Sepia Saturday 342 : Shouting Love In Sepia

Our Sepia Saturday theme this month is "love and marriage" and whilst last week I focussed on the second half of this couplet, today I am looking at the first half - love. 

And if this old, faded photograph of my parents - Albert and Gladys - says anything it says love. It shouts it through the sepia salts, roars it through the cracks and creases of the tiny print. 

You can set this old print next to any million pixel, super high definition digital image fresh from the most mobile of smart phones. You can put it up against the sharpest razor sharp print, the perfectly balanced colour profile, the most competently composed composition. 

And still this old and faded photo would win. It screams love - love that can overcome the ravages of time.

This month our theme is LOVE AND MARRIAGE. See all the posts by visiting the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the links.

Friendship Abides If Distance Divides

This vintage postcard comes from the collection of my Great Uncle, Fowler Beanland. In the early years of the twentieth century, Fowler had moved to Longtown in Cumbria to find work in the bobbin making industry there. He was an avid collector of postcards and many of his friends and relatives from the Keighley area of West Yorkshire would send him cards of that area to add to his collection.

This card of the Victoria Hospital in Keighley was one such card. Originally built as a "cottage hospital" in the 1870s, it was later extended to become the towns' main hospital until the new Airedale Hospital was built in the 1970s and the old Victoria Hospital was demolished.

L.P. sent the card to Fowler, but I have no idea who L.P. was and therefore I can't tell you whether friendship did abide for long.

Sat On A Deckchair Reviewing The Rajar Purchase

RAJAR PURCHASE No. 1 : WOMAN ON A DECKCHAIR

I have been at it again! Another day, another eBay purchase : accumulating more "junk" just at the time of life I should be divesting myself of worldly possessions. The purchase this time was a small collection of old photographs contained within a vintage "film and print wallet" bearing the name "Rajar". This is a famous name in terms of British photographic history, a pioneer in the production of photographic film and papers which eventually became part of the "Ilford" company.

The wallet, I suspect, dates from the mid 1920s, although the twenty-odd photos within it are an eclectic bunch. The fact that I don't know anything about them makes them even more interesting in terms of exploration. So with the photos in front of me I stand on the shores of a new and unexplored continent - or rather I sit in my deckchair enjoying the summer sun whilst sifting through the "Rajar Purchase".

Random Times : A Time Machine To The Light, The Dark, And A Jolly Good Hiding

A few years ago I did a series of blog posts in which I used a random number generator to identify small areas of West Yorkshire to visit and photograph ("West Yorkshire In Ten Squares"). Randomness is a great approach to investigating areas where the subject matter is almost limitless and one's ability to undertake a detailed and comprehensive analysis is constrained by an enhanced susceptibility to boredom. I have decided to once again crank up my steam driven random number generator and, this time, to harness it to a time machine. I am visiting the past via the archives of British local newspapers. The date will be determined by the date of my posts - the year will be the chance product of my random number generator. The first year it has selected is 1940, so we are going to investigate the random lives of British people courtesy of the Gloucester Journal.

CAR LIGHTS IN AIR RAIDS 

CITY POLICE CHIEF EXPLAINS

What the police described as irresponsible behaviour on the part of soldiers on leave and other unauthorised persons in telling motorists to extinguish all their lights while enemy planes were over the south-west of England, was alleged at Gloucester City Petty Sessions on Tuesday to have caused no fewer than 14 or 15 road casualties. It was emphasised that only the police or soldiers on duty possessed the authority to order motorists to put out lights, and then only the headlights should be extinguished as long as the car was on the highway. Before the magistrates was Eric Brown, a soldier, stated to belong to Dudley. He pleaded guilty to having been drunk and disorderly in Westgate Street on Monday night.

MORE LIGHTING OFFENCES 

SIX DEFENDANTS FINED IN GLOUCESTER 

Fines totalling £14 were imposed on Friday on six defendants who were summoned for having failed to obscure lights inside premises to prevent any illumination therefrom being visible outside.

Our random number powered time machine has landed us back in wartime Britain. By August 1940, the war had been in progress for almost a year and the so-called "phoney war" that dominated the first few months of conflict is now a distant memory. France has been overrun by the Germans, British troops have had to flee from Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain is in full force. People looked with fear to the skies, especially at night. And the authorities were constantly on the lookout for any stray lights that would help pinpoint Britain's town and cities.

Situations Vacant 

PROBATIONER NURSE required, commencing salary £25; uniform provided - Apply Matron, Cotswold Sanatorium, Cranham, Gloucester.
HOUSEMAIDS wanted, wages according to experience; uniform provided - Apply Matron, Cotswold Sanatorium, Cranham, Gloucester.
EXPERIENCED LADY SHORTHAND-TYPIST required in old established Company Office in Gloucestershire (12 miles from Bristol). Would be required to reside locally. Permanency. Write stating age, experience and salary required, 625 Journal, Gloucester.
GIRL leaving school, daily. 8.30 to 3.00: no Sundays - Abbotsford, Chosen Way, Hucclecote.

