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.
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.
