Half-Formed Memories And Photographs

 

Found In A Selfie

 

National Indecision

 

Questions - Flower Boxes

 

Transitions

 

An Inconsequential Beard

 

More Views - Friday The 13th

 

The Music Lovers' Ciggy

 

Solid Feelings

 

Paper Portals

 

The Way We Were - Aunty Annie

 

A Good Night Divided

 

Silo Tagging

 

This is unmistakably Brighouse: the giant Sugden Flour silos are as an effective geotag as any map reference. These two concrete monoliths appear almost timeless, but when I took this photo in 1970, one was just seven years old and the other only a few years older. Many of those buildings and chimneys have now gone, of course, but the silos - repurposed as a massive climbing frame - remain.

Cyborgraphy

 

Today’s scene started life as an overcrowded and somewhat over-coloured back street off Thornton Road in Bradford. Post-messing, I managed to get rid of the cars and tone it down a bit. Artificial intelligence is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

17 August 2024 : Snap

 

Those ever-present companies of seaside photographers - going by names such as Seaside Snaps and the like - deserve recognition for their role in documenting twentieth-century life. My two examples document life in Bridlington in 1950: that’s my father and uncle on the left and that’s me on the right!

16 August 2024 : North Bridge Messing

This is the last of the "taken whilst waiting for my wife who was at the dentist" sequence which is probably a good thing as I was getting a bit silly by this point. The photo was taken from North Bridge, Halifax looking towards Dean Clough. The messing about was done on the seat opposite the dentists whilst waiting for my wife to come out.

15 August 2024 : Beacons

 

They used to hang bodies up there, or light beacons to warn of invading Spanish armadas or French onion sellers. They had fancy beacons to shine down on the folk of Halifax below. What they should have had, however, was a good old cast iron gas light, that would have been a beacon befitting Halifax and its eponymous hill.

14 August 2024 : Green

100 years ago you would have had difficulty seeing the hills that surround Halifax because of the smoke and the smog. 50 years ago you would have seen them but they would have been bare and battle-scarred, testament to what industry can do to land. Now they are green with stone-coloured highlights. You can say what you want, but that's progress.

13 August 2024 : Patterns

 

The second of the series of photos taken while waiting for my wife to emerge from the dentist's. These are the steps leading up to Broad Street Plaza in Halifax - a delightfully curve-less concrete and steel prospect that faces off against the classical elegance of Halifax's Victorian Town Hall on the other side of the street.

Bus Station Dynasties

 

History is sometimes measured in dynasties - the Tudors or Stuarts, the Tangs or the Yans - but for most folk a more prosaic way of marking the passage of time is called for. Having grown up in Halifax and having lived in these parts for large periods of my life, for me it’s bus stations. My youth was framed by the concrete aisles of Crossfields Bus Station: it’s there I dawdled with school bag over my shoulder, it was there I ran to catch the last bus in my late teenage years. Then there was the first version of Wade Street which somehow never felt complete, always seemed like an excuse for a bus station rather than the real thing. Today marks the official opening of the new Wade Street bus station - our solar panelled, cycle-parked, bee-friendly bus station. If you look at it from the right angle, Beacon Hill becomes its roof and that’s what a Halifax Bus Station should be like. So welcome to this new dynasty, may its buses run safely for many a year to come.

Not Seeing The Moores For The Trees

This family photograph from the 1930s perfectly captures a marriage of style and elegance. It also captures a marriage between two people, but I am a little uncertain as to who they are. The one person I can identify is the man seated second from the left, the man with a hairstyle of sculptured grandeur, and he is my Uncle Harry (Harry Moore 1903-1982). He did have a brother, Eddy, who married Minnie Noble in Bradford in August 1933, so there is a reasonable chance that is who the bride and groom are. In the hope of finding more information about this relatively remote branch of the family tree I turned to an on-line genealogy site. I quickly found the elusive Eddy Moore and his bride and for further information I was directed to a public family tree of the Moore family. To my surprise this identified generations of potential relatives I never knew I had: the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of my Uncle Harry and his wife, Annie.

This, however, was where the potential problems started. Aunty Annie and Uncle Harry never had any children, especially not in London when they were just teenagers and long before they had met. In constructing this elaborate family tree - which contained a host of photographs of real members of my family - a simple mix-up with a fairly common set of names had falsely grafted our two families together. What I should really do is to write to the person concerned and point out the error of their ways. I won't, however. Let them share our branch of the family - there are enough eccentric characters in there to go around. And let Aunty Annie and Uncle Harry have their descendants erect trees in their memory. They deserve it.

