Wressle - Self Sufficiency and All That

After four years of marriage my wife Sheila and I moved to Yorkshire so that I could take up a teaching post at Thorne, near Doncaster. We bought an eighteenth century cottage with half an acre of garden in the quiet hamlet of Wressle, a dozen miles south of York. Our two children, Eleanor and Russell, were babies at this stage and Wressle was an ideal environment in which to bring them up. Most of my (and Sheila's) creative energies went into the garden - we made ourselves almost self-sufficient with our own fruit and vegetables - and there seemed little time for painting although I got the odd commission for pub murals and so on. (No record of these remains, perhaps fortunately.) Although I didn't exhibit very often at this stage, I can see now that a change was beginning to take place as I painted the things around me and these were inevitably rural in flavour.(7,8,9,10,11) I spent several years studying for an Open University Honours Degree during this period which also meant less time for painting.

After ten years of our rural idyll it became obvious we were going to have to move somewhere more practical - Wressle had no shops and no bus service - and so bought a house at Brayton, near Selby. Eleanor and Russell could walk to school from the new house and we all spent much less of our lives in the car.