| Christine | Farmer |

Above: Lime trees of the Anvil Yard commemorative garden; St. Peter’s Church (originally Cradley Chapel) and churchyard; the Cradley War Memorial.

I always knew my grandmother had been involved in chainmaking in Cradley, but in researching my family tree over recent months I have found that that the making of chains, and before that nails, scythes and other blades, has been in my family for at least five hundred years, and probably well before that.

Last weekend I decided to return to my home town of Cradley, and take some shots of the memorial ground which was once called ‘Anvil Yard’. The tree-bordered and roughly triangular piece of land is one that I’d walked past many times as a child, but it is only in the past year that I’ve learnt what the trees were there to commemorate – a piece of industrial history, and the lives of the people who lived, died and worked there. My great great great grandfather, Tidal Parsons (c. 1806-1882), was a bayonet-striker who lived there in the second half of the nineteenth century, his family amongst many cramped into the tiny houses and workshops ranged around a central yard, and working from morning ’til night in the manufacture by hand of chains and nails.

Above: a few quick sketches of the Anvil Yard commemorative garden.

I’m planning a drawing based on the Anvil Yard, and will be writing more about it in the near future. But for now I feel tongue-tied and in awe of what I’ve found, and will leave it to the words of Robert Harborough Sherard, who visited Cradley in 1896 and witnessed the scene for himself. After describing the conditions in various factories in the town, the employment of girls as young as ten, sweated labour, children and babes in arms at the anvil, Sherard visited Anvil Yard itself, and wrote:

“Of Anvil Yard, with its open sewers and filth and shame, one would rather not write, nor
of the haggard tatterdermalions who there groaned and jumped. In fact I hardly saw them.
The name ‘Anvil Yard’ had set me thinking of some lines of Goethe, in which he deplores the
condition of the people – ‘zwischen dem Ambos und Hammer’ – between the anvil and the
hammer.

“And as these lines went through my head, whilst before my spiritual eyes there passed the
pale procession of the White Slaves of England, I could see nothing but sorrow and hunger
and grime, rags, foul food, open sores and movements incessant, instinctive yet laborious -
an anvil and a hammer ever descending – all vague, and in a mist as yet untinged with red,
a spectacle so hideous that I gladly shut it out, wondering, for my part, what in these
things is right.”

Robert Harborough Sherard, The White Slaves of England, 1898, full text here.

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I’ve recently started on the photography for my new pen and ink drawing projects. Last week I began photographing some of the chairs around my house, and yesterday the clouds were fantastic, so I put one of the dining chairs in the back of the car and took it up the Clee Hills in Shropshire for some location shots. The conditions were clear, and in some of the photographs you can see the Malvern Hills in the distance — click on the thumbnails to see larger images.

I’m really looking forward to getting started on drawing the details of the wood-grain on these chairs, as well as some dramatic, cloudy skies. But first, I need to take more photographs both at home and out on location, so that’s what I’m working on for the time being.

Visit my galleries to see more photography

If you’re a fan of clouds, you might enjoy the Cloud Appreciation Society website.

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