Flights Of Fancy

I bought a job lot of old photographs off eBay the other day intending to put them away so there would be something to amuse me on cold winter evenings. The problem is that I can't resist dipping into the drawer where they are kept to see what delights they offer. I am not expecting to find anything rare or anything valuable, nor am expecting to find photographs of people or places I recognise. Equally, I don't expect to solve any great mysteries by reuniting Jocelyn Trumpington-Baxter to his long lost third cousin Cedric. My love of old photographs is a quixotic affair designed to launch nothing more substantial than the occasional flight of fancy.

Take this Cabinet Card of three men taken in the London studios of J C Grey. I have no idea who they are but, from the style of dress, I would guess that the photograph was taken in the very first years of the twentieth century. The pose is slightly odd, with two of the young men (surely brothers) looking straight into the camera whilst the third (an older brother or maybe even the father) appearing in profile and looking off to the left of the photographer. Whilst the two younger men are in sharp focus the older man appears slightly blurred. At first I thought the third figure had been "burnt in" (photographers sometimes did this to artificially reunite family members) but this does not seem to be the case here (the aspidistra leaf comes in front of the jacket my dear Watson!)

My fancy is in full flight now and circling around the concept of relationships between fathers and brothers. By pure coincidence I am currently listening to the complete Audiobook version of Edward Kennedy's True Compass whilst I drag poor Amy on her daily walks around the mean streets of West Yorkshire. So now I am looking at a photograph of Joe Kennedy looking suitably stern and maybe Jack and Bobby looking so full of potential and possibilities. And then it is my father with me and my brother : my brother looking serious, me looking slightly lost and my father looking to see if the bus is coming.

It is probably better to keep such fanciful flights to myself. Better still, I will keep the old photographs hidden away until those cold winter nights come along.

A Locked Bathroom And A Sober Night In

I had everything prepared. I like to have everything prepared for the World Cup Final. It's a bit of a tradition which started in 1974 when I eagerly prepared to watch the Netherlands play Germany in the final of that year. We were living in Wimbledon at the time in the wonderful house owned by Jane's parents. Jane's father had specially ordered a crate of brown ale for refreshments during the match. I decided to have a celebratory bath before kick-off and retired to the fine old bathroom which for some reason had iron bars to the window. Bath completed I was about to take my seat and pour my first glass of brown ale when I discovered the lock to the bathroom door had somehow failed. I was imprisoned in the bathroom, completely unable to make my escape. I could vaguely hear the sound of cheering coming from the television room but all I could do was to bang on the door in the hope of eventually attracting someone who would rescue me. Finally, Jane and Issy (the Good lady Wife) noticed my absence and traced me to my prison cell. They found the situation highly amusing and made wonderful suggestions like a promise to feed me spaghetti through the keyhole to stop me from starving. Various keys were tried but the mechanism had seized up entirely and the door was of considerable vintage (and therefore stout timbers) and was resistant to the most desperate shoulder charge. I was eventually freed - late in the first half as I recollect - by Jane's mother who smashed the door down with a fourteenth century battle axe that had been in the family for generations and had been awaiting just such an emergency as this. The episode made a considerable impression on my young psyche and I have always prepared for World Cup Finals with a mixture of care and trepidation ever since.

This year I had managed to acquire a six-pack of Spanish beer (San Miguel) and a six-pack of Dutch beer (Amstel) and in expectation of a thrilling and high scoring final I had promised myself a bottle of the appropriate brew each time a goal was scored. As I watched the match my thirst increased in inverse proportion to my enjoyment of what was a pedestrian final. By the time the one and only goal was scored - after 115 minutes of play I was seriously considering transferring my sporting allegiances to an alternative high-scoring came (just think what you could do with the same approach to cricket). It was a sober night in - but at least I didn't get locked in the bathroom.

Sepia Saturday : Pride And The Machine

My father was a fitter. I have never been quite sure what a fitter is (my brother inherited all the mechanical aptitude in our family), but it was a skilled job that gave him the right to full membership of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) once he had served "his time" as an apprentice. Most of his working life was spent in building, repairing and maintaining wrapping and packaging machines, first at a printing and packaging firm in Bradford and later at the Halifax factory of the toffee and sweet manufacturer, John Mackintosh and Sons (the makers of the celebrated "Quality Street" selection). My photograph shows my father and a group of his colleagues at, what looks like, the launch of a new machine. The machine is a splendid 1950s affair with gear levers, push buttons and important looking dials. It has the look of a prop from one of those 1950s low-budget science fiction films - "The Invasion Of The Sweet Wrappers"  perhaps. But however silly the machine may look from the lofty heights of the micro-computer age, there is an almost palpable pride amongst that group of people : pride in the creative process, pride in industry. Maybe these days twenty or thirty fellow workers gather around the photocopying machine and have similar photographs taken. Maybe they pile up volumes of reports, project proposals and database print-outs and proudly sit alongside them like a mother hen showing off her eggs. Maybe. But, somehow, I doubt it.

