In the last of her tutorials, manga artist Abbie Rial helps you find your way of working.

With the latest sculpture trail arriving soon in Hull and East Yorkshire, Burnsy asks Clare Huby what we can expect from A Mischief Of Rats.

The fascinating tale of the water supply that never was is uncovered by our unrealised reservoir correspondent Angus Young.

Despite the signs marking the city boundary, Hull City Council still owns some parcels of land just across the border in the East Riding. The fields off Priory Road as you enter Cottingham and the former Hedon aerodrome site beyond Saltend are both owned by the council. But back in 1932 Hull’s landowning interests extended 50 miles away to the North York Moors.

The land in question was in the Upper Farndale valley, north of Kirkbymoorside, and covered nearly 5,000 acres. At the time it was acquired by Hull Corporation – the forerunner to today’s city council – as part of an ambitious plan to build a huge reservoir to create a reliable supply of fresh water to the city’s industrial sector as well as its expanding population via a very long pipeline.

As well as meeting the obvious demand, there was an element of science behind the idea. The proposal envisaged mixing the soft water of the Moors with the hard water extracted closer to Hull to produce water with less minerals in it. One of the potential benefits promoted at the time was that softer water would make soap lather more easily.

Another was job creation. Corporation officials estimated the construction of the reservoir and a series of weirs and aqueducts would provide enough work for up to 600 unemployed labourers from the city. A third advantage – as promoted by Hull – was the avoidance of any sizeable village or settlement being “drowned” by the scheme. Instead, the relatively remote nature of the land with its scattered farmsteads meant a reservoir would not swamp a significant population. Overall, around 100 people lived there.

Existing farmers in the area became tenants of the Corporation as it secured the necessary parliamentary approval and started drawing up designs for a 1,900ft-long dam standing 130ft high, capable of holding back six thousand million gallons of water in a two and a half mile-long lake. However, the Corporation still needed to fund the estimated £2.1m cost and the start of the Second World War then effectively put things on hold.

When the conflict ended in 1945 Hull applied for extensions to previous permissions, including borrowing powers, to keep the idea alive.

In 1954 the city gave approval for a planned nature reserve on some of the land, partly as a response to problems being caused by people picking wild daffodils in large numbers. However, the council reserved the right to terminate the agreement with six months’ notice.

By 1970 the North York Moors was an established National Park while public opinion was turning against the idea of creating a reservoir in the middle of it.

Then a new parliamentary bill seeking to confirm an updated reservoir scheme costing £8m and incorporating  modern technology as an integral part of future water supply planning in Yorkshire controversially collapsed when an all-party select committee voted against it. The committee chairman Sir Samuel Knox-Cunningham used this casting vote to veto the scheme, having previously ruled that several committee members were ineligible to vote having previously publicly expressed support for it. At a stroke, 38 years of reservoir planning by successive Hull council officials had come to an abrupt end.

Hull eventually transferred the land to the Yorkshire Water Authority when it was created in 1974. Later, following the privatisation of the water industry, the 26 tenants in Farndale were allowed to buy their farms from the new-look company Yorkshire Water.

Angus Young

Amy Thompson pops to Waudby Library to uncover all there is to know about these regular events.

Dave Windass of Humber Street Gallery returns to look at another place where you can enjoy public art.

Crime writer and music aficionado Nick Quantrill tells the sad tale of one of the greats.

Curiosity held our first event in Hull Prison Library last week. Poet Matt Nicholson describes the experience.

I never imagined myself running a poetry workshop in a prison, but here I was, on a freezing cold March morning, meeting my fellow poet, Dean Wilson, and James the Prison Library Manager at the visitor’s entrance to HMP Hull.

I have to admit my heart was earning its keep as we made our way through the security systems, searches and all the processes that makes this enormous machine work as well as it can. After about 45 minutes and almost as many locked, unlocked, and locked again doors and gates, we found ourselves in the well-stocked, completely un-prison-like library. If it wasn’t for the subtle but reassuring presence of two Prison officers in the next-door office and the razor-wire visible through the library windows, I could have easily believed I was in a small village library anywhere in the UK.

