Grandma’s Half Term Treat

Mansfield Museum were doing a kids’ thing about the environment, so off we went. They loved it, though perhaps not as much as dressing up as astronauts next door in the space rockets section. I wandered off in the opposite direction and found myself immediately surrounded by the watercolour paintings of Albert Sorby Buxton. They were quite fetching – gentle, sympathetic, economical and relaxed. They portray a Mansfield that was fast disappearing by the first few years of the twentieth century, when the man himself was head of the art school.

It appears that they had first been collected together for display in 1933. Albert’s widow apparently saw to it that his wishes were met and so the pictures ended up in the keeping of the local authority. The paintings reflect the artist’s love for his home town and reminded me of quite similar work by Harold Hopps on the Wirral. The display took in 161 paintings and I naturally zoomed in on the two railway images. This initially struck me as a significant under-representation, given the way that the railway very noticeably marches across the centre of town on its dramatic viaduct. Maybe Buxton viewed the railway rather disparagingly, like Wordsworth and Ruskin had done, and so chose to largely ignore it. Maybe it just didn’t fit with his mission – to record what was soon likely to be lost, rather than what was comparatively new.

The two pictures concerned are historical depictions of the nearby Mansfield and Pinxton Railway, a very early horse-drawn set-up dating from 1819. The M&PR had been needed to join Mansfield to the Cromford Canal to take out minerals, malt and manufactured goods. In the nineteenth century coal was actually brought in to Mansfield this way. For most of the twentieth century, and once the Notts coalfield had been developed, it went in the opposite direction and on a much larger scale.

Buxton’s railway pictures are of the Level Crossing, Belvedere, showing Signalman’s Cabin and Passenger Coach, Horse drawn, on the Mansfield-Pinxton Railway. The crossing was called Warrens Box after the name of the keeper. The reprinted 1933 blurb adds that [in the days of steam that followed] “The gradient above this box to the station was so great that the engines were taken off and the trains ran down to the station on their own weight. On the approach of a train Warren rang the bell seen on the left of the box. When the new station was made the road between Belvedere and Portland Street was lowered and the level crossing done away with”. The other view is of a horse-drawn passenger coach before the line was taken over by the Midland Railway in 1847.

Though Buxton is credited with telling the story of two hundred years of Mansfield’s history of both its buildings and its inhabitants, one wonders how much he drew on earlier photographs or simply his imagination to bring them to life, in his intimate and familiar style.