Sepia Saturday : My Longtown Sweethearts

Two Sepia Saturday pictures for the price of one today. Both come from the collection of my very late Uncle Fowler (he died over fifty years ago) and date back to the time he spent in Longtown, Cumbria in the early years of the twentieth century. Uncle F (actually he was my mothers' Uncle, but he was always known as Uncle Fowler by everyone in the family) was a textile mechanic by trade and for a time he moved away from his native West Yorkshire to live and work near the Scottish borders. He was the person responsible for the bulk of my vintage postcard collection - although I have added to it - but he also passed on a number of photographs which were printed - as was the fashion at the time - with "postcard" backs. The two photographs show girls posing with bicycles, indeed, the two poses are so similar for a time I thought they might be the same girl.

There are scribbled notes on the back of both photos. On the first (the studio shot) is written "Miss M Spiers, Chamber Maid, (see the other)". On the second (the outdoor shot) is written "Miss E Pearson, Cook at Mr James Grangham, Longtown". So here we have it : Fowler, at the time just over 30 years old, single and living away from home, with pictures of two charming young ladies. He never married, so his Longtown love - whether Miss E or Miss M - must have been left behind in Cumbria when he returned to West Yorkshire, But which one was it? There is normally an unsolved mystery in these Sepia Saturday posts of mine : but not in this case. On the reverse of the photograph of the outdoor Miss E, in the spidery hand of an old man, is written "She was my Longtown Sweetheart". I like to think of Uncle Fowler, as an old man living in Keighley, thumbing through his photograph collection and finally making his decision.

Let me know if you have a Sepia Saturday post and I will add you to the following list.

WILLOW MANOR
POETIKAT'S INVISIBLE KEEPSAKES
SQUARE SUNSHINE
TONY ZIMNOCH
LARRY'S PHOTO A DAY
AT HOME WITH KEITH
MY FIVE MEN
LETTUCE-EATING
THE WEATHER IN THE STREETS
MOUSE MEDICINE
MERI'S MUSINGS
JUNK THIEF
STEPHANIE SAYS

Theme Thursday : Polka Dots And Moonbeams

Do you remember the first record you really knew. Not necessarily the first record you remembered (I half remember a pile of dusty 78s my parents owned) nor the first record you bought (that had to wait until I had money). But the first record I really knew - knew so well that all the tracks were engraved into my subconscious like grooves in polymer - was one of my brothers' LPs. It was called Buddy Greco at Mr Kelly's and it was a recording of a live performance by the great lounge and jazz singer at Mr Kelly's Club in Chicago. After all these years I could still probably sing all the words of all the songs from the moment when Greco says "Welcome To Mr Kelly's" right through to the last verse of the last song ("Give Me The Simple Life", I seem to recall). It is part of my musical heritage and that means track four of side one (younger readers please note, records used to have sides) is part of my lyrical bedrock. Track 4 on side 1 was Jimmy Van Heusen's song, "Polka Dots And Moonbeams".

It's an odd little song, not your usual love, dove, moon, June affair. It conjures up all sorts of odd images. A country dance for some strange reason is being held in a garden! The singers' beloved is described as "a pug-nosed dream" (the song was written in 1940 in the days before nose-jobs existed). But it is a charming simple song which has the power to transport me back 50 years. As soon as I saw the theme for this Thursday I was mentally playing the song in my mind, listening to Buddy Greco's smooth tones. The lyrics are as follows - if you know the tune you can sing along.

POLKA DOTS AND MOONBEAMS (Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke)

A country dance was being held in a garden
I felt a bump and heard an "Oh, beg your pardon"
Suddenly I saw polka dots and moonbeams
All around a pug-nosed dream


The music started and was I the perplexed one
I held my breath and said "May I have the next one?"
In my frightened arms, polka dots and moonbeams
Sparkled on a pug-nosed dream


There were questions in the eyes of other dancers
As we floated over the floor
There were questions but my heart knew all the answers
And perhaps a few things more


Now in a cottage built of lilacs and laughter
I know the meaning of the words "Ever after"
And I'll always see polka dots and moonbeams
When I kiss the pug-nosed dream.

I tried to find a YouTube video of Greco singing the song but I couldn't. There were several YouTube recordings of the song but none of them came within a mile of Greco's way with the words. So instead, I will leave you with a video of another Greco song, one which featured on that same Mr Kelly's LP. It is perhaps his most famous recording and it is "The Lady Is A Tramp". The video is of historical importance as it is a Scopitone movie (Scopitone was a very early form of video juke box which made use of 16mm film) and therefore represents an early antecedent of modern day music videos.

See how other Bloggers faced up to the Theme Thursday Polka Dot challenge by visiting the Theme Thursday site.

Postcard of the Week : Chateau d'Esches

If there is one thing that I love it is serendipity. Faced with a file box full of vintage postcards I plunge my hand in and pull one out at random. It is a postcard which was used in 1905 and sent to a certain Wallis Cross who lived on St Leonard's Street in London. It shows a picture of a chateau in the village of Esches which is twenty or thirty miles north of Paris. The message is limited to the picture side of the card and it notes that this is the house where the writers' sister is staying in the country. The writer - as far as I can make out Millie - stayed there for her Christmas holidays and an "x" on the card marks her bedroom.

