Invasion Colchester 2017

Invasion Colchester is an annual charity drive that takes over the centre of town once a year. The 2017 Invasion took place on Saturday, 2 September, and seemed bigger than ever. There were a lot more props this year, by which I mean cars. We've had cars before—a Duke's of Hazzard Dodge Charger, American police cars, Starsky & Hutch Gran Torino, etc.—but there seemed to be loads more this year.

That's not reflected in the photos as I prefer to concentrate on people... that and I ended up with 116 photos to sort through, plus some that Mel took, and I want to get these up Sunday morning rather than spend all day on them. So, without further ado, here's a selection of characters that I spotted wandering around town while I was doing my grocery shopping Saturday morning...

The first shot, by the way, isn't mine, but shows all of the cosplayers.

 

 

 

W. E. Wightman

W.E. WIGHTMAN

By

Robert J. Kirkpatrick

W.E. Wightman had a short but productive career as an illustrator of children’s books between around 1920 and his early death nine years later.

He was born in 1889 in Basford, Nottinghamshire, and christened William Ernest Wightman. His father, William Henry Wightman, born in Bulwell, Nottingham in 1860, was a lace designer and the son of a glass-maker; his mother, Mary Jane (née Tinley, born in Tipton, Staffordshire), was the daughter of a railway station clerk. At the time of the 1901 census, the family was living at 35 Bobbers Mill Road, Nottingham, which had been the family home for at least a decade.

Ten years later, William Ernest Wightman was an art student in London, boarding at 115 Ivanhoe Road, Camberwell, with Eliza Charlotte Grover, a 58 year-old widow, and her daughter Violet. There were two other boarders, one of whom, 23 year-old Stanley R.H. Rogers, was also an art student. Where Wightman and Rogers were studying is not known. (Rogers later emigrated to America, where he became a aircraft engineer before being drafted into the American army in 1917.)

Wightman also served in the First World War, initially with the Royal Field Artillery, then with the 17th Lancers, and finally with the Motor Machine Gun Service. As a Temporary Lieutenant in Belgium, he was awarded the Military Cross, the citation in The London Gazette (1 February 1919) reading:

When the gun teams came under very heavy machine-gun fire from the cross roads near Gheluvelt, 28th September, 1918, he dismounted all four guns and took up positions in the infantry line. But for this action the guns and teams were in great danger of being put out of action. He showed great courage in the open under heavy fire, and subsequently handled his guns with great ability.

Wightman had married Alice Thorpe in Belper, Derbyshire, in 1916. He left the army on 2 November 1920, and immediately began his new career as an artist, with one of his first pictures, of H. Rider Haggard’s heroine Ayesha (from his novel She) appearing in The Strand Magazine in December 1920. His first book illustrations also appeared in 1920, in Constance Harvey’s novel The Head versus the School. Nothing by him has been traced for the following two years, but in 1923 he began a brief association with the publishers Blackie & Son and Ward, Lock & Co., mainly illustrating school stories. He also provided illustrations for annual such as Blackie’s Boys’ Budget, Girls’ Budget and Blackie’s Boys’ Annual, and Cassell’s British Girls’ Annual. In 1924, he began providing illustrations for Cassell & Co.’s The New Magazine and Cassell’s Magazine. He went on work for C. Arthur Pearson’s The Royal Magazine, and, from 1926 onwards, for The Graphic, The Bystander, The Sphere and The Wide World Magazine.

He died, of bronchopneumonia and influenza and aged only 40, on 10 February 1929, at his home at 2 Claremont Road, Twickenham, leaving a small estate, worth £590, to his widow.

As an illustrator, his black and white drawings were well-executed and often lively, and he was clearly highly-regarded by magazines such as The Bystander and The Sphere. But he was, perhaps, a strange choice as an artist for boys’ books—his schoolboys could rarely be described as good-looking, and he seemed to be have a fixation with one particular hairstyle...

