| 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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Someone today described my earlier work ‘A House in Cradley‘ as an “inside-out house”, and this could easily describe the idea I have for my new drawings. I thought I’d share a little of the work in progress on this one. I don’t tend to do too many preliminary sketches, and jot as many ideas down in words as I do in images. Here (below, left) are some of my notes relating to the new project.

Looking back through my diary I see that the idea has been with me for a few months now, in various forms. It’s a project which has had to stay on the back burner while I set up my studio, but it’s nice to have it there simmering away and developing over time. There are pages and pages of these jottings, here are a couple of them:

I’m currently working on the window which will open into the sky on the new drawing (right hand photos). This is one of the sketches for the window: as you can see I’m using a dolls house window as a model here, but I’ll probably also be photographing some of the sash windows in my house, too. Somewhere in there I want to get lots of woodgrain, and perhaps some fingerprints too, but I’m not quite sure how yet.

Given the amount of material I already have in my art diary it’s very likely I’ll be working on variations of this drawing for a considerable time, and produce many works from it. At the moment my plan is to make the first piece a stipple drawing, but I am considering also sketching in the window in the sky with pen and ink, as well as other ideas. I’m also planning on building some ‘sets’, using dolls house furniture and dolls house windows, the ideas for which you may just be able to make out in the pages from my diary.

To see some of the earlier photographs which will be used in this project, take a look at the chair on Clee Hills post. 

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