The Situations Vacant column is by now the exclusive territory of women workers - conscription has already more or less removed men from the open job market. If the salary of £25 for a probationary nurse looks generous, it should be remembered that this is an annual salary and not a weekly or monthly one. If the nurses or the housemaids had stayed at the Cotswold Sanatorium, by 1949 they would discover that George Orwell was a patient there whilst finishing off his book 1984. The "girl, leaving school" advert we must assume, is an advert for a school-leaver to become some kind of daily housemaid.

PRIVATE E W KENT R.A.O.C. of 131 New Street, Gloucester, who is missing from the Lancastria, sunk by enemy action on June 17. Aged 24, he was formerly employed in the butchery department by the Gloucester Co-operative Society.

Edgar William Kent had worked in the butchery department of Gloucester Co-op. He died on the 17th June 1940 when the ex-Cunard liner, "Lancastria" was sunk whilst taking part in the evacuation of British troops from northern France during Operation Ariel.

Less well-known than Operation Dynamo (the Dunkirk evacuations which had taken place two weeks earlier), Operation Ariel was the name given to the attempts to evacuate British troops and civilians from Western France during the fall of that country to the German occupation. The 1,300 passenger Cunard liner, Lancastria, was crammed with up to 5,000 troops and civilians when it was bombed and sunk in St Nazaire at the mouth of the River Loire. No one knows exactly how many people lost their lives in that disaster, but it is at least 3,500, making it the largest British maritime disaster in history. One of that number was Edgar William Kent.

LIKELY TO CATCH GOOD HIDING
GLOUCESTER CHAIRMAN AND BOY FRUIT RAIDERS

Addressing four boys who had admitted at Gloucestershire Juvenile Court Monday the theft of growing fruit, the Chairman (Mr H G Norman) said: "One of these days you will find someone who will catch hold of you and give you a jolly good hiding, which I think will be the best thing for you". The boys, two 10 years of age, one 11 and the other 12, were fined a shilling each. The value of the fruit was said to be a shilling.

Surely nothing illustrates the passage of time so much as this report of what was little more than youthful scrumping. Today it would have been Mr Norman who would have been thrashed for saying such things.

SMOKES FOR LOCAL SOLDIERS
MORE GIFTS TO OUR FUND
One of the outstanding events in Army camp life is the arrival of smokes for Gloucester and District lads sent by "The Citizen" Cigarette and Tobacco Fund.

---------------

HELP FOR OUR CIGARETTE FUND
The party of children who raised 45/- at a concert given in Theresa Street.

Perhaps this is another illustration of the passage of time. Today, sending a box of cigarettes to someone would be seen in itself as a declaration of war.

Church Street, Morley And The Postcard Pecking Order

During that first decade of the twentieth century - the decade of the picture postcard - the frenzied desire for postcards to send here, there and everywhere soon used up all available stocks of scenes of pretty woodland and sterling castles. And as postcard albums got their fill of views of Edinburgh's Royal Mile or Harrogate's Regal Baths, local photographers became more adventurous in their selection of views to temp their customers with.

I don't have anything against Morley (on the outskirts of Leeds), but it must be said that this view of Church Street must be well down the postcard pecking order. Even the obligatory waifs and strays who stare back at every Edwardian photographer, seem to look in wonderment about the choice of subject.

As far as I can make out, that is St Peter's Church in the background and in front of it are ... some houses. If you were take the same photograph today you would see sign boards advertising "Shake, Latte And Roll", the "Image Hair Studios" and a nail bar called "Nail'd It". It would be a little brighter and a little more lively. But alas, it would be too late - picture postcards have had their day.

The Night Charles Hawtrey Crushed A Wooden Behemoth

It was the contest of the century, the great decider, the true test of wills. It was David against Goliath, Tyrannosaurus Rex against a butterfly, Muhammad Ali versus Charles Hawtrey. It was wood against wood, candle wax against candle wax and elastic bands stretched to the tautness of a dress shirt on a fat man. Yes, at long last it was the Great Tank Race.

Paul had stretched the rules to their limits and entered a wooden behemoth straight out of a derelict Yorkshire wooden mill. In its previous incarnation, the bobbin had held enough thread to make socks for a whole army. By comparison, my little effort - modestly known for racing purposes as "Invincible" - had been home to a dainty skein of sewing thread.

After a false start or two when over-enthusiasm had caused elastic bands to curl beyond their limit of curliness and repairs had to be carried out in the pits, the race was on. The behemoth vibrated a little but thought better of it and remained stuck to its spot on the starting line like a housefly on a tray of treacle.

Little "Invincible" stormed into a lead, like a cotton reel bat out of hell.  Eventually the judges had to intervene to prevent further unnecessary punishment to the rooted behemoth. A winner was declared and the winner - it the best traditions of British sportsmanship - shook hands with the defeated loser, drank a hearty toast in rather splendid Japanese whisky, and returned "Invincible" to his little plastic box and a well-earned retirement. 

