Belinda May: Leeds puppet maker and performer on Workhouse Stories with Thackray Museum of Medicine

It is fitting that her parents would turn up in her puppetry because it is with Alan and Norma Horbury’s tools and techniques that she keeps up her family’s creative traditions.

Belinda, of Bramley in Leeds, began woodcarving her characters in 2021 after training with Bernd Ogrodnik through his World of Puppets online courses. Since then she created her puppet play Workhouse Stories, based on her research of people who lived in Leeds Union Workhouse in 1881. After showing at the Kirkstall Art Trail in July 2023, she performed at Beverley Puppet Festival in July last year and is due to appear at The Workhouse museum in Nottinghamshire this year.

Her creativity and crafting abilities go back to childhood, when she learned from the wartime skills acquired by her parents.

Norma created shows for children and ran the Heydays choir at what was West Yorkshire Playhouse, giving elderly people the chance to express themselves.

Belinda says: “She had a very strong performance element but she also had the skills that everybody had, sewing and textile skills. I was using a sewing machine from the age of seven, doing bits of embroidery and bits of knitting and stuff like that. And my dad, although he was a white collar worker, he loved woodcarving and making things out of wood. He built the kitchen, that kind of thing. So was a practical man but also a creative man. And I think because of the times it wouldn't ever have occurred to him to teach me how to do the woodworking, because that's not something girls did, and that's not the world he grew up in. But both of them were really inspirational to my work.”

For the first decade or so of adult life, Belinda worked in administrative roles. But in 1996, aged 31, she moved down to London to study fine art at Goldsmiths after attending what was Leeds College of Art and Design for a foundation course.

"I just thought, I don't want to waste my life at a desk and miss out on making things,” she says.

After her degree she got jobs as an exhibition technician and similar roles, working with the likes of the Architectural Association, London College of Fashion and London College of Communication.

She says: “I picked up quite a lot of different techniques doing that job because a lot of it's problem-solving, trying to work out how to hang something or show it to its best or or how to do things within budget.

“When you haven't got much money to spend on stuff you have to become really resourceful and I think that's the element I enjoyed the most, is trying to make something out of fairly simple materials that you know will do the job.”

Meanwhile, she also developed her performing abilities, too, becoming involved with burlesque theatre at the age of 47.

Belinda’s mother had vascular dementia and her father had Alzheimer’s disease, and sadly they died in 2017 and 2018 respectively.

However, in 2014 she had moved back to Leeds to be with them, although they went to live in a care home.

"I inherited all their stuff and materials. Wool and wood and woodcarving tools and stuff like that,” says Belinda. “The reason I'm telling you all this is because I am that composite of these two people who had what used to be masculine and feminine craft skills, and I have the benefit of being able to put these together to make characters and to build stories, which is what I think my main aim is – when I make something, it has to have a purpose. So I enjoy making puppets because it brings together the storytelling drive with the making drive, which is very strong, and you can use all these different techniques that I've picked up over the years. As I say, some of them were inherited, some of them I've learned, and you just sort of put them together to make stories.”

Belinda has also long been fascinated by family and social history, so was able to combine her research about the workhouse in Leeds – at the site of what is now the Thackray Museum of Medicine – and puppetry to create her show.

"If it was people today, it would hurt too much. It would be too upsetting,” says Belinda. “But if I can consume it and research it as a person who has this obsessive side and I can make it, I can visualise it, and I can create it in a world that, although it's set in the 1880s, it gives you things to think about today.”

Belinda currently has about 10 characters. She has made marionette puppets on strings but those used in the workhouse shows are all rod and glove puppets, including Louisa – someone “we’d call a bag lady” now – and the nasty Matron of Tadcaster. “She's very much a glove puppet in the Punch and Judy style of things,” says Belinda. There is also Lulu, a “lizard cabaret character”.

The foundation of all these creations are what she has inherited from her family, whether that be the set square and the mini anvil bearing her grandfather Alan’s initials, her mother’s sewing techniques and her father’s woodcarving tools.

Belinda says: "When I started art school and did my foundation in Leeds, I had a tool kit list, and I passed it to my dad and he gave me a box full of stuff. That just swirled my heart, because it said, ‘You're accepting me for who I am’ and that meant a lot.”