyce came to illustrate this book twelve years on from her last illustrated work, is not known, and little information is available about the author, Stanley Malcolm Kirk. He was born in Aston, Birmingham, in 1905. In the 1939 register he is listed as “partner in repetition engineer[ing firm?]” in Birmingham, which may explain why he seems to have written nothing else apart from this children’s story: this may well have been a one–off, done more or less as a hobby (8). In 1946 he married Annabella Sheila Cameron in Solihul (ie Birmingham again.) By 1965, though, they were living in Purley (London) and they were still there when Annabella died in 1979. S.M. Kirk himself died in nearby Croydon in 1990 (or at least his death was registered there.) Barbara Chisholm, who first alerted me to the existence of this wonderful little book, thinks that perhaps Joyce got to know the author through her older sister, Margery (Barbara’s mother.) Given the Birmingham connections just mentioned, this is quite possible.

Unpublished Art Work

Though Joyce gets no mention in most of the standard dictionaries of book illustrators and wood–engravers, she does get a brief mention of her paintings in J. Johnson and A. Greutzner’s book The Dictionary of British Artists 1880–1940 (1986). The entry tells us simply that she exhibited between 1928 and 1937; that she lived in Birmingham during this period; and that she exhibited 26 paintings at the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, and 5 paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy, no details of which are given. Fortunately, we can expand on that.

In 1928 at the Galleries of the Royal Academy in London there was held the 14th exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society. It featured a wide range of crafts from ceramics through jewellery to furniture and prints. One of the prints, no.52 in the catalogue (p.32), was by Joyce. It was a colour print titled “Monkey”, though unfortunately no image of it seems to have survived. The front cover of the catalogue is shown in Fig.17a and the page relating to Joyce in Fig.17b. (The latter gives an interesting snapshot of the variety of material on display.) Joyce also featured in the 15th such exhibition in 1931, where an example of her book–binding was on display: a copy of Songs to Our Lady of Silence, bound in blue morocco with gold tooling (p.70 in the catalogue.) This book of devotional poems, by Mary Elise Woellworth, though she is not named in it as the author, was first published by Eric Gill’s St. Dominic’s Press, Ditchling, in 1920, with a second edition appearing in 1921. It contained five wood–engravings by Desmond Macready Chute (though he is not named in the book either.) St. Dominic’s Press was mentioned earlier in connection with R.J. Beedham, though whether this has any relevance to Joyce’s choice of a book on which to demonstrate her book–binding skills is not known.

As regards Joyce’s paintings, Jane Dew writes:

She exhibited widely and regularly submitted pieces for the Merionedd Artists. I know her work sold well and l clearly remember sitting in the back of the van, holding a single painting, often half a dozen, for delivery to a gallery or a purchaser. Her subjects were landscapes, l have one from the Cotswolds (“The White Road between Windrush and Burford” – Fig.18), given to me as a birthday present in 1962, and one from the Derbyshire Dales (“Via Gallia, Cromford” – Fig.19). She also painted floral subjects, frequently cyclamen, tulips, roses and lilac often with patterned pottery, often the one you were drinking from!

Neither of these pictures is signed or dated, but Joyce’s name and address are given on the back. The inscription on the back of the Cotswolds picture tells us that it was painted in her days at Loughborough, so in the early 1940s; that on the back of the Derbyshire Dales picture, that it was painted somewhat later, when she was living at Wyecliffe Road in Birmingham.

Jane also owns two woodcuts by Joyce, one of her garden at Loughborough (Fig.20) and the other of two penguins (Fig.21.) Note the monogrammed initials EJF in the lower left corner of the latter, as already noted in some of the illustrations for Operation Panpipes.

As regards Joyce exhibiting her paintings, Jane still has the catalogue of a County Art Exhibition held in Barmouth in the late summer of 1965. Its title page is shown in Fig.22a and the page listing Joyce’s contributions in Fig.22b.

Another of Joyce’s paintings is owned by John & Sue Perfect and is shown in Fig.23a. Signed on the front, its title, “Erw Pystill” (a farm near Cae Newydd), and a date of 1950, are given on the back (Fig.23b.) The back of the painting is interesting, for it tells us that it was at one point offered for sale at 15 guineas, presumably through a gallery, but that it was then withdrawn from sale for some unknown reason. Note that the back of the painting bears both her Birmingham address (35 Wyecliffe Rd, mentioned above) and the address of Cae Newydd. Interestingly a phone number is given for both addresses, odd in the case of the latter, which was at that time singularly devoid of most modern luxuries!

Another painting, signed and dated 1967, but untitled, is shown in Fig.24. This is owned by Christopher Riggio, of London, who bought it in “a posh junk shop on Lordship Lane, East Dulwich” in 2018, as it reminded him of the paintings done by a friend of his, Gareth Cadwallader.

