Newsletter April 16th

Website sponsored by the Sunderland Point Community Association

The Mother and Sisters, Fanny and Jinny of John Walker. The children are a nephew and niece c1885: With the permission of Lancaster City Museums

Special News

During the last week we reached 100 subscribers to the website. We are thankful for the support and hope you find the website and magazine articles of interest. We are very open to dialogue and will attend to messages quickly. What will be especially welcome are photographs of Sunderland Point as we make every effort to involve images of the Point in our articles and stories.

Funny you should mention photographs.

Photographs – John Walker

At the top of this newsletter is a John Walker photograph of his mother Alice and sisters, Fanny and Ann Jane - known as Jinny. It comes from his collection of photographs which is currently being digitalised by the Lancaster City Museums. It is known that John was devoted to his family and there are a number of affectionate portraits in the collection.

When the photographs were first acquired by the museum in the 1980s, identification copies were taken and attached to record cards which described details such as the location and naming individuals included in the image where known.

We have been allowed access to these cards and made a number of copies and can share a few of these in this newsletter. The quality is not great but gives a good impression of what the digital copies will show.

A view of First Terrace taken on Town Skear reflected in a sea pool c1900: With the permission of Lancaster City Museums

Sailing boats being towed from Glasson Dock out to sea by a steam tug c1900: With the permission of Lancaster City Museums.

There are a large number of boat photographs in the collection. An interest perhaps stimulated by the view from the Point and because his father was harbourmaster at Lancaster and Glasson Dock.

Number 7 First Terrace the summer home of John Walker and family c1900: With the permission of Lancaster City Museums.

We are greatly in debt to the Museum and the kindness shown to us. More photographs will be published as they become available.  In time we will create a special gallery for his collection as we have done with the Sam Thompson photographs.

Photographs – Our collection

The website was rebuilt around photographs, and many more have been used to illustrate articles with images of the Point consistent with the era. There is now a considerable number that should be presented in the gallery on the website.  We are both fortunate and grateful to residents and friends of the Point who have given permission to use their photographs.

To maintain reasonable website page loading speeds, it seems best to split the gallery into four. One containing our oldest photographs dating before 1918. Another set of photos which date from 1918 to 2000 and then a gallery of ‘Modern’ snaps which bring us to the present day. The fourth gallery will be called ‘Wildlife’ where we mostly display the wildfowl and wader birdlife photographs of Alan Smith.

Much of the work is done. The next step will be to circulate links to the new galleries to those who can check the verification, dating, and look for duplication. This will take time and we ask for patience. We will make this available to everyone as soon as we can.

Looking ahead, we are planning to open a gallery of paintings, and other non-photographic images of the Point.

William Page Atkinson Wells

Next month marks the centenary of the death of William Wells. This artist created a number of outstanding paintings of Sunderland Point during the time he spent his summers here in the first decade of the 20thcentury.

Over the winter we started researching into his life. After a slow start, we began to uncover material, and special help came from Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries. Photographs of Wells are rare, and we are grateful to his great granddaughter Yvonne Wells – who lives in Australia – for this splendid studio portrait.

William Page Atkinson Wells c1918: Provided by Yvonne Wells.

Our biography will appear on the website in early May on the centenary of his death.

Articles to be published soon

Next Sunday we had planned to follow on from the 1927 flood with the 1977 flood, but that has been put back a week as Alan Smith has written a great article,’Winter Visitors Departure’ on the departure and arrivals of bird life as we change seasons. We have other items in planning including revisiting the filming of ‘Ruby in the Smoke’.

The preparation and publication of articles is time consuming and with the coming of spring there are horticultural demands upon us. It is likely we will drop to fortnightly rather than weekly articles, however we will be issuing more frequent newsletters.

New Pages

Just a quick reminder our new pages on ‘Environment’ are available – and many thanks to the large number who have already had a look – by following this link

https://www.sunderlandpoint.net/environment-1 

 The next new pages will be on fishing and farming which will be started later in the year.

 The Patch

Many of you will be aware that Sunderland Point was featured in an edition of the Radio 4 series ‘The Patch’. It was aired on the 22nd of March. They made a great program.

This was arranged through Jo Powell on Second Terrace; we were very interested and asked Jo if she could tell us how it came about. She has kindly done so.

 I first heard of “The Patch” radio 4 programme, when the presenter Polly Weston, contacted us on our Sunderland Point Sea Shanty Crew Facebook page after our postcode was randomly selected. I arranged to meet Polly at the end of the causeway. I told her I would be wearing a red beret, so she would recognise me. She arrived on the densest, foggiest day of the year, so thick, if it wasn’t for my red beret, she wouldn’t have seen me! A few of the sea shanty crew gathered in my front room to meet her and the more she listened to us, the more she became interested in Trevor’s story and how music is helping in his recovery.

Trevor is the guitarist in the shanty crew, (always recognisable in his long red pirate coat + skull and crossbones headscarf) and was also the lead guitarist with local band Rock and Ruin. He had a stroke in June 2021 and became paralysed down one side, lost his speech and devastatingly, he was unable to play his beloved guitar.

Polly picked up on the fact that Scottie and I had secretly been working on a sea shanty that Trevor wrote before he had the stroke and were planning to surprise him and the rest of the shanty crew with it, at our next practise in the Globe, Overton.  Polly asked if she could come along and record it. The rest of the shanty crew soon learned the chorus and it has now become a firm favourite.

Meeting regularly both with the shanty crew and his rock and roll band is really helping Trevor progress, and since the programme went out, we have been inundated with messages from people in similar situations, saying we have given them hope, and how important music is as an aid to recovery.

To listen to Jo and the others in the program please follow this link 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001k7l6

 Whilst the program was being aired – at 9 o’clock in the morning – interested folks from all over the country started looking up Sunderland Point through their internet connections, finding our website they logged in to have a look. During the 30 minutes the program was being aired there were over 1200 hits. These came from almost every county in Britain. It rose to over 1400 for the day and the high activity continued for the next three days bring the total to over 2000.

Next Week

Alan’s article on ‘Winter Visitors Departure’ – and again some lovely photographs.

Wheatear: From the collection of Alan Smith