PUBLICATIONS

Books Illustrated
The Head versus the School by Constance Harvey, S.W. Partridge & Co., 1920
The School Jonah by St. John Pearce, Ward, Lock & Co., 1923
The War of the Wireless Waves by Percy F. Westerman, Blackie & Son, 1923
Honour First: A Tale of the ‘forty Five by Herbert Strang, O.U.P., 1923
Schoolgirl Kitty by Angela Brazil, Blackie & Son, 1923
The School in the South by Angela Brazil, Blackie & Son, 1923
Young Rookwood at School by R.A.H. Goodyear, Ward, Lock & Co., 1924
The Rival Schools by Rowland Walker, Ward, Lock & Co., 1924
The Mystery of the Mine by George Richmond, Blackie & Son, 1924
Captain Peggie by Angela Brazil, Blackie & Son, 1924
The Boys of Ringing Rock by R.A.H. Goodyear, Ward, Lock & Co., 1925
Chris in Canada: A Tale by Dr G.F. Clarke, Blackie & Son, 1925
Sylvia’s Secret: A Tale of the West Indies by Bessie Marchant, Blackie & Son, 1925
A Sixth Form Feud by Harold Avery, Ward, Lock & Co., 1926
Blake of the Modern Fifth by R.A.H. Goodyear, Ward, Lock & Co., 1926
Joan’s Best Chum by Angela Brazil, Blackie & Son, 1926
The Valley of a Thousand Deaths by Conrad H. Sayce, Blackie & Son, 1926
Her Own Kin: A Tale of Flood and Fortune by Bessie Marchant, Blackie & Son, 1926
Di the Dauntless by Bessie Marchant, Blackie & Son, 1926
The Call of the Jungle by Robert Noel Rivers, Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1926
Carton’s Cap and Other School Stories by Richard Bird, Blackie & Son, 1927 *
Blue Brander: A Story of Adventure and Australian School Life by D. Lindsay, Ward, Lock & Co., 1927
Maurice Pomeroy by H. Elrington, Ward, Lock & Co., 1927
The Head versus the School by Constance Harvey, S.W. Partridge & Co., 1927
An Eventful Term by Dora Chapman, S.W. Partridge & Co., 1927
Just the Girl for St. Jude’s by Ethel Talbot, Cassell & Co., 1927
The Captain of Stannard’s by Michael Poole, Blackie & Son, 1928
Rival Schools at Schooner Bay by R.A.H. Goodyear, Ward, Lock & Co., 1928
At School with Rachel by Angela Brazil, Blackie & Son, 1928
The Treasure of the Tropics by Bernard Cronin, Ward, Lock & Co., 1928

* The title page incorrectly gives Frank Gillett as the illustrator

Comic Cuts - 1 September 2017

I spent the morning of Bank Holiday Monday sweltering in 27° heat at a Boot Fair. My sister, who had some doggy and craft-related bits 'n' bobs that she wanted to sell, agreed to drive us out to Ardleigh, which is reputedly the biggest fair in the area. The logistics of the Holland family doing anything is all tied up around my sister's dogs, so my poor mum volunteered to be dog-sitter-in-chief. This meant she had to travel up to my sister's on Sunday evening and stay overnight.

Fortunately, I live roughly half-way along the route between mum and sister, so it was convenient for them to drop in on Sunday evening so we could load the car up with boxes of books and DVDs that I wanted to sell off. Mostly duplicates, but I'm thinning out the ranks of some authors whose books I know I will never get around to reading again.

The last time I did one of these, we had a tables to set out our wares, but not this time, so I bought a nice 6-foot long folding table for the event at a cost of £38. I made £100 or so at the last fair so my target was £50, which would cover the cost of the table and the pitch (£12, split between two).

We were pretty well organized. On Saturday the queue at the bank was a mile long, so I took money out of the cash machine and ran around all the charity shops trying to buy books and get change from £20 notes. I asked first if they had enough to break a twenty—I'm not that mean—and in one instance, when the lady said she had no change at all, I nipped into another shop, bought a book and used the change from that to go back and buy a book in the first shop (it was one I'd been looking out for, so I didn't mind... I just didn't want to spend the change I'd accumulated).