We welcomed 6 inmates to our first Talking about Poetry workshop, with half of them admitting to reading and/or writing poetry and the rest interested to know what this poetry lark is all about. Once we’d established that our intention was to share a few poems with them and to hear some of their work, Dean started us off in his own inimitable way, with his poem about the dangers of standing on a deckchair, and the ice was broken.

I have to be honest and tell you that when James had told us that there would be attendees of mixed abilities and experience of poetry and creative writing, I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but a more interested and engaged bunch we couldn’t have wished for. It was clear that a couple of the attendees were talented and accomplished poets, but everyone entered into the conversations about what poetry is and isn’t, whether it needed to rhyme or not rhyme, have structure or simply flow out of us when the urge struck, and within the first hour, we were all convinced of the power that reading and writing poetry can give people.

In the second half of the session, after chocolate biscuits and some questionable coffee, I noticed that two of the lads had started writing while we talked and shared more poems, and it wasn’t long before both of them said that they had written a poem, one for the very first time, and asked if they could read them to the group. For me, this was the high point of a genuinely enjoyable morning, hearing someone who had never thought he could “do poetry” because he didn’t know what it was, or what the rules were or weren’t, suddenly reading out loud a poem he’d written for his mum and dad. I can’t wait to go back with Dean to do some more Talking about Poetry at HMP Hull. Thanks to Curiosity and the prison library for making it happen.

Matt Nicholson

Tutorial number four finds manga artist Abbie Rial back in the Makerspace and looking at faces.

Burnsy attempts to unpick the important details of the upcoming election to decide who will be the new mayor of Hull and East Riding, with help from Angus Young.

Forget Grok, this is the type of AI we want! Our anthropomorphic technology correspondent Angus Young has the details.

It was billed as Hull’s Great Exhibition. Staged over ten days in March 1935, the City of Hull Trades Exhibition in the City Hall featured 23 stands ranging from the Hull Corporation Electricity Department to Swissaire Refrigerators of Hessle Road. Additional attractions included music by the band and pipers of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, fashion parades and a display showcasing a fully-electric house.

However, the star of the show was a robot called George. “Come and see the great super electro-mechanical man,” said the official programme. “He moves and talks – is almost human. The world’s great electrical wonder, a moving, walking man. A man without soul. Come and see how he will help you to solve the problems of the future. First time in Hull.”

George was the handiwork of Captain William Henry Richards, a journalist, war correspondent and an amateur engineer. He is credited with building Britain’s first mechanical man in 1928. His invention called Eric performed the opening ceremony of the Society of Model Engineers’ annual exhibition that year. Weighing just over 45 kilograms, Eric was made of aluminium and stood in a box which housed a 12-volt electric motor. Inside Eric’s armour-plated chest was another motor with 11 electromagnets and wiring to different parts of his body. Eric could take a bow, look right and left, sit down and deliver a short recorded speech.

Naturally, he caused a sensation and Richards took Eric on promotional tours in both America and the UK before deciding to concentrate on developing a second robot who would become known as George. Boasting a more rounded physique, he made his debut at a Parisian theatre and subsequently toured Europe and the UK appearing in department stores and trade exhibitions such as the one in Hull.

Standing on his own two feet rather than in a box, George moved in the same way as his predecessor and was said to be able to answer a number of pre-prepared questions. Richards used primitive voice-activated technology to trigger the robot’s movements.  He would speak into a microphone built into its body which then transmitted electrical currents to a series of moving mechanical parts. Asked what it looked like inside, he said: “Most disappointing, nothing but gears and cranks. Just like a watch on a large scale.”

Even so, the official Hull exhibition programme promoted George as a technological wonder. “There is no doubt Britain’s great super-electro-mechanical man will arouse keen interest in Hull. What this extraordinary invention means to the human race only time can tell,” it said. As it turned out, George barely survived the Second World War after being badly damaged when a Surrey garage where he was stored suffered a direct hit during a bombing raid.

It’s not clear what happened to the robot when his inventor died in 1948 but four years later George’s story took an unexpected twist when he started to appear in publicity photographs for the actress Diana Dors and her then husband Denis Hamilton. At the time, Hamilton claimed he had built the robot – which he called Robert – from spare parts he had found in the basement of their new home.

However, the robot was clearly George and the publicity shots led to a bitter row between Hamilton and members of the Richards family after which George was never seen in public again.

Angus Young