Of course, I will not boast about my success on the cotton reel tank racing circuit, I'm not that kind of chap. I let plucky little "Invincible" do my talking for me and we will let the photographs tell the true tale of the night.

(Please Note : the final photograph has been digitally edited to better portray the winning margin)

Photography Is A Greedy Medium

It is clearly no coincidence that impressionism in art coincided with the development of photography. Once you could capture a true image of a scene or a person on paper or film, the school of art that strived to ape nature became redundant in the click of a shutter. Once you could get a daguerreotype of Auntie Winnie - warts and all - the last thing you needed to do was to employ some itinerant artist to do a similar job. If you did employ an artist, far better that he, or she, produce an impression of the fragrant Winnie as she wafted her way through life many decades ago.

But photography is a greedy medium: no sooner had it captured the representational market, it made a play for the impressionist work. You could even pretend that you had accidentally got the photo of Ethel and Joan and their boys out of focus and still come up with an impressionist masterpiece. 

Sheffield in winter becomes a steel symphony of light and shade.

The leaden skies seem to evaporate from the Lakeland hills.

Sepia Saturday 342 : 1. The Colourful Spice Of Married Life

Sepia Saturday is a little different for the next couple of months: we are trying an experiment and having a monthly theme rather than a weekly one. That doesn't necessarily mean that I will be producing just one Sepia Saturday post per month - we can return to the theme as many times as we want to and I will certainly be revisiting this "Love and Marriage" theme a good number of times during the coming weeks. 

And as Sepia Saturday is trying something different, I thought I would try something different with my first entry for the August theme. In the past I have occasionally been guilty of getting rid of colour to give my featured photos a feeling of appropriate age. This time I am doing just the opposite.

I am trying to teach myself how to hand-colour old monochrome photographs using Photoshop, and my image this week is part of my learning curve. I have used an old scanned half-plate monochrome glass negative as my practice piece and let my imagination run a little wild with the various colours of the outfits of this wedding party.

The fact is they all looked so miserable that I thought they needed cheering up a little so out came my digital paintbrushes and progressive overlays. After all, even the best of marriages needs spicing up occasionally.

To see what others are doing with the Sepia Saturday theme this moth, go to the Sepia Saturday Blog and follow the links.

Please Sir, The Dog Has Eaten My Homework!

The day of the Great Cotton Reel Tank Contest approaches and yesterday I decided to undertake some advanced road trials of the Beta Test Model (Series II). For those who have not been following this story, a couple of months ago - over a pint of two of beer - a friend and I started to reminisce about the elastic-band driven cotton reel tanks we used to build and race as kids. The talk rapidly escalated into competitive mode and we agreed to meet in a couple of months to race tanks we would have, by then, built and tested.

For me, everything was going smoothly and the tests undertaken on the kitchen table yesterday gave me hope of success on Saturday. I was so pleased with the engineering progress I had achieved that I went off to the pub with a confident smile on my face. 

Alas, on my return I discovered that LucyDog had somehow managed to climb up to the table an eat the Beta Test Model (Series II)! I now must start the long process of rebuilding in the hope that an elastic-band driven phoenix can arise from the ashes - pushed along by its matchstick drive-shaft. But just in case things don't go well, I have managed to get a note from a friend of mine who is a teacher explaining that my dog has eaten my homework. 

The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Walker

We are getting close to the start of the Olympic Games and with that normal outburst of Olympian enthusiasm I will find myself sitting up in the middle of the night on the edge of my seat drawn by the drama of some first elimination heat in some obscure sport I would never normally consider watching in a thousand metres. Take, for example, walking: now there's a silly sport if ever there was one. If you want to go fast, why not run? It is an event for purposely limited potential - which, in a strange way, is my kind of event.

I am a photographer not an artist. My potential is limited by the camera lens and the digital editing software. If I had ambitions to go fast - in an artistic sense - I would paint or sculpt and let my imagination fly free, just like my brother. But as a photographer I am bound by self-imposed rules : one sense has to be on the ground at all times. Occasionally I will think about breaking into a trot - like when I started to colour this old 1901 glass plate negative of Norrkoping in Sweden. And then I remember I am a walker and not a runner. It is the lot of a photographer.

The 98 Rooms Of Oliver Sarony

The name of the studio on this Carte de Visite which probably dates from the 1870s is Sarony of Scarborough. The studio was founded in 1857 by Oliver Sarony who arrived in England from Quebec in Canada in 1843. For the next fourteen years he made a living as an itinerant photographer travelling around the factory and mill towns of the north of England taking Daguerreotype photographs.

Once settled in Scarborough, Sarony's fortunes improved. Scarborough was fast becoming one of the most fashionable holiday resorts in the north of England and the type of visitors the town attracted were obvious clients for the new fashion of photography.

Sarony's studios went from strength to strength and at their height - when this photograph was probably taken - it extended to 98 rooms and employed over 100 employees. By 1871 it claimed to be the largest photographic studios in Europe. By the end of the decade, Sarony was dead and the studio had been taken over by his nephew. It continued to be a substantial photographic undertaking for the rest of the century but the years of rapid growth were behind them.