Sandstone Palaces

 

Sometimes the lines are better blurred. Usually the signs are better blurred. We can forget the message, be it about fake tans or coffee cups, and concentrate on this stone monument to the gods of commerce, a sandstone palace fit for a Coffee King.

After The Rain

 

I recently acquired a lovely old 1904 album of photographs taken in and around the Scottish village of Brig o' Turk. Despite the age of the photos, you are not drawn into the usual "then and now" comparisons: as far as I can tell, little has changed. It is the captions that provide the time stamp - crafted in a font no digital download ever provided.

Daffodil On The Water

When I was young, back in the early 1950s, our family’s annual seaside holiday would alternate between Bridlington on the east coast and New Brighton on the west. On those years we headed west, our journey would involve a train to Liverpool and then a ferry across the Mersey to our seaside destination. Sorting through some old family papers I found this postcard of one of the Mersey ferries from that era, a postcard I probably bought on one of those journeys.

The ferry being “on the water”, it becomes a suitable contribution to this month’s Sepia Saturday theme – “On The Water”. Other Sepia Saturday posts can be found by following the link on the Sepia Saturday blog.

SEPIA SATURDAY

EAST : Hunmanby - Filey - Hornsea

 

Special Delivery

 

For anyone devoted to wandering down the side streets of inconsequence, old picture postcards are an ideal mode of transport. You can spend many a happy hour trying to work out where the old photographs were taken from – where, for example, in Elland was this view taken from 110 years ago – and you can drop in on a century-old WhatsApp conversation. And, if you want even more, you can marvel at a time when postcards appear to have been delivered the day before they were written!

The Stealthy Hebble

The Hebble Brook stealths its way through Halifax, hidden where possible, breaking to the surface only occasionally to spit-wash the shadows of industry gone by.

Soul Ownership

I’ve never been convinced by the accusation that when you take someone’s photograph, you are stealing their soul; just because you possess a photo of someone doesn’t mean you can lay claim to their soul. Possessing the negative is a different thing entirely. Thanks to a recent purchase of an original 1940s negative on eBay, I can now announce that I possess the souls of not only President Roosevelt, but the actress Katherine Hepburn as well!

Listed Time

A photograph from 1990 of the rather grand ornamental cast-iron clock tower at Greenock Customs House Quay at the mouth of the River Clyde. It's seen better days, but it's listed and about to be restored. And that's half the year gone: time seems to go so fast, and I've seen better days. I'm not listed.

The Law Of Decreasing Recognition

With a look pitched somewhere between haughty and flirtatious, this young woman posed before the camera of the Bingley photographer George Tillett more than a century ago. The resulting photograph will have been passed down family generations, subject to the sad laws of decreasing recognition, until it was sold off in a job lot of old photos at some jumble sale. Rescued and restored she becomes Miss Saturday the 29th June 2024.

Memory Lane

Yesterday I went in search of the day before. In some ways it was unchanged: the cobbles, the chimneys, the stone-thick mill walls. In other ways there have been changes: fine craft replacing hard graft, variety replacing dull monotony. The Shears Inn remains – historic and magnificent, and the beer is so much better than it was 40 years ago.

Shear Luck

 

I took this photograph looking down Boys Lane in Halifax towards the historic Shears Inn some forty years ago. It would be interesting to know how much has changed in this part of the town over those four decades. As luck would have it I will be revisiting the Inn later today, so I will be able to report back. The sacrifices I have to make in the interests of fair reporting!

Scanning Nature

 

I am always being told that I should get out more and that it is unhealthy staying in my little room scanning old images. So today I went out and as I walked the dog down the road I picked a few random wild flowers. I quickly returned to the safety of my little room and scanned them.

Black Friar

For a time, during the late 1970s, I had a job leading parties of foreign visitors on tours of historic London pubs. One of my favourite stopping off points was the magnificent Art Nouveau Black Friar pub on Queen Victoria Street, which, back then, had only recently been saved from the threat of demolition. As jobs go, leading educational pub crawls was about as good as it gets.

Stone

 

Halifax does stone well. The railway viaduct could be part of a Roman amphitheatre, and the mill could be the business end of a Gothic cathedral. The wall could be an early stone version of Tetris, and the chimney part of a Gormley sculpture. And there, in the background, is the source of it all - one of the great stone hills of Yorkshire.