In the last eighteen months I have been quiet here. Why?

A number of life changes re-directed my focus. I had a spell of ill health over two years ago and very reluctantly decided to retire from teaching. I still miss a group of very loyal students, the teaching process and ‘the buzz’ when I saw students’ work emerging and developing. What I don’t miss is lengthy preparation, assembling and carting around heavy boxes of materials, stress of busy British roads and physical exhaustion of teaching a course.

With no teaching ahead, weeks opened up, free of planning for the next course. There remained no excuse for not completing the archiving of the Wood & Bedford documents still at home – these were mostly concerned with the orchil trade. Archiving ‘the orchil papers’ was something I had started several years ago, but the task had faltered and then hung embarrassingly unfinished, even through Covid, when I should have had all the time in the world to complete it. So I got down to it and finished the job. I took the annotated lists and boxes to the West Yorkshire Archive Services’ Morley facility in autumn 2024 where they now form part of the main archive for Wood & Bedford, Yorkshire Dyeware & Chemical Co. Ltd, and Yorkshire Chemicals.

There was another local project underway. I am a church bellringer and since 2019 had been heavily involved in a major five-year £75,000 restoration project for the eight church bells in my small Devon town. Over the course of the fundraising and practical work, I took thousands of photos, researched bells history, operated two social media accounts, wrote grant applications and letters, organised concerts and spent a sponsored night in the church tower facing my arachnophobia to raise money (£1,500 if you want to know, and at least one large spider). The project was completed in January 2025.

In 2024 I presented a poster at the Leeds Dyes in History and Archaeology (DHA) Conference, co-authored with Victor J. Chen and Gregory D. Smith of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. We were subsequently invited to write up our poster findings as a paper which was published in Volume 8 of Heritage, in 2025. The work focused on a recipe using orchil in the Stockholm and Leiden Papyri. The months leading up to publication were very intense, requiring repeat experiments and reordering the data.

And now it’s 2026. I have recently received very interesting enquiries about orchil and its history as a result of past posts here and feel I need to bring my front page up to date, as well as revising some of the other pages. Orchil is still very much a ‘thing’ for me, so I thought it prudent to demonstrate I am still alive and kicking.

Finally, I was involved in making a short piece for a national radio programme back in 2009. For several years the link on the BBC website has been faulty – but now it has been put right. Although the interviews were in the early years of my research, the information in it still stands well.

Radio Presentation in the ‘Making History’ series: section about my research begins at about 19 minutes. This recording may not always be available to overseas listeners https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00nk4k4

Links

Milking the Orchil: How the Presence of Goat Milk in the Orchil Dyebath May affect the Color of Dyed Wool: Paper co-authored with Victor J. Chen and Gregory D. Smith in Heritage here

Access to the West Yorkshire Archive Services collection of documents relating to Wood & Bedford, Yorkshire Dyeware and Chemical Company and Yorkshire Chemicals Ltd here.