Happy, Sunny Days

 

What a difference a century makes. Warm weather at the end of June 1926 meant that kids at Holy Trinity School in Halifax had their lessons outdoors, “under ideal conditions.” A hundred years later, similar warm weather brings a very different response. Before we start bemoaning the delicate snowflakes of the modern era, it should be pointed out that June 1926 temperatures were a good 10°C lower than this month’s, and we have also learned a lot more about the dangers of too much sun.

A Grainy Memory

 

It was the 1980s. It was somewhere in the Lake District, I think. It wasn't raining - rare for the Lake District - and the light of day was beginning to merge into the shadows of a summer evening. It's nothing more than a memory: a grainy, black-and-white memory.

Leave The Faces Well Alone

 

All lovers of old photos are faced with endless decisions about artificial intelligence: when to use it, how much to use it, and whether to use it al all. Don't ask me for answers - you have to make up your own mind. I do have one rule myself: I tell whichever AI bot I'm using to "leave the faces alone". Otherwise, you not only get significant facial changes, but also faces that look as though the were cast just yesterday. AI has coloured this old photo of my mother, but left her face alone!

Another Wall

Another photograph of another Yorkshire stone wall. This one is far more recent, however. It is also in a very different part of Yorkshire. This was taken in the north of the county, where fields contain flocks of sheep, not factories.

In Halifax

I'm pretty certain that this photograph - taken well over 50 years ago - was taken somewhere in Halifax. It has all the necessary ingredients: an overgrown, stone-cobbled lane rising up a steep hillside to meet a soot-blackened wall of monumental proportions. It's probably so obviously Halifax that, at no time over the last half century, have I ever got around to reminding myself exactly where I was on that day. Let's just say I was in Halifax.

A 1916 Girl

 

On the back of this sepia portrait of an unknown girl is a studio stamp that states: "W Buckley, Portrait Specialist, 28 August 1916, Regent Square, Blackpool." There is something quite beautiful about the portrait - William Rawlinson Buckley was a celebrated Blackpool photographer - and something that is so resonant of the time. This, after all, is 1916: the girl may have been employed in one of the numerous munitions factories, and the men in her life will have been in the trenches.

A Heated Basin

We are living through record heatwaves here in the UK at the moment, experiencing temperatures that make you want to find a cool stretch of water and take the plunge. I took today's photograph in Brighouse Canal Basin well over half a century ago, when it was surrounded by gasworks and endless, rundown factories. You would have been risking your life by going for a swim in the canal back in those days, and even now you'd be better advised to put up with the heat rather than risk taking to the water.

A 1907 Poke

 

A "Facebook Poke" is defined as "a digital nudge or virtual greeting used to get a friend's attention." The equivalent 120 years ago was a postcard - sent, as it happens, to my great-uncle Fowler Beanland - with the slightly ambiguous message, "What Ho." The advantage of the 1907 poke is that we can compare Wigton Church then and now, and wonder what happened to all the carts!

The Swinging Sixties

The summers of my youth, when the most avant-garde experience might have been listening to a trad-jazz combo in the park. And if the sun was shining, they might even hang their jackets up and perform in their shirt sleeves. Ah, the swinging sixties.

 

Albert

It's Fathers' day here in the UK, so today's picture is in honour of my father. Taken over 90 years ago, the photograph shows a man who is both a stranger and also familiar - an older man I knew well, dressed in a younger man's clothes. I look at him and see some of my brother and bits of my son. I remember him, and I hope I see bits of myself

Bridge Art

 

There should be a special category of art for the work displayed on the metal panels that line endless railway bridges and other lumps of transport infrastructure in this country. Some of it is organised, some of it is feral, and much of it is boring and unimaginative - but some of it would earn a place in any posh gallery. My example comes from the railway bridge next to Brighouse Station and was produced, it seems, by students at Calderdale College. Well done, them.