The next painting (Fig.25) was sold by Monopteros Fine Art some time ago, the gallery listing it as “Welsh Border Landscape” by E. Joyce Francis. But there is a mystery surrounding this picture, for it is unsigned and undated, and there is nothing on the back of the painting to link it to Joyce. On the contrary, on the back of the painting, in pencil, is written: “ St.Georges Comp / Marion C Robison / Farm in the North Riding / 1471.” If anything, then, this suggests that the painting is by Marion C. Robison and depicts a farm in the North Riding. So what is going on here ?

The present owner of the picture is Jeremy Fisher, the son of the gallery owner, and he was able to tell me that the picture had come to the gallery attributed to Joyce and with the title, “Craig with a Smithy” (Elan Valley, Mid–Wales.) Luckily, Sue Perfect was able to throw some light on all this, for Marion C. Robison was a Birmingham–based artist who lived in the same area of the city the whole time that Joyce was there. Sue and her husband (like Jane Dew), are convinced that this painting is indeed by Joyce, and believe that Joyce painted it on a canvas given to her by Marion C. Robison, whom she very probably knew in Birmingham. The Smithy is almost certainly one of two such in the Aberdovey area.

An example of Joyce’s flower paintings, signed and dated 1959, is shown in Fig.26. Titled simply “Vase of Flowers,” the painting was sold by Arcadja Auctions in 2009, and its present whereabouts are not known. Jane Dew believes that this painting’s original title, of which she has a record from when it was previously sold in 1990, was “Gladioli, Carnations and Scabious, in a Vase.”

Our next painting is a still–life by Joyce (Fig.27) now in the possession of artist Tony Sawbridge. He and Joyce were great friends in her Birmingham days. Moving in the same artistic circles – both frequently exhibited at the Royal Birmingham Society of Art – they agreed to swap paintings with each other, which is how this painting came into Tony’s possession. He told me that they rather lost contact with each other when Joyce retired from the Education Department at Birmingham University, and moved to Wales, though he did pay several visits to her Arts & Crafts Café in Aberdovey.

Finally we have two paintings owned by Barbara Chisholm. The first is another landscape (Fig.28), probably in the Cae Newydd area, and painted in about 1965. Joyce gave this picture to Barbara for her eighteenth birthday. The second – altogether different from anything seen so far – is a painting (“Dreams”) of a couple in an armchair (Fig.29). It is signed and dated 1960 in the bottom left hand corner. The young woman is thought to be Joyce’s daughter, Marianne, but it is not clear who the young man was.

It only remains for us to look at some of Joyce’s “lesser works”, a delightful series of Christmas cards which she produced year on year for her friends. Four are shown here as Figs.30a (1962), 30b (1963), 30c (1968) and 30d (1970). Unfortunately, three of these are intended to be displayed folded over, like a tent, so it is difficult to show them effectively here, but the detail in all is clear enough even when flattened out. Cae Newydd and Wycliffe Road put in an appearance, along with Joyce’s famous vans and her pet cats. The double bass, incidentally, is John Goodborn’s (Joyce’s son), shown in Fig.30b in his Land Rover.

Finally, the rather neat little picture shown in Fig.31 was done by Joyce when she and Marianne left Birmingham for Aberdovey for good. It was a farewell from herself, Marianne and their cats to Jane’s parents. What I particularly like about it is Joyce’s skilful caricature of herself – seen also in Fig.30c – both making me smile when I think of Fig.2a & 2b and John Perfect’s description of her as a Margaret Rutherford–ish “woman of ample proportions.”

Notes

Note 1: Jos Coumans, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: an Updated Bibliography (2010), #76.

Note 2: The Registers of the Birmingham School of Arts & Crafts are now housed in the Arts, Design & Media Archives at Birmingham City University (formerly Birmingham Polytechnic), and my thanks are due to Fiona Waterhouse, Research Assistant there, for giving me a guided tour of them. The Registers, which, oddly enough, mostly spell her name as Elinor, give her address at the time of her attendance. That she was still living with her family throughout is confirmed by the Electoral Registers of 1930 and 1935.

Note 3a: A useful biography of him can be found in Lawrence William Wallis, Leonard Jay: Master Printer–Craftsman, first Head of the Birmingham School of Printing 1925–1953: an Appraisal (London, 1963). Jay’s papers are housed in the Leonard Jay Collection at the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham, and there is an online catalogue of them, as well as a typed paper version by Christine L. Penney, Catalogue of the Leonard Jay Collection (University of Birmingham Library, 1988.) The collection had been assembled by a good friend of Jay’s, Arnold Yates, with the assistance of Jay himself, and it was bought by the University of Birmingham Library in 1987, with the aid of a grant from the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Note 3b: A list of the earlier publications can be found in Bibliography – City of Birmingham School of Printing, which is a Catalogue of Books produced between 1926 and 1935, with an introduction by Leonard Jay (undated, but presumably published in 1935/36.) It lists 82 works. A full listing of the 192 publications produced between 1926 and 1953 can be found in L.W. Wallis’s book, cited in note (3a) above. There are copies of all 192 in Birmingham University Library.

