George Mainwaring
George was an honest, reliable and generous-natured man and an artist.
These drawings and the accompanying notes make a valuable record of his early years. His graphical recollections, seen in the published drawings and text, together with additional contributions from contemporaries, help to describe the daily life in Rochdale during the first quarter of the 1900’s.
George lived in and around Rochdale all his life. His drawings of the people he lived amongst, the shared streets and seasons, are variously admiring, sympathetic, truthful and humorous. When published, the Rochdale Observer series recalled events that were only some 50 years previous and would have been familiar to most of the Observer’s adult readership.
Now, 55 years since the last published Observer edition and 30 years since George’s demise, none of the characters nor any of the events are within living memory. They are immortalised through George’s black biro drawings and his later oil paintings. Is it really 108 years since the boy first saw DRAKE 127?
His people are rarely a head-and-shoulders portrait but the whole person, capturing their unique stance, hand gesture or action.
Individuals. Figures and furnishings are faithfully observed and loyally represented. He gave equal attention to the detail of what a workman wore, the harness, suspension and underframe of Peggy Fell’s donkey and cart, and the unique outfit of the clogger’s shop.
His urban landscapes (other than Cronkeyshaw Common, once the favourite meeting ground of early non-conformists, ‘Blanketeers’, ‘shuttle-gatherers’, Chartists and other radical sorts, of national importance) consist of horizontal patterns of stone paving, flagstone walling, vertical planes of detailed brickwork, fenestration and billboards.
Following the publication of a Saturday article, he enjoyed the resulting correspondence from readers how he could bring memories back to life and the reward that others enjoyed his efforts.
This website/book brings together, in generally as-published sequence, George’s 30 drawings of the “Do You Remember?” series of his illustrated articles which were published in the Saturday edition of the Rochdale Observer, from 30 January 1970.
A book of the drawings was discussed and roughed out several times in the late 1970s, and, certainly, once he began his oil paintings, several of which had their origin in one of the drawings. Shamefully, the project never did come to a resolution in time for George to enjoy the result.
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