As a bonus, I found my fathers' old Union Card. The fact that it had been carefully saved again signified something - a pride of achievement at the launch of a career. Maybe those lucky enough to be starting jobs in these difficult times will preserve a similar token, a similar document - whatever it may be. Maybe, but somehow I doubt it.

Take a look at all the other wonderful Sepia Saturday posts which are listed on the Sepia Saturday Blog.

Square One : Little Germany

This project attempts to provide a flavour of what is typical in my home county of West Yorkshire by focusing on ten randomly selected squares from throughout the County. Each of the 500 square metre areas has been chosen by a random number generator and here I explore each of them in images and words. 

Let me first of all say that I didn't cheat. I realise that when you see the location of my first "square" it looks too good to be true (the sharp eyed will even spot there is a "Burnett Street" running through the centre of the square), but I promise you that the numbers came straight from the random number machine and were plotted faithfully in the atlas. And so for my first random exploration of West Yorkshire, let me take you to Little Germany, slightly to the east of the centre of the City of Bradford. And, for me, one of the most beautiful spots in the County.

The first of my random squares is just to the east of Bradford City centre.

In the nineteenth century Bradford had risen to become the world centre of the worsted textile industry (worsteds are high quality woolen fabrics used in clothing). With the construction of the spectacular Wool Exchange in 1862 (now, surely, one of the most beautiful book shops in the world and sadly just outside my square), Bradford confirmed its status as the centre of the world woolen industry and was known far and wide as "Worstedopolis". This new status meant that wool merchants from throughout the world were drawn to Bradford. where they would establish grand Victorian warehouses to store and display their goods. In the mid-nineteenth century so many of these foreign merchants - particularly merchants from Germany - had built grand warehouses to the east of the city centre, the area became known as Little Germany.

Burnett Street in the heart of the Little Germany district

The geometry of stone

The warehouses were built in an Italianate style from fine local sandstone and incorporated wonderful embellishments which proclaimed the status, wealth and pride of the owners. Today you can wander through the streets of Little Germany and continually come face to face with these architectural gems, now with their soot-encrusted skins removed, displaying details that can almost make you catch your breath. But now the wool merchants have long gone and the buildings look for new owners and new purposes. Some have become offices, some have become art centres, some just sit and await what the future may have in store for them.

Street sculpture in Little Germany

Eastbrook Hall in search of a new purpose

It is difficult to imagine a square more full of beauty and history than this first square, Can there be any city that it more typical of West Yorkshire than Bradford? Can there be any building that is more resonant of the area and its rich history than a wool warehouse?  We will see next week when I go off to examine the second square in my Ten Square Odyssey.

Carved stone name from Albion Buildings, Little Germany

West Yorkshire In Ten Squares

One of the interesting things about blogging is that you get to know so many interesting parts of the world.  My regular "reads" give me insights into life in Ohio, Rhode Island, Sydney, Ottawa and so many other fascinating places and I build up pictures of the look and feel of these places from the pictures and the words published. And on the assumption that I am not too unusual ("eccentric" I will accept, "unusual" I will argue against), there must be people out there wondering what this West Yorkshire place is. (That is on the assumption that my readers actually exist and are not represented by a stream of cyber comments sent out by a powerful blogger.com computer - you have to wonder after blogger was feeling ill yesterday and no comments were generated!).

Where was I? Right, West Yorkshire. If you want to know about West Yorkshire you can turn to Wikipedia and it will tell you that it is a metropolitan county within the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England with a population of 2.2 million. Read on and it will give you pictures of Kirkstall Abbey, Harewood House and even the Emley Moor Mast (which, when the leaves fall from the trees I can see from my window). But is this the real West Yorkshire, the typical West Yorkshire, the essence of West Yorkshire?

So I have a plan for a new project. I have a street atlas of West Yorkshire. The entire county is covered in a series of maps covering 239 pages. Each map is divided into forty small squares, each square representing an area of 500 square metres. That is 9,560 squares. Each of those squares is a part of West Yorkshire and each, in its own way, is typical of West Yorkshire. So let us pick ten of those nine and a half thousand squares at random and see what they look like. The mechanics is relatively easy, all you need to do is to turn to one of the many on-line random number generators. And then it is counting and plotting. And then comes the fascinating bit - the visiting and the recording.