If there is another thing that I love it is the internet. You can go online and search for the chateau. You can download photographs of it as it looks now, 105 years on from the postcard. You can walk down the village street using Google Street View. You can read detailed descriptions of life on St Leonard's Street, Victoria, South West London in the notebooks of the famous social investigator and philanthropist, Charles Booth. You can even track down the family history of Wallis Cross using on-line genealogical databases.

Blend serendipity and the internet and you have as good a reason as you ever could require for not going out on a snowy, cold, January day.

Sing Me A Song I'm The Gadget Man

I have always been a bit of a gadget man. I can read of an electronic gadget about to be launched and the salivation process starts. I will research it, track it down, look at it, think about it, and then, eventually - as sure as pods are i-pods - I will buy it. I had a Psion when Psions were red-hot. I had a Palm when most people thought they were a kind of topical tree. My first digital camera was so rare that there was only one shop in England selling them. I have a collection of decommissioned MP3 players which, if laid end to end, would be almost as long as the groove on an old 78 rpm record. (Because I am the kind of person who will no doubt get distracted on my way to my own funeral and because Wikipedia did not seem to know what the total length of the groove of a 78 rpm record would be, I have just calculated and it works out, on average, at a needle short of 500 feet!).

I must confess I have been rather late in the day at jumping on the i-touch bandwagon. Like all good gadget people, I tend to get upset if I am not amongst the first wave to acquire a particular gadget. I think of reasons why I did not launch the bandwagon and stick to my principles with a concrete-like rigidity. When my Spanish relatives Jamie and Bev got i-touches a couple of years ago, I wrote them off as nothing more than toys (the i-touches, not J and B I hasten to add). When my Chess Buddy Martin got one I quickly concluded that it was the kind of thing a bishop-sliding, shoot-em-up chess player would own. When The Lad got one for his birthday I have to confess that I had a little prod and poke under the guise of "setting it up". By the time my Cruise Buddy Harry got one  and my Blog Buddy John told me about his I had reached a state of nervous collapse. With all the pent-up eagerness of a reformed teetotaler crossing the threshold of the Horse and Jockey for the first time, I begged the GLW to intercede with Santa Claus and see if one could be acquired for Christmas.

Santa was - as ever - kind. He pretended never to have heard my denunciation of the shiny-backed, over-priced toy calculator. He turned a snow filled ear to my oft-proclaimed declaration never to give house-room to anything made by Apple-Mac. And he delivered a wonderful, new, clever, imaginative, well-designed ipod-touch on Christmas morning. And I have to confess that I am very impressed with it. When a new gadget is actually acquired I tend to lose interest in it after a few days, but my enthusiasm for the i-touch and its family of little apps goes from strength to strength. I have apps which allow me to access newspapers throughout the world, apps that tell me what is worth watching on television and apps that tell me where to find a decent pint of real ale.

The only two shortcomings I have discovered so far are that it loses its potency when it is out of wi-fi range and it prevents me from being able to hear my mobile phone ring because I am listening to my record collection all the time. Now, of course, both these problems would disappear if I were to upgrade to an i-phone. A shiny new, technologically advanced, sleek and sumptuous i-phone. Sorry, I will have to end the post now - I need to look something up on Google.

Sepia Saturday : Gladys and A Royal Enfield

My first sepia offering of 2010 is another photograph of my mother, Gladys. This picture must have been taken in the 1930s when my mother and father would regularly tour England on their motorcycle. Although the photograph shows my mother at the controls of the bike, she was exclusively a pillion rider : my father - who I assume took the photograph - was the one in charge of the controls. I have a feeling that the photograph was taken in the West Country - in Devon or Cornwall - and the scene in the background would seem to fit in with this. It is a happy picture, a picture infused with adventure and excitement. It is a nice picture to start 2010 with.

Here is a list of those people participating in Sepia Saturday this week. If you would like to be added to the list, just let me know and I will add a link to your blog.

AT HOME WITH KEITH

MY FIVE MEN

LARRY'S PHOTO A DAY

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Strange Meeting

It was a strange meeting, but not of the Wilfred Owen variety. We didn't escape "down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped through granites which titanic wars had groined". But we did both step through that cobbled passage-way out of the grey-flaked midday cold and into the artificial cheer of a sixteenth century coaching inn. But no enemies were we : no battle killed corpses meeting at the gates of hell. Still, it was a strange meeting. Here was someone I knew fairly well. I had traveled with him to Paris and Italy, sat next to him as we watched Bob Dylan and The Unthanks, shared his memories of his father : and yet we had never met in our lives. We blogged. Tony, like all my other on-line friends was only ever a blog-roll away: but unlike most, in real terms, in the real world, in a non-virtual sense, in the cold light of the realistic day he lived just up the valley from me. And so, some weeks ago we decided to meet and share a pint or two at Christmas. This was the strange meeting.

