Black And Brown And Coastal Barges

 

Black Swan Passage in Halifax, so named because it was a passage down by the side of the old Black Swan Inn on Silver Street (approximately where Yates's Wine Lodge is today). This black and white photograph does it justice. For the sake of balance, however, I need to take a white and black photograph of the White Swan Hotel.

Artificial Intelligence can do wonderful things these days. Give it an old black and white photograph, press a button and suddenly it has all the colours of a rainbow. There again, give it one of your of photos of Halifax back in the 1960s and it suddenly has ... fifty shades of mucky brown.

In the mid 1960s, my brother bought an old Humber Keel barge called "Brookfoot" and converted it into a houseboat and studio. After doing the conversion work in Brighouse Canal Basin he then sailed it to the continent and around the canals and waterways of Europe. This photo is from the first time we saw the barge, before the conversion work started.

You could easily mistake it for a coastal view - coastal hills giving way to a grey, coastal sea. There's even a schooner sailing off to distant lands. The sea, however, is a sea of gorse and heather, the schooner is the stone built Stoodley Pike monument on the hills above Todmorden. It's coastal Calderdale.

Thornton And Snowden; Rooftop And Desktop

 

This picture of Thornton Square in Brighouse is from a vintage postcard published in the early 1920s. It had only been called Thornton Square for a few years when the postcard view was taken. It was named after Robert Thornton (1836-1918), who gifted the town a clock, a fire engine, and a place in the record books for being the oldest Mayor in England at the age of 78.

Wanting a suitable illustration for the 1st of May, I turned to my collection of political vintage postcard and find a fine portrait of Philip Snowden MP. Snowden was as full of contradictions as a chocolate teapot - converted to socialism after researching a speech he was due to make on the evils of socialism, eventually becoming Labour's first Chancellor of the Exchequer and then being expelled from the Labour Party for his support of the National Government in 1931. 

I seem to remember taking this photograph from somewhere up Beacon Hill Road in Halifax in the early 1970s. The rooftops created a kind of geometric pattern of the type you would get in school text books when you were required to calculate the angles. The TV aerials added a Mondrianesque quality. Stone and steel, slate and chimney pots: a Halifax skyline.

I'm a desktop kind of chap. I don't hold with these new-fangled laptops or the tablets you can settle down in an easy chair with. Give me a good, old-fashioned wooden desk any day of the week, the kind you can pile real books on, not to mention a bang-on-the-keys typewriter as well. Here's my desk from 57 years ago: I can remember it as if it was only yesterday.

Towering Love And Lifeboats In A Pond

 

As far as I know, this is a family member; it was part of a collection of family photographs handed down to me by my Auntie Annie. That means she is probably a Burnett - and she has that kind of broad, Yorkshire, slightly eccentric look that is common to our family. The photo carried the caption "To my dear niece with best love," which suggests that it is probably Ruth-Annie Burnett (1874-1931) of Little Horton, Bradford.

A trip into Sheffield last night reminded me how much the city has changed since I lived there 40 years ago. This photo of mine from the early 1980s is an even starker reminder. This was Ponds Forge when it was still forging steel rather than creating swimming and diving champions.

A view of a Halifax hillside sandwiched between two cooling towers. The two towers were affectionately known to the locals as "Salt" and "Pepper," and together they created a kind of structural condiment set in what is now Sainsbury's car park. They were eventually demolished in 1974, although it took two attempts before they were finally flattened.

The three subjects of this 1950s "Found Photo" look like they might have been hired from Central Casting. You half expect Terry Thomas to appear with a tennis racket or Margaret Rutherford to waddle on in a fur stole. I'm not sure where The Lifeboat Inn is (I'm hoping someone might tell me), but it is now my ambition to go there.