Each week over the next ten weeks or so I will visit a square picked at random and try to give you a feel of the place in images and in (a few) words. We start tomorrow. The random number machine came up with the first square on Monday and I went there yesterday. Is it typically West Yorkshire?. You will have to visit tomorrow to find out.

I Want A Job (And I Want An iPad)

Since getting my iPhone earlier this year I have become addicted to it. I check it last thing at night to catch up with any e-mails or texts and switch it on first thing in the morning to scan the news. The Good Lady Wife mildly complains that I am always gazing into that "ridiculous little machine", and even The Lad thinks there is something not quite right about my latest infatuation with technology. I ignore such comments and go in search of another App.

I downloaded iBooks the other day and immediately bought Andrew Marr's "The Making of Modern Britain" to test it out. I have dabbled with digital readers before and never been converted by them, but this time I have become a convert. It is partly that the iBook reader (even on a tiny thing like an iPhone) is instinctive and well designed. It is partly that Marr's book sits well on the digital screen. But I have a feeling that it could sit so much better.

On Saturday there was a fascinating article in the Guardian by the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, in which he speculated on the future of "the book" in the new age of information technology. Now I know it is an old argument and people will immediately start incanting phrases such as "it will never have the feel of a real book" or "how can you snuggle up in bed with a machine", but I don't intend to enter into an argument about it  (I am too busy listing to my MP3's and watching re-runs on YouTube). Anyway, what Sautoy was talking about was not the digital mimicking of traditional books but a whole new interpretation of information delivery which makes use of delivery mechanisms such as iPads and the like. The convenience of the page (and a page from a thin book) with the possibilities of almost limitless interactivity.

Reading in the article about what people are doing with texts such as Alice in Wonderland (or the more contemporary Wolf Hall) made me want to take Marr's fascinating history of the first 40 years of the twentieth century and to turn it into something suitable for the iPad generation. The text would be there (in all its stylish simplicity) but so would the ability to seemlessly browse contemporary newspapers, watch newsreel clips, see the art, listen to the music, gather the evidence, and rebuild the work to reflect our own individual conclusions. I want the job. If the publishers of Marr's book are reading this, please note that I will do it for nothing. I will dedicate the next year of my life to the task. If Steve Jobs is reading this, send me an iPad and together with Marr's text I will create something new which will redefine the way we consume information.  All the BBC and/or Apple need to do is to leave a comment to this post and send the iPad to my home address. 

You never get anywhere unless you ask, do you?

A Devil Of A Do In Scarborough

It seems ages since I featured a postcard on the Blog so let's put things right with this 1914 postcard of St George's Church in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. It is a recent addition to my collection, being from a batch the Good Lady Wife bought me for my birthday (a selection of old postcards and a large bottle of Single Malt - now there's a woman who understands me!). The picture is not particularly exciting nor is it of any great historical interest : something like the same scene could be seen by a visitor to Doncaster today. But to those of us who are addicted to the message side of postcards - I would like to call us back side enthusiasts but that might give the wrong impression - the date of the postmark is the most intriguing element : 21st December 1914, just a few days before the first Christmas of the Great War.

The message reads as follows:

"Dear Bert, Lizzie and Freddie, Just a line to let you know I'm going to be alright. There will be no leave this Christmas. I am glad Freddie and Lizzie are looking a bit better now.  I will let you Bert know about what you told me (to) ask about back end of this week. Well we shall soon have Christmas here now. It was a bit of a devil about that Scarboro do wasn't it. Well ta ta for present. Warmest regards, Alb".

How can so few words be infused with so much possible meaning, I am almost tempted to enter the message in one of those meme contests where you have to write a story in less than 55 words. But the words wouldn't be mine, they would be Alb's and the denouement is almost too sad to contemplate. There was no leave that Christmas and no peace for many a Christmas to come. In the trenches in Flanders, the mud had yet to reach optimum consistency : but more blood would be added to the sickening mixture in the months to come. Did Alb contribute to this mix in the way so many ordinary young men did? I could find out - with the information available on-line it would be relatively easy to find his service record - but for the moment I am holding back. I am not sure I want to know. 

Contemporary picture of the Scarborough raid, December 1914.

It is possible, however, to shed more light on the "bit of a devil" of the "Scarborough doo" he alludes to in the postcard. On the 16th December 1914 two German battlecruisers and a light cruiser launched a naval attack on a number of east coast towns, in particular the holiday resort of Scarborough. Whilst the cruiser laid a minefield out to sea, the battlecruisers opened fire on a coastguard station and yeomanry barracks in the town. They also fired on the old castle and the Grand Hotel which they seemingly mistook for a gun battery. The raid resulted in the death of eighteen people in Scarborough and caused much outrage in the British press both because it was seen to be in breach of the "rules of war" and because the raid had not been prevented by the British navy. The full story of the raid can be found here.