There was something slightly unreal about it. It was almost like suddenly meeting one of the characters from a favourite book. You have your own idea what Jane Eyre would have sounded like or Mr Micawber would have walked like : how strange it would be to walk into a pub and come face to face with them. Or, in my blog-encrusted world, how strange to walk into the Union Cross Inn and see Poetikat pulling pints, Simpson and Lynch propping up the bar and having an argument in the corner, Betsy and Willow sharing afternoon tea and Abe Lincoln with his lens pressed up to the mullioned window looking for a robin to photograph. And here I was sat enjoying a pint with Tony as we swapped stories and shared our enthusiasm for the art of blogging. And he is just the delightful chap I expected him to be. Just as witty, just as erudite - a true personification of his blog.

And I am sure that every one of my friends out there is the personification of their blogs. They will be interesting. amusing and talented people - because their blogs are interesting, amusing and brimming with talent. That is why I read them

It is New Years' Eve. In a few hours it will be 2010. It is traditionally a time of hopes, wishes and resolutions. I will limit myself to just one hope. It is that at some point during the coming year I can meet up with other blogging friends : whether it be in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, France .... or wherever. To you all, whichever part of the world you live in, a very happy and peaceful new year.

We Apologise For The Disruption To Our Services

The Lad is back. He had been skiing in France and got stuck for a time when the ports of Calais and Dover were closed by the snow and cold. We eventually collected him from Sheffield on Sunday morning and just made it back home before the really heavy snow set in. The Lad brought a case of beer back with him and decided to leave it out in the garden last night so the snow could act as a natural cooler. This morning there were a suspicious set of paw prints converging on the beer stash, all I can assume is that Amy must have had some of her friends around for a little party.

With the Lad home, the Christmas tree still to put up, presents to wrap, and parties to attend I am unlikely to be able to post to the blog too often over the next week or ten days. Equally visits to my favourite blogs will be less frequent than normal. As hundreds of announcers are saying over loudspeakers at railways stations, bus stations and airports throughout Europe at the moment, "we apologise for the disruption to our services". Just in case I don't get chance to say this before Christmas, I would like to wish all my friends the very warmest seasonal greetings.

Sepia Saturday : Professor Green And A Host Of Admiring Children

I am posting my Sepia Saturday contribution a little early again this week so it acts as a reminder to anyone else who wants to join in. As usual, at the end of the post there is a list of the other Sepia Saturday contributions - if you want your post adding to the list just add a comment and I will update the list throughout the weekend. Before I launch into my sepia post this week, perhaps I should add a few words about the sepia process itself. The term "sepia" was given to a brown pigment used by artists which was derived from the ink sack of the Common European Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis). When, in the late nineteenth century, a chemical process was developed which converted any remaining metallic silver in photographic prints, to a sulphide - which is much more resistant to breakdown over time and which produced a brown-grey tone - it was called sepia toning. Sepia prints are more resistant to fading and chemical decomposition which is why most of the early prints we can still see are sepia toned ones.

My Sepia Saturday image this week was taken by my Uncle Frank back in the 1930s. It shows a crowd gathered around the tent of a Punch and Judy entertainer on Blackpool sands. The brightly decorated puppeteers' tent proclaims "Established 1880, Prof J Green, Blackpool's Old Original Punch and Judy Entertainer". An article by Robert Leach entitled "Punch and Judy and Oral Tradition" published in the journal "Folklore" (Vol 94:i,1983) tells the story of Professor Green (Punch and Judy puppeteers are traditionally known as Professors). In the early summer of 1880, Jack Green set out to walk from his home in Manchester to Blackpool (some 40 miles in distance) pushing a handcart containing his Punch and Judy booth and puppets. He spent the summer entertaining visitors at the popular seaside resort and settled in the town where he acquired a house and, with his wife, brought up nineteen children. Most of the children followed their father into the Punch and Judy business and, at the time the photograph was taken, there were as many as nine separate Punch and Judy shows being staged by his children at points along Blackpool sands. A third generation of Greens went into the same business and the last Prof Green (a grandson of the original) retired as recently as the 1980s.

One of the most glorious thing about these old sepia prints is the richness of their content. The image above is taken from a scan of a small 3 inch by 2 inch print which was taken at random from one of Uncle Frank's albums. But scanning technology - and the quality of the original print - allows us to delve deeper inside the image and discover new images which have been hiding away for decades. The following image - which is merely an enlargement of just part of the crowd - is a picture in itself, a picture which delightfully captures the excitement and wonder in the faces of the audience. If those children are alive now they will be very old. But their youth was captured forever - in sepia.

Next Saturday is Christmas and therefore I won't be posting a Sepia Saturday contribution. But there are no rules for Sepia Saturday and therefore others may decide to post sepia images. I will return to Sepia Saturday on the 2nd January.

POETIKAT'S INVISIBLE KEEPSAKES

WILLOW MANOR
LARRY'S PHOTO A DAY
MY FIVE MEN
SQUARE SUNSHINE