Note 3c: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia: Translated into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald (1928), not decorated / illustrated, (Coumans #94.) The text is from FitzGerald’s first edition.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: translated into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald (1931), illustrated by Charles Meacham (Coumans #81.) It is “Dedicated to Ambrose George Potter the English Omarian Enthusiast.” The text is again from FitzGerald’s first edition.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: translated into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald (1937), decorated by Catherine Gebhard (Coumans #71.) This too is “Dedicated to Ambrose George Potter the English Omarian Enthusiast” and the text is again from FitzGerald’s first edition.

Note 4a: A fascinating and detailed account can be found in Benjamin Walker’s booklet The Resting Places of the Buried Remains of John Baskerville, the Thrice–buried Printer (Birmingham School of Printing, 1944). I have omitted here the somewhat gruesome details of the exhibition of Baskerville’s remains between their removal from his grave in 1821 and their subsequent (clandestine!) interment in Christ Church in 1829.

Note 4b: The story of the petition was covered on the front pages of The Birmingham Post on 8th March 1963 and 2nd April 1963, but was also of sufficient national interest to be reported in The Times on the 9th March 1963 (p.6, col.1) and 13th March 1963 (p.5, col.1).

Note 4c: There is a copy of it in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and it is this which is pictured in Walker, as note 4a, facing p.8.

Note 5: Actually, this was the First Series. A Second Series was started, and presumably it too was intended to consist of twelve booklets, but it seems that only two were actually published: no.1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Selection: Sonnets from the Portuguese (1935) and no.2. William Bennett, Doctor Samuel Johnson and the Ladies of the Lichfield Amicable Society 1775 (1935). The latter had originally been published in the previous year by the Birmingham School of Printing as part of their series titled Johnsoniana: Dr. Samuel Johnson & his friends, along with Bennett’s booklet on Richard Greene mentioned above. Why the second series ‘fizzled out’ in 1935 is not clear, but it may have had something to do with the death of Frank Edwin Baylis in that year.

Note 6: See The Times, 28th July 1934, p.4 col.6. The novel being centred on Glastonbury, the case attracted some attention by the local press. A lengthy account can be found on the front page of The Wells Journal, 3rd August 1934, for example.

Note 7a: Albert Garrett, A History of British Wood Engraving (1978), pp.146, 155–8, 232 & 374; James Hamilton, Wood Engraving and the Woodcut in Britain c.1890–1990 (1994), pp.15 & 121–2; Malcolm Yorke, Eric Gill – Man of Flesh and Spirit (2000 ed), pp.167 & 169.

Note 7b: This is stated on the front inside flap of the dust–jacket of the 1938 edition.

Note 7c: Online quarterly birth records & census returns for 1881, 1891, 1901 & 1911 place him in London, as do electoral registers for 1925, 1935, 1936, 1937 & 1939. The 1921 census return is not yet online, unfortunately.

Note 7d: Beedham engraved two of the illustrations (the rest were done by Gill) in God and the Dragon: a Book of Rhymes, by H.D.C.P (Douglas Pepler), self–published at Ditchling in 1917. (St Dominic’s Press was set up in 1921, but Pepler apparently had his own hand–press.)

Note 7e: This information comes from Joe Cribb, whose father, Joseph, worked with Gill from 1906 until the artist’s death in 1940: “In my father’s memoir of the Guild he says that Beedham worked at the Crank (Gill’s home on Ditchling Common) in the early 1920s. But nothing else. It is unclear whether he was an occasional visitor or local resident at the time.” (Personal email.)

Note 7f: Beedham engraved the frontispiece for Letters of a Portuguese Nun, published by Francis Walterson of Talybont Dyffryn, North Wales in 1929. The frontispiece was designed by Joanna Gill, the youngest daughter of Eric Gill.

He also engraved illustrations for two publications of the Gregynog Press, Eros and Psyche (1935) and The History of St Louis (1937). As indicated in note 7c above, Beedham was actually living in London in both 1935 and 1937.

Note 8: It would appear that S. Malcolm Kirk was the joint translator, with G. Prerauer, from French to English, of D.E. Inghelbrecht’s book The Conductor’s World, published, like Operation Panpipes, by Peter Nevill, in 1953. So far as I am aware, this is the only other published work in which Kirk was involved.

Acknowledgements

In addition to thanking the people named in the body of the above article, I must first and foremost thank Sandra Mason and Bill Martin for handling the initial correspondence with the Birmingham and Midland Institute, Birmingham City University Library and the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Campus. It was they, too, who made the initial contacts with Sylvia Goodborn, John & Sue Perfect, and Jane Dew, and they too who did the initial spadework with the Aberdovey / Aberdyfi Art Society. I must also thank the many staff members of the three Birmingham libraries just mentioned, as well as those at the British Library.

#Rubaiyat of Omar Kyham #E Joyce

0 notes