From Helios to Pan

Hannah born in 1865 was the youngest child of a large, prosperous Liberal family; her father was a stone and coal merchant who owned the Airedale Steam Tug Company and was an acknowledged expert on canal legislation and regulation. He became a Leeds Councillor in 1877, remaining a member until 1892. Her mother died when Hannah was only eight. As one of two daughters and unmarried, Hannah took on housekeeping duties for her father. As a young woman, she became interested in her father's politics and was secretary of the Leeds branch of the Women's Liberal Association. A progressive organisation that advocated a woman's right to vote and combatted outdated views about the role of women in the home, business and politics. Aspects of society Hannah tested throughout her life. Hannah came to formal art education later than her peers.

Meanwhile, the younger Mabel Inez, born in 1872, came from an equally prosperous family of farming stock. Her father, Edward Laws, farmed Thorpe Park near Clacton in Essex in the 1870s. Later the family moved to Suffolk, Hammersmith and Dorset, living off private means. Inez took up modelling, probably in clay, from an early age moving to Leeds by 1891.

The two women met at Leeds School of Art in the late 1880s, and their relationship lasted until Hannah died in 1939. They both began to gain awards for their work at the school, book prizes and National medals. Hannah became a gold medallist in 1902, and Inez's highest award was a bronze. The boundary between student and teacher was an opaque one. Both Hannah and Inez taught at the school in the late 1890s and early 1900s; meanwhile, they continued to study and take exams. A similar trajectory to their acknowledged teacher Edward Caldwell Spruce. In 1899 they took a break from teaching to study in Paris, where they exhibited.

From the very beginning, the two women collaborated. Their most prominent piece was the 1894 Helios and the Four Winds sculpture for the Sun Insurance Building at 15 Park Row, Leeds; demolished in 1997. Unfortunately, no photographs appear to have survived of the piece. The sculpture consisted of two semi-circular panels, ten feet long and four high. One panel represented Helios, the sun god driving his chariot across the heavens. The other panel depicted the north and east winds as two nude male figures, and two nude female figures represented the south and west winds. The Sun Buildings were designed by George Corson in 1879 as the Headland Building originally the premises of bespoke tailor Headland and Sons, the building was extended and altered by  architects Perkin and Bulmer and later Chorley, Gribbon and Foggit.

From about 1894 until the 1920s, they ran a formal business as Hunt and Laws, Sculptors, Artists and Designers, with premises in Caledonian and later Seminary Street. In 1927 they gave up their artwork and moved to Norfolk, to Thwaite Green Farm near Diss and set up as smallholders. They kept fifty or so goats and were beekeepers.

We can glean something of their personality and nature from an incident at the farm in 1933. Local troublemakers had been harassing the ladies; they were considered elderly at the time; Hannah was 68. On one April night, two men broke into the smallholding, causing damage to the goat shed and breaking windows and entering the farmhouse. Inez recognised the troublemakers as the Bartrum brothers brandished a stick and tried to warn the men off. She was no match for them and was disarmed and injured. After struggling with one of her assailants, Inez backed away, and the two women barricaded themselves in their house. The thugs continued to cause pandemonium, and the women retreated upstairs, grabbing a bugle which they took turns to blow and attract the attention of neighbours, at which point the brothers skulked off. At the subsequent trial, the men were found guilty but were spared a custodial sentence by the intervention of Hannah and Inez, who saved the brothers from prison. The men were bound over for two years and forced to pay costs. 

Hannah died on 12 March 1939 at Thwaite Green but was buried with her parents in Woodhouse Cemetery in Leeds. Inez continued at the farm as a smallholder with her goats and bees until she died on 3 August 1950 and buried at nearby Fersfield in Norfolk. They had lived and worked together for nearly 40 years.