Yet another example of how a dog-eared old postcard can take you on the most extraordinary journey.

Sepia Saturday 30 : The Old Commer Van

Memories are ephemeral things which only seem to be able to survive by attaching themselves to physical objects, like a snowflake coalescing around a grain of dust. Here on Sepia Saturday we tend to think of the photograph as the grain of dust - how many times have I and others said that our photographs have the ability to preserve memories - but you can't photograph a memory. It is the object that forms the subject of the photograph that is the fixative agent, it is the object that is the grain of dust within the snowflake of a memory.

My father in his beloved Commer Van

All this serves as an introduction to a photograph of my father in his old Commer Van. It may just look like an old van to you, but to my father it was a pride and joy - his first four wheeled vehicle, an object that was worshiped each Sunday by a liturgy of washing, cleaning, and polishing. To me, this mediocre picture of this prosaic vehicle is a rich tapestry of memories.

The picture must have been taken in the early 1960s. My father worked at the Mackintosh's Toffee factory in Halifax and the firm would sell off vehicles that had been used by their traveling salesmen to workers. It was bright red - the same shade as that used by the Post Office, and we would always have people running after the van trying to push letters through the window into what they thought was the departing Post Office collection van.

My mother posing next to the van on some highway or byway.

I spent much of my early teens in the back of that van. When my father first bought it there were no windows in the back (it had, after all, been a delivery van) but over time he saved enough money to have some windows put in, and all of a sudden I was able to see the English countryside roll by. Eventually it was replaced by other vehicles, but it is that first Commer Van that I remember the best. I suspect that my son will not even be able to remember the kind of car I had when I was young. Times change, and the speck of dust becomes something else. But I have a feeling that if he ends up blogging in a similar vein to this in 40 years time, the picture might be of an old Sega Megadrive, but the sentiments will be the same.

To see photographs of other grains of dust and the memories they preserve, go to the Sepia Saturday Blog.

Theme Thursday : Blue

For me, the word blue is a one-way street leading to the blues. But rather than the pure blues, the delta blues or Chicago blues it takes me to the great Jack Teagarden singing what was to become a theme song of his "Meet Me Where They Play The Blues". I was in my teens when I first heard this. Somehow it slotted in well amidst contemporary sounds such as the Beatles and Dylan. I fell in love with both the song and Big T's singing and playing. I've never been able to get it out of my mind since - even during the days of deafness. Many years ago I wrote a story which had a large Greek philosophy professor turned European Commission bureaucrat who would surprise his colleagues by playing the trombone and singing with a Texan accent. The song he sang in the story - Meet Me Where They Play The Blues, of course. To illustrate this post I searched for a YouTube clip of Jack singing the song, but there wasn't one. So I added one. It can count as my contribution to humanity.

For other Theme Thursday posts on the theme of BLUE go to the Theme Thursday Blog.

The Big Bright Pink Candy-Floss Machine

You may recall that in a recent Theme Thursday post about Candy, I came up with some patent drawings and instructions for home-made candy-floss (cotton candy for those who play soccer rather than football) machines and suggested that my friend Edwin get busy and make one for my forthcoming visit to Oxford. Edwin can turn his hand to most things and I was therefore intrigued to see what he had come up with when we called in at Oxford on our way back from Dorset. What he had come up with was a large box containing a bright pink candy-floss machine. He had baulked at the challenge, but - seeing as it was my birthday - he had managed to find a machine for sale in a local shop. After careful reading of the instruction and experiments with ingredients and colouring, the first batch was made. It worked magnificently and tasted just like the stuff you get at the seaside. So, in future, if anyone calls in on us in Huddersfield, I can spin them up a candy-floss. Thank you Jane and Edwin.

Edwin hard at work spinning candy

Now has anyone got one of those machines they use to make seaside rock?

In Search Of Hebden Bridge's Electric Studios

I bought this fine Edwardian Cabinet Card the other day. At 50p (30c) it seemed a bargain, not only for the wonderful strong portrait, but also for the local connection.  Hebden Bridge is just up the valley from where I live - if some of my far-flung friends think the name sounds familiar it is where our blogging friend Tony Zimnoch lives. From what I can discover, C Westerman of the Electric and Daylight Studio's, Hebden Bridge, was a famous local photographer remembered not only for his own work, but also for the work of his apprentice, the woman who took over the studios in the 1920s, Alice Longstaff. When I checked the web before going on holiday I found a good few references to Alice Longstaff and a book that has been written about her. On my return, I have discovered that the pages are "no longer accessible". So it seems that I will have to abandon technology and get the bus up the valley and try and buy a copy of the book. I will check to see if the Electric Studios are still there and report back.