I bought packets of crisps and made sandwiches to take with me; bought paper, pens, tape, loads of carrier bags... everything you could think of. We were ready to sell.

We arrived at the field around 7:30 and people were already wandering around as we were setting up. The table worked like a dream; the grass was wet, but we had rolls of bubble wrap that could sit under the trays of books that were spread around. A few other cars pulled up after us to fill the row; opposite, a huge bouncy castle was being inflated. It didn't take long to figure out that we were right out on the far edge of the rows of dealers and they weren't expecting too many more people. Speaking to the lady at the pitch next door we discovered that her previous experience of the fair was that it was usually bigger, filling the field we were in and extending into the field next door.

Still, it seemed busy and by around 8:30 I'd made a couple of sales which buoyed my enthusiasm. But it was slow and, after not too long, the heat was relentless. We were facing into the sun with no cover and the only positive is that it was a dry heat, so we weren't ringing with sweat. Small pockets of people wandered through, some ignoring the table, some stopping to look, occasionally pulling out a book to leaf through. Some people were chatty, some people were after specific authors (Lee Child, Andy McNab, one or two I'd never heard of) and some had even more specific wants: one guy was after film tie-ins; another wanted a specific range of Ian Fleming Bond novels with girls on guns. I said my set was from an earlier era like the classic Thunderball bullet holes cover. He looked at me like I was mental and scuttled off. Tie-in guy, on the other hand, was very friendly. He was, in fact, picking up titles for a friend, who was at another boot fair. Thanks to the miracle of mobile phone technology, he ran out of credit after about a minute and, when he came back ten minutes later, was reading out titles at a mad pace because he was running out of charge. I can't complain because I got £8 out of him.

But sales were few and far between. Cars driving to the car park along the track that ran alongside the field kicked up clouds of dust. The sun was right in our eyes and when there were no customers, time seemed to stand still. At 9:30 it felt like we'd been there four or five hours, but it was only two. There was a flurry around 10:30 but then it died out again. By 11:30 we could see people packing up and there were huge gaps in the customer car park that weren't being filled by new customers arriving. I took a brief stroll around and most of the professional-looking outfits were either already packed or starting to pack. We started packing around 12:15 and pulled out around 12:30.

After five hours of selling I'd earned £26.50... less the £6 pitch fee. So about twenty quid total, or four pounds an hour, which is way below minimum wage, let along a living wage. More frustrating than that is the fact that I had to lug 95% of what we'd taken back home and I'd cleared the equivalent of about four feet of shelf space.

The weirdest customer had to be an old guy and his wife who were looking at some old Ed McBain's. "He's only after 87th Precinct," said the wife. I said "I think there must be ten or fifteen in that box." "That's too many for me," said the old guy, who stood up and walked away as I called after him, "You don't have to buy them all!"

I've had a solid week of work in front of the computer. If I'm honest, I've probably been more active on this project than I was on the Valiant index, probably because it's broken down into 50 mini-projects which can, for the most part, be researched and written in two days. Only one has turned into a 12,000-word epic, but the others have been a more sedate 2,500 words (on average) apiece.

For comparison, the original pieces ran to 13,795 words and averaged around 1,500 words. I've now completed ten essays, one of them completely new, and I'm very pleased with the additional information I've managed to gather. I've managed to locate birth dates where they were missing for three of the nine when they were previously published. In one instance I've identified the birth name of an author, which was unknown when I last looked into her work in 2009.

Random scans. I arrived back home on Monday afternoon and it was only when I looked in the mirror that I realised how much I'd caught the sun. When I took my watch off and was able to compare the white under the strap to my red wrists it was really obvious. So here are some sun-related covers. I've tried to not go for obvious choices and, if you think about it, Search for the Sun implies that the sun definitely isn't there. Just to mess with your mind a little more, the sun doesn't appear on any of the covers... but Search for the Sun comes closest as it's the only cover that actually has what look like a couple of stars on it.